Gladiator: take two

9:56 PM / Blu-ray / 1 Comment

Source: AV Science Forum

A rumour posts at The Digital Bits suggests that, hot on the heels of Disney atoning for the disastrous initial BD release of Gangs of New York, Paramount are preparing to do the same for their own embarrassment, Gladiator.

I'm not going to jump up and down with joy just yet - I'll wait for an official announcement, not to mention viewer reports/screen captures - but this is very good news indeed, if true. Despite the negative word of mouth in the AV circle, Gladiator sold extremely well on BD, and was generally reviewed positively by the "mainstream" press, so it's not as if this was a PR disaster that Paramount has a pressing need to correct, as was the case with, say, Sony's initial The Fifth Element release. If they do end up re-transferring and re-releasing the film on BD, however, it will in no small measure go some way towards repairing the tarnished image of Paramount's prestigious Sapphire Series brand among AV enthusiasts. It's not my favourite film in the world, but I do find it incredibly rewatchable, and if the news turns out to be good, then I'll certainly be among those lining up to pick up a copy of the new and improved release.

Just arrived...

2:26 PM / Blu-ray / No Comments

Mystic River (BD, Warner, Region ABC, UK)

BD impressions: The Double Life of Veronique

3:59 PM / BD Impressions / 2 Comments

My first viewing of The Double Life of Veronique was a little on the disappointing side. Prior to watching it, I hadn't seen anything of Krzysztof Zieslowski's work outside of the "Three Colours" trilogy, which I found very impressive, particularly Blue. While that trilogy was very esoteric, all three entries were held together by something approaching a coherent story. Call me conventional, but I generally find that I need an actual story in order to get me hooked. It can be as lightweight as something like that of Dario Argento's Suspiria, essentially just an excuse to indulge in audio-visual excesses, but give me a beginning, a middle and an end. The Double Life of Veronique doesn't really have any of these. What it does have is incredible cinematography and a superb central performance by Irène Jacob, who appears in every single scene and upon whose shoulders the entire film rests.

And maybe that's enough. I can't say I responded at all to the themes of fate and destiny that seemed to be intertwined throughout the narrative (such as there is), but just about every single frame is a work of art and cinematographer Slawomir Idziak's use of gel lighting is every bit as striking here as his later work in Blue and Red (White being, perhaps unsurprisingly, the least visually striking of the trilogy). It's entirely possible to simply sit there and be mesmerised by what it looks like, but I must confess that, at the end of my first viewing, I felt a bit let down. I'm not sure what I'd been expecting, but it didn't provide me with the sense of closure I'd been hoping for (which, you can argue, is the whole point). The Sunday Times quotation on the back cover describes the film as "[r]ich in images, wistful, mysterious, unsettling, inexplicable and beguiling", and I'd have to agree with all of that, with a particular emphasis on the last two adjectives.

I responded more positively to the film on my second viewing, at least in part because I now knew what to expect. I still think it's a weaker film than any of the Three Colours trilogy, but I'm not sorry I watched it, and if it was worth seeing twice in the space of a week, then it must have been doing something right.

Image quality: A bit of a disappointment, this. Such a stunning-looking film undoubtedly deserved a flawless transfer, but what we end up getting is all a bit underwhelming. Right from the word go, it's clear that the image has been blasted with heavy noise reduction, rendering the grain static and unnatural and giving many shots a soft, rather smudgy quality. Some of the close-ups look decent, but a lot of the time I was reminded of a Universal catalogue title in terms of the overall texture of the image. The noise reduction is so heavy that, during fades to black, elements of the previous scene remain faintly ghosted on to the image. For instance, this is what you see following the Sideral logo at the very end of the stream. (If it isn't visible on your monitor, either crank up your brightness slightly or look at this equalised version.) 6/10

The Double Life of Veronique
studio: Artificial Eye; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 21.4 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 31.40 Mbit/sec

My new T-shirt

8:15 PM / General / 3 Comments

I came across this the other day (while Googling solid state drives, for some strange reason) and the PC fanboy in me just couldn't resist. I plan on wearing it to my workplace, a stomping ground for numerous Mac aficionados, to test the reactions.

Yes, I'm easily amused. So sue me.

