HiFi Writer Blog

Look at the top left hand corner of the graphic. What do you see? Would that be an ‘A’ in a hexagon? That’s a region code marking for Blu-ray discs.

Look at the two primarily red boxes on that graphic. What do you see? They are the Australian Film Classification ratings.

Cognitive dissonance!

Australia is Region B for Blu-ray. The Region A marking on the back of the box is for North America.

This graphic is a scan of a portion of the back of the Australian Blu-ray release of No Country for Old Men. As it happens, the Australian release is region free. If you are wandering through an Australian shop that sells Blu-ray discs and stumble across this one, do yourself a favour. Ignore the Region A marking, and buy it. It will work and it will be worth it.

UPDATE (Friday, 15 August 2008, 1:35 pm): For some unknown reason I had the title of the movie in the heading to this post, and only there, as Old Country for Old Men. Now corrected.

Roadshow has sent me a list of its forthcoming Blu-ray releases. Good interesting range of titles there:

The Matrix was the title that became an early best seller DVD. In fact, I seem to recall that for quite a while it was the biggest selling DVD. Its release on Blu-ray has got to be welcome. I thought it was only going to be part of the massive collection, but it now seems that it (and the sequels) are going to be available separately as well.

But if you are a big fan of the movie, you may want to go for the Ultimate pack. From the blurb:

Loaded with over 35 hours of Bonus Features from the 10-disc standard definition release of the Ultimate Collection, exclusive In Movie Experience (IME) and the three films newly presented in hi-def clarity. And now for the first time ever see The Animatrix on Blu-Ray!

This looks remarkably like the Warner Bros release scheduled for October in the US (Roadshow has distribution rights for this movie here). If it’s based on the same encode as the Warner release, and the Warner encode is similar to, or better than, that used on its earlier HD DVD release, it ought to be excellent quality.

It may even be better since Warner could actually provide more encoding space for the movie, given the greater capacity of Blu-ray over HD DVD. Not that they necessarily will.

UPDATE (Tuesday, 5 August 2008, 6:38 pm): The release schedule has changed already, it seems. I’ve updated the above: overscores are deletions, red marks the additions.

Halloween appears to be the Rod Zombie remake, not the John Carpenter original. Pity. But the original is available from the US on a region free Blu-ray. It looks pretty good to me, but it has attracted some criticism for incorrect colours.

The Mist looks interesting. It’s based on a Stephen King short story I read in a volume of his, oh, twenty or twenty five years ago. It’s an odd one because, if I recall correctly, there is no setup for what happens. It just does. Yet, of the dozen or more stories in that volume, this is the only one I can specifically recall because this is the one that my mind has returned to from time to time over the years.

The movie is directed by Frank Darapont who has experience with Stephen King stories (he directed The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile), and it does score 7.5 on IMDB, so I reckon it might be pretty good.

Hah, turns out that 1408 is also a Stephen King movie!

Death Proof (written and directed by Quentin Tarantino) and Planet Terror (Robert Rodriguez) were a matched pair originally released as Grindhouse, complete with pretend trailers for other movies. I hope these releases include some of those extras.

For some reason I fell out of contact with Warner Bros for a while, but have now reestablished contact. This evening they sent me a few press releases. First, they’ve got a two-for-$50 promotion on Blu-ray going from Wednesday until early September. This includes the five Harry Potter movies plus 25 others including several classics from the 60s and 70s (eg. Bullitt, The Dirty Dozen, Blazing Saddles, A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey).

There are also several new releases:

 The Clint Eastwood fans amongst you might notice something a little odd here. Magnum Force, The Enforcer and Sudden Impact might be equally well titled, respectively, Dirty Harry II, Dirty Harry III and Dirty Harry IV. So where’s the original Dirty Harry? This is one of the defining movies of the 1970s. This is the one with:

I know what you’re thinking. ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

This movie has been released on Blu-ray in the US. Why not here?

UPDATE (Wednesday, 30 July 2008, 11:10 am): Just had a phone call from the PR people at Warner Bros Australia. First, I’ve added the last two titles to the list above that I previously overlooked. Actually, now that I think about it, it all comes back to me. I didn’t overlook them. I decided that they weren’t titles that I wanted to make a fuss over. No matter, they are there now. I certainly don’t intend this blog to become some kind of listing for Blu-ray releases. Having said that, perhaps I should think about maintaining such a list for Australian Blu-ray releases. Thoughts?

Second, there have been few WB Blu-ray releases in Australia lately simply because of supply issues. Third, they’d love to put out Dirty Harry with the rest of them, but securing stock has been difficult.

This will, I suspect, be an ongoing issue for a year or two. Not just for WB but for the others as well, but perhaps more so for WB. Warner Bros has not yet, I believe, released a Blu-ray title which is region coded. Consequently any WB Blu-ray will play anywhere in the world. I’m hoping to have a formal policy statement from Warner Bros on this within the next day or so. The result, though, is that all WB Blu-ray production has to be shared in all markets, so we may end up losing out from time to time.

That’s a small price to pay for the great benefit of no region coding. Because in a modern world, except for artificial barriers like region coding, if you really want something you can buy it from overseas. If you can’t wait for Dirty Harry to be released here, which it certainly will be eventually, then buy it at Amazon!