(Runaway) Bride Comes Before A Fall!

Ooops! My Wibble Wednesday entry didn't happen yesterday because of time pressures at work and other commitments.

Luckily, I don't have the same problem today because I cheated and wrote a quick Telly Thursday review over the Easter break that I can now post as if it had been freshly produced this morning, rather than written several days ago! So today's TV show on shiny disc is Doctor Who: The Runaway Bride over on my UK DVD Review Blog (click on the link to read it).

Easter actually proved to be a great chance to catch up on a whole backlog of March and April DVD releases. Little Manhattan, Cinema Paradiso, Trust the Man, The Thing from Another World, Jackass number two: the movie, Peeping Tom and Dog Day Afternoon (on HD-DVD) all got watched over an extended Easter break. But the weekend is when most reviews get written and it looks like I'm going to have to go to the office Saturday and Sunday, so I'm not sure when I'll actually get round to writing reviews to go with the screencaps I've already prepared for these titles.

What I can say for now is that by far and away the stand-out DVD on the above list is Cinema Paradiso. