Thursday, November 19, 2009
Planet Earth (or, looking into the face of God in high-definition)
I mentioned not too long ago that I recently got a Blu-ray player after some initial skepticism about the high-definition revolution. Hi-def does look awesome, but it was really not enough of an improvement on my standard-definition DVDs to warrant shelling out for what were then still fairly prohibitively-priced Blu-ray players, not to mention the groan-inducing prospect of re-buying some of my favorite DVDs on Blu-ray. The problem with this whole thing, though, is that I’m also a fairly avid gamer, and I’d been coveting a PlayStation 3 for a long time, and eventually cracked under the pressure and bought a PS3 (about a month before the well-publicized price drop; this is how my life works), basically so I could watch Watchmen in hi-def and play inFamous. (For the record, it was totally worth it.)
Video game-related digression aside, I’ve been very impressed with my Blu-ray player. Recently I picked up the 2006 BBC documentary series Planet Earth (which I’d actually also been looking forward to experiencing in hi-def well before I had a Blu-ray player), and Sweet Christmas was I blown away. I’ve mentioned more than once here that a great-looking movie can score a lot of points with me – occasionally more than it may actually deserve – and this six-part nature documentary series, which was chopped down into a feature-length film by Disney and released simply as Earth in 2007, had more moments that made me exclaim things not fit for print here in the first episode alone that a lot of entire fiction films do. Between the flat-out brilliant cinematography fact that everything’s in high-definition, Planet Earth has some of the most amazing shots of anything, fiction or documentary, live action or animated, that I’ve seen in a very long time. (It’s also just an excellent nature documentary that, as clichéd as it sounds, really does make you appreciate how amazing the world is.)
If you have a Blu-ray player and you don’t have Planet Earth yet, you should be ashamed of yourself (I certainly was). This is essential high-definition viewing.
previous post
Video game-related digression aside, I’ve been very impressed with my Blu-ray player. Recently I picked up the 2006 BBC documentary series Planet Earth (which I’d actually also been looking forward to experiencing in hi-def well before I had a Blu-ray player), and Sweet Christmas was I blown away. I’ve mentioned more than once here that a great-looking movie can score a lot of points with me – occasionally more than it may actually deserve – and this six-part nature documentary series, which was chopped down into a feature-length film by Disney and released simply as Earth in 2007, had more moments that made me exclaim things not fit for print here in the first episode alone that a lot of entire fiction films do. Between the flat-out brilliant cinematography fact that everything’s in high-definition, Planet Earth has some of the most amazing shots of anything, fiction or documentary, live action or animated, that I’ve seen in a very long time. (It’s also just an excellent nature documentary that, as clichéd as it sounds, really does make you appreciate how amazing the world is.)
If you have a Blu-ray player and you don’t have Planet Earth yet, you should be ashamed of yourself (I certainly was). This is essential high-definition viewing.
previous post
Labels: Blu-ray, documentary
¶ 10:32 AM
