Best Actor: Sam Riley (Control)
Best Actress: Anamaria Marinca (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days)
Best Music Score: Jonny Greenwood (There Will Be Blood)
Best Foreign Language Film: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel)
Best Director: David Cronenberg (Eastern Promises)
Best Film: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik)

Apple TV

The Apple TV was announced by Steve Jobs at the Macworld keynote in 2007. It could have been the Apple product that everyone queued day and night to buy when it was launched, but… Steve announced the iPhone in the same keynote so the Apple TV had some competition.

At the time I couldn’t see me buying one. It just stores your music, photos, podcasts and movies on a hard-drive plugged into your TV. The only thing that I would have used it for was to watch Diggnation from my sofa instead of from the chair in front of my iMac.

Movie Rentals

So what made me change my mind you may ask? At the Macworld this year Steve Jobs announced that the Apple TV wasn’t the great success that Apple had hoped. He demoed the latest software update which has a different UI, lets you look at flickr photos, will work without being synced to your Mac and that you will be able to rent movies from the Apple TV using the iTunes store.

Since Christmas I’ve noticed that Amazon, who I rent DVDs from, have been really slow receiving and sending out discs. They used to be really quick, like the next day or at least the day after. Now they are so slow that I’ve changed my account to the 4 a month for £6.99. I can’t see me ditching Amazon for rentals completely, currently they give me 10% discount if I purchase a DVD, as I can rent the more obscure titles from them. Renting from the iTunes store sounds good. You have 30 days to start watching after you’ve downloaded and 24 hours to finish watching after you’ve started. Those conditions may change but apparently they are similar to the rental terms available with the cable companies. Also, it will depend on the titles available. At the moment there are no movie titles available to buy at the iTunes store for the UK, TV programmes, yes, actual movies, no. Steve says that the major studios are on board but we’ll have to wait and see what the UK ends up with.

It will also depend on the download speed. I could select a film in the morning to watch in the evening. That should give my 8meg connection plenty of time to download the film. Steve said that you could start watching almost straight away. But I always hate it when the playhead catches up with the downloading in QuickTime. The other good thing is that I’ll never have to scrape the finger prints off a rental DVD. No more polishing the disc on my shirt before putting it in the player.

HD DVD/Blu-ray

Steve Jobs also said that for a dollar more you could rent the movie in HD format. Since purchasing a little Samsung LCD TV last year I’ve wanted to see what a HD picture would look like. I don’t want to buy another player while the format wars are still in progress. And I don’t want to have to go back to paying £17 and more for content on disc. So with my Apple TV and a HDMI cable I could see what the fuss is about.

Video Podcasts

Towards the end of 2006 I started to watch Diggnation but it wasn’t much fun spending my lunch hour sat in the same chair that I’d been sat in all morning. So I stopped. When I bought the Apple TV I noticed that Diggnation is now in HD, the files are huge and I don’t for a minute think that it’s full HD but the picture quality is great. Other podcasts that I subscribe to are commandN and GeekBrief.TV. Both technology podcasts with female presenters. Also lots of short podcasts like TGRtv, DiveFilm, Hidden Universe, Hubblecast and National Geographic. The Macworld keynote for this year I watched, I had waited to watch it on the Apple TV. I also have the keynote from last year and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs being interviewed at the D5 conference. The MacBreak shows from Macworld I watched and I downloaded Mr. Deity and The Guild for a little comic relief.

Setup & Problems

I did have a few problems setting it up. Putting in the wireless routers details was fine. I could watch movie trailers but iTunes on my iMac wouldn’t see the Apple TV. I checked around the Apple dicussions and couldn’t find anything to fix the problem. The error just mentioned that iTunes couldn’t sync because of a blocked port in the firewall. Currently I have a firewall in my ADSL router and the firewall switched on in Leopard. All I had to do was go into System Preferences > Security > Firewall and switch from ‘Allow only essential services’ to ‘Set access for specific services and applications’ then add the iTunes application. Then quit iTunes and when you open it again it will ask you to confirm that you want iTunes to have access to the outside world. And it’s been fine since.

The other little annoyance is that moving around using the remote seems a little sluggish to say the least. Possibly because I have a coffee table directly between the remote and the unit, possibly not. The unit seems to re-render the artwork and the file information each time the item is selected. From what I’ve heard about the new update this should have been improved.

Conclusion

The Apple TV so far has been a little lacking. With no movie content then it’s just a more comfortable way of watching video podcasts. I can’t wait for the software update, which has been put back by a week or two from the reports that I’ve read recently.

Amazon.co.uk

A Very Long Engagement was a DVD that took me a very long time to watch.

An old colleague of mine sent me a code from a newspaper which allowed me to get a DVD from Play.com for free. The choice was a little limited to say the least… a choice of one. Either get it for free or don’t get it at all. So I ordered it. It was a film that I wanted to watch anyway because it starred Audrey Tautou who was also in Amelie. When it arrived I put it on the shelf with the other DVD’s in my collection. That was last November.

When I decided to watch it at the weekend I noticed on the cover that it was directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet who also directed Amelie, Alien: Ressurrection, The City of Lost Children and Delicatessen. All of which I own except The City of Lost Children, but that’s now on order.

