DVD

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In case you missed it the first time, tonight at 7 p.m. EST the SyFy channel will be re-broadcasting its natural disaster epic Sharknado.  Last week’s premiere of the movie – about a freak hurricane spawning off the coast of California and hitting Los Angeles, dropping shark-spewing tornadoes all over the place – became one of the biggest television hits of the summer.

(No, I did not watch this movie thing last week.  But the “#sharknado” hashtag on Twitter was sure a hella fun to behold!)

And then there’s this, which is certainly destined to become the centerpiece of every home entertainment library it finds itself ensconced upon: The Power Rangers Legacy: The First 20 Years DVD collection.  Just in time for the twentieth anniversary of the Mighty Moron… errrr, I mean Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers show which first unleashed this plague upon the land, Saban and ...

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This is just plum lousy…

Hey, I’ll buy it. I just pray that I won’t need a Mattel Intellivision to watch it on.

If that winds up being the final cover for the Blu-ray release of Tron, I swear that I’ll compose one of my own design in Photoshop and use that when I put this movie into my personal library.

Could anyone blame me? Just compare that Blu-ray cover “art” to the original theatrical poster for Tron from 1982…

I suspect that Disney’s failure to stand strongly behind the original Tron during the marketing of sequel Tron Legacy will become known as one of the worst commercial tactics in entertainment history. Disney was sitting on a wazoo-load of potential earnings if it had given the original movie some decent respect and linked it to the follow-up. Instead the suits at Disney are acting as if they should ...

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DocArzt’s LOST Blog passes along info about the DVD and Blu-ray release of Lost Season 6. The really good news is that we won’t have to wait hardly long at all to buy it! Whereas there’s been a seven-month gap between the season finale in May and the DVD/Blu-ray sets, Lost‘s sixth and final season is scheduled to drop for retail on August 24th!

Also arriving that day will be Lost: The Complete Collection ($229.99 for the DVD and $279.99 for Blu-ray) containing all of the season sets and bonus material, plus an extra disc of exclusive content. Maybe a good buy if you don’t have any of the sets yet, but I’ll prolly pass and just get the regular Season 6 Blu-ray set, since I’m already well on my way to building up my Lost Blu-ray collection 🙂...

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Startup company Cranberry has unveiled its DiamonDisc: a DVD that stores your data by etching it in stone… literally. The disc is composed of synthetic stone that a high-intensity laser burns the data into, creating a DVD said to be perfectly compatible with all DVD drives and players. But amazingly, Cranberry claims that the DiamonDisc will keep your data safe for a thousand years.

(Whether there will be DVD players in the year 3009 is a whole ‘nother matter.)

You can send your data to Cranberry to have it burned by them. Or you can buy the DiamonDisc recorder for your own use, for the low price of $4,995. But that also gets you 150 DiamonDiscs that currently run $34.95 each when bought separately.

Personally, I think the major studios should adopt this new technology for the home market. And the first movie that gets this “recorded in ...

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Oh geez… how did this one slip under my radar?

I’m going to always think of myself as one lucky son of a gun for having the extremely rare opportunity of enjoying Michael Dougherty’s Trick ‘R Treat the way it was meant to be seen: on a big screen with a huge crowd of fellow film fans (it was at Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9 two years ago). And we were told then that Trick ‘R Treat was supposed to have been released last year in time for Halloween… but for whatever reason the suits at Warners quashed what would have been a fall box-office bonanza.

But at last, however it came to be, Trick ‘R Treat can be enjoyed by the wide audience it deserves.

Slash here for the link to Amazon.com where you can purchase the DVD of Trick ‘R Treat. I’m not earning any coin from this pitch. ...

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If I can keep being a good boy until Christmas maybe Santa will put this in my stocking…

Even though I already own the Director’s Cut (and have recommended it to everyone instead of the original that came out in theaters earlier this year) I am already lusting badly for Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut. /Film has the succulent details about the DVD and Blu-ray releases. Here’s what you get on five discs for the DVD…

Disc 1:
– Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut Film
– Audio Commentary with Zack Snyder and Dave Gibbons

Disc 2: Over 3 Hours of Special Features
– The Phenomenon: The Comic that Changed Comics
– Real Super Heroes, Real Vigilantes
– Mechanics: Technologies of a Fantastic World
– Watchmen: Video Journals
– My Chemical Romance Desolation Row
– Under The Hood
– Story Within A Story: The Books of Watchmen

Disc 3: Digital

...
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A week ago Watchmen arrived on DVD and Blu-ray. You have a choice between getting the original theatrical edition (when the movie debuted back in March) or you can opt for the Director’s Cut. There’s also another version coming out later this fall that incorporates the “Tales of the Black Freighter” animated material into the movie itself. I’ll most certainly be buying that when it comes out (‘cuz I’m such a Watchmen nut)…

…but if you’re wondering which version to get now, the Director’s Cut stands as the definitive adaptation of the Watchmen graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Don’t get me wrong: I loved Watchmen when it came out in theaters (read my original review here). But having watched the Director’s Cut three times now, I cannot help but believe that had the studio execs let Zack Snyder release his original vision from the getgo, ...

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Try this one the next time you go to see a blockbuster movie like Star Trek in the theater: record it with a camcorder and if you get caught, tell the cinema management that “I’m a teacher who needs this for my students!”

Nutty though it sounds, that is what the Motion Picture Association of America is telling teachers to do instead of ripping video from copyrighted DVDs if they want to get clips for classroom purposes. The MPAA has even prepared an instructional video (left) demonstrating how teachers can set up a television with DVD player, and then aim their camcorder at the screen to record it. Which is not only silly but as the article at Ars Technica notes, this is much more laborious and time-consuming on the part of the teacher as opposed to digitally capturing (AKA “ripping” the video segments that they need).

This should be ...

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Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze is coming to your living room… and he’s bringing a few thousand of his friends with him. The 1975 action film based on the classic pulp hero is just one of many movies that Warner Brothers is making available via a first-of-its-kind “on-demand DVD” service that’s launching today.

By visiting warnerarchive.com you can select from many films that have previously not been made available in the DVD format. You pay twenty bucks and a week later a custom-made DVD – complete with nice case – comes in the mail. I just scanned through the catalog (only a fraction thus far of the complete library that Warners aims to make eventually available) and there are some real gems in there, including Abe Lincoln in Illinois and Countdown, the 1968 pre-Apollo 11 flick starting James Caan as an astronaut caught up in a mad race ...

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A little over a year ago I posted the how-to tutorial on putting video content from a DVD onto an iPod. The workhorse program that I found perfect for my needs was HandBrake. When it came time to convert Lost Season 4 for my iPod classic (‘cuz I like having all the Lost episodes hanging on my belt… along with my own movies, the Star Wars saga, etc.) I found that HandBrake had upgraded to version 0.9.3.

So if you haven’t checked it out yet, I heartily recommend giving HandBrake a looksee, because it has become significantly more powerful since the last time I used it en masse. HandBrake 0.9.3 introduces universal video input: it can now convert practically any format of video into MPEG-4, including DivX AVI files (very nice for putting those bootlegged Doctor Who episodes on an iPod or iPhone or any other ...

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