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This may or may not turn into a good thing (R):

Actor Morgan Freeman and chipmaking giant Intel Corp. are teaming up on a new venture to distribute premium movies to consumers over the Internet before the films become available on DVD.
Freeman and Intel executives announced the new digital entertainment company Wednesday at an annual retreat for chief executives of top media companies in this mountain resort.
….
Hollywood has been reluctant to offer digitized movies directly to consumers over the Internet, fearful of suffering a similar fate as the music industry, which has been hit hard hit by piracy enabled by file-swapping services.
Freeman said his deal with Intel should avoid those pitfalls by giving customers a “simple, easy and attractive” alternative to piracy.
“We’re going to bypass what the music industry had to come up with, and that’s to get ahead of the whole piracy thing,” Freeman told reporters at Sun Valley after making his presentation, which was closed to the press.
Few other concrete details were provided by Freeman and Intel officials about the company. However, they did say that ClickStar will be led by former Sony Pictures executive Nizar Allibhoy.

The devil will be in those missing concrete details.
They do have an opportunity to get it right and I, for one, look ahead to the day when it will be easy (read: I don’t have to drive to the rental store or wait for the Netflix envelope to arrive) to see a movie when I want. The price will need to be somewhere close to and ultimately less than the rental price and should allow 2-3 viewings. As I will want excellent quality I’ll also want my ISP connection enhanced…my current Comcast connection will not cut it and will need a simple way to deliver it from my hard drive to my future huge wall mounted plasma screen.

How Stupid Are the Aliens?

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Natasha suggests that the alien invaders in War of the Worlds are pretty stupid:

You’ve had a million years (or even tens of thousands) to plan the invasion of a planet, and not only do you wait as an established civilization grows up, but you neglect to do even minimal epidemiological surveys? In all that time, you don’t send one bloody probe to take air and soil samples, culture the results and maybe experiment with some of the lifeforms on your planet to see if there’s anything to be worried about?
It’s almost as blitheringly stupid as planning to re-invade a middle eastern country for over a decade, ignoring every well-founded opinion on how things will probably go once you get the opportunity, and creating conditions that ensure you can’t call for backup if the things people said would go wrong, go wrong. But not quite. There’s a lot of recent and well-documented history describing the outcome of land wars in Asia, whereas the movie aliens were clearly invading an inhabited planet for the very first time, so there’s an excusable learning curve to go through.

This might be stronger than some of the other 9/11 comparisons I’ve seen over the past week.
Well, the Modulators are on there way to turn off their brains, enjoy the movie and then turn their brains back on to watch some fireworks.
Happy 4th!
Update: Movie Review courtesy of Mrs Modulator: “That Sucked!” I’m not about to argue with her. If you are human you can not turn off enough brain cells or suspend enough disbelief to make War of the Worlds a good movie.
As to the current event analogies: Spielberg stuck some hooks in the movie to try snag folks but it was too obvious to be meaningful.
How about this for another variant, one for the 4th of July: If you infect it with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness the slimy red tendrils of government will wither and die.

Revenge of the Sith

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We went to Star Wars: Episode III tonight and enjoyed it. Fie on all the folks who have been panning it and providing lengthy lists of how they could have done it better, etc., etc. The fact is that they didn’t. Perhaps their time will come down the road a bit. No links for them.
It was entertaining, provided plenty of fodder for discussion and left us ready to watch episodes IV-VI again soon!
NB: I was pretty certain it would be just fine when a I read Jaquandor’s discussion last week and suggest that you head right over there if you want to read the goods on this episode and the double trilogy.