• Amelia

Hilary Swank as Amelia Earhardt? Sounds like fun. Spoiler alert: She disappears!

• Casablanca

A classic. The last DVD restoration looked pretty good, though. Don’t know how much better you’re going to get, but I’m open to it.

• Doctor Who: The End of Time, Part One & Two

This is pure linkbait. I don’t watch the series. No time for it. But I know lots of you do!

• Gangs of New York (Remastered)

This is a legendary digital flop. The DVD was poor. The initial Blu Ray release was a bad upconvert of the DVD, from the looks of it. At last, they’re correcting it, and doing it right, we hope. The ironic part is that the film’s director, Martin Scorcese, goes around telling everyone how important it is to digitally preserve Hollywood’s past in the best possible way. Yet this movie of his has been an embarrassment.

It’s also the subject of the best Blu Ray review I’ve ever now read.

• The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration – Sapphire Series
• The Godfather, Part II: The Coppola Restoration – Sapphire Series

What, they didn’t bother with Part III? Interesting.

• Hellboy: Swords of Stone/Blood & Iron

These are the two animated TV movies they did after the live action theatrical release.

• Maid in Manhattan

And, really, isn’t this why digital preservation of films is so important?

• Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior
• Ong Bak 2: The Beginning

I still have the first, unwatched, on DVD. So sad.

• Walk the Line

It follows the standard Hollywood auto-bio Oscar bait formula, but it’s still entertaining.

• Zombieland

Woddy Harrelson. Zombies. Internet glee!

Next week: “The Phantom,” amongst others.

Last week, I talked about my initial Blu Ray thoughts from watching last year’s “Star Trek” movie. Now, let’s get to the movie, itself, in convenient blogger-friendly bullet point format:

* I still get chills when they do the slow pan across the Enterprise for the first time in any given movie.

* J.J. Abrams knows what the fans wants and throws in as many references as he can, from Kirk bedding green skinned alien women to the guy in the red shirt jumping to his death. Really, we all saw it coming and we all laughed when it happened. Oh, and Sulu is a swordsman! Excellent!

* Chekov is a bit too much, though I did laugh at his inability to pronounce code words right. “Wictor Wictor.”

* The guy playing McCoy sure gets DeForest Kelley’s cadence dead-on. I think it may be my favorite introduction to a character of all time, when Bones walks into the shuttle and sits next to Kirk.

* Abrams didn’t change things as much as I thought he might. He amplified them. He created Spock to be just as much the rebel as Kirk. And those similarities help to amplify the fights between the two which, in the original series, felt almost jocular more often than not.

* Uhura bedding Spock? Interesting. As I recall, the trailers were cut to make it look like she and Kirk were having a romp.

* Pike eating a slug is Chekov getting the slug in his ear from “Wrath of Khan” right?

* I’m a geek, I know.

* Spock’s alternate reality speech is the nice way to consider this a franchise reboot, isn’t it?

* My only problem with the movie? Kirk is handled as a cartoonish buffoon in two places: his blown-up hands, and running away from CGI Creature. Besides, My Captain Kirk (UGH) would have found a gigantic icicle and pierced the heart of that beast to save himself, not cower in fear and wait for a deus ex machina.

* The movie really was like a Greatest Hits Star Trek film. They’ll need to expand beyond that for the next movie, though I have no doubt they will do so admirably.

* Scotty has a cute alien creature buddy. Why? Is there a reason beyond the merchandising? Or was it because another human would have cost more money to pay an actor with lines for? I smell deleted scene. I need to get to that second disc filled with extras . . .

* “I got your gun.” BWAH HA HA

* Damn, he even sits in the captain’s chair like William Shatner.

* Bruce Greenwood will forever be The Nowhere Man to me, but he does well as Pike, too.

* In the end, the movie wears “Star Trek” like a badge on its sleeve, not something to be avoided or ashamed of. It revels in the fact, throws in as many in-jokes and well-remembered punch lines as possible, and then lets everyone know that the old Trek you knew and loved is still valid, but this is the new and modern revamped parallel version (minus a Romulan and Vulcan home world) that you may now enjoy.

Highly recommended.

