What HD-DVD, Blu-ray disc, or D-Theater tape have you gotten lately? (Part 2)

I picked up the BBC David Attenborough narrated "Planet Earth" HD DVD used at MovieXChange yesterday about the time the Warner news was breaking. It was priced ok, not as inexpensive as it might be soon. I had taped the Discovery Channel Comcast cable broadcast last year to D-VHS and was really happy with it. This HD DVD looks really good, but without doing a side by side comparison, I don't know how much better than my D-VHS recording. I don't know the differences in the programs other than narrator. Overall, I consider it a reference HD DVD and my D-VHS recording is reference for that format.

Chris

 

Watched Cat People and Dantes Peak last night. I can highly recommend Cat People.

As for Dantes Peak, well, I'm not quite sure what audience this would be for. It's rated PG-13, but it's a solid PG. The story is just too unbelievable. The pickup truck drives underwater, and through lava, and even though totally on-fire with tires burnt off, it just keeps going and going, throughout the rest of the movie. And then there's the boat. And grandma who decides just to hop into the acid for some unknown reason. Apparently quite a bit of money was spent on making this movie. I wonder how much they lost.

 

That was from the Summer of the lava movies. Dante's Peak and Volcano. Both were awful. Reminds me of the 70's schlocky disaster movies.

 

I took my children to see that one in 1997 and thought it was entertaining. Thanks a lot for explaining that the story wasn't plausible, I thought I was ready to escape from a volcano eruption based on what I learned there, just drive the family over the lava in our getaway vehicle. Now, I will have to completely replan our evacuation.

I checked and IMDb estimated cost to be a little over $100,000,000 and estimated gross $180,000,000 worldwide so I don't know exactly how awful it did, but it didn't do great.

Chris

 

Just picked up Spiderman 3, Harry Potter Order of the Pheonix & Ratatoulie on BR

 

It was drop dead gorgeous with various colour styles to match the film's moods. I also heard the most convincing sound effects I've heard on an HD-disc yet. The beating of the faries wings, akin to hummingbirds, is just amazing in DTS Master.

I think that the film was in 7.1 also. My manual EX mode went off, I think because the source was 7.1 . I know Hairspay is 7.1 and I'll be playing it soon. Pan's audio was magnificent. Gentler effects such as it's usually demonstrate real audio quality better than the big boom.

Este es en idioma de Espanol but it's well subtitled, I thought. I'd give the film's audio a purr-fect score but there's a few scenes with weak dialog set too low, I think.

 

I watched the Blu version of Pan this weekend. Excellent transfer and sound to die for. Yes it is in 7.1, if you have the capability to handle that. I was extremely impressed with the audio quality on this title and that was with my Panasonic doing the internal decoding of the DTS-HD (probably only doing DTS since the player can't handle DTS-HD MA).

 

Today from amazon.com received Good Night and Good Luck and Purple Rain from the blu bogo.

No hurry to view these, of course. But I'll get around to it eventually.

 

Excellent. Thanks Rachael.

 

Not caring about any ending format war I purchased yesterday:

Zodiac on HD-DVD, but also got -

3:10 to Yuma - Blu-Ray
Paprika - Blu-Ray (a friend of mine swore I should pick up this movie and that I would love it - we will see - a totally blind buy - knowing really nothing about this flick other than it adult oriented themes in a Japanese anime)
The Rock - Blu-Ray
Sunshine - Blu-Ray

I also have being delivered today from Amazon (part of their BOGO offer last week) -
Rescue Dawn - Blu-Ray
Cast Away - Blu-Ray

 

I got the Zodiac HD-DVD today. My 3:10 To Yuma, BD, is in the mail....maybe tomorrow?

 

La postino left my 3:10 To Yuma BD today. It plays right after the Lady Vols Bucketball derby this eve.

 

I just watched "Stardust" on HD DVD. A really nice, romantic, and silly fantasy but lots of fun. This one is a Paramount MPEG-4 encode and it looked great to me. That was the first HD DVD I have watched in several months that I can recall.

I picked up a few Blu-ray/HD DVD titles at F.Y.E. in Hot Springs, AR on my birthday today since I got 20% off.

Chris

 

I watched Stardust this week, twice, actually It's was supriningly good. My other fav lately was the BD of Hair Spray. John Travolta just sucks in this film but everybody else is so good that his suck-y-ness ain't so big of a deal. The soundtrack is nice in 7.1 . DTS Master is soundin' better all the time.

 

Resident Evil blu-ray (box set, $64.99 minus my 10% discount) from FYE today, using some of my in-store credit.

Is there a movie he doesn't suck in?

I seem to remember him being in the Phenomenon dts LD that I hated.

 

Mike,

How is the picture quality on the 3:10 movie?

 

Well he was great in Pulp Fiction, one of the best movies of the 90's.

 

Hey, yea, you're right. Just checked my Pulp Fiction dts LD and his picture is on the back. Doesn't even look like him at first, so I guess that's why I didn't know.

 

I thought that the movie looked fine. It's story, well, I'm freaked by it. It just doesn't seem at all believable to me. I'm gonna watch it again and see if I like it any better in a week or two.

I'm already lookin' forward to The Assination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford though....what the world needs now is a new western that's even half as good as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance....I think...

 

Why don't you Get Shorty? Although he does look like himself in it. It seems like his purr-fect movie, for him. As for Hair Spray, he's bad but not bad enough to touch Battlefield Earth! That's one spicy Dum-Butt Film Classic. It's profoundly difficult to make a worse film than that.

 

Latest for me--
Sunshine and 3:10 to Yuma. On the horizon is Deliverance...say isn't that a nifty sentence?

By the way the Sunshine disc has caused problems for some 1.0 players and some of the special features are designed for 1.1 spec blu-ray players and will not play in pip mode on 1.0.

I'd suggest a firmware update because the new (rumor has it) CPS used by Fox evidently causes confusion for some BD players. Mine which has been updated initially recognized the disc as a "slide show" before settling into play mode. Just took a little more time for it to load.

While I was in a Danny Boyle mode picked up "28 Days Later" as well on BRD--keep in mind the original source material (canon handheld digital recorder) as the BRD shows the limitations of the source material. Not the best for showing off your big screen HD or BRD player but still a great movie.

Makes you wish that they had ironed out all the little details before releasing BRD players...by the way a beautiful looking movie on BR

 

One reason why I've decided to wait for the upcoming Panny BD-50 instead of the current 30 model.

If I'm gonna lay out the dough for a player, I'd like it to be as future-proof as possible (though the industry has been doing everything in its power to screw early adopters).

 

I watched Sunshine last night on BD. The movie starts pretty good, then gets kinda wonky near the end with some strange editing.

Anyways, I tried out the Profile 1.1 features, and came away unimpressed. There's a PiP feature, but it looks like it can be watched as a standalone feature regardless of what profile your is. There's also some gimicky option to use the remote to 'pan' some movie effects around to the 5 speakers. Nothing you'd want to do more than once.

I liked the PiP bluescreen option you could watch on the HD-DVD of "300", and I do get a kick out of downloading content for other HD-DVD discs, but Sunshine left me underwhelmed.

 

I watched Sunshine on BD last night also - I loved the movie until the last 1/3 of the movie (which was ok - but sort of ruined the feel of the first 2/3 of the movie - which was like a "poor man's" 2001), not because of the strange editing, but because I think the story plot line just went a bit far after the docking with the Icarus 1.

 

I'd like to see Yuma and Sunshine but they are in the "super-long wait" status at Netflix. Don't join Netflix for newer Bluray discs, they're almost all long wait on very long wait.