Category Archives: Movies & TV

DVD & Blu-ray, Life, Movies & TV

I’m Seeing Kevin Smith!

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Kevin Smith is going to be appearing next month for one of his legendary Q&A sessions at the Prince Charles Cinema (complete with Tarantino-themed bar, which defies awesomeness) in London, and I’ve got tickets! Hooray!

I’ve missed out on the chance to see him speak a handful of times now but have an unhealthy enthusiasm for his ‘Evening With…’ DVDs, and although this one won’t be recorded it’s all worth it to hear some more material. Especially if said material ends up being a tirade against Jonathan Ross, ? la his bash of the 3AM Girls on the last DVD. I’d like to have a bit of a rant about Ross in front of an audience myself, but that’s another story.

Suffice to say I’ll post a report (hopefully some photos as well) on the day after. I can’t wait!

Impressions, Movies & TV

Hot Fuzz

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Hot Fuzz

Last night I got to see Hot Fuzz, the latest from Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright, et al. I haven’t seen this one hyped up nearly as much as Shaun of the Dead was, but as a Spaced devotee I was always going to see it.

First of all I’ll get the bad out of the way. I didn’t like Hot Fuzz as much as Shaun and certainly not as much as [sound of angels singing] Spaced. Secondly, a couple of good laughs aside, I didn’t think the first half hour was particularly brilliant. That’s it. The rest of it’s really good.

Once the main plot gets going and we have the wonderful rapport between Pegg and Frost, things are dandy. Like Shaun, it’s packed full of references to look out for, and of course Edgar Wright’s direction is as fundamental to the humour as the two stars and what’s almost a who’s who of British comedians and their previous collaborators. There’s an unhealthy obsession with Bad Boys 2 and Point Break which is milked for all the humour it’s worth (a surprisingly large amount), not to mention the ubiquitous Cornetto’s. It’s got all the hallmarks of the people who made it, but considering how stylish their oeuvre has been thus far, I’m more than happy with that.

What ultimately won be over, though, was two things. Both are possible spoilers so you might want to save them until you’ve seen the film for yourself. Number one: flying kick to a granny’s face; number two: that the whole thing is basically about militant Daily Mail readers. That gets a thumbs up from me.

DVD & Blu-ray, Impressions, Movies & TV, Tech, Xbox

360 HD DVD Impressions

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Xbox 360 with HD DVD Drive

If you thought getting hold of an Xbox 360 late last year was difficult, you should try finding one of the HD DVD drives. The shop where I had my original order didn’t get any and, according to my friend who owns it, Gem (the main UK Microsoft distributor for indies) only had a couple of dozen for the whole country. Gameplay told me that they couldn’t supply my preorder until, after much ado, it turned out that they could.

Obviously an external drive isn’t the most elegant way to play HD DVD but what this does is make an excellent stopgap until the standalones come down in price a bit. How many HD movie players are there for £130 again?

It’s admittedly a bit disingenuous to say that this is an HD DVD player for £130 when you need a £200 machine to run it, but a quick calculation tells me that £130 + £200 = £330, which is significantly less than the £400+ for the standalone HD players or the PS3. It comes with the remote (usually £20 on its own) and the King Kong HD DVD (£14.99 on Play), and when you look at the aggressive pre-Christmas bundling going on with 360 consoles I don’t think it’s a bad deal.

Pricing aside, the most important thing is how well this works. The answer is pretty well. Not perfect, although it does represent excellent value for money and the quality is very high. It’s certainly the best way to play HD movies without breaking the bank. Continue reading 360 HD DVD Impressions →

DVD & Blu-ray, Life, Movies & TV, Tech, Xbox

HD DVD Hunting

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‘Tis a sad day when you have to jump through more hoops to get a new accessory than you did the console itself, but that’s exactly the experience that I’ve had today while hunting for the 360 HD DVD drive, which neither my friend’s shop (there were around 20 in the whole country for independent shops, according to the distributor) nor Gameplay could supply me with for launch day. I doubt I was alone in this experience, so here’s my day.

