Notes
Film buffs may remember the tangled tale of competing Robin Hood projects in 1991. Kevin Costner, riding high from his Oscar wins for Dances with Wolves, had his pick of projects at the time, and he juggled his interest in parallel Hood films that were under development at different studios. Costner chose Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, of course, directed by his friend Kevin Reynolds, while the other production (the one described here), attached to veteran British director John Irvin (The Dogs of War), ended up on cable television with another Yank, Patrick Bergin, in the lead. Comparisons were inevitable, even though the two films were very different from one another. A little harder edged and more surprising than Reynolds's work, the Irvin-Bergin movie made all that medieval heroism seem more an effort of the heart than previous versions. Roughing things up a bit is Uma Thurman as a bratty Maid Marion, not quite the traditional damsel in distress of yesteryear. Irvin keeps the adventure quotient up, but this is simply a darker, grittier variation on the old tale. With Jürgen Prochnow, Jeroen Krabbé, and Conrad Asquith. --Tom Keogh
Entertainment
The entertainment industry has grown and evolved over the years with music and cinema taking a new form through the ages and so have the technologies that fuel it. Gone are the days of eight songs on a cassette and VCR players with merely two hours of entertainment recorded on a single video cassette. With the advent of computers came digital data storage and hence the birth of DVD/CDs.
Quiet a step back in matters of physical form as these new generation audio/video storage devices hold an uncanny resemblance to the records that preceded the cassette generation. DVDs and CDs today are an everyday household entertainment storage device which has come a long way since the first records and cassettes were distributed commercially.
Notable advantages of DVD/CDs have to begin with the amount of storage space available. These days its possible to burn multiple movies on a single DVD and as far as audio goes if its in a highly compressed format such as .mp3 a single CD can accommodate multiple music albums. These discs are easy to handle, light and portable with no moving devices unlike the tape generation however they are delicate and a scratch on the DVD/CD surface could cause a disruption in the information being read by the player.
DVD/CDs were initially invented to provide high quality audio/video data to a user with the ability to regulate its production however this soon fizzled away with daily household computers gaining the ability to burn data in such formats. The race to curb piracy through such means has not hit a roadblock and DVD/CDs keep evolving with newer encryption technologies in a bid to curb unchecked replication of data spawning newer technologies like Blu-ray discs which seems to be yet another milestone on an unending road of innovation.
