Learn more about the bills by visiting the sites, or watching the video below.

FAQ

What is the intent of SOPA/PROTECT IP?

The stated intent of the bills is to provide tools for law enforcement and copyright holders to protect their intellectual property rights.

What’s wrong with protecting copyrights?

Nothing! The devil, as they say, is in the details. PROTECT IP and SOPA will cause too much collateral damage, have a high potential for abuse, and won’t even be that effective at stopping the crimes they target. Read alienth’s examination of where these bills fail.

I’m not in the U.S. Why does this affect me?

Many of the sites that you may use (e.g. Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.) are all affected by this law and will be required to hide offending domains from you.

If a non-U.S. site is blocked in the U.S., the site could suffer financially or even be bankrupted by the loss of U.S. traffic and revenue.

What are the differences between PROTECT IP and SOPA?

At a general level, the bills are very similar. SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act,” is from the House of Representatives, while the PROTECT IP Act is from the Senate. Either or both bills may pass a vote in their chamber of congress on their way to becoming law. Both must be defeated to end this threat. There have recently been more detailed explanations in an ELI5 thread and alienth’s blog post.

What about ACTA?

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, is a multi-national agreement with similar goals to the U.S.-only PROTECT IP and SOPA bills. It is criticized for many of the same reasons that PROTECT IP and SOPA are, but is also concerning because it has been drafted in secret. ACTA is not the focus of this blackout but please take the time to learn more about ACTA.

I’m not a U.S. citizen. How can I help?

You can still call or e-mail the U.S. representatives (sponsors of the bills would be a good choice). However, you may want to turn your attention more towards ACTA or other over-zealous copyright bills in your country.

When will Movie-List be back? What should I do when it comes back?

Movie-List will return to normal service at 8 PM EST (0100 UTC). While our protest is temporary in nature, PROTECT IP and SOPA are not. Continue to pay attention and join the conversation.

More answers

Check out the /r/SOPA Community FAQ.

• http://sopastrike.com/
• http://americancensorship.org/
• http://americancensorship.org/infographic.htmlhttp://ammori.org/2011/12/08/controversial-copyright-bills-would-violate-first-amendment-letters-to-congress-by-laurence-tribe-and-me/
• http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111122/04254316872/definitive-post-why-sopa-protect-ip-are-bad-bad-ideas.shtml
• http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/01/online-piracy-sopa-and-internet-security-pipa-bills-in-congress
• http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/show
• http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s968/show

Playing out like an overly dramatic preview for an adventure movie, the trailer, titled “Off the Grid,” features a search for Crystal led by Josh Duhamel and Megan Fox. (Is it a sign that the Oscars haven’t given up on their endeavor to reel in young viewers?) A booming voice announces, “They were charged with tracking down a legend.”

“We wanted to try something a little bit different this year instead of a traditional, clip-based piece,” academy chief marketing officer Christina Kounelias said in a statement. “The trailer has a fun twist that conveys how excited everyone is to have Billy back.”

In addition to starring Duhamel, Fox and Mr. Oscar Host himself, the trailer for the 2012 Oscars features cameo performances by William Fichtner, Vinnie Jones and past Academy Awards co-host Robin Williams.

Starting Friday, the trailer will run in more than 2,000 theaters. The 84th annual Academy Awards, which will be Crystal’s ninth time hosting, take place Feb. 26. Watch the trailer below.

You can’t do better then the best and this movie has them all; director, Jon Favreau, executive producers Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, and an all-star cast including Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Paul Dano, Olivia Wilde and Clancy Brown. Need I say more?

Seriously though, this movie could have been disastrous. An old-fashioned western meets alien invaders from outer space had “huge flop” written all over it. Not to mention that Harrison Ford’s last few movies have been real bombs. Luckily for us, Jon Favreau masterfully directs a brilliant cast of actors and combines them with both stunning visual and amazing audio effects that make you completely forget you are watching a cheesy film about cowboys and aliens. In fact, this movie delivered in every aspect of the film. Not only were the sound and visual effects outstanding but so were the acting, directing, set stages, props, make-up and costumes, as well as my favourite, the constant fight/attack scenes littered with delightful one-liners. Everything came together in this movie to make it a perfectly flawless end-to-end action-packed joyride. Pure magic! I couldn’t wipe the smirk off of my face throughout the entire movie. The trick to enjoying “Cowboys and Aliens” in my opinion is to not think about the plot or the corniness of the dialogue. In fact, try not to think about the movie at all. Just sit back, grab a beverage and just have fun with this one. Truth be told, the far-fetched storyline and cheesy one-liners are an intricate part of this movie’s amazing charm. I loved it!

