Some widescreen formats do give you more frames per meter of film. For example, "two-perf" and "three-perf" formats fit the widescreen image between two or three perforations of 35mm film rather than the four perforations that a standard or anamorphic widescreen frame takes up. Lots of low-budget movies from the 1960s and 1970s were shot this way (think spaghetti westerns and formats like Techniscope). This is why Steve McQueen was able to film a 20-minute shot for Hunger when standard 35mm film reels run out after 10 minutes -- he was shooting two widescreen frames in the space normally allotted for a single Academy-ratio or anamorphically squeezed frame. It's a good way to save money on a shoot.
There's a comment somewhere else in this thread that I can't find right now from someone who's under the impression widescreen film is run sideways through the movie camera. Not true unless you're talking about VistaVision or an IMAX camera or perhaps some other nonstandard format I'm unfamiliar with. Standard widescreen formats are either two-perf, three-perf, anamorphic, or simply matted to 1.85:1 from their in-camera aspect for projection.
This seems fairly common. I was having aggravating sound drop-outs and occasional blockiness and stuttering, and when I swapped out my FiOS box all of the problems went away.
But I do see quite a few compression artifacts on FiOS HD channels, depending on the quality of the original stream. For instance, watch one of the rock-video channels (we have MTV, Palladia, and VH1) and wait for something with a lot of strobe lighting. Block city. I see color-banding on occasion, and a lot of the programming on the movie channels has been high-pass filtered to remove fine detail, either before or during the compression process, to improve the efficiency of the codec. These programs can look very good, but the Blu-ray version will almost certainly look better.
The big channels -- specifically the network affiliates -- tend to look really, really good in HD. But during football games, for example, I see some pretty bad motion artifacting, especially as the camera pans quickly across the field. With the old technology (MPEG-2) that's still in use throughout the industry, the bandwidth that those streams have to fit in just isn't quite high enough to do the trick.
Still a huge, huge improvement over digital SD, don't get me wrong. Even something like The Daily Show, which is produced in SD and upconverted to HD for broadcast on Comedy Central HD, looks leagues better with the extra bandwidth alloted to the HD stream. And occasionally I'll be channel-flipping and get stopped by a program like Lawrence of Arabia on HDNet Movies or To Catch a Thief on MGM HD that's just so gorgeous I have to pause and admire it for a while.
Love my HD, love my Blu-ray collection. It's a sizable investment, but I try to make it pay every day. Our friends enjoy it, too.
YES. Here's the real problem. If you call up the average schmoe with an upconverting DVD player connected to an HDTV and ask him if he has "an HD DVD player" I'd wager that at least three times out of 10 that guy says, "Uh-huh."
Leaving that aside, the linked Web site is trying to make a faulty extrapolation from the data. I own an Xbox HD DVD drive that I haven't powered up since last October, a PS3, maybe three or four HD DVD discs and about 90 Blu-ray titles. And yet I do not own a "Blu-ray player." But if I had responded to this survey, my participation would have been used as evidence that Blu-ray adoption is soft. Nuh-uh.
Your music collection fits on a single DVD-R? Guess you're not an especially interested consumer of music.
Hell, Neil Young's latest release takes up ten (10) Blu-ray Discs, which hold up to 50 GB each. Good luck streaming *that* on demand.
Wait, wait. How do "fewer flashy effects" and "shorter game" translate to "game won't be as good?"
To me, that's a big problem in the games industry today. I don't *need* to have a game that pushes the limits of my hardware in terms of speed-rendering of pixillated occluded chiaroscuro texture-bitmapped-film-grain XYZ-spline enabled whiskers on the cheeks of my characters. I don't *need* to have a game that takes 45 goddamned hours to play through in "story mode."
What I *need* is a game that's fun, stylish, and/or challenging. I need a game that's clever and compelling. If that means it's not a compete pixel-buster, or that it only takes 15-20 hours to play through (think of the terrific books I could be reading in 20 hours of gaming time!), fine. If it makes me smile, laugh, cringe, squeal with joy and/or toss my controller into the corner with rage mere milliseconds before jumping up from the couch to fetch it so I can try that devilish level just one... more... time... (at 3 a.m. on a school night), that's good enough.
And if that game can cost $20 or $30 instead of $60, I'll be a lot more likely to experience it for myself. Also, if games were that cheap, many of the publishers might experience the knock-on benefits of torpedoing that lucrative used-games racket that GameStop has perfected. Given the sheer volume of used games in the market, I wonder what the average # of owners is for any given new $60 release?
