Monday: Jon & Kate Plus 8
Schadenfreude alert! The Gosselin family (Jon, Kate and their eight children, including a set of sextuplets) return to television tonight for the fifth season of the hit reality show that bears their name, just in time to make you realize your life isn’t so bad after all. Word is, the current tabloid darlings will address all those reports of martial infidelity and strife. (Jon cheated! Kate cheated! They have an open marriage! They’re already divorced!) Amid all that sleaze however, there are also, y’know, eight innocent children running around looking for parental guidance. For the sake of those cute kids, here’s hoping season six isn’t called Jon and Kate Plus Eight on Alternate Weekends. [TLC, 9 p.m.]

Tuesday: Mental
We can almost hear the pitch for this one: “He’s like House, but less cantankerous and more British!” The “he” is Chris Vance, a British actor you might remember from season two of Prison Break, starring as Dr. Jack Gallagher, the newly appointed psychiatric director at a hospital in Los Angeles. As you might expect, Dr. Gallagher is the type of physician who practices some unconventional methods of care—in the opening minutes of the pilot, he strips naked to corral a patient gone haywire. Mental is such a rote endeavor that it could conceivably make your eyes cross. But, hell,  it’s officially summertime! Being a rote endeavor qualifies it as watchable. [Fox, 9 p.m.]

Wednesday: The Goode Family
Now that King of the Hill has been mercifully canceled, Mike Judge (the overrated mastermind behind Hill, Beavis and Butthead and Office Space) returns to the confines of familial animation with The Goode Family. Think of this of this as King of the Hill gone Blue State: The Goode’s are politically correct environmentalists who have a dog named Che. Yeah, it’s that kind of series. If jokes about Al Gore and vegans are up your alley, this one’s for you. [ABC, 9 p.m.]

Thursday: Kissing Jessica Stein
This is one of the better Woody Allen rip-off New York romances we’ve seen, if only because star Jennifer Westfeldt is so winning as the sexually confused and neurotic lead. That Kissing Jessica Stein rises above the Skinemax-ready premise (pretty single gal decides she wants to be in a relationship … with another girl!) is all due to Ms. Westfeldt's evenhanded screenplay, which is so good we wonder why a big studio never snatched her up to write a mainstream romantic comedy. Fun fact: Keep an eye out for Ms. Westfeldt’s real-life boyfriend, some dude named Jon Hamm, in a small role as a dinner guest. [IFC, 6:15 p.m.]

Friday: The Incredible Hulk
Twenty years from now, when we look back at the passing fad that was comic-book movies, we’ll stumble upon the fun silliness that was The Incredible Hulk and laugh. What other reaction could there possibly be to a movie—about the Incredible Hulk, mind you—that stars noted thespians like William Hurt, Tim Roth and, in the lead role as the Green Menace, Ed Norton. We can only assume Daniel Day-Lewis was unavailable. [5 Star Max, 9 p.m.]

To pinpoint when this phenomenon started, we’d have to head all the way back to the summer of 2004, when Spider-Man 2—the Godfather Part II of comic-book adaptations—managed to squeeze the entire first movie into a sequence of paneled illustrations. The trick worked because it was original and inclusive—if you hadn’t seen the first Spider-Man, you were all caught up by the time the sequel started in earnest—but also because Spider-Man 2 happens to be a great movie. Last summer’s forgotten The Incredible Hulk (we doubt even star Ed Norton remembers this film existed) wasn’t so lucky, despite using a similar tactic for its main titles. And, of course, the pièce de résistance in this movement occurred just this past March in Zack Snyder’s Watchmen. While the movie wound up being entirely mediocre, the opening credits sequence—a five-minute scrapbook of the original graphic novel by way of James Ellroy and scored with Bob Dylan—ranks as one of the best moments of the entire year, and likely still will by the time 2009 draws to a close.

