Swordfish Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Itching to take a page out of her own book, Halle Berry is once again looking to perform one of those big-screen career revival stunts -- this time, however, instead of showing us her bare breasts, she'll be donning a shaved head. Back in 2001, Berry made waves by going topless in the film Swordfish. The scene itself was totally gratuitous and had no business being in the film, but it probably helped boost box office sales for a flick that wasn't that good in the first place. Of course, once the clothes were off, Berry opened herself up to other roles in riskier films -- Monster's Ball (in which she won an Oscar for best actress) being one of them.

This new film, Nappily Ever After (which, thankfully, isn't a sequel to Happy N'ever After), is being labeled a romantic comedy and will follow a woman who decides to shave her head bald when, for some reason, her hair begins to fall out. Of course, there will be this whole "real beauty comes from the inside" theme running throughout. Thanks for the life lesson Halle -- I guess I'm the only one who thinks bald women are beautiful and sexy too (I'll take a bald Natalie Portman over a full head of hair on Cameron Diaz any day). To make things even more "real," Berry will shave her head in the film instead of wearing some sort of cap. However, filming won't begin until at least next year; a new draft for Nappily Ever After was just turned in.

Here's one to make you laugh as we head into the weekend: A 60 year-old guy pulled out a handgun, held up a Hollywood Video in Oregon and forced all of the employees into a back room ... but only after he strolled about the store scoping the latest DVDs to hit the shelves. Arriving a half hour before the store was set to close, the robber killed time before approaching the front counter with a black handgun and one request: "Give me Borat, or give me all your money!"

Okay, he didn't demand a copy of Borat, but who knows what was going through the guy's mind. Heck, there were times before I made the switch to Netflix when Blockbuster would be out of everything I wanted to watch -- for weeks on end! On a few occasions, I would run to Blockbuster after work, arriving pumped up to see a particular film, and not find it on shelves or even in that little pile of movies behind the desk (please, you know you check there too -- after you pretend to be the only one on the planet who knows that secret pile exists.) After I would come to the realization it was unavailable -- and deal with attitude from the Blockbuster employee -- there were moments where I contemplated doing something illegal.

Of course, that never happened -- and thanks to Best Buy, I currently have films like The Rules of Attraction, The Mexican and Swordfish in my DVD library. I say Blockbuster should buy those awful films back from me; sixty bucks down the drain because they couldn't keep their shelves stocked. But I digress. Oh, and the robber was never caught -- though I bet the cops never checked the local Best Buy.

A software-based company in San Francisco has released a new program that can censor DVDs on the fly. It uses an online movie database of existing "safe cuts," or you can upload your own. Their player then uses these cuts to generate a "cutlist," which plays the movie according to that list in real-time, effectively censoring it. This process does not create or leave behind a hard copy of the altered film, it edits everything in the background, splicing together a new version of the film as you watch it, leaving you with the original movie intact after viewing.

This differs from an earlier lawsuit against a company called CleanFlicks which was upheld in court because it was decided that they caused "irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies," by actually taking your DVD, and creating a "clean" copy of it with all the sex and profanity edited out. Basically, they sent you a duplicate that they created, with none of the bad stuff in it, meaning they physically alter the original movie content on the actual media.

Another company, ClearPlay, provides a similar service through a standalone DVD player that has filters built in to screen out portions of the movie the viewer finds objectionable. Since they don't change the movie itself, they have been safe from lawsuits, so far.