A Note, and Our DVD Collection

To start, I want to do more with this blog. It's primary purpose is to post my columns, unedited, for everyone who doesn't- or can't- read The Daily Cougar. However, I'd like to start posting more frequently with other news about DVDs, deals and bargains, and information about new releases that I don't have room for in my column. I'd like this space to become more of a resource concerning DVDs, and I want to answer any questions asked of me, whether they come from comments or emails.

After I spent about an hour cataloging Caitlin's and my DVDs in Delicious Monster (see my September 26th post), I figured I would print to a .pdf, put all of the pages together in Photoshop, and size it down so you guys could see it. This blog is about DVDs, right? Obviously, some of the titles are missing directors, proper covers, etc. But I was too excited to go ahead and post this than spend time fixing all of the little errors (which I'll do later). Unfortunately, the program I used is only for Mac OS-X, so only Apple users can utilize it.

The image below is a link to the full-sized image (click it), which you may have to click the magnifying glass to enlarge to its full size. There are 174 titles, 13 of which are Criterion Collection, and 9 of which belong to my Stanly Kubrick box-set.



Thanks, and feel free to check back soon.

Region Coding Woes (15: Unedited)

Pretend you were vacationing in Europe and picked up a few DVDs from street vendors or video retailers. Somehow, they had your favorite movie that isn’t available in the States. After you get home and past the jet-lag, you pop one of the movies into your computer or DVD player- and it doesn’t work.

The blame falls on a region coding system endorsed by almost all DVD distributors around the world. Region coding basically restricts the use of a DVD to a certain geographical location, denoted by a single digit number on the back of the packaging, from zero to six.

Region one represents the United States, other US territories, and Canada, but to the south, Mexico, the other countries in Central America, almost the entire South American Continent, and Australia and New Zealand are Region four. Region two is Europe, The Middle East, Egypt, South Africa French overseas territories, Greenland, Japan, Lesotho, and as strange as it sounds, Swaziland. Region three contains Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Macau, South Korea and Taiwan, and Region five covers most of Africa, Russia, the Indian subcontinent, Mongolia, and North Korea. Lastly, region six DVDs can only be used in China.

There is a Region seven coding, but it is currently unused. And, for whatever reason, international planes and cruise ships use a special Region eight.

So, why all of the fuss? Most motion picture studios explain that it somehow benefits the customer’s product safety and guarantees compatibility with DVD players or computers purchased in their respective regions.

The truth of the matter concerns the distributor’s rights to control release dates, pricing, and what’s on each version of the DVD. For example, if a DVD bound for Mexico has a special feature European audiences don’t care for, distributors can put out two separate copies, playable only in DVD players with the proper Region coding.

Recently, more and more titles in Region zero have been showing up, and hardware manufacturers are even making DVD players with multi-region capabilities. The players identify the region coding on a disc, and allow the viewer to choose which region the player should adapt to. Other DVD players simply bypass the coding all together.
If you travel with a laptop, and want to watch the anti-Bush documentary you picked up in France, you might have a little bit of trouble.

Most computer DVD-Rom drives allow users five chances to select their final region coding. Dean Marks, from AOL Time Warner explained, “And, the way it works, and I apologize because it's a little bit complicated, the consumer can set it five times.” After those five chances are used up, consumers have the ability to reset the count up to four more times. He continued, “After the fifth time that they've reset it, they do have an ability to reset it again, but they have to bring the drive to an authorized dealer or an authorized service representative, who can then authorize an additional set of five changes, and then they can bring it back for a second, for a third, fourth and fifth set of authorized changes. So you can change it 25 times in total, but you have to go back for each set of five.”

For permanent solutions, the growing company VideoLan has created a free VLC Player. The program bypasses region coding and has a built in DVD player.Almost 29 million users have downloaded the player from the company’s website (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/), and the open-source program is supported on 15 different operating systems.