So much stuff going on these days, no time to pull my thoughts together into a blog post. Seriously, follow me on Twitter to get the latest and greatest, but here’s a few thoughts off the top of my head:

* Oscars: Just finished watching “Up” the other night. Had to watch it in two parts, a week apart. That’s just how my life rolls. And you know what? It’s the only Oscar-nomination film from 2009 that I’ve seen. I used to be culturally hip, you know.

I’m torn on who will win. Not who I “want” to win, but who I “think” will win. There’s two schools of thoughts here: a war movie like “Hurt Locker” is bound to activate the Hollywood insurgents into voting. But “Avatar” is seen as the movie which can save movies. So there’s a solid business reason to give that movie, even with its trite premise and cliche-addled scripts (from what I’ve read about it), the award, anyway. Hollywood must keep pushing 3-D down our throats, so “Avatar” must win. It’s pocketbooks versus politics at the Oscars this year.

* I don’t buy that 3D is going to be the next big thing. I just don’t see it happening, even if it did take over CES this year.

* “Up” is a heart-breaking movie. It’ll break your heart three times before the twenty minute mark, and then twice more near the end. Yet, you’ll love it and root for all the right people. It’s the heaviest PIxar movie to date, though.

And it looks very very cool on Blu Ray.

* “American Idol” has been a lot of fun this year so far, and Hollywood Week is starting next week. The thing that continues to astound me about “Idol” each year is how many singing single mothers they can find to put on stage… It’s sad, but “Idol” is turning into the Olympics: 3 minutes of show biz surrounded by ten minutes of documentaries explaining how wretched this contestant’s life has been.

* The iPad looks cool. It’s not going to pass the Finance Committee’s desk without a veto, so I won’t likely be getting one. But I do think it’s the ultimate comic book reader. The exciting thing is how it’ll look in a year. When the second generation model comes out, perhaps even with a price drop, it’ll be interesting to see how many apps are out there, how much content you can put on it, etc. But I’m excited for it.

* Adobe Flash sucks. Period. It’s the Comic Sans of web technologies and it can’t go away fast enough.

* ALF is on Twitter. Must reading, daily.

* Grammys: I listened to even less music than I watched movies in the theater. On the other hand, I’ve been out of music touch for a while now, so there’s nothing new there. I enjoy podcasts too much to stop to listen to much music.

• Michael Jackson’s This Is It

These Blu Ray write-ups always seem to feature one prominently dead guy, don’t they? I’m cursed.

• Surrogates

Bruce Willis movie, based on the Top Shelf comic book.  Did you ever think you would read such a sentence?

• Atonement

• Pride & Prejudice

Chick flics?  Check and check.

• Fame

The Blu Ray is an “extended dance edition.”  Oooh…

• Saw VI

Do they ship one of these sequels every week now?

• Whip It

Drew Barrymore directs, “Juno” stars.

• Paris, Texas (Criterion Collection)

It’s Criterion, so I’m supposed to love it, right?  I have the Criterion DVD release of “House of Games.” Really need to get to that someday.  Haven’t watched it in years, and then it was in the standard release.

With all of my podcasting now done very lo-fi via the iPhone, I’m clearing some of the old equipment out, and I’m selling the compressor. It’s a nice bit of audio kit for your recording needs, really helping to fill out the sound of your voice in a recording. It’s getting $175 on Amazon used these days, but I though I’d try to avoid those fees by offering it up here first. If anyone wants it, it’s yours for a mere $150 via PayPal.com, shipping included. Email me at augiedb AT Gmail DOT com with any questions or offers…

There are a few scratches on top of the box, but that’s completely cosmetic. yes, the power cord (not pictured) is also included.

Click on the pics below for larger sizes, if interested.

This is something I wrote up three weeks ago, and never posted. Whoops. I’ve since watched a couple more Blu Ray movies and am still in awe of the detail and experience. Let’s get to the writeup:

I finally got to fire up the Blu Ray player on Monday and Tuesday nights to watch a movie, after a long weekend of near-misses. So I watched “Star Trek,” and loved every minute of it. Every line of dialogue. Every bit of questionable physics.

So, time for some bullet points, and I’ll start with the Blu Ray side of things:

* Oooh, so pretty. Even the Paramount logo is sharp and shiny.

* The Blu Ray player really is just a computer that happens to play video. It feels so much like that now. Yes, it loads a little more deliberately than a DVD player, but given how many DVD menu authors like to go overboard with “designed” things that take time to play after you choose any menu item, it’s not that big a stretch.

On the Samsung unit I have, the default menu gives you four additional options to start, including Pandora, YouTube, and Netflix, or Blu Ray. I really need to get internet connectivity working with this player next. I want to watch that whole 90 minute takedown of “The Phantom Menace” on my big screen TV. ;-) (I’ve since watched all the parts of that series, by the way, and it’s hilarious. Well worth the time.)

* Blu Rays still do the annoying “Show Four Trailers Before Accessing the Menu” crap. It looks like the “Title Menu” button will skip past them. Doing chapter skip is too slow for me.

* I like the way the text on the screen seems in proportion to the screen size. Things aren’t REALLY HUGE because they don’t need to be. They’re likely the same size, pixel-wise, as DVDs, but can look smaller and more proportionate just because there’s more pixels up on the screen.

* Surround sound rules.

* I know the home theater experts say to use the cinema video mode and then calibrate from there, but I still find that to be too dull. I use “standard.” “Vivid” is only for those who are half-blind, I guess. Or for Best Buy’s use up on the wall.

* Heh heh. While the disc menu is loading, you get a little Enterprise spinning around.

* Wait, there’s no movie trailer on this disc? I hope it’s on the second disc. I like having movie trailers. (It is on the second disc, with all the extras.)

Quoting my Idol writeup of 08 March 2006:

Ayla Brown did a current song that I’ve heard on the radio once or twice, but don’t know the name or artist on. “Unwritten,” perhaps? It’s a horrible song choice with no range, but not a bad performance song choice. She danced around and mostly pulled the song off. The softer parts were weak, but the power parts worked well. Again, the band drowned her out a few times. Ayla, despite a couple of stellar performances, might be in trouble.

Ryan looks like a midget standing next to her, too. We tall people have to stick together, so I voted for her a dozen times last night.

And, now, lots of Massachusetts voters voted her father into the Senate this week.

• Artie Lange: Jack and Coke

Lesson learned: If you want to off yourself (a regular motif of these Blu Ray posts, it seems), use something quicker and easier than a kitchen knife. Yikes.

• The Bourne Identity (Universal)
  The Bourne Supremacy (Universal)
  The Bourne Ultimatum (Universal)

These are the new flipper discs, where one side is Blu Ray and the other is DVD. I suppose that’s a good gateway drug kind of thing, but it seems ultimately silly to me. Maybe the idea of a single SKU is glorious to the movie companies. I don’t know.

The big problem, of course, is that you’ll need to look at the tiny type on the ring around the hole in the middle of the disc to tell whether you’re about to put in a Blu Ray or a DVD disc.

So just buy the trilogy on Blu Ray and be done with it.

• Che (Criterion)

For you communist revolutionary dictator worshipping types…

• Gamer

Gerard Butler in what looks like a bit of a “Ender’s Game” type of movie.

• The Invention of Lyi

The story of the first politician, right? Stars Ricky Gervaise.

• Whiteout

Yes, this is the comic book-based movie that bombed so big in September that I don’t think it saw October in a movie theater. The original comics are really really good, though.

• Magnolia

I like this movie. I’ve never watched the DVD more than once, but I like it. Big sprawling cast, crazy ending, and a magnificent Oscar-nominated supporting actor turn for Tom Cruise that’s completely NSFW at the beginning there.

• Weeds: Season Five

There’s always a TV-on-DVD release, right? I guess this is TV-on-BD now?

My Canon XTi has done fine by me for the last couple of years, but it’s now a couple of generation old. Heck, I bought it when the price dropped as the next generation was announced. The XSi came out right after I bought the XTi, and now the T1i has supplanted that.

Some big changes have happened in those two years: Video has arrived in the digital SLR world. High ISO ranges are the norm now, supplanting the megapixel race that once dominated the attention span of camera buyers. There’s so much cool advanced stuff going on with cameras just a generation later or a step above my Canon Rebel (the 50D, for example) that it makes me itch.

