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24 May 2008
Runaway Jury (DVD 2004)
Runaway Jury (2003) is an American drama/thriller film directed by Gary Fleder and starring John Cusack, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, and Rachel Weisz.
The film adaptation of The Runaway Jury, which drops the "The" and is simply titled Runaway Jury, makes one big departure from the book. Grisham's novel pits the plaintiff, Celeste Wood, against a large, fictional tobacco company on the grounds that her husband's premature death was because of the company's cigarettes. The scriptwriters substituted a major firearms manufacturer for the tobacco company and firearms for the cigarettes, presumably to differentiate Runaway Jury from The Insider, a 1999 thriller featuring the tobacco industry.
Other significant changes from the book include the circumstances surrounding the husband's death, an increased role for the plaintiff's attorney (and thus for Dustin Hoffman), and more angelic motives on the part of the protagonists.
Roger Ebert's critique of this movie stated that the plot to sell the jury to the highest-bidding party was the most ingenious device in the story because it avoided pitting the "evil" and the "good" protagonists directly against each other in a stereotypical manner, but it plunged both of them into a moral abyss.
07 February 2009
Blackadder - Complete Blackadder
2 of 2 found this helpful One of the best comedy series ever to emerge from England, Black Adder traces the deeply cynical and self-serving lineage of various Edmund Blackadders from the muck of the Middle Ages to the frontline of World War I. In his pre-Mr Bean triumph, British comic actor Rowan Atkinson played all five versions of Edmund, beginning with the villainous and cowardly Duke of Edinburgh, whose scheming mind and awful haircut seem to stand him in good stead to become the next Archbishop of Canterbury -- a deadly occupation if ever there was one. Among tales of royal dethronings, Black Death, witch-smellers (who root out spell-makers with their noses), and ghosts, Edmund is a perennial survivor who never quite gets ahead in multiple episodes. Jump to the Elizabethan era and Atkinson picks up the saga as Lord Edmund, who is perpetually courting favour from mad Queen Bess (Miranda Richardson) and is always walking a tightrope from which he can either gain the world or lose his head. Subjected to bizarre services for her majesty (at one point, Edmund is asked to do for potatoes what Sir Walter Raleigh did for tobacco), Edmund -- like his ancestor -- can never quite fulfill his larger ambitions. The next incarnation we encounter is in late-18th-century Regency England. This time, Blackadder is a mere butler to the idiotic Prince Regent (Hugh Laurie in a brilliantly buffoonish performance) and is caught in various misadventures with Samuel Johnson, Shakespearean actors, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and William Pitt the younger. With a brief stop in Victorian London for a Christmas special, the series concludes with several episodes set during the Great War. The new Edmund is a career army officer, but a scoundrel all the same. Shirking his duties whenever possible and taking advantage of any opportunity for undeserved reward, this final, deeply sour, and very funny Blackadder negotiates survival among a cadre of fools and dimwits. No small mention can be made of Atkinson's supporting cast, easily among the finest comic performers of their generation: besides Laurie and Richardson, Stephen Fry, Tony Robinson, and Tim McInnerny. --Tom Keogh
DVD Description
For the first time every Blackadder episode is packaged together in a special boxset, including Blackadder's Christmas Carol, Back and Forth and The Cavalier Years. This six disc set has a running time of 763 minutes.
19 May 2008
XFX® Fatal1ty Extreme GeForce® 7600GT, real power!
INTRODUCTION
Do you remember a few years back, when the GeForce4 line was brand new and the promise of performance from those cards was causing a gleamin every gamer's eye? The top-of-the-line graphics card when the GF4 was brand new cost around $250. These days, $250 barely buys a decent processor, let alone a graphics card that is worthy of bragging about. The people at XFX would like to change the negative stigma associated with a mid-range or "budget" video card and their solution was the supercharged 7600GT XXX Edition of NVIDIA's versatile and formidable mid-range GPU.
Rounding out the top end of the middle road of the GeForce 7-series, the 7600GT XXX is nothing to scoff at. Clocked at 590MHz/1.6GHz on the core and memory respectively (596/1618 on mine), the XXX Edition packs some serious firepower. And at sub-$200 prices, it seems quite and enticing purchase. Can the allure of a cheap pricetag, insane clock speeds and all the features of the GeForce 7-series combine to make a card worth spending your money on? The results speak for themselves.
XFX GeForce 7600 GT Video Card
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INITIAL IMPRESSIONS
When I opened the box to see the two new XXX edition cards wrapped up in packing peanuts and bubble wrap, I was a little surprised. The boxes are so small! About half again as wide and tall as a standard small-form computer game box (and slightly thicker) the boxes are quite small. I was a little disappointed the cards weren't in the trademark X-shaped box that XFX is known for, but that definitely is not a big deal, nor is it any sort of indication that these cards aren't worthy of the XFX branding.
XFX 7600GT XXX Edition Box Contents
Included in the box is a manual, s-video cable, HDTV adapter and driver CD. I was a little disappointed there was no bundled game and surprised at the same time since this card is supposed to be such a powerhouse – even for being a mid-range part. But, in the long run, if it keeps the price of the card down, that's better in my eyes.
INSTALLATION AND TEST SYSTEM
There were absolutely no problems installing either video cards. Going from my previous dual-6800GTs, having shorter cards that didn't require power connectors but promised performance that would embarass the 6800GTs was a novelty. Even after looking at the Inno3D 7600GST (which, when overclocked, was slightly slower than these XFX cards) and seeing how well that mid-range card stacked up against the previous high-end, I couldn't help but doubt that these two 7600GTs would really be that powerful...but the benchmarks are coming in a few more paragraphs!
The test system used is as follows:
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (Venice) @ 2.377GHz
2GB (2x1GB) Corsair XMS PC3200 DDR400 RAM @ 433MHz
eVGA GeForce 6800GT graphics card (and a second for SLI benchmarks)
Inno3D GeForce 7600GST graphics card (for benchmark comparison)
XFX GeForce 7600GT XXX Edition graphics card (and a second for SLI benchmarks)
Creative X-Fi Elite Pro soundcard
Logitech Z-5300 THX-certified 5.1 surround speakers
Western Digital WD740GD 74GB Raptor 10,000RPM HDD
ForceWare 84.21 WHQL
7600 FAMILY COMPARISON
Just to show a comparison of how the cards listed above stack up with one another and the rest of the 7600 family of cards, the following chart shows a few of the more important stats on each of the cards