Harrison Ford nailed his character in this one. He was perfect. He IS Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde. From slap stick humour to heart-felt tender moments, he really captured my full attention in this film. He made me smile, made me scoff, made me laugh out loud and almost had me in tears…almost. Equally captivating was co-star Daniel Craig who always shines as everyone’s favourite action adventure hero. He is definitely the James Bond of the Old West in my books (and he’s not too hard on the eyes either).

In the late 1800s a wanted gunslinger, Jake Lonergan (Craig) awakens somewhere in an Arizona desert to find himself alone, injured and suffering from amnesia. The only clue to his past and identity is the mysterious metal bracelet locked around his wrist. The confused cowboy finds himself in the sleepy old town of Absolution, where the townsfolk are being held hostage by a rich cow farmer, Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde (Ford) and his arrogant pip-squeak son, Percy (Dano). Initially introduced as adversaries, Lonergan and Dolarhyde must put aside their petty arguments and unite with a band of Apache warriors, women and children to battle alien invaders that are attacking the town and abducting the townsfolk right off of the streets in front of their eyes. A posse is formed and a search party sets out to track down an enemy like none any of them have ever faced before. On their quest, Lonergan’s memories slowly begin to return. As they do everyone suddenly realizes that Lonergan and his mysterious metal bracelet may be their only chance at survival. When they finally track down their prey they must work together to hatch a plan of attack to rescue all of their loved ones and ultimately destroy the alien invaders once and for all. The ultimate battle of cowboys versus aliens ensues, but who will emerge victorious? Watch and find out!

8.5/10

Watch the Trailer

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, a bootleg version of the trailer for director Ridley Scott’s Prometheus was leaked online just as Twentieth Century Fox had released some new images and details about the upcoming sci-fi movie.

While bootlegs usually want for quality, the Prometheus trailer was beyond poor, shot, presumably by the uploader, right off a TV screen with the perpetrator’s image often reflecting off the screen. Fox eventually worked to remove the bootlegged trailer, but the damage was already done according to Fox chairman and CEO Tom Rothman. He called the leak “heartbreakingly unfair” when he talked to MTV at the Gotham Independent Film Awards.

It’s not fair. It’s heartbreakingly unfair, because Ridley Scott, in addition to everything else … the quality of the visuals is as spectacularly beautiful, shot in 3-D compositionally the way only a master could do it. For some early, early, early, early half-baked, half-assed test to leak, it’s so unfair. I will promise you this: When that material is ready and it comes out, you should go see it in 3-D on a screen. It will deliver.

Rothman also insisted that Prometheus is not a prequel to Scott’s 1979 sci-fi classic Alien, as is rumored. Initially set as a prequel to Alien, it was the arrival of screenwriter Damon Lindelof (Lost, Cowboys and Aliens) and his subsequent reworking of Jon Spaihts’s script that made Scott re-title the movie Prometheus, revealing that the movie would feature “a new, grand mythology and universe in which this original story takes place,” that would only have “strands of Alien’s DNA”. Scott recently downgraded those “strands” to a “vague notion” of some “slight Alien DNA” while Lindelof revealed in June that Prometheus would “take place in that Alien universe” but would precede the original movie and wouldn’t be “burdened by all the tropes of that franchise with Facehuggers and Chestbursters, and all that stuff.”

Kinda sounds like a prequel to us, but Rothman insists it isn’t. “Hand to heart,” Rothman said.

I will tell you, here’s the way to think about it. If you looked at the whole movie, 95 percent of it is entirely unto itself. Ridley said it right: If you’re a fan and you look closely, you’ll spot strands of the DNA – I mean that metaphorically. [But] I’ll tell you the great thing: It’s way bigger than that. The ideas are way bigger, way more original and – it’s a scary world – way more profound.

This evening Paranormal Activity 3 is being released early as part of a late night sneak preview. Some markets are getting the film at 9 PM while other, larger markets will get a 10 PM screening. The one thing both markets will have in common, though, is that as the film lets out, the theater lobby will host a stream of confused audience members — perplexed by just how much of the movie’s trailers and TV spots included footage that was nowhere to be seen in the final version of the film.

… [snipped] …

I’m not going to go into specifics about which footage will be awaiting you when you go and see the film but I’d put it at 50 percent for the amount of footage used in spots that is not in the final film.