For those of us who don’t like watching movies on computer screens, a German website (http://www.dvddemystifiziert.de/codefree_en/codefree.html) has instructions for unlocking most home-theater DVD players, but it should be noted that most of the techniques listed void the product’s warranty.

The next generation of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats only have three different region codes, although Europe is still separated from America and Japan. But still, our DVD manufacturers have not become democratic enough in their restrictions to embrace a region-free market and global economy.

The Ever-Aging 3 Letter Words (14: Unedited)

Vertical Helical Scan isn’t an attempt at an awkward sex position; it’s the full name of the dying 30 year-old cassette format for watching movies, VHS.

VHS, which casually stands for “Video Home System,” was invented in 1976 by Victor Company of Japan, Limited, or JVC. As most everyone knows, the cassettes are played in an analog video cassette recorder, or VCR. The format won widespread use over Sony’s Betamax during the famous console war in the early 1980s, and finally became the industry standard in 1990.

Concerning the downfall of VHS from the popularity of DVD and new recording mediums, Variety Magazine quoted Buena Vista Home Entertainment general manager Lori MacPherson saying, “It’s pretty much over.”

Although DVDs were introduced to the United States in 1997, it took until June 2003 for American consumers to overcome their skepticism and accept the new optical format as superior to VHS. After those six years of initial growth, DVD has all but completely obscured the cassette format, almost completely reducing VHS to dollar stores and discount bins.

VCRs remain somewhat popular (though declining) for their inexpensive cost and television recording ability. DVD-recorders haven’t completely replaced them due to infamously temperamental recoding processes, and the fact that single layer DVDs offer a much shorter recording time than four-hour VHS tapes. However, with Tivo, other Digital Video Recorders (DVR), Video-On-Demand services, illegal downloading, networks offering episodes on-line, and the quick turnaround of DVD television box-sets, VCRs are quickly loosing their footing in the home recording market.

30 years really is a pretty long time for one format to be the entertainment standard of the world. DVDs took six years to catch on, and now, only three years later, have already met the introduction of two competing High-Definition formats. Is the life-expectancy of home entertainment media getting shorter?

The war between High Definition (HD) and Blu-ray (BD) only seems to be getting more heated and complicated since their official announcements earlier this year. Both offer unique advantages, but for the most part maintain similar technology in increased storage capacity; 15GB for HD, and 25GB for Blu-ray– exponentially larger than a standard DVD.

Most research firms, including the market researchers at Forrester, predict a Blu-ray dominance after about two years of consumer uncertainty, in part fueled by Sony’s new Playstation 3. However, the industry giant Microsoft has signed up for the HD camp, so heavy marketing tactics and the highly- anticipated X-box HD attachment could pull more customers. However, both formats are shooting themselves in the foot by making customers wary of buying either; no-one wants to get stuck with failed, or short-lived, technology.

Whichever format ends up dominating the market after the advertising and marketing push is over, we shouldn’t expect either to last very long. The rate of consumer technology is increasing so quickly that physical media may be soon outdated. Apple’s iTunes Music Store now offers feature film downloads for $9.99 and single episodes of popular television shows for $1.99.

This year’s expected death of VHS may mark the death of format longevity; the increased turn around for new technology and startling impatience for the consumer dollar only hurries the industry giants’ efforts to get the customer what they want to see.

Pretty soon, it will be time to stash your VHS tapes with your vinyl records and cassette tapes, just be sure to leave enough room for the next few years of DVDs and High Definition formats.

3 Holiday Suggestions (13: Unedited)

When it’s late in the night before whichever winter holiday you celebrate, scramble to the DVD section for these last minute gift ideas. They’ll be a hit with whoever you forgot to shop for, and almost completely mask your inability to buy your sister something thoughtful.

Wonder Showzen: Season One and Season Two

We’ve all seen the re-dubbed G.I. Joe videos on the internet, stuffed with suggested violence and latent homosexual innuendo.

