Mainstream Cinema

This is going to set you back several Disney dollars... (Part 1)

Count Fosco, a good friend of mine, was recently inquiring about the subject of Disney animated features on DVD, and it occurred to me that a post dealing specifically with the available versions and which ones are the best would be a good idea. Disney, after all, has a rather annoying habit of releasing a film on DVD for a limited period, deleting it and then re-releasing it a few years down the line, and, as a result, there are several different iterations of many of their animated classics. This post isn't meant to be taken as completely gospel, because I don't own every single Disney film on DVD, but, generally speaking, I've tried my best to point out instances where I am unsure about a specific title.

So, without further ado...

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937) - I don't own this title on DVD (surprisingly). Of the various editions released, the most preferable seems to be the now out of print Region 1 2-disc Platinum Edition from 2001, which features the original mono track (the Region 2 UK release claims to have a stereo track instead, but I can't confirm whether or not this is a mislabelled mono track). A new Platinum Edition is expected in 2009.

Pinocchio (Ben Sharpsteen, Hamilton Luske, 1940) - The old Region 1 Gold Collection release is long OOP, but the currently-available Region 2 UK Special Edition features a very nice transfer, despite limited extras and a lack of the original mono audio mix. A Platinum Edition is expected in 2009.

Fantasia (James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe, Norman Ferguson, Jim Handley, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, 1940) - I don't own this one on DVD. The 60th Anniversary Special Edition and 3-disc Collector's Edition (bundled with Fantasia 2000) are both OOP. A Platinum Edition is expected at some point, but there is currently no estimated release date.

Dumbo (Ben Sharpsteen, 1941) - No known version contains the original mono mix. The recent US Big Top Edition has the most extras, although it does drop a few that were included in the earlier and now OOP 60th Anniversary Edition. It also has a cleaner transfer, although the 60th Anniversary Edition (the one I own) probably looks more faithful to the film's original intended look.

Bambi (David Hand, 1942) - This film wasn't actually released on DVD until 2005, as a 2-disc Platinum Edition, which is now OOP. Unusually, the Region 2 releases all seem to include the original mono mix, meaning that any of the available releases of this film should be adequate. Please note, though, that all releases suffer from some noticeable "drifting" artefacts.

Saludos Amigos (Norman Ferguson, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, 1942) - I don't own this one on DVD. The OOP Region 1 version is edited to remove a racial stereotype; I'm unable to confirm whether the Region 2 releases are similarly affected.

The Three Caballeros (Norman Ferguson, 1944) - I don't own this one on DVD. The OOP Region 1 release includes the original mono mix. I don't have access to the specs for the Region 2 version.

Make Mine Music (Bob Cormack, Clyde Geronimi, Joe Grant, Jack Kinney, Hamilton Luske, Joshua Meador, 1946) - I don't own this one on DVD. All releases appear to be edited to remove an entire 8-minute short, "Martins & Coys".

Fun and Fancy Free (Jack Kinney, Hamilton Luske, William Morgan, 1947) - I don't own this one on DVD. The Region 1 release is preferable for including the original mono mix; all other versions feature a 5.1 remix.

Melody Time (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Hamilton Luske, 1948) - I don't own this one on DVD. The Region 1 release is edited to remove a cigar from one of the shorts; the Region 2 UK release is unedited. Note, however, that the US release features the original mono mix, while the UK release appears only to have a 5.1 remix.

The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (James Algar, Clyde Geronimi, Jack Kinney, 1949) - I don't own this one on DVD. The Region 1 release is preferable for including the original mono mix, whereas the Region 2 releases are 5.1 only.

Cinderella (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, 1950) - I don't own this one on DVD. The 2-disc Platinum Edition is the only current release of this film, and, as all territories appear to include the original mono mix, any version should suffice.

Alice in Wonderland (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, 1951) - The 2004 Region 1 2-disc Masterpiece Edition includes the original mono mix and the best assortment of extras. Avoid the various Region 2 (and Region 4) editions, which junk most of the extras plus the mono mix so that the film can be sold on a single disc. The old OOP Gold Collection release features a poorer transfer and minimal extras, and is also missing the mono mix.

Part 2 will follow in the not too distant future...

Halloween: what can you expect?

In just a few days' time, it will be Halloween, and, naturally, I'm planning a splurge of horror-themed reviews for DVD Times. Last year, I concentrated mainly on covering HD DVD releases, but this year, things are going to be a little more balanced across the three formats I cover. So, provided I can actually churn them out within the next 8-9 days, here's what you can expect to see:

• The Descent (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Halloween (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• House of 1000 Corpses (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Inferno (R2 Italy, DVD)
• Suspiria: Definitive Edition (R2 Italy, DVD)
• Underworld: Extended Cut (R0 Germany, HD DVD)

Now, I'm aware that that's a bit of a tall order, particularly given that I also have work commitments and my PhD to think about, not to mention a review of the Blu-ray release of Oldboy, plus one of Blue Underground's new release of The Stendhal Syndrome when it arrives, so I don't want to promise anything. I'll do my best to finish as many of them as possible, though.

I am fury!

While my month's free subscription to Amazon UK's DVD rental service is still active, I'm doing my best to work my way through as many awful films as possible. I may not be as experienced a connoisseur of Z-grade movie garbage as Baron Scarpia, but I'm doing my best to make up for lost time, and last night I had the dubious honour of sitting through Dr. Uwe Boll's big screen adaptation of the arcade game House of the Dead.

You have to admire Dr. Boll. He consistently churns out garbage so bad that rats would turn their noses up at it, and yet still somehow manages to get funding for multiple projects and attract A-listers like Ben Kingsley and, er, Tara Reid. He seems to have made it his mission to wreck virtually every successful video game franchise of the past decade (although Halo and Silent Hill, it would seem, are safe, for now at any rate) - a laudable aim given that Hollywood Pictures had already set the bar phenomenally low with Super Mario Bros. The man is so adept at tooting his own horn and acting like a complete blow hole that it's hard to find any sympathy for him when the critics trash his latest train wreck (although I must admit that I did feel just the teeniest bit sorry for him when 90% of his audience got up and walked out during his presentation at the Penny Arcade Expo of the opening scenes from his new film, Postal).

Anyway, enough of that. I'd previously seen Boll's take on Alone in the Dark (review here, and had come to the conclusion that it would be difficult to conceive of a worse film. So horrifying was the experience that it very nearly drove me away from Boll's filmography completely. However, last night, undeterred, I popped in House of the Dead, and quickly realised that Alone in the Dark was merely foreplay to my glorious encounter with the true face of Dr. Uwe Boll.

House of the Dead is a film so staggeringly inept and mind-bogglingly idiotic that I deem Boll to be either completely mad or a ground-breaking genius whose talents will only come to be appreciated after several generations. This is a film in which, with every line of dialogue spoken, you feel that the actors are doing their damnedest not to crack up. A film in which a group of snot-faced teenagers (at least, I'm assuming they're meant to be teenagers - the actors playing them are all at least in their mid-20s) arrive at a rave to find it deserted and a blood-stained shirt on the ground, only to promptly separate to go exploring or have a shag (one participant goes so far as to boast about how quick he can make it). A film in which said teenagers (one of whom wears a one-piece jumpsuit with the stars and stripes on it, while another has a halter top cut so low that her jiggling breasts threaten to pop out at any second), when confronted by seemingly endless hordes of the undead, spend a whole lot of time running around, flapping their arms about and getting bitten, before inexplicably turning into expert gun-slingers/martial artists/sword-wielders (delete as applicable) and going at it to the backdrop of heavy metal that would give 80s Dario Argento a headache and slow motion that would cause John Woo to blush. Oh, and, to spice things up a bit, Boll randomly inserts clips from the original video game, presumably because, without them, you'd never know that this is supposed to be an adaptation of House of the Dead.

But wait! Surely it can't be all that bad? After all, as Dr. Boll himself points out,

HOUSE Of THE DEAD was in a lot of territories a very big success. In Middle East, Russia, Spain, Thailand and South America was the movie similar to the USA and KANADA two weeks in the TOP TEN and a long time in the Video/DVD-Charts.

Maybe I'm being too harsh. After all, I only saw it on DVD on a 40" LCD. Perhaps, had I seen it at the cinema, I would

recognize that the CINEMASCOPE look of the movie and the sound are absolutly A LIST and not one percent less quality as RESIDENT EVIL or UNDERWORLD.

Preach it, Herr Doktor!

In HOD we have a lot of GORE and a lot of action. Much more as in Resident Evil. The big battle in front of the house with the MATRIX and TURN TABLE effects, over 100 blood effects and 11000 cuts in 13 minutes will be film history in a few years because in NO OTHER FILM EVER was a similar scene. Also Rodrigez or Tarantino ever made a scene like this escalating action scene in HOD.

There you have it! A lot of gore and a lot of action! Turn table effects! Over 100 blood effects and 11,000 cuts in 13 minutes! Truly this film deserves to go down in history! I was completely wrong! This is a masterpiece and a prime example of why Dr. Uwe Boll is the saviour of modern cinema. Why, he could be this generation's Ed Wood - that's how good he is.

Jesus fucking Christ. Now I absolutely must see Bloodrayne.

PS. If you still need convincing of Dr. Boll's awesome talent, you can watch the entire fight scene, with its turn table effects, 100 blood effects and 11,000 cuts, on YouTube.

DVD review: The Jungle Book: Platinum Edition

While it would have been nice to have had the alternate Academy ratio version of the film included in the package, it goes without saying that this new Platinum Edition of The Jungle Book belongs on every Disney aficionado's shelf. Controversial aspect ratio choice aside, this is a stellar package with an array of bonus materials that ranks among the best the studio has ever put out.

Arriving on DVD with considerably more than just the Bare Necessities, The Jungle Book remains many people's favourite Disney film forty years after its original release. I've reviewed the Region 1 2-disc Platinum Edition.

Blurry Blu-ray

Looks like the postal system is well and truly getting back to normal. A whole slew of packages popped through my letterbox this morning, among them Anchor Bay's Blu-ray releases of Halloween, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. Unfortunately, the news is pretty bad on every front, as all three are heavily flawed in one way or another.

We'll start with the good (or, I should say, comparatively good) news first: Halloween is the best-looking title of the three, with acceptable (although far from outstanding) detail levels and no obvious noise reduction artefacts. On the downside, as has been extensively documented by Dave Mack at the AV Science Forum, this release, and despite (alleged) claims to the contrary from an Anchor Bay representative, the transfer provided on Blu-ray does not feature director John Carpenter and cinematographer Dean Cundey's approved colour palette for the film. While not as mangled as the Divimax standard definition DVD, there are definite problems here, with the daytime shots alternating between looking too summery (the film is, after all, set in late Autumn) and having the proper "brown" look, while the blue tint that is supposed to be present in the night scenes seems to come and go on a shot by shot basis. In the past, I've come across statements suggesting (some of them rather convincingly) that the Divimax transfer showed the correct colour values, but ultimately I'm going to go with what Synapse Films' Don May Jr., who has had first-hand experience with the original 35mm camera negative, has to say:

You can like the sharpness, detail and the way the new HALLOWEEN looks on BD. That's fine. I have no problem with people's opinions on what they like or dislike and I'm not going to insult someone for the way they feel about a film's presentation. But, based on previous editions that I've seen and the fact that I own original OUT OF THE CAMERA 35mm camera negative (not dupe neg, not print, not IP) for HALLOWEEN shows that the blue tint SHOULD be there in a much stronger way than presented on the current BD version.

HALLOWEEN is a classic of the genre. A film like this deserves to be properly restored each and every time it comes out on a new format. On VHS, LD, DVD, BD or watching on MONSTERS HD or your favorite cable station, you can certainly love it any way you see fit. If you dig it, that's fine. The way it looks, the way it sounds, in whatever format you decide to watch it in... But, the BD isn't necessarily the way the filmmakers intended it to look and, as a person who does digital film transfers and has been working in the film industry for almost 15 years, I personally feel that all transfers need to be signed off on by one of the filmmakers close to the project (whether it's the DP, the director, etc.). Almost every one of our transfers has been looked at by the filmmakers, or personally supervised at OUR expense by the filmmakers BEFORE it goes to DVD... that's the way WE roll. It's a courtesy and a respect that we have for the films we release and the filmmakers that spill blood, sweat and tears over their life's work. Perhaps larger companies don't see that as a viable expense, but we do and, in many of our fans' minds, that what they appreciate the most about us. We just try to do it the right way, every time, so that these sort of situations don't continue to pop up.

As for Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, to the best of my knowledge they do not exhibit any problems with the colour timing, but they have plenty of problems of their own, which have been documented, with visual evidence, by Lyris on his site. To put it bluntly, Dawn of the Dead is a mess, suffering from hideous noise reduction artefacts (particularly smearing during pans), and Day of the Dead is only slightly better. Both are also noticeably edge enhanced.

I'm sorry, but I'm not impressed at all by Anchor Bay's initial foray into the world of high definition. These masters may have been passable in the standard definition domain, but when you move into HD, you really have to step things up a notch. People are paying a premium from what they expect will be first-rate AV presentations, and sloppiness like this is just not the way to go.

One final positive point to help take some of the sting out of all the negatives: all three titles come with their original mono mixes intact, and, in the case of Day of the Dead, the mono mix does not suffer from the censored swearwords which affect the 5.1 (Dolby and PCM) remix. Given that several high definition releases of older films have featured only remixes (Universal's HD DVD of An American Werewolf in London being a particularly nasty offender), and also given the company's somewhat spotty track record in this area, Anchor Bay are to be commended for their decision to cater to purists.

The jungle is jumpin'!

Things have been a bit quiet around here during the last few days. I'm supposed to have quite a few discs of various formats on the way, whether bought, rented or for review, but there has been a nationwide postal strike, which has held things up. Various items are finally beginning to trickle in, and one of these was the R1 USA Platinum Edition of Disney's The Jungle Book, which reached me yesterday.

This is a decidedly problematic release, and the reason for this stems from Disney's decision to present the film in a matted widescreen ratio of 1.75:1. As I previously explained, although most commercial cinemas had become widescreen-only by the mid-1950s, Disney continued to animate their films in the Academy (1.33:1) ratio until as recently as the late 1970s (or early 80s, depending on who you listen to), and it is in this ratio that most of the studio's films of the period were released on DVD until recently (with 1977's The Rescuers, framed at 1.66:1, being the odd duck). These DVDs were open matte, revealing the entire Academy frame as drawn by the animators (again, there seems to be a single exception to this, with the 1.33:1-formatted The Fox and the Hound looking noticeably cropped on VHS, LaserDisc and DVD).

With the 2006 re-release of 1973's Robin Hood, however, all this changed. Previously released in the Academy ratio, the new DVD used the unusual ratio of 1.75:1, matting the image at the top and bottom and as a result reducing the vertical dimensions. As seen in Ultimate Disney's review, the altered framing made the artwork seem much tighter - some might say claustrophobic. Some people were up in arms about this, but I've always attempted to remain as agnostic as possible on the issue. After all, one of my main demands for home entertainment (whether that be DVD, HD DVD, Blu-ray or anything else) presentations of films is that they reflect, as closely as possible, the original theatrical presentations. It's why I hate the concept of reframing in the first place, and why I continually rail against audio remixes or George Lucas-style "tweaks".

With The Jungle Book, I'm forced to come off the fence and categorically state that I don't like the new framing. To put it plainly, it just looks wrong. Far from merely being tight, it looks cramped and claustrophobic, and the overall composition is all wrong. The tops of characters' heads disappear at the top of the screen, while their feet frequently skirt just below the bottom of the frame in a way that I can't believe was intended by the animators. A small amount of information is gained at the sides, but far more is lost. Compare the various images in this post and tell me which version looks the more balanced to you.

Of course, on top of this, there's the whole issue of this being yet another overly soft, DVNR'd to buggery Disney restoration from DTS Digital Images, with highly suspect colour values (more research required in this area to determine whether DTS have pulled another Peter Pan), but I'll save that for the eventual review. At least, to end this post on a high note, the original mono audio track sounds excellent, and the bonus features are very informative - a big step up from those provided for Pan.

PS. For another recent example of reframing, check out what Robert Rodriguez has done to Planet Terror for its DVD release.

I am now a gamma-level Thetan

Over the last few days, thanks to me free month of movie rentals from Amazon, I've been watching the Mission Impossible films on HD DVD. Surprising as it may seem, this is the first time I've seen any of them, and I'd be lying if I said I thought they were brilliant. Actually, I quite enjoyed Brian De Palma's Mission Impossible, although the only moment that truly stood out for me was a particularly nail-biting sequence involving everyone's favourite crackpot, Tom Cruise, suspended from the ceiling of a CIA installation and attempting to download a series of files. John Woo's Mission Impossible II, however, was a tedious wreck, in my opinion.

The best of the bunch, surprisingly, was, for me, J.J. Abrams' Mission Impossible III. Okay, so it's essentially just a feature-length episode of Alias, Abrams' show, with a higher budget and Tom Cruise in the Jennifer Garner role, but that in itself is no bad thing, particularly given that I am quite partial to Alias. It also features by far the best high definition transfer of the series - another home run for Paramount, marred only by some compression problems in a couple of scenes. Okay, so in an ideal world Abrams would just have made an Alias feature film, because I'd much rather watch Garner strut her stuff than the intensely annoying Cruise (Garner is able to frown without smirking at the same time, for one thing), but I suppose this is an adequate compromise. I've ordered a copy of the US release, in fact.

DVD image comparison: The Devil's Rejects (SD vs. HD)

For my first ever DVD to Blu-ray comparison, I've decided to go with a tricky title - The Devil's Rejects. This is an interesting comparison for many reasons, not least because, despite being a recent film, it's not a slick, clean-looking affair from which perfection can reasonably be expected from an HD release. Shot on 16mm film with a lot of hand-held photography, it was always going to be tough to compress, and to be fair the DVD doesn't look too bad, although it certainly plays havoc with the grain. For the Blu-ray release, meanwhile, Lions Gate used the aged MPEG2 codec (the same codec used for standard definition DVD) combined with a single layer BD25 disc, and this, unfortunately, results in some pretty severe compression artefacts. Generally, it's watchable when in motion, but on a few occasions it slips up rather badly, as can be seen in Example 2, which is the final frame of the shot in question. As you can see, the entire frame looks like a ridiculously over-compressed JPEG, and although this is very much a worst case scenario, it does demonstrate the dangers of combining an aged codec, a lack of disc space and and problematic material.

I'm sure a handful of people will take one look at these screen captures and decide that the DVD version actually looks better due to the decreased grain, but make no mistake, the Blu-ray version shows considerably more detail and is a far more faithful to its source materials, regardless of the problems with compression.

Check out the comparison here!

Transatlantic Pan

Source: DVD Times

Not long after the specs were discovered for the upcoming UK HD DVD and Blu-ray releases of Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth from Optimum, New Line Cinema have announced their own North American high definition release of the film. Arriving on both HD DVD and Blu-ray on December 26th 2007 (just over a month after its UK counterpart), this edition seems to be the more impressive of the two, boasting a DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 audio track and including an "enhanced visual commentary" that, as far as I can gather, is not being offered on Optimum's release.

I'm glad New Line are releasing this title simultaneously on both formats, after they got pissy about HD DVD's lack of region coding and decided to delay the HD DVD versions of Hairspray and Rush Hour 3 (not that I'm particularly mourning these titles) to give their international distribution partners a chance to release the films worldwide.

See every fleck of blood in living colour

Lions Gate's track record for Blu-ray output has been rather spotty so far, but given the right materials, they are capable of producing some absolute gems. The best Lions Gate title that I've seen is The Descent, which bears the honour of being one of a small number of films available in high definition that not only looks superb but is also an excellent film. This is a very natural-looking title, pleasingly grainy and not having the extremely clean look of the likes of Black Snake Moan or King Kong. Basically, it looks rough and ready, like the caves in which the heroines find themselves trapped.

The Descent
(Lions Gate, USA, AVC, 20.1 GB)

Upcoming review copies

This have been a little quiet on the review front of late, but I'm hoping that will pick up soon with the arrival of a couple of new titles.

First up is the recent 2-disc special edition of Dario Argento's The Stendhal Syndrome from Blue Underground. Casting my eye around the net, it seems that virtually every major horror review site got their copy ages ago, but one of the problems that faces UK-based reviewers is that, generally speaking, we don't have much direct contact with the US distributors. Still, hopefully the wait will be worth it. Given that I already own the Italian release from Medusa, and Blue Underground's transfer doesn't appear to improve much on it, if at all, my interest in this release comes primarily from the point of view of its bonus materials, which sound rather impressive.

I will also soon be receiving a copy of the 40th Anniversary Platinum Edition of Disney's The Jungle Book. This is not my favourite Disney by any stretch of the imagination - in fact, I'd go so far as to say that it heralded the beginning of a particularly dark age in the studio's history - but it has some great moments, and I never got round to picking up the old Limited Issue DVD release, so I'm looking forward to refreshing my memory of this title. Oh, and it appears to be another of Disney's semi-controversial matted widescreen releases (see here for the debate surrounding Robin Hood and its intended ratio).

Satan created MPEG2

So far with my HD screen captures, I've been selecting the best-looking titles in order to give readers an idea of what HD DVD and Blu-ray are capable of. Today, I'm going to do something slightly different, and show some captures of a title with obvious flaws. The transfer of The Devil's Rejects on Blu-ray is basically solid in every area except encoding: the movie was shot on 16mm film, and was then encoded on a single layer 25 GB Blu-ray disc using the aged MPEG2 codec. This results, unsurprisingly, in noticeable compression artefacts. Generally speaking, it looks reasonably pleasing on motion, but there are some rather nasty moments where the lack of available space, coupled with an inefficient codec and difficult material, causes a few hiccups (the second shot being the most extreme example).

The Devil's Rejects
(Lions Gate, USA, MPEG2, 20.4 GB)

Stay tuned later today for a comparison between the Blu-ray version and the earlier standard definition DVD release.

Cat People claws its way back on to the schedule

Source: DVD Times

Previously delayed from its original intended release date of September 25th, the HD DVD version of Paul Schrader's Cat People has resurfaced, with a new street date of December 26th.

No explanation has been given for this delay, but the optimist in me hopes that the additional time has been spent on making the transfer as good as possible. My pessimist half, however, mindful of the quality of many of Universal's catalogue HD DVD releases, is somewhat less hopeful.

They even have HD in the Deep South now

Paramount have an extremely impressive track record in the high definition domain, and Black Snake Moan is no exception. I contrast to Warner, who seem to routinely filter pretty much everything, Paramount's attitude to their modern, digital intermediate-sourced masters is to leave the damn thing alone - a most admirable approach. Black Snake Moan is one of those titles that really "pops" in HD, with richly saturated colours and most scenes taking place in broad daylight. It's smooth rather than pin sharp, but this seems to be entirely representative of the film's look.

Black Snake Moan
(Paramount, USA, AVC, 20.8 GB)

James Bond, Sony's unofficial marketing agent

As promised, here are my first ever Blu-ray screen captures. I decided to start with some of the absolute best the format had to offer (Open Season is, in my opinion, the single best-looking title on Blu-ray, but we no longer have a copy of that film), so it made sense to go with the excellent-looking Casino Royale, a title which showed that Sony had well and truly learned from their past encoding mistakes.

Casino Royale
(Sony Pictures, Finland, AVC, 31.5 GB)

The actual process took me longer than I was anticipating - a combination of my laptop's slow 5,400 RPM hard drive and the fact that I was attempting to install several Windows Updates in the background, while copying a substantial amount of data from one machine to another. I hope to follow this up with some shots of The Descent and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, the two other Blu-ray exclusives that I've seen which warrant 10/10 transfers, but I don't have an ETA on them.

MC VAIO is in the hizzouse!

My Sony VAIO VGN-FZ11Z laptop arrived this morning, fresh and new, just as the description on eBay stated. After scratching my head as to where the Windows install DVD was (it turns out there isn't one - bizarrely, the user has to create their own set of recovery discs - very stingy, Sony) and discovering that I am entitled to yet another copy of Casino Royale on Blu-ray (free this time, as a reward for registering the laptop online), I got the thing set up and ran Windows on it for the first time.

Sony's laptops now come with Windows Vista as standard, which I'm ultimately fine with, because, although I still use Windows XP on my main system, thanks to issues with my sound card, digital TV stick and a couple of legacy programs, I can't think of anything that I would want to do on this laptop that Vista would create problems for. It is, after all, intended primarily for word processing on the go for my PhD, and the odd bit of Blu-ray watching and screen capturing. In any event, this install of Vista comes complete with the much-needed WinDVD BD for VAIO software, which I would have to pay for separately if I did my own install of Windows XP on the machine. By the way, the laptop comes with an HDMI output, supporting full 1080p video, which is yet another point in its favour as a Blu-ray device... although the fact that the sound card only supports 2-channel audio means that it isn't exactly viable as a home cinema system (unless you have an HDMI-compliant AV receiver, in which case it may be possible to get the whole shibbang).

Oh, and I had a brief moment of panic when, popping in my Kingdom of Heaven Blu-ray disc, I was greeted by a message telling me that my player was not a Region A device and the disc could therefore not be played, but it turns out that, as with standard definition DVDs, Blu-ray drives and playback software allow you to change the region code a handful of times before becoming permanent, so it was a simple case of heading into WinDVD's setup screen and changing my locality from "UK" to "USA". Blu-ray playback seems to be reasonably solid in WinDVD, although I was disappointed to discover that it suffers from the chroma upsampling error (not sure whether this is an issue with the video card or the software, or both).

Unless I run into any problems, my aim is to be able to provide a few Blu-ray screen captures later tonight.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of September

• 300 (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• Black Book (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• Dawn of the Dead (remake) (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• House of 1000 Corpses (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• The Lives of Others (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Silent Hill (R0 Germany, HD DVD)
• Underworld (R0 Germany, HD DVD)
• Waking the Dead: Series 5 (R2 UK, DVD)
• Zodiac (R2 UK, DVD)

Another month with high definition content in a dominating position. I've essentially stopped buying standard definition material unless it (a) stands no chance of being released in HD or (b) wouldn't benefit from being in HD (e.g. TV series shot and/or edited in standard definition). Zodiac, the anomaly, was a free review copy.

More bee action

Last night, I watched the remake of The Wicker Man, a film so staggeringly awful that, a mere year after its original release, it has become a cult classic. You may already have seen the reel put together on YouTube showing its most hilarious moments, but you may not have seen this fan-made trailer which markets the film as, and I quote, "a straight comedy". Definitely worth a look if you're in need of a giggle.

Aaaaaargh! Not the bees!

In case you aren't aware, Amazon UK runs a DVD rental service similar to that offered by the likes of Blockbuster and LoveFilm, albeit without such a wide range of available titles. Anyway, if you have an Amazon account, it seems that you can get a month of free rentals. I'm not convinced that the various packages offered are cost-effective enough to be worth it in the long run, but a free trial certainly doesn't hurt, and I decided a few days ago to start renting some titles.

Top of the list was the remake of The Wicker Man, a film with such an awesome pedigree of awfulness that I couldn't just rely on the word of mouth - I really had to see it for myself. I had already seen a hilarious reel collecting many of its more intentionally funny scenes, but I felt the need to understand them in context, especially after reading my good friend the Baron's excellent review of both this atrocity and the very good 1973 original.

In retrospect, perhaps "context" is a misleading word to use, because there really is no such thing. This film is so moronic and damn near incompetent that I actually think clips of Nicolas Cage karate-kicking Leelee Sobieski in the abdomen, donning a bear costume, stealing children's animal face masks and finally having a hive of bees poured over his head work better in isolation than they do when integrated into this meandering, preposterous tale about a policeman with a crippling allergy to bees invading an island-based matriarchal commune in search of his missing daughter.

Just to put this into perspective, in the original, the protagonist, Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward), was a devoted Christian lured to an island by a group of pagans who needed a virgin for their yearly harvest sacrifice. Obviously, the writer/director of the remake, Neil LaBute, came to the conclusion that Nicolas Cage was such a dishy catch that no-one would believe he was a virgin, so this particular aspect of his character has been replaced by a tendency to flap his arms and faint when in the vicinity of bees. Guess what the women of this island are famed for producing? That's right: honey. ("Well, Christianity and bee allergy, they're kind of the same thing," a friend said to me today when I told him about the film.)

None of this really makes any sense. Why does Cage have a bee allergy? Why is the island dominated by women, with the few male inhabitants subservient mutes? Why does he spend the final act of the film violently assaulting many of said women? Why did LaBute decide to make the missing girl Cage's daughter? Why would anyone in their right mind commission this heap of drivel? Presumably, someone in a position of power genuinely believed in this project. Cage, who also gets a producer credit, certainly did, although his hammy, outrageous performance as the marauding Edward Malus (yes, that is his name - the man who ends up being murdered by a group of crazy women just happens to be called... oh, never mind) might make you wondering if the whole thing is just an extended piss-take. Rest assured that it isn't, more's the pity: it's deadly serious, and it's a strong contender for the worst film of 2006.

Death on my mind

Well, I'm back from the research students' induction meeting - it was essentially just nibbles, drinkies and a blather - and it occurred to me that I hadn't mentioned either of my recent acquisitions.

On Tuesday, I received my copy of the Blu-ray release of House of 1000 Corpses from DVD Pacific. It features a decent but not outstanding transfer, with a VC-1 encode (intriguing, given that all of Lions Gate's previous releases have been MPEG2 or AVC). Detail is very good, and the compression is well-handled (the disc is a single layer BD25), but there is noticeable edge enhancement, and the image has been quite severely noise reduced. I haven't noticed any visible smearing, but the frozen grain in the backgrounds looks decidedly unnatural and unfilmlike, making this transfer a 7/10 for me at best. Oh, and, much to my disappointment, they haven't maintained the hilarious menus from the DVD release, which featured various members of the Firefly family instructing the viewer on menu choices. Obviously, since this material was shot in standard definition, it would have been somewhat problematic to port over, but it's too bad the footage couldn't have been incorporated into a standalone reel, because a lot of it really was very funny. "Pick a feature!!!"

I also picked up a copy of the fifth series of Waking the Dead. I was originally hoping to receive a review copy, but BBC's home video distribution division, 2 Entertain, seem to be rather inconsistent when it comes to sourcing check discs. With Casualty, I was able to get review copies of Series 1 and 3 but not 2, whereas with Waking the Dead, I got copies of Series 2 and 4 but not 1, 3 or 5. Anyway, I'm quite looking forward to seeing this series again, which aired at around this time two years ago (for some reason, there were no episodes in 2006, with the rather disappointing sixth series airing in early 2007). My memory of it is that it takes a while to find its footing, having to cope with the departure of two key cast members, but eventually turns itself around with some very strong episodes in the second half.

Incidentally, this six-disc set, just released this month, has an RRP of £34.99, but I was able to find it at DVD.co.uk for a mere £17.95 - definitely worth considering if you're planning on picking up this title.