God of War and loved the PSP take on the series

God of War: Ghost of Sparta is the follow-up to God of War: Chains of Olympus, a PSP game that somewhat remarkably captured the intense action and epic story of Kratos' struggle against the gods. Developer Ready At Dawn has upped the ante in the PSP sequel, set after the original God of War, with bigger bosses, like the massive Scylla, supposedly bigger in scale than anything Chains of Olympus could muster.
While Kratos still has his trademark chain blades, which I used to dispatch the Scylla in a multi-stage boss battle, he also has a new Spartan shield and spear at his disposal. The shield, of course, can block incoming attacks while Kratos has it raised. It also slows his walking speed, so you may want to use it sparingly. The shield can also reflect projectiles, a trick that will be employed in solving some of the game's puzzles.
The spear can be used as a stabbing weapon, or it can be charged and thrown (in energy form) at foes at a distance.

Kratos will also pick up new weapons and artifacts throughout his journey. In the demo I played, he found an Eye of Atlantis. A tap of the PSPgo's crosspad to the right and the Eye would fire a bolt of energy. That bolt could be aimed while moving around, making it easier to take out a group of foes.
In addition to a new arsenal, Kratos has a new set of attacks dubbed "Combat Rush." It'll let Kratos pummel his foes to the ground and throw them around. All of these varied combat moves have been well implemented onto the PSP's smaller button count, with weapon switching and spell casting performed on the crosspad.
God of War: Ghost of Sparta looks visually improved over its predecessor. In the waterlogged level I played, rain slicked across the floors of a ship and rooms filled with enemies, all of which animated smoothly.
In short, if you like God of War and loved the PSP take on the series, Ready At Dawn is giving you more of what you want. It looks sharp, plays well and adds some new tricks to the franchise. Plus, it may skip the tiresome harpy riding from God of War III! That's a bonus!

God of War: Ghost of Sparta will hit the PSP and PSPgo this fall.

The Hills Have Eyes 2 began filming in the summer

The Hills Have Eyes 2 began filming in the summer of 2006 in Ouarzazate, Morocco, where the previous movie was filmed.
Writer Wes Craven’s initial inspiration for the film came to being as he was having a casual conversation with producer Peter Locke. Craven envisioned that the previous film’s character, Brenda (Emilie de Ravin), traumatized by the torment of the events in The Hills Have Eyes, would join the National Guard to overcome her fears. Barely through her basic training, Brenda would receive a call from her sergeant, who explains that they are sending a team back to the New Mexico desert to rid of the remaining mutants. Her sergeant and the team need her, for she is the only one left alive who knows the mutant’s location. Because of de Ravin’s involvement in the television show Lost, her schedule was unable to encompass filming for the sequel. Wes Craven replaced her character, but kept with much of the original idea in terms of using National Guard soldiers in training.
A one-minute teaser trailer was released on December 12, 2006. The teaser featured “Insect Eyes,” a song by indie folk recording artist Devendra Banhart. In addition to that, a series of clips with an introduction by Wes Craven and a small gallery can be found on the Fox Atomic website. Also on Fox Atomic is a soundless clip of the mutant Grabber attacking Amber. Recently a full length trailer and two new clips were released to Yahoo! Movies.
Craven originally looked at Michael J. Bassett, the director of Deathwatch, to take over the directing role, but ultimately chose Martin Weisz after scheduling conflicts with Bassett.
Although the original 1977 film had a sequel, this is not a remake of that film.
Box office and reception
The Hills Have Eyes 2 received mostly negative reviews, gaining a 11% freshness rating from review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. The film grossed $37,405,247 worldwide. Overall the film had made over $30 million in Dvd Sales making in total

I will freely admit that there are times

I will freely admit that there are times, more often than not, that the ol’ Unimonster’s not looking for a great movie (or even a good one, for that matter).  I just want to be entertained.  Sometimes that means giant bugs, sometimes it means ‘80’s Slasher Films.  And sometimes it means large-breasted young women; gratuitous nudity, violence and gore; and tasteless humor.  Sometimes it means a movie such as Alexandre Aja’s remake of the 1978 Roger Corman-produced classic PIRANHA.

 Less a remake of the original than a, to use the term currently in vogue, reinvention, Aja foregoes the “man tampering with nature” plot of Joe Dante’s original, in favor of a natural cause for the assault of millions of carnivorous fish on a lake full of partiers.