I’d heard that a good number of PC World stores would be getting a handful of units each for general sale. Got up bright and early at 8am this morning so that I could be at PC World in Poole, the biggest around, for when it opened at 9. I asked in there and they said they were expecting a few but they haven’t turned up, and they might be in their delivery later that day. Went home via the Christchurch branch (the other side of town) but they weren’t getting any, checking every place that might have had them (Tesco, Currys, Comet, etc) on the way. No joy.

Then I had to go to uni so I checked PC World in Southampton while I was there, along with Gamestation, two branches of Game, Virgin, HMV, and CEX. Nothing.

On the way home I detoured over to Poole again to see if their delivery had arrived. Nope. Maybe Monday, they said. By then I was resigned to getting an import on Tuesday, obviously at a premium but not as unreasonable as the current eBay prices, so I went to cancel my unfulfilled Gameplay order which still said “Ordered” since I’d missed out on the initial shipment. Went through their cancellation process and then noticed – after I’d cancelled it, mind – that it had changed to “Being Picked”.

I rang them up to see if that was accurate and, if it was, to see if I could cancel my cancellation. The guy there informed me that they’d managed to get a few more units and mine had been shipped out this morning via courier, so I should get it on Monday.

A happy ending, then. Now I think I need to lie down…

DVD & Blu-ray, Impressions, Movies & TV, Tech

Topfield TF5800PVR Impressions

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Another day, another new gadget. This time it’s a PVR funded, as always, by my good old student loan. Hooray!

Topfield TF5800PVR

Say hello to the Topfield TF5800PVR, known to its friends as the Toppy. By day it’s a mild-manned Freeview PVR with a 160GB hard drive to record 80 hours of material, which by my calculations is how much TV I watch in about three months. It also has component output which is a great boon for an LCD TV user. This thing has some real tricks inside that bland little case, however.

First up is the USB port on the back. It’s used not only for the obvious firmware upgrades, but also to pull the recorded video off the hard drive to the computer where it can be edited, burnt to DVD, stuck on the PSP/iPod, or whatever. Obviously this in no way encourages piracy and putting copyrighted material on YouTube. Never. Not even all the weekend’s goals like they show on Match of the Day 2 in a handy two-minute package.

It’s real killer app here, though, is that it can run its own little applications known as TAPs (Topfield APplications). With some judicious tapping mine now pulls EPG data for the next two weeks from the Radio Times site instead of the basic 7-day EPG that Freeview has (this means much more extensive information including mini reviews of every film that’s on) and has a number of searches running that record anything that matches them (e.g. it searches BBC1 and BBC2 at the weekend for names beginning with “Match of the Day” that are on after 10pm, catching both versions). It also allows me to browse the listings by genre, name, and even content summaries. And that pair is just the beginning. There are tons of the things.

I only got it last Thursday (from Superfi, who were pretty good and the cheapest on Pricerunner) so I’m still learning the ropes and doing that perpetual tweaking that I do – I’ve only just become happy with the setup of my Harmony remote that I bought in March – but I’ve been well impressed with this thing. It’s a decent box on its own merits, and when you factor in the ton of extra functionality that you can download for nothing, it’s brilliant.

Impressions, Movies & TV

Jagshemash!

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Borat

Forget De Niro and Pacino, because Sacha Baron Cohen may just be the best actor in the world. It’s one thing to be a great actor, immersing yourself completely in the character, when surrounded by other actors and working from a script. It’s quite another to do so with Joe Public, improvising your lines and keeping up the pretence while actually managing to keep a straight face.

Besides having possibly the best title in the world – Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan – Cohen’s latest (I’ll just call it Borat for the sake of my typing fingers) is one of the funniest films of the last few years. When Empire say that it’ll prove as timeless as Airplane! and This is Spinal Tap, I really can’t argue.

The format isn’t much different to the TV show and indeed some of the “interviews” could have been lifted from it, but this essentially adds a plot and goes further than the budget and taste constraints of television can allow. The fact that the credits name the provider of “Mr. Baron Cohen’s feces” (sic) goes some way in explaining it, as does the fact that Borat has the police called on him and is tackled by security guards on several occasions. Not always while clothed. You’ll know what part I’m talking about when you see it. It’s the part where the whole audience is crying with laughter. Continue reading Jagshemash! →