Broken product

5:50 PM / Blu-ray / 2 Comments

I've returned my copy of Broken Embraces to Amazon. Today I discovered that the UK release by Pathé features English subtitles burned into the image itself (they're not just a forced subtitle stream: they're actually part of the encoded image itself). They're large and ugly, covering the letterboxing (it's a 2.39:1 movie) for single lines and both the letterboxing and the image itself for double lines. To add insult to injury, they're also interlaced. I feel more inclined to trust them to get it right. Beforehand, I never thought a reasonably large label like Pathé, whose distribution is handled by 20th Century Fox, would do something like this, but it just goes to show.

No thanks, Pathé. I'll bide my time and wait for the Sony Pictures US release in March.

No Penélope until March. Ah well.

Just arrived...

10:21 PM / Blu-ray / 2 Comments

Broken Embraces (BD, Pathé, Region B, UK)

The Army of Crime (BD, Optimum, Region B, UK)

Updated Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 05:55 PM: I've returned Broken Embraces for the reasons described here.

BD impressions: Menn som hater kvinner

1:38 PM / BD Impressions / 2 Comments

For my thoughts on the film itself, please see my previous post. A quick summary:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is ultimately hampered by what it is: a faithful adaptation of a novel about a guy who sits around and doesn't do very much except read and talk. It does a fine job of bringing Larsson's characters and world to life, but it fails to expand them beyond what they were on the page. Essentially, it's very well-made. When someone describes a film in that way, it's usually a sure fire sign that they appreciated the technical craftsmanship but didn't engage with it on any level. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has more going for it than that, but it feels remarkably small-screen in its scope.

It's worth stressing once again that no English subtitles are provided on this copy of the film. English subtitles can be downloaded if you know where to look for them (they're not hard to find), and if you have a means of syncing them up with the film then this is a perfectly adequate way of watching the film, even if they appear to have been machine translated.

Image quality: Reference. 10/10

Menn som hater kvinner
studio: Yellow Bird/Nordisk Film; country: Norway; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 32.6 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 30.63 Mbit/sec

A few thoughts on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

9:40 AM / Cinema / 1 Comment

Note: a big thank you to Nick for setting me up with English subtitles, which are not included on the Norwegian BD version I watched. The film will receive a UK theatrical release in March, and an English-friendly BD will likely not be too far behind it.

Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is not the most obvious choice for a big screen adaptation, for the simple reason that it's hardly the most cinematic of stories. There are only two or three genuine action scenes, and for the most part the story is about a guy working his way through page after page of evidence relating to a non-incident that took place forty years ago. This did, it must be said, result in a very engaging mystery novel, albeit one with some significant problems. Books and films are different media, though, and the success of a story in one doesn't necessarily translate into a success in the other. If I were in charge of adapting Larsson's Millennium trilogy, I'd be inclined to suggest that it would be most at home on the small screen as a miniseries.

Indeed, that's precisely what would have ended up happening to the two follow-ups to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest - had it not been for the unprecedented international success of the novels. Thrown into production and shot for television on a small budget, they were hastily upgraded for the big screen, leaving The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as the odd one out: a lengthy and slickly produced affair that, while suffering from and in certain cases amplifying the same problems as its source material, has a certain classiness that elevates a routine murder-mystery thriller into something more than the sum of its parts.

The plot focuses on Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium and an outspoken critic of mainstream investigative journalism. As the story begins, Blomkvist has just been convicted of libel, making accusations about a rival publisher but being unable to back them up. With his reputation in tatters, Blomkvist is contacted by Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), head of the Vanger Corporation, with an employment offer for what initially appears to be a futile endeavour: to dig into the dynasty's mysterious past and uncover the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Vanger's granddaughter Harriet forty years ago. Along the say, he teams up with Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a wild child with a deeply disturbing past, who has spent most of her life rebelling against the various institutions into whose care she has been placed and is a living, breathing illustration of the phrase "damaged goods". Together, the unlikely pair set out to find out what really happened to Harriet and which of the numerous insalubrious members of the Vanger clan was responsible.

