They made BluRays of these movies why, exactly?

We all know that prices for movies on physical media are seriously in the tank. Generally speaking, the only movies that can be priced at top dollar have been released within the past six months, maybe a year. (And special collections like Criterion, of course.)

Everything else -- even the good movies -- can be had for under $15, and usually under $10. That's both DVDs and BluRays. In fact, one of the most interesting parts about this phenomenon is that stores are observing less and less of a distinction between these two formats when pricing them.

Sure, there are the exceptions, like the clueless grocery stores that are still selling DVDs of four-year-old movies for $20. My guess is, they're not selling many of them.

So it's very common to walk into a store that sells movies and find a discount shelf with tons of decent titles on it. Just recently I walked out of Target with a $5 BluRay of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Never mind that I had an unopened DVD at home I had obviously never watched -- the $5 BluRay was attractive enough that I now have two T2s. In fact, I've decided I need to stop looking at BluRays at Target, period. I could walk away with several each time if I'm not careful.

But this piece is not about an idiotic chain that violates these BluRay pricing guidelines. It's about the idiotic companies that release the dregs of their back catalogue on BluRay in the first place, when their only possible destination is the bargain bin.

When I went shopping at Fry's on Wednesday to pick up a hard drive for work, I came across such a $5 BluRay wall, and because I can't help myself, I scanned it to see what BluRay I would buy if I were buying one. (For me, this is like the problem gambler who makes gentleman's bets to feed his addiction without letting it destroy him.)

I couldn't find a single BluRay on this wall that I would actually buy, regardless of price. And it's not just because they were bad movies from the past couple years that I wouldn't want to own. It's because they were bad movies from the 1980s and 1990s that I wouldn't want to own.

Which got me thinking: Why the hell would they have brought these movies to BluRay in the first place?

As a sometimes-anal guy and a self-described completist, I understand and philosophically agree with the idea of making all movies, however obscure, available on the physical media platform that's the current standard bearer. (That's in part because I'm old-fashioned and still love physical media.) But from a business perspective, I don't get it at all. When someone said "Yeah, let's do a BluRay press of The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag," did they really expect to make money on it? What buying public out there was frothing at the mouth for a forgotten 1992 comedy starring Peneleope Ann Miller? (I guess I shouldn't diss on Miller -- she does appear in The Artist.)

I haven't actually seen The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag, but I just noticed a hilarious indicator that it might not be a very good movie. The lead "critigasm" on the poster above is "A screwball comedy!" See, the word "screwball" is not just an adjective modifying the word "comedy." "Screwball comedy" is an actual film genre. So this is the equivalent of a poster for Die Hard proudly proclaiming: "An action movie!" Which tells me there weren't many other options for critics praising Betty Lou. (In fact, it's very possible that this critic was not praising the movie, either. He might have been merely listing the film's genre in his review. But it's common practice for a studio's marketing department to excise any piece of any review for any reason, twist it to sound like praise, and add exclamation points at their discretion. Careful what you write, film critics out there.)

But this was just one of a bunch of hilarious titles, a sampling of which I emailed myself in order to refer to them later. A number of them were terrible straight-to-video movies (Sharktopus) or mockbusters (The Day the Earth Stopped) from recent years, but I get those, because at least BluRay existed at the time those movies were released. It's the ones that are genuine relics that made me laugh the most.

Instead of listing them and telling you why each one is a poor fit for BluRay from a profit perspective, I thought it would be more fun to just show you their posters and leave the conclusions up to you. Forthwith:












For the record, I've seen Consenting Adults, The Marrying Man and V.I. Warshawski. If forced to choose between these, The Marrying Man has a funny moment or two, if I remember correctly.

Of course, if forced to choose from the entire wall, I'd have chosen Betsy's Wedding, a 1990 comedy starring Alan Alda and Molly Ringwald. I remember it primarily as the other movie I saw in an illegal double feature the first time I saw Total Recall. But I also remember finding it pretty enjoyable.

