Just discovered this weekend that Amazon has a complete history of everything you’ve ever purchased available for your perusal. Go to Your Account –> Your Orders and then choose the year from the dropdown box just above and to the left of your most recent orders.

Turns out my first Amazon purchase was September 7, 1998.  I bought two things:

• The Fifth Element on DVD

I had gotten my DVD player a couple months earlier, so this would have been one of my earliest movie purchases.  Back then, DVDs weren’t a dime a dozen.  This one cost $20.99. Today, it’s available for $12.49. For goodness sake, the Blu Ray for this movie is less than $15.

• DVD Demystified: The Guidebook for DVD-Video and DVD-ROM

What can I say, I’m part tech geek. This $42.95 book promised to discuss the format and the processing in detail. I was very curious about it at the time.  I remember carrying this book out of the office one day, when one of the Veeps at the company I worked for (he’s very smart) looked at the book and said, “I didn’t think they were all that mystifying.”

Total price: $68.84

That’s right: There was no free shipping on orders more than $25 back then, let alone Amazon Prime.

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.

• 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.

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.)

• 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?

• 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.

Now that I have a Blu Ray player, let’s see about reviving the New Release List here.  For starters, it’s a much shorter list to deal with each week:

• 9

This is that stop motion movie from the summer produced by Tim Burton.  Got good reviews, looked good, but I haven’t seen it.

• Jennifer’s Body

This is a movie made for the sake of letting Megan Fox prance around in skimpy clothing for two hours.  In other words, it ought to be an EXCELLENT Blu Ray.  There might be a story, too, but I don’t think any of the teenage guys who saw it in the theaters cared.

• A Perfect Getaway

Milla Jovovich.  So once you’re done demoing your system with “The Fifth Element,” go see her serious acting chops in this movie.  This is another horror/thriller movie, set in Hawaii, i.e. the state “Lost” put on the map. (Yes, that is a joke.)

• Paranormal Activity

That’s about as generic a movie title as you can get, isn’t it?  It’s supposed to be “The Blair Witch Project” for a new generation.  If “Cloverfield” didn’t make you nauseous, go for this film!

I think I’ve learned from DVDs.  I learned a lot. . I needed to
 
First, I learned to like movies.  I was never a movie kid growing up.  I liked TV more.  I liked watching Jeopardy! at far too young an age.  I liked and appreciated animation that, while originally in the theaters, at that time resided solely on TV in blissful half hour blocks.
 
To this day, though, there are still large gaps in my movie memory that everyone assumes I have.  When the DVD format hit, I fell in love and watched all I could.  I’d spend Saturday afternoons with the shades drawn, the DVD player fired up, and a couple or three movies ready to go, often in those distinctive little red envelopes from Netflix.  (I subscribed to Netflix in the days before they had warehouses every 15 blocks around the country, dangit!  I had to wait a week to exchange a disc for a new one, at least. Bah!)

But those were the days in the early 2000s that I caught up on classics like “The Maltese Falcon” and “Casablanca” and “Network” and “The French Connection” and “Chinatown” and “The Godfather.” I’m sure there were some movies that didn’t come out of the 30s and 70s in there, too, but you get the idea.
 
DVDs were a weekly purchase, aided by the Sam Goody store (remember those?) downstairs from where I worked, where a pre-order would save you nearly as much as you’d save ordering it on Amazon, in the days before free shipping with your $25 purchase.
 
I bought the discs often knowing I didn’t have time to watch them right away, but figuring I would someday — that I should buy them while I could.
 
The end result?  Literally hundreds of DVDs in boxes are filling up a couple of closets in my house.  A couple of years ago, I sold off a bunch, many of which turned out to be unexpected collector’s items that fetched high prices, such as the “ReBoot” DVDs.  That money paid, in large part, for my dSLR camera.
 
Most of the DVDs in my collection did not retain their value, the way they did in the early days of the format.  There was a time when most movies were $30. You could almost make that back on eBay immediately, if you wanted to.  DVDs weren’t available at every checkout stand and 7-11 spinner rack for $5 or $10.  They weren’t available to rent for $1 from a big red box outside the supermarket.
 
And today, as broadband opens up to ever more of the country and the tech industry fights to put an appliance in your home theater to stream things to your TV, the future of disc-based entertainment, itself, is in danger.  It’s not a perfect solution, though.  Broadband isn’t equally fast or available everywhere.  It’s a lot of data to send through the pipes to show a high def picture on your TV.  And there’s the basic human need to own stuff, not merely have it stream past your eyes.  Why pay for something you can’t hold?
 
An early format war nearly killed the next generation disc-based successor to the humble DVD before it began.  Through various political machinations, Blu Ray eventually won the battle, this despite the HD-DVD plug-in for the Xbox.  In the end, content won out.  Once enough Hollywood studios chose Blu Ray (for whatever reason — pay outs, technical specs, etc.), HD DVD was dead.  With an entire industry behind one format, the march forward with it could begin, and prices could come back down to earth, largely in an attempt to recoup the sagging DVD dollars being spent in Best Buy and WalMart.
 