It’s a pleasant spring day on Lake Victoria, Arizona.  An elderly fisherman, Matthew Boyd (Richard Dreyfuss, in a nice little tribute to his role in JAWS thirty-five years previously), is in a rowboat, drifting along, line in the water.  A small earthquake shakes the area, opening up, deep below the water’s surface, a huge fissure.  A whirlpool forms near Boyd’s boat, drawing it in as thousands of strange fish swim upward from the fissure.  The angler is tossed into the raging water, only to be torn to shreds as the fish swarm around him.  The lake quickly returns to its normally placid state, the only indication of anything extraordinary having occurred being the now-empty rowboat—and Boyd’s arm, bloody, flesh stripped from the bones, upthrust from the water.In another part of the lake, hordes of college kids are descending upon the small community.  It is Spring Break, and Lake Victoria is renowned as a party destination.  Everywhere one looks are drunken college boys and lovely college girls, all ready to have the time of their lives.  Through this mass of humanity a young man on a motorbike can be seen, carefully navigating his way around knots of dancing, stumbling partiers.  This is Jake (Steven R. McQueen), and as much as he would like to join in the festivities, he’s on a mission: to collect his little sister from her music lesson.

He finds her waiting for him in the company of Danni (Kelly Brook), a stunningly beautiful young woman.  As fate would have it, she is a Wild, Wild Girl—one of the stars of a series of videos that feature naked, nubile women behaving, well… wildly.  The brainchild of a weasely character named Derrick (Jerry O’Connell), one of the videos is being produced during the Spring Break activities.  Derrick hires Jake to act as location scout for the production, a guide who knows his way around the lake.

That night, Sheriff Julie Forester (Elisabeth Shue), who happens to be Jake’s mother, is investigating Matt Boyd’s disappearance.  His boat has been found by Fallon (Ving Rhames), one of her deputies, but there was no sign of the missing man.  As Julie reaches from the dock to the boat, she falls in the water, coming up with the body of Matt Boyd.

The body appears to have been in the water for several days, rather than hours.  It’s obvious to both officers that whatever did this to the old man—it wasn’t something to which they were accustomed.  Julie’s first instinct is to close the lake, a lake that, in a few short hours, will play host to a hundred thousand Spring Break revelers.  A hundred thousand potential victims—of something unknown to the Sheriff.

The latest in a string of hits for “splat-pack” member Aja, following on the heels of 2008’s MIRRORS, PIRANHA’s strength lies in its total abandonment of any pretense of being a worthwhile or meaningful film.  It’s pure exploitation, 100-percent no-holds-barred ‘70’s-era Drive-In movie.  It fulfills every tenet of Joe Bob Briggs’ requirement for a good Drive-In Movie: Boobs, Blood, and Beasts.  The script, by Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg, is adequate—don’t expect Shakespeare and you won’t be disappointed.  Aja’s direction has improved with each outing, from HAUTE TENSION, to THE HILLS HAVE EYES, to MIRRORS, and now with PIRANHA.  He has a firm grasp of what modern Horror fans want to see, and the ability to bring that to the screen.

