Film

While I’m not nearly as much of a movie buff as many, I do like ’em and watch ’em when I can.

Tron

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Very, very cool. I just picked up the Tron Special Edition DVD during lunch today, and got to watch some of it after I got home. I jumped around a bit in the film itself just to take a look at it, then bounced over to the second disc for all the special features and watched the ‘Making of Tron’ documentary. Turns out that Disney’s DVD department has done their usual stellar job, and the documentary is a full 90 minutes long! Much better than the 15-minute fluff piece that seems to be the norm for so many studios. I didn’t get through any more of the special features tonight, but I plan to soon.

Oh, and possibly one of the coolest things about this disc — right at the end of the documentary (around the 1:23:00 mark or so), there are a few quick glimpses at concept art for a possible Tron 2.0! There’s also a very cryptic teaser when you load the disc that ends with this web address — www.tronkillerapp.com. I’m not sure if it’s early promotion for Tron 2.0 or not, but it’s a very interesting site…will be fun to see where this goes in the future.

In any case, if you’re at all of the age to have been as entranced by Tron as I was, this set is a definite must-buy.

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Site fixed, new addy, and LOTR

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Okies — first off, I was able to restore this main page from a recent backup, so the page is back to normal again.

Secondly — www.djwudi.com is active! Yay! I’ll go ahead and leave the old djwudi.dyndns.org addy active for a while, but the preferred address for my site is now www.djwudi.com. Woohoo!

Lastly — just got back not too long ago from Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. In a word — incredible. I’m not sure I can get much more than that out yet, a more detailed review will have to wait, but…. Well, I enjoy fantasy movies, and they’re a lot of fun, but this is the first time I can remember that a fantasy film was that good and true to the spirit of the genre, completely sweeping you up in its world and carrying you along the entire time. Just wonderful.

And it’s going to be a long year until the next part….

Two quick things

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One silly that popped into my head: why is the plural of box ‘boxes’ when the plural of ox is ‘oxen’? You just have to love the English language, don’t you?

Second thing — Moulin Rouge! Yay! Picked it up today at lunch…now I just can’t wait to get home so I can watch it. Future project: creating my own 2-CD soundtrack by running my DVD’s audio output into my computer so that I can burn the entire movie to audio CD. The official soundtrack is certainly wonderful, but there were so many other songs that I wanted to be able to listen to…and now I’ll have them! Woohoo!

Aaaah! I wanna see it! I wanna see it now!

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Reviews of the first Lord of the Rings film, Fellowship of the Ring, are starting to hit the net…

Here’s what I’ve found so far: Home Theater Forum Sneak Peaks, Sir Ian McKellan, The White Council Forums, Ain’t It Cool News, The White Council Forums (another one), Home Theater Forum. I may be back to update this list later on, but these are the first batch.

What’s with the black bars?

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While most of my friends have been around me long enough to understand my preference for watching films in widescreen or letterboxed format, occasionally I get questions about the ‘black bars’ at the top and bottom of the screen. While I think I usually do a pretty decent job of explaining why they’re there, one of the members of the Home Theater Forum put together a really nice Shockwave Flash animation demonstrating what’s going on. If anyone’s got any questions about widescreen presentations, this link should help get the idea across:

Original Aspect Ratio, or, Why Widescreen?