We went to Best Buy last Saturday and bought a Blu-ray disc player.  I had seen one at a friend’s house last year, and the picture was incredible.  But I expected it to be.  Since the introduction of the DVD player, video quality has been steadily improving.  HDTV, of course, has been the greatest leap forward.  But the Blu-ray player is much more than high-definition video.  It’s Netflix.

I must be the last of my friends to use Netflix, an online video store that sends DVDs to members through the mail, which they then watch and return.  That process is fairly low-tech, and never struck me as the most convenient way to watch movies, though I had to admire Netflix’s selection.

Recently, visiting friends, I have seen that Netflix now offers streaming video, which can be accessed via fancy game consoles or a Blu-ray player.  Harris and Kat, and Ryan and Karla showed us how they could select from a seemingly unlimited number of Netflix films to watch instantly on their TVs through internet streaming.  My prognosticating skills are apparently limited, because I never thought streaming video was the future.  That is, I thought slow internet connections and limited hard-drive space were significant obstacles.  Who, I wondered, would spend hours downloading a movie, which will take up a ton of space on his or her computer, and which he or she will have to watch on a tiny computer screen?  That’s not how it works, it turns out.

On Monday morning I hooked up our new Blu-ray player, moved around some wires so I could connect it to the cable modem, and then signed up for Netflix.  Last night we experienced the magic.  We went to the Netflix website, selected the exact movie Miriam wanted to see at that moment, added it to our “instant” cue.  Then, magically, that title appeared on our TV screen.  I pressed play, the Blu-ray player spent thirty seconds or less downloading the movie–or at least it began downloading the movie–then the film began.  The picture was widescreen, looked as good as a DVD, sounded as good, too, and played flawlessly without any skips or blips for the entire duration of the film.  I could barely believe it.  Miriam and I high-fived each other.

So, now there are countless movies and TV shows that we have ready to watch whenever we sit down in front of the television.  Plus, we can still get physical DVDs and Blu-ray discs in the mail.  I’m expecting Parsifal today.

We’re living in the future!  What does it cost?  Less than nine dollars a month.  Since we canceled the premium channels on our cable, were saving money.  Huzzah!

At the far west end of Long Island Sound, just to the east of the Bronx, there is a tiny dot of land called Hart Island (view this excellent map).  Over the centuries it has been the site of a mental asylum, a prison, a POW camp, and a U.S. Army missile installation.   It is also the site of the largest cemetery in the United States.  It isn’t a normal cemetery, however.  Hart Island is a huge potter’s field.  The 800,000 bodies buried there belonged to the homeless, the penniless, and the unidentifiable.  Their corpses, along with stillborn babies and amputated limbs fill mass graves, where plain wooden coffins are piled atop one another, over a hundred at a time.  Somewhere in one of those mass graves lies the body of Bobby Driscoll.

By the mid-1960s, Driscoll had seen his fame and fortune vanish.  He’d been to prison and he was addicted to drugs.  When he died alone in an abandoned Manhattan building, his body went unidentified.  More than a year passed before efforts were made to locate the missing Driscoll.  Eventually, police matched Driscoll’s fingerprints to ones taken off the unidentified corpse, but his body was never exhumed for reburial in a family plot.  Instead, Driscoll is still an anonymous person buried among hundreds of thousands of other anonymous people at Hart Island.

Hart Island is strictly off-limits to the public, but Richard Nickel managed to sneak ashore, and his photo essay is marvelous, disturbing, and touching.

I won’t go into any detail about the plot, but it was thrilling, if somewhat complicated.  I actually didn’t fully understand it the first time around, and it was only with Karla’s help that I was able to grasp some of the more sophisticated elements.  She and Ryan know a lot about Star Trek, and they thought it was excellent; I know nothing, and I thought it was great.  So it seems that the filmmakers really did something right.  Karla was mildly obsessed, and had seen the picture four times already by last weekend when Miriam and several other GRR people wanted to go see Terminator: Salvation.  I really didn’t want to see that, and, since Karla and a couple others were going to see Star Trek again, I went along.  It was even better the second time.  I understood more.

I think this film will be a classic.