And that brings us back to X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Like Watchmen on a smaller scale, the opening credits get you prepared for something fantastic, but the movie never delivers. It seems that comic-book films have increasingly become something akin to pop albums—top heavy with hits—and the hits are getting smaller. Call us picky, but we expect a bit more from our superheroes than having them reduced to the celluloid version of a Lady Gaga album. As witnessed by the opening credits, these directors clearly have talent—why not use it for all two hours of running time?

Five years have passed since the first big-screen Hulk wasted the reputation of director Ang Lee on a computer-generated comic strip nobody wanted to see. That film suffered punishing reviews and a devastating 70 percent drop-off in attendance in the second week, from which it never recovered. But you can’t keep an old, green, 10-ton Brussels sprout down for long. It’s too early to predict if The Incredible Hulk, the CGI sequel, will sink to that same level of box office infamy, but take it from me: You’ll have the DVD by Labor Day.

If you didn’t waste your allowance on the Marvel comics created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby 46 years ago, or if you were lucky enough to miss the first film adaptation, this sequel stages a brief opening-credits prelude in flashbacks, showing Dr. Bruce Banner (Edward Norton, replacing Eric Bana) working on a top-secret scientific research project for the U.S. military, supervised by a demented Army general (William Hurt) who is also the father of Bruce’s girlfriend, Dr. Betty Ross (Liv Tyler, replacing Jennifer Connelly). The experiments goes horribly awry in a near-fatal laboratory explosion that leaves Betty without a scratch and Bruce infected with gamma-ray poisoning. Now he’s a mild fellow working in a soda-pop bottling factory in Brazil who turns the color of spinach when his blood pressure rises. Then watch out. Make him mad and he rips his clothes off and morphs into an incredible Kilimanjaro of a hunk—er, hulk—with veins that look like the Amazon River flowing through thighs the size of California redwoods. No wonder Bruce is in Brazil incognito, practicing anger management with a Portuguese guru by working his diaphragm. But the diabolical conservative, right-wing general with the locked jawbone and voice of cold steel (Mr. Hurt, hamming it up all over the place in a witty impersonation of Dick Cheney) wants Bruce captured so he can surgically remove his data bank, replicate it, and turn it into a weapon of mass destruction. (Create more powerful Hulk monsters and the U.S. military could conquer the world!) Bruce doesn’t want to be the Incredible Hulk. He just wants to be the Incredible Ed Norton. But when his eyes turn to neon and his biceps pop his chains like rubber bands, wherever he lands makes a hole so deep you can see Beijing.

After a drop of his radioactive blood lands in a bottle of carbonated fruit juice imported to the U.S., Bruce flees Brazil, wakes up naked in the jungles of Guatemala and wanders barefoot across Mexico to reach the Virginia college campus where Betsy works as a professor of cellular biology. She still loves Bruce, but he’s afraid of sex because there’s no telling what might happen if he got excited in bed. No matter. Liv Tyler has all the passion of mayonnaise.

Just when the déjà vu drives everyone to check their watches for how much running time is left, a villainous rival behemoth is introduced in the human form of a Russian-born guerrilla named Blonsky (Tim Roth), who performs radiation experiments on himself with the aid of an eye-rolling, scenery-chewing mad doctor (another corny over-the-top guest cameo by the dreadful Tim Blake Nelson) and turns into something worse than the Hulk. Imagine a T.rex with a head like a boiled peanut. The mayhem that follows is as rampant and recycled as a contemporary comic-book superhero with CGI can get—and twice as boring. Bruce’s goal: stay alive, keep running, and try not to turn into the Hulk. But war is inevitable; we get two King Kongs in battle instead of one; and the big finale by hack director Louis Leterrier is like Godzilla Meets Reptilicus, all staged in front of the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. For anyone who misses the days when monsters were played by real actors instead of computers, there’s a cameo appearance by Lou Ferrigno—who played the Hulk for years on TV—as both the voice of the Hulk and a security guard. Looking good, Lou.

It’s dismaying to think of all the wonderful performances Edward Norton has given in movies nobody ever saw. This one is high-octane slumming that will keep him in Bentleys for years.

rreed@observer.com

THIS WEEKEND BRINGS the girl-friendly Kit Kittredge: An American Girl (yes, based on the dolls), the Steve Carell remake Get Smart and Mike Myers’ The Love Guru, about a Deepak Chopra-esque self-help mogul trying to help a star hockey player whose wife left him. We can’t help but think that if it’s a comedy you’re after this weekend, you might as well stick with a classic and check out Woody Allen’s 1973 classic Sleeper, playing as part of the midnight series at the IFC Center.

The premise, based loosely on the H. G. Wells novel The Sleeper Awakes, has Woody Allen playing Miles Monroe—a health food store owner who goes to St. Vincent’s for a routine peptic ulcer operation and ends up frozen in nitrogen until 200 years later. When Mr. Monroe is awoken, the world in 2173 is unrecognizable and civilization as he (and we) know it has changed. For starters, the leader of this society is somehow only a nose, and Miles is charged with joining the underground resistance as he’s the only one around without a high-tech ID. Enter Diane Keaton, a good four years before she became immortalized as Annie Hall. She plays Luna Schlosser, a rich poet whose path crosses Miles when he poses as a robot in her house. See? Robots are clearly our future (see next week’s big Pixar release, Wall-E).

Mr. Allen has a whimsical good time imagining what the future might look like. There are vegetables of unusual size (like celery that could take your head off), orgasmatron booths (no muss, no fuss) and intoxication orbs at parties. Also, in 2173, previous no-nos, like smoking and eating red meat and other fatty foods, are thought to be good for you (if you remember how eggs were the enemy not too long ago, this doesn’t seem that farfetched). In homage to real life, Mr. Allen has Miles shown pictures of Stalin, Howard Cosell and Richard Nixon, and sneaks in some fun stuff for New Yorkers, too (Albert Shanker, anyone?). But the best part of Sleeper is the rare sight of Mr. Allen doing some Buster Keaton-like physical comedy. Which he’s really good at! What on earth could be better than watching Woody Allen fighting a monster blob of instant pudding with a broom?

Sleeper screens this Friday and Saturday at midnight at the IFC Film Center.

svilkomerson@observer.com

THIS WEEKEND, we’ll see a showdown between Edward Norton in The Incredible Hulk (like Shrek, big, green and often exceedingly grouchy) and The Happening, the latest from M. Night Shyamalan (brace yourself for the inevitable “I so saw that twist coming”). But for those seeking a little something off the beaten path, there’s the quirky personal flick My Winnipeg from the ever-inventive Guy Maddin, filmmaker of numerous shorts and nine other features including The Saddest Music in the World and Brand Upon the Brain!, which played at last year’s New York Film Festival accompanied by a live orchestra. In the film, Mr. Maddin tackles his Canadian city of birth, examining the idea of trying to break out of your hometown (think Bruce Springsteen) and the ties and personal mythologies that often keep you right where you started. The director describes My Winnipeg as more “docufantasia” than documentary, which is fairly accurate. Shot in stark black and white, with actors portraying both the director and members of his family (his deceased father is represented by a rug), the film mixes archival footage with the director’s home videos. Everything is set sort of dreamily, with a narration that seems more beat-poetry-like than plot-driven. Winnipeg is apparently no different than any other town in its quirks and pride (since 1888, on the first day of winter, there’s been a citywide scavenger hunt with the first prize being a one-way ticket out of Dodge—though no one ever actually takes it, as the point of the exercise is apparently to discover through a day of city scouring that there’s no place like home). Mr. Maddin describes himself as being enchanted and intoxicated by this city where he’s lived for the past 50 years, but also “bitterly disillusioned.” Among the history and minutiae of Winnipeg that Mr. Maddin provides (and there is a lot), there’s also an awful lot of personal ground covered, too; one almost has the tickling sensation we’re watching some sort of B-roll from a looong Freudian therapy session. We’re not convinced that tourism is going to jump in that part of the world thanks to My Winnipeg, but as with his previous films, one must admire the originality of Mr. Maddin’s work.

My Winnipeg opens Friday at the IFC Film Center.

svilkomerson@observer.com