So why didn't I include the Betsy's Wedding poster in my list of humorous posters?

Well, like the marketing departments of movie studios, I like to pick and choose only the evidence that actually supports my case.

The predominant physical delivery method for movies?

There are moments in life when you notice a shift in the way things are done -- in the way people talk about things, in the way people do things. The shift doesn't occur in that moment, of course -- it's gradual. But there's always a moment when you first acknowledge it.

I had one of those moments yesterday.

KCRW, the local NPR station, doesn't have commercials of course -- it's public radio. But it does have little sponsorship interstitials to pimp the underwriters, which are different from commercials, I guess, in the sense that the station produces the promos rather than the underwriters themselves. And it's supposed to be just an acknowledgement, a brief piece that doesn't contain any discussion of the actual quality or benefits of the product in question.

Many of these are for movies. I like hearing them because, you know, I like movies. Sometimes they're for movies currently in theaters. Sometimes they're for movies that are allegedly still in theaters, but really are not. (I just heard one for The Ides of March on my way in to work.) And sometimes they're for movies that are about to arrive on video. As in the one I heard yesterday, which went something like this:

"KCRW is brought to you by The Help, from Dreamworks Pictures. Available on BluRay December 6th."

The first thing I thought was, "Well, what if I want to get it on DVD?"

The second thing I thought was, "Ah, I get it -- DVD is yesterday's news. BluRay is now where it's at."

This interstitial implied two things to me:

1) There are really no new movies anymore that are not being released on BluRay. I kind of knew that, but it took something like this to make me consciously acknowledge it.

2) It is sort of assumed that pretty much everyone has BluRay now. Enough that advertising its arrival on DVD seems outdated.

In the past, I believe KCRW said "available on DVD and BluRay." But DVD has now been dropped. The Help probably wasn't the first time it was dropped -- it was just the first time I noticed it.

I find this kind of fascinating. We only just bought our BluRay player in August of 2010, and we weren't the last among our friends to get one. But by now, since it doesn't cost a king's ransom to invest in one, KCRW is assuming that everyone has one -- everyone who's anyone, anyway. Everyone who's really serious about movies.

Of course, this could just be one random decision made by one random KCRW copywriter. But really, nothing is random when it comes to writing copy. There's an intention behind everything, especially when it's short and it's pre-recorded, meaning it will play multiple times over a couple weeks. It must be efficient and it must default to the greatest level of accessibility for the most listeners.

And for the most listeners, BluRay seems to have become the most relevant medium for them to watch new movies. So says/thinks KCRW, anyway.

Now, not every part of the video industry reflects this. If you walk up to a Redbox kiosk, you will still find many more movies available on DVD than on BluRay -- maybe only half the titles are also available on BluRay, and it may be even fewer when you consider that Redbox also stocks timely old releases (you know, holiday classics around this time of year). And you won't find anything in a Redbox kiosk that's only available on BluRay. They've made the judgment that with a finite amount of physical storage space, they can serve a wider array of customers by skewing the inventory toward DVD. (It also helps that you can play DVDs in BluRay players, but not the reverse.)

But I do think it's reasonable for KCRW to have graduated beyond saying "available on DVD December 6th." When you come right down to it, perhaps it is starting to sound a little quaint.

I suppose one way around it would be to say "available on video December 6th," because the word "video" does still function as a catch-all for movies you no longer have to go to a movie theater to see. (I used it in the fourth paragraph of this piece without even thinking about it, and I bet you didn't blink.) But if we're talking solely about the impression created in the listener, the term "video" could also remind some people of "video tape." And that is certainly quaint, as they haven't made video tapes of new movies for probably six or seven years. (I got my first DVD player in 2003, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't forced into doing so by the total obsolescence of the video tape.)

Or maybe it's just that KCRW wants to sound progressive. It's no secret that many of the people who listen to public radio are liberals who probably have a decent amount of money. Your average joe may not have converted to BluRays -- you never see BluRays positioned as an impulse buy at the checkout stand at the grocery store, for example -- but maybe your average KCRW listener demands the highest quality standards for his/her movie-watching experience.

