October 2006

Peep Show Series 3

I’ve pre-ordered the upcoming R2 UK DVD of the third series of Peep Show from Play.com. It was originally announced for a late October release, but it appears to have been pushed back to November 6th. This series was a lot more hit-and-miss than the first two, but it still had some absolutely classic moments (the “mushroom party” being the highlight for me).

Unfortunately, there won’t be a fourth series until some point next year. David Mitchell and Robert Webb are currently frittering away their talent on some BBC show that’s been getting less than favourable reviews (I can’t even remember what it’s called), which is too bad, because an Autumn without new Peep Show just doesn’t feel right.

Site status: now with RSS

Hopefully this’ll be the last change I make to the site for a while, but it suddenly occurred to me that I never bothered to add support for RSS feeds when I switched from Blogger to Movable Type. In Blogger, such features are included automatically with their prefab templates, but, as always, Movable Type makes things slightly more complex. Now, however, everything should be working as before, meaning that, if you use an RSS reader like SharpReader or the one offered with customised Google accounts, you’ll be able to check for new posts on this site without actually visiting it.

To subscribe to the Whiggles.com RSS feed, use this link.

Enemy of the State - image comparison

After absolutely ages, I’ve finally done a new DVD image comparison. Tonight, I take a gander at Enemy of the State, a silly but highly entertaining thriller from the master of cheese and explosions, Jerry Bruckheimer. How does this year’s R1 US Special Extended Edition measure up to the earlier R2 UK “remastered” edition? Find out!

More Sony lies

The Sony Bullshit Machine is fully operational today as, in an exclusive interview with High-Def Digest, Don Eklund, Executive Vice President of Advanced Technologies, and Claire McKittrick, Director of Worldwide Publicity, spew a load of garbage as they attempt to excuse their lacklustre Blu-ray releases, lack of extras and refusal to adopt modern codecs. As always, everything is someone else’s fault - the reviewers don’t understand what they are reviewing and need to be educated about it, people are using crap TVs, Samsung put out a Blu-ray player with a faulty noise reduction chip, filmmakers are making poor stylistic choices… oh, and the corker:

We as a studio have a responsibility to educate the people who are reviewing our discs; but they also have a responsibility to their consumer to look at our discs on the right kind of equipment. So they can say, “Oh, maybe I could have been wrong? Is it possible that the MPEG-2 delivers a better and more accurate picture than VC-1? And, oh, yeah, what are those funny amoeba-like artifacts that VC-1 can produce, where it looks like there is a jellyfish on the wall that’s moving around?”

Bollocks, bollocks, and more bollocks. You blew this one, Sony, and yet you’re still not listening. Because admitting you’ve made mistakes is just out of the question. No, instead you try to tell people that they’re not seeing what they think they’re seeing. To quote one fan, “I could barely finish the article, I felt disgusted by their patronizing attitude.”

Where have I been?

Apologies for the comparative lack of updates over the past few days. I’ve not been feeling great, and it turns out that I’ve got a urinary tract infection, which is currently being treated with antibiotics. Today is the first day in nearly a week that I’ve not felt like I’m bursting to take a piss every waking moment, and I’m also feeling considerably less sick and tired, so I think it’s pretty safe to assume that the drugs I’m on are working to flushing out the infection.

On top of that, I was at a job interview in Motherwell last night, for a home-based transcription post. Basically, I would have received audio files of Scottish court cases and transcribed them into something approaching intelligible English (which anyone who’s spent any time in this neck of the woods will tell you is pretty much vital for understanding the bizarre jumble of accents you invariably end up hearing). This afternoon, I received an email telling me that I hadn’t got the job, which is rather disappointing, because it sounded like a good one, with a lot of flexibility and something that might also be reasonably enjoyable. It’s also slightly frustrating because here to Motherwell was something approaching a two-hour round trip (not fun if you’re dying for a piss the whole time), but that’s the nature of these things, isn’t it? I’ve been put on a “first reserve” list and will apparently be contacted if they feel the need for more staff, but in the meantime I will of course be looking at other avenues.

The good news is that I was at the Job Centre today getting various bits of paperwork sorted out, so I should start receiving my Jobseeker’s Allowance by the end of the week.

