Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Picture This

It seems they've dreamt up something called Blu-ray which is a super-duper kind of DVD. DVD players are now termed 'venerable', according to the supplement to today's newspaper, which, I think, indicates they are well out of date, if not yet quite history. Now it's possible to admire the strands of blond hair on the head of an actress whom I've never heard of but is mentioned so casually, in a review of one of the players of these Blu-ray thingies, she must be famous.

This is all very jolly, but why would anybody want to fixate on a character's hair? Obviously people do, I suppose, as there's clearly a market for this technology, but not in this house. I suspect I'm sadly lacking in the visual department. This might explain why I find it difficult to watch almost any movie and rarely maintain full attention for any tv programme lasting more than around fifty minutes.

I still haven't watched all the cheap stuff I brought back from Medan in February. In fact, there's quite a bit from our trip to England in December that's not yet made it to our trusty DVD player. An embarrassment of riches.

Roll on June and the opportunity for couch potato-dom, just to ease my conscience.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

personally i find that things in HD ("high definition", of which blu ray is a variant i think) tend to look a lot worse. somehow the supposed accuracy in tracking motion and detail makes it look too real, like a news report or handheld camera-filmed natural disaster footage. i like watching the news and think such footage is valuable, but not so much that i think movies should look like channel 5 9.30 too.

rant aside, my point- HD is perhaps an interesting point in examining how we "suspend our disbelief" when watching works of fiction - they need to be sufficiently "visually unbelievable", with no semblance of non-fictional, (sometimes depressingly) real news reports, documentary tapes, visual recordings made with the deliberate intent to convince a viewer of something that actually happened.

at the very least, i feel it's ironic in the same way a very expensive vase makes an otherwise pleasant common white flower look cheap.

i'm not sure if any of the above makes that much sense - sorry for the really long comment!