Is this a good thing? Can this deliberate misdirection and decoy footage actually help audiences’ enjoyment of the movie? One of the biggest complaints about trailers is that they give away too much of the movie. By the time you see most comedies and horror films, you already know the best laughs and scares, respectively. By filling a trailer with footage not actually in the movie, perhaps audiences are being treated to the rare experience of seeing a film that they haven’t already experienced piecemeal through advertising.

… [snipped] …

The trailers give a very different impression of the actual movie than what audiences will discover when they go to see it. They trailer (successfully) compiles the best scares from not one but two different horror films — the Paranormal Activity 3 being released in theaters and the Paranormal Activity 3 destined to be released as a supplemental bonus disc during the movie’s home video release. By doubling up on the amount of scares in the trailer, the marketing material is giving the impression that the film is full of edge-of-your-seat horror from start to finish. Instead, Paranormal Activity 3 is a movie with maybe half a dozen really good scares before a pretty intense finale — in other words, pretty much par on course with the previous two movies. The trailers are promising scary moments in the film that just aren’t there.

Read the full story at Inside Pulse

Trailer 1:

Trailer 2:

Oh this is awesome! SlashFilm is reporting, and we’ve confirmed with our own sources, that an 8-minute prologue for Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises will be showing in front of IMAX prints of Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol this December. If you recall, it’s opening in IMAX a few days early starting December 16th. This is a repeat of Warner Bros’ showing the opening bank robbery prologue from The Dark Knight in front of I Am Legend in IMAX in late 2007. We can expect this to be shot and shown in IMAX just like that, which sounds amazing, as that was one of the most thrilling parts about the early lead-up to TDK.

The news tip from SlashFilm comes from an exhibitor source, and we’ve confirmed with our own inside reference, that this is indeed true and a prologue will be showing. We don’t know what scene it is or what it will be, we only know that it’s 8 minutes long and will be in front of Brad Bird’s new Mission: Impossible movie opening this December (watch the trailer). There are scenes in Ghost Protocol shot on IMAX (we should know more this week) and there are many scenes in The Dark Knight Rises shot on IMAX too, so we can expect this prologue to be another IMAX opener. I can’t wait to see it and I almost don’t want to know anything about it until seeing it for the first time later this year – but I’m very excited knowing it’s coming!

Marvel Studios announced today that the trailer for next summer’s most highly anticipated movie, Marvel’s The Avengers, has been downloaded over 10 million times in its first 24 hours on iTunes Movie Trailers (Apple.com/Trailers), shattering the most-viewed trailer record in the site’s history.

The trailer, which debuted Tuesday, October 11, exclusively on iTunes Movie Trailers, gives fans a sneak peak at Marvel’s The Avengers – the Super Hero team up of a lifetime-based on the ever-popular Marvel comic book series The Avengers, first published in 1963 and a comics institution ever since.

USA Today reports that a 3D Trailer for the re-release of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace be attached to The Three Musketeers, beginning October 21st.

The entire series is returning to theaters, in 3-Dimensions starting with Episode I on February 10, 2012.

photo courtesy of G4TV

Amidst the massive update release from Apple today (iOS 5, iCloud, Lion update, etc), Apple snuck a new movie trailer app right on by us and into the iTunes App Store. It’s not your normal movie trailer application. iTunes Movie Trailers not only lets you view trailers, but it also lets you view movie posters, check local listings, and see what movies are being released in the future.

Think Apple’s trailer webpage, but streamlined for the iPad and iPhone, and a lot more intuitive, just like the iOS experience is expected to be these days. Like the webpage, iTunes Movie Trailers lists a synopsis, genre, director, and cast information, as one would expect. The application also lists similar titles and related videos that are currently available on iTunes. Apple also built in Rotten Tomatoes scores and reviews right into the application so you can see what’s a hit and what’s a miss.

You can get the application in the iTunes App Store.

After seeing a pseudo teaser trailer in the form of a high school reunion photobooth slideshow featuring the cast of American Reunion, the fourth (theatrically released) installment in the American Pie franchise, we now have some official photos from the film itself featuring the likes of Jason Biggs, Alyson Hannigan, Seann William Scott, Eugene Levy and even Jennifer Coolidge as Stifler’s Mom. In addition to the new photos below, tomorrow the first R-rated trailer will be hitting the web, and Levy says, “”It’s simple and brilliant. It brings everyone out of the world today and back to where they were before.”

[see photos over at FirstShowing.net]