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Tuesday, December 27, 2011

'Fast Five' was downloaded 9M times

'Fast Five' is the most pirated movie of 2011

"Fast Five" will probably not be at the top of many year-end movie lists -- best, worst, biggest hits or otherwise. But it is No. 1 somewhere, although probably not where its studio, Universal, would want it to be.
The movie was the most pirated film of 2011, according to data compiled by TorrentFreak. The Vin Diesel-Paul Walker-Dwayne Johnson action saga was swapped almost 9.3 million times via BitTorrent.

That's a lot, but it's way down from 2010 piracy leader "Avatar," which racked up more than 16 million downloads. TorrentFreak says the average for the Top 10 this year was also way down from 2010, although the number of BitTorrent users didn't decline.

"The Hangover Part II" and "Thor" were second and third on the list, each with more than 8 million downloads.
Best picture winner "The King's Speech" and "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2" also made the Top 10, but it wasn't all hits. Middling box-office performers like "Source Code" and "Sucker Punch" also made the list. 

Here's the Top 10, per TorrentFreak:
1. "Fast Five"
2. "The Hangover Part II"
3. "Thor"
4. "Source Code"
5. "I Am Number Four"
6. "Sucker Punch"
7. "127 Hours"
8. "Rango"
9. "The King's Speech"
10. "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2"

Adapted from MSN
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Published by Gusti Putra at: 5:12 PM
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Top 3 Movies of 2011

These are top three movies of 2011:

3. 'The Descendants' 
A number of major movies this year were about looking into the past and attempting to find some sort of solace or meaning there, creatively, personally or otherwise. But as Woody Allen revealed in his "Midnight in Paris," our view of the past is often distorted by our own desires, and things weren't truly any better then than they are now. That's why there's not a whole lot of emotional truth in a simple homage. But there's a ton of it in "The Descendants," which is ultimately about taking one's eyes off the rearview mirror and peering into the future. That means letting go, and the grief that Matt King (George Clooney) and his two daughters must work through as they say goodbye to their dying wife and mother is acute and real. So is the sense of loss that Matt feels over the possibility of relinquishing his family's stake in their home state of Hawaii. In both cases, Matt comes to terms with the mistakes of the past and attempts to move forward -- forging a new relationship with his daughters now that their "primary parent" is gone, and finding a way to preserve his family's land. Your reaction to "The Descendants" may depend on what point in your life you're at while watching it. For us, it was somber, funny and terribly moving. It's a beautiful film about trying to live right now, to know the people around you and where you all come from, before everything slips away and becomes just another distant, nostalgic dream.

2. 'The Tree of Life' 
If, in one sense, the power of Terrence Malick 's filmmaking comes from its ambiguity, "The Tree of Life," has to rank as his most potent and daring work yet. The movie begins and ends with an image of a swirling energy, a smoky, dancing light which means ... what? The spark that began the universe? The essence of everything that began and will eventually end what we perceive as reality? Yes ... and ... sure, why not? With Tree," it's always more about the questions than the answers. Malick's heartfelt meditation on life's mysteries, as filtered through a portrait of a West Texas family in the 1950s, has been fashioned to allow his audience the space to experience the emotions it might evoke within themselves. So as you watch the film's three young boys caught in the middle between the physical embodiments of grace (their lovely mother, played with such tender feeling by Jessica Chastain) and nature (a never-better Brad Pitt as their stern, thwarted father), we, too, feel the push and pull between the physical and infinite aspects of the human existence. There's beauty, poetry, tyranny, death. There's the birth of the universe. There are dinosaurs! Why dinosaurs? Short answer: (Again) Why not? Long answer: Perhaps Malick is reminding us that the creatures that once held dominion over the Earth no longer exist. Could the same fate befall their successors? Or maybe that little moment of grace where the big lizard spares its sickly cousin shows a way of avoiding that destiny. Again, it's all about the questions, and Malick gives you enough to chew on here that you could return repeatedly to "Tree" for years to come, knowing (and savoring) that your experience will be different each time you watch it.


1. 'Melancholia' 