The Canon 5D Mark II is the leader of the pack in Caon’s high ISO performance, and does remarkable video. It’s also full frame, and will run you about $2500. The Canon 7D is much cheaper ($1700), is still a crop factor sensor, but has even better video, similar low light performance, better focusing sensors, a built-in flash commander, and more. It’s my ultimate dream camera at the moment, but still three times the price I paid for my current camera.

So how about a rumor of a third camera to lust over at an even lower price point?

Let’s go to Canon Rumors, who’s skeptical enough on this particular rumor to place their highest THIS IS ONLY A RUMOR sticker on top of it. Don’t believe this one. It’s almost certainly not true.

Yeah, but isn’t it fun to speculate? Have fun with it? Drool over something that will likely never exist?

The rumor is for a 9D/Rebel XF camera that will be full frame. For $1000.

I’d almost be tempted to sell everything I have to upgrade to it, along with a 50mm f/1.4 lens. It would be a drastic shift in my photography, but how cool would it be?

All of my current lenses, I believe, will work on a full frame camera, actually, so I would have the option to keep them, but something has to pay for the camera.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the specs are right, and that this turns out to be more than a rumor. Just don’t hold your breath.

(Whoops, the link is dead. Seems the story had so little credibility that they just pulled it down. Still, fun to dream, isn’t it?)

• 8 1/2

It’s a Criterion movie, so there’s an audience for it.

• Cliffhanger

Sylvester Stallone hangs off a mountainside. Everyone roots for the mountain.

• Fame (2009)

Despite co-starring someone from “So You Think You Can Dance,” it didn’t do too well. I believe Ebert was tracking some stories about unfortunate cuts being made to bring the film in under a certain time limit that completely destroyed the plot and characters, though. No reported “Director’s Cut” here, though.

• The Hurt Locker

An Oscar favorite for Best Picture, Best Director, and probably more. It’s currently also the #1 best selling DVD/Blu Ray on Amazon.

• Last Action Hero

Really? They bothered to put this on Blu Ray? The new gold rush must be on. The movie tanked so bad when it was released that Topps famously canceled the comic book adaptation of it, after all the work was already done!

• Moon

2009 smaller budget science fiction movie. Got some good reviews that I saw.

• The Simpsons: The Complete 20th Season

Remember when they announced this series coming to DVD at a rate of two a year and people complained that it would take forever to catch up to the series? Is this being released out of order? It hasn’t really been 10 years of Simpsons releases, has it?

On the bright side, there’s nothing I’m tempted to buy this week. I can go back to not watching the five Blu Ray discs I do already own.

You know what would be really funny? Even funnier, perhaps, than Apple calling an event at the end of the month and just announcing an Apple TV update or some random MacBook processor upgrade?

I want them to announce a Tablet that’s just a big screen iPod. Literally, it’s the same thing with a bigger screen. There’s no fancy new user interface with it. There’s no content deals with cable television or book or magazine publishers. It runs iPhone apps, just with all the graphics doubled in size. (Key developers have been told to redo all their JPGs at twice the size.) It doesn’t have a camera, a kickstand, or BlueTooth functionality. There’s no built-in comics reader. No 3G. Just Wi Fi and a USB port. There’s only 4GB memory, even.

It’s just a big dumb iPod Touch for $1000.

Then watch the internet burn itself — and Cupertino, CA — to the ground for 24 hours. It would be hysterical.

And I only say all this because I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to afford whatever piece of awesomeness Apple DOES announce at the end of the month, so it doesn’t matter to me.

Two of my favorite songs on the Wiggles concert DVD that’s stuck in perpetual replay at home are “Six Months in a Leaky Boat” and “Old Dan Tucker.”

The former is a Split Enz song from the early 80s, and quite a catchy one at that. Watch its YouTube video here.

“Old Dan Tucker” turns out to be one of those traditional songs from the old west, for which sheet music has been around for 150 years or so. The funny thing is, Bruce Springsteen has covered it.

Here are The Wiggles:

Here’s The Boss:

Last year, one of my daughter’s favorite toys was this doggie that had a mirror for a body and played lots of music.

2008 Dog Edition

This year, it’s this doggie that’s bigger, softer, and has lots of buttons that start him off singing.