I have a DVD player with an Realta HQV video processor and it really does a great job. In order to visually benefit from something like BluRay over a top notch scaler you have to have a pristine master and a high quality large screen (1080p at least 50"). It is difficult to get that good a master from older film or most video. That is great news since the vast majority of my current DVD collection will remain satisfactory for a long time.
I don't have a player with a Realta HQV processor -- just an upconverting PlayStation 3 -- but I do work in the video industry and I've seen the Teranex in action and in my opinion there's a significant difference between Blu-ray and "a top-notch scaler." I watch at home on a Sony 47-inch XBR4, and the difference is substantial.
As far as "older film" goes, I have The Wild Bunch, The Searchers, and Black Narcissus, and they crush the older DVDs like the proverbial grapes. Just marvelous viewing. It's not just a question of resolution but also color fidelity. (And, of course, the Blu-ray masters may well be the newest transfers, which makes any comparison to older discs a little unfair. But still -- I look at enough video on enough different screens in enough different high-end facilities to know what I'm seeing.)
I know a lot of people claim there's not a big difference between good SD upconversion and true HD, but these people either sit too far from their screens or just don't know what they're looking for. (Some of them may be the same people who keep their LCD screens set to "Vivid" and complain about grainy pictures.) As a cinephile who'd like to see more titles beyond the frat-boy demographic become available in the format for purely selfish reasons, it frustrates me a little when people argue that HD doesn't represent a significant quality gain over SD.
Two words: Blade Runner. The full five-disc version (including all four released versions of the film plus the 70mm workprint) is $24.99 at Amazon.com.
Two more words: Speed Racer. I saw it in Imax and thought it got an unfair rep, but, man, this is the most impressive thing I've ever seen happen inside my house. (Well, since my college days anyway.)
Movies like The Wild Bunch look great. Criterion's line-up, including The Last Emperor and Chungking Express, will almost certainly look great. The Godfather
discs being released today are said to be awesome.
Someone upthread mentioned that documentary is their thing, and granted there's not a lot of docs on Blu-ray. Helvetica is out and I'll bet it looks amazing. I just read something about Iraq in Fragments being transferred to Blu-ray, and that's a great documentary. (Guess it was shot with HDV cameras.) The Last Waltz is out. Also that Scorsese Rolling Stones movie, which I haven't seen. Criterion is putting out Monterey Pop and Gimme Shelter early next year. Also Walkabout. The Third Man is coming. The Seventh Seal is available if you're willing to import. I just ordered Ang Lee's Lust, Caution from Amazon.com.
There's a lot to watch, but you're not going to find it at Blockbuster!
Why does it matter if some people choose to believe in a soul? Do you have "religious wingnuts" crawling up your ass all day about converting, thus the bitterness towards their faith?
Are you kidding? Have you not been watching the Republican National Convention this week? If you don't actually live in the U.S., well, just walk a mile in my shoes, friend.
Bullocks yourself.
Even an MPEG2 movie at 480 looks fairly spectacular on a large screen....
h264 mastered onto a dual layer DVD by the studio would impress all but the most obstinate snob. Well then, obstinate snobs unite! I mean, I agree that 480p DVDs can look pretty good on a large screen. But "spectacular?" I shudder.
As a longtime movie buff who's logged many hours watching 16mm, 35mm and 70mm prints, my worst fear is that people who know and understand very little about the characteristic of a 35mm film image will eventually determine the direction of the market for HD video.
We already have studios compromising the quality of full-bandwidth Blu-ray discs by over-zealously noise-reducing and then "sharpening" the image to appeal to a certain type of home-theater geek that wants everything glossy and grain free. The last thing we need is a movement toward applying even more aggressive manipulation and filtering to the film image before cramming it into an even more highly compressed, and highly compromised, video version. If it takes snobs to keep that from happening, well for the love of god bring on the snobs!
I'm not sure why people would shell out big money on an HD home theater system if they lack the eyeballs to notice the difference that a sixfold increase in resolution makes, but all this "who cares if a romantic comedy is high definition?" business makes me almost as crazy as that other standby, "old movies won't look any better in HD anyway." I know that great HD versions of movies like Casablanca and Rio Bravo (some of them, at least, based on stunning 4K film transfers done at Warner Bros.) are selling poorly, and it breaks my heart. (I've downloaded "What's Opera Doc" and "One Froggy Evening" in 720p via Xbox Marketplace, and they look pretty good, too.) HD is a huge improvement on 480p DVD, and I would like to see every new movie, regardless of genre, available in the format.
I look forward to the day when HD gear is so inexpensive that people with markedly more eccentric tastes than the current, action-and-SF-driven, demographic are picking up movies. I want Wong Kar-wai movies in HD, dammit!