Larsson's novel, an imposing 550-page doorstop, has been pared down quite admirably to a less daunting 152 minutes by screenwriters Eric Kress and Jens Fischer, who do a decent job of excising the various mundane observations in which Larsson was apt to indulge and compressing or combining various events to make the story more succinct. This is particularly true of Blomkvist's early investigations into each and every member of the Vanger family, where several generations of history are reduced in the film to a brief montage of photographs charting various key events of the past century. Likewise, Kress and Fischer make the wise decision to bring Blomkvist and Salander together earlier in the narrative, rightly realising that the rather stodgy central mystery becomes more interesting when it is attacked concurrently by the two mismatched amateur detectives. A lot of it is still Blomkvist and Salander sitting in front of computer screens and occasionally venturing outside to talk to witnesses, but it gets from Point A to Point B far more quickly and with less irrelevant waffle than the novel. Where appropriate, significant events have also been shifted around to give them more narrative relevance. This is particularly true of a shocking revelation about Harriet, which was revealed in the novel when there were a good 200 pages still to go, but is here held back until the final 15 minutes, greatly lessening the sense of anticlimax. Likewise, Blomkvist's prison sentence, which in the novel occurred at an arbitrary point and served as little more than a distraction, has been shifted to a more dramatically appropriate point in the narrative and is now actually used to facilitate Blomkvist's character arc. That said, it's an extremely faithful adaptation indeed, maintaining virtually every plot development and generally only compressing and reordering events rather than altering them completely. (They even maintain the excessive product placement for Apple computers, although at least they refrain from listing the system specifications and hard drive capacity of each model they encounter.)

Niels Arden Oplev's direction is by no stretch of the imagination stylish, and he is hampered by the fact that he is saddled with a plot that provides few opportunities to do anything genuinely exciting with the camera, but the film has a polished, lavish appearance in spite of its staticity. He is also aided by an excellent performance by Noomi Rapace as Salander. Prior to seeing this film, I'd never heard of Rapace before, and I now find myself wondering why she isn't better known because she embodies the character so perfectly that I can't imagine anyone else playing her. True, she looks like an adult woman, whereas the Salander of the novel is repeatedly mistaken for an adolescent, but that facet is not exactly vital to the plot or characterisation anyway. Michael Nyqvist is less impressive as Blomkvist, although I'm inclined to go easy on him as he doesn't exactly have the world's most dynamic character to work with: the Blomkvist of the film is as dry and unremarkable as his counterpart in the novel. At least, though, this out of shape, humourless, middle-aged journalist doesn't spend the film's duration bedding everything with a pulse and a vagina, as he does in the novel, which gives him considerably more credibility.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is ultimately hampered by what it is: a faithful adaptation of a novel about a guy who sits around and doesn't do very much except read and talk. It does a fine job of bringing Larsson's characters and world to life, but it fails to expand them beyond what they were on the page. Essentially, it's very well-made. When someone describes a film in that way, it's usually a sure fire sign that they appreciated the technical craftsmanship but didn't engage with it on any level. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has more going for it than that, but it feels remarkably small-screen in its scope. 7/10

BD impressions to follow...

BDs and DVDs I bought or received in the month of January

11:59 PM / Blu-ray / No Comments

• Wednesday, January 13, 2010: Antichrist (BD, Region B, UK) - BD impressions
• Saturday, January 16, 2010: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (BD, Region ABC, UK) [review copy] - BD impressions, review
• Monday, January 18, 2010: Suspiria (BD, Region B, UK) - detailed impressions
• Friday, January 22, 2010: Mesrine (BD, Region B, UK)
• Tuesday, January 26, 2010: Red Road (BD, Region B, UK)
• Tuesday, January 26, 2010: Pontypool (BD, Region ABC, UK)
• Tuesday, January 26, 2010: Menn som hater kvinner (BD, Region ABC, Norway)
• Tuesday, January 26, 2010: Jenta som lekte med ilden (BD, Region ABC, Norway)
• Thursday, January 28, 2010: The Double Life of Veronique (BD, Region ABC, UK)

Holy crap, they fixed Gangs of New York!

1:02 PM / Blu-ray / 10 Comments

Clicky!

Once again, the "screenshots scientists" and everyone else who complained about the woefully sub-par first release have been vindicated. Now come on, Disney, do the decent thing and set up an actual disc replacement programme instead of expecting us to shell out for it again. Oh, and Paramount and New Line respectively, how about doing the same for Gladiator and Dark City?

Here are a couple of comparisons from AVS Forum's Xylon, the champion of screenshot scientists: [1], [2]. These have been saved with less compression than the blu-news.com ones and should be more reflective of the actual product.

Just arrived...

11:00 PM / Blu-ray / 2 Comments

The Double Life of Veronique (BD, Artificial Eye, Region ABC, UK)

BD impressions: Live and Let Die

12:45 PM / BD Impressions / 17 Comments

Live and Let Die: in which James Bond discovers that every single black person in the world really is out to get him, and that they're all secretly communicating with each other by radio, tracking the whereabouts of this "honky" (as they like to call him) as he traipses from Harlem to New Orleans to the Caribbean, threatening to put an end to their murderous, heroin-dealing ways. And yes, it does include the line "Get me a make on a white pimpmobile!"

What follows is a dully plotted, convoluted and (yes, you guessed it) far too long romp which sees Roger Moore, in his first outing as Commander Bond, doing his best to immitate Sean Connery without actually being Sean Connery. My dislike of Moore in the role is no secret (Connery, Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig are my top three, though I'm never quite sure in what order), but he's far from the worst thing about this film. (That would be Gloria Hendry. Good grief!) In fact, I'm rather inclined to go easy on him, given that, despite this being his first Bond film, he at no point comes across as an imposter. His banter with M and Moneypenny is spot on, and it's fairly clear that, here at least, he's playing the same character embodied so successfully by Connery. If memory serves me correctly, he would make the character more his own later, much to the series' detriment. Unfortunately, the puerile humour that would in many ways come to define his tenure as the character (whether fairly or not) has already begun to creep in at this stage, exemplified in a tortuously drawn-out boat chase sequence featuring a loud-mouthed local sheriff, who doesn't seem to have got the memo telling him he's supposed to be in a spy movie rather than a broad comedy.

Of all the Bonds I've seen of late, this is by far my least favourite. It's not without its merits - the uncanny atmosphere, particularly apparent in the first half, is pleasingly sinister and unlike anything in the rest of the series, and if Jane Seymour isn't the best Bond girl of all time she's at least easy on the eyes and far less annoying than the aforementioned Gloria Hendry - but it drags like nothing on earth, and for a film in which Bond has a near-death experience with alligators and screws a clairvoyant virgin, thereby robbing her of her fortune-telling powers (don't ask me how that works), is surprisingly forgettable.

PS. I noticed that the actor playing Felix Leiter in this film is the same one who'd go on to portray him in Licence to Kill - a nice bit of continuity for a character who has been recast more times than Bond himself.

PPS. Interesting note about Moore: he is largely considered to have stuck with the role well past his prime. Conversely, I think he looks too young in this film.

Image quality: This is probably the best-looking of the Bond BDs that I've seen so far. The usual problems with these Lowry restorations are present, namely the at times unnatural grain that warps and freezes around areas of movement, but on the whole I was happy with this presentation. There's some terrific detail (see Example 8 and Example 12) and, barring a few of the darker scenes, the wonky-looking dynamic range that plagued Thunderball is absent here. 8/10

Live and Let Die
studio: 20th Century Fox/MGM; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 33.1 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 39.05 Mbit/sec

For those keeping track, here are my Bond ratings so far:

• Dr. No - 7/10
• From Russia with Love - 8/10
• Goldfinger - 8/10
• Thunderball - 6/10
• On Her Majesty's Secret Service- 7/10
• Live and Let Die - 4/10

For Your Eyes Only is up next. Oddly enough I don't feel any great urge to rent the BDs of The Man with the Golden Gun and Moonraker, although I'm sure I'll come back to them eventually.

First post from my new laptop

11:43 PM / Technology / No Comments

My ASUS UL30A arrived first thing yesterday morning and I wasted no time in getting it up and running, which didn't take long, as I didn't have to install much - just OpenOffice, Google Chrome and a handful of other programs I use regularly. And of course reverting the taskbar back to its Windows 95-through-Vista state. This was never intended to be a heavy duty multimedia or gaming machine, just something light, portable and long-lasting.

And just how long-lasting is it? Judge for yourselves:

Obviously, that figure is just an estimate that Windows spits out based on your current usage, and it tends to yo-yo up and down like nobody's business. For instance, after installing a bunch of Windows Updates, it dropped to as low as four and a half hours on an 85% charge, but even that is light years ahead of my previous setup, the battery for which has just degraded to point that it's really only useful for checking my emails while sitting on the crapper. (Come on, laptop users, don't try to tell me you've never done it.)

I can't say I've run into any major problems yet. It's small without being overly tiny (I don't like squinting at minuscule screens, which is one reason why I didn't go the whole hog and get a netbook), the keyboard feels pretty nice to type on, and the thing resumes from hibernation pretty quickly (around 15 seconds, which is nearly double the 8 seconds ASUS boasts, but still pretty impressive). The quality of the screen, particularly its viewing angle, is several notches down from that of my old VAIO, but that was to be expected as the VAIO was built as a multimedia system (or as close as you can get with a laptop), and I suspect its display was responsible for the lion's share of the power suckage. In any event, image quality is rarely the first thing on my mind when I'm on the move, and when I'm at home I just hook it up to the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo 3230T monitor in my bedroom anyway.

