Go, Mickey! And, er, Barton Fink.. ?

TORONTO — Fox Searchlight Pictures put some heat into an otherwise cool film market this week by beating out competitors for distribution rights to “The Wrestler.”

The film, which is directed by Darren Aronofsky (“The Fountain”) and stars Mickey Rourke as a retired wrestler looking to make a comeback, was picked up after a Sunday night screening at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Variety, an industry trade paper, reported the acquisition price as $4 million, but a person briefed on the sale said the price was somewhat lower. The bid was nonetheless a strong one, given the surplus of films and scarcity of buyers.

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Battlefield YouTube!

Over a period of twelve hours, between this Thursday night and Friday morning, American Rights Counsel LLC sent out over 4000 DMCA takedown notices to YouTube, all making copyright infringement claims against videos with content critical of the Church of Scientology. Clips included footage of Australian and German news reports about Scientology, A Message to Anonymous/Scientology , and footage from a Clearwater City Commission meeting. Many accounts were suspended by YouTube in response to multiple allegations of copyright infringement.

YouTube users responded with DMCA counter-notices. At this time, many of the suspended channels have been reinstated and many of the videos are back up. Whether or not American Rights Counsel, LLC represents the notoriously litigious Church of Scientology is unclear, but this would not be the first time that the Church of Scientology has used the DMCA to silence Scientology critics. The Church of Scientology DMCA complaints shut down the YouTube channel of critic Mark Bunker in June, 2008. Bunker’s account, XenuTV, was also among the channels shut down in this latest flurry of takedown notices.

Original article.
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Sad, but Apparently True. De Niro Please Wake Up

I think the last good De Niro film was The Score. My Favorite Last De Niro film was Ronin.

Since then we have a parade of crap. And I don't think Pacino has done much better.

After leaving CAA, a post by an insider at the agency left the entertainment industry talking.

Here's the article from Alternative Film Guide.

Robert De Niro’s CAA Controversy

April 22nd, 2008 by Andre Soares

In her blog Deadline Hollywood Daily, Nikki Finke posted an "exclusive" scoop about Robert De Niro’s departure from Creative Arts Agency (CAA) to look for greener pastures at Endeavor. One commenter, purportedly a disgruntled (and anonymous) "CAA Agent," posted the following message that has been circulating all over town (make it "all over world" by now).

See below:

(Note: I didn’t bother using [sic] next to the several typos. The name of the Al Pacino movie, by the way, is 88 Minutes. The three-hour De Niro film is called The Good Shepherd. It could be that the "CAA Agent" got those film titles wrong; it could also be that all the typos found in the message were deliberately made; and it could be that the message itself is a total fake.)

Why did Bobby leave us?

They promised they could turn back time.

They promised they could get him 20m a picture.

They promised they could get a release for his Something happened, a Barry Levinson show biz pic that’s has no market, and Mark Cuban lost a fortune on.

They promised they could get him the $1m production fee on every picture he does, that he and his partner put their names on, and do nothing to earn.

They promised they could convince Hollywood that they should still pay that 1m vig on top of his acting fees.

They promised him they’d find a respectable release for the Pacino picture he did last summer [Righteous Kill], that basically stars two 65 year old guys as detectives — while the audience is under 35, and has no interest in seeing.

As I said, they promised him they could turn back time, and make him 50 again, and relevant, and hot, and interesting to today’s movie going audience.

And they probably promised that they’d find a way to erase the memory of all of America about the number of god-awful paycheck films he did during the past ten years.

DeNiro had a choice ten or so years ago. He could either go the Nicholson route — very selective, very particular, protect the brand — or go out sending himself up in tripe like Analyze this, which made money but turned him into that "old psycho guy."

And he could of concentrated on quality stuff, but instead wanted to keep funding his little empire in New York.

A year ago, Bobby came to us complaining that he was losing a fortune underwriting the film festival every year, and wanted us to find bigger corporate sponsors.

We tried, but the stumbling block was always the same thing: The corporations all thought that the Tribeca film festival was a not-for-profit organization, sponsored by the city. But when they got under the hood, they found out that it was all for the greater glory of Bobby and Jane and her husband, and the corporate stuff shied away from it. Bobby held us responsible for his own greed, his own avarice, and his own megalomania.

And it’s just like the studios now ask us: Why should we pay this guy - who doesn’t open a movie - the payoff to his production company, just so he can add his name as a producer.

Sure, there’s more; he thought we should have delivered an Oscar for his paint-drying slow 3 hour Good Shepard. But we couldn’t.

And finally, if really want to understand why now, why today, look at the review today in Variety for the Pacino "86 Minutes" stinker. It’s directed by Jon Avnet, (a career ending review), who just happens to be the director of Bobby’s next movie. (With Pacino.)

Bobby blames everybody but himself for the way he’s squandered his career, and refused lots of quality pictures because they wouldn’t give him producer credit.

Good luck in the Hotel Business, pal.

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PC, Mac, Linux Variant? Does it Even Matter Anymore?

LifeHacker asks, with the advent of WebApps, is the OS battle a moot point? I personally don't think so. No matter what browser you use, or can use, you still have to have a machine, and that machine still has to be able to A) Boot up, and B) Access local files

I used to be thye guy on the left, but I'm now the guy in the middle, who is, since the release of OS X, more a composite of the guy on the right.

