Tag: dvd
A month later
So it’s exactly a month since surgery-eve and I’m doing ok physically… Aches and pains still but I’ll manage. Not wanting to go out in public much due to my eyes not being tip top, nor my hearing, or my hair for that matter. I’ll live though.
There are some things starting to get to me though. I guess I was spoiled rotten during my hospital stay and my recovery and now I feel like I’m socially in a black hole. Limited reach outs from friends, limited shout outs and more, and less.
There’s also a lack of focus I am experiencing right now that un-nerves me. For the past 2 weeks I’ve been spot on with focus. On the ball. I see something that needs to be done, I do it. If someone else has something that needs to be done and isn’t sure of steps, I consult. I consult when not requested (and not in a rude way, it coincides needed productivity for a dormant product). I was all over the friggin’ place. AND I was hitting the ball out of the park on this shit! It was incredible, it was a rush…
…It was temporary?
I’m procrastinating more right now — with incoming emails, with to-do projects and what not — than I have at any time since I went to the hospital. There’s just this… social dread? I dunno… Part of me wants to get it done, knows I gotta get it done, knows I NEED to get it done.
The other part of me wants to chill out and surf the web and wait for someone to distract me. The people I want to distract me get credence while the people I don’t drive me back to work.
How about that? “Test your worth to John! Send him an IM during anti-social/anti-productivity hour and if he drops you for a project, you know your value!”
Newest skill test at the state fair, ya’ll. :-p
Oh, one other thing that is getting to me lately… Why can’t I enjoy movies any more? I feel a horrid pain when I watch Superman Returns (who hasn’t?) due to Bryan Singer’s epic scoping of the film and lack-of-editing to make Superman seem more likable. I saw The Two Towers before surgery and thought it (again) a disaster of editing proportions. That’s what I am seeing everywhere — edit, voice-over, edit, edit, chop, dissolve, blah, blah, blah… And these aren’t action sequences where I see them (most of the time)! Is it just heightened perception or should I burn my DVD Collection, get rid of my cable box and renounce Speilburg?
DVD play revisited
More than three years ago I wrote about the end-of-life of my original DVD player. It was a pretty sweet machine and I was sad to see it go.
Especially sad when I’ve tried the competition.
My first replacement player was a Toshiba progressive scan blah-blah-blah that was purchased in 2004. The player was slow, annoying and overheated easily. I started looking for a replacement for that sucker (casually) last fall and mentioned to family how I’d like a new DVD player for Christmas.
My older brother obliged me. I wish he hadn’t.
While I was looking at the new systems and thinking there was a chance I could buy a player from either side of the current format war, my brother went out and bought me a DVD Recorder. Pretty nice, right?
Yeah, it’d be real nice if it wasn’t a bottom-of-the-line Memorex player which cannot even send closed captions to my TV in a timely fashion during standard DVD playback. Movies end up being somewhat like watching dubbed karate movies with captions being displayed well after someone speaks.
Just a little annoying for this hearing impaired movie fan.
Factor in a poor remote control that focused on recording aspects instead of play (as well as additional captioning lag, if not dropped captions, if you paused or fast forwarded through a portion of a DVD) and you have all the makings of a gift that counted for the thought — nothing more.
So for the last several months I’ve been watching movies on my computer instead of on my DVD player which is bothersome as well (17″ monitor replacing a 27″ TV will do that) and I finally decided enough was enough. Twice now, I have had equipment purchased for me by my elder sibling (who’s motto sometimes is “I don’t care” — he’ll get the job done but getting the job done is more important than doing it well sometimes) and both times I was fed a shit sandwich. Enough is enough.
I went shopping on Amazon yesterday.
The only thing that guided me on my search was the quality I had found in my original DVD player. Panasonic had won me over in it’s simplicity and quality (you know, what companies are supposed to do with their products instead of winning you over by being the lowest priced object on the “clearance” rack at Wal-Mart). I didn’t want tons of bells and whistles (no DVD-R this time, no Blu Ray or HD-DVD) and ended up choosing a highly-ranked unit that costs a little more than a fifth of what I paid for my original player back in 1998).
The only down side is having to wait for it to arrive.