Speaking of which, I did run into a slight problem with regard to compatibility between the laptop and the monitor. The laptop comes equipped with an embedded Intel GMA X4500MHD video card, hardly the most advanced piece of equipment out there. Its software is pretty substandard, and for some reason it detects my Amilo as a television rather than a monitor, and as such ends up sending video levels (16-235) rather than PC levels (0-255) via HDMI. Translation: severely washed out blacks. Unfortunately, there's no way to either tell it you have a computer monitor, not a television, nor is there any way to force it to use PC levels.

My (temporary) solution to this problem has been to use the VGA output instead of HDMI, which actually delivers a reasonably good image, albeit ever so slightly ringy, which isn't ideal when you're staring at scads of black-on-white text. That said, adjusting Windows' ClearType settings (a nice little unpublicised addition to Windows 7) has allowed me to alleviate the problem somewhat. I'm going to continue to explore the issue, but in the long run I suspect that, if I want to use HDMI and get the correct levels, I may have to look into a different monitor. I'd rather not have to spend yet more money... but then again, the laptop was pretty inexpensive to begin with. We'll see - it's not a life or death issue.

Just arrived...

8:54 PM / Blu-ray / 11 Comments

Red Road (BD, Verve, Region B, UK)

Pontypool (BD, Kaleidoscope, Region ABC, UK)

Menn som hater kvinner (BD, Yellow Bird/Nordisk Film, Region ABC, Norway)

Jenta som lekte med ilden (BD, Yellow Bird/Nordisk Film, Region ABC, Norway)

The last two are better known as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire respectively - movie adaptations of the first two novels in Stieg Larsson's posthumously-published Millennium Trilogy (the third film is to follow on BD in March). Alas, neither of these discs has English subtitles, but since I've already read the books (well, I've read the first and am about a third of my way through the second), I'm going to see how far I can get without the aid of a translation. At any rate, I didn't feel I could resist these after I saw the screen captures for the first one over at Hundland.org.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is released theatrically in the UK on March 12.

Cleaning up this site's act

9:28 PM / Web / No Comments

In an attempt to cut down on the spam that's been accumulating on this site recently, I've installed the Blog Janitor plugin for Movable Type and set it to disable commenting on all entries over 30 days old.

It's rather irritating to have to do this, but it should hopefully cut down on the amount of maintenance I'm currently having to do (most of the spam comments end up being posted in entries that were written several weeks ago), and in any event it's fairly rare for anyone to want to reply to anything older than that. If you want to comment on something from an older entry, you'd probably be as well leaving it on a more recent entry and linking back to the post you're referring to.

Amer and uncut A Lizard in a Woman's Skin playing at the GFT

7:20 PM / Cinema / 3 Comments

On Friday 26th and Saturday 27th of February, the annual Glasgow FrightFest is being held at the Glasgow Film Theatre. As per the official web site, the full list of titles being screened is as follows:

Friday:

• 7.00 pm - Frozen
• 9.30 pm - 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams
• 11.45 pm - Stag Night

Saturday:

• 2.00 pm - A Lizard in a Woman's Skin
• 4.15 pm - Amer
• 7.00 pm - [Rec] 2
• 9.00 pm - Splice
• 11.30 pm - Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre

I'll certainly be going to Amer and A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (which is being touted as a 110-minute "re-mastered, restored and never-before-seen fully uncut version" - which, if correct, would make it six minutes longer than the current longest available version), and perhaps some of the others as well, time and inclination permitting. Anyone else going to be there?

BD review: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

11:55 PM / Reviews / No Comments

I have nothing but admiration for Pixar's Wall-E and its push for realism, and I'll even grudgingly commend the heavily flawed 9 for its attempt to tell a darker, more mature story than we're used to with North American animation, but it always strikes me as something of a missed opportunity that so few animated movies, CG or traditional, fail to take advantage of the innate opportunities afforded by their medium - namely the opportunity to indulge in outrageous, broad acts of comedy that would be impossible in the real world. To that end, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs may very well bear the distinction of being the first CG animated feature to not be ashamed of being a cartoon.

[Continue reading...]