Well, I'm just glad we still watch movies using physical artifacts at all. If the prices they're charging at Target for BluRays these days -- as low as $5 for some older releases (I just bought Terminator 2: Judgment Day at that price) -- are any indication, movies as physical artifacts are on their way out, too. Of course, that's hardly the only indication of that reality. Just ask the music industry.

And so I'm expecting another day like this to come in, what, three years? Five years? KCRW will have an interstitial that says:

"KCRW is brought to you by The Hunger Games 3, available in Ultraviolet and on the cloud December 6th."

Christmas BluRay haul

I've done nothing but weigh you down with words over the last couple entries, so I thought I'd give you a break with a different approach today. Who has the time during the holidays to read all these words, many of them self-indulgent?

So instead of discussing at length how literally my family took me when I told them I wanted movies for Christmas (and that I didn't get the one movie I definitely expected to get), today I will post in pictures only. Here are the BluRays I got for Christmas, posted in the order I opened them. Discuss.

Haunted by spirits

As recently as Friday I wrote about how our "new" LG BluRay player (we got it in August) has been acting up a bit. In a longer post about other things, I mentioned that it had shown poor fault tolerance when trying to get me through a viewing of a DVD of The Best Years of Our Lives, which I was able to complete without further incident on my laptop.

It's not the first time it has showed that behavior, and the age/history of the disc doesn't seem to be a factor. As a matter of fact, it choked on the last chapter of Gigli a couple weeks ago -- on a brand new disc. How did I have a brand new disc of Gigli in my possession? It was part of a gag gift for a friend, and the gag part required me to open the packaging anyway, so I thought I'd use the opportunity to finally watch this famous turkey. Let's just say I didn't find it to be as much of a turkey as most people, but I did think it was hilarious that even a brand new disc couldn't play through to completion. At the time I took it as a sign of the poor quality of the pressing -- but now I'm not so sure.

So over the last few days we had a couple funny incidents that I thought were worth sharing, involving the movies Disney's A Christmas Carol and Japanese Story. As you see, I have cleverly fit them both under the title "Haunted by spirits" -- A Christmas Carol involves that quite literally, while Japanese culture is steeped in the spirit world. But the real haunting is of my BluRay player, whose quirky behavior is getting harder and harder to pigeonhole.

Don't pause it

As I may have discussed before, I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to monitoring how closely other people are watching the movies I'm watching. And since my wife is the one I usually see movies with, she's the one who gets under my skin on this issue -- looking down at her food too long while missing visual information, not looking at the screen while there are subtitles to read, etc.

But the one that gets me most is when she gets up from the couch and says "Don't pause it." That's right, she's going to walk away from the movie for some unknown amount of time -- she may know, but I don't -- and she doesn't even want me to pause it. If it's a crappy movie, I don't mind so much, but if it's something I'm enjoying, it disappoints me greatly.

"Don't pause it" took on a different meaning on Friday night, Christmas Eve, when we watched Disney's A Christmas Carol, which I had been raving about since I saw it in the theater last year -- and since she refused to go with me for what would have been my second time. The viewing was a victory overall, because she told me afterward that it might be her favorite film version of Dickens' tale -- and that it would, in fact, have been cool to see it on the big screen in 3D. (Not saying "I told you so," not saying "I told you so.")

But the viewing got off to a rough start when I paused to yell at the neighbor's dogs. Most often, their toxic behavior presents itself in the form of hair-trigger barking, but they're also known for trying "to make their great escape" from the yard. That's how my wife and I refer to it when they rip and tear at the corrugated plastic fence, which sounds a bit like a child's toy going a couple rounds in the garbage disposal. "Knock it off!" I shouted a couple times, with mixed results at best.