Wonder Showzen takes that idea of perverse children’s entertainment too many steps further with bloody animations, drug induced puppet hallucinations, and Tom Green-style Clarence, who interviews the sleeping and irritable strangers of New York City.

Both seasons are double-disc sets and have about an hour of special features, the funniest of which show children being interviewed by the show’s producers.

Individually, they run $26.99 each, but a gift set will be available December 12^th for $59.99 list price.

Brick

Probably better than the old flatfoot detective movies Brick pulls its structure and style from, this modern day interpretation of the unpredictable mystery demands recognition for the surprisingly good performances of its pseudo-high school cast.

Brendan Frye’s flighty girlfriend is murdered and left in a storm gutter, forcing the introverted outsider (with the help of his only friend, the Rubik’s cube expert and hear-it-all “Brain”) to figure out- and punch- his way to revenge and understanding.

The movie is funny, compelling, and at times, downright confusing. Therefore, having the DVD allows rewinding for clarification of the characters’ bizarre slang and intricate vocabulary. Writer and director Rian Johnson has impressive fast-paced scriptwriting ability, and the tonal composition of the cinematography plays a highly effective storytelling role.

Because it’s from Focus, the special features are minimal and the included booklet is an advertisement. $29.99.

Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic

Aren’t quotes on stand-up comedy DVD packaging annoying? They all say relatively the same thing: Hilarious! Explosively Funny! Outrageous! Jesus Is Magic deserves something more that doesn’t fit in the leftover space, whether it’s a recommendation or a warning.

The borderline anti-Semitic comedy (Silverman is Jewish) rips into common decency and surprising vulgarity. The movie is mostly Silverman on stage, sometimes interjected with behind-the-scenes narrative featuring her manager, Bob Odenkirk, and awkwardly racist music videos. There’s also a strange fascination in watching a beautiful woman start a sentence with, “So I was licking jelly off my boyfriend’s penis…”

For $26.99, Silverman provides a mouth-hurting 72 hilarious minutes by violating our racial and gender sensitivities, perfect for grandma.

ADV Bridges the Pacific with Anime (12: Unedited)

After I parked my car and walked up to the front door of ADV Films, I was greeted by Jack Glauser, a University of Houston alumnus and ADV’s Marketing Associate. He swiped a card to unlock the door, and had me sign-in to a log and wear a “guest” badge. The red and black, traditionally decorated office has a large plasma screen in its lobby, but the strict security guards something else; cartoons.

In 1992, the Land of the Rising Sun shone a new beam of entertainment on a Disney and Looney Toons saturated audience, called ADV Films. The Houston based anime provider now dominates the US market as its largest supplier of Japanese anime, a $4.3 billion industry, and is growing exponentially. It’s a strange gem in the diverse and rough bootleg-fashion area of Harwin Street.

With the popularization of DVDs and variety of subtitle, dubbed audio, and commentary options, Anime has steadily become much more accessible to American audiences. Aside from ease of playability and collectable value, it offers something that older American audiences were almost completely without. “Most of the American animation…has been for a younger audience. And the animation from Japan; yes it’s stylized a lot differently in character and design and stuff, But really, some of the stories are crazy, and you’ve got all sorts of adult themes. So if you like watching animation, but you’re not a child, you’re going to find anime,” said Anne Armogida, ADV’s Director of Marketing.

Anime is most often presented as a series, although many feature-length films are made. In Japan, a surprising number of television stations broadcast anime as regular programming, and the subject matter is as diverse as America’s dramas, comedies, sports, action and detective shows. Because these series are almost entirely unavailable to American audiences, ADV acquires the licensing distribution rights to take the series further than the North Pacific Ocean.

This process is a long and complicated one. ADV first contacts the Japanese producers of an anime after it has gained a certain degree of popularity in Japan. Another UH alumnus, Griffin Vance, and other members of ADV’s legal team acquire the rights to an English version of the anime. The Japanese production company then sends over the available materials, which range from a basic episode to multiple sound and video tracks, scripts, unused material, and extras.

