Reviews: "Recount," "The Andromeda Strain" and some reality junk on E!

Our good friends at LA.com are too busy enjoying the holiday, so the duty of posting these reviews falls to us:

"Recount:"

Some Democrats kvetched long and loudly about how Al Gore was cheated out of the 2000 Presidential election by malfeasance in Florida and the Supreme Court's hijacking of the public's will. Conservatives offered them this helpful bromide: Get over it, already.

Which seemed sensible, if slightly insensitive, advice. One wonders how many of those triumphal champions would repeat those words to those bitter losers today, with that winner's approval rating at an all-time low and 80 percent of Americans believing the country is heading in the wrong direction.

Still, I wasn't particularly looking forward to "Recount," HBO's docudrama about the 2000 Florida debacle, as I expected the whiff of sour grapes to emanate pungently from it. And I wasn't wrong, but despite its self-righteously indignant stance and the fact that anyone who might watch it already knows how things turn out, it's still eminently watchable.

Gore and George W. Bush are but peripheral players in this film, which is most concerned with the "street fight" their minions notoriously engaged in in Florida. Essentially, the film's conceit is that Gore had a legitimate beef, but his milquetoast consigliores weren't nearly as adept at knife-fights as Bush's cutthroat strategists, who understood what American politics were (ital) really (end ital) all about.

Kevin Spacey stars as Ron Klain, Gore's former chief of staff who was dismissed then brought back in at a late date to work on his campaign. He leads the charge when Florida's vote becomes hopelessly convoluted on Election Night (there is much archival footage of the news networks' fumbling coverage of that evening), particularly when the Democrats' go-to man, Warren Christopher (John Hurt), proves vexingly ineffectual.

There are no such worries on the Republicans' side: James Baker (Tom Wilkinson) is in his element when it comes to manipulating media coverage; he proceeds, hammer and tongs, to utterly discredit any argument, legal, moral or otherwise, that Gore might have.

Parts of "Recount," such as a lowly Gore operative's efforts to prevent him from delivering a concession speech on Election Night as results become murkier, play, as scripted by newcomer Danny Strong and directed by Jay Roach (the "Austin Powers" and "Meet the Parents" movies), like a political thriller. Elsewhere, as the proceedings become mired in legal minutiae, the viewer is given far too long to remember that he or she already knows how this plays out and wonder why it merits a replay in 2008.

What enlivens "Recount" are supporting performances, such as Wilkinson's, Denis Leary's as a Democratic strategist and Laura Dern's as Katherine Harris, who was then Florida's Secretary of State, who essentially helped give the victory to Bush.

Dern's turn as Harris is hilarious, as she essays the self-deluded ditziness that eventually turned even staunch Republicans against her in the 2006 Congressional election.

Harris' ultimate fate is not mentioned in "Recount," however, nor is the ironic fact that a post-Inaugural count of the votes in Florida found that if all votes had been counted in the manner requested by Bush, Gore would have won, and if all votes had been counted in the way Gore requested, Bush would have won.

But then, once all those votes had been counted (and recounted, and then recounted again, at a cost of nearly $1 million), the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 had already occurred, and America needed a President to rally around more than the truth, and so those results were pretty much buried by the media. In that regard, "Recount" not only buries its lead; it strangles it offscreen.

- "Recount:" 1 p.m. and 9 p.m. Monday, 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. Thursday, 9:30 a.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. and 10 p.m. June 4, 2 p.m. and 11 p.m. June 8 and 4 p.m. June 14, HBO.

*

"Denise Richards: It's Complicated" and "Living Lohan"

Before becoming one of the four horsemen of the impending cultural apocalypse, E! used to be known - if it was known at all - as a channel that provided gushing, brown-nosing entertainment coverage with but one show, "Talk Soup" (now simply "The Soup"), that turned a cheekily askance eye at the entertainment-industrial complex.

Today, it's ground zero for some of the most lurid "reality" shows to pollute basic cable, such as "The Girls Next Door" (featuring Hugh Hefner), "Dr. 90210" (a plastic surgeon to the stars), "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" (starring the star of a notorious Internet sex tape) and "Snoop Dogg's Father Hood" (widely believed to be scripted due to its out-sized situations).

Tonight, it adds two more dubious contributions to Western Civilization: "Denise Richards: It's Complicated" and "Living Lohan," two more reality shows that exist only to exploit (and, largely, frustrate) America's insatiable craving for tabloid fodder, a hunger perhaps even more unhealthy than its hankering for Big Macs.

"It's Complicated" is the better of the two shows, if only because it's nominally more honest. Even though participants are interviewed against greenscreens that recreate a faux bucolic domestic existence, and the show wistfully notes that she currently lives in a small town - heck, her (ital) ranch (end ital) is the size of a small town).

Richards, today best known for her messy divorce from Charlie Sheen, makes no bones about being attracted to what her sister calls "self-absorbed Hollywood a--holes;" when told she needs to date "normal" guys, she replies, "To me, 'normal' is a famous person or a rock star."

