COMPETITION: Life on Blu-ray

Life is a pretty neat thing sometimes, and we are here to make yours a little bit better by giving you a chance to win a Life of your very own. We can’t help you score or win the lottery, but thanks to Roadshow Entertainment/ABC DVD and DVD Bits we can give you some Blu-rays. We have the entire series of the spectacular Life, narrated by David Attenborough, to give away on Blu-ray!

Discover the glorious variety of life on Earth and the spectacular and extraordinary tactics animals and plants have developed to stay alive. Packed with excitement, revelation and entertainment – and stunning screen firsts – this breathtaking ten-part blockbuster brings you 130 incredible stories from the frontiers of the natural world. Four years in the making, filmed over 3,000 days, across every continent and in every habitat, this is Life – as you’ve never seen it before.

To win this great prize, valued at AU $89.95 RRP each, all you have to do email us and let us know the name of the legendary narrator of this series. (Hint: The answer is in this post).

Important: You must answer all the questions to be eligible. To ensure people do not have an unfair advantage by entering multiple times, only 1 entry per person will be accepted. Every entry is looked at and if duplicate/suspicious entries are found you will automatically be disqualified. This competition is only open to residents of Australia. Please note, the Blu-rays are encoded for Region B.

We will be drawing the competition on Friday 29 October 2010, so make sure you get your entry in!

Privacy Note: The DVD Bits takes the privacy of its readers very seriously. Your email address will be not be used for any other purpose other than to enter the competition. Upon completion all email addresses will be deleted. Please do not post your name or details to this blog. Email entries protect your privacy.

Terms & Conditions

1. DVD Bits and Roadshow take no responsibility for any delay, loss or damage to prizes sent to winners.
2. While all attempts are made to supply prizes at the completion of a competition, no responsibility will be held by DVD Bits to supply prizes if for unseen circumstances they are not available.
3. Staff of this site and other DVD websites and their immediate families are not eligible to participate in the competition.
4. No responsibility will be taken for any entries that may have been lost. The judges decision is final and no correspondence will be entered upon.

COMPETITION: More Doctor Who on Blu-ray

Update: We are now giving away Doctor Who – Series 5 Volume 3 AND Volume 4. Those who have already entered don’t need to do anything: you just have a chance of winning more now!

Recently we gave you a chance to pick up a copy of Doctor Who – Series 5: Volume 1, and now thanks to Roadshow Entertainment and DVD Bits we are offering readers a chance to bookend their collection with the final two volumes of that series on Blu-ray!

Doctor Who stars Matt Smith as the Doctor and Karen Gillan as his companion, Amy Pond. Doctor Who – Series 5 Volume 3 sees Amy and Rory living a life of marital bliss (or are they?), and a journey to the centre of the Earth. Doctor Who – Series 5: Volume 4, the final volume of the fifth series of the rebooted Doctor Who is filled with some of the most epic, funny and sweet episodes to date. The final volume kicks off with “Vincent and the Doctor”, in which the duo visits artist Vincent van Gogh. The Doctor sees if he is up to the challenge of share house living with the lads in “The Lodger”. The whole thing comes to a close with the two-part “The Pandorica Opens” and “The Big Bang”.

We are giving away TWO copies of  each of these Blu-rays to our lucky readers. To win one of these great prizes, valued at AU $79.90 RRP per prize pack, all you have to do email us and let us know the name of the actress who plays the Doctor’s companion in this series of Doctor Who? (Hint: The answer is in this post).

Important: You must answer all the questions to be eligible. To ensure people do not have an unfair advantage by entering multiple times, only 1 entry per person will be accepted. Every entry is looked at and if duplicate/suspicious entries are found you will automatically be disqualified. This competition is only open to residents of Australia. Please note, the Blu-rays are encoded for Region B.

We will be drawing the competition on Friday 29 October 2010, so make sure you get your entry in!

Privacy Note: The DVD Bits takes the privacy of its readers very seriously. Your email address will be not be used for any other purpose other than to enter the competition. Upon completion all email addresses will be deleted. Please do not post your name or details to this blog. Email entries protect your privacy.

Terms & Conditions

1. DVD Bits and Roadshow take no responsibility for any delay, loss or damage to prizes sent to winners.
2. While all attempts are made to supply prizes at the completion of a competition, no responsibility will be held by DVD Bits to supply prizes if for unseen circumstances they are not available.
3. Staff of this site and other DVD websites and their immediate families are not eligible to participate in the competition.
4. No responsibility will be taken for any entries that may have been lost. The judges decision is final and no correspondence will be entered upon.

Easy A

Overall rating: ★★★½

Judging from the cinematic output of the United States, the national pastime of the school populace is either trying to lose one’s virginity, talking about losing it or having lost it. Over the last decade or so, from the smash hits of the American Pie series to just about anything with Michael Cera in it (including the recent and pedestrian Youth in Revolt), screenwriters have been outpouring their tales of putting out. There is certainly nothing new about this wave of cinema, which goes back at least as far as the John Hughes films of the 1980s. However, nothing has really taken an original look at the genre for quite some time. Easy A may just break that track record.