Thanks for the information. That's interesting -- for a long time, HD DVD's claimed reason for existing was that its physical structure was much closer to existing DVDs, making the costs of ramping up hardware and software production lower.
No, a neutral Blu-Ray forum gets the licensing fees. Well, yeah. And then the "neutral Blu-ray forum" divvies up the licensing fees and hands them out to participating companies that own a patent stake in the technology and have chosen to administer it through said organization. Which companies would include Sony. In a big way.
I've worked in the optical-disc industry and my understanding is that the money Sony stands to gain if Blu-ray becomes the standard is substantial. We're talking annual licensing fees for the technology, and then a per-disc licensing fee for replication.
the only thing that stopped HD-DVD and Blu-Ray combining a few years back was the refusial of the Blu-Ray consortium to add iHD (Microsofts menuing format) into the Blu-Ray standard Can you cite a source for this? The two disc types have completely different structures. Were the competing consortiums really that close to agreeing on a single "compromise" structure? If so, was it more DVD-like, like HD DVD, or was it closer to the Blu-ray idea? I was under the impression that it was the same old story -- both sides were trying to protect their own patent interests in the technology, and neither was willing to cede ground (future patent-royalty dollars) to the other -- which is what happened at the 11th hour before the launch of the unified DVD format.
I'm a journalist. I get lots of email from publicity types, many of which include print-ready imagery (which can be as much as several megabytes in size). I get email from freelance writers, which often includes attached.DOC files of stories and/or invoices. (I know, I know -- I'm nuts to be using Microsoft Word when emacs would do the job with less overhead.) I try to regularly delete the largest, least necessary email from my box, but in truth what I really like about Gmail is the ability to keep everything. For one thing, it works as a great PR photo archive with next to no effort required on my part. For another, it's a poor man's backup system -- I actually trust it more than the one my office IT department provides, which has failed me in the not-too-distant past. Anyway, I'm at 1209 MB and growing.
Email attachments are obsolete? Get out of town. I happily use FTP as much as possible, of course, but email attachments are, bar none, the easiest, fastest way to communicate with publicity agents and other journalists, not all of whom are Internet savvy. Yes, there are occasional issues where attachments are munged -- or legitimate attachments get snared in our corporate spam filter -- but those annoyances are far outweighed by the relative convenience of not having to teach every single person I deal with by email on a daily basis how to download and use FTP clients.
But has anyone ever been sued for "downloading" music? These cases typically hinge on distribution, or "making available." There is a big difference, because "downloading" a track means you, the defendant, downloaded an MP3 for free instead of paying 99 cents to iTMS (or wherever). The industry has lost, flatly, 99 cents. But if you "share" that track, you have suddenly made it available to God only knows how many other miscreants. In essence, you are distributing it -- and that is, rightly, a whole 'nother kettle of fish compared to the original download. The industry can't prove how many people you distributed it to, but it could have been dozens. Given enough time online, it could have been hundreds. I think that's a legitimate issue.
All that said, for me, the legal strategy really boils down to the fact that this woman is said to have purchased "hundreds" of CDs from Best Buy alone. If the RIAA wanted a slam-dunk case for its first trial, it should have waited until it could put in front of a jury real scofflaws who pirated substantially all of the music they owned. It'll be very interesting to see how the jury reacts to both sides of this case, but this "suing your own best customers" business is really disconnecting the industry from the young people it should be nurturing as its future.
I dunno, man -- without the Rolling Stones and the New York Dolls I don't know if you ever even get to the Pistols. I'd challenge you on the subject of Never Mind the Bollocks as a conversation-starter, too, since I think of the Pistols' contribution as more about image and attitude rather than just those recorded songs. But Exile on Main Street and Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed? Yeah, people still talk a whole hell of a lot about those records. Not to mention that Mick Jagger was helping define in-your-face rock star attitude while John Lydon was just a schoolboy.
Yeah, the Pistols were great. But the Stones laid the groundwork for a band like the Pistols to blow the culture wide open. Direct comparisons aren't really fair.
I'd have to vote for the moment when the green alien dude (whom you've mistaken for a fellow astronaut in need of rescue from a forbidding otherworldly fractal-scape) pops up in front of your damn windshield and starts banging his way into your spaceship in Rescue on Fractalus, one of the first games ever to come out of Lucasarts. I used to play that on an Atari 800XT and it used to scare the hell out of me.
