Following a strong box office run early in the year, Adam Sandler's romantic comedy "Just Go With It" is one of the most prominent new DVD and Blu-ray releases this week followed by "True Grit," the Coen Brothers' successful remake of the popular John Wayne western.
Thriller "Sanctum" will also hit stores following a lukewarm run in theaters and seldom seen drama "The Company Men" looks to find its intended adult demographic this week as well. Clint Eastwood's "The Outlaw Josey Wales" is another title hitting Blu-ray in a special edition and Martin Scorsese fans can grab his underrated "New York, New York" for the first time in high-def.
Though Joel and Ethan Coen have been mostly noted for critically acclaimed movies with modest box office totals, "True Grit" did quite a bit to change that. An update of the popular 1969 John Wayne film of the same title, the Coen Brothers' version started slowly in theaters but ended up with $171 million in domestic revenue, making it far and away the Coens' biggest commercial success.
With an All-Star cast that includes Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Josh Brolin, "True Grit" is an unflinching story of revenge as told through the eyes of a 14-year-old girl (Hailee Steinfeld) trying to bring her father's murderer to justice. "True Grit" ended up with a bevy of Oscar nominations, including for Best Director, Best Actor (Bridges) and a Best Supporting Actress nod for newcomer Steinfeld.
Thursday, 9 June 2011
Wednesday, 4 May 2011
MPAA, Sony, Google vs. little guys
This seems to be the week of the big media guys beating up the little guys and the little guys fighting back.
On Monday, the Motion Picture Association of America sued the new DVD streaming service Zediva. On Tuesday, Sony said its PlayStation Network had suffered outages as a result of attacks by the Anonymous group of hackers. On Wednesday, Google said it had removed an app for the Grooveshark music streaming service from the Android Market.
Movies, games, music then, with a common thread of users trying to circumvent the usual licensing and encryption restrictions on access to media.
We wrote about Zediva when it launched last month and the service promptly fell over as too many people tried to subscribe.
The company streams users the latest DVD releases for as little as $1 each. It thinks it can avoid the usual delay imposed by the movie studios on such releases being streamed by buying the actual DVD, putting it into a DVD player in its data center and renting access to it to subscribers.
But the MPAA alleges this constitutes a “public performance” and Zediva labelling itself a DVD rental service is a “sham”.
“In reality, Zediva is a video-on-demand service that transmits movies over the Internet using streaming technologies in violation of the studios’ copyrights,” the MPAA said in a statement.
It is seeking an injunction and damages against Zediva in a federal district court in Los Angeles. A Zediva spokesman said today it was still reviewing the suit and considering its response.
Sony’s websites have become the targets of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by Anonymous because of the company’s legal action against George Hotz, a 21-year-old US hacker, and Alexander Egorenkov, a German counterpart.
Both are alleged to have “jailbroken” the PlayStation 3 so that unauthorised games could be played on it and then shared their methods with other gamers.
Sony has acknowledged “interrupted service” and says its engineers have been working to restore and maintain its network.
On Monday, the Motion Picture Association of America sued the new DVD streaming service Zediva. On Tuesday, Sony said its PlayStation Network had suffered outages as a result of attacks by the Anonymous group of hackers. On Wednesday, Google said it had removed an app for the Grooveshark music streaming service from the Android Market.
Movies, games, music then, with a common thread of users trying to circumvent the usual licensing and encryption restrictions on access to media.
We wrote about Zediva when it launched last month and the service promptly fell over as too many people tried to subscribe.
The company streams users the latest DVD releases for as little as $1 each. It thinks it can avoid the usual delay imposed by the movie studios on such releases being streamed by buying the actual DVD, putting it into a DVD player in its data center and renting access to it to subscribers.
But the MPAA alleges this constitutes a “public performance” and Zediva labelling itself a DVD rental service is a “sham”.
“In reality, Zediva is a video-on-demand service that transmits movies over the Internet using streaming technologies in violation of the studios’ copyrights,” the MPAA said in a statement.
It is seeking an injunction and damages against Zediva in a federal district court in Los Angeles. A Zediva spokesman said today it was still reviewing the suit and considering its response.
Sony’s websites have become the targets of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by Anonymous because of the company’s legal action against George Hotz, a 21-year-old US hacker, and Alexander Egorenkov, a German counterpart.
Both are alleged to have “jailbroken” the PlayStation 3 so that unauthorised games could be played on it and then shared their methods with other gamers.
Sony has acknowledged “interrupted service” and says its engineers have been working to restore and maintain its network.
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