Olive (Emma Stone, Zombieland) is a fairly invisible student at her high school. Wanting to spend a quiet weekend alone, Olive lies to her best friend and tells her that she lost her virginity to an older college student. Unfortunately, they are overheard by the pious Christian Marianne (Amanda Bynes, Hairspray), who spreads the word around the corridors faster than an Internet meme. Although somewhat annoyed by the condescending attitude if the god squad, Olive revels in her newfound attention and plays up to it. Her troubles begin when she agrees to pretend to sleep with gay friend Brandon (Dan Byrd) and perhaps stop the bullying at school, but this turns into a cottage industry when others find out what Olive is willing to do for the underdogs. Buying a whole new outrageous wardrobe and embroidering a red ‘A’ on her outfits (as a nod to The Scarlet Letter, which they are reading in class), Olive soon begins to learn what getting a reputation means and how fickle the bonds of friendship can be when they are put to the test.

Easy A breaks from some of the traditions of the high school sex comedy by not really being about an attempt to lose one’s virginity, but rather restoring a reputation lost as a result of allegedly doing so. Instantly recognizing the inherent contradiction in a society that elevates sexually active men as studs, and trashes promiscuous women as ‘sluts’, the schoolyard here is almost a microcosmic proxy for the tabloid media that rewards and punishes the behaviour of people the world over, building and destroying reputations in the process. To borrow a parable from another recent film about reputation, the Academy Award nominated Doubt, rumours are like feathers: once they are released, they are very hard to gather up again. Easy A doesn’t dissect this dichotomy with any great depth, but it recognises the power of misinformation in a globalised world through using the web as a major narrative device and the delivery method of the final message.

Emma Stone is the real gem of the film, and if she is not the breakout star of the year then there is no justice in the world. At the time of writing, Stone has just been offered the role of Mary-Jane Parker in the rebooted Spider-man film due out in 2012. As demonstrated earlier in Zombieland, Stone has a real sense of comic timing that is not often found in folk her age, and she delivers some fantastic dialogue (via writer Bert V. Royal) at a machine gun speed reminiscent of the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, despite the shop-front of the racy topic, the film has a very old-fashioned sensibility to it that gives the movie a sweetness at its core. Some of the characterisation may be a little too simplistic – Olive’s parents (Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson) are too good to be true and her favourite teacher (Thomas Haden Church, Spider-man 3) is someone we all would have liked to have in front of our classes (instead of an embittered former priest) in our day. Worse still, while the film makes a few great jibes at the role of religion in America, the stereotypical portrayal of the bible bashers is not doing it any favours.

Yet these are minor quibbles, with Easy A being an easy film to like. Offering a clever alternative to lame coming of age comedies and even lamer rom coms for big kids, Easy A offers a generally likeable cast of characters and a moral message that is something more to aspire to than simply getting a leg over.

Easy A is released in Australia by Sony Pictures Entertainment.

DVD Bits is athttp://www.dvdbits.com. DVD Bits can also be found on Twitter @DVDBits.

KOFFIA winners announced

We are very pleased to be able to announce the winners of our three giveaways courtesy of KOFFIA, the inaugural Korean Film Festival in Australia. DVD Bits is proud to be a Festival Partner for the newest festival on the Sydney scene.

We have been overwhelmed with the number of entries we received to this competition, and rest assured that if you missed out this time around you will soon have another chance to win big as we launch several new competitions and giveaways over the coming months. In fact, we are announcing a brand new giveaway in the very near future. Enough about that, you want to know who won this one, right?

So without any further ado, the winners are:

• Chan Meng
• Jenny Morgan
• Samson Kwok

Congratulations to you folks, and thank you to everybody who entered. We’d also like to thank KOFFIA for generously providing us with material to give away on our new blog. Look for some new giveaways in the very near future.

DVD Bits can be found on Twitter @DVDBits and of course, DVD Bits.com.

Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D

Based on the series of Japanese video games (where they are known as Biohazard), the film versions of the Resident Evil franchise have taken on a life of their own. The first of these, released back in 2002 and helmed by Paul W.S. Anderson (Alien vs. Predator), was a unique twist on the zombie genre and gave geeks one more reason to drool over supermodel-turned-actress Milla Jovovich (The Fourth Kind). After handing his scripts to the subsequent sequels to directors Alexander Witt and Russell Mulcahy (Give ‘Em Hell, Malone), Anderson has returned from running a Death Race to once more send Alice into battles with hordes of creatures with targets on their foreheads. Perhaps he should have stuck to the scripts.

