The trailer doesn’t show the entire film, obviously, but I feel like it gets a very good feel for the movie. It definitely looks like something I can’t wait to see.

I remember watching the cartoon version of The Hobbit years ago and reading the book even before that. What is almost strange about The Hobbit is that at this time, nobody is really someone you could call a hero. I mean, they all have pretty human traits. Later, with the Lord of the Rings, you have amazing battles and special effects. With The Hobbit, it may be harder to capture the more human-like side of things and make a successful movie, though I do have faith in Peter Jackson.

Even though I say there may not be a lot of special effects, there will still be plenty I have a feeling. I mean, we do have the story of Smaug, which will have to be 100% special effects, not to mention that the release is a year away, so they have plenty of time to add little things and work on the effects.

Source: Ars Technica

Artist representation of Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been trying to tighten copyright enforcement for quite a few years. In 2008, they pushed the PRO-IP Act, which allowed the federal government to seize domain names used for copyright infringement and created a new federal copyright czar. This year, 2011, the MPAA is a leading force in the campaign for “rogue sites” legislation, which would give the federal government powers to target sites with minimal judicial oversight.

Viacom, whose Paramouth subsidiary is an MPAA member, told the Wall Street Journal that “a new wave of digital piracy could threaten the US media business” if they lost their copyright infringement case against YouTube. The MPAA has argued that “when profits are reduced, the studios have fewer dollars to invest in movies, and when there is less money to invest they make fewer movies and the diversity and variety of films we love become more limited.”

CNN recently released a story on the top 20 biggest CEO pay raises. Want to know who was at the very top of the list? You either read the title of the article, the last paragraph, their story, of you have psychic ability. Viacom’s CEO Philippe Dauman. He received a pay raise of $50.5 million in 2010 from 2009. This increase is a 149 percent pay increase from his 2009 compensation of $34 million.

Dauman isn’t the only CEO that is rolling around in money made from the record-breaking box office results. Disney CEO Robert Iger made $29.6 million in 2010. While the US economy has been in a pretty nasty recession, these CEO’s have been sitting around without any trouble in the world.

While you must understand that this raise isn’t really primarily in the form of cash, but stocks and stock options, it is still a huge increase in compensation. Viacom’s shareholders are pretty much the ones that made this possible, so perhaps he earned it. Since stocks fluctuate, for all we know, that $50 million could tank in future years.

The underlying problem is this. They and other companies are trying to get taxpayers to spend more taxpayer dollars to better protect copyrights, especially in the case of Viacom copyrights. Making movies seems to already bring in millions of dollars. It seems strange that a company that is complaining about losing money to pirating and needing money to protect against it would up compensation of the CEO, one person, by $50 million.

Source: Ars Technica

The streaming-only plan came in November of 2010, a few months after their streaming option became popular. They started giving the streaming plan at $7.99 per month, with the one-DVD-at-a-time add-on for $2 per month. Thus, $9.99 per month for both. But now, there will only be two plans: a $7.99 streaming-only plan and a $7.99 DVD-only plan. If you want both, you’ll have to subscribe to both. That means users will have to pay $5.99 more per month for nothing new, which adds up to $71.88 more per year. That’s pretty harsh, given the availability of titles and rarity of updates. Hopefully they come up with a plan for both features, perhaps at $11.99 per month or something.

Netflix VP of marketing Jessie Becker wrote that the company had never intended to offer DVD-only plans until after the streaming-only plan went into effect. “Since then we have realized that there is still a very large continuing demand for DVDs both from our existing members as well as non-members,” she wrote. “Given the long life we think DVDs by mail will have, treating DVDs as a $2 add on to our unlimited streaming plan neither makes great financial sense nor satisfies people who just want DVDs. Creating an unlimited DVDs by mail plan (no streaming) at our lowest price ever, $7.99, does make sense and will ensure a long life for our DVDs by mail offering.”

Now, here’s the part that sucks. Some movies are only available on DVD until many months later. Movie lovers will have to decide whether DVD’s are something they want, or if they would rather have streaming. When it was a $2 add-on, DVD’s only made sense. Now, an extra $7.99 might be a little harder to cash out for ordering a movie here and there. There’s a slight chance that this may push Netflix to more rapidly move titles from DVD-only to both streaming and DVD for availability.