The biggest difference between Windows on the one hand and Mac/Linux on the other is that Windows seems to be always set up to make it easier for the computer to do what it wants you to do. Macs seem to be set up to make it easier for you to get the computer to do what you want it to do.
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iTunes 8.0 Leaked - Mock-Up Revealed

Check out the article on AppleInsider.
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Cyber Crime Hall of Fame

Interesting article in PC Mag, which compiles a list of the most infamous hackers and their crimes.

There are all sorts of crimes, but the ones that probably happen most often and hurt the most are crimes of opportunity—breaking into a house with an open window, nabbing the wallet from a purse left unattended, stealing an unlocked car, etc. Now, for the average Joe, breaking into NASA's infrastructure and bringing online giants like Amazon to a grinding halt would not fall into that category; for someone with in-depth networking and computer know-how, though, it's a different story altogether. Often the greatest tech crimes in history have little more reason behind them than "because it was there." More often than not, a hacker sees an open window—a hole in system's security, a backdoor, etc.—and climbs on through. And they don't do it for any real worldly gain, but merely to prove that they can. That's not to say that there isn't malicious intent underlying some attacks (take Vladimir Levin's $10.7 million hoax on CitiBank, for example). And we're not saying that all hackers are bad guys, but a few fall prey to the dark side and use their talents for evil—not good.

What does it take for a cyber crime to catch our eye? In compiling our list, we looked for a few things: ingenuity (had it been done before?), scope (how many computers, agencies, companies, sites, etc. did it affect?), cost (how much in monetary damages did it cause?), and historical significance (did it start a new trend?). Only one of the nine crimes we highlight ranks on all four counts. No matter how you slice it, though, each one of these security cracks warrants a, well, we'll let you fill in the exclamation.

Read it.

(Hat tip: Slashdot)
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iLovePhotos on the Way

Facial recognition software to organize and tag your digital photo collection?

Blue Lava has announced a new photo organizing app that relies on facial recognition technology. As users import pictures, iLovePhotos automatically detects the faces of the individuals in each picture; this allows users to then filter their library to show only photos of specific people. As users tag subjects, the app also begins to pull information from Address Book, relying on this to set up automatic sharing feeds. Photos can thus be set to upload automatically, and trigger e-mail notices with links.

From MacNN.
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Futurists

An interesting article from Rule 42 on Futurists' predictions from the past. A taste:

Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future
Date: 1963
Accuracy rate: 39%
Best predictions: Global library, subnuclear structure
Worst predictions: Cyborgs, fusion power

Clarke began this book with the statement “It is impossible to predict the future.” What he attempted to do instead was outline, in seventeen different chapters, seventeen different directions in which future research and technology might head, and the consequences of various inventions of the future. For the most part, he successfully navigated between what he identified as the Scylla and Charbydis of prophecy: the failure of nerve (not properly extrapolating from what already exists) and the failure of imagination (not factoring in the unexpected developments of the future). And since he was wise enough not to commit to concrete dates in those seventeen chapters, it’s nigh-impossible to grade his predictions, except to say that they still seem plausible.

In an appendix, however, he offered a “Chart of the Future,” and it is this frivolous exercise that I took advantage of. While Clarke correctly predicted translating software and personal radios, we still don’t have “wireless” energy or fluency in cetacean languages. Nevertheless, Clarke’s multiple visions of our future still seem much more cogent than most of the other futurists I read; he was just off on the time frame, which, as he admitted in his introduction, was not his strong point. I’ll give him a few more decades.

Some funny and interesting stuff. Read the whole thing.

(Hat tip: Boing Boing)
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Comcast to Limit Usage to 250GB/mo

Yikes!

The part that's scary is that they will suspend your service for up to a year if you happen to exceed the limit.

WHAT?! Note to Comcast... this is America. You CHARGE if we go over the limit. What are you, the high school principal?

The new bandwidth cap will affect less than 1 percent of Comcast customers, Douglas said. Those customers "are using so much bandwidth that they are degrading the experience of other users," he added. "Two-hundred-and-fifty gigabytes is an extremely large amount of data."

Some high-bandwidth users have asked Comcast to identify a specific cap so they know where the line is, Douglas added. Some other broadband providers also warn customers about excessive bandwidth use.

An average Comcast customer uses two to three gigabytes of bandwidth a month, Comcast said. To reach the 250G-byte limit, a customer would have to do one of the following: send 50 million e-mails, download 62,500 songs or download 125 standard-definition movies, the company said in its announcement.

(Hat tip: PC World)
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W0W

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And On Top of Everything Else...

Reports are that Paul Newman has only a few weeks to live. I guess I should have expected it at some point, but I didn't.

I'm reeling.

More on this to come.
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Isaac Hayes - R.I.P.

A voice and music that defined a whole era of sound. What strides he made in his own music and the production of the music of others. Bad weekend.

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Bernie Mac - R.I.P.

There are a whole lot of hilarious Bernie Mac moments. But one that made me laugh more than most of them was that scene in Ocean's Eleven where he is complimenting the car salesman's soft hands. I saw the movie on DVD and I hit rewind about five times and it never really got any less funny. Such discomfort for the salesman!

We lost one funny man. I was really hoping his funniest moments were ahead of him.
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Stay Informed - Here's What the MPAA is Up To

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Would You Drop In?

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