I’ve written out a monster of a review for the recent special edition DVD treatment of Sin City which can be found here. You may remember that I bought this a while back only to get screwed by the French-Canadians, but my US copy arrived a few days ago and I’ve now watched everything on the discs. It’s a great set if you haven’t bought it already.

Mainly due to the fact that one person in particular can’t talk to me without slipping in the fact that I should enable comments on this blog (you know who you are), but also because I was a bit bored this evening, you can now comment on my posts if the desire takes you. I can’t really go back through every post and turn it back on, but they should be working on the last couple of weeks and all new posts from this point on. Knock yourself out.

I should note that I’m just trying this out, so if I’m not happy with it after a while I might go back to my dictatorial ways where only I get to post.

This is good for a laugh. You may remember a brief trend for editing movies to make trailers that show the movie as a completly different genre like The Shining as a life affirming dramedy or West Side Story as a zombie movie (links to the best ones here).

Anyway, there’s a new one to take a look at named Brokeback To The Future. If you find the idea of Heath Ledger mounting Jake Gyllenhaal repellant just think about Christopher Lloyd getting freaky with Michael J Fox as star-crossed lovers across time. Suddenly sounds more appealing, doesn’t it?

An article in PSM on some of the apparent planned features of the PS3 seems to have set the rumour mills into working overtime, with the news that not only are Sony planning an Xbox Live-style online service (not surprising, considering what a fucking mess PS2 online was), but that it’s to include a number of big multimedia features including a DVR and LocationFree server to go with the PSP. Impressive, but I’m going to call bullshit with the following calculations:

• The only comparable games console sells for $400.
• First-generation Blu-Ray players unveiled at CES are set to start at $1,000.
• An HD DVR is going to need at least 250GB of space, and a drive of that size goes for around $100 alone.
• The PS2/DVR hybrid, the PSX, sold for the equivalent of $720 at launch.
• LocationFree servers sell for $200-300.

Now I obviously don’t expect it to cost the total of all that, but unless Sony plan to take a colossal loss on the machine there is no way in hell that they can get all of that functionality in and keep it at a decent price.

People complained and indeed still do complain that $400 for a 360 is obscene, so I hope that for Sony’s sake they don’t announce that the PS3 is going to cost more than $500. I can’t wait to find out how much they expect people to pay for it.

I’ve really wanted HD-DVD for a while now but I’ve just seen this comparison between an HD broadcast of Fellowship of the Ring and the standard DVD. Hold your mouse over the DVD shot and it’ll change to the HD version so that you can easily see the difference.

The amount of detail that the HD version has over the DVD is quite striking, but bear in mind that it should be even better with the real thing. HD broadcasts are around 12Mbps (a little more than the maximum 10Mbps for DVD) and HD-DVDs will be more like 25Mbps, and the HD shots are scaled down to DVD resolution so when you see them in their full 720p/1080i/1080p glory they should be more detailed still. I need it now…

Some people have complained that the DVD doesn’t look as bad as those shots suggest, but they look similar to a DVD upscaled for an HDTV (albeit slightly worse, which probably comes from them being upscaled to 1920×1080 for the comparison), so it’s a fairly good comparison of how the two sources will look on that new TV that’s only getting a workout with the 360.