Universal Home Video DVD's suck…
Yeah, they are filled with bonus material. Yes, the movies tend to be really cool or funny…
But is Universal Studios and Universal Home Videos able to CLOSED CAPTION a single DVD? Noooooooooo.
Instead, what Universal does is SUBTITLE films, thinking this will cover the hearing impaired just fine and dandy. In some cases — things are indeed fine. But white text on a bright or white background (any given movie image) makes Subtitles a pain in the ass and impossible to read. It’s quite possible to entirely miss out on certain scenes from films because the text subtitles blend in to well.
The above is an example image of a CLOSE CAPTIONED broadcast… See how the text is laid against a black screen?
This is an example of a Universal DVD with subtitles. Notice the location of the titles? On the picture with absolutely nothing to contrast the text with. It’s easy for the text to become illegible depending on the scene.
Of course, most computer DVD playing programs let you change the subtitles around a bit — make them different colors, different fonts and so forth… You don’t have that option on stand-alone DVD players…
Universal prefers subtitles to keep things on teh cheap. It doesn’t matter if hearing-impaired fans have a hard time (or can’t access the bonus materials — a common problem from all Home Video companies). It just comes down to their financial bottom line. Cheap bastards.
Back in the Saddle Again
Hope everybody had a great Christmas.
Well, it’s been over a year since I left Netflix and what did Santa bring me but a one year gift subscription. Ho Ho Ho… I’m trying to build up my queue again and there are a number of films I have flat out forgotten about over the past few weeks and months that I would like to see.
At the top of my queue is War of the Worlds and Sahara. I’ve also got Seaon 3 of 24 in there, Murderball, March of the Penguins, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Team America – World Police, Crash, Constantine and a few others… But I know or sure I’m forgetting a lot of flicks and can us some recommendations. I’ve seen a few thanks to cable and owning the DVD’s (so please no one suggest Batman Begins or the last Star Wars sequel)…
Social Saturday's
Great news to report regarding me hanging out with Leah on Saturday!!
I FINALLY got my DVD’s — Resevoir Dogs and Equillibrium – back! Oh joy! Oh joy! 😀
I also got a wakeup call seeing an old friend and attending his wifes baby shower. I won’t go into details for the sake of trying not to sound judgemental, but to go from hard and at the high point and then get responsibilities while enjoying yoruself sure can change a person.
Home Video Lameness and marketing idiocy
It was sort of an interesting thing to happen and cool that it happened to me but at the same time, it aggravated me… No, not just that, it infuriated me.
Last nigh, a representative from Warner Brothers Home Video emailed the webmaster of Boltsmag.com — namely moi — and tried to recruit me to help sling their product on the web. The product in question is the Stanley Cup Championship DVD which shows highlights of the Tampa Bay Lightning season along with Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final and the Lightning being crowned as Champs. It’s a DVD I very much want to be able to enjoy….
But I can’t. No sir, I can’t invest a couple of bucks in the DVD knowing it’s going to a company that didn’t complete the DVD and put it on the market. I can’t invest in a company branch that does it all the time with their sport DVDs. The Warner Brothers Stanley Cup Championship DVD lacks Closed Captioning for the Hearing Impaired and I happen to be hearing impaired.
Lets roll back the clock to more than a year ago with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers winning the Super Bowl…. It was a cap on a dream season for the Bucs and I quickly went and bought the DVD that Warner Brothers Home Video produced that had the entire game — or a likeness of it — along with season highlights and a pre and post game show (so they claimed).
What I found out, cruelly, was when I tried to view the season highlight package (which is always an incredible job done by NFL Films) I got pictures and sound but no clue what the narrator was telling me. No clue what miked players were saying. I could see games and relive moments but not find out what people were blabbering about at any given moment…. Was this a joke? I went to the actual game and they had the network video feed but — what is this? Not only is the video feed replaced by the respective teams radio commentary men but — no closed captioning. I had no clue what was being said by Buccaneer radio man Gene Deckerhoff or the Oakland Raiders respective play-by-play radio man.
