The theme is the Holiday Movie Preview, and the cover features Julia Roberts and Natalie Portman. They are very beautiful to look at, and yet there's something about the way they're looking back at me that makes me slightly uncomfortable. It's not as if they can tell what I'm thinking....

At last, incontrovertible proof that 'bots are writing letters to the Mail page: the very first letter is from an artificial personality apparently condemned to read EW in Bot Hell. The 'bot takes issue with the placement of Mel Gibson instead of Christopher Reeve on a recent cover, and writes, "I guess I'll just rip off the first few pages and pretend you folks cared enough to put a true Superman on the cover", though I would suggest that ripping out all of the pages of the magazine before reading them is a better idea.

What sells? Sex, of course, which is why a cartoon woman in a provocative pose is one of the illustrations gracing For Adults Only, Neil Drumming's News + Notes opening article about how "Grand Theft Auto takes videogames to a whole new extreme". In this case "extreme" seems to mean the commission of virtual acts of violence and other anti-social behavior in an urban American setting rather than in a medieval setting or in an extraterrestrial setting. Raymond Fiore tells me that Alicia Keys Keeps A 'Diary' and that Keys apparently plans "on becoming the next Maya Angelou", although I already knew that from EW's rather mean-spirited review of Keys' book of poetry last week, so it seems that Raymond actually has told me nothing I didn't already know. On the next page there's another Dalton Ross Hit List as well as an unsigned Is It Just Us..., both of which are so embarrassingly unfunny that they cause the cowboy in the Stetson cologne ad on the facing recto to look away. The floating head of Wayne Newton accompanies The Deal Report, and the associated story that Newton is hosting a new reality show starting in January threatens to loose my head from its moorings. Karen Valby reports in Texas Tease that Robert Harling is writing a movie adaptation of the TV series Dallas, in which "[e]very woman in the cast is Lady Macbeth and every man is Macbeth" -- I know that there's often some doubling in Macbeth, but this sounds rather excessive. College Rocks, according to Leah Greenblatt, courtesy of the 750 colleges that offer mtvU, which unlike its MTV parent actually plays music -- the story is quite upbeat, since it only interviews music company executives and not students or their parents. The Style Sheet shows a fashion model wearing a denim jacket with nothing on underneath it, and I wonder just how irritating the rough fabric feels rubbing against her skin, but I know it can't be as irritating as this week's The Shaw Report. The Monitor reports on three celebrities who are dealing with DUI charges, reports which seemingly are more newsworthy than the buried note on the murder of van Gogh's great-great-grandnephew, a filmmaker who was shot and stabbed to death after receiving death threats for "criticizing the treatment of women under Islam"...maybe if he'd been arrested for drunk driving first....

It's the Holiday Movie Preview, and EW celebrates by bulking out the magazine with six consecutive pages of photos before actually getting to the first story, Julia...&...Clive..&...Natalie...&...Jude by Scott Brown, which is actually pretty good by EW standards, by which I mean that I didn't completely want to gouge out my eyes after reading it.

'Company' Man by Josh Rottenberg profiles Topher Grace and spares maybe two sentences to discuss the movie in which Grace appears.

Daniel Fierman's Parts of Darkness offers two paragraphs and two captions to accompany three stills from Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Nice work if you can get it, Dan.

Steve Daly recounts the development and production process behind The Polar Express in Claus and F/X, and his writing is not nearly as creepy as the ads for that movie are.

Missy Schwartz's Behind the Music, a "sneak peek" at Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, provides one paragraph and two captions for a two-page spread of photos, almost exactly like Fierman's effort a few pages earlier, right down to the layout. Way to crank out the verbiage, Missy! And kudos to EW's layout artists, too, for their undeviating adherence to their carefully crafted "sneak peek" template.

Dave Karger's Sexy Feast, the preview of Kinsey, tells me much about Liam Neeson and not much about the film, being mostly a listicle about Neeson's other films and his opinions of them.

Michelle Kung follows the one-paragraph, two-caption, facing-page photo spread paradigm, pioneered previously in this issue by Schwartz and Fierman, in Come Dance With Me, a sneak peek at House of Flying Daggers. It appears that the film features long, pink, sleeves, which I somehow think is not going to be enough to extract the ten dollar admission price out of my wallet.

