Starring Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, and Stanley Tucci. Rated PG.

In adapting such a complex, cherished book as The Lovely Bones, its not surprising that Peter Jackson would get one thing wrong. But its a big thing.

Alice Sebolds 2002 novel is told from the perspective of a 14-year-old girl who has been murdered and is watching from heaven as her family self-destructs, then rebuilds from the tragedy. Jackson, who had such success mixing human darkness and fantasy in his early film Heavenly Creatures, here goes into full, CGIhappy Lord of the Rings mode: Susie (Saoirse Ronan) inhabits a psychedelic afterlife of rolling Teletubbies fields, Middle Earth mountains, and Moody Bluesalbum sunrise skies. What Jackson forgets in these wildly distracting sequences is that Sebolds novel, even though it draws on the supernatural, is very much rooted on Earth.

When the movie returns to that Earth, it is often moving. Jackson does a perfectly detailed job of evoking the late 70sfrom the split-level houses and woody station wagons to the David Cassidy posters, photo cubes, and Archie comics that litter Susies room. This is important: this is a story about the loss of innocence, and the era was a time when no one believed that bad things would happen to them.

The characterizations are also mostly strong, too, centred around Ronans ice-blue-eyed teen, a nonsaccharine mix of sweetness and naivet. Stanley Tuccis psychopath is truly sinister in his unassuming comb over and windbreaker, and Susan Sarandons steely granny is a treat too: a woman who can juggle a vacuum, drink, and smoke at the same time. But we need more from Rachel Weiszs catatonic, absentee mother, and Mark Wahlberg is one-dimensionally bug-eyed in his rage.

Still, my biggest fear about the film adaptation, that Susies rape and murder might somehow become explicit, is never realized: Jackson, like Sebold, handles it in deft impressions. If only he could have shown such restraint with his hobbit-tinged heavens.

Starring Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman. Rated 14A.

Hollywood hasnt ended the world this often since the 1950s, it didn’t end then, so the odds this time are remote as well.

Twin filmmakers Allen and Albert Hughes decided to return to the big screen after a nine-year hiatus (their last film together was From Hell ) with a postapocalyptic fable about a lethal warrior with a precious book.

Eli (Denzel Washington) has what might well be the last King James Bible in the world. Its 2043 and, after the flash, all such texts have been destroyed on the grounds that they were bad influences on the human race. Now he must protect this scriptural treasure from the clutches of Carnegie (Gary Oldman), the megalomaniacal mayor of a burned-out desert town. (In his upstairs saloon office, this scenery-chewing Oldman looks uncannily like Larry King pretending to be Deadwood s dangerously mercurial Al Swearengen.)

Rarely has a movie worn its cultural references so baldly on its sleeve. As Eli heads west down Cormac McCarthys road, he must deal with violent bikers straight out of George Millers The Road Warrior . The townscapes are pure Heavy Metal (the illustrated fantasy magazine, not the much-disparaged musical style), and Eli himself bears more than a passing resemblance to a Japanese pop-culture hero (think samurai; despite the omnipresent radiation damage, I am obviously not referring to Godzilla).

Ultraviolent but full of pious platitudes, The Book of Eli seems to have been made primarily for Baptists with a guilty yearning for sleaze. To be sure, body parts roll and loose women abound, but that wont keep these viewers out of church on Sunday morning. Who knows? This movie might actually appeal primarily to those who are accustomed to thinking of Hollywood as a limb of Satan.

My Picks For The Top 10 Best Movies Of 2009
It was a year of outer-space spectacles and inner-city dramas, animated delights and sombre period pieces. Critical acclaim may yet swirl around flicks like Crazy Heart and The Messenger, but they wont hit local screens until 2010. Thus, the following is how the best of this years celluloid lot stacked up for our movie reviewers. The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, and Up in the Air scored the most accolades with our critics, with An Education and District 9 coming in a close second.

Hair-metal has-beens, supersized pregnant teens, and crustaceanlike aliens: it was a weird cast of characters in the years best films. I wouldnt have it any other way.

Sin Nombre
A mind-blowing mashup thats equal parts chase movie, tragic love story, and politicized documentary, amped up by lush Latin American scenery and Mexican gangsters so bad-ass they make the Crips and the Bloods look like grade-school wannabes. The rail ride to El Norte has never been more heartbreaking or sangre-spattered.

Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire
If there is a hell, it must look something like the title characters dank Harlem flat. Disturbing yet exhilarating, Precious also has hope, whether its in the Beyonc-video-styled fantasies or one overweight teens lumbering escape from the darkness.

