Film | by Shane “Let’s Get Physical” Hnetka
The 2018 Saskatchewan Entertainment Expo had fantastic celebrities and terrific comic industry guests, highlighted for me by Pistolwhip cartoonist Matt Kindt. The Sept. 15–16 con was packed Saturday (and pretty busy Sunday), with a total attendance of 15,421. I didn’t get a chance to meet many stars but Ron Perlman (Hellboy) was awesome. Yup. it was a pretty damn good event. Hope you made it. If not, see you next year!
Digital Deletions
There was a little bit of hubbub recently after a guy complained on social media that Apple deleted three movies he’d bought online. Everybody was shocked — shocked!!! — that a customer’s digital movie could be deleted by the vendor. Cue the uproar!
But wait — the facts are more complicated. Stupid facts.
When the customer, Anders G. da Silva, moved to Canada from Australia, three films he’d “bought” (technically, licensed) and stored in the cloud (as opposed to his hard drive) didn’t make the trip with him. The films were deleted from his iTunes cloud account because Apple doesn’t have their Canadian distribution rights. Nothing was pulled off his hard drive. Da Silva is just stuck in a regional rights limbo. It’s exasperating, but not nefarious.
Still, it’s a reminder that companies can delete your movies.
I’m a collector. I like physical copies of my movies, books and music. Yes, digital stuff is (marginally) easier to buy and use, and it takes up less space — but I OWN my movies. And thanks to my physical DVD library, I have films that are currently impossible to watch — such as Peter Jackson’s gory and hilarious Braindead, a.k.a. Dead Alive. You can’t even buy the censored version on DVD, Blu-ray or find it on any streaming service.
Everyone’s obsessed with digital stuff but if you really love a film, a physical copy is the best.
Besides, Blu-rays come with digital downloads anyway.
Fears For Years
It’s that time of year where I go stark raving mad and write blog posts about awesome horror movies on our blog. The column is called 31 Days of Horror and like the title suggests, I post about one horror movie every day in October.
Since this is my tenth year, this year’s series will be called 10 Years of Fear and it will feature my absolute, all-time favourite horror films. Some of them you’ll have heard of, others, probably not.
Get ready for 31 Days of Horror 2018 — it’s going to be awesome.