Classic Drama Collection: Emma, The Woman In White, Jane Eyre, The Death of the Heart, The Lady’s Not For Burning

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I rotate between being a physical media snob and a guy who wants to grab everything, no matter how cheap. There are a number of boutique Blu-ray labels (Criterion, Arrow, etc.) that put out these really nice discs. They restore the audio/video, load them with extras including making-of featurettes, audio commentaries, and more, and put them in attractive-looking boxes and include lovely little booklets to go with them.

They are awesome. They are also expensive. I love them, but I ain’t exactly rich.

Then there are companies who put out lots of cheap sets. They don’t do any type of restoration to the video, they come in cheap plastic, and they include very few extras. Often they’ll bundle multiple movies into a single set.

The snob in me prefers the fancy sets, but my budget often tells me to just buy the cheap stuff. It depends on the day on which part of me I listen to.

Truth be told I don’t care that much about audio/video presentation. I mean there are limits, I don’t like grainy images projected with poor lighting, etc. I want things to look as good as they can, but at the end of the day, I’m not upset if I’m watching something on the lower end of the spectrum instead of ultra-high-quality 4K productions.

I don’t love the way those mult-movie sets look on my shelf, but for the right price, I’ll get down with it.

That’s a long-winded introduction to this set featuring five cinematic adaptations of British literature/drama. It is a nice, if rather bare-boned set. This is actually the kind of thing this sort of set is good for. On their own, I don’t know that I would purchase any of these movies. They are mostly made-for-TV type deals, with not incredible production volumes. But they are still good movies and bundled up like this makes it a good purchase.

Anyway, you can read my review of it here.

Little Orphan Annie, Volume Ten: The Junior Commandos by Harold Gray 

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For a little while I was getting a bunch of these really amazing-looking hard-bound comics from The American Library of Comics for review. Half the time I had little interest in the comics themselves, but they books are so beautiful I wanted to own them, so I wrote reviews.

I can’t say I’ve ever been particularly interested in Little Orphan Annie, but judging from my review (written ten years ago) I rather enjoyed this one. Maybe I should give them another try.

Jack Taylor – Set II

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I’ve been enjoying reading all my old reviews, and I hope you have too. Part of the enjoyment for me is thinking about how my writing style has changed – sometimes that embarrasses me, but mostly I enjoy reading my old stuff (does that make me a narcissist?). But I also enjoy seeing what I thought about something many years ago. Sometimes I’ve revisited the stuff and my opinion has changed.

Sometimes, as is the case with Jack Taylor I barely remember watching it in the first place. I have only the vaguest memories of watching this show, mostly I remember Iain Glen who was starring in the immensely popular at the time Game of Thrones. He’s probably the reason I agreed to review this set in the first place.

In my review, I made a crack about how I’d probably sell this DVD set as I didn’t enjoy it all that much. But I didn’t sell it as it is still sitting on my shelves. I kind of want to watch it again as I’ve softened quite a bit on these old mystery shows. I wonder if I’d enjoy it now.

Anyway, you can read my review here.

Jackson Browne & Friends – Santa Barbara, CA (09/15/99)

Jackson Browne
Bonnie Raitt
Shawn Colvin
Bruce Hornsby
David Lindley & Wally Ingram
9/15/99
Santa Barbara County Bowl
Santa Barbara, CA

Neumann AK-40’s (x/y) >LC3 >KM-100’s >Beyer MV100 >Sony TCD-D7

DAT >CD Transferred Via Tascam DA-P1 >S/PDIF Coax >HHb CDR 800 PRO.
CD Masters Transferred With xACT 2.24 >WAV >FLAC
FLAC >WAV >Audacity (De-Amplify Countless Close-Proximity Hand Claps, Reduce Crowd Noise Hoots & Hollers, Repair Two Minor Left-Channel Dropouts, Minor Edits, Fades) Fix SBEs >FLAC (Level 8) + Tags Via xACT 2.53

(Recorded, Transferred, Audacity Post, FLAC, Tags, + Front-Cover Artwork By OldNeumanntapr)

18th Row, Left

Disc I:

  1. Old Coot From Tennessee
  2. Bon Temps Roulet
  3. Well Well Well
  4. Catfood Sandwiches
  5. Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies
  6. Everywhere I Go
  7. Down The Road Tonight
  8. You And The Mona Lisa
  9. Dimming Of The Day
  10. Thing Called Love
  11. Shotgun Down The Avalanche
  12. Lost Soul
  13. The Barricades Of Heaven
  14. World in Motion

Disc II:

  1. I Believe I Am in Love With You
  2. Nick Of Time
  3. Band Intros
  4. The Facts About Jimmy
  5. Sunny Came Home
  6. A Night On The Town
  7. Bright Baby Blues
  8. Something To Talk About
  9. Diamond In The Rough
  10. I Can’t Make You Love Me
  11. The Pretender
  12. Just the Way It Is (Prelude)

Disc III:

  1. Just The Way It Is
  2. Love Sneaking Up On You
  3. Running On Empty
  4. Valley Road
  5. Polaroids
    [Medley]:
  6. (Just My Imagination) >
  7. (Too Busy Thinking ‘Bout My Baby) >
  8. (Reunited)
  9. Mercury Blues
  10. Load Out/Stay
  11. The End Of The Innocent

Encore:

  1. Black Muddy River

Oldneumanntapr Notes-
This was a fun show. David Lindley & Wally Ingram played four songs to open the show, and it just rolled on from there. Instead of separate sets from each artist, they would all play together and swap lead vocals. The show ran about 3.5 hours! The Santa Barbara County Bowl is a very intimate place to see shows, as it’s small (3,000 capacity) and nestled in the hills of Santa Barbara. The security is really tight there, and it took three of us to bring in my recording equipment. The security staff at the bowl, from what I’ve been told, are all off-duty SB County Sheriffs deputies, and they DO have the authority to arrest people on the spot, as apposed to most venue security who will either confiscate your batteries and blanks, or kick you out of the venue if you are caught taping.

It was difficult to record, not only because of the ever-present security staff, but also because the show started durning daylight hours. I wanted to record David Lindley & Wally Ingram, as they opened the show, but it’s really hard to stealth record in broad daylight.

I had a problem at the time with my Beyer MV100 microphone preamp because of a loose XLR input jack, so I had two channel drop outs on this recording that I had to repair. I later had the jack re-soldered, which fixed the problem. While I was at it, I also went in and reduced the over enthusiastic crowd noise wherever I could. I think it made a big difference.

During one song someone seated near me was trying to get everyone to stand and I didn’t want to comply so there is a brief moment of talking from this guy that I couldn’t completely remove. ‘Don’t you want to stand up?’ NO.

I remember that one of my friend Dave’s friends, a lady that I think worked at KOTR FM in Cambria (Not Carol Jo, who talked all the way through my Miles Davis Cal Poly recording in 1990), sat next to me while Dave was up front in a closer row. She dropped my binoculars onto the concrete floor, which I could have done without, but I think they didn’t come away with any damage.

I think mine is one of the better recordings from this mini tour, with only the final show at the Gorge Amphitheater in George, Washington, that maybe a little better. That show was uploaded without any recording lineage, which is a pet peeve of mine, so I was unable to tell what gear was used to make the recording.

Doctor Who – The Enemy of the World

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Classic Doctor Who ran from 1963 to 1989. It included some 311 stories told over 695 episodes of television. The Doctor was portrayed by seven different actors. While I have watched every episode of the New Doctor Who series, I’ve not yet made it through all the classic stories.

I have seen at least a few stories from each Doctor, but I’ve always watched it fairly randomly – watching one story from this era and then another one from a different era with a different Doctor, etc.

They are now releasing complete seasons of the classic series on Blu-ray but for ages they released single stories on DVD. I reviewed a few of them for Cinema Sentries including this one starring Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor (and in this case the story’s central enemy).

I’ve come to love Troughton’s version of the Doctor, but this was the first time I’d seen him in the role and my opinion of him was not yet solidified. Anyway, you can read the review here.

Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (2013)

friday

I’m on record as loving a good slasher movie. I grew up in the 1980s and slashers were all the rage. I didn’t actually watch any of them in theatres and rarely saw any in their unedited forms on VHS. Mostly, I watched them on late-night, basic cable television. Which was probably the best way for my pubescent self to have seen them. With some of the sex and violence edited out for TV, my hormone-addled mind filled in the blanks with things far more sexy and gruesome than any of the films could possibly have produced.

I actually remember later in life watching some of those films and being disappointed with how little I had missed.

Friday the 13th and its many, many sequels are not good movies. They aren’t even particularly interesting slash flicks. But there is something about them that has excited horror hounds, including myself for decades.

This documentary covers everything you’d ever want to know about the franchise. It interviews nearly everyone involved in any of the films (or the television series) and breaks them all down into the minutest of details. For seven hours it does this. That’s more Jason Vorhees than anyone can handle.

Except me, apparently. I watched the entire thing and wrote a review about it. You can read that review here.

Cardinal Richelieu (1935) & Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay! (1948)

dvdcover

It is a wonderful, wild time to be a physical media fan. Streaming services seem more and more to be pushing the new in favor of the old. They spend billions of dollars making new movies and television shows while ignoring the incredible, wonderful, often beloved films in their catalog.

But there are numerous niche Blu-ray labels putting out incredible-looking, and supplementally loaded old (and often obscure) films. I love it.

A few years back I reviewed a couple of these old and very obscure films that had just come to DVD. The historical drama Cardinal Richelieu (1935) and comedy Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1948) (best known now for being Marilyn Monroe’s debut) are not particularly good films, but I’m glad that got a true physical release.

You can read my full review here.

The Deep End (2001)

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I love crime thrillers but I’m the first to admit they aren’t always realistic. Detectives make unbelievable leaps of logic to solve the crime, and seemingly normal people suddenly turn into superheroes when they or their families are threatened.

The Deep End is a film that puts a normal, average housewife (played by the always wonderful Tilda Swinton) and then puts her into an extraordinary situation. But she doesn’t instantly become an amazing crime fighter, she behaves like a normal person would. Dealing with blackmailers – coming up with the cash they are asking for – becomes just another task on his long list of “to-dos” for the day.

It is a very good movie and you can read my full review here.