BD impressions: Antichrist

8:42 PM / BD Impressions / 5 Comments

The thing about a film like Antichrist is that, unless you were in the fortunate position of having viewed it at its premiere, every man and his dog will have expressed an opinion on it by the time you get around to seeing it, whether or not they actually saw it themselves. As such, I wonder to what extent my lukewarm reaction to it stemmed from having unrealistic expectations. Like just about everyone else, I knew all about "that scene" before going in (if, by some remarkable twist of fate, you don't know what "that scene" refers to, I'm not going to ruin it for you here), so its shock factor was dulled to a certain degree (it's still a squirmer, though). What I did realise was that "that scene", and the fifteen or so minutes surrounding it, were atypically arresting. The rest of the film is plodding and dreary, with powerful (or should that be unrestrained?) performances and some striking cinematography failing to liven it up. At times, von Trier seriously overestimates his viewers' (or at least this particular viewer's) suspension of disbelief, with a scene in which a fox talks to Willem Dafoe eliciting gales of derisive laughter.

In his Kermode Uncut blog, Mark Kermode cites Andrzej Zulawski's Possession as the spiritual forerunner of Antichrist, which I'm inclined to agree with, with the caveat that Possession is the better movie. It's far more gung-ho in its balls-to-the-wall weirdness, and while its performances are similarly hysterical, nothing Charlotte Gainsbourg does in Antichrist can hold a candle to Isabelle Adjani's subway station meltdown.

Antichrist, or rather the ideas behind it, are interesting enough, and the aforementioned fifteen minutes, which combine cringe-inducing gore with nail-biting tension, make it worth viewing, but on the whole I was a little let down. Kermode claims that no-one reacts to this film with indifference. Well, I respectfully disagree. There's always one, I suppose.

Image quality: A real mixed bag. Antichrist is an at times striking-looking film. At other times, it's a rather cheap-looking one, owing to the varying shutter speeds employed by von Trier and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, which results in the look alternating between that of film and that of someone's home video. A major issue with the image is the crushed greyscale, with severe banding and blocking visible in most scenes that take place in low light (see Example 1 and Example 4). I don't know whether the problem lies with the encode or the source material, but either way it looks like ass. Further problems are evident in the form of what looks like a dodgy scaling algorithm, which creates pronounced aliasing on any diagonal edge (look at Dafoe's cheek in Example 3 and the child's sleeve in Example 8). By far the worst problem, though, is the encoding, which is dismal. The film occupies a mere 14.8 GB on the disc, and it shows in the form of the worst compression artefacts I've ever seen on a BD. Look at Example 5 and Example 14 and try to hold on to your lunch.

It's a shame, because there is plenty of detail in the image, and without these severe flaws I'm sure it would look great. 5/10

Antichrist
studio: Chealsea Films; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 14.8 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 20.43 Mbit/sec

I've ordered a new toy

10:46 PM / Technology / 4 Comments

When I bought my Sony VAIO VGN-FZ11Z back in Autumn 2007, I thought it was the bee's knees. It was actually the first laptop I ever owned, and it was a far cry from the variety of clunky old rustbuckets that my dad had owned at different points throughout the 90s. It also had a BD-ROM drive, which was a big deal at the time, mainly because it allowed me to take screen captures of my BDs for the first time.

Things have changed a bit now, however. I now have a BD-ROM drive in my desktop machine, and I've come to see that, in some respects, I may have allowed the VAIO's drive to wow me at the expense of its other shortcomings. For one thing, it's pretty bulky and heavy. For another, its battery life is absolutely dismal. That's not much of a problem when it's sitting in my bedroom plugged in at the mains, which to be fair is where it is to be found most of the time, but on long trips it's a nightmare. Even in Performance mode, I get just over an hour's juice out of the battery before it gives out - less if I'm doing something CPU-intensive like playing a video file. This is partly due to the simple fact that rechargeable batteries become less effective over time, but it was never great, and I must confess to being more than a little jealous of my brother, who gets a good 3-4 hours out of his MacBook when running Windows on it.

Tonight, after a semi-lengthy period of perusing reviews and benchmarks of various different laptops, I decided to order an ASUS UL30A. It's smaller and lighter than my VAIO, has double the RAM and a significantly higher capacity hard drive, and best of all its battery lasts for ages. ASUS boasts 12 hours, which I immediately suspected was puffery, but the reviewers who have benchmarked it have all reported figures of between 8 and 10 hours, which is nothing to sniff at and far and away superior to what I'm getting at the moment. I found a new one on eBay for a very reasonable £500 and will be selling my VAIO forthwith in order to recoup some of that.

I'll let you know what it's like when it arrives.

Just arrived...

2:32 PM / Blu-ray / 3 Comments

Mesrine (BD, Momentum, Region B, UK)

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