If you want to create digital copies of Blu-ray and DVD gems you own so you can watch your favorite flicks wherever you happen to be, you won’t have to schlep into Walmart with a bag of discs anymore (“UltraViolet: Building a Movie Library in the Cloud,” October 2012). Walmart is expanding its Disc-to-Digital service so discs you own can be registered for digital conversion on your home PC. Once the discs are authenticated and you’ve paid to acquire the digital copies, movie files are stored in the cloud.
In addition to innumerable television episodes, Paramount has produced no fewer than 12 Star Trek feature films. The canon is vast, and the core characters and their relationships are familiar to many moviegoers. The dilemma is this: How to make a film that satisfies both hardcore Trekkies as well as more casually invested international movie audiences. Does this latest installment boldly reinvigorate the franchise, or merely recycle it?
Almost all high-end audio products focus on stereo music, fovcing those who dig 5.1 music – and, of course, movies – to use audio products designed primarily for home theater.
The next time you sit down to watch a movie, take a minute and look around the room before you turn down the lights and hit the play button. Is the space everything it could be? Could it use a little drama? 3-D Squared, a Florida-based home theater design company, specializes in creating decorative acoustic panels and themes for home theaters. You can choose from more than 50 original designs, or the company will work with you to create appropriately sized panels featuring reproductions of existing art or your own art.
"So this is a tuner headphone," our frequent West Coast listening panelist Will Huff commented when I showed him the Mad Dog Alpha. "Like tuner cars?" he suggested when he saw my quizzical look. "Like in Fast and Furious?" he asked when I gave him a shrug. Ah, finally I got it.
If it weren’t for the 2012 presidential election and the recent public shaming of Anthony Weiner and David Petraeus, we might have a difficult time finding any credibility in the outrageous humor of The Campaign. Scandals, corruption, lies, and character assassination: It isn’t just for breakfast anymore. It’s become part of our daily diet. Just watch CNN, for Pete’s sake.
One magical night, a lonely young boy named John makes a special wish that his teddy bear will come to life and be his best friend. And on that special night, the fates decide to grant him his wish. The next morning, John introduces Teddy to his absolutely freaked-out parents. Flash-forward 25 years, and John has grown up into a strapping young man who looks astonishingly like Mark Wahlberg. Best friend, Teddy, now just called plain Ted, has grown up, too, but only in maturity…or lack thereof. John and Ted now spend their afternoons getting high in front of the tube and talking trash about women.
With each passing year, we seem to be witnessing the further shrinkage of the gender gap, and so movies like A League of Their Own are ever-more fascinating. It shares with modern movie audiences the little-known true tale of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, created to help keep the national pastime alive while the menfolk were off fighting World War II. The idea was met with much resistance at the time, and so the girls face challenges off the field as well as on.
Written and directed by Andy and Lana (formerly Larry) Wachowski (The Matrix trilogy) and Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run), Cloud Atlas takes you on a mind-boggling odyssey through many ages and places that come together to make up the six-story tapestry of lives and previous lives, allowing many of the best actors in Hollywood and England to play multipl