Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Increasingly disturbed by the dark energies building within him, Ryu is unexpectedly confronted with the appearance of Shun - a boy claiming to be the long-lost brother he never knew. Soon, signs of their common lineage are revealed as Shun enters a martial arts competition and manifests the same fearsome Dark Hadou. But before Ryu has the chance to consider whether Shun's timely appearance might be more than coincidental, agents of the insidious Shadowlaw organization kidnap the boy.
To recover the child, Ryu must undertake the ultimate journey of self-discovery and learn to control the power threatening to consume him. But with his confidence waning, will he have what it takes to confront Akuma - the vicious lord of the Dark Hadou himself?
Find out as allies old and new join forces against a sinister new threat in the pulse-pounding prequel to the phenomenally popular Street Fighter II - The Animated Movie.
To recover the child, Ryu must undertake the ultimate journey of self-discovery and learn to control the power threatening to consume him. But with his confidence waning, will he have what it takes to confront Akuma - the vicious lord of the Dark Hadou himself?
Find out as allies old and new join forces against a sinister new threat in the pulse-pounding prequel to the phenomenally popular Street Fighter II - The Animated Movie.
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
'Audition' is an eerie tale of a man (Ryo Ishibashi) who, in his search for a new wife at the insistence of his son, holds an audition for potential mates. He disguises his actual intentions by saying that the audition is for an actress to star in a new movie that he is making. When at last he finds the perfect woman (the model Eihi Shiina), she disappears, leaving a bizarre trail of gruesome murders in her path...
to buy Japanese DVDs
to buy Japanese DVDs
'Audition' is an eerie tale of a man (Ryo Ishibashi) who, in his search for a new wife at the insistence of his son, holds an audition for potential mates. He disguises his actual intentions by saying that the audition is for an actress to star in a new movie that he is making. When at last he finds the perfect woman (the model Eihi Shiina), she disappears, leaving a bizarre trail of gruesome murders in her path...
to buy Japanese DVDs
to buy Japanese DVDs
Sunday, April 18, 2004
At the dawn of the new millennium, Japan is in a state of near-collapse. Unemployment is at an all-time high, and violence amongst the nation's youth is spiralling out of control. With school children boycotting their lessons and physically abusing their teachers, a beleagured and near-defeated government decides to introduce a radical new measure: the Battle Royale Act.
Overseen by a former teacher, (Takeshi Kitano), and requiring that a randomly chosen school class be taken to a deserted island and forced to fight each other to the death, the Act dictates that only one pupil be allowed to survive the punishment. He or she will return, not as the victor, but as the ultimate proof of the lengths to which the government are prepared to go to curb the tide of juvenile disobediance.
Likened to Stanley Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange' by many critics, this explosive film shocked a nation with its violent portrayal of a society in ruins.
to buy Battle royale or any other foreign titles visit our site
Overseen by a former teacher, (Takeshi Kitano), and requiring that a randomly chosen school class be taken to a deserted island and forced to fight each other to the death, the Act dictates that only one pupil be allowed to survive the punishment. He or she will return, not as the victor, but as the ultimate proof of the lengths to which the government are prepared to go to curb the tide of juvenile disobediance.
Likened to Stanley Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange' by many critics, this explosive film shocked a nation with its violent portrayal of a society in ruins.
to buy Battle royale or any other foreign titles visit our site
Thursday, April 15, 2004
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Tuesday, April 06, 2004
£1 million raised…
All sectors of the UK video industry have teamed up to form a new company to help fight piracy and has raised an initial £1.2 million to fund its activities.
The Industry Trust for IP Awareness Ltd has been registered as a non-profit making company with the objective creating a fighting fund to tackle the growing menace of copyright theft.
Key high street retailers and video distributors, including Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Blockbuster met in March to agree the terms of engagement for a concerted effort to fight IP theft.
British Video Association chairman and MD of Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment, Marek Antoniak, described video piracy as "a problem which affects every part of the supply chain of our industry".
He added that, as video generates the largest return to movie makers, and the public has demonstrated an insatiable desire for more new movies, we have a responsibility to continue look after our industry for the future.
