Jessica Alba

Jessica Alba (full name Jessica Marie Alba), an American actress was born on 28th of April, 1981, has become known for her roles in the hit TV series Dark Angel and feature films Sin City, Dark, Into the Blue and Fantastic Four.
Jessica Alba was born in Pomona, California into an Air Force family. She has two siblings, both of whom appeared in an episode of Dark Angel. Up until 17 ypours of age Jessica Alba lived with her grand parents. Being a military family, they about quite a bit: Biloxi, Idaho, the states of Mississippi and Texas.
Jessica Alba had an array of health problems during her childhood. Her lungs collapsed twice, she developed pneumonia several times and a cyst in her nose. As a result of these health issues, she was often isolated from kids her age and her friendships suffered. Upon moving to California Jessica's health improved.
Since a very young age, Jessica Alba had a passion for acting. She took acting lessons, and this is where she was discovered by an agent. Her first role was a small one in a film titled Camp Nowhere. Later on she was featured in a number of commercials and some independent films. She also appeared in a comedy series on Nickelodeon. Some of the feature films she appeared in are Idle Hand (a horror flick) and Sin City.
In 2006, Jessica Alba was featured on the cover of Playboy magazine, and in the same issue she was named one of the 25 Sexiest Celebrities. In the same year, she was named Sex Star of the year by Playboy. Also, Jessica was voted number one of Askmen.com's 99 most desirable women.
As far as her personal life is concerned, she dated actor Michael Weatherly her costar in Dark Angel from 2001 to 2003. Afterwords, she was involved with golfer Sergio Garcia. On the set of Fantastic Four, she met Cash Warren the assistant director of the movie.
An interesting fact about Jessica Alba is that she has a strict "no nudity" clause in her contract. This can be attributed to her conservative upbringing.

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Malcolm in the Middle

Malcolm in the Middle is an American comedy television series that was telecasted from January 9, 2000 to May 14, 2006. It is created by Linwood Boomer and produced by Satin City and fox Television Studios. The series has proved so popular and syndicated in 57 countries, as in the United States, it has been syndicated in the day time on FX and at night time on Nick at Nite, and also on network ten in Australia. It ended after seven seasons and 151 episodes, and received critical acclaim and won a Peabody Award, Seven Emmy Awards, and one Grammy and was nominated for seven Golden Globes.
The whole series consists of seven characters, parents with their five children, named as Lois and Hal played by Jane Kaczmarek and Bryan Cranston respectively, Frankie Muniz in the role of Malcolm, Francis played by Christopher Masterson, Rees by Justin Berfield, Dewey by Erik Per Sullivan, and Jamie by Lukas Rodriguez. Malcolm plays a lead role in the series as a more or less normal boy who tests at genius level. Malcolm enjoys being smart but hates to take classes for gifted children, the reason of it is that they are teased by other students as Krelboynes. Malcolm's mother, Lois appears so haughty, strict, and a complete embarrassment to her five sons and devoted husband. Although she has a great sense of morality, and has a tendency to impose it on others. Malcolm's father Hal is more relaxed in his parenting than Lois, mainly because he is afraid to make wrong choices. Francis is the oldest of the brothers and the biggest troublemaker. During the first five seasons Francis is a regular character on the show. Francis was exiled to a military academy after he was caught in bed with his girlfriend. Reese is the second oldest of the children, and appears to be the least intelligent and most destructive, although at the same times, he shows even more intelligence than Malcolm when devising fiendish plans, and also has scored high on tests, when he set his mind to it. Dewey is portrayed as being quieter and more inclined to the arts than his brothers. Jamie, the fifth son of Lois, was added to the show in season four. He is the youngest of the family for almost all of the series.
The shows early seasons centered on Malcolm dealing with the rigors of being a teenager and lasting the odd behavior of his life. The characters are gradually explored in more depth in later seasons.

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Torchwood Review

This is a spin off from Doctor Who. Jack was killed off, resuscitated and abandoned sometime in the future but inexplicably we now find him safely back in the present leading 'Torchwood' an organisation which investigates and deals with inexplicable phenomena (like X-Files).
John Barrowman, whose guest appearances on Doctor Who added a fun and humorous element to the show, seems to only be able to truly shine while in the presence of a Doctor. And while his fake American accent is fine in small doses on Doctor Who, in Torchwood the extended use gets very annoying very quickly. Plus his story is mishandled, his missing two years which played an important motivation for his character in the Empty Child are not addressed at all. And the rest of the characters are unlikable and two dimensional at best.
But personally, the most disappointing aspect of the show is its billing as adult-oriented. The throwing in of some swearing and sex doesn't make it adult when the script is simplistic, juvenile and utterly lacking in any of the intelligence, edge or wit needed to raise it to the level of a genuine adult drama, it simply comes across as a kids show suitable for Saturday mornings than anything else.
Now, shows like Battlestar Galactica (the new one) manage to come across as adult through intelligent, layered scripts, which, if the need arises, include sex, violence and the rest, whereas Torchwood seems to have stapled these excesses on.
The other problem with this show is the overwhelming, dreadful music, which is not only awful in its own right but any kind of atmosphere or tension is more often than not blared out by the terrible, dated, cheesy techno.
The only thing that impresses me about the show are the special effects, which are actually decent but on the whole not worth keeping your eyes open for an hour.