Asterix and the Vikings… soon

The French R2 release of the latest Asterix film, Asterix and the Vikings, is due to be released tomorrow. I’ve had it pre-ordered for some time, but, mindful of my horrible experience with Astérix: La Trilogie Gaumont, which was delayed for over a year, I was half-expecting a last-minute postponement. Luckily, my copy is now packing at Amazon.fr, so with any luck I’ll be able to let you know how the disc measures up before too long.

Until then, you might want to check out this review at DVDRama. The text is in French, so I know not everyone who visits this site will be able to follow it, but both the transfer and audio have received very high marks (and this is a site that’s generally very good when it comes to audio-visual reviews), and you can see plenty of screen captures from the menus and extras. Most surprising is the audio setup menu screen, which shows that not only does the disc include English subtitles but also English audio. I was half-expecting this to be left out, given that it’s absent from DVDFr’s spec page for the DVD, and also because French DVD distributors, to be honest, don’t have the best track record when it comes to supporting English speakers. Asterix and the Vikings was animated to an English vocal track, however, so it’s only right and proper that this is included, even if I have a sneaking suspicion that I may end up preferring the French dub, as I did for Asterix Conquers America. Still, you can’t argue with choice, and I’m glad I get the chance to make up my mind for myself. Fingers crossed for the first ever non-problematic Asterix DVD!

Update, October 24, 2006 06:54 PM: As of 6:50 PM, it’s now on it’s way.

Site complete!

As of 5 PM today, Whiggles.com version 9 is officially complete! The final DVD Image Comparison, What Have You Done to Solange?, was converted over to the new layout, meaning that the entire site is now as it should be. This should be good news to those who enjoy looking at the comparisons, because I have a couple of new ones in the pipeline that I was holding off doing until I’d migrated the current ones over to the version 9 layout. In particular, I’d like very much to cover the R2 UK and R1 USA Extended Edition releases of Enemy of the State, and to finally redo the Scream comparison that I took down a few months back because I didn’t think my analysis of it was in-depth enough or the screengrabs used sufficient for illustrating the differences between versions.

Site status update

DVD Image Comparisons have now been converted over to the new layout up to and including The Omen. I decided to more or less stick with the same structure as before, since, while not ideal, it’s at least functional. As I’ve been going through the comparisons, I’ve been attempting to bring them all into line with the latest format (i.e. one roll-over image using the same JavaScript code as the main menu buttons at the top of each page), as well as adding in data for number of discs, sides and layers where absent.

I hope to have the whole lot done within the next couple of days. I doubt I’ll get any more done tonight, though, as I’ve got a job interview coming up this evening. (More on that later.)

Digital drawing board

Source: YouTube

For the average man on the street, or even the average artist, the benefits of this device would probably be pretty limited, but it looks like a very impressive tool nonetheless.

Site status update

I’ve just finished converting all the reviews in the Cartoons section over to the site’s version 9 layout. That means that, barring the DVD Image Comparisons, everything is complete. I’ve decided to save these for last, mainly because they’re going to take longer than most pages to go through and re-tool manually, but also because I intend to try to improve their layout a bit, so they’ll probably end up taking even longer than they normally would.

Here be spoilers

I’ve now implemented a “spoiler” feature (well, added a “spoiler” tag in CSS, that is), which should be pretty useful when it comes to discussing the intimate details of films and so on.

Highlight below to reveal spoiler text:
Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father! LOL!!!!11~

Scary Christian lady rants about heathens

One of the best advertisements for sectioning I’ve ever seen.

Corpse Bride - Warner finally hits a home run

My review copy of the recently released HD DVD of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride arrived today. You can read my overall opinions of it in the post I made when I rented the standard definition DVD back in February, and they haven’t changed all that much (although I did find myself appreciating the art direction slightly more this time round), but of all the various blockbuster releases that I was offered by DVD Times, it struck me as being one of the more interesting.