Consumers throw their discarded discs

If you are a film enthusiast, there is a unique history behind the development and launch of the DVD. It was May 1994 when Sony and Philips announced that they would be cooperatively developing a new high-density medium known popularly as Digital Video Disk (DVD) (Dwyer). This technology was supposed to be the successor to compact disks (CD-ROM) made for computers. The DVD was intended to replace VHS tapes and laserdiscs, and a big part of the film industry.
The good news is that the latest digital sales for songs are now at about 30 percent of all U.S. music sales and 15 percent globally. (Source: International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.)
So what is the history behind such a sad environmental mistake? It was May 1994 when two of the big industry titans, Sony and Philips, announced that they would be together developing the new high-density Digital Video Disk (DVD). Originally discs were supposed to replace VHS tapes and laserdiscs and to be used predominately in the entertainment industry.
Basically the DVDs were disks of the same size as a CD, but they had up to ten times more data capacity, which made them ideal for big content like films. DVD audio would be a big improvement over CD audio.
Two other companies, Toshiba and Warner Home Entertainment, announced their a different project designed to develop similar DVD technology. They eventually realized that in fact the true market for potential licensees of the new DVDs, which were disc and drive manufacturers, would be unreceptive to two competing disc formats.
In the end, the three companies – Sony, Philips, and the Toshiba – exchanged their technologies, and united their efforts to create the thin, double-sided, super density DVD that was launched in late 1996, and is how we know it today. The new DVD standard was centered in the mutual exchange of technologies.
There’s a number of DVD formats including recordable DVDs: DVD-R, which has the capacity of recording up to 4.7 GB of data. DVD-R, is for authoring and uses a special format for recording DVD masters.
*DVD-RW, is a rewritable format that can record up to 4.7 GB of data.
*DVD-R DL, is a double layer DVD-R, for recording up to 8.5 GB of data.
*DVD-RAM, come in varying capacities (2.6/4.7/9.4 GB), or double-sided discs store up to 9.4 GB. They can be rewritten more than any other format.
*DVD+R, DVD+RW and DVD+R DL are some of the other recordable DVD formats that are supported by the DVD+RW Alliance.
Today as evidenced by all the people who enjoy countless films on DVD, once they films are reviewed by movie reviewers, people can choose to see a movie via DVD, a miraculous invention that is well-serving in today’s marketplace.
But, what happens to old DVDs? There are vast numbers of DVDs being produced every year, but according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), CDs and DVDs are manufactured by combining various mined metals such as aluminum, gold, nickel, and silver, along with with petroleum-derived plastics, dyes and lacquers. They are nearly impossible to recycle because most of the municipal recycling program will not accept them.
Consumers throw their discarded discs end up in the trash, which can pollute our groundwaters. So people have started to try to figure out how we can replace CDs and DVDs with a greener technology such as Polylactic acid (PLA). PLA is a biodegradable plastic-substitute derived from corn that could potentially replace plastic polycarbonate in the current DVD discs. One problem, these materials are very expensive.
So can today’s consumer do to discard these hazardous CDs and DVDs? By paying a fee you can send old CDs and DVDs to one of several private companies that will recycle them into high-quality plastics.
Consumers are beginning to demand new solutions to make their entertainment such as music and films more environmentally friendly.

With its hacker-friendly aesthetic and open

With its hacker-friendly aesthetic and open source mentality, you'd think a Linux desktop would be the best place to assert your digital rights—you know, make backup copies of your DVDs, convert them for iPods, that kind of thing.

zone: downloads

And you'd be half right. There are plenty of programs that let you take control of your video discs, but they're only useful if you can make it through a maze of configuration menus, command line options, choices about bit rates and codecs, and the occasional confusing message about a missing library.

I've tried out a good number of DVD ripping and conversion programs, and I've made peace with one method, and one program, that gets the job done more often than not. It's not exactly one-click, but once your system is set up, you can drop in DVDs and back them up or convert them with relative ease.
Note on system differences: I set up my ripping/burning system on a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 running a brand-new installation of Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). As with so many things Linux, packages and commands may vary based on your system. But for the most part, the tools I use in this walkthrough work across distributions and on both major desktop environments, GNOME and KDE.

Make your system media-friendly

The key ingredient to ripping in Linux is enabling your system to read encrypted DVDs—the kind you buy and rent. Since Linux lacks (to my knowledge) a licensed DVD player, we'll be using the libdvdcss2 package to get access. You might find the libdvdcss2 package in your distro's repositories, but you'll definitely find it at the , and Ubuntu users can install .

Released in Blu-Ray and DVD on July 2008

Released in Blu-Ray and DVD on July 2008, Batman: Gotham Knight is a series of loosely related vignettes of the caped crusader as a prequel to the movie, The Dark Knight. The straight-to-DVD animation delves into Batman’s relationship with Gotham City and each vignette shows a different aspect of the city as it relates to the need for a savior.
Although both The Dark Knight and Batman: Gotham Knight can be viewed as stand alone films, when viewed as a continuum, some answers are revealed. For example, in the movie, The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne questions if he can continue as Batman. But in Batman: Gotham Knight, we already know the answer because the segment “Working Through Pain” shows us why Batman continues.
Additionally, Batman: Gotham Knight also introduces Officer Anna Ramirez and the full trust that her boss, James Gordon, affords her. We know that she plays a significant role in The Dark Knight. We are also introduced to mobster Sal Maroni. He is a lesser known villain from the initial years of Batman, but given a bigger role in both movies.
Although the animation for each segment is performed by different studios, when viewed as a whole, the animation is largely Japanese anime-ish. Perhaps done as a matter of style and since anime is rising in popularity, the execution could have been better. In one segment, the fully grown adult Bruce Wayne looks dubiously very young, as he would be in his late teens. Not a major flaw, but the young look of Bruce Wayne can be disrupting. It is worth noting that the anime-style does work at times. In some scenes, the sharp, angular character images added poignantly to the darkness surrounding Gotham.
All in all, the Blu-Ray or DVD is a collector’s item that should be right next to your DVD or Blu-Ray of The Dark Knight when it comes out. One thing of note, BGK carries a PG-13 rating and shows more blood than TDK. The list of Batman Gotham Knight episodes is available on Wikipedia.

