Archive for the ‘Movies’ Category
I read some great reviews about this BluRay player and I really wanted something that had a fast startup time and BD Live 2.0 so I put the JVC XV-BP1 on my Christmas list. My wife was feeling like Santa this year so she got it for me and I was like a kid in a candy store, or maybe a kid on Christmas day would be more appropriate. The first Blu-Ray movie I tried was The Mask with Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz. It played great and the load times were as advertised, I was excited. Then I played another movie and the audio didn’t work on pass-through. It only worked if I set it to PCM-Multi. So now I’m nervous, I did my homework, my Magnavox Blu-Ray was junk so I justified the JVC. Let me try something else, so I pop in John Mayer’s Where The Light Is – Live In Las Vegas… Still no audio on passthrough it only works on PCM setting.
So I start looking on the Internet for others having this problem and it comes up blank, no hits. This can’t be true, am I really the only one? Next I jump over to the JVC site and search for firmware and I see that my firmware is 6 months old. Apparently this thing has been in the warehouse for awhile. I download the newest firmware, put it on my flash drive, boot the player, it installs and BAM! it works. Man am I happy. If you have this same issue be sure your flash drive is formatted FAT not NTFS or it won’t work.
You can get the firmware update for the XV-BP1 Blue-Ray Player at JVC Firmware Update.
I just watched this movie for the first time since it came out. I didn’t remember it being that funny, maybe because I’m older I saw it different but it was entertaining the second time around. Billy Bob Thornton, Bruce Willis, and Cate Blanchett made a great team. Thornton as a hypochondriac made the movie. The story came from the rights to the true life story of some 1970s bank robbers but it was painted with a wide brush and turned into a moderate action, comedy, romance movie. If you have Netflix and your queue is low I would add it, if you see it in the $5 bin at WalMart grab it. If you can’t wait:
Knowing – I watched the Blue-Ray version of the movie Knowing the other night and was not impressed. I can’t believe how much money Hollywood is wasting on film these days. I have spent more enjoyable time on YouTube. Don’t try to blame Nicolas Cage it was not his fault at all. The story had nowhere to go except where it ended. There were just not any real surprises. The Aliens made no sense appearing and disappearing and watching, what for? In the end they just took the kids anyway so why the cat and mouse? Why drive people crazy with incoherent whispering and numbers if you don’t really care if they are going to understand? You are just going to take them anyway, right? The spaceships were very lame and there were presumably hundreds if not thousands. Did they drive all of those people crazy for 50 years and then torture their kids with whispering and number carving just to kidnap the kids in the end? Figuring it out or “knowing” didn’t and couldn’t save anyone. I just didn’t get the script, who wrote this crap? One more thing, why was some of it shot in Australia? This is another stupid trend. I watched New in Town a week ago and it is set in Minnesota but they filmed it in Canada.
If you have a choice you should watch New in Town rather than Knowing. It’s corny, predictable, and a cookie cutter chick flick but it doesn’t try to be anything other than what it is. Harry Connick Jr. does a great job too.
Finally, it has been announced that Heat should be available on BluRay on November 3rd 2009. It’s about time! Now can we get Michael Mann back in the studio for Collateral on Blu-Ray? You can pre-order Heat on BluRay at Amazon.
Heat on Blu-Ray
The Magnavox NB500MG9 BluRay player looked like a great deal and things were going good for a month or two. When I upgraded my Netflix account to 3 movies at a time I started getting a lot of Blu-Ray Discs and I started to see that the player had issues. Many times the movie would freeze or jump ahead. I could not rewind or forward to see what I missed so I would unplug the player and start over and it seemed that it would do this at exactly the same spot every time. I would clean the disk, try again and it just would not play. I would have to go upstairs and borrow the kids PS3 to finish watching the movie. The latest failure is the 15th Anniversary Resevoir Dogs on Blu-Ray, no audio or video, period. Fire up the PS3 and no problem.
At the request of my wife I was updating my Christmas list and 2 of the first 3 movies I looked for are not out on BluRay yet. I was happy to see they released Man On Fire (Denzel Washington) but then I looked up Heat (Deniro, Pacino) and Collateral (Tom Cruise) and no luck. Still no Minority Report on Blu-Ray either, come on, is there really no demand, is everyone really buying Planet Earth and Kung-Fu Panda? I get the appeal and top ranking of movies like Ironman, it has something for everyone and Robert Downey Jr. has that special charisma that would have turned any 1950’s actor into a screen legend but some of these Blu Disk releases baffle me. Hollywood! I need action movies with a plot and actors that can, well, act and I need them in HD. I don’t need Crank or The Transporter, you should be ashamed.
Fired up the Pioneer SX-780, Beogram 1602 turntable and my copy of Spin-It-Again and resumed my project of converting my vinyl to Windows Media Audio files. I forget how great some of Mark Knopfler’s soundtrack work was. Everyone knows Local Hero but the music he did for the movie Cal is mystic and peaceful as well. There are hints of this music in A Shot at Glory but make no mistake the two albums are very different.
I was looking for minority report on BluRay or HD-DVD and had no idea it wasn’t available until just now. What a bummer. I can get Rio Bravo on Blu-Ray or Christmas Vacation on HDDVD but not minority Report?
Don’t get me wrong, I like both of those movies but there is no reason for an old grainy western like Rio Bravo to be out on HD before Minority Report and Christmas Vacation has a choice of stereo or mono track on HD. Give me a break Hollywood.
The Bourne Identity A great CIA movie. Good plot, good characters, good combat and weapons but not too far over the top like most modern action movies. Matt Damon is Jason Bourne. This is the best of the trilogy but Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum are not far behind. Very few sequels can pull off what they did with this trilogy. I only wish they would have stuck with Doug Wiman as the director on all three. One can only wonder if the “shakey cam” would have been under control if so.
My wife and 2 sons bought me a Blu-Ray player for my birthday. Sweet! I thought I would have to wait until Christmas. I got the new John Mayer concert, “Where The Light Is” and “The Punisher” both on Blu-Ray.
Update: Turned out even at a great price the Magnavox NB500MG9 Blu-Ray player was not up to the task. There were way too many discs from NetFlix that just wouldn’t play on it. We constantly had to use the Playstation to watch Blu-Ray discs from NetFlix. It was very slow but that would have been OK if it just worked.
I recommend the JVC XV-BP1 for features and performance. At current prices there is no reason to buy less. There are better, if you have the budget for it.