The results were decidedly negative for the movie. For some reason, upon coming out of the pause, we were now in "closed captioning for the hearing impaired" mode. Huh?

Thinking it a fluke, we went back to the main menu and reset the settings. Back to normal. But, I made the mistake of pausing a second time, and once again, the movie thought we were deaf. I've seen strange behavior by DVD players in terms of the closed captioning, but never triggered by the pause button.

So we took this opportunity to go to the bathroom, put on another layer, and stock up on whatever food and drink we might possibly need for the rest of the film. Still, I was worried. This was a film I had a lot invested in, and I could easily see her needing to do or get something, and refusing to let me pause it, knowing that the pause would entail yet another trip out to the setup menu.

Nope. We made it all the way to the end. She fell asleep for 15 seconds once or twice, which I guess is the equivalent of leaving on a 15-second errand around the house -- or "not pausing." But her praise for the film meant I could live with that.

Reboot

The previous story could have been blamed on either the BluRay player or the disc itself, but this next example is a lot less ambiguous.

Wanting to reconnect with her Australian homeland on Christmas Day, my wife asked if we could watch one of the Australian films we had on our Netlix instant queue -- which of course uses our BluRay player to operate. Walkabout was a possibility, but we ultimately went with Japanese Story, a movie directed by a woman named Sue Brooks, starring Toni Collette. It's a bit of a weird movie, but I mean that in a good way. It's about an unexpected love affair between Collette's geologist and the Japanese businessman she's driving around, because his company owns hers. And it takes a definitely unexpected turn around the end of the second act. But I agreed with my wife that in the end, it's quite beautiful in its way.

It was the end of the third act that was the problem. In fact, on the very last shot of the film -- even if she hadn't already seen it, I'd have known it was the last shot because it had that "last shot feel" -- the movie crapped out. At first it just got stuck, like a DVD freezes when it encounters a scratch. But then when I tried to press stop, it hung while trying to process the command to return to the previous menu.

It soon became clear that I wasn't going to have any luck until I shut down the player entirely. But even this was a no-go. Pressing the power button on the remote control was having no effect. So I pressed the power button directly on the player. Still no effect. Just when I thought I was going to have to unplug the damn thing, it finally shut down.

That would have been weird enough, but when it came back on, and we tried to go to Netflix, it asked us if we were subscribers. Upon selecting "Yes," it then asked us to go to our Netflix account on our computer and type in this code. In other words, we needed to be set up for the first time all over again. I immediately wondered what might have been lost in this exchange, like the memory of where we were in certain incomplete viewings -- or even that we'd ever had any viewings at all.

My wife did as requested, and everything was restored. Except for the fact that we had recently viewed Japanese Story -- there was no evidence of it whatsoever. I had to select it from our instant queue again, and fast-forward all the way to the end in order to watch the last 30 seconds of the last shot, and the credits.

So yeah, we may have a cheap BluRay player. I guess we'll just have to see what the future holds in store.

And maybe call an exorcist to banish these ghosts from my machine.

Ranking the Star Treks

It only took 11 days, but on Thursday, we finally watched our first BluRay on our new (and first) BluRay player.

The delay had a lot to do with getting the right HDMI setup. See, we have only one HDMI port on our TV, a consequence of having purchased it about three years ago. It still feels like our "new" TV, so this was one of our first pieces of evidence that it's not quite cutting edge. Our cable box had been hogging the one HDMI port, so we initially set up the BluRay player using ... um, regular cables. (Sorry, I'm not a component geek -- I don't have all my terminology down.) But we knew we weren't taking full advantage of the HDMI picture quality, so the day before we went into the hospital to give birth to my son, I bought an HDMI two-port hub, that would allow us to have both the cable and the BluRay player take advantage of the TV's one input at the same time. I didn't get to actually try it until a week later, at which point it proved to be a total dud -- thanks a lot, Radio Shack.