But there's a difference between that (relatively) easy videogame shock and the sense of deep disquiet that a really good horror movie can instill in you. It's true that the average scary game may make you jump more often than the average scary movie -- which rarely seems interested in the kind of classic horror-movie atmospherics that inform current game design -- but that's because the average scary movie really, really sucks. They're targeted at an audience of high-schoolers and/or gorehounds. Rob Zombie's movies may be *meaner* than anything this side of Manhunt, but they're certainly not scarier.
But the best scary movies are about something bigger than jolts. It may be hard, after several decades' fetishization of H.R. Giger's designs for the original Alien, to understand just how deeply creepy those insectoid, vaguely sexual, shapes up on screen were. It's easy to forget, watching the original Halloween at home on a letterboxed Anchor Bay DVD, what that movie looked and felt like, back in the day, when it was playing up on the big Panavision-sized screen in the kind of cavernous movie house that doesn't exist anymore.
There are some contemporary examples as well. Before their visual tropes became the stuff of cliché, Japanese horror movies like Ringu and Kairo brought the scary pretty effectively. 28 Weeks Later spun anxiety about avian flu and the Iraq war into a haunting zombie yarn about the dissolution of the family unit and wartime theatrics. The Descent had some real white-knuckle moments involving strangely deformed creatures in the near-total darkness. I love Bioshock and the immersive experience it provides in all its Dolby Digital 5.1 glory but the seams show -- the lines of dialogue spoken by the splicers are repeated too often, the gamepad mechanics are a little too abstract, the high-polygon creatures and texture-mapped environments just a little too uncanny-valley. Shocks-per-minute rate aside, the movies provide by far the more enveloping -- and aesthetically compelling -- psychological experience.
Whichever format becomes dominant, there's the potential for the consortium of technology license holders behind it to make a little bit of coin on every disc manufactured. Even if Warner Bros. and Toshiba only see a dime on every HD DVD made by anyone, anywhere in the world (well, anywhere where patent rights are enforced), you can see how that would quickly add up when we're talking about print runs in the millions for individual discs. CD patent royalties were a gold mine for Philips and everyone wants a piece of that kind of action.
This is why the companies involved dig in their heels so hard when it comes to technology format wars -- the winner is guaranteed a "free" revenue stream for many years into the future. (Or until physical media goes away.) The same thing almost happened with standard-definition DVD -- a compromise was brokered at pretty much the last minute that resulted in the combination of two competing technology proposals into a single DVD format. Any lessons learned in the aftermath of that particular tete a tete (as DVD went on to be one of the most wildly successful media format launches in history) have obviously been quickly forgotten.
I'm sure this will be an unpopular idea, but I like the idea of journalists pre-filtering things for me -- at least when those things are bloated press-release material from corporate PR types. Yes, in the case of an issue that I find extremely interesting, I guess I may want to read as many words as possible on the subject. But in the case of the McDonald's story linked here, I didn't find anything relevant in the corporate response.
McDonald's seems to be eager to spout the party line about all the healthy food options they offer (including the "right-sized" 375-calorie Happy Meal), but the story is really about the way corporate brand-awareness campaigns have our kids salivating like Pavlov's dog. Letting McDonald's turn the message into something about how you can get applesauce with your Shrek Happy Meal, or whatever, seems to dilute the original reporting, rather than enhancing it.
I'll be interested to see how the Google thing develops, because it is a neat idea. But one of the things journalists do (or at least they're supposed to do it) is give comments from the people they're interviewing the smell test. Does Google have a staff that's equipped to run these comments through the bullshit detector? In other words, even if someone can prove their identity as the subject of a story, it doesn't necessarily mean they'll feel compelled to tell the truth in their comments.
I'm not a huge fan of the mainstream media -- CNN and Fox should both fall off the face of the earth, as far as I'm concerned -- but I still think journalism, in general, is an under-appreciated craft.
NYPD Blue went on the air in the 1990s, and it did more than just about any prime-time show before or since to make a case for the legitimacy of (partial) nudity and profanity on the airwaves. The crackdown didn't come until the Bush Administration decided to make some hay out of "indecency" on television.
There was an NPR interview with Stephen Bochco in 2006 where he said the following about NYPD Blue:
"You know, we made twelve years of that show, and it really was only in the last two years, I would say, that we began to feel the sort of restrictive vise of these new broadcast standards.... What you had to realize is that the FCC essentially serves at the pleasure of the administration, and as the administration in power turns more conservative, the FCC is going to be completely reflective of the philosophies of the administration. I think that's what we're dealing with now."
I mean, you can choose to take Bochco at his word or not. But the fact remains that NYPD Blue, a broadcast network television program, was using words like "bullshit" and "dickhead" in prime time until fairly recently. Bochco blames the Bush Administration for the current crackdown on that kind of language. Is he really making that much of a stretch to say so?
1) You don't know what a "snuff film" is.
2) People don't have a right not to have their feelings hurt.
A videotape of a fiery crash on the Garden State Thruway (according to the linked news report, this did not happen on the New Jersey Turnpike) is newsworthy. In fact, having just driven the entire length of the Garden State Thruway yesterday, I took a fairly keen interest in this video, and not just for reasons of prurience/schadenfreude. (Certainly it will make me an even more attentive driver next time I'm on a toll road.)
I can't think of a single good reason (again, "my feelings are hurt" doesn't count) why government-owned footage of significant events on a state-owned highway system shouldn't be available to any member of the press or public who wants access to it. Giving the government the right to withhold information from the public on copyright grounds sounds like a Very Bad Idea to me. (Maybe the White House will next try to block newspapers from republishing classified material on the grounds that it violates the government's copyright on those documents?)
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Some widescreen formats do give you more frames per meter of film. For example, "two-perf" and "three-perf" formats fit the widescreen image between two or three perforations of 35mm film rather than the four perforations that a standard or anamorphic widescreen frame takes up. Lots of low-budget movies from the 1960s and 1970s were shot this way (think spaghetti westerns and formats like Techniscope). This is why Steve McQueen was able to film a 20-minute shot for Hunger when standard 35mm film reels run out after 10 minutes -- he was shooting two widescreen frames in the space normally allotted for a single Academy-ratio or anamorphically squeezed frame. It's a good way to save money on a shoot.
There's a comment somewhere else in this thread that I can't find right now from someone who's under the impression widescreen film is run sideways through the movie camera. Not true unless you're talking about VistaVision or an IMAX camera or perhaps some other nonstandard format I'm unfamiliar with. Standard widescreen formats are either two-perf, three-perf, anamorphic, or simply matted to 1.85:1 from their in-camera aspect for projection.
This seems fairly common. I was having aggravating sound drop-outs and occasional blockiness and stuttering, and when I swapped out my FiOS box all of the problems went away.
But I do see quite a few compression artifacts on FiOS HD channels, depending on the quality of the original stream. For instance, watch one of the rock-video channels (we have MTV, Palladia, and VH1) and wait for something with a lot of strobe lighting. Block city. I see color-banding on occasion, and a lot of the programming on the movie channels has been high-pass filtered to remove fine detail, either before or during the compression process, to improve the efficiency of the codec. These programs can look very good, but the Blu-ray version will almost certainly look better.
The big channels -- specifically the network affiliates -- tend to look really, really good in HD. But during football games, for example, I see some pretty bad motion artifacting, especially as the camera pans quickly across the field. With the old technology (MPEG-2) that's still in use throughout the industry, the bandwidth that those streams have to fit in just isn't quite high enough to do the trick.
Still a huge, huge improvement over digital SD, don't get me wrong. Even something like The Daily Show, which is produced in SD and upconverted to HD for broadcast on Comedy Central HD, looks leagues better with the extra bandwidth alloted to the HD stream. And occasionally I'll be channel-flipping and get stopped by a program like Lawrence of Arabia on HDNet Movies or To Catch a Thief on MGM HD that's just so gorgeous I have to pause and admire it for a while.
Love my HD, love my Blu-ray collection. It's a sizable investment, but I try to make it pay every day. Our friends enjoy it, too.
YES. Here's the real problem. If you call up the average schmoe with an upconverting DVD player connected to an HDTV and ask him if he has "an HD DVD player" I'd wager that at least three times out of 10 that guy says, "Uh-huh."
Leaving that aside, the linked Web site is trying to make a faulty extrapolation from the data. I own an Xbox HD DVD drive that I haven't powered up since last October, a PS3, maybe three or four HD DVD discs and about 90 Blu-ray titles. And yet I do not own a "Blu-ray player." But if I had responded to this survey, my participation would have been used as evidence that Blu-ray adoption is soft. Nuh-uh.
Your music collection fits on a single DVD-R? Guess you're not an especially interested consumer of music. Hell, Neil Young's latest release takes up ten (10) Blu-ray Discs, which hold up to 50 GB each. Good luck streaming *that* on demand.
Wait, wait. How do "fewer flashy effects" and "shorter game" translate to "game won't be as good?"
... more ... time ... (at 3 a.m. on a school night), that's good enough.
To me, that's a big problem in the games industry today. I don't *need* to have a game that pushes the limits of my hardware in terms of speed-rendering of pixillated occluded chiaroscuro texture-bitmapped-film-grain XYZ-spline enabled whiskers on the cheeks of my characters. I don't *need* to have a game that takes 45 goddamned hours to play through in "story mode."
What I *need* is a game that's fun, stylish, and/or challenging. I need a game that's clever and compelling. If that means it's not a compete pixel-buster, or that it only takes 15-20 hours to play through (think of the terrific books I could be reading in 20 hours of gaming time!), fine. If it makes me smile, laugh, cringe, squeal with joy and/or toss my controller into the corner with rage mere milliseconds before jumping up from the couch to fetch it so I can try that devilish level just one
And if that game can cost $20 or $30 instead of $60, I'll be a lot more likely to experience it for myself. Also, if games were that cheap, many of the publishers might experience the knock-on benefits of torpedoing that lucrative used-games racket that GameStop has perfected. Given the sheer volume of used games in the market, I wonder what the average # of owners is for any given new $60 release?
I have a DVD player with an Realta HQV video processor and it really does a great job. In order to visually benefit from something like BluRay over a top notch scaler you have to have a pristine master and a high quality large screen (1080p at least 50"). It is difficult to get that good a master from older film or most video. That is great news since the vast majority of my current DVD collection will remain satisfactory for a long time.
I don't have a player with a Realta HQV processor -- just an upconverting PlayStation 3 -- but I do work in the video industry and I've seen the Teranex in action and in my opinion there's a significant difference between Blu-ray and "a top-notch scaler." I watch at home on a Sony 47-inch XBR4, and the difference is substantial.
As far as "older film" goes, I have The Wild Bunch, The Searchers, and Black Narcissus, and they crush the older DVDs like the proverbial grapes. Just marvelous viewing. It's not just a question of resolution but also color fidelity. (And, of course, the Blu-ray masters may well be the newest transfers, which makes any comparison to older discs a little unfair. But still -- I look at enough video on enough different screens in enough different high-end facilities to know what I'm seeing.)
I know a lot of people claim there's not a big difference between good SD upconversion and true HD, but these people either sit too far from their screens or just don't know what they're looking for. (Some of them may be the same people who keep their LCD screens set to "Vivid" and complain about grainy pictures.) As a cinephile who'd like to see more titles beyond the frat-boy demographic become available in the format for purely selfish reasons, it frustrates me a little when people argue that HD doesn't represent a significant quality gain over SD.
Two words: Blade Runner. The full five-disc version (including all four released versions of the film plus the 70mm workprint) is $24.99 at Amazon.com.
Two more words: Speed Racer. I saw it in Imax and thought it got an unfair rep, but, man, this is the most impressive thing I've ever seen happen inside my house. (Well, since my college days anyway.)
Movies like The Wild Bunch look great. Criterion's line-up, including The Last Emperor and Chungking Express, will almost certainly look great. The Godfather discs being released today are said to be awesome.
Someone upthread mentioned that documentary is their thing, and granted there's not a lot of docs on Blu-ray. Helvetica is out and I'll bet it looks amazing. I just read something about Iraq in Fragments being transferred to Blu-ray, and that's a great documentary. (Guess it was shot with HDV cameras.) The Last Waltz is out. Also that Scorsese Rolling Stones movie, which I haven't seen. Criterion is putting out Monterey Pop and Gimme Shelter early next year. Also Walkabout. The Third Man is coming. The Seventh Seal is available if you're willing to import. I just ordered Ang Lee's Lust, Caution from Amazon.com.
There's a lot to watch, but you're not going to find it at Blockbuster!
Why does it matter if some people choose to believe in a soul? Do you have "religious wingnuts" crawling up your ass all day about converting, thus the bitterness towards their faith?
Are you kidding? Have you not been watching the Republican National Convention this week? If you don't actually live in the U.S., well, just walk a mile in my shoes, friend.
I'm not sure why people would shell out big money on an HD home theater system if they lack the eyeballs to notice the difference that a sixfold increase in resolution makes, but all this "who cares if a romantic comedy is high definition?" business makes me almost as crazy as that other standby, "old movies won't look any better in HD anyway." I know that great HD versions of movies like Casablanca and Rio Bravo (some of them, at least, based on stunning 4K film transfers done at Warner Bros.) are selling poorly, and it breaks my heart. (I've downloaded "What's Opera Doc" and "One Froggy Evening" in 720p via Xbox Marketplace, and they look pretty good, too.) HD is a huge improvement on 480p DVD, and I would like to see every new movie, regardless of genre, available in the format.