A Very Long Engagement is just a wonderful wonderful film and is absolutely gorgeous to watch. The second disc of the two has a 70 minute ‘Making of’ feature which shows how much the film relies to CGI. The street scenes outside the opera house are actually composed from 3 different shots mixed together. At one point Jean-Pierre is telling the extras in the scene what their character is and where they are going. I would have to watch the film again to catch all of the plot points and the cinematic details, but that’s certainly no hardship.

The other film that I watched was The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle which couldn’t have been more different.

I’m a fan of the Sex Pistols and John Lydon but this was just a Malcolm McLaren ego trip. It did have some good clips of the band playing but most of them I’d seen before because I own the Longhorn DVD. A film must be pretty bad for me to fast-forward through great chunks of it. Thankfully it was only rented and is now whizzing back from where it came.

In next months issue of Empire magazine Chris Hewitt reviews the new DVD of Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile. Talking about the DVD extras he finishes by saying :-

Oh, and yet again that Hanks fella comes across as the nicest guy in the world. Just once, can’t the guy be caught DUI with a dead hooker in his trunk?Chris Hewitt - Empire

Batman Begins

On the way home I paid a rare trip to the cinema to see Batman Begins.

I’m kind of picky about the films that I go to the cinema to watch as my town doesn’t have a multi-screen cinema, not even a single screen cinema come to that. But being a fan of the first two, Tim Burton directed, Batman films and being a fan of the director of the new one, Christopher Nolan, I had to make the trip.

Now, maybe it’s just me but I didn’t think that it was the greatest movie I’ve ever seen, just a good movie. Just a nice way to while away a few hours. It definitely had an all star cast - Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Rutger Hauer and a new improved batmobile.

I knew before hand that practically all the stunts were done on the set and not CGI’d in later, which was a good sign. The sight of Batman stood on the edge of a skyscraper while the camera flies around him is an image that stays in the memory longer when you realise that it was a real person and not a bunch of pixels.

I saw Spiderman 2 a few months ago now on DVD and didn’t like it at all. You do just seem to see the same CGI effects over and over again. The sound was good but that was about it.

What has happened to Gary Oldman recently? After staring in Dracula, Leon, Immortal Beloved, The Fifth Element back in the nineties he has done nothing of any great note since his part in Hannibal in 2001. He does just seem to be doing films like the Harry Potter films and Batman Begins to pay the bills.

Possibly Batman Begins is a film that I’ll like more after repeated viewing on DVD when it comes out. It’s worth seeing at the cinema and should be a must buy if it’s released as a two disc DVD.

&uotLong gone are the days when I used to travel to HMV in Market Street with a list of CD’s, Video’s and occasionally book’s that I could only buy from the store. There was always the trip a little further down the street to the Virgin Megastore to compare prices. I mean if I could walk 100 yards to save a few quid I would do. Those days are B.I. (before internet). Nowadays I do all my shopping online.

Tod Browning’s Freaks

I saw in Empire magazine that the Tod Browning film Freaks was being released on DVD. I had recorded the film the last time it was shown on TV. Prices for the video at the time were around £15, which seemed a bit steep considering the film is only just over an hour long and is one of the first ‘talkies’. The advert in the publication showed a price of £15.99 with a little line of small type stating that the release would be a HMV exclusive and also wasn’t to be released until April 25. No I didn’t immediately pre-order the DVD. Over the last 10 years, whenever I have been near a HMV I have always paid them a visit purely for the entertainment value. Having looked at the extras on the disc and obviously knowing that I liked the film, Johnny Eck and Prince Randian being my favourite Freaks, I checked Amazon.co.uk. They didn’t have it listed for sale as a region 2 disc, because HMV have the exclusive remember, but they had it listed as region 1 sold by Caiman USA in the Amazon Marketplace. The price was, drum roll please, £7.82 with £1.24 postage and packing from the states. Buying it from HMV.co.uk would have cost £15.99 with £1.40 postage and packing and not available until April 25. That’s a saving of £8.33 or 91%. You wonder why I hate HMV.

HMV’s rip-off
Kill Bill box-set

Another thing, while I’m on a roll, figuratively speaking. I’ve been waiting for the Kill Bill DVD box-set. Yes, the one that Quentin Tarantino promised would have both films and better extras than the individual DVD’s. Of course I’m still waiting. Just before Christmas, can you spot the cash-in yet, HMV released ‘a’ Kill Bill box-set, I checked the extras and this is not the one that I’m waiting for. The price for Kill Bill Vol. 1 at HMV.co.uk is £8.99. The price for Kill Bill Vol. 2 at HMV.co.uk is £9.99. The price for the HMV ‘exclusive’ box-set is, wait for it, £28.99. Let’s look at the figures again because they can seem a little baffling at first glance. Cost of the individual DVD’s £18.98. Cost of the ‘exclusive’ box-set £28.99. Therefore, and I think you are ahead of me here, you are indeed paying £10.01 for the cost of a box, just a simple cardboard box.

HMV obviously have to pay substantial amounts for the real estate that they have in most high streets. Thankfully the only people who buy goods from them are just buying the odd CD or DVD once a year as gifts. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not completely anti-HMV, occasionally, in the sales they do have the odd bargain. You just have to look long and hard for them. As with all things you have to shop around.