WITH THE PHILLIES OUT OF THE WAY, WE SHIFT TO THE HARDWOOD: A.I. [heart] practice? Practice?

"SO MUCH EXTRAORDINARY TALENT HAS GONE INTO THE BATTER THAT IT'S NO WONDER THE CAKE CAME OUT WITH A SMILE": While I'm comfortable allowing others' praise of In Her Shoes to speak in place of my own today, I did want to share with you a short list of Things You Can Notice During In Her Shoes When You See It This Weekend (You Will See It This Weekend, Okay?) That Will Make You Feel Smarter Than The Person You're Sitting Next To:

• Notice the nods to Curtis Hanson's prior and next movies. Like 8 Mile, it begins with a lead character vomiting in a public restroom (and has a passing reference to "the new Eminem video" during one scene). Like his upcoming Lucky You, images of poker are everpresent.
• Rose's best friend, Amy? Played by the same actress, Brooke Smith, who was down the oubliette as Catherine Martin in Silence of the Lambs. And Jerry Adler (Lewis Feldman) has a decidedly different role on "The Sopranos" as Hesh.
• During a crucial scene, Simon Stein offers Rose a single Mento. For about 15-20 of this site's readers, this is a fact of much significance.
• There really is a Jamaican Jerk Hut in Philadelphia.
• While "the Professor" is unnamed during the movie, in the script he is named "Professor Sofield" in honor of David Sofield, a poetry professor at Amherst College, alma mater of both screenwriter Susannah Grant ('84) and co-star Ken Howard ('66).
• Jen and I once had really awful service while on vacation at a restaurant called the Canal House, so bad that we left the restaurant because no one even brought us a menu after 15 minutes. This will help one reference in the movie make sense.
• Despite her importance to the script, MyMarcia does not have a single speaking line.

Enjoy the movie, folks.

HE'S WEARING A RED AND WHITE STRIPED SHIRT AND A RED SKI HAT AND HE HAS SPECTACLES. SEEN HIM? It's been quiet around here -- scary quiet. I invite you to speculate: where have Adam, Alex, Kim, Kingsley, Matt, Pathetic E., and Phil been? I'll start: I think I read about this in Left Behind.

TO UNDERSTAND THIS SYMPOSIUM, PRETEND JIM KELLY IS THE TIME MAGAZINE EDITOR AND NOT THE FORMER USFL QUARTERBACK: From Adlai, whose seersucker suits may soon need to be boxed up for the winter, comes word of the absurdly well-concocted magazine humor symposium featuring the editors of Vanity Fair, Time, Cosmopolitan, and Men's Health (though the last may have been Details -- I refused to acknowledge the difference, if there is one, when reading the article), moderated by Jon Stewart. Moderated to hilarious effect, I might add.

A WARM WELCOME TO FANS OF LORD OF THE FLIES: Since K. Cosmo is currently holding out until Adam renegotiates her contract and there isn't yet an open thread on last night's Alias episode, I'll give my two cents:

1. The new title sequence is trying to do a lot of the necessary work of lowering expectations. Last season it featured a montage of all of Sydney's disguises, emphasis on the ridiculous (brightly-colored upswept 'dos) and the sublime (the skivvies that Matt claims are not the point of the show. This season Abrams's disco-meth-porn-casio soundtrack (boom-chicka-chi-bow-bow-brrring-tinka-tinka) is accompanied by full cast parity. Introducing Balthazar Getty as a new character, "Liev Schreiber."

2. If there is one cinematographic trick for which Alias really sets the standard, it is the pan-down to show what a female character is holding in her hands coincidentally close to a well-ventilated body part. Last week Abrams introduced us to Rachel Nichols's dimples. This week, courtesy of her cell phone, Abrams introduced us to her cleavage (if Spacewoman can drool over Vaughn for four years, I think I'm entitled to say that this was the high point of the episode). I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that at some point in the next two episodes we're going to get memory stick/lace panties.

3. Poor Agent Weiss. Last year he had a storyline and a love interest who was out of his league. This year he has an e-meter reading from Ethan Hunt and yet another Abrams ensemble piece.

4. As for the episode, it involved using the faro dealer from Deadwood to get to the guy who killed Syd's baby daddy and then taking a very long nap in which we dreamed of the time when this show was moderately interesting. Doesn't it seem like everybody involved has lost interest? Except Dixon, who never really showed an interest in the first place?

THERE MUST BE A FRONT DOOR: I had a couple of questions and non-spoiling thoughts about this week's Lost:

- If Desmond has been trapped down the hatch for three years, only getting out for a few months' worth of Calvin's shifts, how did he seem to know where he was going when he ran away?

- Gosh, they lingered for a while on Alvar Hansa. I wonder if he looks like anybody we've seen in, say, two episodes.

- Can anybody help with the philosophers? I know that Calvin is the determinist, and although I remember that Locke was an empiricist, I also thought (perhaps embarrassingly incorrectly) that he was a free-will guy too. Maybe that's just me trying to impart meaning into the the Calvin-Locke contrast in the hatch. How does Rousseau (Danielle) fit in? Just the "noble savage" thing, or does Rousseau have something to say about Calvin and Locke?

- When are we going to get some real Hurley/Claire/Maggie time?

- I dug the way that the "why is it so hard for you to believe?/why is it so easy for you?" debate was a shout-out to Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan's "miracles" exchange from the Scopes trial.

- Did anybody else freak out at the Jin bit on the next-ons?

Comments are open for more full-on spoilgasms.

CHARTER MEMBER OF THE DAVID E. KELLEY PLAYERS: Thought while watching last night's Boston Legal (other than the fact that Julie Bowen's character really doesn't seem to fit in)--why on earth does Anthony Heald not have formal H!ITG! status? Heald has a special honor in the Kelley-verse, having appeared on three Kelley shows, including a wonderful first season as Vice-Principal Guber on Boston Public, which then lost its way.