Ewww. Please forgive the centered image. I need to work with this new version of b2e posting a bit.

I think I saw this in the beginning of December sometime, but I completely forgot to post about it!

Back in October, Ric and I rented the original 3:10 to Yuma. Ric liked it so much he wasn't interested in seeing the new version. I wanted to compare. Truth be told, I think the original is superior, although that doesn't make the new version a bad movie.

Again, the story begins when Dan Evans and his sons witness Ben Wade's gang robbing a carriage. Dan ends up involved with local townsmen in capturing Wade. He's desperate to make enough money to provide for his family. In this version, his son is very resentful of their poverty. I didn't like that addition. Also, in this version, more time is spent on the road, and there's a lot more action. There's a lot more downtime, too, and I honestly thought some of the night conversations between Wade and Evans were boring. There was a lot less punch to the dynamics between the two characters, and I guess I was tired too, because I fell asleep (for the first time in a theater!) for a few minutes there. I'm glad someone started shooting not long after I nodded off! There's a lot more focus on Evans' son and Wade's right-hand man in the newer movie, neither of which I think really improved the story, but both of which worked all right, though a bit predictably.

Russell Crowe and Christian Bale are fine actors, but given less to work with dimensionally. Ben Wade was a lot funnier and more charming in 1957, and Dan Evans was a lot less easy-looking to beat then too. Like Ryan mentioned in his review, I enjoyed that Van Heflin was physically stronger looking than Glenn Ford, which made Dan's internal struggle all the more interesting.

Well, I've kind of run out of time to review this. I thought it was made competently, but enjoyed the original significantly more because it was more character-driven and had a more urgent sense of tension even though it had less action. The final scenes of this new version were very effective, but like others, I'm not so sure I cared for the change in the ending, since it didn't feel very believable.

So I guess you can file this under "This movie was.. fine."

The internets were abuzz on Friday with talk of the death of DRM in the music industry as Sony had announced they would be going DRM-Free. We now have the details of Sony's DRM-Free offerings and they are quite lame. The folks at downloadsquad have the details:

While most record labels offering DRM-free downloads are letting users buy songs from online retailers like iTunes and Amazon, Sony wants you to go into a bricks and mortar store and drop $12.99 on a plastic card with a code that will let you download the album from the company's new MusicPass web site.

That's right, you've got to walk into a store, pay for a full album, and then go home to download your song. You might as well just buy a CD while you're at the store and rip it for yourself.

But wait, there's more. Or less, rather. When the service launches on January 15th, there will be a whopping 37 albums available for download. And no way to buy singles.

So you have to go to a store and buy a card that will let you go back home and download the DRM-Free album. This is hardly progress. I don't think we can sound the bell for the death of DRM just yet, especially with all the DRM being used for movies these days.