So we decided on a temporary solution of going old-school, and simply changing which cable was plugged into the back depending on whether we were watching cable or BluRay. This can't be our permanent solution -- it's just too much of a hassle. But we put it in place at least long enough to pop our BluRay cherry. And instead of watching either of the two BluRays we'd bought -- Where the Wild Things Are or Bram Stoker's Dracula -- we went with a rental from Blockbuster: J.J. Abrams' Star Trek, which we'd both seen. Simply put, it looked beautiful.

There had been exactly ten of the "original" Star Trek movies -- six with Captain Kirk et al, and four with Captain Picard et al. Abrams' film goes back to Kirk et al, but of course recasts those roles with younger actors. (As well as including Leonard Nimoy as part of the plot's time-travel element.)

And though I usually like to choose round numbers to rank things, yesterday I got to thinking that it would be a fun blog post to rank the Star Trek films, since I've seen all 11 of them. If I want to add some kind of flimsy justification to ranking the top 11 of something, I can tie in the 11 films with the 11 days it took us to watch our first BluRay. Hey, I said it was flimsy.

One note before I begin: Many of these rankings are based on only a single viewing, which in some cases took place over a quarter century ago. But let's just say I'm not committed enough to fairness to re-watch ten other Star Trek films, just so I can be absolutely certain of the accuracy of my personal rankings.

Without further ado (SPOILERS TO FOLLOW):

1) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982, Nicholas Meyer). As I discussed in my post about good sequels earlier this summer, Star Trek II is almost certainly the most important Star Trek movie ever made, as it allowed all future Star Trek movies to exist. When Star Trek: The Motion Picture failed to register, a lot was riding on this movie to succeed, else they probably would have stopped making theatrical incarnations of the adventures of Kirk, Spock, Bones and the gang. And succeed it did -- even though the original actually made more money, this was considered to be the far superior effort by critics and fans. The Wrath of Khan gave us one of the great mano-a-mano cinematic battles of all time between Kirk and Khan, even though they never meet in the flesh in the movie. It's like a great chess match between two brilliant generals, and it includes some of the most quotable Star Trek dialogue of all time. (Not to mention Kirk's all time great melodramatic moment, seen here.) Not only are there some excellent space battles and military strategizing, but the film also contains some melancholy philosophizing on aging, which is nearly poetic. (Ironic in retrospect, considering that the Enterprise crew were just getting started in their cinematic adventures, not wrapping them up.) Ricardo Montalban surely gives one of the great villainous performances of all time as Khan. If this is not everyone's favorite Star Trek movie, it should be.

2) Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986, Leonard Nimoy). However, I'd have a hard time begrudging anyone this as a choice for best Trek movie of all time. If you want to talk about truly going where no [Trek film] had gone before, how about making a Star Trek movie that could accurately be characterized as a modern-day romantic comedy? The film is suffused with a sprightly quality that was absolutely infectious -- I remember the audience I saw it with in hysterics over the writing, especially Spock's attempts to fit into life in 1980s San Francisco. It was a masterstroke, after two previous extremely dour entries, to give us a Trek movie in which not a single tragic thing occurs, and the primary conflict is whether humpback whales can be returned to the 23rd century, to communicate with an alien probe that is inadvertently sucking Earth dry in its attempt to contact them. This is a tight, exciting script, and it features a darling relationship between Kirk and a 20th century marine biologist (played by Gillian Hicks). That's where the romantic comedy element comes in. William Shatner and Nimoy lead the way as the cast gives us a bunch of loosey-goosey performances, and a helluva fun time at the movies. To add to the movie's quirk factor, they're riding around in a captured Klingon vessel. If there were ever a Trek movie for non-Trekkies, it was this one.