So I could see but I couldn’t really enjoy the DVD. I wrote off a scathing letter to Warner Brothers Home Videos and got offered a free DVD of my choice as if to say “Sucks to be you – have one of our movies we can’t move on us!”
This isn’t an isolated incident with DVDs and lack of closed captioning. While major motion pictures are captioned on all DVDs, DVDs tend to be loaded with extra features such as commentary tracks and featurettes. Neither of these are captioned so that the hearing impaired can enjoy these additional features they are paying for when they buy DVDs. To make matters worse, Universal Home Videos doesn’t even use Closed Captioning but instead relies on Subtitles (much like you would see on a foreign film) with their movies. It becomes difficult to follow the film if the text is set on a white background or over a bright object. You lose entire sentences or entire conversations because of the setting of a scene.
And it gets worse from there. Trimark Home Video has the rights to NBC’s Saturday Night Live on DVD — which is both syndicated on TV and broadcast on NBC with full closed captioning… Trimark couldn’t be bothered to add this captioning to their DVDs of Saturday Night Live. Just as Rhino Home Videos couldn’t be bothered to add captioning to their DVD palette which includes children’s TV series like Transformers, Jem, GI Joe… Not to mention their Monkees DVD’s…. Or their original offering of South Park DVDs. (I have no clue if Rhino is still responsible for publishing South Park DVDs at this time. This may have changed).
With the Baby Boom population aging and their bodies failing them to one degree or another, why is it that the Home Video industry gets away with this? Better yet, with 22-34 deaf and hard of hearing Americans out there, why does the movie industry think they can ignore this demographic when it comes to their home video sales? Even more pertinent, why doesn’t someone stick the Americans With Disabilities Act in their face and tell them to shape up or ship out?
It’s an ironic story that Warner Brothers tries to get someone to help sling their DVD — for free — on the web when that person can’t even enjoy the product. It’s even more ironic that no one in the deaf community or elsewhere in America makes a fuss out of this… It’s one of the great dupe jobs going on in the entertainment industry for the sake of the almighty buck.
The Death of a DVD Player
I’ve alluded before on Der Stonegauge that I was an early adopter of the DVD format. In 1998 I had the money to blow so I went out and got a player before the format even took a firm hold on society. Over the years, my Panasonic DVD-A105 has shown hundreds of hours of DVD video in high quality without a ton of bells and whistles like some of the new models that come out. It isn’t a progressive scan DVD player, it doesn’t have digital zoom, or a hard drive or whatever… it’s just a solid machine that has gone the distance time and again.
I bought Star Wars original trilogy (pirates :p) on DVD when the problems really started with my player. I attempted to play each movie and I had “digital breakdowns”, so to speak. I had been noticing the machine acting funny lately besides that (even though I clean it regularly) and just giving a few more problems than normal…
Well, Star Wars seemingly did a number on the machine. I tried playing Gladiator last night and what happened was… well, I couldn’t get past certain chapters due to digital breakdown on a clean DVD along with several messages telling me I had no disc in the machine while I did.
I bought condensed air to clean my machine, I ran my DVD laser cleaner, I tried running those DVDs again and the same problems came up. The machine would lock up while having the tough time reading the discs and end up ejecting the DVD from the machine or just plain turning off.
Sadly, I knew that my 5+ year old Panasonic is on it’s last legs…
I started looking at new players today seriously with regards to replacing my machine… And as I was sitting down to write this entry, my brother dumped a new Toshiba. Personally I would have preferred to find my own system but… Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, ya know?
Oh so patiently
Mr. Postman, look and see — a couple of packages, packages for me….
I got word Monday morning that my little bundle of joy is going to be returned to me this week. Yes after more than a month I will get my Playstation 2 back. *a warm and contented sigh is issued by John*.
Meanwhile, I also blew a wad of cash on 3 DVD’s — 3 special DVD’s because they are non Special Edition DVD’s. Yes they are PIRATED DVD’s but they are special none-the-less because HAN SHOOTS FIRST! What the hell am I talking about? The original Star Wars Trilogy on DVD which I bought off Ebay. Yes, the Special Edition/ official release of films will be on DVD this fall but I didn’t care for the Special Editions to begin with.
