Peon's Place

I cannot find a better reason to cancel my Netflix plan and to go with Hulu Plus for a change.

Announced this week, my plan will go from $10 to $16. While you may scoff at the $6/month ($72/year) difference, you need to realize that it’s a 60% increase. If gas rose that high per gallon that quickly, you’d be outraged.

Netflix will no longer offer a $9.99 package of DVD-by-mail and unlimited streaming, the company said in a statement today. Instead, more than 23 million subscribers will pay $15.98 monthly beginning September 1st if they choose both options, or $7.99 for just one.

The company introduced a DVD-only plan for $7.99 on July 8 for new subscribers and extended that to current customers to reflect the costs of acquiring and delivering content digitally and by mail, Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman, said in an interview. Many customers want the option of streaming-only or DVD-only packages, he said. “We wouldn’t have charged this when the streaming catalog was still lean,” Swasey said. “The streaming catalog is robust to the point where a lot of people won’t want DVDs anymore.”  Read the rest of this entry »

Oh, my dear LiLo, you shall never learn until you’re locked away for 2+ years, will you? Tsk tsk.

Lindsay Lohan may be going from house arrest to the Big House. TMZ reports that the troubled star, who turns 25 next week, recently tested positive for alcohol and must appear before a judge in an LA County Superior Court this morning.

The former Disney actress was sentenced last month to four months in jail after she pleaded no contest in the theft of a $2,500 necklace in April. Due to prison overcrowding and because she is a nonviolent offender, she’s been serving the time via house arrest. Lohan’s alleged positive alcohol test means she violated her probation terms — and L.A.’s probation department plans to ask Judge Stephan Sautner to throw her into LA County Jail.

Gamers can now rent video games locally at all hours of the day and night.

Redbox, the stand-alone kiosks at local retailers most known for their dollar-a-night movie rentals, now offer video games. Games cost $2 a day and can be reserved online for easy pickup at the nearest Redbox location.

Top new releases are available for rental, along with popular family and children’s games. A complete list of available titles is available online, available for PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360. Each of the company’s kiosks will carry anywhere from 22 to 28 different gaming titles, but there’s no indication as to how often the selection of games will shift around.

Redbox officials said the company began testing video game rentals at 5,000 locations across the country in August 2009. During that time, officials said, more than 1 million games were rented, proving that the customer demand was there as nearly 64 percent of Americans own at least one gaming console. ”With more than 21,000 Redbox locations slated to feature video game rentals alongside movies this June, Redbox will be the one-stop shop for entertainment,” company President Mitch Lowe said in a written statement.

Buying any game is a gamble. You can use reviews and recommendations to make more intelligent purchasing decisions, but ultimately, you might spend $60 and hate the game, or you might spend $60 and love the game so much that you basically complete it in a weekend. Either way, you are basically out the $60. However using the $2/day method and their limit of 25 days unreturned, you end up saving $10 on your games. After those 3-and-a-half weeks, you get to keep the rental game, after which time Redbox will dispatch the software disc’s accompanying box and instruction manual.

I have not had cable/satellite television at home for about a year now; Linda doesn’t subscribe, either. But why would anyone need to, with multiple sources of television and movies that stream from the internet? Live sports? Perhaps. But there are other ways to obtain that, as well…

Linda says that I’m not allowed to get a Vizio TV to match my future Vizio VIA cell phone. We’ll see about that, though! It’s already beneficial to load up a movie from Netflix streaming and to entertain her three-year-old. I’ll keep you tuned in as to who wins this fight. =P

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I have the Flixster app on my iPhone, I wonder if I’ll soon be able to stream movie content with it, just as I can with my Netflix application!

Time Warner has purchased Flixster to be yet another competitor of Netflix. Too much of a good thing leads to numerous copycats, right? The owner of the Warner Bros. studio and the HBO cable movie service didn’t disclose what it paid for Flixster, which owns the Rotten Tomatoes movie-review site and also runs a streaming video service that has about 1,200 movies and an array of TV shows.

By comparison, Netflix has more than 20,000 movies and shows available for streaming. Time Warner said it plans to position Flixster as a tool for people to access digital copies of content they buy.

Just as I posted previously, this movie is on for an amazing ride! ”Fast Five” has left the competition in the dust with an $83.6 million debut to grab the No. 1 spot at the weekend box office, according to studio estimates Sunday.

Universal Pictures’ fifth movie in “The Fast and the Furious” franchise was by far this year’s biggest opening. Its take was more than double the previous best of $39.2 million for “Rio,” the 20th Century Fox animated hit that slipped to No. 2 with $14.4 million. The No. 1 movie the two previous weekends, “Rio” raised its total to $103.6 million.

“Fast Five” set a record for best April debut ever, speeding past the $71 million haul of its predecessor, “Fast & Furious,” two years ago. The movie reteams stars Vin Diesel and Paul Walker as outlaw driving aces and adds Dwayne Johnson as a federal agent on their tail. The action expands beyond the franchise’s traditional racing scene into a broad crime romp.

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Trashy love novel look and feel? Check!

The Little Mermaid has nothing on the real life thing. Not even Aquamarine can touch this one. But how ever will Disney cover up the frontal shots? Long hair cannot possibly hide the lovely nudity forever, can it? Perhaps seashell bras?

May 20th cannot come soon enough. Early birthday present to me, anyone??

View the rest of the movie posters!

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Our favorite celebutard has had the book thrown at her today in court, sentenced to 120 days in jail. Lindsay’s lawyer has said she’ll appeal, which means Lindsay is entitled to post bail.

Lohan was also ordered to complete 480 hours of community service, 360 of those hours must be performed at the Downtown Women’s Center, so Lindsay can see how needy women have to live. The remaining 120 hours will be served at the L.A. County morgue. Judge Sautner explained that Lindsay should have called the store and notified the owners about the necklace sooner. She waited several weeks and returned the necklace after finding out the cops were about to raid her house. Sautner seemed influenced by the surveillance video, which she saw for the first time in court today.

Oh, how we never get enough of Ah-nold!

Ex-California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his return to movies last week, saying a film version of his much-publicized cartoon project The Governator is in the works. “First will come (The Governator) comic books, then a (cartoon) TV series and after that we will develop the games and then a movie,” Schwarzenegger told a packed room of international journalists at global TV market MipTV in Cannes. “Maybe then we’ll be back in Cannes for that.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger says his new animated TV venture features a “superheroic guy” who gets things done — without constraints like laws to thwart his action.

“I think that a lot of times you can actually do more and accomplish more being outside of the system,” the muscle man-turned-Hollywood hunk-turned-California governor told The Associated Press in an interview Monday.

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Watch this Jimmy Kimmel “Hottie Body Hump Club” exercise ball video, with a ton of guest appearances. I couldn’t stop laughing. The best workout video since the Shake Weight commercials!

Working out their Hump routine are Scarlett Johansson, Minka Kelly, Jessica Biel, Jessica Alba, Eva Longoria, Emily Blunt, Sofia Vergara, and Lindsay Lohan. My favorite part is the very end, where it’s Jimmy and LiLo, with the following line:

Jimmy: “…so affordable it’s practically a steal”

Lindsay: “Allegedly.”

View the video below, have fun!