Black Friday last week was kind to me, as I was able to acquire a Sony BDP-S350 Blu-Ray player greatly discounted.  I was quite unimpressed with my first shopping experience at Conn’s, however, which is like an electronics store staffed entirely with the pathetic salesmen from Glengarry Glenn Ross.  A trip to Fry’s netted me a high-quality OEM HDMI cable for $7 and a 45 minute wait in line, and Best Buy’s sales graced me with BD’s of Pixar’s Cars and 300 - about opposite ends of the spectrum as far as family friendliness is concerned, but both great movies and excellent showcase discs.

My Xbox 360 and Time Warner Cable’s watered-down HDTV have been the only things feeding my poor HDTV for the last year, so the 1080p visuals really stand out on my 56″ screen.  The sound is fantastic as well –improved sound bitrates mean no more of the huge difference between loud and quiet scenes that’re so prevalent on DVDs due to compression.  I was a bit miffed that while the box and promotional materials for the player tout it as “BD-Live ready”, they left off “…after you buy a 1GB thumb drive.”  So far, the BD-Live (also called “Profile 2.0″, also called “Why can’t products launch with a completed feature spec these days?”) bonuses I’ve come across have failed to impress.  Iron Man‘s BD-Live required an irritating registration that I didn’t feel like signing-up for, and Tropic Thunder‘s BD-Live content wouldn’t even finish loading.  GREAT FEATURE, SONY!

Aliens is a badass movie.  Aliens is one of the rare movies that proves the exception to the “if it has a kid sidekick in it, it’s going to suck” rule. Aliens also has the distinction of being the movie I’ve bought and re-bought more than any other.

  • My first VHS copy was the THX remastered theatrical cut (which really had a great picture for a VHS tape)
  • Then, the VHS letterboxed Director’s Cut version, which was huge because that version had never been seen outside of a rare laserdisc print — and everyone knows James Cameron’s director’s cuts are way better than his theatrical cuts (See: Terminator 2*, The Abyss)
  • The original DVD release, which was pretty much identical to the director’s cut VHS with some archival commentary
  • The extra-super-special-mega DVD with both cuts of the movie and loads of extras

So, eventually, Cameron’s gonna wrap up work on Avatar and get around to putting together new special features out for ALL SIX of his movies (not the most productive filmmaker, is he?), and put them out on Blu-Ray, and I’m going to have to give Fox more of my money for a fifth copy of this movie, in all it’s high-deffity goodness.  And I’ll be happy to do it, too.  Mmm…Blu-Ray…….

*Caution, my fellow Blu-Ray owners! Terminator 2 is on BD, but it’s a rush-job that only has the inferior theatrical cut and pretty much no special features worth mentioning.  Hold out for the special edition.