The true cost of free iPods – Engadget
Boing Boing: Lucas put malicious Xbox trojan on Star Wars DVD
Star Wars DVD Grosses $115MGoogle Search: star wars holiday special
[not only do i remember the fam rushing home so my brother and i could watch this over 25 years ago, i have always rather vividly remembered a couple moments from it (like the stormtroopers searching the wookie kid’s room), and the images at these sites were so familiar i found myself saying “oh yeah, i forgot about that part”… yet i have trouble remembering my own phone number…]A visual history of spam (and virus) email
The Spam WeblogBoing Boing: Fave music site: Oddio Overplay
Play the PlayStation Portable — in Japan – Engadget
[um, yeah, i’d probably like to play with that… btw, best pics of the PSP i’ve seen yet…]Guardian Unlimited Film | Features | Ruined by R ratings
[something of a history of not-safe-for-network-tv language in movies being dubbed for broadcast…]NetRatings: Broadband users a majority in U.S.
[i somehow missed this news until now…]Cities Collection [via RefDesk’s SotD]
This NASA site offers outstanding astronaut photography of cities taken during space-flight.craigslist – Gorgeous 2br Penthouse on Las Vegas Strip [sigh]
Tag: films/movies
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links – couple of star wars dvd bits, a few various
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star wars dvd notes
nothing in-depth, just going to c/p the notes i took of what we saw as we watched the three movies…
this is just about the dvd/transfer quality, not about any changes to the movies (there are countless sites for that)… nor comparisons to the laserdiscs or “did they fix [insert notorious problem] yet?” stuff (short version is sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t, again, there are many sites out there that cover that issue)…
if you want a full review, google it, there are plenty out there…
anyway, here is what i saw…
star wars
colors are very oversaturated- at times it is so bad, it reminds me of the old tnt colorized movies
things change colors in the frame sometimes- see c3po in the first desert scenes and the rocks in the background when the tusken raider jumps onto the bantha
and is that really bad edge enhancement where the dunes meet the sky as the camera pans early in the first desert scenes?
audio does REALLY funny/awful things- mainly dialogue, starts with leia before tarkin
empire strikes back
looks very good, hella better than star wars- but, the colors are also a little oversaturated on this one
return of the jedi
looks largely untouched, replete with matte lines, bad colors in some matted shots- in fact, MOST of the matte shots look really bad
again, a bit oversaturated colors
the image is not as sharp and clear as the other two- even grainy at times
probably the worst looking of the three
the empire strikes back is the clear winner here… it looked and sounded pretty much excellent…
the first movie had the really bad color issues and the sound was downright horrible in spots and return of the jedi had so many unfixed terrible-looking matte jobs that it was quite distracting…btw, that sound issue on the first film is widely reported and seems totally inexcusable, i would have to pop in a laserdisc and see if it sounded that bad before… but, i sure don’t remember it sounding like that, yet i DO remember where a couple audio problems have always been, such as “into the garbage shoot fly boy!”, which still sounds just as bad as it always has… so, i feel pretty safe trusting my memory on this one, star wars has never sounded so bad…
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links – The Holy Trilogy on dvd, two more 9/11 links, and a few various
these links came from an AGSF (?) thread titled “Star Wars DVD LG did not do a good job on remaster thing sound”…
ours have been pre-ordered for quite some time, just waiting for launch day, with a gift certificate given to us for just this set, so, george technically got none of our money…
besides, we still treasure our near-mint Star Wars Trilogy Definitive Collection LaserDisc Box Set of the original theatrical cuts of the films, and even have the Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition LaserDisc Box Set, the now intermediary 1997 versions, also not available on dvd (even though, with all the dumb stuff added in ANH and the dumb stuff already there in ROJ, only ESB is worth watching, but, VERY worth it)…anyway, on to the links…
Digital Bits DVD Review – The Star Wars Trilogy
May The Force Be With You – Star Wars Trilogy DVD Media Day [plus a forum thread]
IGN – DVD: Star Wars Trilogy
dvdforum.nu – dvd, film & hemmabio [Region 2]and just some other things i came across today…
American RadioWorks – Witnesses to Terror [RealAudio format]
Poynter.org – Covering the AttackEngadget – The Search Engine Belt Buckle
Terra Nova: Ye Olde Disciplinary Punch-and-Judy Show [reported on boingboing.net as “Narrologists versus Ludologists: battle of the games-academics“]
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a few various links
DTS Online – Consumer – Home Theatre – DVD Title Search
Chicago Sun-Times – Roger Ebert – Movie Answer Man
Museum of Hoaxes – Time Travel Spam
Wired News: Turn Back the Spam of TimeAchaea – Dreams of Divine Lands
IRC Roleplaying – Dungeons and Dragons Games Looking for PlayersThe Morning News – Tricks of the Trade
SpamTown :: Current Spam-Blocking News And Information
Welcome to Spam Town. We don’t make spam, we learn to live with it.i may do this more often…
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sexiest sci-fi babe ever?