Picking up immediately after the events of Resident Evil: Extinction, Alice (Milla Jovovich) and her hordes of genetically-enhanced clones invade the high-tech Japanese digs of the wicked Umbrella Corporation. Although largely destroying the facility, Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts) manages to inject her with a serum that neutralises the T-virus that courses through her veins. The now super-powerless Alice is left to wander the Earth searching for Arcadia, a ‘town’ that is broadcasting a message indicating they are free of the infection that has now turned much of the world into the undead. Travelling to Alaska to find Arcadia, Alice is reunited with Claire Redfield (Ali Larter), although she is suffering severe memory loss. Hooking up with a group of survivors in Los Angeles, Alice must now find a way to get to Arcadia and avoid the horde of zombies hungry for flesh. Yet not everything is as it seems…

Resident Evil: Afterlife is a shambolic mess. It is definitely a case of style over substance, except even the style feels like it has been chewed over several times by the undead. Using the same 3D Fusion Camera system developed by James Cameron (Avatar), this is one of the prime examples of why 3D should never be seen in a major motion picture ever again. Despite the largest budget of a Resident Evil film to date, many of the effects look cheap and obvious through the 3D goggles affixed to our collective noggins. It is a shame, then, that the film largely relies on these and slick action sequences to prop up the film’s slender plot. Indeed, the film seems content to meander from scene to scene, throwing unnecessary items like cohesion out for the sake of slick set-piece sequences involving guns. Lots of of guns. Indeed, at one point Alice seems to be randomly back in possession of her abilities again, despite being as weak as a kitten shortly after losing them.

Actually, for a zombie film, Resident Evil: Afterlife is surprisingly light on the undead. There are plenty of them to be seen outside the building, and there is a giant hulk of a creature with a potato sack on its head, but the old-fashioned shuffling flesh-biters don’t get much to sink their teeth into. Yet the worst crime of Resident Evil: Afterlife is that it leaves us no further along Alice’s arc than we were at the start of the film. Without spoiling the ending, there is an obvious set-up for the inevitable sequel (that has been confirmed within the last few weeks). This is lazy filmmaking, and only the most die-hard of Resident Evil fans (which I would have considered myself up until this point) will be looking forward to the afterlife of this franchise.

Resident Evil: Afterlife will be released by Sony Pictures Australia on 14 October 2010.

DVD Bits can be found on Twitter @DVDBits and of course, DVD Bits.com.

COMPETITION: KOFFIA tickets

DVD Bits is proud to be a festival partner of KOFFIA, the first Korean Film Festival in Australia. Thanks to the good folks at KOFFIA, we have some double-passes to give away to THREE of our lucky readers.

Hosted by the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea, KOFFIA will mark the arrival of the Korean wave on Australian shores. After years without an outlet on the Australian circuit, Korean film is finally here and KOFFIA invites you to experience it.

Featuring some of the best Korean films from the last couple of years, KOFFIA will truly be a festival for everyone. From Drama to Comedy, Action to Romance, K-POP to Ssireum, KOFFIA is the perfect meal for anybody ‘Hungry for Drama’.

KOFFIA will take place at Dendy Opera Quays from October 1st-5th, 2010. 5 days of fun and festivities are planned in an aim to entertain and inform about Korean culture.

It’s less than three weeks till the launch of the festival so start planning your October long weekend! Come on down to KOFFIA and say Annyeong (Hello!) to Korean culture.

The festival kicks off with Bong Joon-ho’s Mother with a panel discussion and closes with the unique Lee Hae-jun’s Castaway on the Moon, which will also feature a Q & A with the director. Other films include Rough Cut, the recommended Secret Sunshine, Old Partner, 200 Pounds of Beauty, the classic Housemaid and the quirky Like a Virgin.

To win one of three double passes all you have to do email us and let us know what is the name of one of the films screening at KOFFIA 2010? (Hint: The answer is in this post).

Important: You must answer all the questions to be eligible. To ensure people do not have an unfair advantage by entering multiple times, only 1 entry per person will be accepted. Every entry is looked at and if duplicate/suspicious entries are found you will automatically be disqualified. This competition is only open to residents of Australia. Please note, the the festival is being held in Sydney and winners will have to make their own way to the screenings.

We will be drawing the competition on Monday 27 September 2010, so make sure you get your entry in! THIS COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED. THANK YOU FOR ENTERING!

Privacy Note: The DVD Bits takes the privacy of its readers very seriously. Your email address will be not be used for any other purpose other than to enter the competition. Upon completion all email addresses will be deleted.

Terms & Conditions

1. DVD Bits and KOFFIA take no responsibility for any delay, loss or damage to prizes sent to winners.
2. While all attempts are made to supply prizes at the completion of a competition, no responsibility will be held by DVD Bits to supply prizes if for unseen circumstances they are not available.
3. Staff of this site and other DVD/film websites and their immediate families are not eligible to participate in the competition.
4. No responsibility will be taken for any entries that may have been lost. The judges decision is final and no correspondence will be entered upon.
5. The double is able to be used for any film during the festival with the exception of the Opening and Closing night events (i.e. Mother and Castaway on the Moon).

DVD Bits can be found on Twitter @DVDBits and of course, DVD Bits.com.