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Watchmen Movie Review

"Watchmen" (7 out of 10)
Director: Zack Snyder
Screenplay: David Hayter, Alex Tse, based on the Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore graphic novel
Cast: Ensemble, including Jackie Earl Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Goode, Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup
Time: 2 hrs., 43 min.
Rating: R (strong violence, sexuality, nudity, vulgarity)
Grandly eloquent, gruesomely grisly and breathtakingly spectacular in what it wants to say, but clumsy and amateurish in its wrap-up.
The much anticipated "Watchmen" deserves a lot more artistic accolade than the knee-jerk criticisms are allowing it. It is, quite frankly, the most wildly ambitious comic book expression on the big screen ever, superior to "Dark Knight," "Sin City" and other attempts. Measured in terms of sheer creative input and explosive output, it absolutely had me hypnotized by its total audio-visual force all the way up to an ending that you can easily see is sputtering badly, headed for an unstoppable letdown in intelligence and imagination.
Up until then, the film rarely leaves you in peace. Set in continuous off-tones of deep sepia and and icy blues, its whiplash montage of vigorous images are nowhere arbitrary and everywhere pulsating. Every image is pumped up to max. This is pure comic book artistry supercharged into the demanding designs of the motion picture at uncompromising levels of film mastery. If there's a conventional confrontation, say a hand-to-hand fight or a lethal threat between individuals, it ratchets the energy up way beyond the orthodox, power-injecting every small aspect of the scene with hardball augmentation of blood, mutilation and bodily destruction.
And yes, as you might expect, this is the ultimate test of the admonition that in artistic expression, one must give the devil his due.
This is not the first time in film history that hideous violence has had to be painfully conceded as having its own energy to be judged in creative terms. The magnificence of the grotesque.
Yet you start to wonder, after almost an hour of this, if the film actually expects to roll continuously on its boosters and after-burners. Shouldn't we have some serious characters and emotional involvements?
Well, . . . it does seem to want to recognize that, but, let's see what's involved.
Based on the comic book, "Watchmen," often reputed among many critics and Hollywood insiders to be unfilmable, is certainly a grandly offbeat, bizarrely styled fantasy sci-fi adventure set in an alternate universe in a 1985 America. In this, Richard Nixon has been re-elected for a third term and nuclear war with the Soviet Union is imminent. By law, all superheroes have been outlawed. But a group of them calling themselves the Minutemen is inspired back into action when one of their number, "Comedian" (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), is brutally murdered and those remaining realize their own destruction may be imminent. More to the point, they will find that a far more grandiose and villainous plot is afoot, one involving nuclear destruction.
Their talents? Well, for those newcomer audiences to this ongoing saga, there's the masked Rorschach (Jackie Earl Haley), a sociopath with an ever-changing "Rorschach blot" mask who breaks thugs' fingers, dorky Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson) who's a genius with gadgets, the smug Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode) who has licensed his identity as Ozymandias, "the smartest man in the world," and seductive Laurie Jupiter (Malin Akerman) who unwillingly inherited her mom's superhero status. She loves Jon Osterman (Billy Crudup), a.k.a Dr. Manhattan. A government experiment had both destroyed him and granted him unimaginable superpowers that made him a weapon for the U.S. military.
It is Rorschach who sees a sinister connection between the murder of The Comedian and a coming apocalypse.
The film, with its often sharply observed cultural and political themes in more than a few cannily written dialogue segments, takes its cues from its bleak and barren comic book origins. It attempts to ground extensive violence into strong character and emotional values soundtrack by cleverly cued songs (Bobby Dylan's "The Times They are A-Changin'," Simon & Garfunkle's "The Sound of Silence," plus Richard Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries"). But in that, it fails. Those attempts come off as terribly ordinary.
The cast is ensemble, that is, not centered on any one. Intellectually, the film thrusts almost satirically, and often effectively, at modern examinations of chaos and order in a context of loony fanaticism and will in the way of The Joker and Batman, even as it pokes generously at the denseness of men, in particular military and presidential authority, in their macho- and ego-driven parodies of power. It has conventional murder mystery elements and various judgments on the subject of heroism.
Indeed, "Watchmen" lays doubt on notions of heroes and villains even as the survival of humanity under the protection of the Watchmen is in itself called into question.
The film draws no world calamity into play that it cannot depict with stratospherically spectacular screen dynamics. Watch Manhattan being consumed by nuclear blasts at the street level, or the incineration alive of a couple standing together in a kiss as their skeletons remain Watch the grandose representations of the planet Mars.
How, you may ask, is the film going to resolve all this? The final interactions are embarrassingly trivial. You may find yourself blanching in chuckles as the empty final statements. But hey, I was glad I saw this movie and do regard it as a landmark production. There really is something missing in your life's artistic experience, however ugly it may project itself to you in this film.

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