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Long trips over endless blacktop, uncomfortably cramped accommodations in the air, and endless meetings around the corporate bored-room tables - these are the times when watching a movie is darned difficult to do. Archos and palmOne, among others, would love to change that; they've recently announced new gadgets aimed at making movie watching more convenient and much more portable.

At the Society for Information Display (SID) 2005 International Symposium, Seminar, and Exhibition this week in Boston, MA, Samsung is highlighting a number of important developments. Their 82-inch LCD panel, the largest in the world, is being exhibited for the first time in the Americas. The prototype is said to have a horizontal and vertical viewing angle of 180º, reproduce 92% of the NTSC color gamut, and exhibit a response time of 8ms or less.

Video: 4
Audio: 3
Extras: 2
I don't know if I hearted Huckabees, but I liked it an awful lot. It's an odd film (I expect nothing less from David O. Russell, the writer/director of Three Kings and Flirting with Disaster) about an environmental activist (Jason Schwartzman) who hires a pair of existential detectives to help him find meaning in a coincidence that he's experienced. With an incredibly strong cast at his disposal, Russell manages to explore weighty philosophical, political, and social subjects in a way that's both thoroughly relentless and charmingly playful.

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/headshot150.sw.jpg" WIDTH=150 HEIGHT=200 HSPACE=6 VSPACE=4 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>As digital television emerges as the home-entertainment medium of the new century, the convergence of audio/video broadcasting and the Internet is inevitable. After all, DTVs are nothing more than computers dedicated to A/V tasks; it seems a simple matter to include telecommunications capabilities as well. This convergence is made even easier with the increasing use of broadband cable modems, which access the Internet via the same infrastructure that brings television to roughly two-thirds of American homes.