But Amazon’s download service is excellent, just slow

Admittedly, Wal-Mart’s video download service is still in beta, which W-M does not disguise, but my experience with it shows it has a long way to go to alpha.

I signed up out of curiousity more than anything else. I have an All-In-Wonder TV card in my computer with cable TV running into it and from time to time I’ll record a movie onto my hard drive. I don’t record “keepers” that way; movies I want for my permanent library I get on DVD, and that’s not very many. The movies I record to hard drive I usually record to VCD resolution, just under 600MB per hour. Sometimes I’ll record a show to timeshift for my wife, and VCD resolution makes it convenient to write it to CD. Furthermore, I watch these shows while I do other work on the computer, with the media player shrunk to a box in the upper-right corner of the screen.

That’s why the W-M video download service appealed to the geeky side of me. It costs more than renting the DVD from Blockbuster (downloads range from $7.50-$9.88, with “hot” movies ranging up to $14.88), but I own the movie as long as I want. That price is also less money than buying the DVD, which I’d do for only a small number of movies anyway, and just as permanent.

But I haven’t able to make the download service work. It seems a simple process, though not a short one. You have to register, of course, and after that you must permit an Active-X control to be loaded, then download and install a series of propietary software control programs, one of which is the actual “Wal-Mart Video Download Manager.” Then you have to give your computer a name on another setup page, then, presumably, you can proceed. This page advises,

By naming you’re computer, you are authorizing it to play the videos you buy on our site. You can also transfer and watch videos on as many as three portable players.

Keep in mind: You can install the Wal-Mart Video Download Manager on as many computers as you like. But, the computer you use to download a video is the only computer you can use to view that video.

“Presumably,” I say, because that’s as far as W-M’s pages will let me go. Their servers refuse to accept any name I try to give my computer on the site, so that’s where it sits as of now. I’ve tried several times as I’ve been writing this, and not only did it refuse to accept any name it also zeroed out my shopping cart.

Although I have not yet been able to download or watch one of the movies, I have learned that you can copy the movie to other media such as a writable DVD, but cannot convert it into actual DVD format. If you want to watch one of the movies on a real TV, you need to download it to a computer that is equipped for TV output, such as a notebook computer. I do not know how large the files are, W-M only claims that they download in a surprisingly short time.

Not only movies can be downloaded. TV shows can, too. For example, you can buy a whole season of Fox’s “24″ for $36.25; single episodes are $1.96. Episodes of the current season are available up to Feb. 5’s show.

Wal-Mart, of course, isn’t the only game in town for this kind of service (and pffft to it, anyway). Amazon.com also has just started a service called Amazon Unbox. Unlike Wally World, Amazon emphasizes downloads of TV shows, charging $1.99 per episode, and also claims DVD quality.

Some of the most popular shows on TV (24, Prison Break, CSI and more) are available for download from Amazon Unbox. Which means you can enjoy them without commercials, and in DVD quality — before they come out on DVD.

It does offer movies, too. Unlike W-M, you can rent a movie by downloading it.

Your rental video can be stored on your PC for 30 days. Once you press play, you have 24 hours to watch the video before it expires.

Rentals seem to average $3.99 each. Download purchases pretty much track W-M’s pricing, with a twist. While both services allow transfer of the movie from PC to portable viewer (can you say iPod, boys and girls?), Amazon says, “you can keep purchased videos on 2 PCs and 2 portable video players at the same time.” Like W-M, you have to download and install propietary Amazon software.

Both W-M and Amazon offer shopping by movie genre, studio and TV channel. It appears to me that Amazon’s TV offerings are far greater and just as current for this season as Wal-Mart’s. I never got W-M to download, but Amazon claimed a DL time of 2.5 minutes for a 6MBPS connection, twice that for a 3MBPS connection, and 52 minutes for a 1.5 MBPS connection; this for a 1.93GB movie file. Well, it took almost an hour to finish downloading to my desktop machine. I ran the speed download speed test at PC Pitstop just afterward, which said that my connection is 3.3MBPS. What gives? I dunno.