Tonight's installment features not one but two scenes featuring pigs having sex, which seems a bit of a metaphor for her experiences in Hollywood. But at least the scenes aren't contrivances - she lives with 10 dogs, three cats and, by the end of tonight's episode, three pigs.

Still, one imagines there are more interesting things going on in Richards' life than seeking out a stud boar for her sow or sitting at the DMV awaiting word on whether she can change the name on her driver's license back from Sheen back to Richards. There is one sort of funny scene in which she goes on a blind date and the guy mentions her film "Wild Things" - which features a notorious scene between her and actress Neve Campbell - and all he wants to talk about is how good Matt Dillon was in the movie.

By contrast, "Living Lohan" is not only a fraud, but a tedious, self-aggrandizing fraud. It's about Lindsay Lohan's stage mom, Dina, who, having lost control over her older daughter (whose well-documented woes she essentially blames on "the idiot people ... trashing us"), has decided to turn her attentions to transforming her 14-year-old daughter, Ali, into a pop icon.

(Dina insists Lindsay will not appear on her show, so the editors opt for the next-best thing - the opening minutes of tonight's premiere focus on family snapshots of Lindsay around Dina's Long Island mansion and onscreen graphics insist to viewers that she's on the phone with her daughter, even if her voice is never heard.)

There's an attempt to milk drama from a producer working with Ali claiming to the tabloids to be dating Lindsay. In other words, he's using Dina's daughters to boost his career in the same way that she's using E! to boost Ali's. Dina thinks that makes him a real low-life barnacle.

With Dina Lohan's behavior widely reported, the fact that Dina also serves as an executive producer on the show results in what feels like an utter white-washing of whatever actually happened. We see Dina go out for a night on the town, but the events are cut short. Instead, the focus is on Ali's diligent quest to find the best material for an upcoming album.

Nonetheless, all the judicious editing in the world can't quite mask Dina's domineering and calculating nature. Had "Living Lohan's" producers been given free reign, the show might've been a steroidal exercise in Schadenfreude and an exquisite train wreck; as is, it's simply a train kind of vaguely bumping into another train and masking any residual damage, which simply isn't interesting to anyone.

Both shows feature similar lines: "There's nothing more important than family to me," Dina insists; Richards vows, "My life is all about family." Were that so, wouldn't they have devoted their energies to their kids away from the intrusive purviews of ogling cameras?

- "Denise Richards: It's Complicated:" 10 p.m. Mondays, E!
- "Living Lohan:" 10:30 p.m. Mondays, E!

*

"The Andromeda Strain"

It's a good time to remake "The Andromeda Strain," Michael Crichton's 1969 novel about a micro-organism from the cosmos that seemingly can't be killed but is awfully good at killing anything it touches. Paranoia over biological weapons, the SARS scare, a hypochondriac populace - just about everyone has a decent reason to fear for their health, if not their lives, these days.

Directed by Mikael Salomon (TNT's "The Company" and "The Grid") from a screenplay by Robert Schenkkan [cq] (the Pulitzer Prize-winning play "The Kentucky Cycle"), A&E's new four-hour miniseries hews closely enough to the source material, while adding more cutting-edge technobabble and incorporating the current geopolitical turmoil and environmental concerns into its melodrama.

Tonight's installment is burdened with all the narrative heavy lifting, so it provides a bit of a bumpy start. An orbiting satellite crashes into Piedmont, Utah, instantly killing everyone there but an infant and an old drunk. Wildfire, a team of medical specialists - Drs. Stone (Benjamin Bratt), Noyce (Miller), Tsi (Daniel Dae Kim), Barton (Viola Davis) and Keene (Ricky Schroder) - are summoned to assemble in a high-tech underground bunker and figure out how to resolve the situation, while the military, led by General Mancheck (Andre Braugher), tries to quarantine the area.

Trouble is, they can't figure out whether the alien organism found on the satellite is a virus, bacteria or some exotic life form, and it proves remarkably adept at adjusting to their assorted remedies, as well as finding faster, more efficient ways to kill. And the military must also contend with a brash (is there any other kind?) reporter (Eric McCormack) who stumbles upon the story.

Schenkkan's script briskly delivers the exposition, but offers some awfully bland dialogue and characterizations and rote friction between the doctors and the reporter and his boss. (Not to mention some trite plot detours - as dire as the situation is, a couple of doctors can still find time for a smooch or two.) Salomon's direction undercuts tonight's climax - a race-against-the-clock sequence is so languid that you just know something worse is just around the corner.

And a lot of the bit players who show up just long enough to succumb to the malady are a tad, shall we say, histrionic in delivering their death screeches. I played a sequence over the phone for a friend who called up and who couldn't stop laughing.

But Salomon ratchets up the suspense quite efficiently in the second episode, as everything goes to hell. (You could probably skip tonight and watch Tuesday without missing too much important.) There's only one big inadvertent laugh, a slo-mo close-up of a severed thumb spinning through the air; too bad it happens right at the climax.

"The Andromeda Strain" fits pretty snugly in the wheelhouse of TV spectacles with just enough intrigue and star power to keep you engaged but not quite enough cheese to send you lunging for your remote.

- "The Andromeda Strain:" 9 p.m. tonight and Tuesday, A&E.