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Top five Kate Winslet films

In honour of her two Golden Globe wins, we decided to honour the English Rose with a round up of her top five films.

5. Titanic

Contentious, I know. But it was schmaltzy, unrealistic and I didn’t really like the end. If Rose wasn’t such a selfish cow she would have edged over a bit and let Jack share her plank of wood he wouldn’t have sunk to the icy depths. However you can argue with the 11 academy awards and its place as the highest grossing film of all time making $1.8billion.

4. Iris

Winslet played the role of Iris Murdoch the headstrong young Oxford undergraduate and her relationship with John Bayley. In this radiant performance, Winslet captures all the vibrancy and joie de vivre of the gifted young author.

3. Heavenly Creatures

Based on a true story, Beautiful Creatures depicts an intense female friendship that leads the pair of New Zealnd school girls into a world of fantasy and murder. Winslet perfectly captures the spirit of the haughty upper class Kiwi girl in a believable and sympathetic performance.

2. The Reader

The Reader is based on Bernard Schlink’s novel from a couple of years ago. Winslet plays a former Nazi prison camp guard, Hanna Schmitz who embarks on an affair with a 15 year old Michael Berg. Berg is reunited with Hanna ten year later as she is tried in a war crimes trial. In a complex performance, Winslet is able to envoke the culpability and the moral ambiguity of a post war nation.

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

This fast paces, surreal film is almost too confusing to describe. The film is chronicles the relationship between Winset’s Clementine Kruczynski and Jim Carey’s Joel Barish from their first meeting to bitter break up. The novel narrative frames the events through the mind of Carey as his memories of the relationship are erased by a specialist company set up to help people get rid of painful memories. Winslet plays a sparky, multi-coloured hair woman who speaks her mind and isn’t afraid of any one. The chemistry between the characters is believable and this is mainly down to Winslet’s performance. She creates a thoroughly believable, ultimately flawed and extremely attractive character in Clementine.

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Blu-ray sales will triple this year

In the face of the credit crunch and rock-bottom DVD prices, manufacturers are hoping that Blu-ray technology will finally catch on this Christmas. The adoption of Blu-ray has so far been quite sluggish, but many industry insiders predict that Blu-ray’s fortunes will turn around this Yuletide.

Although the Blu-ray format has been around since 2006, it has yet to capture the public’s imagination. It is resilient however, and beat Toshiba’s rivalling HD DVD into submission to become the surviving High Definition format.

Blu-ray’s mastery of the HD market mirrors the supremacy of VHS over Betamax a couple of generations earlier. VHS was helped to establish itself as the main video format because it was adopted by the porn industry; if any one wanted to watch porn at home (dirty devils) they had to buy a VHS player.

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Hancock released on DVD

Everyone loves WIll Smith, don’t they? He could be caught on camera kicking a puppy or stealing sweets from a baby and people would still love him. It is his exceptional likeability that makes him such a high-rollin’ star that and choosing really interesting and diverse films to star in. He starred in vampire apocalypse film I am Legend and Hancock a comedy about an ineffectual super hero within a year of each other. Both film are worlds apart yet Smith is excellent in both of them.

Now you can own Hancock, the heart-warming tale of the rehabilitation of John Hancock, LA’s most hated superhero. Although Hancock keeps trying to save the city he always ends up making things worse through his reckless behaviour and destructive tendencies. Although he might catch the bad guy or stop the major disaster, in the process he manages to cause millions of dollars of damage. After Hancock saves the life of PR man Ray Embrey played by Jason Bateman, Hancock’s fortunes begin to change, as Embrey decides to change the public’s opinion of this troubled hero.

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DVD boxsets

We all know the feeling. It’s 12 you have to go work the next day and you’ve just been watching a box set of your favourite TV show. You could go to bed or you could watch just one more episode. What do you do? You watch it of course. In fact you keep watching it until you can barely stay awake. You watch so many that when  you close your eyes you hear the theme tune endlessly looping round your skull and your dreams revolve round the central characters.

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WALL-E released today

Buy Wall-E today at Play.com and get a free slinky. Pixar’s latest animated comedy follows the adventures of WALL-E whose mission is to clean up an earth completely covered in trash. You can buy a copy of WALL-E on Blu-ray here.

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Kung Fu Panda is now available

Dsa1358It’s been tough for everyone but the wait is now over as Kung Fu Panda has now been released. Now you can enjoy Jack Black’s Panda based Kung Fu animated film comedy in the leisure of your own home. Phew, there were a lot of adjectives in that sentence. And relax.

Amazon’s got it cheaper beating Play.com by a penny. £9.99 vs £9.98. HMV’s being tardy and hasn’t yet released it on their site.

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