3) Star Trek (2009, J.J. Abrams). Or this one. I needn't go about praising this movie too much, because plenty of other people have already done that. But if there were ever a person who could bring Star Trek to the masses, Abrams was apparently the guy. Sure, you have to adjust for inflation, but Star Trek's $257 million at the U.S. box office was nearly $150 more than the next highest grossing film in the series, the aforementioned Star Trek IV ($109 million). The film is excellently cast from top to bottom, with Chris Pine effortlessly taking Kirk's confidence by the lapels, and Zachary Quinto seemingly born to play a Vulcan. This film may have spoken to audiences in a big way, but that doesn't mean it plays it safe. In fact, Abrams risked royally pissing off a nation of Trekkies (they actually prefer the term Trekkers) by messing with the Star Trek timeline, including destroying the planet Vulcan. But the kooky time travel logic actually makes a certain sense, and for the most part, I think Trekkers bought it. As well they should -- the new timeline will allow new, never-before-considered adventures for characters whose fates had already been known in previous Trek films.

4) Star Trek: First Contact (1996, Jonathan Frakes). And here's where I start to get a bit fuzzy. According to my records, I have seen this film only once, and it had to be in the theater, which means I haven't seen it in 14 years. But I remember thinking that this excellently continued the reliable "the even Star Trek movies are better than the odd ones" principle, this being, for all intents and purposes, Star Trek VIII. Again time travel enters into one of the best Trek movies, as the Enterprise returns to the moment on Earth when contact was first established with extra-terrestrial life, paving the way for the future of human space travel. But it also contains Picard's tangling with the ominous Borg, a great Trek villain that had not yet appeared in a movie. Both elements are carried off excellently. Also, Frakes continues the series' tradition of actors taking the helm for at least one film -- he also plays first officer William Riker.

5) Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991, Nicholas Meyer). And speaking of the even-numbered movies, this is the other great example, in addition to II, IV and VIII. This and First Contact could easily flip-flop in the rankings, as I remember them about equally well, and they are probably about equally good. I clearly owe them both another viewing, as the primary thing I remember about this movie is that Kirk gets stranded in some kind of ice prison, and that David Bowie's wife, Iman, makes an appearance. The rest is just nebulously positive vibes.

6) Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984, Leonard Nimoy). Hands down the most difficult-to-watch Star Trek movie. It surely helped solidify the "odd movies are bad" principle, but I think this movie is difficult more than it's bad. Even if it weren't about the rapid re-growth of a reborn Spock on the Genesis planet, and all the trauma that entails, the movie also features Kirk's son David (Merritt Butrick) getting killed by a Klingon, and the crew setting the invaded Enterprise to self-destruct. The movie is literally dark, shot in shades of red, and there's nary a happy or humorous moment in it. But in my book it gains points by really "going for it."

7) Star Trek Generations (1994, David Carson). I've actually re-watched this film in the last five years, and if not for that second viewing, it might have been ranked lower. However, this is a pretty good film. It's an effective torch-passing ceremony from the old Enterprise crew to the new, and contains perhaps the single-most momentous occurrence in the entire Trek narrative: the death of James T. Kirk. It's a pretty satisfying death -- he pretty much saves the universe in the process. Oh, and Brent Spiner is really funny as Data, who has an emotion chip implanted with hilarious results.

8) Star Trek: Nemesis (2002, Stuart Baird). This film earns extra points for its own sense of finality, as it was pretty much known that this was going to be the final Star Trek film (Star Trek X, if you are keeping count) -- at least that's what we thought before J.J. Abrams came along. In fact, it's the only even-numbered Star Trek movie that is not widely acknowledged to be significantly superior to its odd-numbered counterparts. I don't remember a whole lot about what happens in this movie, but it does feature a major character death as well: Data, who has always been the Next Generation's answer to Spock. Then again, they do create a new Data at the end, he just doesn't have the original Data's personality -- or should we say, memory banks?

9) Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979, Robert Wise). Despite listing several Trek films earlier that I said were most urgently in need of revisiting, this may actually be the most deserving candidate for a second viewing because it's been over 30 years since I've seen it. That's right, I only saw it in the theater, and all I really remember about it is my profound sense of disappointment when I walked out. It must have been really boring to leave a six-year-old like me, who should have just liked seeing laser blasts and space ships, so totally unsatisfied. In fact, I remember actually feeling a palpable sense of uncertainty about Star Trek II when my dad and I went to see it in the theater, because of how much I'd disliked this film. But this is the one that demands a revisit merely for academic purposes -- it couldn't have been as bad as I remembered, could it? The other thing I remember is that there was a bald woman in it.

