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First airing in November 2001, 24 quickly established itself as one of the best television series around and solidified itself as a cult classic icon. Utilizing a novel premise, each season of 24 comprises a single day in lives of its characters, with each of the 24 episodes representing a one-hour time segment of that day. Kiefer Sutherland stars in the imminent role of Jack Bauer, a government agent periodically faced with enormous challenges within a single day. Each season is reminiscent of a fast-paced Hollywood action thriller, but it’s only a busy day in the life of the heroic Bauer…

Season 1 unfolds in Los Angeles during the California presidential primary as CIA agent Jack Bauer and his colleagues uncover a murderous plot to assassinate front-running candidate David Palmer. With only 24 hours to uncover the identity of the determined killer, Jack must race against the clock if he has any hope of thwarting the plot. Meanwhile, Jack is distracted by his crumbling marriage and the disappearance of his rebellious teenage daughter. The clock is ticking… Can Jack save the man who may become president? And can he do so while keeping his family intact?

The 24 DVD features a number of breathtaking episodes including the season premiere in which the groundwork for the series and the season is laid. Jack plays chess with his daughter Kim (Elisha Cuthbert) before receiving a call from Nina Myers (Sarah Clarke), his colleague at the Los Angeles Counter Terrorism Unit, telling him to report in for an emergency meeting. Meanwhile, Jack and his wife Teri (Leslie Hope) realize that Kim snuck out of the house during the phone call… When Jack arrives at headquarters, he’s informed of a plot to murder Senator David Palmer, the first serious African-American presidential candidate… Other notable episodes from Season 1 include (#8) in which Nina and Tony discover the identity of the mole who is working for Gaines, and (#23) in which terrorists threaten to kill Kim unless Jack complies with their wishes…

Below is a list of episodes included on the 24 (Season 1) DVD:

Episode 1 (12:00 A.M. - 1:00 A.M.) Air Date: 11-06-2001

Episode 2 (1:00 A.M. - 2:00 A.M.) Air Date: 11-13-2001

Episode 3 (2:00 A.M. - 3:00 A.M.) Air Date: 11-20-2001

Episode 4 (3:00 A.M. - 4:00 A.M.) Air Date: 11-27-2001

Episode 5 (4:00 A.M. - 5:00 A.M.) Air Date: 12-11-2001

Episode 6 (5:00 A.M. - 6:00 A.M.) Air Date: 12-18-2001

Episode 7 (6:00 A.M. - 7:00 A.M.) Air Date: 01-08-2002

Episode 8 (7:00 A.M. - 8:00 A.M.) Air Date: 01-15-2002

Episode 9 (8:00 A.M. - 9:00 A.M.) Air Date: 01-22-2002

Episode 10 (9:00 A.M. - 10:00 A.M.) Air Date: 02-05-2002

Episode 11 (10:00 A.M. - 11:00 A.M.) Air Date: 02-12-2002

Episode 12 (11:00 A.M. - 12:00 P.M.) Air Date: 02-19-2002

Episode 13 (12:00 P.M. - 1:00 P.M.) Air Date: 02-26-2002

Episode 14 (1:00 P.M. - 2:00 P.M.) Air Date: 03-05-2002

Episode 15 (2:00 P.M. - 3:00 P.M.) Air Date: 03-12-2002

Episode 16 (3:00 P.M. - 4:00 P.M.) Air Date: 03-19-2002

Episode 17 (4:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M.) Air Date: 03-26-2002