I look forward to the day when HD gear is so inexpensive that people with markedly more eccentric tastes than the current, action-and-SF-driven, demographic are picking up movies. I want Wong Kar-wai movies in HD, dammit!
Thanks for the information. That's interesting -- for a long time, HD DVD's claimed reason for existing was that its physical structure was much closer to existing DVDs, making the costs of ramping up hardware and software production lower.
I'm a journalist. I get lots of email from publicity types, many of which include print-ready imagery (which can be as much as several megabytes in size). I get email from freelance writers, which often includes attached .DOC files of stories and/or invoices. (I know, I know -- I'm nuts to be using Microsoft Word when emacs would do the job with less overhead.) I try to regularly delete the largest, least necessary email from my box, but in truth what I really like about Gmail is the ability to keep everything. For one thing, it works as a great PR photo archive with next to no effort required on my part. For another, it's a poor man's backup system -- I actually trust it more than the one my office IT department provides, which has failed me in the not-too-distant past. Anyway, I'm at 1209 MB and growing.
Email attachments are obsolete? Get out of town. I happily use FTP as much as possible, of course, but email attachments are, bar none, the easiest, fastest way to communicate with publicity agents and other journalists, not all of whom are Internet savvy. Yes, there are occasional issues where attachments are munged -- or legitimate attachments get snared in our corporate spam filter -- but those annoyances are far outweighed by the relative convenience of not having to teach every single person I deal with by email on a daily basis how to download and use FTP clients.
But has anyone ever been sued for "downloading" music? These cases typically hinge on distribution, or "making available." There is a big difference, because "downloading" a track means you, the defendant, downloaded an MP3 for free instead of paying 99 cents to iTMS (or wherever). The industry has lost, flatly, 99 cents. But if you "share" that track, you have suddenly made it available to God only knows how many other miscreants. In essence, you are distributing it -- and that is, rightly, a whole 'nother kettle of fish compared to the original download. The industry can't prove how many people you distributed it to, but it could have been dozens. Given enough time online, it could have been hundreds. I think that's a legitimate issue.
All that said, for me, the legal strategy really boils down to the fact that this woman is said to have purchased "hundreds" of CDs from Best Buy alone. If the RIAA wanted a slam-dunk case for its first trial, it should have waited until it could put in front of a jury real scofflaws who pirated substantially all of the music they owned. It'll be very interesting to see how the jury reacts to both sides of this case, but this "suing your own best customers" business is really disconnecting the industry from the young people it should be nurturing as its future.
And, oh yeah, go Radiohead!
I dunno, man -- without the Rolling Stones and the New York Dolls I don't know if you ever even get to the Pistols. I'd challenge you on the subject of Never Mind the Bollocks as a conversation-starter, too, since I think of the Pistols' contribution as more about image and attitude rather than just those recorded songs. But Exile on Main Street and Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed? Yeah, people still talk a whole hell of a lot about those records. Not to mention that Mick Jagger was helping define in-your-face rock star attitude while John Lydon was just a schoolboy.
Yeah, the Pistols were great. But the Stones laid the groundwork for a band like the Pistols to blow the culture wide open. Direct comparisons aren't really fair.
I'd have to vote for the moment when the green alien dude (whom you've mistaken for a fellow astronaut in need of rescue from a forbidding otherworldly fractal-scape) pops up in front of your damn windshield and starts banging his way into your spaceship in Rescue on Fractalus, one of the first games ever to come out of Lucasarts. I used to play that on an Atari 800XT and it used to scare the hell out of me.
But there's a difference between that (relatively) easy videogame shock and the sense of deep disquiet that a really good horror movie can instill in you. It's true that the average scary game may make you jump more often than the average scary movie -- which rarely seems interested in the kind of classic horror-movie atmospherics that inform current game design -- but that's because the average scary movie really, really sucks. They're targeted at an audience of high-schoolers and/or gorehounds. Rob Zombie's movies may be *meaner* than anything this side of Manhunt, but they're certainly not scarier.
But the best scary movies are about something bigger than jolts. It may be hard, after several decades' fetishization of H.R. Giger's designs for the original Alien, to understand just how deeply creepy those insectoid, vaguely sexual, shapes up on screen were. It's easy to forget, watching the original Halloween at home on a letterboxed Anchor Bay DVD, what that movie looked and felt like, back in the day, when it was playing up on the big Panavision-sized screen in the kind of cavernous movie house that doesn't exist anymore.