great debate going on over in a fark thread about it, with plenty of evidentiary pics 🙂…
(needless to say, being fark, and being fark’ers discussing women, the discussion gets a little raw at times, you were warned…)the article the thread is about strangely declares jane fonda’s barbarella the honor…
personally, my first choice would have to be milla jovovich as leeloo in the fifth element…
also on my list would definitely be zev (and xev) from lexx and padme, the star wars inamorata for this generation…
and, not that i have exactly sat and watched an episode of the show all the way through, but, as an honorable mention, gabriella from xena is cute…
and, though a video game, not only is space channel 5 unquestionably sci-fi (imdb agrees), ulala is unquestionably a sci-fi babe…/haven’t seen nicole kidman in anything sci-fi yet
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movie-related amusements
i have been meaning to post these for quite awhile… will probably add them to the side bar at some point…
first, there is Invisibles…
fun little thing where a frame from a movie is shown with the actors in the frame removed, but with their clothes still standing, ala the invisible man… name the movie…
new group of them every week…
a nice mix of really easy and really tough…then there is movie trivia on funtrivia.com…
fun site, user-made trivia quizzes, a huge range of topics and specific movies, and it keeps score of how you do to rank yourself with other players… (nothing to download, btw…)
funtrivia.com has a lot more than movie trivia, but, i have yet to try anything else out, too many good movie quizzes…
i am playing as “i_plots” and i cannot figure out a way to link to my stats page, but, it says:You have played 74
quizzes and have scored 7470
points.Your score ranks you as # 43,083 of
300,000+
playersYou have answered 747 of 940 questions
correctly.
Your accuracy is therefore 79%You are a Trivia Rookie
Renton: Well, he’s always been lacking in moral fiber.
Swanney: He knows a lot about Sean Connery.
Renton: That’s hardly a substitute!/trainspotting
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When DVD Spells B-A-D
When DVD Spells B-A-D
Some Great Films Suffer in Transition To New Format
November 12, 2003
By FRED KAPLAN
The New York Timesa great article about things that drive us nuts about the dvd industry/format and why we are not giving up on our laserdisc collection any time soon…
for instance, here he adresses a great example of some of the issues at the very heart of the matter…
Digital technology seems, on the face of it, a preposterously inadequate medium for storing movies, and we should gape in wonder that DVDs yield coherent pictures at all, much less the gloriously sharp, detailed images they churn out under the best of conditions. Consider: A DVD stores only 17 gigabytes of data. A two-hour film, transferred to digital data and otherwise untreated, would take up more than 150 gigabytes.
So the data must first be massively compressed, mainly by digitally sampling a frame, then sampling only the information that changes in subsequent frames.
