Halle Berry

''Strictly Business'' is a sociologically important film. Dramatically, however, it is little more than trivial.Directed by Kevin Hooks, the new film is obvious more than subtle, and subtlety is what the movie needs. It is also badly acted in some instances, ragged in others.''Strictly Business'' is really a redo of ''How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,'' or ''Secret of My Success,'' if you want a more recent example.The difference here is that the principals are black. But theprincipals just happen to be black.

If you've ever wondered what it's like to be able to blow hundreds of thousands of dollars on silly items like diamonds, shoes and spa services, you shouldn't miss A&E's episode Saturday of Behind Closed Doors With Joan Lunden. Lunden, host of the show (which takes viewers places they ordinarily wouldn't have access to), faces an extraordinary task in "New York on a Million Dollars a Day," which airs at 8 p.m. She has to spend $1 million in 24 hours in an attempt to demystify the lives of the super-rich.

OK, HERE ARE the rules: 1. If there's a line, you get at the end of the line, and you wait your turn. 2. You own one place in the line. You do not have the right to invite friends to join you in the line. This is rude to the people behind you, who got there before your friends, and will now have to wait longer. If you want to be with your friends, you can join them at the back of the line. And, no, it's not enough to ask the person immediately behind you if it's OK for your friends to butt in. This person does not speak for the entire line.

HOLLYWOOD - A tearful, overwhelmed Halle Berry declared, "This moment is so much bigger than me" when she became the first black woman to win a best actress Oscar. The triumph was not hers alone, she said, but belonged to past and current black actresses who have struggled in Hollywood. More than three months later, Berry's words still ring true - but in a way she likely did not anticipate. Caustic remarks by Angela Bassett in the July 1 issue of Newsweek, in which she criticizes the sexual nature of Berry's Oscar-winning role in Monster's Ball while subtly questioning Berry's choice in taking on the part, has reignited a fierce debate inside and outside the black entertainment community about Berry and the bittersweet significance of her victory.

No one is who they seem in Perfect Stranger, but the promise of the unexpected comes across as a boast, not a challenge. Instead of heightening the intrigue in this psychological thriller, the labored twists and out-of-leftfield turns will leave audiences more weary than wary. Halle Berry, in her most challenging role since Monster's Ball, for which she won an Oscar, is Rowena Price, who opens the film as one seriously ticked-off investigative journalist.

Halle Berry's stalker stopped by Calif. judge A Superior Court judge in Santa Monica, Calif., granted a preliminary injunction that bars Greg Broussard, of Baldwin, La., from coming within 100 yards of actress Halle Berry, her manager or publicist. Broussard allegedly tried to contact Berry, 35, by telephone and fax. In a written declaration to the court, she alleged that 35-year-old Broussard "has imagined a relationship with me wherein he and I are engaged to be married and that my manager and publicist are preventing him from being with me."

The Oscar red carpet traditionally has been the backdrop for the glamorous and the ridiculous, the style-setters and the fashionably challenged, the covered up and, well, Jennifer Lopez. This year, however, there was a common theme -- taste and restraint, with a touch of old Hollywood sophistication. Instead of plunging necklines and displayed derrieres, there were champagne ruffles, scrumptious lace and wispy chiffons. "People wanted to do glamour but nobody wanted it to go over the borderline between glamour and vulgarity," said Valerie Steele, acting director for the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

Surrounded by reporters pushing and shoving each other, the nationally known politician says to hell with it and in the glare of television lights and flash bulbs, passionately kisses the young woman who is not his wife. His advisers look at each other in dismay, knowing that their careers have just been flushed down the toilet.President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky? No, it's Warren Beatty, playing Sen. Jay Bulworth and Halle Berry, playing his lover, Nina, who is African-American. Fed up with reciting the worn-out nostrums necessary to get re-elected, Bulworth starts saying exactly what he thinks about the state of race and politics in America.

PHILADELPHIA Few were surprised when Halle Berry was named 2004's Worst Actress at the Razzie Awards, an annual lambasting of the year's worst films held the night before the Oscars. But what happened after her "win" for playing the title character in Catwoman surprised nearly everyone. "Ladies and gentlemen," Razzies founder John Wilson intoned from the stage of Hollywood's Ivar Theatre, "Halle Berry." When Berry herself appeared, wearing a Cheshire-cat grin on her face, the Oscar she'd won for 2001's Monster's Ball in her left hand and the Razzie in her right, the audience gave her a standing ovation.

Halle Berry has a big, Cheshire grin as she reports on her latest male trouble. "He won't come out from under the bed," she says of the cat she adopted to study for the movie she's currently making, a Batmanless vehicle for the comic book hero's slinky nemesis/romantic interest, Catwoman. "It's not working too well, actually. He's scared of me." Which, though she clearly finds it amusing, must also be kind of frustrating for the Academy Award-winning actress. But at least the shoe's on Puss-in-Boots now; the cat's scared, but not Berry, which is a very nice change from the way things once were.