Chris Chiarella | Feb 11, 2008 | First Published: Jan 11, 2008
The meticulous effects auteur looks back on a career spent creating movie magic.
During a time when movies were made entirely by hand, Ray Harryhausen knew better than anyone how to make the most spectacular cinematic creatures come to life. Inspired, like so many, by the original King Kong, Harryhausen honed his filmmaking skills on a variety of short subjects before he tackled his first feature film, Mighty Joe Young, working alongside Kong's stop-motion maestro Willis O'Brien. For you kids reading at home, stop-motion animation is the painstaking process of moving one or more specially designed models a precise fraction of an inch for each frame of film. Do it perfectly 24 times in a row (which can take a full day or more), and you've created one second of a movie. Along the way, Harryhausen even invented the Dynamation technique to more realistically combine his creations with live-action backgrounds, and his work became the gold standard that continues to stoke Hollywood's collective imagination. His 1957 black-and-white, monster-attacks-Rome opus 20 Million Miles to Earth was colorized and released on Blu-ray disc, the first Harryhausen title in high def, along with a new DVD boxed set that adds colorized special editions of Earth vs. The Flying Saucers and It Came From Beneath the Sea, all from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
Netflix will drop HD DVD and stock its virtual shelves exclusively with Blu-ray discs, the rental service announced today. From now on it will buy new stock only in Blu-ray and will phase out existing HD DVD stock by year-end.
This week, instead of answering a reader question, I'd like to ask you a question. You can answer in one of two ways—either post a comment after this blog or send me an e-mail at <A HREF="mailto:scott.wilkinson@sourceinterlink.com">scott.wilkinson@sourceinterlink.com</A>.
Editor's Note: this review was originally written and prepared for the March issue of Home Theater. However, just as we were going to press, Fujitsu announced it would be exiting the plasma display market as of, you guessed it, March. We pulled the review from that print issue, but have decided to publish it here since Fujitsu's remaining plasma inventory will be available while supplies last. According to statements by Fujitsu it will offer service and support for its plasma products for several years.
LCD flat panels may be the hot ticket in the TV market these days, but plasmas shouldn't be counted out by any means. For example, they offer superior off-axis viewing and generally better black levels. Not only that, large plasmas are often less expensive than LCDs of similar size.
In <I>Donny Darko</I>, Drew Barrymore's character, Ms. Pomery, says that a famous linguist once proclaimed "cellar door" to be the most beautiful phrase in the English language. I'm here to recommend we consider "Marantz" for that title, because it reproduces the most beautiful sounds in <I>any</I> language. Be it Zoot Sims on JVC XRCD, Claudio Arrau playing Beethoven sonatas from a Philips CD, or that gawd-awful good <I>Transformers</I> movie on HD DVD, the Marantz is beauty personified!
Got a really big living room? Got a really big entrance to that really big living room? And is your electric bill no issue? Then somewhere at CES, there was an über-jumbo-sized TV for you.
I never meant to hold the cable guy hostage. But there he was sitting in my desk chair just a few feet away from my plasma, watching the little "preparing" prompt on my TiVo setup screen spin round and round and round . . . Then round some more . . .
Three years ago, Sound & Vision staged the first of its HDTV technology face-offs when we put a 37-inch Samsung plasma alongside a like-sized Sharp LCD, tuned them to the hilt, then fed them the same programs to see which was king of the HDTV hill ("Plasma vs. LCD," February/March 2005).