If it’s not already translated, ADV utilizes its three in-house translators, but also contracts translators from all over the United States. “They translate the show, or any of the extras or booklets that we get with the DVDs,” said Jin Chung, one of ADV’s veteran producers, “That’s a big chunk of our period of waiting, because that takes a while to translate. In the best case scenario, we get the Japanese script, and the translators watch the show, and hear it, and also go off the script. Sometimes we don’t get the script, and the translators just have to go through it, just by listening to it, and that takes some time.”

The literal translation is rough and almost never matches the “flapping-” or movement of a character’s mouth. ADV hires screen writers to re-script the dialogue and rearrange sentence structure to make sense in English. This can be restrictive because the sync may not match up, and many of the Japanese cultural references are easy to lose.

A director then looks over the script, watches the anime several times, and casts voice actors for the English dubs. The actors are brought into ADV’s prized on-site recording studios with a director and an audio engineer. ADV Films is the only anime distributor in American with its own recording studio, and it helps them to save on costs and turn a product around that much more quickly.

I was invited to sit in on the recording session for an episode of the highly anticipated series, Air Gear. Kira Vincent, the voice actress behind character “Emily,” has an impressive resume in voice acting, and her wide range (she’s voiced male characters) can be heard in dozens of ADV titles. She has a fan base among “otaku”, the Japanese word for geeks, and sound engineer John Swaize appreciates her efficient adaptability.

The five recording studios are all state of the art. Swaize watches the video as Vincent speaks, and makes quick edits to the script as necessary, which feeds directly into the glass booth. Vincent can hear Swaize’s instructions and recommendations, and watches the anime to maintain correct pacing.

While the audio engineers are busy with sound, the art department recreates newly translated packaging. Hiroko Fukumori, the senior graphic designer, also creates advertisements and point-of-sale material.

The new vocal track is mixed, and sound effects and music are recorded if they weren’t separate on the original master. The production department brings everything together, designs the menus, adds whatever extras they can find and will fit, authors the discs, edits trailers for other upcoming products, and the whole product is sent back to Japan for approval.

The popularity of Anime and other Japanese entertainment media is growing quickly in the United States. Not only in DVD series and feature films, but also in manga, cosplay, videogames, Newtype USA magazine, and ADV’s newly created Anime Network television station. Our university was the launch pad for many of ADV’s employees, and the amount of work to share a nation’s cartoons with another is awe inspiring., especially in such a niche form of artistic expression.

My Morning Jacket, First Time's A Charm (11: Unedited)

Halloween is an interesting release day for music and DVDs and even more interesting for a group whose only other live album was, whether coincidentally or brilliantly marketed, recorded on Halloween a few years ago. My Morning Jacket’s Okonokos double-disc live album has been out for about a month now but their concert footage DVD release drops today. It is the visual companion to the live album that shares the same name, and the band’s first distributed concert footage and DVD.

To try and explain the name Okonokos is an impossible task; the title is a made-up representation of front-man and guitarist Jim James’ objective artistic concept. The title is really more of a question than anything, and stays definitely unanswered through the course of the film.

In a unique way, it is a film. The start of the DVD opens to an old Victorian-style home hosting a candle-lit party in the night. A horse drawn carriage pulls up and drops off a top-hatted and mustachioed guest, and he’s ignored and scorned as he tries to make his rounds greeting the other people at the party. For some reason, his voice is inaudible despite his efforts at speech, and he is later mesmerized by the appearance of a large white alpaca. The two are mostly ignored, so they leave to go walk in the foggy woods. They see a bright white light and hear sounds alien to the melancholy forest, then find themselves inside the concert hall as My Morning Jacket begins the first song from their newest studio album, Wordless Chorus.

