Why Do Great Movies Get Terrible DVD Cover Art?

Digg: “Why do good films with great movie posters get awful DVD Cover Art? This post discusses the question and compares some recent examples of this disturbing trend.”

My comment: Although I don’t judge what movie I buy solely based on the DVD cover, it does help to attract your attention. I don’t understand why a lot of movies don’t just use the movie poster as the DVD cover. One cover I actually like is The Departed 2-disc version cover art. The regular one is not as good. I see far too many covers displaying pretty much the same content: 2 or 3 of the actors’ heads, their names at the top, and maybe a quote from a critic at the bottom. For the most part, they don’t even try to be creative. The designers just follow the same formula and don’t do anything different. Casino Royale had an especially crappy DVD cover with the gray background and the silhouette of a random woman with a car jutting out of Bond’s side. I like the Last King of Scotland’s cover, it made me laugh with the “Whitaker triplets”.

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The Floating Pyramid City of the Year 2000 (1979)

Digg: “The Sea City 2000 shows some great paleo-future technology such as the dish-shaped antenna that “beams microwave energy, generated by solar cells, to a receiver on the nearby coast.” The bottom right corner shows a Buckminster Fuller design for a floating community. His design includes shops, schools and homes for 5,000 people.”

My comment: As always, people in the past think technology is going to advance much faster than it actually does. People in the 50’s thought that we would have flying cars in the year 2000, and look where we are now. Maybe we will need to build a structure like that if Al Gore is right and the earth will be covered in a fiery flood from global warming. That’s a really interesting idea though.

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Why Your Death is Bad for the Environment – New “Green” Natural Burial Better for Mother Earth

Article: “Over 22,500 cemeteries, 827,000 gallons of chemical-rich embalming fluid each year, thousands of tons of steel and cement, rare trees cut for coffins, etc. Learn about the new “Green Burial” movement, and how it could affect your remains.”

My comment via Digg:
Can’t wait to tell grandma the good news!

Seriously, this sounds pretty cool. It is less expensive. It gives the decomposition of your body some use by fertilizing a tree, and it looks more pleasant than being buried in a mass of similar tombstones. This is probably how they did it back in the old days; just find a nice tree and bury the dead in a hole in the ground. No harmful chemicals or expensive ceremonies, it’s just a natural process.

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MPAA Wants New Rating Somewhere Between PG-13 and R

Digg text: “MPAA chairman Dan Glickman is trying to find a new rating that will group together the movies that currently tip the dirtier scale of the R-rating — the ‘hard R’ films that contain copious amounts of nudity, the f-word every three seconds, or gruesome torture-horror imagery, for instance.”

My comment via Digg: I have been thinking about something like this for a long time. Many movies I have seen that are rated R are not that violent or have much language and whatnot. But some are much more violent, profane, drugged-up, and sexual. Take for example Pan’s Labyrinth: The Spanish film, which has a fair amount of violence and language, but no sex or drug content, which I would place somewhere between PG-13 and R. The Matrix is another good example with its more stylized violence and some language but no sex. Regularly R-rated romantic comedies would also be in this “in between” category, because usually all they have is profanity and sexual content. On the other hand, movies with very brutal violence like The Passion of the Christ and the more recent 300 (not to mention nudity) I would give a regular R. I would think the MPAA would keep the regular R rating and just make it the more graphic and adult of the two. There needs to be something between PG-13 and R because there is a huge gap in the level of violence, language, and nudity, and drug content. Many R-rated movies I have seen I will walk out of the theater thinking “What? Why was that movie rated R?” Especially older movies which had the PG and R, and nothing in between. A new rating would make it a little easier to distinguish between what you are going to see.

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Richard Roeper’s 4-Star Review of “300″ Strays from Most Critic’s

Roeper gives an excellent review of the new movie “300″ with the maximum 4-star score. He compares it to “Sin City” and “Gladiator”. Most other respected critics gave “300″ less-than-great reviews, saying it contains too much violence and not enough story. I believe Roeper represents the more average movie goer’s perspective in most of his film reviews.

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“300″ Movie Inside Story from Howstuffworks

Article: “In 480 B.C., a small army of 300 Spartan warriors led by King Leonidas held off 100,000 Persian invaders under the command of King Xerxes at a narrow canyon called Thermopylae. Twenty-four centuries later, the story author and illustrator Frank Miller captured so vividly in his 1999 graphic novel has been realized on screen as “300″

My comment via Digg: “This movie looks frickin’ amazing. I’m hoping to see it opening weekend at the IMAX in Vancouver. Gerard Butler (who says “Tonight we dine in hell!” in the trailer) just appeared on the Tonight Show. He’s actually a pretty guy in person and he said he had to wax/shave all his body hair off (except his head I guess). I’m sure this will be #1 for a long time and make well over $150 million. I want to read the graphic novel, also by Frank Miller.”

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