Each of the 4400 had disappeared at various times

The 4400 (pronounced “the forty-four hundred”) is a science fiction TV series produced by CBS Paramount Network Television in association with Sky Television, Renegade 83, and American Zoetrope for USA Network. The show was created and written by Scott Peters and René Echevarria, and it stars Joel Gretsch and Jacqueline McKenzie. The series ran for four seasons from 2004 until its cancellation in 2007.
In the pilot episode, what was originally thought to be a comet deposits a group of exactly 4400 people at Highland Beach, in the Cascade Range foothills near Mount Rainier, Washington. Each of the 4400 had disappeared at various times starting from 1946 in a beam of white light. None of the 4400 have aged from the time of their disappearance. Confused and disoriented, they remember nothing between the time of their disappearance and their return.
The National Threat Assessment Command (NTAC), a division of the Department of Homeland Security, is in charge of dealing with the return of the 4400. The primary agents assigned to the cases of investigating the 4400 are Tom Baldwin and Diana Skouris, as well as their immediate superior for season one, Dennis Ryland. In seasons 2–3, Ryland is replaced by Nina Jarvis and theory room consultant Marco Pacella, with Ryland becoming a recurring character. Season 4 sees Jarvis replaced by Meghan Doyle.
Many of the returned people have trouble trying to get their lives back on track after being separated from their world for years. More significantly, a small number of the returnees begins to manifest paranormal abilities, such as telekinesis, telepathy and precognition, as well as other “gifts”. For example, in the pilot, Shawn Farrell manifests an ability to bring a dead bird back to life. In addition, one of the 4400, Lily Moore, has become pregnant between her disappearance and return.
The first season finale, “White Light”, reveals that the 4400 were abducted not by aliens, but by humans from the Earth’s future, that Kyle Baldwin was to be their “messenger”, and that they were returned to avert a catastrophe.
By the second season, it is revealed that all 4400 have a fictional neurotransmitter, promicin, in their brains, which gives them their powers. The government, afraid of what this large group would do with such power, had secretly been dosing all of the 4400 with a promicin inhibitor, which had worked on most, but not all, of the 4400. One of the inhibitor’s side effects is a potentially fatal immune deficiency. The inhibitor is ultimately removed from the 4400 by a dose of promicin extracted by Kevin Burkhoff from the blood of the infant Isabelle, who was never given the inhibitor.
At the beginning of the third season, the Nova Group, a terrorist faction made up of 4400s, has made itself known. Originally formed as a “defensive” group in the aftermath of the promicin-inhibitor scandal, the Nova Group eventually carries out numerous terrorist attacks against the government and NTAC. The group is responsible for many terrorist attacks including the assassination of the men involved with the promicin-inhibitor conspiracy; the attempted assassination of Ryland; the framing of Baldwin for murder; and the driving of another person to insanity.
During the third and fourth season, it is revealed that only a certain faction from the future wants to see history changed. Another faction, which prefers the status quo, opposes the 4400, and has sent their own operatives, including Isabelle Tyler and “the Marked”, into the past. The exact motives of both factions have not yet been revealed.
Eventually, Jordan Collier, a returnee who declares himself the savior of humanity, makes promicin shots available to the general public. However, only half of the human population can actually tolerate promicin, and thus develop superhuman abilities, while the other half die upon taking the shot. Although the government outlaws promicin use, thousands of previously ordinary people have developed superhuman abilities, severely complicating NTAC’s task. Collier later annexes a part of Seattle and transforms it into “Promise City”, a self-proclaimed paradise open to all people with superhuman abilities. The US government attempts to reclaim Promise City but meets with little success.
At the conclusion of the series, Danny Farell’s uncontrolled ability exposed some of the residents of Seattle to promicin, resulting in about 9,000 deaths and as many newly-empowered humans, while at the same time forcing the remains of NTAC (now themselves mostly promicin-positive) to ask Jordan Collier and his followers (as the only group immune to the 50% chance of death from exposure) to become the de facto government of Seattle. The series ended with a cliff-hanger, with Collier pledging to build the future he had promised, while the government watches uneasily as Collier’s militia remains in control of Seattle, now known as Promise City.