Kung then offers Global Storming, a listicle about the various locations in which various forthcoming movies were filmed, though few of the accompanying photos actually highlight those locations: the picture of Al Pacino in his Shylock togs, for example, looks like it was shot against a hastily painted backdrop.

Steve Daly's second article, What, Him Worry?, profiles Spanglish and its director, James L. Brooks, and, like Daly's earlier efforts in this issue, is reasonably intelligent and informative, but it doesn't answer the most important question I have, which is why he bothered to compose two substantial articles in one issue? Has he learned nothing from Kung, Fierman, and Schwartz?

Oscar's Hopefuls gives Dave Karger free reign to discuss the award nomination chances of various films, directors, and performers; since nearly all the films mentioned have not yet been released, Dave's opinions are free to float untethered by the bonds of boring reality.

The Calendar reveals that the holiday season extends to January 28 this year. Good to know, because it means that I can put off my holiday shopping for that much longer. Thanks, EW!

At number 8 on The Must List is Gilgamesh, which EW finds slightly less lovable than the Darth Vader Voice Changer, which is at number 2.

In Movies Lisa Schwarzbaum loves The Incredibles, and love makes her do strange things, such as produce this bizarre and unlovely opening sentence: "The onrushing convergence of pop-cultural trends and technological progress has resulted in a lot of dubious achievements lately -- cell phones with built-in cameras, low-carb bread, The Swan -- but there's one place, at least, where phenomenal gains in mechanical sophistication have been applied in the service of profound artistic creativity with the power to change the entire movie medium." Can you feel the love? Owen Gleiberman evidently doesn't feel any for Alfie, and he blames the lead actor for what sounds to me more like failures in direction and writing. He feels even less love for Anatomy of Hell, calling it "homophobic, sex-phobic, maybe even human-phobic" and unintentionally evokes in me a neologism-phobic response. He also plays Ask The Critic with one of those "name the best" questions that reduces the act of critical analysis to absurdity and the critic to a disallowed fool.

Michelle Kung is Dalton Ross in DVD&Video this week; that is, she does the lead review of Gone With the Wind, and her paraphrase of Rhett Butler ("[the DVD] should be watched, and often, and by someone who knows how") with which she concludes the review makes the very act of movie watching sound distinctly dirty. Donald Liebenson's review of The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection refers to "the carbon-dated Cocoanuts", which both gets the name of the film wrong and implies that Liebenson may not be very clear on the concept of carbon-dating.

Gillian Flynn continues to be Ken Tucker in Television, to indifferent effect, and her answer to an Ask The Critic question ("What recent shows have influenced our language the most?") proves her to be no linguist. On the other hand, Josh Wolk's review of The Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Battle of the Sexes 2, while ignoring the ungainly title of the show, does introduce the term narcissexual to describe the contestants, which quells my burgeoning neologistiphobia. Although November is a sweeps-month, Alynda Wheat's What to Watch provides evidence that this may be more of a sweepings month.

Neil Drumming is David Browne in Music, and his lead review of two dance music albums, rather than annoying me in the way that only Browne can do, simply quells my interest painlessly and quickly. David Browne does appear to write a capsule review of Elton John's latest release, but his seventy-three-word-review just isn't long enough to irritate me very much, though, to be sure, it is not without its annoyances (e.g., "balm-cream ballads"). Nearly a full page is devoted to The New Wave Of '90s Nostalgia sidebar, "That's Sooo Last Decade", and I'm all sooo what about it. Chris Willman reviews a Courtney Love and Juliette Lewis concert, proving that there is little that's more uninteresting than reading about a musical event you didn't attend featuring performers you don't particularly like.

Lisa Schwarzbaum is Jennifer Reese in Books, and in her lead review of Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons she suffers another bout of bizarre opening sentence syndrome with a 113-word parody of Wolfe's style that is as bad as her opinion of the book. Reese does have a featured review on the next page, though, and while it is not bad, it seems oddly incomplete. Nicholas Fonseca reviews a book by Seth Mnookin -- I only mention it here because Mr. Fonseca recently wrote me to complain that I regularly misspell his name in the EW Review (sorry!) and I note that he doesn't misspell Mnookin's name, which I would have found tempting.

Sharon Osbourne answers Dan Snierson's Stupid Questions. I think that speaks for itself.