Sunshine Cleaning
A failed cheerleader who cleans up gory crime scenes, a one-armed janitorial-supply salesman, and an eight-year-old who hawks popcorn with his hustler grandad: out of this ragtag crew of characters comes something close to the perfect comment on our tough times.

Inglourious Basterds
Never mind the epic odes to old war movies and over-the-top flights into bloody revenge against the Nazis, the most reviled targets of the last century. Only a master like Quentin Tarantino could build the kind of tension in the years two most harrowing scenes: one in a cramped French farmhouse, the other in a basement soldiers bar.

The September Issue
Breezy and engrossing, The September Issue is a lot like losing yourself in that fat fall edition of Vogue. Keep your The Devil Wears Prada; the battle of wills between Anna Nuclear Wintour and her equally passionate art director, Grace Coddington, is the real deal.

Anvil! The Story Of Anvil
From the icy suburban wasteland of Mississauga to the basement European bars where metalheads go to die, Sacha Gervasis doc rocks. You start out thinking 50-year-old Steve Lips Kudlow is a pathetic loser whos more Spinal Tap than Spinal Tap, and suddenly youre rooting for his return to his spandexed glory days.

The Necessities Of Life
Benot Pilons aching ode to cultural divides is almost unbearably moving. An Inuk man is ripped from his family and shipped to Quebec for tuberculosis treatment in the 1950s. Imagine being sent to the ice floes and youll get a sense of his loneliness.

The Hurt Locker
War is insane, but Kathryn Bigelow makes it seem even more twisted than usual, zeroing in on the lunacy of roadside bombs in Iraq. The enemy is invisible, and the job is bleaker than anything Franz Kafka could have concocted.

Up In The Air
George Clooney finds the ideal vehicle for whats normally his downfall: sleek insincerity. The brilliance is in playing his Teflon axe man off an equally driven upstart (Anna Kendrick)with a bunch of enraged and depressed schmoes thrown in for colour.

District 9
An FXpumped science-fiction movie with a scathing social message about segregation, all set in South Africa? Not only is District 9 provocative and thrilling, but you actually feel empathy for an alien that looks like the mutant child of a cockroach and a lobster.

Starring Ethan Hawke, Sam Neill, and Willem Dafoe. Rated 18A.

When it comes to vampire flicks, I prefer the down n dirty kind. Screw the refined elegance of Bram Stokers Dracula or Interview With the Vampire; give me the gritty backwoods bloodsucking of Near Dark any day. I want to hear undead biker Bill Paxton bellow, I hate it when they aint been shaved! before gorging himself on a rednecks neck.

Daybreakers is the visual opposite of Near Dark. Its upscale vampires wear tailored suits, drive luxury cars, and savour blood from wine glasses. Its 2019, and they exist in a polished, gleaming world where amber-eyed vamps rule and humans have been hunted almost to extinction.

Lifes a bitch, and then you dont die, quips hematologist Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke). If he doesnt discover a substitute for human blood soon then he and his neck-biting brethren are toast. His experiments are carried out under the eye of his greedy boss, Charles Bromley (Sam Neill), who runs a corporation that farms humans for their precious and fast-diminishing fluid. In the glossy, blue-tinted future created by sibling Aussie writer-directors Michael and Peter Spierig, blood is the new oil, and the ramifications of peak blood arent pretty.

After an impressive first half that scores points with such timely socioeconomic speculationplus the most entertaining exploding-body scene everthings start to sour when the monumentally miscast Willem Dafoe shows up as a 50s-style hipster in full-on Happy Days garb. Hes the Elvis-quoting leader of an underground militia and the only person whos ever changed from vampire back to human, so naturally Dalton takes that as a cue to try and save the world. Around here Daybreakers clever streak runs out and the previously witty, refreshing film becomes a predictable action romp thats big on over-the-top gore but lacking in everything else.

How to Play Tennis is a step-by-step video instructional guide for beginners put together by Tomaz Mencinger, a level 3 coach in European standards and a USPTR Professional tennis coach. Tomaz has a modern and proven approach towards teaching tennis and many people of different ages have found his instructions useful. With the easy to follow instructions provided in the videos you will learn how to play the forehand groundstroke, backhand groundstroke, forehand and backhand volley, and serve, return and overhead. There are three packages that you can choose from. 1.) How To Play Tennis From The Baseline 2.) How To Serve and Return 3.)How To Play Tennis At The Net.

How To Play Tennis From The Baseline
With the help of 7 videos you will learn how to find a forehand grip and how to start playing mini tennis in the first minute. Tomaz explains why mini tennis is a great way to speed up your learning process. He will show you how to follow through properly.

