Our picks for this week’s top TV, movies, DVDs, CDs and more

“Everybody’s Fine”? Don’t bet on it. In the new film, Robert DeNiro plays a widower who seeks to reconnect with his adult children, including one played by Drew Barrymore.

MOVIES
Need some family-related sympathy as you begin to run the inevitable holiday gauntlet? Slip out for a showing of Robert DeNiro’s new film, “Everybody’s Fine,” in which the legendary actor plays a widower who goes on a lengthy road trip to reconnect with his adult kids, discovering more about their lives than perhaps he wanted to know. Drew Barrymore and Kate Beckinsale co-star. (In theaters Dec. 4)

“Brothers” also tackles family issues. When military man Sam (Tobey Maguire) is missing in Iraq, his brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) gets a little too close to Sam’s wife, Grace (Natalie Portman) and their two girls. But when Tommy turns up alive, the very foundations of family have shifted. (In theaters Dec. 4)

TV
The revamped “Scrubs” returns Dec. 1, and Entertainment Weekly’s Michael Ausiello has already dished some dirt. “The first two episodes contain news of a death, Dr. Cox takes a page from Dr. House’s playbook and refers to his students as numbers (although he adds his own special twist), and J.D. and Turk’s hit single “Guy Love” makes a comeback,” reported Ausiello. (Dec. 1, 9 p.m., ABC)

DVD
Just in time for Christmas, there’s a new four-pack of “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ DVDs released — this one is Volume XVI. This set includes the films “Warrior of the Lost World,” “Night of the Blood Beast,” “The Corpse Vanishes,” and the timely “Santa Claus.” There’s also a Tom Servo figurine to go with the Crow T. Robot figure provided in an earlier set. Because you do buy them all, right? (Out on DVD Dec. 1)

Sequel nets $42 million but football drama earns $40 million at No. 2

Kristen Stewart, left, stars as Bella and Taylor Lautner plays Jacob in “The Twilight Saga: New Moon.”

LOS ANGELES - Vampires and werewolves continued to howl at the box office with a $42.5 million weekend for “The Twilight Saga: New Moon.”

Summit Entertainment’s “Twilight” sequel remained No. 1 over what proved a record Thanksgiving weekend for Hollywood. But “New Moon” was nearly blind-sided for the top spot by a real-life football drama.

“The Blind Side” had a great second weekend with $40.1 million coming in at No. 2 just behind “New Moon.” Released by Warner Bros., the inspirational story of Baltimore Ravens tackle Michael Oher stars Sandra Bullock as a woman whose wealtThe two movies propelled Hollywood to record revenues over the five-day Thanksgiving period. Wednesday-to-Sunday receipts came in at an estimated $275 million, according to Hollywood.com box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian.

That surpassed the previous Thanksgiving record of $244.4 million set in 2000, when “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and “Unbreakable” topped the box office.

With 2009 domestic revenues at $9.5 billion, Hollywood is on the verge of breaking the record of $9.7 billion set in 2007. Studios have a month of prime holiday business ahead, so the industry should easily top the $10 billion mark domestically for the first time.

“We’re going to buzz past it,” Dergarabedian said.

New wide releases had so-so results this weekend. Disney’s family comedy “Old Dogs,” starring Robin Williams and John Travolta as single guys forced to mind 7-year-old twins one of them never knew he had fathered, came in at No. 4 with $16.8 million for the three-day weekend and $24.1 million since opening Wednesday.

The Warner Bros. action tale “Ninja Assassin” opened at No. 6 with $13.1 million over the weekend and $21 million since Wednesday. The movie features Korean pop star Rain and Naomie Harris in a thriller about a hit man on the run from his assassination clan.

“Fantastic Mr. Fox,” the 20th Century Fox animated comedy with a voice cast led by George Clooney, expanded to nationwide release and pulled in $7 million to finish at No. 9.

“New Moon” raised its domestic total to $230.7 million after just 10 days. That’s nearly $40 million more than the first movie, last year’s “Twilight,” took in during its entire 20-week run. The movie’s worldwide gross stands at $473.7 million.

The “Twilight” movies star Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner in an adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s books about teen heartache among a school girl, a vampire and a werewolf.

“New Moon” is approaching numbers achieved by another teen fantasy sensation, the “Harry Potter” films, which had domestic totals ranging from $250 million to $317 million.

