I own a Toshiba SD-K700 DVD player. It’s a nice DVD player, and it’s never given me any trouble. Until tonight.

Tonight I attempted to watch Casino Royale, and it wouldn’t load. So I switched to Stranger Than Fiction, and that wouldn’t load, either. Then I tried The Prestige, which worked fine. All of my other DVDs still worked, too. (and yours worked in another player)

Three brand new releases, and the two that don’t work say “Sony Pictures” on them. Hmm…

[Update: the story has finally hit Slashdot]

My initial response to the vintage-pulp poster for this film was, “oh, I don’t think so”.

My second response was “well, Christina Ricci’s been looking kind of hot, recently, so I should at least watch the trailer. After all, she is in chains.”

After watching the trailer, I’ve moved to “this could be fun.”

Just search for it on Google and Youtube. It’s terrifying, in a “do I really need a Japanese Xbox 360 right now” kind of way. If you find yourself downloading the 720p version of the trailer from that German torrent site, all hope is lost.

[Update: this site seems to have the best set of screenshots showing the gameplay. I like the dialogue in this one:

]

[Update: holy crap, that qj.net page is a giant cesspit of Javascript, weighing in at nearly 240K of code, and maybe 2K of actual HTML content. I was initially curious how much overhead the trendy-annoying JS image display code was adding (72K if it’s the only thing prototype.js is used for, 21K otherwise, plus the overhead of actually calling it, which makes the HTML basically unreadable), but now I’m wondering just how painful this site is for anyone with low bandwidth and an older browser.]

“​…is a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie!”

I’m not entirely sure why, but it must be so. Perhaps it’s the unique vision of writer/director Kevin Munroe, as displayed in his previous hit, the D-grade console game Freaky Flyers. [disclaimer: I’ve never heard of this game, and apparently neither has anyone else]

Nice rendering in the trailer, though.

If Brian and Lion are right, the worst mistake Disney has made with this movie is creating a trailer that makes it look like a remake of Doc Hollywood.

Saturday, a friend was flipping through channels and left this running. I’d never gotten around to seeing it, since I generally consider Tarantino an overrated hack. After a few minutes, I was mentally apologizing to George Lucas for the things I’ve said about his ability to write dialogue. Fortunately, we were soon able to get back to something more interesting.

Last night, I got bored and found it on cable again, and watched some more. I felt like I was slowing down to watch a train wreck. I didn’t enjoy it at all, but a question just kept running through my mind: “has it hit bottom yet?”.

The answer was always “no”.

Just watched the high-resolution trailer for Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm (normal, boring Quicktime trailer here). The 720p version isn’t entirely smooth on my 1.25 GHz G4 Powerbook, but still quite gorgeous; upgrading to Quicktime 7 Pro and switching to full-screen mode improved it a bit (and, of course, enabled the various save and edit options as well).

The woman in the trailer who looks a lot like Claudia Black apparently isn’t, by the way.

Coming this fall: The Legend of Zorro, sequel to The Mask of Zorro, once again starring Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. It appears to come from the same school of sequelizing as The Mummy Returns, including the annoying child.

Co-written by the executive producers of Jack of All Trades and Alias, which tells me nothing. Same director, cinematographer, and sword master as the original movie, which I must confess are good things. What the trailer really seems to lack, though, is any hint of the charm of the first movie; both leads seem to be trying to mimic their earlier work without much success.