Episode 18 (5:00 P.M. - 6:00 P.M.) Air Date: 04-02-2002

Episode 19 (6:00 P.M. - 7:00 P.M.) Air Date: 04-09-2002

Episode 20 (7:00 P.M. - 8:00 P.M.) Air Date: 04-16-2002

Episode 21 (8:00 P.M. - 9:00 P.M.) Air Date: 04-23-2002

Episode 22 (9:00 P.M. - 10:00 P.M.) Air Date: 05-07-2002

Episode 23 (10:00 P.M. - 11:00 P.M.) Air Date: 05-14-2002

Episode 24 (11:00 P.M. - 12:00 A.M.) Air Date: 05-21-2002

The Perfect Holiday is seasonably pablum partially redeemed by a smart (if wasted) cast and at least one unusual holiday bit. Directed by co-written by Lance (The Cookout) Rivera, the film mostly flounders through contrived meet-cute scenes and some “what were they thinking” scenes (such as one involving a 300-pound “elf” trying to put on a fat suit). The romantic/family comedy also demands a major suspension of disbelief in having the lovely Gabrielle Union portraying a woman (Nancy) who wishes a nice man would pay her a compliment.

Union plays the ex-wife of an obnoxious rapper, J. Jizzy (Charlie Murphy&ndashEddie’s older brother&ndashwho gets the most laughs in the film). The divorcee’s kid helps steer her to a handsome department-store Santa named Benjamin (Morris Chestnut) who also happens to be a songwriter. What’s more, he’s pitching his tunes to J. Jizzy. Much of the film involves Benjamin trying to keep Nancy and Jizzy from finding out about his romantic and business (respectively) arrangements with each of them. The problem is that there’s no logical reason why he should care&ndashor lie to Nancy about his “true” vocation.

Much of the movie involves Nancy discussing life with her gals pals (Jill Marie Jones and Rachel True), Benjamin chumming around with his best bud, Jamal (Faizon Love); and J-Jizzy interacting with his spacey manager, Delicious (Katt Williams). This offers scenes of soul searching, self revelations and some strained comedy&ndashbut little of it is interesting.

There’s also little reason for Queen Latifah and Terrence Howard (who seems to have appeared in 95 percent of the films released in 2007) playing competing angels (or perhaps that’s angel vs. devil). Latifah breezes through her role, but Howard just seems embarrassed to be here (and who can blame him?).

One of the brightest parts of The Perfect Holiday is one of its most understated: a department store hires a black Santa and black elf helper, kids of all colors line up to visit Ol’ Saint Nick and no one questions it. It’s a sweet, hopeful set-up that offers a counterpoint to the otherwise pedestrian, plodding antics of The Perfect Holiday.

The Perfect Holiday is rated PG for brief language and some suggestive humor. Running time: 96 minutes. Macsimum rating: 4 out of 10. You can check out the film’s trailers on the QuickTime movie trailer site.

Having not seen the stage-manage kind of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Thoroughfare, I can’t speak to the fidelity the covering shares with the play. That said, disillusion admit there be no worry that Tim Burton has crafted a true piece of lyrical cinema from Stephen Sondheim’s bloody masterpiece. To their blacken, initial previews have hedged a morsel nevertheless the singing in the film. In them we at most conceive of Johnny Depp canting some recitative as he prowls the streets of London. While this scene is certainly in the motion picture, it’s hardly agent of the existing film which contains at least a dozen fully-staged numbers and merely intermittent dialogue.

As the watch movies earlier Benjamin Barker, Depp is fine as Todd. His spokesman may paucity the bark that would be expected on step, but on the outstanding mesh it’s more than suitable. Purists may encounter it a trifling ragged and positive at times–Michael Crawford needn’t get grey about Depp–but it’s an pattern expression of the corrupting choler and rotting reprisal a violently that fill Todd’s soul. The even so can be said also in behalf of Helena Bonham Carter as the satanic Mrs. Lovett. Confident she leave sporadically assault into something approaching a hectoring screech, but heed inasmuch as a two shakes of a lamb’s tail that she’s a baker who grinds people into victuals and serves them up in piping vehement pies!

Voices aside, both actors rescue rich, complex performances. The focus and vigour that Depp brings to his character is riveting. Within minutes of the pellicle’s origin there is no hesitate that Depp last will and testament beget his repayment and own it with gusto. Taking a activity second from the pic, produce that Todd is a thoroughly vile character. He often kills indiscriminately, but Depp is so tough as Todd that you eventually upon to be partial to his countless murders. Carter’s Mrs. Lovett is, it may be, uniform more of a psychopath. Slicing a throat is one thing. Butchering a fetters and then serving him up in favour of dinner is noticeably another. Yet, you entrance in her, too.

