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Monsters in the house

Most genius, Monsters Inc. DVD arrived today and the "extras" are wonderful. This has so many wonderful extras it could be hours if not days of entertainment and education before watching the actual movie again.

Enjoying Possession

We saw Posession this afternoon and enjoyed it very much. The scenery and story were very enjoyable, a little predictable, but good none the less. I would encourage you to see the movie, but not in a theater that has an action flick playing in the next multiplex slot.

Gold Box provides

The Amazon Gold Box provides a goodie to get. After watching the Gold Box for weeks, and wondering where it went for a week or so, the Gold Box had a solid offering. I found Memento on DVD popped up. I did not see the movie in the theater, but have had an interest. The 10 dollar plus price made it less than a movie out for two and the fancy tiles are not available at the rental joints. One thing I did not realize about the Gold Box is that if you select an item to buy before the final item you do not get the opportunity to see the remaining items.

Creative Commons comes to life

The Creative Commons is up for our perusal. This seems to be a much better approach to digital rights management than the Hollywood and music industry approach, and light years better than DCMA.

Bethesda gets a Landmark theater

Wahoo, Bethesda gets a Landmark theater, which means foreign and independant films are going to be with in walking distance. Landmark usually restores historic theaters, but in this instance they have built a new property. That whole area is now hopping on weekend nights.

I am a fan of Landmark. I had many great nights in Landmark theaters in San Francisco and the East Bay. Washington, DC had the Key theater, but even with that I missed the wonderful Landmarks of the Bay Area. Now there is great hope.

We finally saw Amelie this evening. I wished I had seen this earlier as I would have seen it a few times by now. This is a wonderful movie that had me laughing and yearning. This deserves an all thumbs up.

We finally saw a beautiful mind this evening. I rather liked the movie, but it was not as deep as I thought it was going to be. Yes, I am a wee bit behind in my movie watching. I tend to lean on the computer, Internet, books, and magazines for entertainment.

There are Quicktime clips of SXSW sessions and interviews, which includes one from the Josh Davis session. It is rough and not in context, but it does offer a good snippet of Josh and the magnetic dots.

We saw the Fellowship of the Ring today. It was better than I was expecting. I my expectations were rather high, but I was also prepared to be let down. The film work, special effects and the acting was quite enjoyable. I have to say I am not only looking forward to next years addition to the trilogy, but also the DVD as there is a bundle of interviews and behind the scenes information that would make it a wonderful addition to the collection.

Sting's All This Time DVD Success

Yesterday I purchased the Sting's "All This Time" DVD and have been so happy for the purchase. I caught snippets of this performance and documentary (recorded before and on September 11, 2001 in Tuscany, Italy). The documentary reminds me of "Bring on the Night" video of the assembly and rehersals of the first Sting band. Both the BotN and All This Time offer a great insight into music rehersals and musicianship of some amazing musicians. Watching either digs at that itch to get my sax and keyboard out of the closet and just play.

The "All This Time" provides some wonderful rearrangements of Sting and Police tunes. The performace portion of the DVD offers fantastic music to dig into. One of my favorite jazz bass players, Christian McBride, has joined the Sting ensemble for this DVD and co-released CD.

I did not know there was a DVD that had been released, but was so hoping there would be one. I was overjoyed to find it in the store yesterday. (Not so much Joy as she is having to return one of my Christmas gifts).

We went and saw Harry Potter at the Uptown this evening. It was better than I thought it might be (after running it through the hype recalulator). I had not read the books, although Joy has been through the series (up to 4) twice. It was a fun movie and it seemed to be a rather quick two and a half hours. It felt like parking took longer.

Zeldman and his folks at Happy Cog and NotLimitedNYC have launched Charlotte Gray for Warner Brothers. At first I thought it was nothing great, but there is a simple elegance that radiates the period and the feeling of the film. The site does not have an over the top Flash interface, but a nicely crafted interface. All the links state exactly what will happen if you click on the link. It is very Zeldman-esque in that it is very well designed and gives the user a wonderful experience.

I was trying to catch-up to life today. I ran my usual errands and some of Joy's. Joy got out of the house for the first time today to go get her haircut, a quick trip to the bookstore for magazines, and the movie rental place. Joy has been plowing through movies this week. The short trip wiped Joy out.

We watched The Mighty this evening. It was a good movie in the My Bodygard and Simon Birch genre. It plays on the Nights of the Roundtable lore. It could be one to own for those, need to refocus days.

Monsters Inc. is nothing short of great. It is a fun and entertaining story, with amazing graphics. There are some scenes with Sully, on of the main characters with lots of fur, that are just amazing watching gentle breezes flow through his hairs. The animation was better than Shrek, which I thought was wonderful too. In all Monsters may be one of my favorite movies, it was that good. What added to the movie adventure was taking twin five year old boys. Joy and I had the nephews between us and they were so much fun to experience the film with. One was a little scared with Randall, but other than that they were really into the movie. Go check the movie out. You may even want to go back, as I do.

Movie industry hit by courts in DeCSS decision, which states that the DVD cracking code printed on t-shirts and such is free speech. As background, DeCSS decrypts DVDs so that they may be played back. DeCSS was coded to build a DVD player for Linux. The movie industry used a very poor encryption scheme, which made for easy cracking. The DeCSS allowed people who owned DVDs the ability to play them, and nothing more. There are other copyright infringement possibilities that one can apply when using the code, but lawn fertilizer has not been banned and it has been commonly used by terrorist to make bombs. Banning code that allows a person to watch a movie they bought legally, is greedy and inane.