It's a blue bleu blu bloo kind of day.
Blue.
Blue is my favorite color. I don't find it depressing like some people claim, but I do find it calming. Blue skies, blue water, and blue ice all make me happy. I am disappointed that there's not more blue foods to eat.
Bleu.
Yesterday I brought up Jean-Pierre Jeunet after seeing his Chanel No. 5 commercial. This resulted in all kinds of discussion about French cinema and eventually came 'round to another brilliant French writer/director... Luc Besson. His body of work is such genius that it is difficult for me to decide on a favorite. The Fifth Element? Genius! Leon? Genius! Nikita? Genius! It goes on and on. But it's one of his earliest works that I love most... Le Grand Bleu. Now, here in the USA, the film was retitled The Big Blue and butchered to the point of incomprehension. First they lost the achingly beautiful score by Eric Sera. Then they chopped it to pieces. Then they slapped on a stupid happy ending on it that destroyed the entire point of the film. HOWEVER, if you ignore the shitty US version, the original film is... as one would expect... genius. On the surface, it's a film about free-diving competition. Going deeper, the film is so much more. And while I'm willing to accept that it's not going to be everybody's cup of tea... I think humans would have a much better understanding of living if it was.
Assuming you can ignore the misstep in casting Rosanna Arquette as the love interest.
What surprises me... but not really... is reading all the reviews on NetFlix from the many people who liked the butchered American crap, but hated the restored "Director's Cut" with a passion usually reserved for serial killers (Dexter not withstanding). Apparently, if a story doesn't move at a break-neck pace and gets all tied up with a happy ending, Americans just don't "get" it. Not that this is a bad thing... it just speaks volumes as to the cultural differences that make this world such a fascinating place.
Blu.
Remember the good ol' days when you bought a fucking DVD. You took it back to your fucking house. Then you put it in the fucking DVD player. Then you pressed the fucking "play" button. THEN YOU WATCHED THE FUCKING MOVIE? Now-a-days? Not so much. Now there's Blu-Ray. Sure it has amazing picture and fantastic sound... but you pay a price for it. You pay with time.
This morning my copy of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds arrived on Blu-Ray, and I spent my entire day dying to run home and watch it. Finally, 5:00 arrived and I rush home to find... that it wouldn't play. Thanks to the idiotic copy protection bullshit that plagues the Blu-Ray format, I had to upgrade my P.O.S. player to accommodate whatever new "protection" crap Macrovision has dreamed up. It took 50 minutes. So I wait. Then, because the player has to boot up like a computer to decode all the copy protection shit, I wait. Then, because everything takes forever with a Blu-Ray player, I press the button to open the drawer, and I wait. Then I put in the disc, and I wait. Then I press the "play" button, and I wait. Then you have to wait for the disc to load... the menus to load... the button presses to be acknowledged... it's waiting on top of waiting on top of waiting to see if the disc will even play. It sucks. Hard.
What good is the superior picture and sound if you can't play the disc? How much of a wait is worth it? I struggle with these questions every time I go to play a Blu-Ray disc. Bigger, more expensive, slower... is progress?
Bloo.
Because nothing blue could be complete without Bloo!
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If it consoles you, remember that DVD players are also shit like the Blue-Ray ones as they force you to watch mindless text and possibly trailers before the film. They also have those country restrictions etc. It seems that Blue-Ray is just ‘better’ at those things as well.
One more reason to just skip from VHS to downloads in one go…
How is mindless text and trailers the fault of the DVD player? It can only play the content it was given! And, while I don’t know how it was for home-video in Germany, VHS was the exact same way here… FBI warning texts and trailers plagued that format as well. At least when you press the “chapter skip” or “fast forward” or “DVD Menu” button, you don’t have to wait for something to happen like you do with Blu-Ray! Region encoding is a pain to get around, but it seems a small price to pay for the speed of DVD compared to either VHS or Blu-Ray (which is worse than VHS ever was). If only legal downloads offered the picture and sound quality of Blu-Ray, I’d have a lot easier time buying into it as an option. 🙁
Plus, blueberry pie.
On VHS you could at least fast forward over the crap. When trying that on a hardware DVD Player or even Apple’s DVD Player software it goes ‘Verboten’ all over you.
So I have to watch DVDs with VLC whose interface for that is – cough – far from brilliant. Let’s hope that new ‘Lunettes’ effort will improve that (not too optimistic, though). How are the chances that good natured applications can play Blue-Ray discs, by the way?
Fortunately the HD-Download situation is not a matter of technology anymore but merely one of business incompetence. So I assume you’ll be able to get those downloads for-pay soon – or you’ll just settle for using the pirate-bay until people get their act together.
We’ve had this conversation before but I love that film so much. Jean Reno is simply the best.
What Blu-ray player do you have? The PS3 does require some updates here and there, but it will play Blu-ray discs, even new ones, without forcing an upgrade to the firmware (I’m at ver. 3.0 on our PS3).
Blu-rays do load much slower than most DVD players. We actually have a separate DVD player just to play movies for both Reba and her granddaughter (they both have a hard time navigating the PS3 menu system).
I’m assuming you watched the Inglorious Basterds disc eventually. I really enjoyed the extra features and the Elvis Mitchell interview with Quentin and Brad. And of course the movie is clear and awesome on the HDTV.
Part of the speed problem may be the particular player — newer ones are typically faster. But most of the problem is the content, same as the DVDs. I just watched “Elf” on Blu-ray and it started relatively quickly and played the movie automatically.
The really slow Blu-ray movies are the ones that use Java for their interactive menus.
blue is supposed to be a healing color. years ago when mom went in for surgery i brought her a k-mart blue light sign that i had stolen and a blue blankie that i purchased. musta worked coz she healed up incredibly fast.
fucken blu-ray! (i don’t even know what makes a blu-ray any better than a regular ole dvd, but fuck them for driving you crazy!)
What about “blue” from “blue’s clues”? Although that show sucked after Steve left.
WORD! I used Blues Clues for background noise when working, and even had my very own handy-dandy notebook! I stopped watching after Steve left, because his replacement (cousin?) wasn’t nearly as engaging. 🙂
If you want to know what happened to Steve, here you go…