Virgin Megastore Union Square

Union Square in San Francisco, that is.

This is the front of the store as of this morning. The signs have been changed from "Up to 40% off" to "Up to 50% off."

When I was there on Sunday, the only things that were 40% off were magazines. CDs and DVDs were 25% off, and Blu-ray discs were 20% off.

I hate to sound unfeeling, but I don't see the loss of Virgin as nearly the tragedy that losing Tower Records was. Virgin's prices have always been too high for my tastes, even for sale items. At Tower, I often saw sale prices that were on a par with Amazon's prices (with shipping). But whenever I've shopped at Virgin, my first thought upon seeing their sale prices has always been, "I bet I could find that significantly cheaper online." When Tower was around, I would buy something there on impulse during about half of my visits. At Virgin, I have bought things on impulse on fewer than one visit out of ten. And the reason has been their "MSRP or close to it" pricing structure.

One thing you need to remember about all "Everything must go" sales is that the first thing that happens is that everything is raised back to Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price before the "10-40% off" is applied, so the deals are not always such good deals. Virgin has never been the land of bargains, and it won't be one until the closing sale exceeds 25% off.

Here's another reason I have never liked shopping at Virgin:

Several months ago, I bought a DVD on the second floor. On my way out of the store, I noticed a CD that I wanted, so I picked it up and got in line. When I got to the register, the goth chick behind the counter started to ring me up and said, "Oh, did you get caught?"

I asked what she meant. She pointed to the Virgin Megastore bag in my hand, held up the CD she was ringing up for me and said, "Did they catch you sneaking out the door with this in your bag and make you come back to pay for it?"

I would like to say that I drew myself up, haughty and indignant, and said firmly, "How DARE you accuse me of shoplifting! I demand to see your manager NOW!"

Instead, I just looked at her like I barely understood what she said, and I said, "Erm...No."

But (as Bertie Wooster would say) I meant it to sting.

Mirrormask on Blu-ray

I missed this one when it happened. I only noticed it in Best Buy last week.

"Mirrormask" has been released on Blu-ray. According to Amazon, it was released on November 18.

We subscribed to Netflix concurrently with our getting a Blu-ray player. Something about having a Blu-ray player puts me in a state of mind where I am less likely to buy something on disc.

I used to have the attitude that paying $20 for a DVD was cheaper than two people going to the theater to see the same movie, and buying meant that you didn't ahve to worry about the title being checked out at the video store.

But the advent of Blu-ray is just that one step too far -- Beta, VHS, Laserdisc, DVD, HD-DVD and now Blu-ray. I mean, just how many copies of "Casablanca" and "Citizen Kane" do I need to buy in one lifetime?

And you do have to store these discs somewhere. A small San Francisco apartment is not ideal for owning a large library.

So if I buy something these days, it needs to be pretty darn special (with the possible exception of "The Dark Knight," which I figured would be good as a demo disc).

"Mirrormask" is visually very rich. If you like Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, then this is your movie (but if you like them, you probably already know about "Mirrormask"). It's Gaiman's take on "Labyrinth." Literally. The film is produced by the Jim Henson Company, and it is intended to be a companion film for "Labyrinth." And Stephanie Leonidas is really wonderful in the lead role.

So you may take this as a recommendation.

Rent Cinecast DVD

DVDPriceSearch shows a February 3, 2009, release date for the DVD and Blu-ray release of the cinecast version of "Rent."

DVDEmpire is taking pre-orders, also shows a release date of February 3, 2009.

DeepDiscount is also taking pre-orders, and also shows a release date of February 3, 2009.

Amazon is taking pre-orders, and also shows a release date of February 3, 2009.

As of this writing (1 a.m., December 3rd), the Wikipedia entry for "Rent: Filmed Live on Broadway" has not been updated to show a video release, but the IMDB entry was updated a week ago.

Netflix finally did it.

I have heard rumors for several months that this was going to happen. In fact, Netflix announced it in April.

But today I got the official e-mail notification from Netflix.

The price of memberships for rental of Blu-ray discs is being raised in order to offset the higher cost of Blu-ray discs.

How much of an increase?

$1 per month.

I'm okay with that. They could have done much, much worse.

DVD player with Netflix built in

Via Gizmodo:

LG has announced that it will be releasing a Blu Ray DVD player with the ability to stream movies from Netflix. It will be the third device to enable Netflix streaming, but the first DVD player to do so.

Criterion Collection does Blu movies

I was wondering last night when (or whether) Criterion would start producing Blu-ray DVDs. So I set out this morning to check for that information.

The Criterion Collection is in the process of preparing their first Blu-ray releases. Buried in their website, is this announcement:

"We’ve got some exciting news for this fall: our first Blu-ray discs are coming! We’ve picked a little over a dozen titles from the collection for Blu-ray treatment, and we’ll begin rolling them out in October. These new editions will feature glorious high-definition picture and sound, all the supplemental content of the DVD releases, and they will be priced to match our standard-def editions."

