YouTube, the amateur video service is rumoured to be on the verge of streaming full length movies from the likes of MGM. Soon, we could be enjoying James Bond, Legally Blonde and more, for free!
It’s all a bid to earn more in advertising revenue; something the service desperately needs to keep afloat, with such high bandwidth and storage costs.
But will the service be of any value? YouTube is characteristically slow, with small and bad quality streams. How much fun will the videos be in YouTube style?
With an all star cast, including Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Tom Cruise, Matthew McConaughey, Steve Coogan and Robert Downey Jr, Tropic Thunder promised to be a hilarious film, to top the likes of Meet the Parents or Meet the Fockers.
I went to see the film yesterday. Although I found some parts immensely funny, the film lacked something. Watching Stiller singing while holding the head of the dead director on his machine gun was enough to make me chuckle for hours to come. However, the film wasn’t, in my opinion, great.
The funny moments yes, were good, but it wasn’t enough to disguise the film’s lack of story line. The characters weren’t developed; we knew pretty much nothing about Stiller’s lead character, or any of the other ones in the film. The film lacked all sensibility, and I know, yes it was a comedy, still needed some reality.
I have to add though that Tom Cruise stole the show, with his cameo as a Film Producer/Executive. He was hilarious, especially when he was dancing in his office. Lol. (You’ll understand if you see the film!) It was nice to see him not taking himself so seriously, as he does in his normal films.
So I rented the much hyped ‘I am Legend’ Will Smith film from iTunes last weekend. It started off pretty well, with some cool cgi imagery of New York desolate. Then it came to the end. And that was it. He was blown up by a grenade while killing all the mutants and saving that foreign woman and her son. It was a terrible ending in my book; he was the hero! Generally there the ones who survive and live happily ever after. I didn’t think much else about the film, (except what a waste of £3.49 it was), until I saw this video on youtube. It’s the alternate ending featured on the dvd, and in my opinion, much better. See what you think:
So Friends. It was a classic series, running for 10 seasons, with average viewing figures of 24 million per season. It was undoubtedly one of the greatest TV success, both commercially and socially.
So. In 2003 when the final episode aired in the US on May 6th 2004, the Friends team claimed that they wanted to leave the show “on a high”, and announced it as the last ever season.
Now, with the success of ‘Sex and the City Movie’, grossing $300 million at the box office, Rumours are that ‘Friends the Movie’ is coming soon. But will it give audiences what they want?
Over the years, there have been so many of these TV show movie adaptations. So far, hardly any of the transitions between the small screen and silver screen have been a success. ‘Miami Vice’ for example. One of the worst films I have ever seem; or ‘The Dukes of Hazard’, stupidness knows no boundaries with that movie.
I hope that it will be success. ‘Friends’ was and still is one of my favourite TV shows. It’s still in syndication all over the world, on E4 over here in Britain, and no matter how many times I watch an episode, I still laugh at those old jokes, like the time Joey puts on all of Chandler’s clothes. Classic. What is for certain, if it gets released, I will be first to queue up at the cinema.
