Currently I’m thinking that Saturday night (3rd May) around 7pm would be good for Life of Brian. Complain in the comments!

The disc looks really nice for what it is, btw.

edit: Moved to Friday night, 7:30pm to satisfy Justin. So he’d, like, better show up!

The latest batch of discs from Amazon arrived on Wednesday, and I took the time to compare the Blu-ray of Baron Munchausen with my Australian DVD copy (my old dvd.net review is here).

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So, my Life of Brian disc arrived.

Who wants to come see it, and what time works for you?

Home was first slated for September or October 2007 and then pushed back to “Spring 2008.” It’s now been pushed back again until Summer (our Winter) 2008.

“We have come to the conclusion that we need more time to refine the service to ensure a more focused gaming entertainment experience than what it is today” is Sony-speak for:

“Home is a fucking trainwreck right now, sorry.”

Words fail me.

This is a company with more money than most small countries. If you can make it all the way through this video (and it’s only 3 minutes long, how hard can it be?) you’re a stronger man than I.

I approve. I approve overwhelmingly.

I bought a Blue Jeans cable a month or so ago. It’s excellent, and it’s about 15% of the cost of a Monster cable, while being equivalent or better in build/picture quality.

I’ve been debating with Crumpet for a while that there’s something broken in the Japanese psyche. She still doesn’t believe me, but I think the evidence I presented her with today strengthened my case.

Uwe Boll directed such cinematic masterpieces as Bloodrayne, House of the Dead, and Dungeon Siege, and they’re hated by critics and filmgoers alike.
Here’s the petition asking him to stop making movies. And here’s his response, where he also gets a plug in for his latest abomination:

I don’t think a million signatures are going to do it - do you? Certainly Postal seems to be his best film yet. It might even be the first of his game adaptations to score higher than 4% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Watched Once tonight. So many goosebumps. A lovely, lovely film.

Kinda charming how the entire film was in mono until the end credits too.

It’s still early days, but I think Quickflix is going to be a keeper. It’s (as far as I can see) a complete clone of the US Netflix company - you pay a fixed monthly amount and create a queue of films on their website. They send you the first disc from the queue, you watch it, return it in the supplied envelope when you’re done, and they send you another. No late fees, no hassle, but the real win for me is the selection.

I have a list of shame - the films I’ve never seen, whether it was because I grew up in the country, or never had a decent video store close by, or just blanked out when I walked into a good one.

Anyhow, some of my most shameful omissions are: Godfather II, The French Connection, The Conversation, The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Repo Man, The Vanishing, Paris, Texas, Klute, Blood Simple… the list goes on. Do you think you’d find all of those titles in the average video store? I never did.

You could find them in a great store like Video Dogs in Carlton, but it’s really too long a trip for me just to rent a disc, plus they tend to be $7 a night, whereas the Quickflix plan I am on (2 discs at a time, max 5 discs a month - $19.95) works out to $4 a disc if I watch and return the discs fairly swiftly. There’s no pressing hurry to return them immediately, you can hang onto them for a couple of days - or even lend them to a friend and ask them to pop them in the post when they’re done. You can tell the site that you’ve posted a disc and they’ll send another before they receive it, which is very cool.

Another good thing - they rent Blu-ray, which was the final impetus to push me to try the service out. The only downside that I have found is that certain long films that stretch over two discs (e.g. Godfather II, Lawrence of Arabia) are classified as two discs by their system, so you are essentially paying the cost of two films to rent the one.