Happy Monday, everyone. I didn’t get to the movies again this weekend, but a whole bunch of people showed up in droves to see Paranormal Activity 2, making it the #1 movie with $41 million! No surprise I suppose, as the horror genre usually reigns in October. As I’m not a horror fan, nor am I particularly fond of anything to with Halloween, we opted to see a fun family flick How to Train Your Dragon. Given all the positive reviews, we both had a high expectation for it. Fortunately it didn’t disappoint! LOVE Toothless, now I want my own pet dragon!
Anyway, this week is shaping up to be a cold and wet one in my neck of the woods 😦 Oh well, I knew we’d have to pay for all those gorgeous sunny Fall days we had all last week. But you know what, we’ve got something that might help chase out the blues of the upcoming Winter… we finally got our Blu-ray player! We were going to order online for our player but hubby took the day off on Friday and came across the exact Sony player we were going to buy at a giant retail store in town for 20 bucks cheaper! He then called me to ask which Blu-ray disc we should get first: Avatar or The Dark Knight. It didn’t take me a second longer to yelp, “The Dark Knight, of course! There’s no question!” He..he… I can be so decisive when the occasion calls for it 🙂
I was with my pal Prairiegirl Friday night to see this wonderful BBC production of the Taming of the Shrew, which is one of the four ShakespeaRe-told series, a modern-day adaptation of Shakespeare’s work. You can see a clip of Rufus Sewell and Shirley Henderson in my Rufus b’day tribute post, I’ll discuss this series in more detail once I see all four of them. In any case, as soon as I got home, hubby was already playing the disc so I couldn’t resist to join him and watch some of the scenes. The image quality obviously is striking in Blu-ray, especially the breathtaking truck-flip scene (so yep, it still deserves to be on this list). The movie itself still holds up well, we were as immersed in the story as we did the first time we saw this in the theater. And after that spectacular, cliff-hanger ending, I’m even more excited to see what Nolan has in store for us for Batman 3. Curious to see what he’ll call it. My friend Ted told me via Twitter he hoped it’ll be The Caped Crusader. Y’know what, I can live with that.
Well readers, hope your weekend was fun. Did you get to see any good movie(s)? Oh, just out curiosity, those who own a Blu-ray player, what disc did you either buy or watch for the first time? Any suggestion for a ‘must-own’ Blu-ray disc?
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I still don’t have a blu-ray player Ruth but I’m getting ever closer to purchasing my first. We just got a new big-screen TV to replace the old CRT so a blu-ray player, given they seem to be getting lower and lower in price every week, can’t be far on the horizon. Perhaps Christmas is the moment!
How have you found your new shiny disc spinner? Is the picture quality worth the extra cash (and buying films I already have on DVD)?
Hey Dan… we waited quite a long time for our Blu-ray but glad that we did. We got ours for less than $200! We originally thought it’d be a Christmas gift for both of us but when we saw the price we couldn’t resist!
The picture quality is definitely much more superior to DVDs, but I think it also depends on the movie. The Dark Knight is fairly new, but for older movies that have been converted to Blu-ray, the quality might be different. In fact, we resisted buying a used Gladiator Blu-ray because the reviews say the quality isn’t that much better, plus we’ve already got 2 copies of that movie in our collection 🙂 For now I think I’m not going to buy stuff that I already have on DVD unless someone says something is REALLY worth buying on Blu-ray.
Whether you like it or not, The Watchmen is a nice Blu-Ray to have… BTW, if any of you folks are upgrading to Flat Screen HDTVs, please recycle the old CRTs (places like Best Buy and other local recycling facilities will take them). Don’t just throw them out by the trash bin or you’ll find it still sitting there for weeks or forever. Scavengers will also take the copper from it but leave everything else behind making a worse mess.
Hey that’s a good one, Vince, the visual is striking when I saw it in the theater and I don’t own the dvd yet so that’s definitely one to consider. I actually was going to get it on Half Price Books, but turns out it was the complete graphic novels on Blu-ray, not the movie.
I donated my CRT a long time ago, but good tip there on getting rid of it.
Hope you enjoyed Taming of the Shrew, it was good the first time, but even better the second time around for me ;-)) Don’t know how Ruf does it, being superb in anything he does, from villain to a cross-dressing spoof! Also saw Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2001). What a cavalcade of big name actors in this one. A twist on the ordinary who-done-it, and really wished for more screen time for Clive Owen. Need to see more of his movies now.
Yes of course I did, Rufus is always excellent in any role, but his TOTS character was really fun to watch. Now that’s a guy who looks good in eyeliner & mascara 🙂
Oh, you saw Gosford Park? That’s on my top five ensemble cast list (https://flixchatter.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/five-notable-ensemble-cast-movies-in-the-last-decade) Yes Clive is wonderful, and so was Jeremy Northam. If you want to see more Clive movies, may I suggest The Boys Are Back? I reviewed that back in February. Also Children of Men, Inside Man, and Elizabeth The Golden Age – he really smolders as Sir Walter Raleigh. Lucky Cate Blanchett! 😉
Thanks, rtm, I knew you would recommend some good movies of Clive!
Congrats on your first BD player Ruth, I have a bunch of movies on the format. If you ever wanted to burrow some, just name the titles, chances are I might have some of them. One of the first Blu-ray I bought was Terminator 2 and it wasn’t that impressive, picture quality wise. But this was back in 2006 when Blu-ray first came out.
I would recommend buying all your Blu-ray on Amazon, they’re much cheaper than at Target, Wal-mart or Best Buy. As for a must own movie on Bluray? Well for me it’s Blade Runner since I love the movie. All of the Harry Potter films looks great too. Of course newer films will tend to look great on the format and yeah some older films won’t look as great. Some older films like Blade Runner looks stunning on BD because the studio decided to spend a lot of money transferring it to Bluray, while some titles they didn’t spend much time or money on it, so the picture quality is pretty average.
Here’s a good site to read review about new and old Blu-ray: http://www.highdefdigest.com/
My goodness, you’ve got your BD player 4 yrs ago??? You really are an early adopter! Hey, I might take you up on that… in fact, I was kinda hoping you’d offer because at this point I don’t really know what is worth buying.
I was just talking to Vince about HP on Blu-ray. I might wait until the last two came out and then get the whole box set 🙂
Thanks for the tip, Ted, I’ll check out that site.
glad that you chose The Dark Knight! it SHOULD be #1 blu-ray option! also glad you loved How To Train a Dragon! It is such a magnificent animated feature! enjoy and welcome to the blu-ray world! 🙂
Thanks Scarlet! Yes I’m certainly glad we did. I love that it has a bunch of Special Features on it, while the current AVATAR blu-ray just have the movie itself… lame!
I might review the Dragon movie sometime later, I really enjoyed that. We might even buy the disc when it goes on sale.
My dad got blue ray a few months ago(around June) and the first thing we watched on it was Watchmen with the enhanced viewing thing(the one where the creator talks about the process while the movie is playing).
And i remember being pleasantly surprised by the first Paranormal Activity