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A Cruise Through Royal Caribbean's History
Copyright 2005 http://royal-caribbean-world.info
* Introduction *
Ever heard of a luxury hotel that moves every half hour?
You guessed it: it's a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, a mass of
one hundred thousand tons, that glides on the...
Are you addicted to TV?
It is 2AM and you are blankly staring at a rerun of "Columbo". You meant to go to bed hours ago, but the time has somehow managed to slip through your fingers. Your hand reaches for the remote. It's Saturday afternoon and your best friend since...
ASCAP and MySpace.com, Fantasy International Film Festival, Script Consultant Pilar Alessandra Talks, Hip-Hop Flmmaking, Country Music Awards, Head November Media Dates
The Sixth Annual Latin Grammy Awards features 43 categories and is set for November 3 at Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Latin Grammy Viewing Parties, set up by the Recording Academy that hosts the award, take place in Miami and New York City...
Classic Orson Welles, Writers Boot Camp, People's Choice Awards, NAMM Music Market, Trailblazers of Gospel Music, Animex Awards, SAG Awards, in Jan
Keynotes by Bill Gates, Sir Howard Stringer, Paul Otellini and
Terry Semel to name a few, are given at the Digital Hollywood at
CES in Las Vegas, running through January 8. Classic Orson
Welles Films will be screened January 4-8 in a...
Games People Play
Games and role-playing are as ancient as Mankind. Rome's state-sponsored lethal public games may have accounted for up to one fifth of its GDP. They often lasted for months. Historical re-enactments, sports events, chess - are all manifestations of...
Home Cinema Design
Home Cinemas are becoming increasingly popular, but if you decide to install one you must think carefully about home cinema design. What system you buy, what seating you decide on and how you arrange your speakers depends on many factors, such as...
Kung Fu Cowboy Free
Filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee have spent their lives capturing the world in and around New York City. Last year, Michael Mann won acclaim for accurately depicting L.A. in his hitman drama Collateral. What about everywhere else? ...
Machiavelli Hangman Is A Masterpiece
The theme of Machiavelli Hangman is "Carpe Diem." And it does not just jump at you spelling out all the ways you can live life to the fullest and live all your dreams today instead of leaving them for tomorrow. It slowly crawls out of the story,...
Monsters and Demons: A Short History of the Horror Film
Going to the movies may not seem like a novel way for little kids to spend an afternoon. But have you ever brought your child to see a Disney flick and ended up viewing trailers for Jeepers Creepers 2 or Freddie vs. Jason? When this happened in...
Sin City; Antagonist Fatalism or the Ultimate Good vs. Evil?
The Sin City DVD blew my mind, or maybe I should say, warped my
mind. I haven't been a great fan of Graphic Novels, but this
movie encouraged me to purchase a few of the Sin City books.
Frank Miller's now famous, series creations have taken us...
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Bootlet Bandits Deliver Sub-Par Downloads
This week notorious internet news nanny Matt Drudge reported the presence of advanced bootleg prints of The Two Towers floating about online available for download. While the validity of this story is actually quite questionable and completely unconfirmed, for me it raises the question why?
Why would anyone want to download bootlegs to begin with? Sure, I'm not a total innocent; I've dabbled in it once or twice and know what I'm doing well enough to find the same things all you hardcore bootleggers find. But I simply don't see the point. Presumably hardcore downloaders are doing this for the love of film. It takes a real movie lover to put that kind of time and effort into hunting down something just to have the chance to see it first. As a movie lover, how could you watch something so totally inferior?
Put aside questions of legality or morality involved with such things, this isn't a rant about breaking the law or the unjust behavior of fat cat studios that makes them richer and screws the rest of us over. I'm talking about loving movies. Bootlegs are an inferior product. Generally they are grainy, fuzzy, and of poor sound quality. Most of them are taken by some guy with a camcorder in a movie theater, recording what's up on the screen. There are a few high quality prints out there, most of these from stolen press screening copies, featuring the type of quality you'd expect from a purchased dvd but these are rare and still not perfect.
So you download and if you're lucky you manage to find a quality bootleg that's actually watchable, instead of the aforementioned camcorder mess. You download and you sit, hunched over a tiny computer screen. Alone. Isolated. Squinting to make out pictures compressed onto your 17-inch monitor. Listening intently to the tinny sound coming out of your outdated Altec-Lansing computer speakers. Imagine this is the way you see The Two Towers or the next Star Wars
installment for the first time. Not in a theater, not on opening night, not surrounded by other movie lovers basking in the glow of a crystal clear 75ft screen enraptured by pure digital surround sound that pumps out every click, boom, and ping from Howard Shore's magnificent soundtrack. No not like that. Instead you get it early, you get it at home, and you watch it alone in the dark squinting for clarity.
That's not a movie experience that's a disappointment. If you REALLY love movies, why would you CHOOSE to watch any film much less one you care about, in such a sub-par, low-tech environment? You're doing yourself and the film an injustice.
So why do we bother with bootlegs? Are people so set on one upping their friends by seeing things first that they don't care HOW they see it? Maybe. As a critic it would do wonders for my career to see things further ahead of time. I won't tell you that I don't receive such things occasionally from a few folks I know trying to help snag The Film Hobbit an exclusive sneak peak. And I'm grateful. I watch. I'm happy. But to do so on a regular basis, or to watch a film you really CARE about, a film like Lord of the Rings... that's a shame.
I'd rather wait in line outside the UA MacArthur Marketplace 16 here in Dallas for days rather than spend 3 hours in a hardbacked chair at home glaring at my computer. There's magic in the movies. If you lose that, and reduce films to just a bunch of pixels on your screen, you've lost what movie making is all about. The first time you see something should be the best time.
You only get one opportunity to experience each movie as something totally new. Don't waste it on some slacker's attempt at underground bootleg fame. Your movie health depends on it.
About the Author
Joshua Tyler is the Owner and Creator of CinemaBlend.com, a movie news and review resource updated daily and available for paid syndication.
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