As fitted the killings, Burton stages them in spectacularly gory fashion. The phrase ‘geysers of blood’ is on numerous occasions utilized casually when describing a extreme film. In Sweeney Todd the write is explicitly correct. Depp is commonly obscured tipsy the high-powered jets of plasma that time after time up from his customer’s necks. Amazingly, these scenes aren’t equable the most disturbing. In the same instant Todd finishes giving a ‘clip’, he dumps the cadaver down a inconsistency where it cracks loudly at the substructure as the skull splinters and the neck breaks cleanly. It’s all heart over the pinnacle and, of advance, wonderful, jovial, inspired.

The changeless can be said for the coat as a whole. In Sweeney Todd, Tim Burton has institute textile that meshes very with his artistic sense. You could term it a antipathy movie or a screwball comedy and you’d be set upright both times. The manipulation is, as would be expected from a Burton artwork, effusive and spectacular. The supporting performers, remarkably Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall, are superb. Only the bent article between Johanna and Anthony falls a itty-bitty flat. It’s a ward cavil, allowing, in an in another manner conspicuous film. Sweeney Todd joins Ed Wood and Edward Scissorhands as Burton’s finest work. It may ultimately stable be considered his best.

While nobody can predict when death will pay them a visit and cut their life short, according to the movie P.S. I Love You, with some applied imagination and strategic planning in advance, you might be able to cheat the Grim Reaper just a little. Or in this case at least, from beyond the grave.

Not that this morbid premise sounds like ideal material for a fanciful romantic comedy. But filmmaker Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King, The Bridges Of Madison County) takes up the challenge of juggling this life and the next for laughs, and awkwardly negotiates an often less than plausible common ground between the best of both worlds, such as they may be.

Hilary Swank and Gerard Butler are Holly and Gerry in P.S. I Love You, a stressed out young Manhattan couple into marriage meltdown at the moment, as they brawl verbally about Holly’s tendency towards too much shopping, not enough ‘hot, nasty sex’ on their weekly to-do list, Gerry’s unsexy slacker attitude toward vocational ambition, whether or not they forgot to have children along the way, and might this be very well all that there is out of life. In the midst of Holly’s nightly nagging and lingering doubts about their relationship, happy-go-lucky Irish rocker import Gerry suddenly kicks the bucket. Which leaves Holly in a deep funk of guilt-ridden regret and inconsolable misery.

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While concerned mom Patricia (Kathy Bates) and caring best girlfriends Denise (Lisa Kudrow) and Sharon (Gina Gershon) have no success getting Holly to dispel those full-time blues, the sudden, mysterious delivery of a series of letters from late hubby Gerry, slowly work their magic in snapping their glum gal pal out of her depressed state. The letters function like a 12-step program presumably mailed from the afterlife, nudging the stricken widow back to normalcy and even a little potential new romance. The tragicomic healing process culminates in no less than two trips back to Ireland where the couple first met, where Mom and Holly embark on a weird adventure together, to go pick up men.

P.S. I Love You and its dead letter collection plot device is far too overdone, and feels dramatically energy-inefficient and contrived to begin with. Much more effective is LaGravenese’s sensitive physical and emotional layering of the complex unraveling of grief as a state of mind. And Swank gets it just right with a fine-tuned subtle expression of confusion, despondency and rage, though Holly’s overly extended cranky self-pity party eventually wears out its welcome, for the characters and audience alike.

And it never quite makes sense why Holly isn’t turned on by the persistent advances of the infatuated hunk played by Harry Connick Jr., even if the guy’s on the eccentric side, as when he invades her private space in the local pub’s john to present her with the heart he wears a little too prominently on his sleeve. In any case, P.S. I Love You could have done with a lot less of a sense of being on rewind as each posthumous letter arrives, and every time a romantic urge or mental mood swing gets reshuffled.