“We always hesitated to compare ourselves to ‘Harry Potter,’ but the numbers do speak for themselves,” said Richie Fay, head of distribution for Summit.

While the weekend haul for “New Moon” dropped a steep 70 percent from the movie’s $142.8 million opening, “The Blind Side” actually went up 18 percent from its $34.1 million first weekend. Dan Fellman, head of distribution for Warner Bros., said the movie is on track to top $200 million.

“The Blind Side” is drawing equal audiences among men and women and finding fans from ages 8 to 80, said Andrew Kosove, co-founder and co-chief executive officer of Alcon Entertainment, which produced the film.

“Even though Michael Oher is a football player, and football is a part of the story, the movie is really not a sports movie. It’s a family movie,” Kosove said.

“The Blind Side” lifted its 10-day total to $100.3 million and has generated Academy Awards buzz for Bullock.

In limited release, the Weinstein Co. apocalyptic drama “The Road” opened strongly with a $1.5 million weekend and $2 million since opening Wednesday. Adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, the film stars Viggo Mortensen as a father struggling to survive with his young son in the wasteland of America after an unspecified catastrophe.

Disney’s animated musical “The Princess and the Frog” did huge business, debuting in two theaters with $712,000 over the weekend and $1.1 million since Wednesday. Updating the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “The Frog Prince” to jazzy New Orleans in the 1920s, the film expands nationwide Dec. 11.

hy family takes in the homeless teen and enrolls him in private school.

Sheriff’s official: Gunman opened fire in ‘execution’-style attack

PARKLAND, Wash. - A gunman walked into a coffee shop and shot and killed four police officers Sunday morning in what sheriff’s officials described as a targeted “execution.”

The officers were sitting in the cafe at a strip mall near the Tacoma suburb of Parkland with their laptop computers, preparing for their day shifts, when a man came in and opened fire, Pierce County Sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer said.

The officers were obviously targeted because they were in full uniform, their marked patrol cars were parked outside and no one else was shot at, Troyer said.

“This was more of an execution. He walked in with the mind of shooting police officers,” Troyer said.

It wasn’t immediately known if any of the officers were able to return fire. They were declared dead at the scene.

Troyer said two employees and a few customers were in the Forza Coffee Company shop at the time but no one else was hurt. “As you can imagine they are all traumatized,” he said.

Authorities scoured the area for the gunman, who fled from the coffee shop on foot and may have gotten into a nearby vehicle. The shooting suspect was described as a “scruffy”-faced black man in his 20s or 30s, 5 feet 7 to 5 feet 10 and wearing a black jacket over a gray hooded sweatshirt, and blue jeans.

“We are in the process of searching multiple locations,” Troyer said.

Nearby McChord Air Force Base was put on alert.

No advance threats
The victims were three males and one female, all officers with the Lakewood Police Department southwest of Tacoma, Troyer said.

There were no specific advance threats against the officers, Troyer said.

A $10,000 reward was being offered for information leading to those responsible.

Lui Kit Wong / The News Tribune Concerned citizens react near the location where four police officers were killed.

“This is an example of the danger that police officers and deputy sheriffs and state troopers face every day,” Sheriff Paul Pastor said. “The person or people who did this not only harmed us, they harmed the good that we can do in the community.”

There was no indication of any connection with the Halloween night shooting of a Seattle police officer, Troyer said. The suspect in that shooting remains hospitalized.

‘Hits close to home’
The Forza coffee shop, part of a popular local chain, is on a side street near McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma, about 35 miles south of Seattle. The shop is in a small retail center alongside two restaurants, a cigar store and a nail salon.

Brad Carpenter, founder and owner of Forza Coffee, said his staff was OK and being interviewed by police, and that his main concern was with the families of the police officers.

“I’m a retired police officer, so this really hits close to home for me,” he said.

Streets around the coffee shop were blocked off late Sunday morning, and a police helicopter hovered over a large crowd of investigators.

Dave Gabrielson, a clerk at Foot Mart about a block away from the coffee shop, told The News Tribune of Tacoma all was quiet when he opened the store at 8 a.m. About 30 minutes later, “All of a sudden a million cops were zooming up and down the road,” Gabrielson said.

He said he saw officers bring a police dog into a nearby apartment complex.

Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire said she was “shocked and horrified” by the killings.