Han shoots first and no girlie screams when Luke and the Emperor fall to their respected dooms. *a warm and contented sigh is issued by John*
:smile
Backbeat
I used to own Backbeat back before I went to DVD in 1998. I started a VHS ban when I bought my DVD player in 1998 and that basically shut me out of watching my Backbeat video. Polygram Entertainment didn’t have the movie on DVD until just last year…
Well, I have it right now — rented it form Netflix.
I can go into detail about the synopsis of the film but that’s not exactly what I want to talk about. What I wanted to talk about because of a scene that just passed was John Lennon and how not only the movie portrayed him but how I know him from what I read… How different he is from myself but how much of the same he is too.
I’m into astrology a bit and I like Libras from what I have encountered. I know I can fight with Aries, I know I can have a good time with Gemini’s and Pisces’s, but it’s Libra’s that I can most identify with… I feel sort of a kinship with them even though we come from different backgrounds and different trains of thought in life – it all comes back to certain underlying personality traits to me.
John’s a Libra — Born 2 days after myself — well, but 39 years before me…
At any rate – there is a rage in Lennon in this portrayal by Ian Hart (who does an absolutely superb job. He looks like Lennon as a teen in the famous Wooten-Fete photograph) which coverts up known facts about Lennon – his insecurity, his troubled past. John’s father left him when he was young, his mother left him as well — dropping him with his Aunt Mimi.. She (John’s mother – who was immortalized in the Beatles song Julia) was later killed when she was hit by a car. John often covered this sense John’s anguish – his loneliness — is displayed well by Hart, especially in the face of the possibility of losing best friend Stuart Sutcliffe to a local girl (world famous photographer Astrid Kirchherr). The slow lose of Stu to love drives Lennon mad.
How many times have we all be jealous of losing someone to the world?
How many times have you been jealous having someone move on in life when you ant very much for them to stay?
I can identify with that quit ewell… But this isn’t the first movie that I could identify with one of the characters….
And to take John’s send off to Stuart and Astrid at the end of the movie:
Love me tender…. Love me sweet…. Never let me go…. Yiou’ve made my life complete, and I love you so…(followed by a “fuck it, lets go” )
I continue to believe Editing is a lost art – "Jackie Brown"
Jeez… now I know why Jackie Brown tanked.
It’s playing on the DVD player right now and I can see for myself that there are two key problems with the movie: Editing and direction. Not that Tarantino did bad in directing it – he did bad steering the movie where it is supposed to go. Half of it feels like it’s trying to be another Reservoir Dogs and another Pulp Fiction – stylish, crude, violent… The crude term is what really takes over the movie…
Bobby DeNiro can’t save this movie playing a stoned ex-con, neither can Samuel L. Jackson who’s mouth is filthier than I have ever seen it before in his role as Ordell. Chris Tucker’s talent is all but wasted… Some humor wouldn’t have hurt this movie — it definitely needed a pick-me-up.
Less is more, moviemakers… You don’t have to show everyone the minute details to a seen — you can trim the fat and make a movie a load better…
Netflicked
What the heck happened with my Netflix Profile???
Oh, it’s not like something wrong or bad happened to it. Quite the opposite really. Netflix, it seems, made two of my movie reviews spotlighted (that or there is a glitch in the system) and I am very much surprised to find that some of my reviews have large numbers of people who have voted to describe my reviews as “Helpful”.
For example, check out the review for Jewel of the Nile by Stonegauge and you’ll see that this crappy movie and subsequent review has a ton of votes now for it…
Also, my review of X-Files: Fight the Future now has seven favorable votes in it’s name. All my other reviews (from The Naked Gun 33 and 1/3rd to the Buccaneers Super Bowl DVD) have somewhere below 10 votes to them – mostly 1 or 2.
Personally I think it’s a technical glitch but who cares? I’ll take it!
And for those following my 24 Season-renting-saga, it is now 4PM on the day of the California Presidential Primary. Disc 4 was much weaker than the first 3 discs (first 12 episodes) mostly because the product can’t keep providing great plot twists over and over again. I can’t get into details because I don’t want to spoil the show (I consider it like a movie after seeing as much as I have) for those who have not watched it yet. It’s that good.