The announcement says that the first twelve titles to be released will be:

The Third Man
Bottle Rocket
Chungking Express
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Last Emperor
El Norte
The 400 Blows
Gimme Shelter
The Complete Monterey Pop
Contempt
Walkabout
For All Mankind
The Wages of Fear

I kind of feel sorry for Criterion in one regard: They started out doing laserdiscs, then with the advent of DVDs, they got pushed back nearly to square one of their production process. I say "nearly" because, while they did have to remaster everything, they didn't have to do new transfers, since the resolution of LDs and DVDs are the same. [1]

Now it seems like Blu-ray will require them to go all the way back to square one and do new hi-def transfers of movies they've already released before (and released twice or more times in many instances -- they've already done at least two DVDs of Cocteau's "La Belle et la Bête").

On the other hand, I don't feel sorry about the fact that they'll make a freakin' fortune from selling Blu-ray DVDs.

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[1] Long ago, I did a side-by-side comparison of the laserdisc and DVD of "The Red Shoes," and noticed that they appeared to be from the same source transfer. Both editions had identical flaws -- scratches, color instabilities, etc.

The Blu-Ray/HD-DVD War

Like many, we got an HD-DVD player in December.

Here was the logic: "They keep predicting the end of this battle, but it keeps going on. Picking one or the other seems like a fool's game. But they make combo players that will play both, which seems like a fairly safe thing to have when the battle finally ends."

But then we went to the store. Combo player: $1,000. HD or Blu-ray individually: less than $400 each. It would have been cheaper to buy both players than to buy the combo player. So there goes that theory.

But even I think that bringing two DVD players into the house at once is excessive, so we figured we'd get one of them now and would probably eventually wind up with both at some future date. So we looked at what was available on both formats.

We found that Blu-Ray seemed to focus primarily on hot new releases, especially of the action and violence and gore variety. Lots of Die Hard, lots of Saw, lots of focus on what came out last week. HD-DVD, on the other hand, seemed to have a much broader range. More obvious catalog titles (Robin Hood, Casablanca, Clockwork Orange).

So we got a Toshiba HD player. It turned out to have an added advantage of intelligent upconversion. Unlike our other upconverting DVD player, this one didn't automatically stretch everything to a 16:9 aspect ratio. It recognized the difference between a 4:3 signal and a 16:9 signal, and it upconverted 4:3 pictures while maintaining the 4:3 aspect ratio.

Two months later, Warner Bros. stopped releasing titles in HD-DVD format, and Toshiba announced that they were killing the format. After the biggest Christmas season ever, after having sold more HD-DVD players in December than they'd ever sold before, they yanked the carpet out from under their customers. And Best Buy "generously" offered a $50 gift card to anyone who bought an HD player from them in December.

A few weeks ago, we happened to be in Best Buy with that $50 gift card.

There was an "open box" LG combo HD-DVD/Blu-Ray player for $300. The one that had been selling for $1,000 at Christmas, the one on that very day available on the other side of the store for $600, selling over here for $300. The sticker on the outside of the box was marked with check boxes giving the store the opportunity to say whether the product was missing parts or damaged, but these boxes weren't checked. So we combined the $50 gift card with a couple other gift cards we had, and we took home the combo player for a cash outlay of about $100.

The only problem was that it turned out not to have a remote control. We called Best Buy to complain and talk about this. It turns out that they do not consider the remote control to be a "part" that can be "missing." If an open-box DVD player does not have its remote control, that doesn't constitute a "missing part" because they assume that whoever buys it will just come back to Best Buy and buy a universal remote from them. (Yes, that's they way they put it: "We just figured you'd buy a universal remote from us to replace it.")

I wrote to Best Buy online to complain that their doing this was, in fact, misleading us about the actual cost of the product. If we had known in advance that we'd be paying $350 or $400 instead of the $300 that the box showed, we might have felt differently about buying it in the first place. Their response (direct quote from e-mail): "Though I cannot verify what signs were on the boxes at the store that day, I would like to offer you a $30 gift card to assist you with the purchase of a universal remote."

Yes, in essence they might as well have said, "You are probably lying about the store failing to mark the box as having parts missing, but in my generosity, I'll graciously give you $30 toward a universal remote just to shut you up."

The good folks at Best Buy just don't know when to stop digging, do they?

So now we have a combo player that seems to work fine. We found a remote that will work with it. It doesn't upconvert as well as the Toshiba (it stretches all pictures to 16:9 when upconverting), but it plays both Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. All in all, regardless of the rigmarole and corporate pig-headedness, it was a darn good deal.

But we're still less likely to spend a lot of time or money at Best Buy.