Source: Ars Technica

Netflix has even surpassed BitTorrent, which is definitely saying something. However, the experts that did the report say that they don’t think P2P (person-to-person sharing, such as BitTorrent) will be going anywhere anytime soon. In Europe, the numbers are much closer between BitTorrent and Netflix.

In North America, for March of 2011, 49.2% of peak-time traffic was from real-time entertainment, which includes Netflix. However, in Europe, for the same dates, 33.2% of peak-time traffic was from real-time entertainment. Europe has almost twice as much percentage using P2P, but it’s getting there.

Netflix continues to grow its availability as well as selections. With that comes more consumers, and Netflix grows even larger than it already is. With piracy lowering, but not being halted, applications like Netflix will become more prominent.

Source: Ars Technica

And just for fun, and since I love them, here are all of the Messin’ with Sasquatch commercials that Jack Link’s has done.

Source: Engadget

How would you pay for these? Facebook credits. 10 Credits is approximately $1, and a movie has been quoted to be 30 Facebook credits, or approximately $3. Once the rental or purchase has been accounted for, the credits will be subtracted from you. If you rented the movie, you will have 48 hours to watch it before it is “returned.”

Another great feature that Warner Bros. has told the public about is that the capability to pause and resume movies will be present. All you will have to do is pause the movie or exit your browser. Upon your next login, granted it is within that 48 hours if it’s a rental, you will be able to resume the movie exactly where you stopped last time.

As for the “why,” the movie studio simply says that Facebook is the place to be. “Making our films available through Facebook is a natural extension of our digital distribution efforts,” Warner Bros. digital distribution president Thomas Gewecke said in a statement. “It gives consumers a simple, convenient way to access and enjoy our films through the world’s largest social network.”

The first available title will be The Dark Knight, but don’t let the “old” sense linger too long. This movie is merely just a test; more titles will be coming shortly. It will be interesting to watch how everything unfolds, and as time elapses, I suspect this to become a significant way to buy and rent movies on the internet.

Source: Ars Technica

Source: LA Times

Why did it take so long for Star Wars to come out on Blu-ray? George Lucas was playing the same card he did when DVD came out: he waited until it caught on with consumers and more people were able to buy it. Makes sense since putting it out right away might not be a good idea since a lot of the early Blu-ray titles weren’t that great. But yeah, Star Wars, Blu-ray! EXCITEMENT!

Source: Blu-ray.com

That’s the basic premise of the story, but there’s so much more going on here too. What’s great about it is that it isn’t all about battling these evil exes, there’s many emotional layers too. The characters in the story all have flawed relationships and we not only experience what Scott and Ramona go through, but what all the others go through as well.

Now on to the main subject of this article, the movie. It’s directed by one of my favorite directors in the world, Edgar Wright, who previously worked on the TV series Spaced and most famously, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. If there was ever a perfect pairing of material and director, this is it. Edgar brings the world of Scott Pilgrim to life in an astonishingly stylish way that just leaps off the screen and grabs you by the throat. It isn’t all style though, there’s still all the emotional complexity of the novels. In fact, this is probably one of the better book to movie adaptations I’ve seen because Wright has such respect for the source material. It does start to veer off the storyline of the books about half way through the movie, but the plot points are mostly the same. The reason for that is because Edgar started writing Scott Pilgrim while he was working on Hot Fuzz, and not all of the books were out yet. So him and Bryan Lee O’Malley worked very closely on making sure the story was mostly the same.

And of course, the film retains much of the video game feel of the graphic novels and is littered with all sorts of pop culture and geeky references. There’s Zelda music (Koji Kondo is credited in the movie! ), Earthbound references, Final Fnatasy references, the 8-bit rendition of the Universal logo, and much more. There’s so much more I want to say about the movie, but I’d rather just leave you to go watch it yourself. If you’re a geek, and between ages 16-35 or so, this movie is tailor made for you. Be sure to check out the original graphics novels too. All 6 volumes are rather cheap on Amazon right now (like $7 per book). Here’s the trailer: