Film Strip

I’ve hinted at it and mentioned it a few times before, but I had a DVD-buying problem for about three or four years between 2005 and around 2008. I don’t know how to explain it. I wanted every good movie ever made. I wanted to own them. Maybe part of me thought that in the future, I will draw a comic strip based around movies, so this will all be my research.

That certainly was a dumb idea.

I never counted how many DVD’s I owned, but I’d estimate it was near or over 300. Sure, that’s not a record, but who needs to own that many movies? I would buy them five or six at a time on sale at Best Buy. It wasn’t until I looked at my DVD shelf and noticed that I had roughly 40 or 50 still unopened in their original packaging that I decided to pare down.

So I sold almost all of them expect for the choice 25 or so that I really like. These include the Lord of The Rings Trilogy, Kill Bill, Casablanca, Almost Famous, etc. I felt really good about my collection.

Until DVD’s started phasing out as Blu-Ray has come. I really like HD movies, and I told myself I wouldn’t try to own every movie this time around, but rather replace my DVD’s with their Blu-Ray counterpart. The trouble is, most of my all-time favorites aren’t on Blu-Ray yet.

IGN posted this article the other day listing all the good movies not yet on Blu-Ray. Look at this list! Citizen Kane, The Incredibles, The Indiana Jones Trilogy, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, Pulp Fiction, and The Star Wars Trilogy! It’s like Blu-Ray makers took a look at my DVD shelf and decided, “Nope, can’t make any of these.” That list doesn’t mention it, but The Lord of The Rings extended editions are still missing from Blu-Ray as well.

I don’t understand this. These are awesome movies. Put them out, and I will buy them. I’m a movie addict, and you’re missing out on the action I could bring. You could put out all the crappy movies you want thinking I’m going to buy them just to utilize my Blu-Ray player, but the joke’s on you!

I’m not even buying a Blu-Ray player until these movies are available (or until PS3′s aren’t back-ordered anymore.) So bring on the good Blu-Rays!

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Last night I happened to be flipping through the channels and saw that Tron was on HDNET.  Tron was a favorite when I was a kid, and I hadn’t seen it in a few years, so I flipped over. 

After watching it for a little while, I’ve gotta tell you I was wowed by it.  It honestly took me longer than I’d like to admit to myself to realize I was watching Tron in High Definition, and it looked awesome. 

I’ve had my 50 inch 1080p DLP HD TV since the World Cup in 2006 (so that I could watch all the soccer games in High Definition), and while I have become an HD snob for TV shows and Sports, I haven’t yet put in the money to switch my movie watching to Blu-Ray and full HD.  Part of that had to do with the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD wars, and part of that is because I had an addiction to buying DVD’s from around 2003 – 2008 that took me a while to get over.  (I’m doing good in the fact that I’ve only purchased one DVD for myself in the past 2 ½ years – Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and it was a used copy for cheap.)

This viewing of Tron reminded me how awesome HD can be.  Now that I think about it, the only other HD movies I’ve watch are The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and The Fifth Element, and I remember thinking those looked great too.  But Tron is a little different because these computer graphics should be incredibly dated by now with the dawn of Avatar in 3D (Which on a sidenote, I’m over Avatar these days because it just looks like stuff we’ve seen in Final Fantasy games for years—that, and the overly clichéd story). 

Instead of looking dated, Tron in HD looked really polished and cool.  Sure it was hokey at parts, and the technology is simple polygons and such, but you tell me when you can watch Tron in HD and not want to create a custom Tron costume next Halloween.

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For the past 4 or 5 years, when the Academy Award nominations are announced, I try to use the nominations to rate which movies are most important to see before the Oscars.  Of course, importance is relative, but basically I try to see which movies are the ones you have to watch to get the most out of the Acedmy Awards Ceremony.

In past years, this worked out great for me. This year is a little odd, or obvious, as I’ll show in a minute.

To show you how I determine which movies are most important for Oscar viewing, I developed a very simple rating system where I award movies points for each of their nominations.  The points are on a scale of 1 – 5, and since it’s my own personal rater, I decide which nominated categories deserve a certain point value.  The point values are as follows:

• 5 – Best Picture
• 5 – Director
• 4 – Original Screenplay
• 4 – Adapted Screenplay
• 4 – Actor
• 4 – Actress
• 3 – Supporting Actor
• 3 – Supporting Actress
• 3 – Cinematography
• 3 – Editing
• 3 – Art Direction
• 2 – Costume Design
• 3 – Original Score
• 1 – Original Song
• 1 – Makeup
• 2 – Sound
• 2 – Sound Editing
• 3 – Visual Effects
• 3 – Animated Feature
• 2 – Foreign Language
• 2 – Documentary Feature
• 1 – Documentary Short
• 1 – Short – Animated
• 1 – Short – Live Action

Feel free to argue with these point values if you want, but that’s simply what I came up with one day at work a few years back, and it’s helped me out ever since.

Once again, in the past, this was a great system.  Obviously the movies that are up for Best Picture are usually nominated for the most awards, and thus they score the highest, and should naturally be on the pre-Oscar viewing list.  However, this rater helped me to see some pretty good movies that were not nominated for Best Picture and definitely expanded my horizon so that I knew a lot about what was going on during the ceremony.  Ratatouille in 2008, Pan’s Labyrinth in 2007, Walk The Line in 2006, The Incredibles in 2005, and City of God, Finding Nemo, and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl in 2004.  (Embarassingly, I just realized I did not yet rate 2009.  I may just do that for fun this weekend.)  Should any of these movies have been nominated for Best Picture?  Debatable. Am I glad I saw them? Most definitely.

Now this brings me to the 2010 Oscar problem.  With ten movies nominated for Best Picture, my rater is skewed and those are the ten movies at the top of my rater.  This should be obvious, and you should all be telling me, “No kidding? The ten Best Picture nominated movies are the ones you should try to see?” in the most sarcastic tone ever.  But I liked trying to find some “hidden” gems within the nominations.  Now I’m probably better off just trying to catch up with these ten movies.  When you think about it, that’s a lot to try to see anyway if you haven’t already seen most of them.

The funny part to this whole story is even after rating these movies and finding out rather plainly that the top ten are the same ten the Oscars choose, I still want to try to see a lot of the other movies. Invictus, Sherlock Holmes, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, and The Lovely Bones are on my radar in addition to the fact that I’ve only seen two of the Best Picture nominations (Avatar and Up).

I know, that’s not like me to be so behind.  I know.  But gimme a break, in the past year I got married, changed jobs, moved three times, and just bought a house.  But know that the Oscars are my favorite awards, and I’ll do my best to see as many as possible before the awards, but I can’t make any promises.

I may also post during the weekend to show you all my ratings for the past few year just for fun.  What’s your Pre-Oscar routine or tradition?

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