Picture and sound quality:

This applies to the mandatory-install Amazon video player: Neither the sound nor the picture approach DVD quality. Heck, the sound isn’t even CD quality. It’s a low-power FM station kind of sound. The video quality is absolutely horrid. The image is extremely low resolution, much, much worse than the VCD video I can record off cable. There is an enormous amount of ghosting and fading with extremely poor color reproduction, all overdrawn with jigglies and swaths of lost detail.

But using Windows media player gives you an altogether different picture. The file is WMV format. I can’t honestly say the video is actual DVD quality, but it is excellent. The sound, however, is stereo and reasonably clear, and that’s it.

Will this kind of service take with the public? No question, I think. It’s convenient and not priced very high. Media storage costs and capacities are low and high, respectively, and I imagine there are a lot of folks like me who are content to keep an eyeball on a movie in the corner or the screen, instantly accessible on a hard drive, for a few dollars, rather than peel bills for a DVD that has to be shelved, located and loaded.

Both services can use a lot more titles, but that will come quickly, I would think. The main market may be the TV shows, though, for people who want to time-shift their favorite programs but don’t have a DVR and are put off by the price of getting one. I think the ability to watch shows on a personal media device will find favor with airline flyers. Amazon even features a way to buy a show on one computer and download it to another. My only complaint is that download speeds are still way too slow, but I am saying that after only one test, I admit.

Try it out! Buy link on the left; rent link on the right:

Update: I learned how Amazon enforces the 24-hours-to view rule. After 24 hours, the video file self-destructs and does not wind up in the recycle bin. Crude but effective.

On March 3, 1977, I took a girl on our first date to see Rocky, or Rocky One as it would later be known after a few sequels. I was a senior in college, she was a freshman. We’d just met the week before at a party at my school. It had been a fairly dull party, as such mixers go, and at 10 p.m. I headed for the door. I saw a pal, Chip (who is now a senior official in the FBI) and stopped to say hello. He was speaking with three or four young ladies and was kind enough to introduce me to them. I rather perfunctorily acknowledged their greetings, said, “See ya” and turned for the door. I took a step and a half when I heard one of the girls say, “I like your beard.”

(This was 1977, mind you, when ROTC recruitment was so low that even a soon-to-be-commissioned senior, an ROTC scholarship student at that, could sport a full beard and long hair. I had both; my beard really wasn’t all that impressive but my hair was magnificent, flowing all the way to my shoulders all around. And it wasn’t yet gray. Or thin. Ah, lost youth!)

So I rear marched, smiled at the sweet young thang and said in my very best Hollywood-leading-man voice, “Wunna dance?” She did, we did. We wound up partying until long after midnight. I drove her back to her dorm at another school (heck, in another city, Greensboro, 30 miles away!) and promised to call her. She gave me her number and I got back to my room in time to see the sunrise, which I would have seen had I not gone to bed.

My close buddy, Charles (now a US Marine colonel), and I had a running contest that we’d kept up since early our junior year. It was simply to see which of us could graduate with the most refusals from girls for dates. Our scores were in the low hundreds each. My best score (or non-score, depending on your point of view) was with a girl named Ann, who declination of my invitation was so nice, so sweet, so doggone Southern cultured that I thought several times later about asking her out again just so I could be refused so beautifully. (I didn’t know when I called her that she had just gotten engaged.) But Charles and I had a rule that we could not pile up points by repetitively asking the same girl over and over.

Charles was slightly ahead, so I figured I’d call sweet young thang up, get verbally thrown under the bus, and make an easy point. Now get this straight: I wasn’t joking about the date, but I seriously expected to be rejected. Say la vee, or whatever the Frogs say about romance. So a couple of nights after the party I dialed her number.

“Hi, I was thinking of you and wondering whether you’d like to go out this weekend.”

Everything went exactly according to script: “Oh, it’s so good to hear from you, but I won’t be here this weekend. It’s the start of our spring break and I’ll be leaving for home midday Friday.”

“Well, sorry to hear that. Some other time, perhaps?” (Maybe I could get a twofer in one phone call…)

“That would be great. How about Thursday?”

Silence. I’ve never fielded curve balls well. Finally, “You mean this Thursday?”

“Yes, I’ll still be here that night.”

Silence. I’ve never fielded curve balls well. Wait, you already know that. “Okay, that would be fine.” Think furiously about what to do, where to go and when. Wait, there was a little Italian restaurant in Greensboro I’d been to called Cellar Anton’s. Nice place and it’s right across the street from a multiplex with three screens. (In 1977, three screens qualified as a multiplex.) “I’ll pick you up at five-thirty, okay?”

“Okay! See you then!”

There was only one thing better than calling Charles to tell him I had scored another rejection, and that was calling Charles to tell him that he could sit at home if he wanted, but I was going out. With a girl. Yeah, I know it makes no sense, but we were college students.

So the young lady and I had dinner and crossed to street to see Rocky, which was just getting buzz about that time. (It went on to win Oscars for Best Picture, Best Directing and for Film Editing. The film also garnered nominations of Sylvester Stallone for Best Actor, Talia Shire for Best Actress, both Burt Young and Burgess Meredith for Best Supporting Actor, Stallone again for Best Original Screenplay, and nominations for Best Sound and Best Original Song, “Gonna Fly Now.”)

Two years later I had returned from the 2d US Infantry Division in Korea, reassigned to Ft. Jackson, SC. The young lady, Cathy, and I were engaged. Rocky II came out. I drove to Greensboro a couple of times per month and we went to see it. This was the movie in which Rocky and Adrian got married.

Cathy liked Adrian’s wedding gown so much she ordered it for her own gown.

I go through all this to advise you that I am not an objective reviewer of the capstone of the Rocky saga, Rocky Balboa. I agree that the series was badly in need of a better ending than the rather poor Rocky V gave it. So Cathy and I went to see Balboa last night.

How was it? Perfect. Just plain perfect. If you didn’t like the other Rocky movies much, even the first three, then you won’t like Balboa. But we loved it, every minute. I have no nits to pick.

But I do have some comments. It was good to see Burt Young reprise his role as Adrian’s brother, Paulie. And while his screen time is short, Tony Burton is back as Duke. He began the series as Apollo Creed’s trainer, then had a major role in Rocky III, when Rocky faced Mr. T as Clubber Lang.

Talia Shire is listed in the cast credits, but only because her photograph appears several times, along with a couple of flashbacks. Adrian is not in the movie, having died. This is no spoiler, since the audience learns this fact very early. Rocky’s inner demons torment him not only on the poor ending of his boxing careeer, but on her absence from his life (hence, his inability to set things right with her) and their son’s. Rocky, Jr. is played by Milo Ventimiglia. His performance is unimpressive.

In Adrian’s absence, Geraldine Hughes plays Marie, whom Rocky recollects knowing from years before, when Marie was just a little girl. (Hughes does not appear in any previous installments.) He re-befriends her (no romance), thus ensuring that a woman is in the fight’s audience, gasping with each blow Rocky takes. Think of her part as an Adrian stand in for the fight scenes.

So why no Adrian? The only work Talia Shire has going on right now seems to be as the therapist in the Geico ad where the caveman is upset that his intelligence is insulted. Access Hollywood reports that Ms. Shire told the mag,

“You know Sylvester and I talked about it over a year ago and I think he was correct in wanting to design Rocky as a widower so he comes back with this kind of great longing and loss. I think Adrian is actually a presence in so many ways she is still there. She’s a part of his heart, so I’m very anxious to see it. I read it, I thought it was great, again great on the page because he is a great writer. So I’m kind of excited about seeing it. I am in his corner always.”

Okay, I see what Stallone was trying to accomplish and why, but I still wish Adrian had been there.

I give Rocky Balboa nine out of 10 boxing gloves. I hold one glove back because Adrian isn’t there, but otherwise, it’s perfect.

The Missus and I went to see Casino Royale Friday. Is it, as some critics have said, the best Bond movie yet and is Daniel Craig the best Bond so far?

Yes on both counts.

