Watching Halloween on Blu-Ray

[kybearfuzz]

Yay! I'm back to work. Thankfully, as I was getting a bit stir-crazy at home.

Last weekend, my buddies Drew and Bill had a few of us over for a late evening cookout. It was a spontaneous thing with little notice. Brian (cincycub) was there and so was a new guy, a 23-year old cubby named Jordan. So after dinner, we went to the living room to watch a movie. Bill had just received the 35th anniversary edition of "Halloween" from 1978, so we coerced his other half to sit through it with us.

I have to admit, the new Blu-ray version was crystal clear on their HD television. You could see everything, the leaves on the trees, the knit of the outfit, etc. It's strange to see such detail on a movie filmed that long ago. Everything also seemed brighter, which was one of the complaints online was that the special blue filter they used to make it look like fall was supposedly gone.

What struck me so odd was that the improvements that made the movie seem so clear and detailed also made the movie appear cheaply done. I know it was an independent movie done on a shoestring budget, but the original version hides a lot of imperfections that the new HD detail seems to bring forward. The movie is still fun to watch, but it almost looks like it was filmed with a hand-held camera.

The best part was watching it with friends after drinking a few beers and critiquing certain parts:

• "If Laurie looked out the window to see a guy across the street in a mask staring at her, why doesn't she scream?"
  
  
• As Annie and Laurie are driving to their respective babysitting gigs, they are sharing a joint. Annie freaks out when she sees her dad, the sheriff, at the hardware store that has been burglarized. She quickly tries to get rid of the joint. Drew asked, "surely she realizes that she doesn't have to stop, right? She could just drive on by as her dad is busy."
  
  
• We think that the Sheriff and Dr. Loomis are having a thing, since they are spending so much time together in the bushes.
  
  
• Dr. Loomis finally turns around and sees the state car that Michael stole right behind him, parked on the street, even though he's been hiding in the same bushes for hours and never looked around.

Even more fun was explaining the older stuff to the 23-year-old, such as a rotary dial phone, how taking a phone off the hook would prevent it from ringing, why there is a phone booth in the middle of nowhere for people to use, etc.

I liked the remastered movie, despite the flaws I see in it. I ordered it from Amazon today.

Comments

[barak.livejournal.com]

Can't go wrong with Jamie Lee Curtis, now can you?

Hope your return to work isn't going to keep you insanely busy...

[kybearfuzz.livejournal.com]

Of course not!

And we're all playing catch up now. I'm sure it'll keep us busy for a while.

[dendren.livejournal.com]

LOL... HD totally changes things. Some movies and tv shows just weren't meant to be seen crystal clear and large as life. I often get caught up looking at how bad their skin looks up close, they didn't cover up near as much 20 years ago because who was going to see that little pimple on their 19 inch low-def tv LOL It's kind of distracting to me at times "omg, look how huge his pores are" LOL

[texwriterbear.livejournal.com]

Yes because you are looking at their pores :-) lol

[dendren.livejournal.com]

well... the 70s did provide lots of other pretty incredible "look how huge" visuals. The only good thing about 70s fashion was their constant showing of basket LOL

[kybearfuzz.livejournal.com]

That's what I was thinking! It seems like the pants were all cut short in the crotch to let things hang over the seam.

[dendren.livejournal.com]

most 70s/early 80s movies and tv was pretty bad and you wonder how you enjoyed them so much in the first place. And then you see all the 70s bulges and wonder how you *didn't* really notice that the first time around. I think it was just so common a look then that it didn't phase me. It was definitely hot to my young gay eyes, but I didn't have the same "omg I can see the head" reaction I do now when I see those old shows.

oooooooooh, and every actor had a full thick chest of hair, not even remotely covered or trimmed. those were the days

[changeling72.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to hear the US government has sorted things out - and hope it doesn't happen again in a few months.

I find it scary what I can remember and what youngsters can't. I find it even more scary that I'm old enough to consider a 23-year old a youngster. I'm getting older, my friend.

[maxauburn.livejournal.com]

I agree-23 is very young to me. I could be his grandfather!

Glad you enjoyed the movie-haven't seen that one in a few years, but I'm certain it'll be on TV this month at some point.

[mort-83.livejournal.com]

I love that movie. When Jamie Lee is in the closet with the hanger. Yikes.


Love the things the 23 year-old was clueless about.

One of my grad students found an old ZIP disc in a drawer in the lab. She turned to me and another student, and asked what it was. I said "Ummm.It's a ZIP disc." She looked at the other student. He shrugged and they looked at me like I had two heads.

[kybearfuzz.livejournal.com]

LOL... I can only imagine what they'd think if they saw a old floppy disks... or a reel-to-reel tape.... or a punch card!!!

[mort-83.livejournal.com]

I still have some floppy discs around..the big ones that really were floppy!

We used punch cards in high school and for a while, even in college. LOL

[kybearfuzz.livejournal.com]

I came into the computer world at the big floppy disk era. I remember seeing punch cards in some drawers in high school, but never knew what they were for.

[mort-83.livejournal.com]

In high school we had one computer in the math lab. We had to do BASIC programing in algebra, ut only the math nerds were allowed to use the card punch for that computer. (They saved the chads for confetti at football games!). The rest of us had to fill out the cards with a #2 pencil and put them through a card reader which often smeared the pencil. It would take forever to figure out why a program wouldn't run!

In college there was a senior-level course in animal behavior that was computer intensive-lots of modeling. When I was a freshman, my upper class friends had to use punch card, load them into a VAX mainframe, and get the raw data printed out on huge roller feed paper, then plot all the graphs. If they were wrong, they had to do it all over again. There were always bottlenecks with the engineering students, all trying to get data into the VAX. By the time I was senior, they had switched to PCs and we had math processors that could crunch the numbers and spit out the graph plots in about a minute or two. My friends who had to use punch cards were so jealous of us!