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Friday, October 2, 2009: Wallace & Gromit: The Complete Collection (BD, Region ABC, USA) Saturday, October 3, 2009: The New York Ripper (BD, Region ABC, USA) Saturday, October 3, 2009: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (BD, Region A,...

Posted at 11:59 PM in Blu-ray / DVD

No horror movie reviews this year, I'm afraid. I've simply been too busy to find the time....

Posted at 9:21 PM in General

Ah, the early 00s - a time when the horror genre hadn't yet gone down the route of remaking every single scary movie from the 70s but, by the same token, had only just shaken off the spectre of the...

Posted at 1:31 PM in BD Impressions

...the most celebrated creation of Albert Uderzo and the late René Goscinny. Asterix turned 50 yesterday, the first page of his first adventure, Asterix the Gaul, having appeared in the first issue of the magazine Pilote on October 29,...

Posted at 11:26 AM in Books

North by Northwest (BD, Warner, Region ABC, USA) Quite possibly my most anticipated BD release of 2009......

Posted at 11:15 AM in Blu-ray

One of the greatest irritants about Windows as an operating system is what I call "the grind" - i.e. the process by which, once the system has booted, it crunches away for a while, continually accessing the hard drive and...

Posted at 5:13 PM in Technology

Upcoming US and UK Blu-ray titles for the next week. Titles I intend to pick up at some point are in bold. Monday, October 26: Book of the Dead (Lions Gate, UK) Dances with Wolves (Warner, UK) District 13/District 13:...

Posted at 12:42 PM in Blu-ray

More like the edge of boredom, upon which I tottered for the duration of this biopic of playwright Dylan Thomas, told primarily from the perspectives of the two women in his life. Despite being beautifully shot by John Maybury (The...

Posted at 11:02 AM in BD Impressions

Particularly hilarious if you've seen the original Microsoft-sanctioned advertisement of which this is a parody....

Posted at 3:52 PM in Technology

Although its annoyingly smug narration device does grate at times, Shane Black's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a riotously enjoyable and appropriate convoluted twenty-first century take on 40s film noir conventions, with Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer serving well...

Posted at 1:58 PM in BD Impressions

The Vice: The Complete Series (DVD, Network, Region 2, UK) A bit of a story behind this: LoveFilm has the first series of The Vice available for rental. I added it to my queue, it arrived the other day,...

Posted at 11:37 PM in DVD

...which was released today. I received my download link first thing this morning and was ready to begin the install process within about 20 minutes. Because I was going from Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional (a pox...

Posted at 5:58 PM in Technology

Would it be an exaggeration to suggest that Transsiberian is the sort of film Alfred Hitchcock would have made if he had still been alive in 2008? The designers of the UK cover art certainly saw the similarities. Myself, I...

Posted at 12:32 PM in BD Impressions

Angel-A, Luc Besson's return to the director's chair after a seven-year hiatus, is certainly derivative. Highly reminiscent of a Parisian It's a Wonderful Life, it also has obvious parallels with another French film, Patrice Leconte's La fille sur le pont,...

Posted at 1:57 PM in BD Impressions

Let's get the downsides of Drag Me to Hell out of the way right off the bat. Yes, it's true, there is an over-abundance of CGI effects and a lot of them are cringe-inducingly bad. Also, while a number of...

Posted at 12:40 PM in BD Impressions

Upcoming US and UK Blu-ray titles for the next week. Titles I intend to pick up at some point are in bold. Monday, October 19: 24: Season Seven Blu-ray Collection (20th Century Fox, UK) The 39 Steps (ITV, UK) All...

Posted at 10:18 AM in Blu-ray

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is, of course, Disney's first and the first North American animated feature (although not, as it happens, the first animated feature, despite more than seventy years of misinformation) - "the one that started it...

Posted at 2:10 PM in BD Impressions

At one point, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings was my favourite book. That may no longer be true, but if so I'm unable to think of another book that would claim the throne in its place. In terms...

Posted at 10:59 PM in Books

The other day, I came across captures of the recent BD release of Drag Me to Hell on a DVD and BD review and image comparison site. (There are only a few sites that actually post direct full resolution captures,...

Posted at 5:50 PM in Blu-ray

...or "Why I Can't Stand Children" History repeats itself. A few posts back, I told you about my foolish decision to go and see Pixar's Finding Nemo during the school October week holidays of 2003. Well, today, I went to...

Posted at 9:20 PM in Cinema

Upcoming US and UK Blu-ray titles for the next week. Titles I intend to pick up at some point are in bold. Monday, October 12: 12 Rounds (20th Century Fox, UK) B-Girl (Anchor Bay, UK) Bridget Jones's Diary (Universal, UK)...

Posted at 12:00 AM in Blu-ray

The television miniseries (or serial) is something of a lost art. British television dramas tend to take one of two forms: (1) one-off or two-part standalones, or (2) longer-running, multi-season productions of varying length. Wikipedia defines a miniseries as "a...

Posted at 3:04 PM in Television

....with removable BBFC and IFCO logos on Optimum's new range of Studio Canal Collection Blu-ray Discs. I'd really like to see this become the standard. Particularly when you have cover art as tastefully designed as that of the titles...

Posted at 1:10 PM in Blu-ray

Belle de jour (BD, Optimum, Region B, UK) Le mépris (BD, Optimum, Region AB, UK) Defiance (BD, Momentum, Region B, UK) The Duchess (BD, Pathé, Region B, UK) Transsiberian (BD, Icon, Region B, UK) Borders - well, the Glasgow...

Posted at 8:49 PM in Blu-ray

I've only myself to blame, really. For some time now, I've run a dual boot Windows XP/Windows Vista system, keeping XP around mainly for compatibility purposes, should the need ever arise. In the last year or so, though, I don't...

Posted at 11:11 PM in Technology