Why? it’s the intangibles, I think. Early in the series, Bond films became not much different than later, filmed “graphic novels.” That is to say, most Bond movies have been celluloid comic books. The prolepsis for this trend was in the very first Bond flick, Dr. No, and by You Only Live Twice was well established. Both of Timothy Dalton’s turns as Bond, The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill, fit this description, as do, well, all four of Pierce Brosnan’s.

Not all Bond films are animated comic books, though. Substitute “al Qaeda” for SPECTRE and Thunderball becomes frighteningly plausible. From Russia With Love is pretty much a straightforward spy thriller. Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun are low on the comic book quotient even though much of the action in the latter is just silly. 1983’s Octopussy had another frighteningly plausible plotl; like Thunderball it involved smuggling an atomic warhead into the West. The ending sequence of Ninja-Amazon-circus acrobats was silly, though.

Anyway, enough of memory lane, because Casino hits the reset button. It pretends and so must viewers that the previous 20 Bond movies don’t exist. The clock begins anew as the movie begins before Bond has even been awarded double-oh status - and informs the viewer just how he did attain it. Judi Dench returns as M, but there is no connection to her previous appearances as M. It is she who awards Bond his 007 identity. All these events take place in modern days, none are are flashbacks.

Rather than rehash the plot and storyline, which you can read a gazillion other places in the internet, let me simply offer some impressions.

The screenplay is very good. It’s not the best Bond screenplay (that honor lies with Thunderball) but it’s very near the top. Craig is a better actor in his movie than Brosnan or Dalton or Roger Moore were in theirs. Right now I’d call it a draw with Sean Connery.

Casino’s Bond is very physical. This James Bond is a brawler and a very good one at that. The fisticuffs in this movie are the best executed of any Bond film I remember. Bond hits and gets hit. He bleeds and gets bruised. After a fight his knuckles are raw and red. The physicality of the movie dominates its action sequences. There is no car chase but there is an outstanding foot chase, even if it is a bit Jackie Chan-ish in places.

Neither Moneypenny nor Q appear. Not a loss; they would have been misfits in this movie. Besides, though John Cleese did a credible Q, no one can really fill Desmond Llewelyn’s shoes. And Samantha Bond as Moneypenny was hopeless.

The reviewers are gaga over Eva Green as Casino’s main Bond girl, Vesper Lynd. Sorry, no, she’s merely competent in the role and (IMO) not nearly are DD Gorgeous as the press seems determined to describe her. The best Bond girl for both the role and her looks remains the incomparable Luciana Paluzzi as Thunderball’s Fiona Volpe. Speaking of Bond women, there are no female forms in Casino’s title sequences, a first for the series, I think.

License to kill? Yes, of course. Some reviewers have said that Casino’s Bond is the coldest-blooded killer yet. In the beginning he doesn’t merely kill, he assassinates. I’d say he is as cold as any but consider Sean Connery in Dr. No, awaiting hours through the night for the arrival of Professor Dent, shooting him, then carefully aiming and shooting him again. Or Roger Moore in For Your Eyes Only, kicking a bad guy’s teetering Mercedes off a cliff. FYEO also has, IMO the most spectacular stunt ever done in a Bond film, a hundred yard plunge into space by the piton-climbing Bond.

Though my favorite Bond film remains Thunderball, Casino Royale is better, I reluctantly conclude. And in this movie for this screenplay Daniel Craig surpasses even Sean Connery in any of his movies. I’ll wait until Craig has one or two Bond flicks under his belt before definitively deciding he surpasses Connery.

The movie made almost $15 million yesterday.

The 21st James Bond film, Casino Royale, smashed the first 21 movies to smithereens today in first-day revenue in the UK.

The film, which features Daniel Craig’s first outing as the super-spy, sold £1.7m of tickets in the UK on Thursday.

The figure is more than twice as much as the previous record-holder, 2002’s Die Another Day, took in its first day.

But there’s not unalloyed joy in mudville.

Michael G Wilson, the producer of the film said he was "disappointed although not entirely surprised" that it had already been pirated.

It gets better.

Casino Royale has been approved by China’s censors, and will be the first 007 film to be screened in the country. …

“We are extremely pleased that the film has passed and expect it to be one of the highest-grossing films next year in China,” said Li Chow, Sony Pictures’ general manager in the country.

