As Ebenezer Scrooge (not to mention The Grinch), Jim Carrey aims to put a lump of coal in the Christmas stocking and a lump of emotion in the throat. That he fails is not for lack of effort.

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'The Box' is a mess, but it's a curiously haunting, intriguing, brain-tickling mess.

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NEW YORK First it was books. Now it's DVDs.

LOS ANGELES Nick Counter, a longtime negotiator for Hollywood producers who led the studios through two grueling writers' strikes last year and in 1988, has died. He was 69.

You cannot ruin the essence of "A Christmas Carol." The example of a man who learns that wealth is not happiness, but happiness is wealth, is surely eternal.

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You've heard about close encounters of the third kind, of course, the extraterrestrial meetings that involve contact, presumably of a benign nature. The fourth kind involves a more invasive sort of contact: alien abduction, possibly including those uncomfortable probes about which the true UFO believers are always so nervous.

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Roland Emmerich has an ongoing project: destroying the world. In 1996's "Independence Day," the German director sent aliens to wipe out the White House. In 1998, he unleashed "Godzilla" to wreak havoc on the streets of New York. In 2004's "The Day After Tomorrow," he froze the planet in a new ice age.

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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. Matthew Broderick says he's puzzled by the bashing he's received for his actions during the first New York preview of "The Starry Messenger," a new play by good friend Kenneth Lonergan.

1. The original version of "The Box" was a short story by Richard Matheson that was published as "Button, Button" in the June 1970 issue of Playboy.

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A title card at the beginning of "The Men Who Stare at Goats" announces, "More of this is true than you would believe." Less of it is entertaining than you would wish.

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"More of this is true than you would believe," warns a title card at the start of "The Men Who Stare at Goats," although the ever-reliable "I know this sounds crazy, but ..." would have worked just as well.

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Opening Nov. 13:

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WARWICK, R.I. Two-time Oscar-nominated actor James Woods has sued a Rhode Island hospital over the 2006 death of his younger brother.

JACKSON, Miss. Morgan Freeman has settled a lawsuit related to a 2008 car accident that seriously injured him and a passenger, according to court records posted Thursday. Terms of the settlement were not released.

"The Box"

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Filmmaker Richard Kelly's initial encounter with Richard Matheson's fiendish little short story "Button, Button" - about a cash-strapped couple offered a million dollars to push a button on a box that will instantly cause someone they don't know to drop dead - came not on the page, but on TV.

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Nearly 20 years ago Grant Heslov met fellow struggling actor George Clooney at an audition.

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NEW ORLEANS Actors Tom Hanks, Patricia Clarkson and James Cromwell walked the red carpet Thursday before a private screening of the Hanks-produced war film "Beyond All Boundaries" held at the World War II Museum in New Orleans.

TORONTO - Oprah Winfrey did not write "The Bluest Eye" or "Middlesex" or "Love in the Time of Cholera." But her formidably influential book club has helped many an author - alive or dead, famous or no - reach a wider audience. (Sample thank-you note from the beyond: "Oprah, thanks for your support of 'Anna Karenina.' Leo.") Now the multinational corporation disguised, cunningly, as a cultural arbiter and television personality hopes she can do a similar favor for a film she "really, really, really loves."

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