10) Star Trek: Insurrection (1998, Jonathan Frakes). This movie may actually be better than Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but the reason it's ranked where it is is that it has the least grandiose plot of any Star Trek movie, despite that inflammatory title. In fact, I remember writing in my review that it was more like a regular episode of The Next Generation than a movie. The plot had something to do with saving people on a doomed planet, and I remember that Picard and his love interest spend a decent amount of time trapped in some kind of cave. As an interesting side note, this may be the only review I've ever written where I no longer have access to any copy of the review. For some reason, my review was replaced on the website with another writer's work, and I can no longer find the Microsoft Word original. Also, I thought I'd share a funny little story, this being Star Trek IX. Back when The Search for Spock came out, my friends and I had a joke that each of the next however many movies in the series would be the search for one of the other crew members. The one that always was funniest to me was Star Trek IX: The Search for Uhura. Because let's face it -- even though Abrams is trying to make her a more important character this time around, Uhura was a total afterthought in the original six Star Trek films.

11) Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989, William Shatner). You'd like to think that the only film in the series directed by William Shatner would be better than this, but it ain't. As a sign of my affection for the series in general, I still do not consider Star Trek V to be out and out bad -- but it's not good. Shatner wisely tried to continue the levity and camaraderie of Star Trek IV by having Kirk, Spock and Bones go on a camping trip and climb a mountain. It's a good effort but it doesn't quite work. Of course, the real lasting impression of this film is that the Enterprise crew goes to the edge of the universe (or some such) in a quest to find God. Who knew that God was a renegade Vulcan named Sybok, Spock's half-brother? Not how I pictured him.

Agree? Disagree? Actually seen all 11? I'd love to hear from you.

Catapulted into the future - twice

I am an IT guy by day, but that doesn't mean I'm necessarily into the latest and greatest gadgets. As a matter of fact, part of me hates the latest and greatest, because it means I have to learn something new. As an example of that, I'm still using Windows XP on my work computer. It's the same operating system the users still use, so it has its benefits in that respect, but most of my co-workers have been using Windows Vista for some time, and some have even moved on to Windows 7.

This carries over to my need -- or lack thereof -- to have the latest and greatest in entertainment gadgets. On the Mac/PC spectrum, I'm a PC, so it goes without saying that I've left most of Apple's shiny new toys untouched, save the ipod. But it actually took me two to three years longer than most people to get my first one of those -- I didn't have my first ipod (the one I still use) until Christmas of 2006. You'd think, since I'm a huge movie buff, I would have been faster to snap up a DVD player, but no. By the time I got my first one, in 2003, most of my friends had already had theirs for those same two to three years.

I guess you could blame my Puritanical New England upbringing for this. It's not that I didn't see the value in an ipod or a DVD player -- not that I didn't want one. It's that I felt I didn't really deserve one. What had I done that meant I got to have a shiny new toy so soon after it was available? And so with each, I've waited until the point that I thought most other people already had the thing in question, so my purchase of it wouldn't seem like an extravagance, a luxury that I hadn't earned. (Plus, in most cases, the price goes down once something starts to saturate the marketplace.)

You may have figured out where this is going. That's right, about two or three years after most people got theirs, I now finally have my first BluRay player.

The thing is, the ability to watch BluRays wasn't even our big technological advancement of the weekend. See, even though we had it set up starting at about 7 o'clock on Saturday night, we have yet to watch an actual BluRay in our player.

That's because we got one of those BluRay players that streams Netflix on your TV. And that, my friends, was the big, gasping, forehead-slapping leap forward into a new horizon.