The film is expected to hit China’s cinemas in January 2007.

Yes, it will doubtless be the highest-grossing film in China ever. And the most pirated!

“We got a film piracy problem big time with the movie. What do we do about it?”

“I know, I know! Let’s release it in China. yeah, that’s the ticket!”

Okay, take all the pre-release hype with huge doses of NaCl. But that is the hype, that Daniel Craig, playing James Bond in Casino Royale, is the only one of six Bond actors to give Connery a real run for his money. The main thing going for him, says This Is London, is that ” he is the first Bond since Connery to exude an air of menace. He’s also funnier than Roger Moore, and more of a credibly ruthless womaniser than Pierce Brosnan.”

Well, they have a point there. Beginning with Connery’s immediate successor, the flash-and-gone George Lazenby in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Bond actors have all been pretty boys. That didn’t quite apply to Connery and for sure doesn’t apply to Craig, whose looks are far from Hollywood classic.

Casino Royale premiers in general release today. The Missus and I plan to see it tonight. I’ll post a review after.

Twenty-Sided offers an alternative, pictorial story for the naming of the Fellowship of the Ring.

Coincidentally, I was chatting with my son last night and we decided that the movie trilogy was seriously miscast. Here’s our “fantasy cast” for the movies.

Gandalf: R. Lee Ermey.
Frodo: Jesse Ventura
Aragorn: Arnold Schwarzenegger
Sam: Harrison Ford
Gimli: John Wayne
Legolas: Johnny Depp, savvy?
Saruman: Rick Moranis

The mind boggles. Add your own fantasy cast members as a comment.

I went several days ago to see Clint Eastwood’s new epic about 1945’s battle for Iwo Jima. Or his movie about the flag raising during the battle for Iwo Jima. Or his movie about the war-bonds tour of three of the flag raisers after the flag raising during the battle of Iwo Jima. Or his movie about the American Indian flag raiser making the war-bonds tour after the flag raising during the battle of Iwo Jima, and whose decline into alcoholism is a tragic story in its own right.

Or something like that. Or something like those.

Confused already? Now you know how you’ll feel walking back to your car after the movie.

This movie’s technical merits are excellent beyond all praise, but good luck trying to figure out just what is the story line. I remember what Alfred Hitchcock said decades ago: Before everything else about a movie, you have to have a story. And FOOF doesn;t really have one. Instead, it has three or four, and winds up telling none of them well.

The story(ies) is (are) told almost exclusively through flashbacks. Sometimes what is really a single flashback by one of the characters is split into two scenes in the movie - one key flashback consists of two parts separated by about an hour (maybe more) of running time. And it’s not always clear who is having which flashback. I think Eastwood and the screenwriter chose to make the movie this way because they wanted to focus not so much on the battle itself as the battle’s after-effects on the three men who lived long enough after the flag raising to be pulled back to the States to make a war-bond tour. (Three marines who raised the flag were KIA before they knew they were being hailed as heroes.)

Yet to make the movie chronologically would have made part one a straight-up war movie, followed by more than half the running time of the tour scenes. And frankly, I agree that that would not have worked very well. So I can’t fault Eastwood for using the flashback technique - it lets him keep inserting combat-action scenes throughout the movie so it doesn’t drag along as it would otherwise. But I don’t think it worked out well. I can see why he did it, I just don’t think the how was successful.

The characters also a certain papier-mache feel to them. The only one whose role is really fleshed out is Pfc. Ira Hayes, the Indian Marine at the far left of the pole.

His decline into alcoholism started on the war-bond tour and eventually, as the movie shows, he simply laid down and died in a barnyard some years later. It is a sad story, but it also completely dominates the movie, to the detriment of, well, everything else. The movie’s subtitle could have been, “The Ira Hayes Tragedy, also with the US Marine Corps.” I say this not to diminish either Pfc. Hayes or his sad end but to identify one reason why the movie ultimately was disappointing. It simply never figured out exactly what story it was trying to tell.

