Evelyn Mercer (Fionnula Flanagan) innocently walks into the local convenient store to scold one of her foster children for attempting to shoplift. She’s an angel of sorts, a kind old lady living in the roughest part of Detroit taking in the lost souls of the foster children in the city. It is at this convenient store that she meets her untimely fate as a suspicious robbery goes awry.
The rumor mill is running rampant today as word this afternoon is that Best Buy may be interested in buying Netflix for $44 a share. The move comes on the heals of speculation that Blockbuster may purchase electronics chain Circuit City.
Brad Jr. (Sean Penn) is a young outcast going nowhere in life. Living with his mother, grandmother, and stepbrother Tommy in a broken down home, his days are spent drinking Colt 45’s and smoking weed on the couch. Then one day everything changes when his estranged father (Christopher Walken) stops by with a wad of cash, a fast car, and a seducing lifestyle.
Norway, Iowa sits in the heart of Iowa. A small town with a high school of only 100 kids, the school managed to put together a remarkable history in baseball that encompassed 19 straight State Championships in a 24 year run. They went toe to toe with school’s 10 times their size and came out on top. The town embraced them and the tradition reigned down from generation to generation. That is until the day the powers to be decided to merge tiny Norway High School with a larger school, and thus destroy the storied tradition that had touched so many lives.
Compliments of the folks at the Netflix Community Blog, Netflix has added a tab at the top of your queue to the “Play Instantly” movies and TV shows you have. It’s a nice tough to the site and makes it a little easier to see what movies you can avoid having shipped and just watch online. We’d like to see a feature in the future that lets users mark a title as “Instant View Only” which would queue it in your instant selections, but not mail it out to you. I find myself occasionally coming up to a title that can be viewed online and realizing they just mailed it out to me. Kind of feels like a waste of a movie.
Move aside HBO, Showtime, and Starz!, Blockbuster is currently in talks with Viacom to start it’s own premium channel. The move would involve Blockbuster investing in a partnership with Viacom in return for the digital rights to the new channel.
The network which is expected to debut in the fall of 2009, would mix movies and television shows from Paramount, MGM, and Lions Gate. Currently those studios have an agreement with CBS owned Showtime, but talks have stalled on renewing that deal.
I did not really know what to expect when I rented Manda Bala. I saw it mentioned on the Green Cine blog and figured I would rent it. I am glad I did.
Manda Bala is a Brazilian documentary that I guess is illegal to view in Brazil. The main subject of this movie is the crime / corruption that is rampant in Sau Paulo and all of Brazil, and gets interviews with both victims of crime, and those that commit the crime, as well as any other party involved.
After a tough first quarter financially, DVD rental giant Netflix has announced that it will be raising monthly membership fees for those renting Blu-Ray discs. Currently there is no extra charge for renting Blu-Ray as opposed to the standard definition DVDs. The move is not entirely unexpected as the increase in Blu-Ray players in households coupled with the higher cost of the high-definition discs has risen
This Is England is a film featuring a young actor by the name of Thomas Turgoose; he plays a boy named Shaun growing up in 1983 England. Shaun comes from a working class, single parent family; his father was a soldier serving in the Falkland war and lost his life there, leaving Shaun’s mother to raise him on her own.
The combination of Shaun’s lack of a father figure and his adolescent search to find an identity lead Shaun to be befriended and adopted into a local clique of skinheads.
First off I was quite happy at the speed of which this movie was delivered to me. It was a new release so sometimes the availability is a bit “wonky”. I added this and a few other new releases to the top of my queue and this one was one of the ones that showed up.
The Darjeeling Limited is the newest Wes Anderson movie, and stars many of the same people as his other movies such as The Life Aquatic, Rushmore, etc, etc. It adds Adrien Brody to the cast which is a new addition.