This is no big deal for a scene of someone standing still against a blank wall. But it’s a major challenge for a scene of someone running through traffic surrounded by dozens of flashing lights and moving objects.while ld video definitely has its own issues, it is NOT compressed and cav laserdiscs even store actual individual frames of film, something no other format does even today…
If a film is old and damaged, the compression machine will “read” random dirt and scratches in the same way it reads motion. If the machine’s operator doesn’t pay attention and make adjustments, or if the machine is subpar, the digitized image will be full of waves, zigzags and other distracting distortions.
Similar problems can plague color or, if it’s a black-and-white film, the gradations of gray. When transferring film from a negative to a print, someone has to practice the fine art of “color timing.” The same thing has to be done, though electronically, when transferring it to DVD. The job can be done well or it can be done badly.
“The main reason a lot of DVDs are so bad,” says Robert A. Harris, president of the Film Preserve, one of the top film-restoring companies, “is that the people making them don’t know what they’re doing and don’t care what they’re doing.”well, why should they care??? they are going to price these things to sell to any shlub, so, they will not bother… dvd regularly cheaps out, while makers of ld knew they could not sell them at the prices they were asking unless they threw in GOOD extras… Boogie Nights is a great example… criterion paid for the john holmes documentary the film was based on, but when the dvd came around, new line was not willing to pay for it… the dvd was around $30, the ld was nearly $100… but, you get what you pay for… and, right now, many ld collectors are selling off their discs at insane prices, therefore, now is a great time to buy…
Doing a DVD right takes time and money. A good Telecine machine, which transfers film to an image suited for television, costs about $2 million. Use of an outside lab’s Telecine facilities can cost up to $1,000 an hour.
The Criterion Collection, which produces some of the finest DVDs of classic films, routinely takes months to make a digital transfer. Lee Klein, Criterion’s chief technician, says: “If there’s a scratch, we draw it out frame by frame. When there’s 12 pieces of debris on each frame, it takes a long time.”
Most studios don’t bother.
Some simply take the master that was made for laser disc, or even for VHS videotape, and transfer it to DVD. This was an especially common practice in the infancy of DVD, four to six years ago.and he gives a few good examples in the article of lousy dvd’s, showing the widespread apathy of dvd makers… their attitude is getting better, so, i hope by the time hd-dvd is the standard, they will have learned and can offer a consistently worthy product…
i am NOT saying that laserdisc is necesarily better in every way to dvd, my point is that laserdisc is still a viable format today, for those willing to pay, and should not have been discontinued so early (the last u.s. laserdisc release was in 2000)… many ld collectors out there are already regretting selling off their collection when they are left with substandard dvd’s, or even no dvd release available, such as the theatrical cuts of close encounters and star wars… and those two are great examples because there will NEVER be a dvd release of them…
laserdisc is a format for the serious film lover, dvd is the next vhs, the format for the masses…
what hd-dvd will be remains to be seen… -
our CE3K collection is complete!
today, we finally got our Close Encounters of the Third Kind – Collector’s Edition LaserDisc Box Set!
it is a gorgeous set, great high-res cover, three discs, the film on three sides, and three sides of extras… in fact, the documentary runs 140 minutes and the movie is just 137… this is the laserdisc upon which the Collector’s Edition DVD is based, (which we also have, of course) and so far as we can tell, it has almost all of the extras that appear on the dvd…
got it off of ebay for just over $20 and it is in excellent condition…this was the last ce3k item we wanted, we already had the dvd, the CAV Criterion set, the CLV Criterion set, and a couple releases of the inferior “Special Edition” version of the film… and, we also have the collector’s edition versions of the theatrical one-sheet poster and soundtrack cd, both released at the same time as the laserdisc set…
so, this set fills a gaping hole in our collection…
we will watch it tonight or tomorrow, but, we popped on side three (which is cav) and it looks fantastic, you can tell it is the same transfer used for the dvd… released in ’98, dolby digital 5.1, thx-certified, surely this is going to be on our list of the best looking laserdiscs ever made…
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opening Kubrick’s boxes
Stanley Kubrick’s films were landmark events – majestic, memorable and richly researched. But, as the years went by, the time between films grew longer and longer, and less and less was seen of the director. What on earth was he doing? Two years after his death, Jon Ronson was invited to the Kubrick estate and let loose among the fabled archive. He was looking for a solution to the mystery – this is what he found
and here are some excerpts giving you a hint of the weirdness within…
starting with a bit of background…
nine years had passed since Kubrick’s last film, Full Metal Jacket. All anyone outside his circle knew about him was that he was living in a vast country house somewhere near St Albans – or a “secret lair”, according to a Sunday Times article of that year – behaving presumably like some kind of mad hermit genius. Nobody even knew what he looked like. It had been 16 years since a photograph of him had been published.
