With autumn comes great movies

And so the summer turned into autumn and the time for movie watching and music listening have come and i have found my way back to my blog.

I start off this rebirth by expanding my movie collection a little. This time i found a store that had a 50% on all of the movies for a very limited time period. So i picked up some movies i’ve been looking for and some that i just thought was a nice release of the movie.

The movies i picked up was:

Band Of Brothers – Steelbox
EAN: 5051895051306

A nice steelbox edition of this great mini series that was aired in 2001. It’s a “clean” edition just like almost every Band Of Brothers editions i know of, it only contains the 5 discs for the episodes as well as one bonus material disc with a documentary. No other content such as booklet or postcards.

Resident Evil: Retribution – Steelbook
EAN: 5051162303374

Not much to say here really, a steelbook edition of Resident Evil: Retribution, just like the Band Of Brothers box it only contains the movie itself on one disc along with some extra features like commentary for exapmle.

Hobbit – Steelbook
EAN: 7391772200853

Same here, simple steelbook edtition. Just the movie disc with some extra features on the same disc such as behind the scenes videos.

Battle Royale
EAN: 7319980013935

Basic blue plastic cover edition. This acts as a place holder until i can get the steelbook version or/and one of the limited editions that exists of this movie.

Akira
EAN: 5022366800549

Same as Battle Royale, very simple and cheap edition, just the movie. Just like the Battle Royale i got this is an “stand-in”. I already own Akira, but the edition i own is a steelbook edition that still is sealed. So this will be the one that i’ll be using when i’m watching Akira.

So not the biggest update but it was an update. I haven’t been slacking off totaly during the summer, i have been looking around for new interesting editions and new movie releases and have some pre-orders that should be coming pretty soon.
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Summer and sunday topic, steelbooks.

I’ve been way to lazy lately with posting the Sunday topic, but it’s summertime and the weather is just to good to sit at the computer and thinking about blu-ray’s and CD’s. I have my saved searches on ebay and check them from time to time but nothing more.

So today i thought i should do a Sunday topic since it’s been 5 weeks since last post. Todays topic will be about Steelbooks, the little bit more premium releases of movies.

While the steelbooks is one step bellow collectors/limited editions they are one step above the regular blue plastic case that BD movies usually comes in. It’s a good compromise between price and extra features. A good example i just noticed is “Jaws”, the regular boring version costs about US$15, the “Special Collector’s Limited Edition Gift Set” is US$45 which can be a little steep. But then there is the steelbook of the movie, which only is US$22 not much more then the regular version but it’s in a much nicer case which in my opinion looks much better in the shelf then just the blue plastic covers.

When i started being interested in movies i didn’t see the reason for steelbooks, i just thought it was an unnecessary cost for just a steel instead of plastic case. But my opinion have changed, i now always look up just how much big the difference is between regular and steelbook.

I have seen steelbooks going on ebay for very high prices, more then limited and collectors editions, but they have all been from some very small pressing of example 5000 pieces. I think it’s fun that there are people who just collects steelbooks and that keep the price up, but if you’re the average movie viewer and just want a premium version of your favorite movie, it can be a pain in the…

Make sure to watch many movie and have a great summer!

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Sunday topic, remakes and new series parts

Today’s Sunday topic is about the what seems to be the year of movie remakes and new installments i.e. lack of new ideas.

I don’t know why, but when glancing through IMDB of movies that are to go up on cinema or have gone up on cinema this year, there are many names i recognized, many new parts of movies series and some concepts I’ve seen before. This is both good and bad, some, most remakes and old concepts, are the movies that i really want to see.

There seems to be empty in the idea office in Hollywood this year or is it the big company’s money cravings that decide which movies is getting produced? Movies like “Fast & Furious 6”,isn’t time to let that series go, it have lost most of the feel that the movie is based around the car. It was a good series until after Tokyo Drift. And a quick look on wikipedia shows that Fast & Furious 7 is due in 2014. The same goes for “A Good Day to Die Hard”, it’s the fifth movie in the  Die Hard series. I was convinced “Die Hard 4.0” was the last movie, but no, someone thought it was a good idea to make another sequel.

It’s not all bad though. There are remakes that i really want to see, both out of curiosity and where the original is getting old. The best example here is “The Great Gatsby”, which i haven’t seen yet. The latest movie adaptation of the novel is from 1974 (i do not count the TV movie from 2000).

One movie where i can feel some light influences from anime and manga hits Neon Genesis and Gundam is the movie “Pacific Rim”. Which i think can be really good, it’s something new, although the concept is old, it has never been seen in a live action movie before.

The fact remains though, I recognize many, perhaps too many of this year’s blockbuster names from the past. I could talk on forever on this topic, this is the same for games, money rules, a little to much.

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Sunday topic, game music

Today’s Sunday topic, i will share my thoughts on game music/game soundtrack. And this is a long one.

Lets start off by saying I’m an long time gamer who started playing games very early, so gaming have a special place in my heart even tough i rarely do it nowadays.

In the early days of my gaming history i never thought the music could have a big impact on a game, it was something that just was silently in the background and sometimes even annoying. But then I played the first Halo game on Xbox back in 2003-2004 and it was after playing that i started to realize how big impact music really can have on a game. After getting Halo 2 and playing the campaign with my brother i was very impressed by the music used in it.

With Halo and especially Halo 2 and 3, the music was a big part of the game and you could really feel the stress when you knew you had limited time and the music started to getting faster and faster. I do own both Halo 2 and 3 OST CD’s and when listening after all these years of playing the game, i still know where in game I am. For me it really was halo that showed how soundtracks was supposed to be done.

Games came and went past for some years without much attention. Until a friend thought I should give The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim a try. I was blown away by the music, i hadn’t felt the same since Halo 3. The soundtrack of Skyrim is amazing with a total of 52 songs on 3 CD’s, each one composed for specific parts of the game. And one whole CD with one 42 min long “song” with the sound and music for the atmosphere in the game.

So nowadays, the music in a game is very important, good music can take the game to a whole new level and it’s a big part of the overall impression of a game for me.

Will update with images when i find the Halo and Skyrim OST CD’s
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Steamboy

How could I forget, about 2 weeks ago i got a really nice version of Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s “Steamboy”. It’s an UK release and it’s acctually DVD, not blu-ray. But it’s stil a very nice release with lots of extra features. Even if i often think the country of origin releases of movies are the best, i have to say this is on par with the Japanese blu-ray box version in terms of features. Not quite packed with extra stuff as the Japansese Memorial Box, but that one is hard to come by.

Everything is stored inside a very sturdy slide in and out box, which is very nice, not like some movies where they come in a flimsy box. The movie and extra disc is stored in a digipack which itself is stored inside a slipcase. Furthermore there is a booklet with drawings and sketches from the movis which i think is really nice as well as a small manga booklet. Other then that it’s included a small envelope with 10 postcards.

So all in all this is very nice edition, even though it’s a DVD in a now blu-ray dominant market i think it’s a very worth edition since it can be found fairly cheap and it comes with so much extra stuff.

Steamboy
EAN: 5035822422513
Bonus material disc
Small but thick booklet with sketches and drawings
Small manga booklet
10 Postcards

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Sunday topic, why i hate translated movie titles, Part 1

Todays Sunday Monday topic is about translated titles of movies, since it’s where you’re most likely to encounter it.

One of the worst, if not THE worst, ok probably the 3rd worst thing i know about movies is the use of translated titles. It may seem a small and insignificance thing. But it can be really annoying for us consumers, it means that we need to take one extra step in finding the right name of the movie we want and it can sometimes even be very confusing. There are movies that are pretty much translated right over from English to another language and they’re easy to find. But there are movies like “The Shawshank Redemption” when translated straight over from my native language have the name “The Key To Freedom”.

I’m the kind of person who love lists, i have lists of everything possible, a list over what movies i own and a list over my most wanted movies. When adding lets say 10 movies to my wanted list and i just know them in my native language it take some time to look up the “real” name on either wikipedia or IMDB. And the same goes the other way around, i want to find out which store have the desired movie cheapest in stock and i just know the English name.

The best, or should i say worst, example of a title translation that somewhere must’ve gone horribly wrong is Makoto Shinkai’s anime movie “Children Who Chase Lost Voices”. The original Japanese title is 星を追う子ども, which literally means “Children Who Chase Stars”. The English title that’s used the most is “Children Who Chase Lost Voices”, BUT, in the UK it’s known as “Journey to Agartha” (sure, it describes a part of the movie, but i think the real name have a deeper meaning then just describe it). They basically changed the whole name of the movie, which to me is strange, why would you deviate from original name that much.

Maybe I’m just very picky, but i can’t be the only one that wants the movies with the right titles in my movie shelf instead of some translated title. I can’t see why all movies just can’t have their real names, let the English movies have the English name, the French movies have their French names and so on. Can’t be that hard.

This is part 1 of 2 on why i don’t like translated titles, there are more then just the title itself.

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Sunday topic, return of the vinyl records

Todays Sundays topic is about the return of the vinyl records into the the home of music lovers.

While I’m a bit to young to fully remember and buying vinyl records, i do know my dad used to play some when i was a kid, you had to walk through the living room calmly, so you didn’t make the pick-up jump. After that i rarely saw records, i bought all my music on CD’s and eventually moved on to digital media such as iTunes and similar services. I was one of the people that said that physical media was dead in just a few years and that everything would be digital in the future.

But a couple of years ago when i got my first stereo setup, although without a turntable, i started seeing more and more albums released as digital download, CD and VINYL!? And i still see them coming. I often look up a release on discogs.com, where you can find good info about different releases. And I’ve noticed that vinyl is coming back, The Rolling Stones is a good example here they are starting to release albums and compilations on vinyl again. There were a couple of years with CD as the only format but that is changing.