Bit players come and go who were very important in the historical battle but who are never even identified by name in the movie. The Marine commander was Lt. Gen. Holland M. Smith, whose nickname was “Howlin’ Mad.” We see why he was so nicknamed when he throws a screaming fit at some poor bloke on the other end of a telephone line, but the movie never reveals his name or what he was doing. If you don’t already know, you still won’t. Same with Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, afloat offshore, who observed when the first flag was raised atop Mt. Suribachi on the island, “This guarantees a Marine Corps for five hundred years.” An actor delivers the line to the still-anonymous Gen. Smith without clue of just who he was. If you don’t know, you don’t know.

Another nit that comes to mind: the movie portrays a burning, battle-damaged B-29 bomber fly over two protagonists, heading for the island’s airfield while the battle still rages. In fact, such a landing did take place. This bomber’s landing was filmed by a combat-camera crew and its widespread use in newsreels back inthe US gave rise to the false belief that the island was invaded in order to have an emergency landing strip halfway between Honshu, the principal B-29 target island of Japan, and the Marianas, where the bombers were based. Not so. But that’s not the nit, and the movie does not reinforce the notion anyway. The nit is that the real bomber was not burning, as the historical film clearly shows. The bomber was low on fuel. The Marines refueled it and off it flew again. But this is a minor nit, I admit, and it does convey to the audience right away that the landing was an emergency one.

Major kudo: the famous flag raising is accurately represented as the second one. The principals in the movie are mystified why it is so important, just as they were in real life. Iwo vets have said that “the flag raising” to them always meant the first, smaller flag that went up and was replaced with the soon-to-be-famous second, larger flag, ordered raised to prevent Secretary Knox from confiscating the original. The movie faithfully reproduces how Rosenthal almost missed the shot and doesn’t ignore the presence of Marine motion-picture photographer Sgt. William Genaust, who was later KIA, and who filmed the raising of the second flag. To history buffs like me, getting these details right is crucial, and the movie does.

Technical merits: the integration of CGI and real filmery is now total and complete. The art directors obviously spent hours poring through photos of movies taken during the real battle. On-screen reproduction of Mt. Suribachi, weapons effects and the landscape (much shot in volcanic Iceland) is flawless.

Make sure you stay for the end credits all the way to the end. They, unlike the movie itself, actually tell the story of the battle and pay a good tribute to all six flag raisers.

BTW, AP photographer Joe Rosenthal, who took the shot, died only last August at age 94. I posted about it here.

Movie Blog reports that Disney screenwriters have cut Orlando Bloom’s character, Will Turner, from Pirates of the Caribbean 4, now being written. Seems that the Mouse Men have concluded Bloom’s role (or maybe Bloom himself) is “human Nyquil” on the screen (”nighty-night,” viewers). Also,

… Disney bean counters are already examining ways to cut [Pirates 4’s] massive costs. They have concluded that although both Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley are essential to the continued success of the series, Orlando’s character is human NyQuil and “not necessary” to maintain the gravy train (I could have told them that). Whether or not he will be killed in the third movie, due next summer, or be bumped off early in the fourth is not specified.

Movie Blog asks reasonably, “Why cut costs on a series that is dragging in truckloads of money? I am thinking that maybe Disney doesnt have the confidence in a fourth movie… .”

Maybe it’s the third movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End, Disney doesn’t have confidence in. By now its release editing has got to be completed or nearly so. The Pirates franschise was always envisioned as a trilogy, shot all together, as Peter Jackson pioneered with his award-winning Lord of the Rings series, then assembled in the editing rooms.

The other speculation is that Disney can’t drop Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow to cut costs, since the whole series depends on Depp’s character and viewing loyalists won’t stand for Sparrow’s removal or anyone else to play him. Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Swann could be considered expendable, too, except that the movie must have a female lead and Knightley or her character would simply have to be replaced. Turner, though, can be taken out without inserting an equally large character in. The male-female interplay could be done just between Swann and Sparrow.

Actually, I agree with the “human Nyquil” hypothesis. Bloom is a competent actor and has the physical skills necessary for an action role, but he’s just boring.