I was thrilled, then, to see that the new year brought with it new adaptations of nineteenth century British novels, beginning with Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles.  It was fantastic.  The acting, sets, costumes and cinematography were all splendid.  It was truly affecting.  I had high hopes for Wuthering Heights, but alas, it was terrible.  Aside from the odd aspects of the filmmaking itself, the story was twisted and modified in really pointless ways.  It’s not hard to see why a filmmaker might choose to eliminate the dual narrator technique Bronte adopts.  What works in a book doesn’t always translate well to the screen.  So, Nelly Dean was just a minor character in this production, and Mr. Lockwood didn’t appear at all.  Much of the plot was compressed, and some of my favorite scenes from the book were jettisoned.  Most of Healthcliff’s evil machinations from the book were glossed over, and others not in the book were invented.  The conclusion was not right at all.

I’m crossing my fingers for Sense and Sensibility next week, and four Dickens adaptations.

Mrs. Hill and I spent New Year’s Eve at home, where we enjoyed a delicious spaghetti dinner (she makes the sauce spicier than most; it’s good), caught a final movie for the year, and watched Dick Clark countdown to 2008. We lit sparklers in the house for the occasion, frightening Moggie.

As some may know, for years now we have kept a list of every film we’ve seen at home or in the theater, and we set a record in 2007 with 234 movies. That might seem like a lot, but it might have been much higher had we continued at the pace we established in January and February: by the first of March we had already seen 66 pictures.

Movie highlights for me included: Mermaids (1/2); The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (1/27); Hotel Rwanda (2/10); Elizabethtown (4/13); Breaking Away (5/15); The Simpsons Movie (8/5); Stranger Than Fiction (9/9); The Illusionist (9/19); Walk Hard (12/21), and, believe it or not, Dirty Dancing, which we saw in the theater on May 1. I also re-watched some other films I regard as great, including Jaws; Saving Private Ryan; Field of Dreams; Back to the Future; Der Untergang and what may be my favorite movie of all, The Sound of Music. The complete list is here.  And, for the record, the 2006 list is here.

I hope 2008 is brings you good health and happiness. Hard times come again no more.

Also note: everybody in the world was in this movie, including people you have seen before in lots other things, but whose names you don’t know; and tons of other people with big names who have small parts.  Now, I am sure you’re wondering, “but, Dana, does it have Jackson Browne?”  Hell yes, it does.  It even has butterscotch blonde Fender Telecasters.  So, something for everybody, specifically me.

Walk Hard stars one of my very favorite actors, John C. Reilly, in his first leading role, playing a character named Dewey Cox, a fictional legend of popular music, whose life and career trace a contour reminiscent of scores of rockers and country singers.  The film is apparently a humorous homage to music biopics from Walk the Line and Ray to The Buddy Holly Story.   John C. Reilly sings all the songs in the film, and from the excerpts I’ve heard, he is actually a talented singer.  And the songs, while presumably played for laughs, seem to be genuinely good compositions.  I heard a bit of a tune from the picture called “A Life Without You”, a Roy Orbison-inspired  ballad, and it is fantastic, and, had it been written in 1960 would undoubtedly been a number one hit record, even sung by John C. Reilly.

I encourage you to listen to this extended interview with Reilly and director Jake Kasdan from the December 3 edition of Fresh Air.  At about 24 minutes you can hear an excerpt of “A Life Without You”, and plenty of other music from the film throughout.

And, as an added bonus which I only just realized from looking at the IMDB entry for Walk Hard:  the movie also stars Jenna Fischer.

Fast forward over twenty years, and the Soviets no longer inspire fear in the hearts of Americans, in spite of their backsliding on democracy under Vladimir Putin. There are actual lunatic terrorists on the loose in places like Pakistan, but god forbid we make good on President Bush’s “you’re-either-with-us-or-you’re-with-the-terrorists” rhetoric and come down hard on Pervez Musharraf. I am all in favor of parachuting Chuck Norris into the mountains of Tora Bora and having him deal with Osama bin Laden in whatever manner he saw fit. I imagine it would look something like this, but possibly less swampy.

Still, that doesn’t seem to be a priority for Republican voters or political candidates. Rather, their enemy has suddenly become Mexico, as though we’ve rolled the clock back to 1846. I have a big problem with politicians exploiting people’s bigotry to win office, nevertheless, if they do it like Mick Huckabee does here, I can at least appreciate it as comedy:

Bandidas, which I had never heard of before, was originally supposed to be released in 2005, then was pushed back several times, and ultimately had very poor distribution in the United States, and no promotion, which accounts for why it was unfamiliar to me. But it had everything I like in an action movie, including a cartoonishly super-evil villain played by Dwight Yokam, mariachi music, trains, Salma Hayek, etc.