“Our police put their lives on the line every day, and tragedies like this remind us of the risks they continually take to keep our communities safe,” she said in a statement. “My heart goes out to the family, friends and co-workers of these officers, as well as the entire law enforcement community.”

Seattle police shooting
On Oct. 31, Seattle police officer Timothy Brenton was shot and killed Halloween night as he was sitting in a cruiser with trainee Britt Sweeney. Sweeney was grazed in the neck.

Authorities say the man charged with that shooting also firebombed four police vehicles in October as part of a “one-man war” against law enforcement. Christopher Monfort, 41, was arrested days after the Seattle slaying after being shot by officers surrounding an apartment complex south of Seattle where he was staying. He remains hospitalized in stable condition and is reportedly paralyzed from the waist down.

Review could be seen as warning against opponents of a troop surge now

WASHINGTON - Osama bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora when American military leaders made the crucial and costly decision not to pursue the terrorist leader with massive force, a Senate report says.

The report asserts that the failure to kill or capture bin Laden at his most vulnerable in December 2001 has had lasting consequences beyond the fate of one man. Bin Laden’s escape laid the foundation for today’s reinvigorated Afghan insurgency and inflamed the internal strife now endangering Pakistan, it says.

Staff members for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Democratic majority prepared the report at the request of the chairman, Sen. John Kerry, as President Barack Obama prepares to boost U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

The Massachusetts senator and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate has long argued the Bush administration missed a chance to get the al-Qaida leader and top deputies when they were holed up in the forbidding mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan only three months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Aimed at foes of surge?
Although limited to a review of military operations eight years old, the report could also be read as a cautionary note for those resisting an increased troop presence there now.

More pointedly, it seeks to affix a measure of blame for the state of the war today on military leaders under former president George W. Bush, specifically Donald H. Rumsfeld as defense secretary and his top military commander, Tommy Franks.

“Removing the al-Qaida leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat,” the report says. “But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide. The failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism.”

The report states categorically that bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora when the U.S. had the means to mount a rapid assault with several thousand troops at least. It says that a review of existing literature, unclassified government records and interviews with central participants “removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora.”

Fewer than 100 U.S. commandos
On or about Dec. 16, 2001, bin Laden and bodyguards “walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan’s unregulated tribal area,” where he is still believed to be based, the report says.

Golfer must speak publicly about car crash — and rumors of Uchitel affair

When Tiger Woods got in the car just before 2:25 a.m. Friday, he didn’t just crash into a fire hydrant. He had a head-on collision with another object: the invisible bowels of the bad-publicity machine, which in more than 13 years of professional golf, he’d been able to avoid.

As a college athlete in the mid-1990s, my circle overlapped with Woods’ from time to time, and I can attest there are plenty of stories about a slightly awkward Stanford golf prodigy that could be filed under “typical college kid behavior,” or twisted into tabloid fodder.

As a fledgling journalist at Golf World magazine in the early 2000s, I can attest to similar stories of the youngest golfer to achieve a career grand slam behaving in a way that might have looked bad on paper.

But these stories never really materialized. Thrown clubs and the errant F-bombs were chalked up to pressures of the sport and apologies followed. So why has an accident in the driveway turned into a full-blown train wreck? Because much like a guy named David Letterman, up until now Woods’ public life and private persona have had few intersections, and the former has been for the most part, unimpeachable.

And when that’s the case, we tend to want to believe the best in our celebrities. In the early iterations of crash-gate, there were facts that allowed us to do so. Instead of focusing on why Woods was leaving his house at 2:25 a.m., we focused on his wife of five years, Elin Nordegren, extracting him from the car with a 7-iron.Only later did the question arise of whether she might have also chased him out of the house with it. And when the Woods camp made a statement about his “minor accident,” we focused on the fact that it stated Woods was in good condition.

It’s nicer to think his putting game wouldn’t be affected than to wonder why it took the Woods team 13 hours to come up with it, or it was a coincidence the crash happened just days after the National Enquirer alleged Woods was having an affair.

Which brings us to the woman at the center of that story, Rachel Uchitel. She didn’t waste as much time as the Woods camp did in getting a statement out, relatively speaking. Of the Enquirer story, she told the AP, “I resent my reputation is getting completely blasted in the media … Everyone is assuming I came out and said this. This is not a story I have anything to do with.”

Which is not exactly the same as saying the story is not true.