He’d gone from making a film a year in the 1950s (including the brilliant, horrific Paths Of Glory), to a film every couple of years in the 1960s (Lolita, Dr Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey all came out within a six-year period), to two films a decade in the 1970s and 1980s (there had been a seven-year gap between The Shining and Full Metal Jacket), and now, in the 1990s, absolutely nothing. What the hell was he doing in there? According to rumours, he was passing his time being terrified of germs and refusing to let his chauffeur drive over 30mph.and…
“The good news,” wrote Nicholas Wapshott in the Times in 1997, bemoaning the ever-lengthening gaps between his films, “is that Kubrick is a hoarder … There is an extensive archive of material at his home in Childwick Bury. When that is eventually opened, we may get close to understanding the tangled brain which brought to life HAL, the Droogs and Jack Torrance.”
and then, inside kubrick’s world…
There are boxes everywhere – shelves of boxes in the stable block, rooms full of boxes in the main house. In the fields, where racehorses once stood and grazed, are half a dozen portable cabins, each packed with boxes. These are the boxes that contain the legendary Kubrick archive.
Tony takes me into a large room painted blue and filled with books. “This used to be the cinema,” he says.
“Is it the library now?” I ask.
“Look closer at the books,” says Tony.
I do. “Bloody hell,” I say. “Every book in this room is about Napoleon!”
“Look in the drawers,” says Tony.
I do.
“It’s all about Napoleon, too!” I say. “Everything in here is about Napoleon!”“Somewhere else in this house,” Tony says, “is a cabinet full of 25,000 library cards, three inches by five inches. If you want to know what Napoleon, or Josephine, or anyone within Napoleon’s inner circle was doing on the afternoon of July 23 17-whatever, you go to that card and it’ll tell you.”
“Who made up the cards?” I ask.
“Stanley,” says Tony. “With some assistants.”
“How long did it take?” I ask.
“Years,” says Tony. “The late 1960s.”
In one portable cabin, for example, there are hundreds and hundreds of boxes related to Eyes Wide Shut, marked EWS – Portman Square, EWS – Kensington & Chelsea, etc, etc. I choose the one marked EWS – Islington because that’s where I live. Inside are hundreds of photographs of doorways. The doorway of my local video shop, Century Video, is here, as is the doorway of my dry cleaner’s, Spots Suede Services on Upper Street. Then, as I continue to flick through the photographs, I find, to my astonishment, pictures of the doorways of the houses in my own street. Handwritten at the top of these photographs are the words, “Hooker doorway?”
“Huh,” I think. So somebody within the Kubrick organisation (it was, in fact, his nephew) once walked up my street, on Kubrick’s orders, hoping to find a suitable doorway for a hooker in Eyes Wide Shut. It is both an extremely interesting find and a bit of a kick in the teeth.
It is not, though, as incredible a coincidence as it may at first seem. Judging by the writing on the boxes, probably just about every doorway in London has been captured and placed inside this cabin.