With prices of Blu Ray players eking below $100 (albeit for bare bones, previous generation, non-internet capable players), now is the time to start buying.
 
So why go with Blu Ray?  Because it’s cool looking.  Because I’m a tech geek.  Because I bought a 1080p TV screen capable of displaying it. Just because.
 
But I learned from the years I spent vacuuming up new DVD releases.  There are limitations this time around.  Here’s my thinking:
 
I’m sticking with movies that take advantage of being in high def.  I want the spectacles.  I want the special effects monsters.  I want the loud surround sound movies. 
 
Failing that, I want only the best movies in Blu Ray.  If it doesn’t qualify for the previous definition, I’m only buying it on Blu Ray if it’s an exceedingly good movie with a new transfer that I’m likely to watch again.
 
Comedies, old classics, etc. are fine enough in DVD with the upscaling DVD player.  As much as I love and adore Airplane!, I don’t need to buy it again, thanks.
 
I’d almost go so far as to say TV shows will be good enough in DVD, but so many of those today are shot in high def beyond what DVD is capable of showing that I might go Blu Ray with those, too.  Plus, fewer discs means less swapping things in and out of the player!
 
I’m also not planning on a lot of double-dipping.  If I already bought it on DVD, I’ll stick with that.  I will have one or two exceptions (Hello, “Matrix”), mostly to see the difference between the two formats, but I’d prefer those on a budget basis — if there’s an Amazon sale where I can get it for $10 (Hello, “Dark City”), I might go for it.
 
I don’t want to end up with a large library here.  I want something manageable and something of quality. Plus, I just don’t have the time to watch a large volume of movies/tv shows anymore.  I know my limits better now. 
 
So let’s see how this goes…
 
 

Remember when Laserdiscs were dying, DVD wasn’t yet around, but the Director’s Commentary track was primed to be the next big thing? You got two-tape VHS packages. The first tape had the movie. The second had the movie, but with the commentary audio on it. Neither, of course, was likely to be in widescreen, though some movies were starting to go there. You just lost too much resolution on a VCR with widescreen movies in their proper format.

Seeing a feature on those VHS tapes is one of the reasons I picked up the original “Scream” DVD. I was a “Dawson’s Creek” fanboy at the time, so a Kevin Williamson commentary would have been tough to pass up.

And now DVDs can feature multiple commentaries per movie, and Blu Ray gives you video commentary. Isn’t technology grand?

Two of my favorite comedies of all time are coming back with new features. They’re doing new editions of both the “Fawlty Towers” and “Black Adder” DVD sets.

John Cleese and crew will be providing commentaries for “Fawlty Towers,” which likely justifies the price of admission, alone. That’s possibly the best $50 (less via Amazon, no doubt) you could spend on a DVD set this year.
Commentaries and other miscellany are promised for “Black Adder,” but a high price point and an uncertain feature set make that a “wait and see” proposition. And while I adore the third and fourth season, the second is uneven, and the first isn’t all that rewatchable for me.

The greatest season of television I’ve ever watched is now on DVD:

Commentaries on every episode.  Great cover art, too.

It’s releases like this that make me want to jump back into the New DVD Releases pool. . .

Update: Best Buy is offering all previous season of “The Shield” for just $19.99 this week.

• “Joe Schmo” was a fabulously funny send-up of reality dating television, done as an improv show in which everyone’s in on the joke, except the contestants. Finally, the second season is being made available on DVD. This is Must Viewing TV.

• I had more to say on “American Idol” during the Round of 3 week, but Alan Sepinwall beat me to every single point I’d make. Go read his stuff, instead.
  

• You have to love a site which invites you to bet on the programmer’s blood sugar levels. THIS is why the internet was created.

• Wired Magazine has great pictures from the wreckage of the Hudson River plane. Great stuff, including commentary from the photographer.

• Shatner Sings! 

It’s Benjamin Button.

Recently missed:

“Water go down the hole! I want to Flush. It. Again!” Time to go scrounge up my Amazon points. . .

• Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares

This is the original British show that started it all.  Includes four episodes where he goes back months later to the struggling restaurants he helped out to see how they’re doing. I understand that’s not always pretty.

Let’s see what came out today, shall we?

First, the TV stuff:

• Night Court: The Complete Second Season

At last!  Man, that was a great show.  Where’s the reunion special on this one?

• Dave’s World: Season Two

This must be Harry Anderson’s Big DVD Week.

• Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume 14

For those keeping track at home: “Mad Monster,” “Manhunt in Space,” “Soultaker,” and “Final Justice.” I remember the last couple. I probably SHOULD remember the first two. . .

And now for the movies:

• Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist
• Zack and Miri Make a Porno
  

This is the kind of stuff the kids today like. I can’t believe I just typed in that second title. This used to be a family-friendly blog. . .