One more big indication that vinyl is coming back is the lack of second-hand vinyls. Just 5-10 years ago, i often saw in the local newspapers “buy & sell” section that people were selling or giving away plastic crates full of vinyls, just because they took up so much space. In the same sections nowadays it’s “looking for crates of vinyl” or “looking for vinyl collections”. For me as a collector this is both good and bad, it’s fun to see vinyl coming back, it really is, the more support it has, the longer it lives. But at the same time it’s hard to do find the super deals you could find a couple of years ago with a crate full of vinyl for 5-10$ or even free.

Even if it’s only a return into the homes of audiophiles and collectors, it’s still a return and i think it’s great that the future not just holds digital formats.

I’m a big supporter of vinyl records, i think the sound is slightly better then a CD, but of course it depends on the song as well as the quality of the original recording. But there is something strangely satisfying with putting down the tonearm and hear the pops and crackle as the needle make contact with the vinyl and that’s what keeps me playing a vinyl rather then a CD when it’s time for some fine listening.

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Dr. Jones and some bad movie and vinyl hunting.

Bad and good updates, let’s start with the bad ones. Yesterday there were a Asian/Japanese items second-hand market which i had been looking forward to for some time. And at the same time drop by two flea markets which i heard had lots of vinyls and were located in the same area. After a small delay from toping up the car with fuel i was on my way. All good, but what i didn’t know was that there were some major roadworks last part of the trip, then add an accident that caused the police, ambulance to squeeze through the traffic jam, it was chaotic to say the least. A trip that usually takes about an hour and a half took two and a half hours.

But my bad luck doesn’t end here! The delay caused me not be able to get to one of the flea markets which had vinyls and just browse the other for about 10min just to find nothing of interest. Then of to the asian items only second-hand makret. Where i found it to be in the smallest of places i’ve seen and the queue was the longest i’ve seen since a home electronic store shut down and hade a huge sale. I’m not joking if i say it was at least 100 meters and this was more then an hour after they opened. So i turned around and went home!

(I really don’t know why i write about this, it’s not really relevant to this blog, maybe because i had high hopes of finding something interesting.)

And now the good ones (which is really relevant to the blog), won an auction for a brand new and sealed “Indiana Jones – The Complete Adventures” very cheap and it was in the mail when i got home. I think last time i saw these movies were back in the good ol’ VHS time and i acctually haven’t seen the newest movie yet.

Indiana Jones – The Complete Adventures
EAN: 7332431038813
features 4 BD discs, one for each movie and an extra BD disc with 7 hours extra material

I’m really glad to see that they included a BD disc with the extra material. Sometimes you see a two disc release but only the movie is a BD and the extra is on a DVD, which is kind of boring.

Evangelion 3.33! + bonus

And finally today, the mailman rang my door, holding a small package. I knew it was on it’s way, but didn’t expect it to come this quick, not that I’m complaining. Not at all.

So now i can finally add two Blu-Ray’s of Evangelion 3.33 You Can (Not) Redo, first pressing, to my small but growing collection of movies. And as a bonus, since i was ordering from Japan anyway, i bought a really nice Children Who Chase Lost Voices box.

I have not and probably will not open the Evangelion BD’s, since they are Japanese spoken and subtitled only and my Japanese language knowledge is about 0. I will wait for the US or UK version or if there are any other nice European releases with English subtitles. I haven’t opened the Children Who Chase Lost Voices box but i might open it.

Evangelion 3.33 You Can (Not) Redo
EAN: 4988003818128
First limited pressing including OST CD

Children Who Chase Lost Voices
EAN: 4935228113569
Art-booklet
Small manga booklet
Bonus material disc
35mm movie strips

But without further ado, here they are:

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Sunday topic, exclusive rights.

Well, since I’ve been lazy as [insert word of choice] last time and missed 2 Sunday topics and almost 3. it’s time to step up the game.

Today’s Sundays topic (if a little late) is, exclusive rights on movies. The reason for this topic is what horrible things i found out when searching for a Blu-Ray release of Akira Kurosawas movie “Ran”.

Everything started after i borrowed a DVD version of Ran and really enjoyed it and thought it would be a really nice movie to have in the collection. So i began searching for a BD version, i stumbled upon “Criterion Collection” and their DVD (the one i borrowed was not a criterion) and after reading all good reviews of it i had high hopes that they would release it on BD. And Criterion have a very good goal with their releases, mess nothing with the movie, no cutting, no editing.

But i soon found out that they lost their rights to StudioCanal and that there in fact were a BD version. Fine and dandy i thought, but when i started reading reviews on the StudioCanal version, it turned out to be a really bad release, way to much EE (Edge Enhancement) and so on.

This is a very good example of why i really hate exclusive rights to movies and basically anything, if the release or what it may be is bad, there’s nothing for the consumers to do, there is only this version. Some of the reviews on the StudioCanal BD version even suggested it was an upscaled DVD with lots of EE and other filters to try and make it look better. Another good example is Disneys exclusive rights to all Studio Ghbili films release after 1996. The cause was good, getting more money to be able to cover the production costs. But it feels like the have sold their soul to the devil.

I should rename this blog to “Ranting for my eyes”, because it feels like i just rant about things.

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