The founding company members (12 distributors and four retailers) have already committed £1.2 million in voluntary contributions and will now decide how funds will be spent across a range of tactics, including retail training, government lobbying, additional support for the industry enforcement agency, FACT and to raise consumer awareness of the links between counterfeiting and serious and organised crime.
HMV's product director, Steve Gallant, one of the directors of the new company, said: "We have been talking about this for some months and now, after a record year of pirate seizures, it is the time for action. We will be launching our programme this summer, in time for the popular car-boot sale season, and by then we hope that many more will have joined the new Industry Trust to protect our future business."
for latest dvd films
All sectors of the UK video industry have teamed up to form a new company to help fight piracy and has raised an initial £1.2 million to fund its activities.
The Industry Trust for IP Awareness Ltd has been registered as a non-profit making company with the objective creating a fighting fund to tackle the growing menace of copyright theft.
Key high street retailers and video distributors, including Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Blockbuster met in March to agree the terms of engagement for a concerted effort to fight IP theft.
British Video Association chairman and MD of Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment, Marek Antoniak, described video piracy as "a problem which affects every part of the supply chain of our industry".
He added that, as video generates the largest return to movie makers, and the public has demonstrated an insatiable desire for more new movies, we have a responsibility to continue look after our industry for the future.
The founding company members (12 distributors and four retailers) have already committed £1.2 million in voluntary contributions and will now decide how funds will be spent across a range of tactics, including retail training, government lobbying, additional support for the industry enforcement agency, FACT and to raise consumer awareness of the links between counterfeiting and serious and organised crime.
HMV's product director, Steve Gallant, one of the directors of the new company, said: "We have been talking about this for some months and now, after a record year of pirate seizures, it is the time for action. We will be launching our programme this summer, in time for the popular car-boot sale season, and by then we hope that many more will have joined the new Industry Trust to protect our future business."
for latest dvd films
Monday, April 05, 2004
The first term in the list--the "grandeur of mass meetings"--raises the specter of political gatherings. The phrase would seem to refer to films such as Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, though that film came out a few years after the Hays Code. I do not think it is a mistake to bring up such movies: the concern about crowds, as I will show later, is in part a concern about the politics of mass movements, and in particular an effort to protect the United States against political systems based on representing masses rather than representing individuals, namely Communism and Fascism. Communist and Fascist leaders agreed with the Hays Code that large audiences make people suggestible, but they presented this as a wonderful effect that promotes morality, not a danger. The ministries of propaganda in Fascist and Communist countries actively promoted films full of scenes of grand mass gatherings.
For now, it is enough to note the oddity of the phrase, "grandeur of mass meetings" and to consider why it gets placed as an equal to large action and spectacular features. The list suggests that mass meetings, large action and spectacular features share a certain quality, and it is not hard to see what might be underlying this trio of filmic features: all of them carry viewers away from the intimate world of friends and families and into scenes too big to be experienced intimately, scenes that generate the psychological responses of people as part of a mass.
All three would be presented in movies in long shots, and long shots function for crowd response theory the way that point-of-view shots and shot/reverse shot structures function for spectator theory: point-of-view shots define the position spatially and emotionally from which the projected spectator is to view everything; similarly long shots create what could be called the "crowd-in-the-text" by defining the position spatially and emotionally from which the projected large audience described in the Hays Code is to view everything. Adapting a term from Louis Althusser, we can say that long shots and in particular crowd shots "interpellate" the large audience directly, creating an image of the kind of crowd that is observing the movie and implying that the crowd should have certain qualities and not other qualities. (15) Movies "hail" their audiences as crowds in ways parallel to but distinct from the ways they hail audience members as individuals.