Universal and personal, blatant and mysterious, sorrowful and funny, nihilistic and yet, sublimely, romantically, celebratory, Lars Von Trier's "Melancholia" takes the black bile of its namesake -- the depression of its heroine -- and transforms the "humor" into exaltation. A terrifying, dazzling planet that, true to Dane Von Trier's dip into German romanticism, is set to destroy life on Earth: Götterdämmerung via Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" (used in the picture's rapturously beautiful overture), via Ophelia via Cassandra via Von Trier's personal mythology. Clinically depressed Justine (a stunning Kirsten Dunst, Von Trier's surrogate) does what's often expected of those afflicted -- wear a brave face and a wedding dress, embrace love, work, family (no matter how dysfunctional) and rules. Well, Von Trier cannot accept that fate, and in the picture's first half, in which Justine destroys her nuptials, her actions serve as depressive, rebellious self awareness. "What did you expect?" she asks. Indeed. And then comes planet Melancholia, inching closer, leaving stable sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) panic stricken while Justine, calmly, grimly and at times, cheekily, accepts annihilation, not as easy suicide but as a kind of cosmic extension of despair. Finally. Justine isn't wallowing in depression, she's embracing, seducing it, and in one of the picture's most exquisite moments, lying beneath it naked, basking in the glow of doom. Von Trier, a sufferer himself, sincerely understands depression (just as he understood anxiety in "Antichrist"), which may be why he maddens many. Weaving himself into his characters, he's sadistic, masochist, empathetic, self obsessed, morbid and morbidly funny and then honest and honestly confused. With "Melancholia" he grants depressives a gift. Taking Justine's depleted darkness and imbuing her with celestial life through doomsday, he, to recall another German Romantic, creates an "Ode to Joy" through heartbreaking and gloriously inspirational...woe. 




Adapted from MSN


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Published by Gusti Putra at: 5:00 PM
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Deer find safe home at FBI firing range, academy

'They're pretty immune to the sound ... they don't know what a gun is,' says FBI instructor

QUANTICO, Virginia — Call it a playground for Bambi and G-Men, where imaginary criminals are hunted and deer are the spectators.
Deer roam atop a berm surrounding the shooting range at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., on Dec. 19.
The 547-acre FBI Academy, where some of America's best marksmen fire off more than 1 million bullets every month, happens to be one of the safest places for deer during hunting season.
The property on the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va., is home to some of the FBI's most elite forces and training programs as well as a de facto wildlife refuge where deer, fox, wild turkeys, groundhogs and vultures roam fearless and free.

In recent years, a black bear was spotted running across a parking lot, and a groundhog cornered an FBI agent coming out of the cafeteria, hoping to score some human food, FBI spokesman Kurt Crawford said. Turkey vultures are often seen perched atop the 500,000 square foot national crime lab where the FBI analyzes evidence, including the remains of the former al-Qaida leader in Iraq.
The wild animals are as much a fixture at the academy as the hostage rescue team and criminal profilers.
The most common furry friends on the sprawling campus some 30 miles outside Washington are the deer, a regular at the shooting ranges, driving courses and physical training trails.
On a December afternoon, deer grazed above one of the academy's 16 practice shooting ranges. They stood just 15 feet away from the paper targets. Nearby, shots popped loudly from a Colt M4 Carbine rifle, and the white-tailed deer did not flinch.

"They're pretty immune to the sound," said Sean Boyle, supervisory special agent bomb technician and principal firearms instructor for the Critical Incident Response Group based at the academy. The deer typically graze on top of the berm, about 15 feet away from the targets and rarely go directly in the line of fire. Boyle said he doesn't recall an instance where a deer was shot accidentally.
"It's like they think, 'We've pushed the limit for this far, and all our generations have pushed the limit for this far,'" Boyle said. "They're just so docile around here. They don't know what a gun is."
The Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries does not keep direct tabs on the deer population at the FBI academy, but a spokeswoman said statewide the deer population has remained about the same over the past decade, partly because of regulated hunting. Licensed deer hunters are allowed on parts of the Marine Corps base but not at the academy where the FBI does not hunt its animals.
At the FBI Academy, the deer have even become part of the training in some of the driving courses, said Tim Moles, the supervisory special agent who oversees the Tactical and Emergency Vehicle Operations Center, where recruits learn to avoid crashing their cars and conduct surveillance without being spotted.

The deer are convenient when recruits learn to avoid collisions, Moles said. "There's times when it seems like they're playing chicken with us," Moles said. "We respect them because they can do damage. We'd rather avoid all deer stories in this end of the academy."
For the most part, the deer have stayed out of trouble. Twice, however, deer have eaten freshly-planted pansies at the academy's 9/11 memorial courtyard, Crawford said. Eventually a fence was built to keep the flowers off limits.
Deer have been known to interrupt physical training, too.
"We've had the deer walk across the middle of the track during the 300-meter sprint," said Susann Dreiling, unit chief of the academy's physical training unit.
To become an agent, recruits must pass a physical fitness test. They are scored on how fast they can run and how many push-ups and sit-ups they perform. Sometimes, training will involve running a quarter-mile path along the lake area of the academy, stopping for push-ups, running some more and breaking to box, Dreiling said.
During these exercises, a mother and her fawns are often close by.
"They just stand there and watch as if they're evaluating them," Dreiling said, "just like the instructors are."

Adapted from MSN
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Published by Gusti Putra at: 2:47 PM
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