Todd’s Movie Blog

Like most people I have been giving some thought to getting a Blu-Ray player, but all of that changed when I visited a friend a few weeks ago.  I had always thought Blu-Ray and Hi-Def were the same thing, enhanced picture that had a three dimensional depth to it.  But that was incorrect.  Hi-Def was the system that had the three dimensional depth so that when a camera panned you get motion sickness and the picture is so clear you can see every cavernous craggy wrinkle on Tommy Lee Jones’ face.  Blu-Ray, good picture but not anything like Hi-Def.

So, back to my friend, my wife and I were visiting to see his new baby and while we were there he showed me his Blu-Ray copy of The Watchmen.  And I had to admit that the picture quality was great.  Then we started watching some episodes of the old Gil Gerard Buck Rogers TV show.  And the picture quality was exactly the same.  I was amazed, Blu-Ray can upgrade regular DVD to the same picture quality?  Not really.  When I mentioned this to my friend he explained that it wasn’t the Blu-Ray it was his TV, a 1080, Blu-Ray enhances the sound to theater quality, not the picture.

The sound?  All that extra money for Blu-Ray discs is so you can have awesome sound?  Just to make sure sure I was clear on this, when I got home, I put on a disc of the old cult classic TV show Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea I had gotten from the library.  Now my TV isn’t up to the scale of my friend’s, it’s like a 780 or something like that, and my DVD player is a $30 Wal-Mart special I got about four years ago.  Guess what?  Picture quality was about the same.  Picture was so clear I could easily make out the zipper line in the monster suits and could tell at what time of day each scene was shot going by the prominence of the actor’s 5 o’clock shadow (side note, Richard Basehart apparently never worked late on that show, no 5 o’clock shadow ever).

So for me, Blu-Ray is pointless.  With a good enough TV I have excellent picture quality, and I really don’t need theater quality surround sound.

As we head toward the end of the month and everyone gearing up for Halloween, things don’t look too good for a filmatic enjoyment of the holiday.  Maybe it’s due to two lackluster horror films having already hit the theaters this month, Rob Zombie’s unnecessary sequel to his unnecessary remake of Halloween (2007), Halloween II (2009) and the Megan Fox vehicle Jennifer’s Body (2009), where a high school cheerleader gets transformed into a vampire/ ghoul hybrid who feeds on high school boys.

While the latter has an interesting sex reversal premise, the fact that she mostly targets the nerdy unpopular boys instead of the popular jocks, kills a lot of the vicarious thrill in the film.  Instead of the guilty pleasure in seeing smug, macho and bullying jocks get taken out, it is the saddening sight of the already victimized members of the school who get consumed (and yes, obviously, I was one of those geeky nobodies back in high school).

Adding to the film’s problems is the same thing that has killed a lot of new horror films, most notably Wes Craven’s Cursed (2005), taking R rated material and toning it down to PG-13 to gurantee a wider audience.  People that go to see a film like Jennifer’s Body are not the same audience you get for Twilight (2008), it’s premise appeals more to gorehounds who watch movies like Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005), and who probably all lined up to see Sorority Row (2009) instead.   The only thing I can say about this one is that as remakes go it’s better than the original  House on Sorority Row (1983), which isn’t hard to do considering how awful the original was. That being said, it is still sad to see Carrie Fisher appearing in the new one as the house mother (I guess script doctoring jobs are getting scarce these days).

Looks like this Halloween I’m going to be breaking out the old Universal classics again and staying home.

With all of the talk about the Disney Marvel merger making comics a big topic on many sites it jogged a thought I had been keeping in the back of my mind up toward the front.  Namely, with the success of Lord of the Rings, Narnia  and Harry Potter films why hasn’t Marvel put out a live action Doctor Strange movie? A costumed superhero wizard that fights demons.  How could that miss?  In the comics he defeated Dracula, so you could throw in some whiny vampires to appease the Twilight fans.  Wizards, demons and vampires, now that’s a summer blockbuster!