After we got the player set up, we debated a bit about the input cables -- whether we should take the one HDMI cable out of our cable box in order to use it for the BluRay, etc. But this was quickly forgotten as soon as the player detected our home wifi. My wife logged into her Netflix account on the TV screen, and voila -- there was her instant online queue of movies to watch. But that's not all. There were also 15-20 other genre categories of suggested movies -- and terrifically specific genres, too. Action/Adventure. Thriller. Horror. Sci-Fi. Documentaries. Foreign Films. Both Comedy and a category called "Witty Films," though we did not immediately see the distinction. TV. And each of these categories had something like 75 titles up for the offering, immediately accessible to us.

Our first impression, which we shared with each other, was that it was like we were in a hotel, choosing between a massive selection of titles, yet all of them were free. So maybe it was more like those exciting plane trips to Australia, where there's no end to the number of gratis options for your eyeballs to look at.

Just to test the connection speed, to see if there would be service interruptions because we were connected wirelessly, we threw on an episode of the original Aeon Flux series from MTV. I expected it to be about five minutes long, but because it crept up to 14, we only half-watched it as we prepared dinner. But the important thing was that it had passed the test -- no dropped service or other service issues whatsoever.

The first thing we watched completely, again from the TV category, was the pilot of Futurama. We needed something short to watch over dinner, as an amuse-bouche before the movie we planned to watch afterward. Sure, you can find Futurama on a number of different networks at any given time of the day. But when do you ever stumble across the pilot? Because of this new big-screen access to my wife's Netflix account, we could pick and choose which Futurama we watched.

I wish I could say that the movie we chose was a better first feature-length use of the technology. After a number of giddy trips through the various categories -- and it looks so pretty up on the screen, a line of movie posters passing along from left to right, with the current selection enlarged in the center -- we decided on Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms. Even with the limitless possibilities of the new device, I was still in killing two birds with one stone mode. See, I had gotten approved to review Twentynine Palms, and it was in my wife's instant online queue, which means she wanted to see it too. So onward we went. It was only after we'd finished what I consider to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen (which really deserves its own post -- or maybe doesn't deserve it, because that might encourage other people to subject themselves to it) that I realized there was already a review on my site for this movie. Turns out I'd been approved to review Leonardo Ricagni's 29 Palms, from 2002, not Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms, from 2004. Bummer, because I was super excited to rip into this movie. Instead, somebody else got to do it.

We did have a couple short service interruptions this time. To add insult to the injury of watching this particular film, one dropped signal came with less than two minutes remaining, and we almost decided just to shitcan those last two minutes. But we overcame the three minutes of being down and finished the movie. I must say, I was a little concerned about losing our connection two or three times total.

Until Sunday afternoon, when we watched Lance Hammer's excellent debut feature Ballast (also from my wife's instant online queue), and experienced nary a signal drop throughout. Score.

As for the BluRays ... well, we may wait until we get the HDMI cable thing sorted out before we sit down for an entire one. We want it to blow our minds, right? It was excited enough just to make our first two BluRay purchases. I don't know that we're going to amass a huge BluRay collection -- we're trying to be more sensible about such things, and besides, we have a child on the way -- but it was no problem deciding to purchase one BluRay as part of the ceremony of buying the player. We chose that one rather easily -- Where the Wild Things Are -- and paid the $29.99 full price for it gladly. However, I also made an impulsive second purchase when I saw that one of my favorite visual feasts of all time -- Bram Stoker's Dracula -- was on sale at Target for only $9.99. Hell, I would have paid $9.99 for it on DVD. So we bought both.

It was Bram Stoker's Dracula that I tested when we first set up the player, and it was Bram Stoker's Dracula whose opening minute did not look any different than a regular DVD. I am hoping this is just our current cabling setup, not an actual deficit in our BluRay player or our TV. I'm told that HDMI is a must for BluRay, and I'm excited to get that resolved this week.

The future ... it can be scary, and it can seem like you don't deserve it. But once you get here, it feels very, very good.