Apple has brought its iTunes movie store to Britain, making the Apple TV about a million times more useful and hammering another nail into DVD’s coffin.
As ever, the catalogue’s a little sparse at launch – so you get I Am Legend but not No Country For Old Men – and like all legal digital downloads, the price often seems rather high compared to physical releases. You’re looking at £10.99 for new releases and £6.99 for old ones, and rentals are £3.49/£2.49.
Speed Racer: shite.
Fed up with DRM and file format compatibility hassles? The entertainment industry’s favourite chap, DVD Jon, may have the answer: DoubleTwist.
As CNet reports, DoubleTwist is “a free desktop client that essentially allows any kind of music, photo, or video file to be shared between a long list of portable media players, and through Web-based social networks.”
The idea, according to DoubleTwist founder and CEO Monique Farantzos, is that media files should be more like e-mail. It shouldn’t matter what service you create the file in, or on what type of hardware, it all should work together seamlessly, she says.
The PC version is available now, and a Mac version’s in development.
Woo-hoo! It comes out on the 16th October, making it a particularly fine choice of birthday present for an ageing hack whose 35th birthday is just a few weeks afterwards. Ahem.
There’s a trailer here.
…is superb. I’m trying to think of any other trilogy where all three movies were great, and I’m coming up with nowt. LOTR doesn’t count – it’s disqualified on grounds of (a) numb arse syndrome and (b) the final film going on and on and on and on and…
I wish I’d read Biffo’s blog before going to the cinema:
Ignore all these 4/5 reviews telling us not to worry that they might’ve ballsed it up – they have ballsed it up. It’s really, really, really average. And it feels hollow – unlike the series, you can almost hear the air whistling between the gags; it’s not four episodes rolled into one. It’s two, maybe two and a half episodes, stretched out to the length of four.
That’s it exactly. I think it’s maybe the Cartoon Curse: what works in quickfire episodes doesn’t stretch to an hour-plus. Same way some acts are singles bands who can’t stretch their talents to an entire album.
Mind you, I’m still in a “don’t make me think, entertain me dammit!” frame of mind, and I quite fancy seeing Transformers as a result. Is it the big, dumb, fast, noisy pile of crap it seems to be? And if so, is it a big, dumb, fast, noisy pile of crap *in a good way*?
I’m sure you all know this already, but I’m indebted to Total Film’s Jamie Graham for adding to the sum of useless but mildly interesting stuff that floats around my head. I always thought that the 1980s video-nasty panic originated in the tabloids, but Graham’s piece in the current TF points out that it was largely due to a publicity stunt that backfired.
It all started with Driller Killer and Cannibal Holocaust. The lurid ads for the former caused a lot of complaints, but the distributor for Cannibal Holocaust decided to kick things up a notch. Posing as an outraged member of the public, the distributor wrote to Mary Whitehouse expressing shock and horror that such filth was available for purchase. The distributor helpfully included a copy of the video so Whitehouse could be shocked too.
Whitehouse did exactly what the distributor hoped and went ballistic, but the issue gathered momentum, the tabloids seized on it and inevitably, there were demands that Something Should Be Done. That resulted in the Video Recordings Act, the expanded role of the film censors and notoriety for the 30-odd titles dubbed Video Nasties, but it also created the system that recently banned the computer game Manhunt 2.
The moral of the story? While it’s fun to wind up the self-appointed guardians of public morality in an attempt to boost sales, once you’ve wound them up you can’t always stop ‘em. Headline-chasing games developers might want to bear that in mind.
Is brilliant. Particularly the bit where the baddies attempt to download the contents of every single database in the whole wide world onto a laptop. You fools! You’d need two laptops for that!
It is good, though, in a big dumb fun kind of way. Although as soon as you notice the product placement (Alienware, BMW, Gears of War…) you end up playing the “which product’s going to recur next?” game.
[insert usual rant about "30 mins of ads and trailers before a two hour movie being particularly annoying when you've got a slipped disc and can't sit still for long" here]
Eye-poppingly beautiful, extremely tense and genuinely gripping. The last 20 minutes are rubbish, though.
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