The fan letters are perfectly preserved. They are not in the least bit dusty or crushed. The system used to file them is, in fact, extraordinary. Each fan box contains perhaps 50 orange folders. Each folder has the name of a town or city typed on the front – Agincourt, Ontario; Alhambra, California; Cincinnati, Ohio; Daly City, California, and so on – and they are in alphabetical order inside the boxes. And inside each folder are all the fan letters that came from that particular place in any one year. Kubrick has handwritten “F-P” on the positive ones and “F-N” on the negative ones. The crazy ones have been marked “F-C”.
“Stanley loved typefaces.” Jan pauses. “I tell you what else he loved.”
“What?” I ask.
“Stationery,” says Jan.
I glance over at the boxes full of letters from people who felt about Kubrick the way Kubrick felt about stationery, and then back to Jan. “His great hobby was stationery,” he says. “One time a package arrived with 100 bottles of brown ink. I said to Stanley, ‘What are you going to do with all that ink?’ He said, ‘I was told they were going to discontinue the line, so I bought all the remaining bottles in existence.’ Stanley had a tremendous amount of ink.” Jan pauses. “He loved stationery, pads, everything like that.”
I suppose that the closer you get to an enigma, the more explicable it becomes. Even the somewhat crazy-seeming stuff, like the filing of the fan letters by the town from which they came, begins to make sense after a while.
It turns out that Kubrick ordered this filing in case he ever wanted to have a local cinema checked out. If 2001, say, was being screened in Daly City, California, at a cinema unknown to Kubrick, he would get Tony or one of his secretaries to telephone a fan from that town to ask them to visit the cinema to ensure that, say, the screen wasn’t ripped. -
horror night
seems every time we meet someone that actually has a real interest in movies, it is always horror… usually cheap, sleazy, b-grade horror… we try to be open-minded and go with the idea that maybe there is just something we don’t know and perhaps it is simply a matter of broadening our horizons, so, we decided to try a couple of horror classics to see what might be there that we never saw in horror before…
so, we have the criterion laserdisc of halloween and a standard laser release of the omen and we watched them both the other night…
first up was halloween, the film credited with starting the “slasher” genre…
and, it was not long until we were wishing it would hurry up and end…
of course, after starman, the thing, escape from new york, and now this, i think we are ready to really and truly give up on john carpenter…the only good thing i have to say about it is that the music was very good…
one interesting device i noticed was that, as the movie built up to the climax, it seemed to me that the director was intentionally using a lot of shots to show the time of day… no indoor shots without plenty of windows and most shots prominently showed the placement of the sun, like a ticking countdown to nightfall… in fact, at one point, it is suddenly and abruptly night, which gave me a feeling of “it’s night already!? they’re out of time!”…
while this kept me (almost unconsciously) estimating how much time was left, i really could not care less if these people were actually going to survive or not… we were hardly told anything about them, so, they really did not seem like real people, just actors doing what the director told them to…
and, as is always the case, the characters seemed to behave in very unbelievable ways… i know this is a staple of the genre, but, that is one of the things that alienates me from the genre… too much of having to give up reason to follow the story… not that there is usually much of a story… i often hear horror described as a sub-genre of sci-fi, but, to me it seems more a sub-genre of action… any film where you can relate pretty much everything it covers as just “this happened, then that happened, etc.” is an action movie… no concepts to ponder, no characters to get to know better, no reason to care WHY things are happening, most of the time… all of that comes in scarce tidbits, which is why, to be totally coherent, you need a whole series of films… maybe by die hard 3, i might care what happens to john maclaine, maybe by halloween 9 i might know why michael myers killed his sister and all these others…if they were better movies, i might take that journey…
or maybe i will listen to the commentary on halloween and see if john carpenter can reveal to me the subtle intricacies…
then, with a bad taste in our mouths, we took a chance on the omen…
this one was much better, but, there was very little action, just lots of dialogue and concepts… it was more like a mystery to be solved…
