2009 — 7 March: Saturday

Early night? I wonder! Tonight's picture of Christa is the last of the set I unearthed from a 1983 visit to the Royal Victoria Country Park, Netley, but last time I was there (sixteen months ago) it was no longer possible to walk along the bit shown here:

Christa and Peter at Netley in 1983

We always tried to take visitors there as one of our little trips. Ho-hum. And a tentative g'night.

Devonian Age

Having recently slagged off "text outliners" I've just read a fascinating confession by an author I know, that may yet get me trying something newer than the ancient grey matter. A chap should try new things from time to time. Even if they are pieces of Mac software.

It's 08:30, the wonderful musical choices of Brian Matthew are in full, swing, (though they are strictly rock'n'roll of course) and it's time for the cuppa that slakes. Another interesting read here, even though it mixes those dreadfully lazy pieces of shorthand: "monetization" and "eyeballs". Speaking of which, my own eyeballs were caught by an astonishing fact about money (not that I know what money is): that Darling man in "our" Treasury has already "spent" almost a fifth of Britain's GDP on bailing out the banks. Crikey! (Source.)

Hi, Mr Postie. Why so Blu(-ray)?

It took three rubber bands to package the first batch of viewing pleasure from the VAT-free zone of Jersey. Even the two-disc remastered BBC TV Pride and Prejudice cost less than the first few NTSC DVDs I imported from the Land of the Free back in 1998. As I've said elsewhere, I reckon I've paid my dues to the video industry¹ over the years.

Whedonverse

I'm not quite in the same league of Whedon geekiness as this writer, but it was an interesting piece, arrived at from IMDB while I was browsing downstairs. I'm now listening to NPR's "Car Talk" (carried by the European satellite feed of World Radio Network) after a break of many, many months. The brothers have not changed their amiable shtick!

First impressions

That new release of Pride and Prejudice initially irritated me, but quickly started to delight me. My mistake was to hit the "Enter" key when invited to do so, where I then found myself in "Audio Description" hell — every menu item being read out to me a helluva lot more slowly than I can manage for myself. There's an interesting set of test patterns buried in the HD Setup section. Loading the second disc (in search of the extra features) I pressed "Skip" instead of "Enter", and entered a more conventional system. There's a nice interview with Andrew Davies (and others) but, fascinatingly, there's also a 5-minute chat from the chap who oversaw the HD remastering from the original 16mm film negative² rather than (as has been the practice in the past) from a film print or other intermediate stage. Almost worth the cost of admission alone, as they say. Let's hope there are many archived boxes of negatives and matching audio tapes in the vaults.

Replacing the DVD that my chum Brian very kindly brought back for me from somewhere in the wilds of Finland...

... Life of Brian is, indeed, "the immaculate edition" with some excellent documentary extras, including a 2007 item: "The Secret Life of Brian", that whiled away a delightful hour of my life effortlessly. To hear Malcolm Muggeridge pontificating and watch the pompous Bishop of Southwark fondling his huge crucifix "necklace"... priceless. Let alone the spoof re-imagination of that BBC2 confrontation (with Cleese and Palin) made just a few days later by the Not the 9 o'clock news crew. Wikipedia's entry is well worth reading, not least for a reminder of the ghastly Whitehouse campaign, too.

For the sake of my sheepish NZ film choice critic:

The 6th day is a surprisingly good examination, albeit Arnie-fied, of some possible implications of human cloning.
Across the Universe is a no-brainer for anyone raised on Beatles music.
A Knight's Tale is an amusing joust.
Cruel intentions is a re-telling of the French epistolary novel by Laclos though, of course, relocating it to the world of wealthy New York teenagers.
Ronin contains the delicious Natascha McElhone and the amazing Jean Reno (so wonderful in "The Truman show" and "Léon" respectively).
Corpse Bride superbly demonstrates what can be done with Canon digital SLRs and Apple's Final Cut Pro.
Finally, Casino Royale re-energises the Bond franchise, and also has an amazing title sequence (almost as good as the one in "Ruthless People").

All recommended, naturally. Time now (18:31) for a bite to eat, methinks.

Footnotes

¹ And how has that fine, unselfish, ungrasping industry repaid me? With Macrovision, with anti-piracy warnings I cannot skip past, with CSS and hdcp content "protection", with ever-changing formats and format wars. Pah!
² Cuts and scene transitions in edited film have always posed video disc mastering problems. Returning to the original negatives, working frame by frame, and using some very newly-developed electronic magic, has restored colour, cinematic smoothness, and detail to an extent I simply find hard to believe. So what was a glorious period costume drama from 1995, but of relatively "unexciting" technical quality when originally transmitted, has become a delicious showcase for what HD can manage. I have quite a long list of classic BBC film productions from the past that I'd love to see as beautifully remastered as this one. How about Edge of Darkness for example? And The Pallisers (which was the first such drama Christa and I enjoyed together).