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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.

Thievery is alive and well in Hollywood. The glamorization of crime invariably tickles the curiosity of the public. Criminals have been portrayed as exciting, daring and cunning tantamount to hero status. They are the risk takers who should not be completely judged upon their criminal expression but rather looked at as individuals with some merit. They are cast sympathetically as their relationships are examined and ultimately lend credence to the justification, in their minds, of the criminal choices they have made. But worst of all, they are often shown as being ‘cool’, even as they hurdle towards the death of their freedom.

Take, for example, the jewelry or art thief. Movies like the Italian Job, the Score and Ocean’s Eleven display criminals as generally model citizens, other than when they are committing crimes. There may be such criminals but are they so suave in their real lives? Are they seemingly morally upright in their relationships with others? Are they really just good guys who happen to commit crimes? In real life the majority of criminals are not suave, cool or sympathetic figures. They are cutthroat, ruthless and to a degree, sociopathic. Mob figures are the best example of the paradox between the glamorization of criminal life and reality of criminal behavior.

All agree that the Soprano’s, a show about mob life in New Jersey, is a great show. The production value is high, the actors are skilled and the plot lines are well conceived. People get whacked, money gets laundered and criminals get promoted for good work. Yet, in order for the audience to tune in every week they must connect with the characters. Hence, the boss of the family, Tony Soprano is shown as a father, a husband and as attempting to improve his relationships with the outside world by visiting a therapist. This is a ploy to create sympathy for a ruthless murdering crime boss. And it works, as the Sopranos is a hit. What then are the real criminals doing?

True mob figures don’t give a damn about the outside world. Their loyalty lies with their crime families. They lie, cheat and murder for riches and would stomp on the average person, literally, to further their gains. A true jewelry thief is usually a two bit criminal who robs the local family owned jewelry store, as can be verified by FBI criminal statistics. Real criminal life is fraught with betrayal, pain and stints in prison. Most criminals are caught at some point with over 13 million arrests made in the US in 2005 alone, according to the FBI.

The business side of Hollywood is reactionary in nature. The glamorization of criminal life is partly in response to a demand by the public. Interest in stylized underworld figures comes from a public perhaps bored with their average daily existence. The idea that there are people who survive in a world where they ignore the law, fascinates us. But when the glamour is shaken off, and the dust clears, there is only an empty fancy suit left, where a thief once stood.

Digital Light Processing can be considered as the pinnacle in science and technology that has focused its resources on the gigantic possibilities in improving digital entertainment. You may wonder, what is Digital Light Processing, and how it will help, or better yet, change digital entertainment. Here’s a sneak peak on the what’s and how’s of Digital Light Processing.

Digital Light Processing was originally developed in 1987 by Texas Instruments scientist, Larry Hornbeck. Hornbeck had been trying experiments on how to manipulate reflected light since 1977, and developed the Digital Micromirror Device. Five years after Hornbeck’s development of the Digital Micromirror Device, Texas Institute started to explore the commercial possibilities of Digital Micromirror Device. After a year of intensive development, TI named its new technology as Digital Light Processing or DLP for short. Their next step was making a separate group to further develop the commercial display applications of DLP. Their new group was aptly named, DLP Products division.

The prototype for the Digital Light Processors was seen for the first time in 1994. With the recognition of how promising the new technology could be, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences chose Digital Light Processing to project films on the Oscars. This was also the first time were the three-chip DLP technology was introduced to Hollywood.

The first ever release of DLP in public was in 1999, in the release of the George Lucas’ movie “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.” After DLP’s successful release, over two million DLP subsystems were shipped by December 2002.

The achievements of the Digital Light Processing products were also recognized when it was awarded with two Emmy awards. One was for broadcast excellence in 1998 and on 2003 for technology and engineering.

How does DLP, or Digital Light Processing work? DLP is basically a nanotechnological transformation of the basic survival technique of using a mirror to signal for help. You may wonder how such an advanced system could be compared to something so basic. Let me explain. The concept on both applications is the same, by shining a controlled series of light flashes on a target you are able to send out a message. The mirror on DLP’s case is a part of an optical semiconductor which is the DMD also known as a Digital Micromirror Device. The DMD chip contains not only 1 but millions of microscopic mirrors each having the size of 16 micrometers or less than five times smaller than a human hair.

The DMD chip works by translating graphic signals into a corresponding mirror. By adding a projection lens and a light source, the mirrors are able to reflect any image on any available surface. The mirrors create light or dark images when they are tilted from a light source. This is accomplished by tilting two tiny hinges attached to each mirror.

With the advantage of smooth jitter free images, no burn-in effect experienced from plasma televisions, good color depth and contrast, and being smaller, thinner and lighter than the CTR-based options, Digital Light Processing is rapidly becoming a major player in the rear projection television market. Although Texas Institute remains the sole developer of this technology, many companies that have seen the capabilities and the promise of DLP have secured licenses with Texas Institute to market products that are based and developed from the DMD chipset.