Rock and... Walmart

If you walked into any local Walmart lately, you saw the massive amount of AC/DC merch floating around

On October 20th, Wal-Mart opened a temporary 3,000-square-foot store on Hollywood Boulevard devoted entirely to AC/DC's new album, Black Ice. Like the Eagles successfully did a year ago, AC/DC are selling their record exclusively through Wal-Mart's 3,500 stores, tapping into the chain's marketing might and 200 million annual customers at a time when CD sales dropped 36 percent between 2000 and 2007, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan.


The deal is paying off! Black Ice was on track to sell more than 900,000 copies in its first week at press time, making it the year's second-biggest debut. And Wal-Mart — the nation's number-two music retailer, behind iTunes — has reportedly ordered 2.5 million copies of the record.


Other superstars are making similar deals: Best Buy will release Guns n' Roses' Chinese Democracy on November 23rd and the Police's Certifiable box set on November 11th. (David Gilmour's Live in Gdansk and Elton John's The Red Piano box sets hit shelves earlier in the season.) And Christina Aguilera's Keeps Gettin' Better hits package will come out at Target on November 11th. "You're talking about retailers that can come up with millions of advertising dollars," says Tom Corson, general manager of Aguilera's label, the RCA Music Group. "That can be attractive if you have the right brand and the right artist."

Wal-Mart has special rooms for the band in its stores, selling $11.88 Black Ice CDs — plus the group's catalog, merchandise and an AC/DC version of Rock Band. And in addition to opening temporary AC/DC stores in L.A. and New York's Times Square, Wal-Mart sent black AC/DC ice cream trucks into those cities to hype the disc.

"If you are not going to be a digital band [AC/DC don't allow their music to be sold as downloads], then it behooves you to explore opportunities for an alliance with someone who is powerful in the physical world," says Steve Barnett, co-chairman of the band's label, Columbia Records.

Have some Tissues Ready

"The Boy in the Striped Pajamas", a novel written by Ireland native, John Boyne, has finally been made into a movie. Directed by Mark Herman and produced by David Heyman, this heartfelt film stars Asa Butterfield, David Thewlis and Vera Farmiga... and the music is by James Horner (who also did the soundtrack for Titanic), so you know its going to be good.

The movie tells the strory of an eight year-old boy named Bruno, the sheltered son of a Nazi officer whose promotion takes the family from their nice and comfortable home in Berlin to a pretty much deserted area where the lonely boy finds nothing to do and no one else to play with. Boredom and compelles him to curiosity. He ignores his mothers instructions not to explore the back garden and heads for the backyard anyway. He finds a "farm"(which is really Auschwitz) and sits outside of the fence. There he meets Shmuel, a boy his own age who lives a behind the barbed wire fence. Bruno's encounter with the boy in the striped pajamas leads him from innocence to an awareness of the adult world.

The author commented that he chose to tell the story through the eight year old boy in oder to take own a unique perspective full of innocence and how easily it can be shattered.

The film was shot in Budapest between April and June 2007 and was released on September 12, 2008 in Ireland and the UK, on September 17, 2008 in China and Japan, on October 3, 2008 in Finland and on November 7, 2008 in USA.

You can go see this movie at your Local Ritz Theatre