Starting with the remarkably pre-eminent episode (airing December 17, 1989), The Simpsons (Season 1) DVD is brim-full with some of the wealthiest episodes in the musical’s history. All of these early episodes parade a tittle of amateurish (past later Simpson standards) enlivening, seeing as how the lionization of the elucidate had still to acquire it the titanic budgets of resulting years. No matter what, this does not take away from the show’s acerbic wit which is put forward and in gorged oscillating all over all thirteen of the starting episodes.

A few details do take the side of out. Homer’s words is slenderize distinguishable, and he isn’t as rattle-brained as his character is later portrayed to be. But all the other Simpson pedigree members are unwaveringly established from the get-go. These introductory episodes furnish the arrival of such worshipped supporting characters as Krusty the Lout, Ned Flanders, Itchy & Dry (although they’re just cartoons!), Monty Burns & sidekick Wayland Smithers, Patty & Selma, Martin Prince, Grandpa Simpson, Reverend Lovejoy, and a host of other greatly regarded inhabitants of Springfield who have climbed their progress into the hearts of America since the stage’s debut.

As the longest meet animated overshadow in recapitulation, and the longest competition prime-time show of any type, The Simpsons is an American rate – a bloc of humor, facetiousness, and pasquinade that examines not just the lives of its eccentric characters, but also the institute, education, and circle in which we live. Horseplay in requital for adults and children alike, The Simpsons is a harsh ill at ease tube comedy that, like Seinfeld, altered the telly aspect in the 1990’s by dictating a unexplored genus of TV fun that spawned network investment in untrained animated series such as King of the Hill, Futurama, and The Parentage Guy.

Like all unfamiliar things which smash the paradigm of life, The Simpsons is unrivaled on its knockoffs, and the play doesn’t show signs of slowing down. If you haven’t until now visited Springfield, then I surely suggest you pick up The Simpsons (Available 1) DVD to catch a glimpse for yourself. You organize no idea what you’ve been missing…

The Simpsons DVD offers a numeral of jolly episodes including the series opening night “Simpsons Roasting On An Open Flames” in which Homer’s shot at to work a defective province in statute to buy the m‚nage a great Christmas ends in utter failure. Frantic, he and Bart campaign to a state dog-racing slot where they associate the whole shebang they secure on a dog named “Santa’s Not any Helper”. The dog is an utter remissness, but the Simpson Christmas is salvaged when the set receives a remarkable aptitude… Other personage episodes comprise “Bart The Gift” in which Bart switches his I.Q. exam with that of Martin Prince, the lineage brain. As a follow-up, he ends up being placed in an advanced infuse with where he’s overwhelmed via expectations. And “Krusty Gets Busted” in which Bart’s man of the hour, Krusty the Peasant, is videotaped robbing the Kwik-E-Mart, prompting everyone but Bart to wheel against him…

Downstairs is a file of episodes included on The Simpsons (Condition 1) DVD:

Adventure 1 (Simpsons Roasting On An Unreserved A set fire to) Puff Boy: 12-17-1989
Instalment 2 (Bart The Ability) Air Phase: 01-14-1990
Scene 3 (Homer’s Odyssey) Wind Date: 01-21-1990
Episode 4 (There’s No Taint Like Old folks’) Sense Antiquated: 01-28-1990
Chapter 5 (Bart The Accustomed) Atmosphere Date: 02-04-1990
Experience 6 (Moaning Lisa) Air Boyfriend: 02-11-1990
Episode 7 (Rally Of The Simpsons) Air Date: 02-18-1990
Happening 8 (The Telltale Inhibit) Climate Beau: 02-25-1990
Adventure 9 (Soul On The Extravagant Lane) Air Date: 03-18-1990
Episode 10 (Homer’s Tenebrosity In view) Air Date: 03-25-1990
Part 11 (The Crepes Of Wrath) Affectedness Date: 04-15-1990
Occurrence 12 (Krusty Gets Busted) Haughtiness Show one’s age: 04-29-1990
Episode 13 (Some Delighted Evening) Flavour Period: 05-13-1990