now, i must say i thought the dialogue was very weak… it got the point across, but, there was no personality, no cadence, no art… with good dialogue, you can take a line out of context and, if you know the characters, you can usually deduce who said it… and this is true of life as well… the omen is one of countless movies where you could have mixed and matched the dialogue between characters… the characters were definitely not defined by how they said what they said, they were just telling us what we needed to know to advance the plot… in a movie filled with dialogue, you need more personalized speech to really carry it, or at least to keep it interesting… (cf. david mamet, btw…)
but still, it was a good movie… pacing was good, i was never really bored, the material was great, and the music was superb, even though it was mono… the actors were varied; the kid was great (not that it was a demanding part), the various clergy were good, and the nannies were great, but, too many other parts seemed totally interchangable…we liked it… it does not go on “the shelf”, but, i will definitely watch it again sometime to look for other nuances… i just don’t expect much from donner in that area…
i just have a hard time calling it “horror”… it was more of a mystery, as i said above… yes, there were horrific IDEAS, but, again, that makes it a movie of IDEAS, not actions…
as far as “horror” goes, we have only really seen a few and disliked most of them… (btw, remember, we pretty much only count what we have seen since we started into the world of dvd and home theater, since we now “see” movies differently than we used to… i have seen literally thousands of movies, but, i know a lot more about movies now and feel i need to give them all another chance…)
i will briefly touch on a few and try to avoid sci-fi horror, like alien, forbidden planet, or event horizon, just to try to prove we are capable of contemplating another genre…we have seen a nightmare on elm street and wes craven’s new nightmare and only new nightmare was any good to us… i guess because it was likeable even if you scoffed at the genre… hell, it scoffed with you… but, even new nightmare is in “the pile”, not on “the shelf”… it was good once, may be again, but, we are not in any hurry… the next viewing would probably be for the commentary…
poltergeist IS on the shelf… now that is one creepy film… the chair-stacking scene chills me every time… in fact, there is so much good about that movie, i will not even get started lest i go three paragraphs…
then, there is that “m. night” dude or whatever… we have seen both signs and sixth sense and disliked both of them… and there was very little that we found disturbing, creepy, and very very little that was anything like scary… sure, a few disturbing concepts, no action movies here, but, still, they are old concepts and the films really brought very little, if anything, to the genre that we had not seen before…
and, btw, we generally despise surprise endings… in fight club, it explained a lot, in sixth sense, it seemed just a gimmick… (iow, with the former, you want to watch it again more to understand the symptoms better now that you know the cause, in the latter you want to watch again to see if the film is internally consistent with the ending…)
[must’ve re-written the last two sentences twenty times to ensure it was spoiler free :P]now, one horror movie we really liked was the others (and, no, not because it had our beloved nicole in it, though that doesn’t hurt it any)…
that was one SCARY frickin’ movie!
i mean, it was disturbing!
and, one of the best uses of surround that we have ever heard…
we were jumping, cringing, hoping that what we knew must happen next would not happen; i think the others, so far, is the only movie to actually put a fright in us…
it was just plain well-directed… the kids, the rules of the house, the cinematography, including the overall look, the time setting, it just starts pulling you in to an alternate reality, so, you already have no idea what to expect and it unhinges your mind from the everyday, emptying it, so it can fill it up with what the director chooses, hopefully freeing you from expectations of normality… like misdirection… and the unfamiliarity
means it will be more unpredictable, which means it has the potential to be scarier… and the director did not disappoint, though, admittedly, the first half of the movie is much much better than the second half…
it is a dvd, not a laserdisc, so there is no “shelf vs. pile” issue (all our dvd’s are in one place), but, if there was a choice to be made, it would go on the shelf…so, anyway, next in our horror education will probably be clive barker… we have nice laserdiscs of the serpent and the rainbow, hellraiser, and lord of illusions (or is it the frighteners? can’t remember)… i read the great and secret show and loved it (though, more fantasy than horror)… i found it to be very original, creative, and interesting, so i figure i will like more of his stuff… having seen some clive barker long ago, i think it is safe to assume it will be truly horrifying stuff, with more in common with event horizon than the other stuff i have been covering here…
hopefully in a good way…
