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Words With Fracas Alec Baldwin shuts down his Twitter feed after airline dispute

Nobody Loves Amy

The years most appealingly tragicomic series is about to end its rookie season. Enlightened (HBO, Mondays, 9:30 p.m.) is a portrait of a mad corporate slave. Amy Jellicoe (the incomparable Laura Dern, above) threatens to kill her ex-lover at a soulsucking health conglomerate, blaming him for her transfer to a less glamorous job. Hawaiian rehab restores her sanit or does it? Back at work and eager to be an agent of change, she is always late, she pursues personal dogooder projects on company time, and she relentlessly chats up colleagues who think shes crazy. Amys private life is equally messy. Shes moved in with Mom (Derns reallife mother, Diane Ladd), queen of the withering comment: You look awful. Are you going to go to work like that? And she reconnects with her drugusing ex (laid-back Luke Wilson). Mondays finale has a typical mix of sly humor, oppressive earnestness and frustrating irresolution and another extraordinary performance by Dern, who can turn ravishing or careworn, spiritual or sensual, with a mere glance. Ratings have been OK, but no decisions been made about the shows future. HBO: Enlighten us with more!
Read Marcs previous columns at: expressnightout.com/muse

Stephens, imitating the last-scenefirst device Hollywood is fond of. After an opening drone that suggests a flat-lining EKG monitor, Black Thought raps from the perspective of a spirit freshly escaped from the body: From a man to a memory. ... I wonder if my fam will remember me. Then, back to the beginning, where Stephenss life slowly takes shape and quickly splinters. Different voices step in to inhabit his firstperson, including rising Mississippi rapper Big K.R.I.T. and longtime Roots collaborator Dice Raw. In the meantime, the band handles each of these delicate backing tracks with a pleasing and elegant touch. The album closes with an

PRASHANT GUPTA/HBO

Jimmy Fallons house band hits its artistic peak on the conceptual undun
There are some incredibly evocative songs on the Roots new album, undun. The electronic pulse of Sleep sounds like molten gold dripping from a leaky spigot. The bass at the finale of Make My plows tunnels through the cumulus Alps of heaven. So its too bad the one song that the Roots will likely be remembered for in 2011 is a 16-second swatch of Fishbones Lyin A-- B----. As the house band on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, the Philadelphia-born hip-hop collective recently spat up the rowdy ska tune as Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann traipsed out onstage for an interview. The band considered it a joke. Certain corners of the media considered it an outrage. NBC apologized to Bachmann and severely reprimanded the Roots. Last week, bandleader Questlove said the stunt was absolutely not worth it. But regardless of whether the decision was in poor taste, it underscored a bigger point about the Roots: The band members might spend their work week taking Fallon in and out of commercial, but theyve never stopped thinking of themselves as artists.

Its an idea addressed more explicitly with undun, the groups most adventurous outing since 1999s Things Fall Apart. But where that triumph folded hip-hop into new shapes like so much origami paper, undun slowly allows itself to spread in every direction, the way water spills across a tabletop.

DEF JAM

The Roots

Thats just the music, though. Lyrically, this is a concept album with a linear narrative that frontman Black Thought follows with admirable discipline. The story begins with the death of a semi-fictional drug dealer named Redford

orchestral suite thats every bit as lovely as the beat-driven stuff on the front end. Two Decembers ago, Questlove said he was paranoid about the Roots being known merely as Jimmy Fallons band. Hopefully, hes gotten over that. The Roots have inarguably made television a better place for music, while life on television has inarguably made the Roots a better band. Lets hope they never quit t hei r d ay job. O r ge t f i re d.
CHRIS RICHARDS (THE WASHINGTON POST )

Fillmore, 8656 Colesville Road, Silver Spring; Dec. 29 & 30, 8 p.m., $54; 301-960-9999, Fillmoresilverspring. com. (Silver Spring)

A stunt for the Discover Channel show MythBusters sent an errant cannonball through a California familys house and into a parked minivan a few hundred feet away. The cannonball, fired at a sheriffs department bomb range on Tuesday, was supposed to go through a few water-filled barrels and a concrete wall. Instead, it passed over the barrels and through the wall, and then took a skyward bounce. No injuries were reported. (AP)