Wesley Snipes is facing sentencing today after being convicted of several tax misdemeanors. He had some of his friends submit letters to the court asking for leniency and attesting to his good character. Among the letter writers were Denzel Washington, Woody Harellson, Judge Joe Brown, a Shaolin monk, and Snipes’ personal driver and personal stand-in (who presumably doesn’t have to stand in his stead in this instance).

But the winner by a mile is the letter submitted by Bokeem Woodbine which is actually handwritten on college ruled paper ripped from a spiral notebook (to his credit he did use both sides of the sheet). What on earth was Bokeem doing that he couldn’t find the time to compose his thoughts on a computer? Hell, an email to the judge would carry more weight.

Bokeem

“Oh shit! They Got Wesley? This is an injustice! I need to express myself to the judge! No… no time to log on. You know how slow Windows Vista is. I’ll just (*rip*) take a few of these sheets and put pen to paper….”

The letters can be found here (pdf). If you just want to see Bokeem’s letter, and who could blame you, it is the very last letter in the document.

I have written several posts about the interesting space that Netflix fills between physical stores that cannot offer a sizeable library or customization features and digital delivery with its bandwith issues and pricing problems. In my last Netflix post I noted that:

“… Netflix never saw delivery by the mails as a permanent solution to the “watching movies at home and on the go” industry. As I mentioned before, their relatively luddite service was possible because Blockbuster sucked and digital delivery hadn’t (and even with Apple’s entrance, still has not) been perfected. Like Apple, Amazon, Walmart, and a host of other companies, Netflix always planned to offer a digital service when it becomes feasible.

Well, Netflix launched its Media Center today to select customers and will be rolling it out to its entire customer base over the next six months. The Media Center will digitally deliver movies to users in a matter of seconds. According to Netflix:

The new immediate viewing feature differs from current services in that it does not require the often lengthy downloading of a large video file. The Netflix feature uses real-time playback technology that allows video to be viewed at virtually the same time it is being delivered to a user’s computer. Following a one-time, under-60-second installation of a simple browser applet, most subscribers’ movie selections will begin playing in their Web browser in as little as 10 to 15 seconds. Movies can be paused and a position bar gives viewers the ability to immediately jump to any point in the movie. In all, the instant watching feature requires only Internet connectivity with a minimum of one megabit per second of bandwidth. The more bandwidth a consumer has, the higher quality the video displayed, ranging from the quality of current Netflix previews to DVD quality with a three-megabit-per-second connection.

Download time is the major bottleneck to adopting digital delivery. If Netflix can truly solve this, they will have a huge leg up in the race. Another major problem over time, of course, will be whether users can seamlessly watch movies on their televisions through this service. I’ll watch movies on my computer, but the average citizen (read my parents) will not.

Netflix is including the service at no additional charge. Customers electing the most popular plan, $17.99 for unlimited DVD rental and three discs out at a time, will have access to up to 18 hours of online movie watching per month. This is preferrable to the a la carte pricing offered by the able companies Movie On Demand services and Apples downloading features.

Netflix seems to have its head screwed on straight here. Here’s hoping Netflix’s latest offering meets our lofty expectations.

File this one under obsessive. Brian Jones recently bought the house used for the exterior shots in “A Christmas Story” in Cleveland for $150,000.

How did he get the $150,000? By manufacturing and selling the “leg lamp” depicted in the movie.

Leg Lamp

He then went frame by frame and transformed the interior of the house to match the set of the movie (at a cost of $240,000). He now offers guided tours of the house and transformed a house across the street into a gift shop. 4,300 people came out for the opening day. Jones expects 50,000 people per year to visit the house.

Only in Cleveland.

The Goonies is on. I saw this movie in the theater 3 times in 1985. Still a record.

Turning on the television and trying to choose between the good the bad and the ugly, rocky IV (the one where Apollo creed is killed by drago), Friday, cool hand luke, o brother where art thou, grave of the fireflies, and raging bull.

Michael Arrington points an article in Business Week that claims that Apple will begin selling movies for download this month. According to Business Week, Walmart is up in arms because Apple is getting a better wholesale price.

I was surprised by Arrington’s closing remarks:

“Given that it will be trivial for iTunes users to simply burn a DVD of these movie downloads, Walmart has good reason to be worried. Netflix should be nervous, too.”

When the stars align and bandwith providers, movie studios, consumer elctronics makers, and digital distribution partners like Apple, Amazon, Walmart, AOL and Netflix get digital distribution right some old business models will certainly be eclipsed. But I think it’s a little early for Netflix to worry.

As Mark Cuban notes, download times are still abysmal:

“Easier to download a movie? Maybe. Easier to download 2 or 3 movies than going to the store to buy or rent ? Never. Never, ever, ever. (Which means not in the next 5 years).”

You think going to the movie store is a pain in the arse? How many of our average citizens will be able to endure the download time, much less figure out how to burn a dvd of the movie? That’s assuming, of course, that all of the aforementioned players above allow one to freely do so.

I am sure the Netflix never saw delivery by the mails as a permanent solution to the “watching movies at home and on the go” industry. As I mentioned before, their relatively luddite service was possible because Blockbuster sucked and digital delivery hadn’t (and even with Apple’s entrance, still has not) been perfected. Like Apple, Amazon, Walmart, and a host of other companies, Netflix always planned to offer a digital service when it becomes feasible.

No doubt, Apple launching any service should make its competitors nervous. But in this case, I don’t think Netflix has anything to worry about for quite sometime.

I saw Clerks II recently, and while I thought it was good, this post isn’t about the movie really. In one of the early scenes, Elias (Trevor Fehrman) and Randal (Jeff Anderson) banter about the upcoming release of the live action Transformers movie.

That got me wondering if there were other films that discussed or at least gave a nod to upcoming or contemporary movies. Sure enough, as I watched Big Fish last night, I noticed that Will Bloom (Billy Crudup) and his father (Albert Finney) drive past a theater which is showing Identity. Identity and Big Fish were both released in 2003.

Are you up to the challenge? Can you name any other films that hat tip contemporary movies or projects that are in the works?

The Transformer Trailer isn’t all that exciting, but I bet the intro credits to the film will be totally sweet given how they handle the transforming typography at the end of the trailer.

If you are in New York, I highly recommend heading over to the Film Forum to watch 13 Tzameti. I saw this 90 minute gem on a whim while trying to escape the 100 degree temperatures last week. While the film is in French, the director (Gela Babluani) and the lead actor (George Babluani) are Georgian.

I find it difficult to explain the premise of the movie without ruining it. The New York Times review had this to say:

This diabolical thriller is as cold and sharps as razor blades stored in a sub zero freezer.

You can watch the trailer, but I was happy I didn’t know anything about the film at all when I sat down to watch it.

Sidenote: According to IMDB, an english remake is due out in 2008.

Steely Dan and Owen Wilson have beef! Well not exactly. It looks like it was all a prank by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen of Steely Dan. But it was hilarious.

Becker and Fagen wrote an open letter to Owen’s brother Luke on July 17th expressing outrage at what they perceived as Owen’s blatant rip-off of their 2000 hit Cousin Dupree about a couch surfing bum of a cousin. The rip-off, of course is Owen’s You, Me, and Dupree starring Matt Dillon, Kate Hudson, and Owen Wilson. Seeking an apology, they wrote the letter to Luke presuming that he could bring some older brother pressure to bear on Owen. Fagen and Becker mistakenly believed that Luke was the older brother. Upon learning that Luke was in fact younger, the duo remarked, “We’re now seeing that according to Wikipedia, Owen is older than you are. But you seem a lot more mature somehow… don’t you?”

After making their case and asking Luke to get Owen to apologize at one of their concerts, Becker and Fagen resort to some pretty awesome threats:

Otherwise, if this business goes unresolved, there are some pretty heavy people who are upset about this whole thing and we can’t guarantee what kind of heat little Owen may be bringing down on himself. When negative energy like this attaches itself to someone because they allow themselves to get involved in stuff that is not spiritually aligned for them on all levels, there can sometimes be some very harsh trips that go down. Your bro might be creating an extremely retrograde reality matrix for himself with his whole sellout moviestar game and there may be some righteous dues to pay, amen.

For example, there’s this guy that works for us sometimes, he’s not necessarily the kind of folks you want to know or hang with, but, if you happen to get in a bar fight or some kind of hassle in a foreign country, he’s your best fucking friend in the world. You guys must go to the movies a lot - you know what a Navy Seal is, right? Well, this dude’s like that, only he’s Russian. This particular guy - of course, he’s a big fan of ours, but he may not have ven heard of “Bottle Rocket” - hardly anybody has - I mean one time we saw this guy, WITH HIS BARE HANDS, do something so unspeakable that - but, hey man, let’s not even get that way, you know? Let’s just help Owen C. do what’s right…

Extremely retrograde reality matrix?

Owen’s response was equally funny. Through his publicist, Owen Wilson said:

I have never heard the song Cousin Dupree and I don’t even know who this gentleman, Mr. Steely Dan, is. I hope this helps to clear things up and I can get back to concentrating on my new movie, HEY 19.

On a side note, I am a huge Steely Dan fan but had no idea they were still making records. Cousin Dupree won a Grammy for best pop performance by a duo or group in 2001. The album that it was on, Two Against Nature, won album of the year.

Interesting article in today’s NYTimes about Netflix and how they are succeeding despite the fact that the technology exists for digital delivery of movies. Interesting fact from the article: Netflix carries roughly 60,000 movies. How many of them are rented by users everday?

35,000 to 45,000.

Shocking.