The focus switches to a wide and slowly zooming shot of the theater; a huge concert hall that’s totally full, balconies included, and decked out with chandeliers and moody lighting. The wall behind the stage is painted with tall dark tree trunks, and vines weave down and across the stage from all angles. Owls perch on the amplifiers and keyboards, and the band starts to move about the stage with its new song.

It sounds incredible. The DVD boasts Dolby Digital 5.1 Sound, but even the basic stereo setting sounds like a studio album. Concert DVDs are infamous for drawing attention to a band’s inability to measure up to their recording studio talent but even the thick reverb the band is famous for sounds crystal clear. The mix was done by Michael Brauer (Bob Dylan, Coldplay) and perfectly accents the achievements of the concert’s visual clarity.

All too often, attendees of live recordings boast about the transcendence of quality of the live show versus its recorded presentation. Marketing also contributes to the notion that a live performance is better than DVD with devices like, “It’s as if you’re really there!” However, the dozen or so cameras that follow each band member (even the drummer), wide shots of the stage, audience perspective shots, and pans across the crowd take the viewer so much further than the concertgoer.

The changing lighting of cool colors and contrasted oranges washes each song a different way, and adds to the crashing echo of the band’s sound. When the energy is high and strobe lights are used smartly, the audience reciprocates the excitement and screams accordingly. The band’s more ethereal alt-country songs of lap steels and heavy reverb are treated with shifting purples and greens, while the rolling ankle-high smoke helps write the myth of Okonokos.

The ornate and eerie indoor location, the mood and sounds of the Kentucky natives, and the absence of a credited venue add another mystery to the Okonokos performance: where is it? A better question to ask is: does that matter?

Okonokos feels like a timeless performance. An impressive two hours of music is without band-to-audience banter, and the clothing the patrons are wearing mimics the transgenerational feel of the setting and its story. This adds to James’ continual emphasis on wanting to create a lasting performance, and it does exactly that. After (or while) watching it, the viewer doesn’t want to know the logistics of the performance, he or she wants to try and decide which song was done the best.

The performance is mostly new material, and by new I mean from their most recent album, Z. About half of the eighteen songs are tracks from their other three albums, The Tennesee Fire (1999), At Dawn (2001) and It Still Moves (2003). The song “O Is The One That Is Real” is from their 2002 split EP with the band Songs: Ohia (2005).

As with anything, the DVD does have its weak points. During “Mahgeetah” the band is beginning to wear down, and one of the most impressive guitar riffs seems to be over-simplified. That is, until someone working sound realized the guitar wasn’t plugged in and the problem is rectified near the end of the song. The show concludes nicely, though somewhat abruptly, with the general everybody-do-whatever-with-your-instruments-all-at-once ending, but the movie keeps going. We rejoin the sometimes mentioned party expatriate (named in the credits “A. Man”) and alpaca, and leave the concert hall to walk back to the Victorian mansion. A large bear, assumed to be a reference to It Still Moves’ and Acoustic Citsuoca’s (2004) cover art, attacks A. Man and dismembers him. Awkwardly, the party witnesses this from indoors, and somehow the concert audience sees it too.

Special features are mostly absent as well, save a silent and random photo gallery without narration. But, with a two-hour runtime for one performance, there probably wasn’t much space to fit too many extras. Instead, it’s worth watching the concert again and considering making the commute to their November shows in Austin and Dallas.

For more information, and to watch a one minute preview, visit www.mymorningjacket.com. $19.99.

Harry Potter Re-examined, Dear Reader (10: Unedited)

Most people that have seen the Wizard of Oz set to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of The Moon agree that it’s a pretty cool coincidence. Replacing the soundtrack to a movie can significantly change a viewer’s perception of the film, because audio almost always plays a large role in a film’s storytelling, mood and tone. Wizard People, Dear Reader manipulates that idea and hilariously re-envisions the 2001 adaptation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by providing a full-length, alternate soundtrack of narration to the film.

