For a summer opening blockbuster Spiderman 3 had all the standard elements: amazing special effects, great action scenes, cool villians, and cooler heroes. These elements were combined to make a reasonable movie but it just didn't hold my attention. I was looking forward to the new Spiderman movie just because I liked the other two but this one was a bit disappointing. There were too many times in the movie where the pacing slowed to a crawl and the story just became uninteresting. At least 30 minutes (of the 2:20) could have been cut out without missing any of the action or lessening the story.

There really does seem to be a fascination with time paradox movies in Hollywood lately. Off the top of my head I can think of The Lake House, Premonition, and now Next as recent offerings that had time issues central to the plot. In Next the Chris Johnson, played by Nicholas Cage, has the unique ability to see up to 2 minutes into his future. In Las Vegas, where he lives, this comes in quite handy. Although Chris keeps a low profile he doesn't escape notice. Eventually the FBI tracks him down and uses him to diffuse a national crisis. I won't give anymore of it away.

Meet The Robinson's is a quirky story about time travel and an orphaned boy's quest to find himself and become great. That's it in a nutshell. Along the way it is funny, a bit odd, and sometimes touching. Since it is a kid's movie the most important thing is to see how the kids react. My kids loved it. They thought that the Robinson family was hilarious. The dinosaur was the family favorite.

Sandra Bullock seems to have a recent interest in time paradox stories. First there was The Lake House and now we have Premonition. In Premonition Sandra's character, Linda Hanson, gets the news that her husband has died in a car accident. When she wakes up the next day she finds that he hasn't died. In fact, no one knows anything about it. And again, when she wakes the day after that, everyone is acting like he's dead again. It's a strange story of twisted up time and the dependencies caused by the time aberrations.

The standard installation of Joomla! statically defines an HTML SELECT statement to control the number of list elements shown per list page. These SELECT statements contain the values 5,10,15,20,25,30, and 50. In some cases a webmaster wants to offer more options to the site viewer. This article explains how to modify the Joomla! core files (version 1.0.12 only) to add more options to this dropdown box.

Music & Lyrics was this years Valentine's Day film. It is a sweet romantic comedy that has quite a bit of both romance and comedy. Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore work well together in this film as they bring together two very unlikely people into a relationship that everyone cheers for. Much of the story and plot is standard romedy fare. As with all movies in this genre, the charm is in the details and the execution (of the plot, not the characters). Grant plays a has-been rock star from the one-hit-wonder band Pop. Unfortunately he hasn't quite figured out that his time is over. Barrymore plays the roll of the most unlikely houseplant tender you would ever meet. Through comical circumstances they meet and find themselves bound together on a common mission to write a hit song.

For most people in America, a cellphone is a cellphone. That's it. The phone is used for talking mostly and occasionally some SMS (short message service) messages. And you know what? That's the way people like it. For several years cellphone companies have been trying to push more and more services on the phones hoping that people will love it. But they don't. A phone is a phone. There are a few hardcore gadget-type people who like all the fancy stuff -- a phone that doubles as an mp3 player, pda, dvd player, and paperweight -- but that's not the norm.

I was first introduced to Karen Hancock's book with the Guardian King series (The Light Of Eidon, The Shadow Within, Shadow Over Kiriath). Considering how much I liked those books I decided to check out her first published book, Arena. The back of the book describes it as a combination of The Pilgrim's Progress and The Matrix. This scifi allegory certainly does seem a lot like The Pilgrim's Progress or Hind's Feet On High Places but the similarity to The Matrix is a bit stretched. The story takes place in a science-fiction setting but it's not a virtual reality.