I can’t believe how many films I’ve watched already this year. I’m behind on the cinema viewings (I wanted to go once a week), but the home cinema experience is hardly slumming it.

I watched The Host alone last night, and The Fountain with Crumpet tonight. I’m very glad she chose to watch it - I thought it was wonderful… and yes, it did get dusty in the room.

This one started off very promising (I felt it was going to be a buyer), but it dragged towards the end with too much police procedure and not enough spooky murdering. Also, not enough Robert Downey Jr. But then, there can never be enough RDJ.

And man, it’s long. So long that they obviously had to compress the video heavily to make it fit on one DVD, and good lord it looked bad. Mosquito noise everywhere.

Seriously, Apple.

What.

The.

FUCK.

We watched this last night - well worth watching, but I don’t want to say too much about the plot besides the fact that Mel Gibson is still obsessed with brutality.
The image was really… interesting. When it moved slowly, it looked very good - excellent detail, decent good shadows, but it didn’t feel ‘perfect’. And when things moved fast (there’s a battle scene fairly early on) it stopped looking like a film entirely. I leaned over to Crump and asked, “Does this look odd to you?”

Crump said, “Yes…”

I said, “I think this might have been shot on digital…”

And lo and behold, it was shot with a Panasonic Genesis camera (which was used for Superman Returns and a few other big budget films). They still have a way to go for me to be comfortable with the look - fast moving objects don’t blur in the same way that I’ve become accustomed to. It’s not bad, it’s just different. Maybe people will think that film looks ‘wrong’ in 20 years time?

The format war is over. Moments after Toshiba announced they were giving up on HD DVD, Universal followed suit.

It’s certainly not unexpected, but there was always the possibility that Universal would be tied into some stupid exclusivity contract until the end of 2009. I can’t wait for Children of Men on Blu-ray! And of course Crumpet will be jumping onto Serenity nearly as quickly as she’d jump onto Nathan Fillion..

How weird is it that on the night that we watch Ratatouille, Stella catches and kills a freaking rat in the back yard? The first rat since we moved in about 3-4 years ago…

Pixar rats are much cuter than real ones.

Crump and I watched the first two episodes of Weeds tonight. Ten half-hour episodes with commentaries and other features, all on the one disc. I love Blu-ray.
Oh, and the show is fun too!

In one day both Netflix and Best Buy have turned away from HD-DVD in the States and put their support behind Blu-ray. It looks like the high-definition format war is going to be over even earlier than I expected. I predicted Q3 2008, but I’d say HD-DVD is going to be dead before June now.

The $299 Toshiba HD-DVD player is no bargain.

I would have loved to have been involved in this:

I think I’m done with going to the cinema. It costs the same to buy a film on Blu-ray as it does to see it once with Crumpet, plus I get special features, commentary and the like… and if the film sucks, I can sell it to get some money back.

Plus, I’m really over putting up with thoughtless people - I can’t believe that people still leave their mobile phones on…