“We were at a bar and there was a guy playing pool all by himself, and he had sunglasses on and this kind of big hat, and headphones on… just totally cut off from the world even though he was right there in the middle of it, playing pool. We were just kind of taking turns, as people do when you’re just sitting around just kind of throwing out jokes, about what he could possibly be listening to,” creator Brad Neely said. “I bet he’s listening to a book on tape of Harry Potter.”

From there, Neely adopted the enthusiastic and scruffy voice that such an overbearing narrator might have. Though unnamed, this narrator becomes another character in the film, and seems more in-tune with the characters’ inner-dialogue than factual information; Hermione becomes the ugly and obnoxious Harmony, Professor Snape is now a female, and Rubeus Hagrid is called “Hagar the Horrible.”

Although Wizard People started out as a popular live performance, much like Mister Sinus Theater (a sort of live version of Mystery Science Theater 3000), Austin-based cartoonist and musician Neely no longer performs it live because of legal issues. However, he has recorded and made available a downloadable two-disc set to sync and play along with the first Harry Potter film.

Neely made it easy, and free, to download this two-and-a-half hour recording, divided into two separate burnable files, from counter-copyright website www.illegal-art.org. Simply follow the syncing instructions on the website to watch the film with the new soundtrack, or pop the CDs in your car stereo and listen to the “book on tape” as if it were one.

Aside from just being incredibly funny, Wizard People uses heavy-handed metaphor and hyperbole to tell another story that may not be immediately apparent to fans of the film’s original version. The narrator makes frequent religious and existential references to Harry’s powers, situation and inner conflicts. One of the most interesting scenes in Neely’s interpretation takes place in the school’s attic in front of the Mirror of the Erised, between Harry Potter and “Ronnie the Bear.” Harry finds the mirror and sees it as a gateway to heaven, and the scene becomes a moment of conflicting value systems between the two friends.

“What’s funniest sometimes is the serious stuff in the world…it kind of gets tied up in the whole reason that the Christian Right doesn’t like Harry Potter; if you’re going to be a wizard you have to kind of not believe in heaven, but you can believe in all these other crazy magical awesome things. You know, like Dumbledore’s pitching being a wizard to Harry as an alternative to going to heaven. I just think that’s cool, and Ronnie the Bear’s already totally into that whole idea.”

Ironically, one of the most fertile topics for Wizard People is Harry’s obvious biblical references, “He’s prophesized, he’s the most powerful being whether he wants to or not, and in every movie he saves the world from Satan, or Voldemore. I just think it’s such a Christ story, and I like the idea of a reluctant Christ. So, I saw the potential to be able to get that across.”

Whether altering the soundtrack to a film is considered a new art form is up to the viewer’s interpretation, but Neely’s attention to time and tone deserve recognition. The narration syncs almost perfectly in chronology and visual action, and each time the DVD player’s screen moves to a new chapter, the narrator announces it and introduces what’s on screen. From there, the storytelling analyzes the scene, or spirals away on an absurd tangent concerning nothing on-screen.

Aside from straining his throat to maintain a bizarre voice for the entire length of a film, another obvious difficulty of the project was working within the time constraints of a given scene or chapter, “That was a challenge, but a fun one… it was also a way to keep variety from chapter to chapter, so it wasn’t just all the same tone. [I] could work on one specific chapter at a time and kind of, hopefully, make these little, different sections.”

Although the project started out a joke between a group of friends, Neely has received a huge amount of positive response from fans who have downloaded and synced the DVD and audio, “I still get emails pretty much daily where someone has watched it and enjoyed it. So, that’s gratifying.”

Brad Neely’s other projects can be found online at www.creasedcomics.com, including the popular George Washington music video. Future projects include a series of short cartoons for an internet TV station, and a fictional rough-draft to Ulysses S. Grant’s autobiography, The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant.