waider dot i e

June 21: Shutter Island: it's funny that the trailer seems to portay this more as a horror movie than a thriller movie, or at least that was my take; it's pretty much straight-up psychological thriller. Much as with The Bookshop I'm not exactly happy with it because it works out pretty grimly in the end, regardless of how you interpret it.
June 17: Manually verifying a few of the videos and I'm seeing a couple of cases where the TV firmware is clearly at fault: the current movie is 1m23s into what the TV claims is a 4s video... there are a few cases so far where I've ripped the wrong title, possibly through mixing up discs again.

Also I still haven't figured out the subtitles thing.
June 16: My understanding of DVD construction is, despite doing some research in the course of my current ripping ~~yarn~~ adventure, somewhat sketchy still, but I think one of my disks has a wacky sort of copy protection on it that effectively amounts to multiple copies of the same movie, with all but one of them pointing at an unreadable block on the disk. It's all made up of pointers, so it doesn't mean they've put 100 copies of the movie on the disc, just two - one with the bad block, and one without - and the navigation data points to one or the other as appropriate. Now, this is based on observation and theory, and I've not yet checked the resulting (successful) rip, but if this is the case it's an interesting (if somewhat futile) copy-protection system: a pirate - yaaaar! - tries to do a bit-level copy of the disc and can't because of the deliberate insertion of unreadable blocks, so they then resort to using the navigation files to pick out the "good" blocks only to be stymied by the fact that their 4GB disk is producing 400GB of data. I dunno.

And of course all this is so much wasted effort since it's been overtaken by streaming services anyway.
June 15: The Bookshop is one of those stories where, oh, spoilers, the expected denoument never arrives, and horrible people get away with being horrible. You don't even get the satisfaction of them feeling guilty about being horrible because they clearly don't. I don't much enjoy this sort of thing; I expect my escapism to right the wrongs of the world (possibly through blowing up things, driving fast cars, or throwing out witty dialogue). OH WELL.
June 14: Lost track of things here for a bit. Still slowly ripping DVDs; a few of the more recent ones are TV series and I've not yet decided how best to auto-rip them.

I am sure there are internet fora dedicated to fighting over Anatomy of a Fall, specifically with respect to what actually happened. It's excellently done, and it's interesting to see how in a court everyone behaves as if every single person acts as a rational being with perfect recollection and logical movitations for their actions. You kinda want to ask these people if they know any, you know, humans.

Also I think the blood spatter evidence from the defence is compelling. FIGHT ME.

Also yes I did notice the gender split in who agreed with the prosecution and who agreed with the defence.
June 07: Steve Jobs was disappointing: it simply didn't have a story. Three half-hour segments from Jobs' business life and a definite leaning into portraying him as an unmitigated asshole, all of which was done so much better in the other Steve Jobs movie, and that actually had a storyline to follow. Waste of talent and time.
June 06: Our internet radio appears to have lost the ability to stream. This may or may not be related to the fact that favourites on the device are managed by some sort of third-party site which has gone through some issues. Plus, I don't know how long it's been like this because it's also a perfectly capable FM radio, and that's what we've relied on. I am tempted to poke it with the various hacking toys but at the same time I've got more than enough half-finished projects to play with.
June 01: I've had Split Second on my to-watch list for so long I can't recall why I put it there, and having watched it I definitely have no idea. It's sort of Predator meets Blade Runner meets ... I dunno, Lethal Weapon with a side order of is-it-or-isn't-it occult. I think they basically asked Rutger Hauer to tear up any scenery he happened to be near, edited it together, and called it a movie.
May 31: Amsterdam was also a bit of a lark. As with last night's 1956 fare, this 2022 movie has been called "too complicated" which, well, it's not; it's actually pretty straightforward. But also lots of fun. Granted, it gets a little preachy in spots (needs less "tell" and more "show") but that's a minor quibble.
May 30: The Killing was a fun piece of work. I see the studio at the time thought the non-linear timeline was confusing and insisted on a voiceover, which to me just suggests that the studio thought the audience was an unsophisticated bunch of rubes. I dunno, it didn't seem that difficult to follow, but who am I to question the wisdom of the greats etc. etc. Anyway, this one's definitely worth a look to see early Kubrick doing his thing.