The videos will guide you through the process of developing a stroke that comes naturally to you so that your movement is not mechanical. The backhand videos teach you which type of backhand (one-handed or two-handed) you should be playing and the correct grips for both types.

The program also focuses on player movements and positioning by including basic footwork patterns and tips to keep you sideways for a one-handed backhand follow-through and enable you to move quickly in both directions.

How To Serve and Return
In the program Tomaz explains to the viewers that the serve is a complex stroke, and it will take a while to learn. He further says that due to the complexity of the stroke there a lot of wrong techniques that you could develop and they may become a habit.

With “How To Play Tennis” videos, you learn the right way to serve and lay a foundation for serves that are more accurate topspin and slice serves and faster. The videos will show you how to coordinate both the arms in a natural way when hitting the ball.

In addition, you will learn 3 key components of a good serve. Learning this right way is very important if you want to play good tennis.

How To Play Tennis At The Net
This has valuable information for tennis beginners who can serve and play from the baseline with some consistency but feel their game at the net needs much improvement.

From this book you can learn how to prepare for the volley in a quick and simple way, how to react faster at the net and play your first volleys with control, despite of the fact you don’t have a lot of feel at this stage.

Higher level players might benefit from the movement and reaction drills and learning how to practice so they develop instinctive volleys.

How To Play Tennis From The Baseline includes 8 videos for forehand tennis lessons and 8 videos for backhand. How To Serve And Return package includes 6 videos for serve lessons and 6 for return lessons. How To Play Tennis At The Net includes 7 videos for volley lessons and 4 for overhead tennis lessons. The price of the each package is the same $17 and each package comes with 5 bonus videos and an 8 week money back guarantee.

Starring Robert Downey Jr, and Jude Law. Rated PG.
He was making a movie with a director whose own decision to work with his wife had been calamitous, but Robert Downey Jr. was excited about setting up shop for Guy Ritchies movie Sherlock Holmes with his own spouse, producer Susan Downey, and her long-time boss, Joel Silver. In Londons Freemasons Hall, one of the locations for the movie, Downey says it worked out well.

She is fantastic, he says. There was a lot of den-mothering in this process. Sometimes we were having so much fun and a huge stunt was going down and he [Ritchie] would be playing his guitar and I would be saying, Look at Nero over there, fiddling while Rome burns. Susan would be saying, Dont say that. We have to do something.

Susan, who produced films like Gothika and Ghost Ship for Silvers Dark Castle Entertainment under the name Susan Levin, is credited by some in the industry with saving former alcohol and drug abuser Downey from himself. She says it makes sense for them to work together. We have a good time, she says. Making a movie takes so much time out of your life and so much energy, so we try to find a way of doing it together. That is certainly our preference, and I think we have a way of making people comfortable with each other. He is a little nutty, but it keeps things fresh.

The movie, which opens on Friday (December 25), stars Downey as the iconic Holmes and Jude Law as his partner in crime, Dr. Watson. The two manage to track down a serial killer who plays with black magic, and they even watch him hang for his crimes. However, he makes a comeback within days and the hunt is on again. Meanwhile, Watson is ready to leave Holmes behind to get married, and an old flame of Holmess (Rachel McAdams) has reappeared in his life, ready to play havoc with it.

While the traditional Sherlock Holmes productions portray Watson as almost subservient, this version fits in more with the bromance subgenre of buddy films. For it to work, there had to be chemistry between the two lead actors. Downey says he finds it strange to hear himself and Law compared with traditional romantic comedy teams.

I am so used to people saying, You and your costar had such great chemistry on-set, but here they are talking about Jude and I like we should be doing romantic comedies. It is not a comedy, and it is a love affair of sorts. Holmes and Watson are aspects of all of us, and we knew when to yin and yang back and forth. But we were just a good team.

Downey has come a long way in a short time. Its been a little more than 10 years since he was a regular visitor to California jails. However, thanks to box-office and critical success in recent movies like Iron Man and Tropic Thunder, he is now considered one of the worlds biggest movie stars. He says that if there is a secret to his success, it is that he keeps busy.

I dont get scared anymore; I just get busy. I have definitely felt the onus of the fear of the judgment of others, but at a certain point it comes down to will. You meet the standards that people expect of you and you expect of them. In the case of this film, I knew that this was a fresh interpretation of the Sherlock Holmes story, and I have worked with Joel Silver a bunch and I have lived with Susan Downey a bunch, so I knew that I was in good hands. So again, it was a matter of getting down to business.

Downey says that working in Londonone of the locations of 1992s Chaplin, for which he won an Academy Award nominationreminded him that the American way of doing things is not always the best approach. There is something about the work ethic here and the people and the culture. As Americans, Joel and Susan and I have a bit of an abrupt attitude. We got here and said, Lets get down to work. Fuck what you are going through. We will eat later. We were very shortly reminded that there is a much more civilized way of operating. They [the British cast and crew] would say, Lets put out a little cheeseand lets talk and lets be grownups. It has been a huge experience in the proper way of doing things.

So was it a better experience than he had in London with Chaplin? Downey isnt sure. I kind of sucked 20 years ago. Far be it for me to say what was good, when and where, since I barely remember any of it.

Find a Good Teacher - There is no substitution for a good guitar teacher. You can buy all the books and videos you want, but in order to really become a good guitar player, you need to learn from a pro. A professional guitar teacher has the experience and wisdom necessary to teach you how to become a proper guitar player. Books, videos, and the Internet for that matter, lack in their ability to provide you with feedback and advice. A good guitar teacher will correct you if you are doing something wrong so that you don’t form bad habits or techniques. A good guitar teacher will also encourage you when you are doing something right.

Do Not Get Discouraged - When first learning the guitar, or any instrument for that matter, you may find yourself getting discouraged, or perhaps saying to yourself “this is just too difficult”. You may find yourself practicing the same song or chords over and over again, and never getting any better at it. Do not let this discourage you. Sometimes are brains just need a little rest, or need to be occupied with something else. Take a break and come back to your practice with a fresh mind.

Practice - The more often that you practice your guitar the more familiar you will become with the instrument. Your playing will become easier over time. Try and free up at least 20 minutes of time every day to practice your guitar. Find a time and location where you know you will not be interrupted. Interruption can really kill your concentration and snap you out of a good rhythm. Warm your hands and stretch your fingers before you play. Talk with your guitar teacher to develop the best practice exercises that are right for your style of playing.

Create an effective practice schedule - The length of your practice is not necessarily the most important thing. Usually it is the quality of your practice that is most important. Make sure your guitar teacher is giving you a well-rounded approach to guitar playing and helping you make the most of your practice sessions.

Slow Down - One great bit of advice with your practicing don’t play too quickly! Many new guitar players will rush through a lick or a song in the beginning, trying to play it exactly as they hear it and only wind up butchering it. Before you can play anything correctly, you must learn to slow down and play it right at a much slower speed. You can then slowly increase your speed as you improve.

Watch your posture - Guitar playing should not be extremely painful and uncomfortable. If you find yourself with various aches and pains in your shoulders, your neck, your back, etc., chances are you are not in a correct playing posture. Ask your guitar teacher to demonstrate a proper playing posture, then do your best to stick to it. Tell your teacher to observe you during practice and correct you whenever you fall out of the correct posture.

Get a metronome - A very important part of guitar playing is the ability to keep good timing. An instrument, which will help you become better at timing, is called a metronome. You can purchase this at any guitar center. When working with a metronome, in the beginning, you should start off at a slow speed. This will help you build your muscles and develop better control and good playing habits.

Change your strings - Your guitar strings are very important to the quality of sound your guitar produces. How often you change your guitar strings really depends on how often you play. Professional guitar players may change their strings before every gig. Others who don’t play as often, may change their strings every 2 months or so. Again it really depends on how often you play, and how well you take care of your guitar strings. Don’t wait until your strings break before you change them and you should change all of your strings at the same time.

Try new things/experiment - If you feel uninspired in your guitar playing why not try something fresh and different? If you have mastered a particular song on your electric guitar, why not try the same song on an acoustic guitar? If you only play your guitar using a pick, put down the pick and just use your fingers. Perhaps you only enjoy playing blues guitar. Why not try some jazz or classical?

I hope these guitar tips were helpful. The most important thing is to never get discouraged and never give up. Persistence is key when it comes to playing the guitar. If you really have a sincere desire to learn, and you continue to practice, you will become a better guitar player.

Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, with Marion Cotillard Rated PG.

A few years ago, Daniel Day-Lewis, the son of a poet and the grandson of the founder of a British movie studio, left the movies behind to find poetry in the making of shoes in Florence, Italy. He was at the top of his game but felt he needed some time off. When he returned to the business, he won a third Academy Award nomination (for 2002s Gangs of New York) and followed it up with his second Oscar, for 2007s There Will Be Blood. It made sense, then, that he would be a good choice for the role of an Italian filmmaker who is concerned that he is burned out.

The movie Nine, which opens on December 25, is based on the Broadway musical of the same name. Both are set in 1965 and follow the plight of director Guido Contini as he tries to make a movie while dealing with the emotional baggage of a full life. In addition to Day-Lewis, the film stars Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Judi Dench, Kate Hudson, Penlope Cruz, Sophia Loren, and Stacy Ferguson. In a New York City hotel room, Day-Lewis says that although he was apprehensive about taking on the part, he could relate to it.