One other feature of movies is highlighted in the Code as of particular power in conveying suggestions to audiences, namely stars:
The enthusiasm for and interest in the film actors and actresses,
developed beyond anything of the sort in history, makes the audience
largely sympathetic toward the characters they portray and the
stories in which they figure. Hence they are more ready to confuse
the actor and character, and they are most receptive of the emotions
and ideals portrayed and presented by their favorite stars. (16)
Stars are not exactly "textual" features of movies; rather, as the Code notes, they exist partly within and partly outside of movies, and one crucial part of their power is that they cause audiences "to confuse the actor and character." Psychoanalytic spectator theory, for all its concern about who is looking at what, pays little attention to the strange position of stars as only partly contained within Hollywood movies. For one thing, spectator theory postulates that everything is done by Hollywood movies to make people forget they are watching a movie--the diegetic world is supposedly experienced as a sealed reality. Stars break up that sealed reality by bringing into the world of the movie all kinds of other worlds: the worlds of other roles played by the star; the world of the star's real life as an actor; the world of the theater in which the audience is sitting (because for someone to be a star they must be on a stage with an audience watching them); and the world of thousands of other theaters across the country in which people are also watching this star. The supposedly sealed diegetic worlds of movies are bent by the presence of stars: scenes are set up, lit, photographed, and plotted to highlight the star quality of actors.
dvd films
For now, it is enough to note the oddity of the phrase, "grandeur of mass meetings" and to consider why it gets placed as an equal to large action and spectacular features. The list suggests that mass meetings, large action and spectacular features share a certain quality, and it is not hard to see what might be underlying this trio of filmic features: all of them carry viewers away from the intimate world of friends and families and into scenes too big to be experienced intimately, scenes that generate the psychological responses of people as part of a mass.
All three would be presented in movies in long shots, and long shots function for crowd response theory the way that point-of-view shots and shot/reverse shot structures function for spectator theory: point-of-view shots define the position spatially and emotionally from which the projected spectator is to view everything; similarly long shots create what could be called the "crowd-in-the-text" by defining the position spatially and emotionally from which the projected large audience described in the Hays Code is to view everything. Adapting a term from Louis Althusser, we can say that long shots and in particular crowd shots "interpellate" the large audience directly, creating an image of the kind of crowd that is observing the movie and implying that the crowd should have certain qualities and not other qualities. (15) Movies "hail" their audiences as crowds in ways parallel to but distinct from the ways they hail audience members as individuals.
One other feature of movies is highlighted in the Code as of particular power in conveying suggestions to audiences, namely stars:
The enthusiasm for and interest in the film actors and actresses,
developed beyond anything of the sort in history, makes the audience
largely sympathetic toward the characters they portray and the
stories in which they figure. Hence they are more ready to confuse
the actor and character, and they are most receptive of the emotions
and ideals portrayed and presented by their favorite stars. (16)
Stars are not exactly "textual" features of movies; rather, as the Code notes, they exist partly within and partly outside of movies, and one crucial part of their power is that they cause audiences "to confuse the actor and character." Psychoanalytic spectator theory, for all its concern about who is looking at what, pays little attention to the strange position of stars as only partly contained within Hollywood movies. For one thing, spectator theory postulates that everything is done by Hollywood movies to make people forget they are watching a movie--the diegetic world is supposedly experienced as a sealed reality. Stars break up that sealed reality by bringing into the world of the movie all kinds of other worlds: the worlds of other roles played by the star; the world of the star's real life as an actor; the world of the theater in which the audience is sitting (because for someone to be a star they must be on a stage with an audience watching them); and the world of thousands of other theaters across the country in which people are also watching this star. The supposedly sealed diegetic worlds of movies are bent by the presence of stars: scenes are set up, lit, photographed, and plotted to highlight the star quality of actors.
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Thursday, March 18, 2004
Buena Vista Home Entertainment has announced the DVD release date for Kill Bill: Volume 1 will be April 19.
Starring Uma Thurman, Daryl Hannah, Lucy Liu and Michael Madsen, the Quentin Tarantino film pays homage to the best of spaghetti westerns and kung-fu thrillers.
DVD extras have not been confirmed. dvd fillms
Starring Uma Thurman, Daryl Hannah, Lucy Liu and Michael Madsen, the Quentin Tarantino film pays homage to the best of spaghetti westerns and kung-fu thrillers.
DVD extras have not been confirmed. dvd fillms