There are some contemporary examples as well. Before their visual tropes became the stuff of cliché, Japanese horror movies like Ringu and Kairo brought the scary pretty effectively. 28 Weeks Later spun anxiety about avian flu and the Iraq war into a haunting zombie yarn about the dissolution of the family unit and wartime theatrics. The Descent had some real white-knuckle moments involving strangely deformed creatures in the near-total darkness. I love Bioshock and the immersive experience it provides in all its Dolby Digital 5.1 glory but the seams show -- the lines of dialogue spoken by the splicers are repeated too often, the gamepad mechanics are a little too abstract, the high-polygon creatures and texture-mapped environments just a little too uncanny-valley. Shocks-per-minute rate aside, the movies provide by far the more enveloping -- and aesthetically compelling -- psychological experience.
Two words: patent royalties.
Whichever format becomes dominant, there's the potential for the consortium of technology license holders behind it to make a little bit of coin on every disc manufactured. Even if Warner Bros. and Toshiba only see a dime on every HD DVD made by anyone, anywhere in the world (well, anywhere where patent rights are enforced), you can see how that would quickly add up when we're talking about print runs in the millions for individual discs. CD patent royalties were a gold mine for Philips and everyone wants a piece of that kind of action.
This is why the companies involved dig in their heels so hard when it comes to technology format wars -- the winner is guaranteed a "free" revenue stream for many years into the future. (Or until physical media goes away.) The same thing almost happened with standard-definition DVD -- a compromise was brokered at pretty much the last minute that resulted in the combination of two competing technology proposals into a single DVD format. Any lessons learned in the aftermath of that particular tete a tete (as DVD went on to be one of the most wildly successful media format launches in history) have obviously been quickly forgotten.
I'm sure this will be an unpopular idea, but I like the idea of journalists pre-filtering things for me -- at least when those things are bloated press-release material from corporate PR types. Yes, in the case of an issue that I find extremely interesting, I guess I may want to read as many words as possible on the subject. But in the case of the McDonald's story linked here, I didn't find anything relevant in the corporate response. McDonald's seems to be eager to spout the party line about all the healthy food options they offer (including the "right-sized" 375-calorie Happy Meal), but the story is really about the way corporate brand-awareness campaigns have our kids salivating like Pavlov's dog. Letting McDonald's turn the message into something about how you can get applesauce with your Shrek Happy Meal, or whatever, seems to dilute the original reporting, rather than enhancing it. I'll be interested to see how the Google thing develops, because it is a neat idea. But one of the things journalists do (or at least they're supposed to do it) is give comments from the people they're interviewing the smell test. Does Google have a staff that's equipped to run these comments through the bullshit detector? In other words, even if someone can prove their identity as the subject of a story, it doesn't necessarily mean they'll feel compelled to tell the truth in their comments. I'm not a huge fan of the mainstream media -- CNN and Fox should both fall off the face of the earth, as far as I'm concerned -- but I still think journalism, in general, is an under-appreciated craft.
NYPD Blue went on the air in the 1990s, and it did more than just about any prime-time show before or since to make a case for the legitimacy of (partial) nudity and profanity on the airwaves. The crackdown didn't come until the Bush Administration decided to make some hay out of "indecency" on television.
.... What you had to realize is that the FCC essentially serves at the pleasure of the administration, and as the administration in power turns more conservative, the FCC is going to be completely reflective of the philosophies of the administration. I think that's what we're dealing with now."
There was an NPR interview with Stephen Bochco in 2006 where he said the following about NYPD Blue:
"You know, we made twelve years of that show, and it really was only in the last two years, I would say, that we began to feel the sort of restrictive vise of these new broadcast standards
Transcript here.
I mean, you can choose to take Bochco at his word or not. But the fact remains that NYPD Blue, a broadcast network television program, was using words like "bullshit" and "dickhead" in prime time until fairly recently. Bochco blames the Bush Administration for the current crackdown on that kind of language. Is he really making that much of a stretch to say so?
1) You don't know what a "snuff film" is. 2) People don't have a right not to have their feelings hurt. A videotape of a fiery crash on the Garden State Thruway (according to the linked news report, this did not happen on the New Jersey Turnpike) is newsworthy. In fact, having just driven the entire length of the Garden State Thruway yesterday, I took a fairly keen interest in this video, and not just for reasons of prurience/schadenfreude. (Certainly it will make me an even more attentive driver next time I'm on a toll road.) I can't think of a single good reason (again, "my feelings are hurt" doesn't count) why government-owned footage of significant events on a state-owned highway system shouldn't be available to any member of the press or public who wants access to it. Giving the government the right to withhold information from the public on copyright grounds sounds like a Very Bad Idea to me. (Maybe the White House will next try to block newspapers from republishing classified material on the grounds that it violates the government's copyright on those documents?)