Anyway, I’ve been a little critical of Warner’s HD DVDs in the past. Million Dollar Baby and Constantine were both edge enhanced and slightly noise reduced, while Charlie and the Chocolate Factory looked noticeably diffuse (a flaw also affecting the HD broadcast master) and suffered from a few instances of compression artefacts, so I was a little apprehensive about Corpse Bride. Luckily, the results are considerably better than I was expecting - indeed, this is one of the best HD DVDs I’ve seen so far, beaten only by the majestic Serenity and the flawless Unleashed in terms of visual pizzazz. Edge enhancement is non-existent, contrast is spot-on, colours (in the saturated “Land of the Dead” sequences) are a joy to behold. This is so close to being a perfect transfer, and is marred only by a few mild instances of digital banding in the colours in the background. I feel slightly bad about knocking a mark off the score for these minor problems, but, with my high definition reviews, I want a 10/10-rated transfer to really mean absolute perfection.

Oh yeah, and I pre-ordered the HD DVD of Wolf Creek from DVD Pacific. It’s due out on December 5th.

Music mania

My two Sarah McLachlan CDs, Mirrorball: The Complete Concert and Wintersong, arrived yesterday from Nettwerk. I’m not sure exactly when they were shipped, since the invoice didn’t state this and I didn’t get a shipping confirmation email, but, considering that Wintersong was only released on October 17th, I’ll have to consider this to be extremely fast service, especially given that they came all the way from Canada.

Anyway, the new Mirrorball is great, and I highly recommend that anyone who likes this sort of music picks it up, whether or not they own the original single-disc version. The obvious benefit of the new release is that, as the title implies, it’s a recording of a full concert - in this case the final night of Sarah’s spring 1998 tour. Songs that were missing from the earlier release, including very good performances of Plenty, Vox and Into the Fire, are included here, as well as a few brief bits of talking in between songs. A few of the songs here, including Hold On and Ice Cream, appear to be different recordings from the ones that appeared on the earlier CD, however (they match the performances on the Mirrorball DVD, suggesting that it and the new CD were both culled from the final night of the tour), so it’s probably worth hanging on to both releases for the sake of completeness.

I’m somewhat less enthusiastic about Wintersong, though. As I predicted, the notion of a Christmas album doesn’t really work for me, since the songs are, generally speaking, ones we’ve all heard a million times before and are unlikely to listen to at any time other than around the festive season. The performances themselves are fine, but there are very few tracks here that I would consider listening to on a regular basis. As I predicted, the one original song on the disc, also called Wintersong, is the stand-out, although I also like the Joni Mitchell-penned River and the John Lennon/Yoko Ono piece Happy Xmas (War is Over), although the rendition of the latter is about as generic as they come.

Basically, I’d class Mirrorball as a must-buy; Wintersong, less so, but still worthwhile for completists.

The Fox and the Hound: 25th Anniversary Edition

The 25th Anniversary Edition of The Fox and the Hound is comfortably the worst release Disney have put out in a long time, with the state of the film itself and the paltry extras suggesting that more thought was put into designing the packaging than the contents of the disc itself. As such, I can think of no reason for anyone to purchase this sorry excuse for a special edition - you’d be just as well waiting for it to show up on TV again, as it generally does every Christmas or Easter.

I’ve reviewed Disney’s recent 25th Anniversary Edition release of The Fox and the Hound, an often ignored 1981 offering from the studio based on the book by Daniel P. Mannix. How does this new release match up against its disappointing predecessors?

Man to Man with Dean Learner in 35 minutes

Channel 4, 11:05 PM. Be there!

The hammer falls: Sony Blu-ray player delayed again

Source: High-Def Digest

Well, who could have seen this coming? Sony has delayed their Blu-ray player, the BDP-S1, yet again, this time pushing it back from late October to early December. Just in case you’ve forgotten, this is the player that I originally had pre-ordered for a June 30th release date.

Over at the AV Science Forum, the mood is not pretty. The general consensus is that Sony has backed itself into a corner, attempting to dominate both the game market (with the PS3) and the film market (with Blu-ray movie discs), but, thanks to a lack of blue laser diodes, has had to choose between pushing stand-alone players and pushing the PS3. The gaming market it clearly more important to them, so they’re electing to support it and screw Blu-ray. Mark my words: this could be the beginning of the end. Expect Disney and Lions Gate to announce HD DVD support by the end of the year.

This really isn’t a good year for Sony, with the news of this delay coming hot on the heels of yet more battery recalls and a predicted net profit drop of 38%. Oh, and they may not hit their PS3 shipment target. Seriously, at this stage, is Sony ends up crashing and burning, I won’t be shedding a tear for them. They’ve strung their loyal customers along for too long and seem content to screw them again and again. The lack of diodes can’t have come as a surprise to them. They must have known that they wouldn’t have enough for both the PS3 and the Blu-ray player for some time, and yet neglected to say anything until the last minute. If I still had a BDP-S1 pre-ordered, this would be the point when, like many people, I’d say “fuck ‘em”.

Oh yeah, and the PS3 won’t upscale standard definition DVDs. The Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on will.

Update, October 20, 2006 22:41 PM: Sony Computer Entertainment America co-chairman Jack Tretton admits that the PS3’s November 17th release date is “more of a target” than something that’s set in stone.

Update, October 20, 2006 10:48 PM: And the Pioneer BDP-HD1 Blu-ray player has been delayed until January due to “technical issues”.

New Lizard in a Woman’s Skin DVD from Media Blasters

Source: 10K Bullets Forum

Media Blasters, it would seem, are working on a new release of Lucio Fulci’s A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin. As many of you probably know, they hopelessly bungled their previous release of the film a couple of years ago, failing to secure an uncut print and as a result offering only a choice between a widescreen cut version and a VHS-sourced, pan and scan version, which contained considerably more material than the cut version, but was still missing a couple of segments due to Italian censorship. At the time, Media Blasters claimed that an uncut print of the film didn’t exist.

Egg was on their faces, however, when Federal Video in Italy released a DVD earlier this year which contained an almost-uncut version of the film. This version, it would seem, will be used as the source for the new Media Blasters release, which, according to 10K Bullets editor Mike Den Boer,

will include the region 2 cut of the film and the extras from the region 2. All with English subtitles.

Apparently, they will be syncing the superior English dub up with the transfer wherever possible, but there are still a number of issues to consider. First, will this be a proper native NTSC transfer, or will they simply do a half-assed PAL to NTSC standards conversion of the Italian DVD? Secondly, will they make any attempt to reinsert the material that is missing from the Italian DVD? There are three specific instances: (1) around 15-20 seconds of sapphic canoodling near the start of the film; (2) a few seconds of Anita Strindberg’s ass as she approaches a man lying prostrate on the floor during one of her sexy parties; (3) a dream sequence which misses a few more seconds of fondling, and is partially overlaid with a “ripple” effect. For the composite version of the film that I made for my own personal use back during summer this year, I was able to fix the first two but couldn’t do anything about the third. The discrepancy on the Italian release came about because they used two different sources for their version - the cut American print and a slightly poorer quality but less cut Italian print. The American print includes the “ripple” effect and is partially censored, but for some reason whoever was in charge of combining the two didn’t notice this, and as a result the Italian DVD features a botched version of the dream sequence. The uncut version presumably exists on the Italian print, so if Media Blasters are able to access it, they could, with a little effort, create the definitive version of this film. Unfortunately, knowing their track record, I somehow doubt that they are going to go the extra mile.

Oh, and I’m still waiting for Media Blasters boss John Sirabella to make good on the promise he made back when the previous version was released, that, should an uncut print emerge, he would ship replacement copies of it free of charge to everyone who got gypped in the first place.

Mother of Tears cast news and shooting date

Variety has a piece on Dario Argento’s upcoming Mother of Tears. The article, written in Variety’s usual bastardisation of the English language, states that

Shooting is set to start Oct. 30 in Rome, with plans to move after one week to Turin, where the Piedmont Film Commission is providing location and accommodation incentives.

Additionally, two more cast members are announced: Massimo Sarchielli and Philippe Leroy (no word on who they’ll be playing, though).

Real-life Suspiria locations

Source: Mobius

Ever wondered what some of the locations from Dario Argento’s Suspiria look like without the crazy Technicolor lighting? This guy has visited some of them and taken a few photos, which are interesting to say the least. The text is in Italian, but the pictures speak for themselves.