2009 Dog Toy

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

A conversation over at Johanna Draper-Carlson’s blog brings up the discussion of what TV shows you’d like to see on DVD, but most likely won’t. I know I discussed what’s left to put out on DVD here last year, but this is a different angle on that. And the more I think about it, the more interesting answers come to mind:

VR.5: The most obvious answer in my mind. It was released on VHS back in the day, but they replaced the soundtrack. Sadly, I bet they’d do the same thing on DVD, and this is a show that NEEDS that original soundtrack.

(Trivial tangent: The first CD I ever bought was the VR.5 soundtrack. I didn’t get a CD player until six months later, for Christmas 1995.)

Orleans: Created by one of the VR.5 creators. Starred Larry Hagman. Ensemble drama show. Don’t think it lasted past 6 or 8 episodes, but remember it was incredibly lush for a network drama of the time. Might even have aired in widescreen mode at a time when widescreen TVs weren’t yet common. (Many shows were already taped that way for futureproofing sake — “Babylon 5″ and “Adventures of Lois & Clark” amongst them — but none aired those versions.) The big brouhaha at the time the series debuted was the brother/sister who were, uhm, getting it on in the pilot. I think they were only half-siblings, but let’s not think too much about it, OK?

Two: Syndicated show. Lasted one season. Starred Michael Easton, of VR.5 fame, and now a soap opera star. He played twin brothers. One was good, one was evil. In the wake of VR.5, I hopped on board to be the FAQ maintainer for the series, got a hold of the press materials for it and everything. The show tanked.

Spy Game: Short-lived 90s show (ABC, maybe?) that was, as I recall, half comedy and half drama. I didn’t realize until I looked it up that it was created or produced by Sam Raimi. Hunh. I have an ep or two sitting on VHS tape somewhere. I should dig that out.

Time Traxx: Still in the mid- to late-1990s, this was a series on the new UPN channel. Time travelling cop comes to the past to prevent a bad future. Something like that. I enjoyed it at the time. I get the feeling it wouldn’t hold up today for me.

Viper: I want both the original expensive NBC season, and the syndicated version that aired later, filmed much more cheaply in Vancouver. The original driver from the NBC show suddenly appeared on it after a season or two.

Bonkers: Nah, I’m kidding. I never want to see this one. I was just reminded of it while watching an Animaniacs episode on DVD the other day where they made two separate jokes about the series. “Bonkers” may have been the nadir of the Disney Afternoon animated line-up, that started off so strongly with Gummy Bears, DuckTales, TaleSpin, and Rescue Rangers. Bonkers was, as I recall, a talking cat on the police force. Or his owner was a cop? I don’t know. It was awful.

You Can’t Do That on Television: I don’t want the Alanis Morisette years. I don’t care. I want the original seasons that I watched as a kid. My daughter needs to see slime in a few years, right?

Any other obscure shows you’d like to see?

Last summer, I asked for one iPhone App: a version of ProfCast, a popular Mac slideshow-making program that allows you to record your narration as you flip the slides over. Check out the comments to my original post for a comment from a ProfCast developer that they were working on it.

This week, it arrived. It’s called SonicPics. It does just what I asked for.

You create a project, drop all the pictures in from your picture library on your iPhone then record your narration as you swipe across the screen to change slides. There are even three different recording quality choices.

You need to be on a wi-fi connection to then transfer the final video to YouTube or your computer. For whatever reason, you can’t just save the video into your photo library and then transfer it via iPhoto. It’s a bit kludgy, too: the app gives you an IP address you go to on your web browser, and there’s a page with the video to download. I don’t understand that part, but I can get past it. It still saves the video for you, so you could work on a second project while the first one is still sitting out there. It doesn’t stop you from doing any more work.

My dream new feature: Telestrator capabilities. Let me draw on the slides as I talk, and then erase that drawing when I flip to the new slide. That’s above and beyond, but it would be cool. I can do it on the desktop with SnapZ, but I want everything on the iPhone.

At $3.99, it’s worth it to me for all the things I could do with it — and plan on doing with it.

For now, here’s the video I made this afternoon to test it out. It’ll show you what HDR photography is, and how that can be done on the iPhone, as well. Let me know what you think. Thanks!

(Whoops. Vimeo mangled the transcoding. Am now uploading it to YouTube instead. Let’s see how that goes.)

OK, let’s try YouTube now: