After innumerable delays, technical difficulties, rights management issues, and internal struggles over the business model and terms of service, Hulu.com is finally fully online.

The video-on-demand service, a costly but widely hyped venture of NBC/Universal, was announced to great fanfare last year, and those writers and industry insiders who got a sneak preview (although its form and delivery, at the time, were much different than they are now) announced that it would be a major event when it finally debuted; some even went as far as to call it the savior of television (and a positive boon to the movie industry as well, although the usual DRM issues ended up largely sinking that possibility).  What no one anticipated -- not even Hulu's management -- was the long delays they would face in getting their site completely online and functional.

Read More...

Ridley Scott's American Gangster, ostensibly based on the real story of the '70s drug dealer Frank Lucas, ends with Lucas (Denzel Washington) basically joining forces with Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), the detective who's nailed him, by agreeing to testify against their shared enemies, the crooked lawmen who shake down crooks and sneer at clean cops. The movie wraps up its story with a series of titles that state that "three-quarters of the drug enforcement agents assigned to New York" wound up being convicted thanks to Lucas' testimony. The DEA and its agents are pissed off about this, and they're not settling for barging into Scott's home and shooting his dog; a bunch of former feds have filed a class-action defamation lawsuit against the movie. The suit charges that "the defamation involved the defendant NBC Universal, through its Universal Studios, falsely communicating, in writing, to millions of people in a motion picture called American Gangster that three-quarters of New York City's DEA, from approximately 1973 through approximately 1985, were convicted criminals."

Read More...