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Boredom can drive us to many things, and one of them is watching Private Practice. A so-called medical show, this is an hour with some very unpleasant, unlikable, annoying rich people who sleep with each other because no one else could tolerate them. So badly written, this show could fall into the comedy category for the Emmy's though one suspects the writers take themselves very seriously. Very seriously. Every week, this medical facility is faced with moral challenges that bring out the worst in one another, beginning with the truly absurd Dr. Naomi Bennett. Completely without a hint of charm or likability, this actors job is is to perpetually snarl at the daughter and the ex-husband, and now, the best friend. Second in line is Dr. Charlotte King, a character born out of the imagination of a sober Tennesee Williams. When she isn't spraying her female musk, she is chopping balls off her new husband, the docile Dr. Freedman. Even Taye Diggs character has recently entered into annoying territory as he ponders ethical and moral questions, usually shirtless. The real issue with this show is how bad the characters are and how as an audience, we could care less. At night, these horrible people retire to their beach-front Malibu properties to drink Chardonnay and engage in a game of sexual tick-tack-toe, only to wake each day and pretend they are doing something useful. If this were the show, at this point, the poignant sad folk-like song would be underscoring the deeply felt, overly dramatic moment that will happily lead to a commercial break.

Some men buy hot cars when having their mid life crisis, some men make movies. In this horrific homage to the brutal close-up and an America that doesn't exist, Stallone has fashioned a movie that is so thin on substance and excessive on violence, it is at best a fairy tale. This movie could have been titled, Cliché, because that is what it is at every corner. Stallone must have seen the movie, 300 and liked the graphic splattering of blood, because you see it so often in this film you wonder if he's not being slightly ironic. And why he decided close-ups of every aging hero was interesting is nothing less than bewilderment. Yes, Mickey Rourke gives a three minute speech with a close up of nothing but his lips, but the speech is flat, detached, despite the close up (what else?) of tears on Sly's famously botoxed cheek. This is one of those movies we Americans like: we always win, we never get shot and we ALWAYS teach our enemies a lesson. Somewhere in the back of one's mind, we're thinking, they can't even find bin Laden and yet this little group infiltrates and basically destroys a government...if only. But it is really the excessive, meaningless violence that is most troubling. There is no regard for human life in the slightest here. Men are killed on the average of three per second. It's not interesting violence. Its not martial art eloquence, or supported by any kind of romance of violence, its dirty, bogus, badly photographed violence that leaves one running for silence later.