The tone of the script was beautiful, but I had concerns that I could appreciate it from the outside without being drawn into the world he was describing. But anyone who does any kind of creative work at some time in their lives knows that as you grow into middle age, you come to a time where you question whether you have anything else to offer. You feel utterly bereft of whatever creative force it takes to do that work. I suppose I was interested in that dilemma for a man who is about to shoot a film but is living in a wasteland of his own making.

Although Day-Lewis was able to find a way into the character of Contini, the second part of the equation was more challenging. Guido daydreams that his life is a musical. And he sings. Day-Lewis had never sung in a movie before, and he told the films director, Rob Marshall, that he may have chosen the wrong man for the role.

I tried to convince him not to hire me because I thought he should use someone else, he says. I even gave him some names, but he said, I think you can sing. So I said, Lets put it to the test, and Paul Bogaev, our musical director, and I tried to stagger through the songs. Quite clearly, I was incapable of singing them, but Rob still managed to convince me that it would be okay. I took the job on blind trust but had severe doubts about it. I had no idea of what the work would be like. I was a choirboy at the local church when I was a schoolboy, but other than that, I hadnt done anything like that.

Starring Sam Worthington and Zo Saldana. Rated 14A - Directed by James Cameron

As the preeminent purveyor of nifty techno-fantasy wrapped in spiky individualism, James Cameron is, arguably, our generations Robert Heinlein. He has shown us distinct yet admiring scenarios of the military in Terminator, Aliens, and even The Abyss. After his detour into Titanic, Cameron returns to genre storytelling with Avatar, the adventures of space marine Jake Sully on the moon Pandora.

A self-admitted dumb grunt, and recently rendered paraplegic, Jake (Sam Worthington) is on Pandora to persuade the unfriendly natives to part with their valuable minerals. To do this, the humans have established a research lab where they operate a small number of custom-fitted avatars. These are fleshly automatons who look like the skinny blue aliens and are piloted remotely. In the lab, Jake deals with a skeptical scientist (Sigourney Weaver) and a scheming colonel (Stephen Lang). On Pandora, he fights to survive innumerable vicious predators while attempting to make rapport with the Navi, the indigenous people. In particular, Jake tries to make nice with Neytiri, the hot daughter (Zo Saldana) of a Navi chief.

Plotwise, Avatar is a little undercooked. The moment that avatar Jake meets the Navi elders and feels their withering contempt for his so-called civilized ignorance of their environment-embracing ways, you know what will happen over the next two-plus hours: its Dances With Wolves in space.

If youre not into heroes riding into battle on the backs of gigantic, neon-orange bird creatures, Avatar is probably not your kind of movie. It worked for me, though. Even after the years spent developing 3-D motion-capture technology just for this movie, Cameron retains a gift for action scenarios, providing high-energy pulp adventure in a fantasy world that is almost goofy in its layers of minute detail. Avatar is not graceful or deep, but its call to my giddy inner 12-year-old will bring me back to the movie sooner rather than later.

Starring George Clooney, Anna Kendrick, and Vera Farmiga. Rated PG.

The ability to roll with the punches, absorb information quickly, and travel in some kind of style are now requisites to modern living. Most folks still see actual legwork as an unfortunate cost to doing business on planet Earth, but a special few prefer to stay in motion. This movie is about one of them.

George Clooney has found a perfectly tailored fit in Ryan Bingham, who fires people for a living. This downsizing specialist buzzes all over the U.S., employing his Clooney-esque charm to gently blunt the axes falling at newly acquired companies. Hes in it for the air miles and those little bottles, plus upgrades and special promotions. And his world is threatened by the appropriately named Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), who has come up with one-size-sacks-all software designed to turn termination into another form of telemarketing.

Ryan manages to talk his glib boss (Jason Bateman) into letting him fly Natalie through a quick show of the golden ropes. Remarkably, writer-director Jason Reitman does not embark on a quirky romantic comedy. Binghams beef with Keener remains a professional matter, while his private realm is gradually shaken by mid-air encounters with a playful fellow traveller (Vera Farmiga, in her best screen turn yet) who warns him: Im just like you, only with a vagina. Does he listen?

Working from the tight script he wrote with Sheldon Turner, from Walter Kirns novel, Reitman is as alive to the manifold ambiguities of these situations as he was in the lighter-toned Juno and Thank You For Smoking. This wildly entertaining movie wobbles in the middle, at an unengaging family reunion, but that diversion ultimately turns out to ensure that Up in the Airs darker notions stay aloft to the end.