Welcome to this week’s DVD Diggers, now in technicolor.
This week almost caught me off guard. Typically after the holidays comes a bit of a lull. It’s simple economics - people spend lots of money during December, which means they’re either out of money after that, or paying off credit cards. If you want your DVD sales to go well, you don’t put them on sale when there’s not a lot of money available, thus a lull.
This year however, there isn’t much of a pause coming. This week’s big releases include far-too-long-in-the-coming Special Editions of The Fifth Element and Leon-The Professional, as well as releases of mediocre 2004 movies The Village and Without a Paddle. For most of these releases you can bet CinemaBlend will be on top of things with reviews, letting you know whether these DVDs are worth your hard earned money, which frees up this column to cover... poker.
We Flopped A Siegfried and Roy
Yes, Poker - anyone who has been paying any attention to television or just about any place to shop has noticed how poker has become a hot hobby. You can’t go much of anywhere without finding a place to buy a deck of cards or poker chips, and it’s not hard to find a poker tournament on The Travel Channel or ESPN on any given weekend. It’s a hobby even I’ve been taken in by, with a nice set of chips, a poker table top, and a weekly game between friends. With poker being a hot commodity right now, it’s no surprise DVDs are affected.
First up this week, Phil Hellmuth follows in the footsteps of Johnny Chan and Howard Lederer by releasing game and tournament strategies. His two-disc set covers bluffing and recognizing tells, as well as tournament strategies which, knowing Hellmuth, probably also includes how to whine when the cards don’t come up in your favor. I’m sure it’ll be an informative DVD for people too busy or dumb to read one of the proven books out there. If you’re one of the people too dumb to read the books, give me a call - we always have room for you at our table.
The other release this week, which will probably be lots more popular than Phil Hellmuth’s disc, is Ultimate Poker Babes. Yes, that’s right - ESPN and Bravo may show you how the pros play Texas Hold’Em, but it takes DVD to bring you Strip Poker. When seven beautiful women sit around the table for a game of strip poker, the audience is certain to win. Why didn’t someone send me a screener of this one?
The DVD Lexicon
An e-mail from this week’s mailbag reads...
“Ok, you refer to Quantum Leap being on Flipper disks. I know what a PC flopper is (a very old school method of making a bootable disk on the drive). But what is it in terms of DVDs????”
This reminded me that while we movie-philes may use DVD terminology all the time, not everyone may be aware of these terms and what they mean. So with that in mind, here are a few phrases or words used to describe DVDs and their contents that you might not be familiar with.
artifacting - digital “noise” in the picture, affecting the quality of the image. Typically this looks like a grainy picture, particularly when movement is occurring on the screen, although it can look like the picture has a “mosaic” filter on it like in old ‘80s music videos.
digi-pak - what would be considered to be your typical DVD case these days. It’s a plastic case (typically dark gray or black) that holds the disc with a jewel-case “push to release” type button. Television sets typically are made of cardboard rather than plastic, but use the same “digi-pak” type method of holding the disc.
double dip - when multiple versions of the same movie are put out, intentionally ripping off the consumer by placing extras on subsequent releases that weren’t available for the previous releases.
dual-layer - a method of storing the information on the DVD in “layers”, which allows more information to be stored on the disc. This is more prevalent with today’s DVD releases.
featurettes - short documentaries that cover the making of a film or a specific element of the movie. Documentaries are typically longer, and these days a documentary may be made up of several featurettes.
flipper - a DVD with information on both sides of the disc. This means the disc has to be removed from the DVD player and flipped over to get to the information on the second side. In the early days of DVDs, before dual-layer technology, movies were sometimes released as flipper discs just to hold the whole movie, meaning you had to flip the disc at some point just to get to the second half of the movie.
fullscreen (aka “foolscreen”) - a presentation of the movie where the picture has been modified to fit on the 3:4 ratio of a typical television screen. Since movie screens are much wider than a typical television, this means the image has cut, removing extraneous material from the picture to make it fit on the television screen. This is done by either panning across the shot to make sure all the important material is on screen, or by underscanning the image (referred to as “Pan and Scan”) Since this removes the director’s original shot and possible artistic merit of a shot, it’s not the preferred method of watching a film by most movie buffs. (Note: While older movies are often presented in a method that fills the screen of a standard television, this is not Pan and Scan. Older movies typically were filmed at a 3:4 ratio, before the concept of expanding the screen came to movie theaters)
outtakes - bloopers and mess ups by the cast and crew while filming a movie. You’ll often hear us complain about a disc that claims to have outtakes, which are really just deleted scenes.
snapper case - an older (and thankfully no-longer commonly used) method of packaging DVDs. With snapper cases, the case was made out of cardboard with some plastic (they still had the “push to release” button method of storing the disc. The snapper part of the case would be a plastic tab that snapped closed, holding the cardboard cover of the disc closed. After opening and closing the case a dozen times or so, the snap would weaken and stop snapping, or fall off, rendering the case pretty useless. When it was announced that companies were going to stop using snappers, not many people cried.
widescreen - a presentation of the movie where the picture has black bars across the top and bottom of the screen, preserving the aspect ratio of the film. This allows the entire picture to be displayed on the screen, keeping the director’s original vision intact. There are two versions of widescreen - Anamorphic widescreen which has been developed to utilize the newer widescreen televisions, and standard widescreen, which really is intended for standard 3:4 televisions. Anamorphic widescreen basically takes advantage of your television’s size by modifying the image to fit that screen, reducing the black bars at the top and bottom. Trying to fit a standard widescreen on a widescreen television usually results in a stretched image. Anamorphic widescreen is the predominant way of presenting films these days.
Can you think of any other terms we use that you don’t understand? Let me know and we'll try and cover it in the future. Until next time...
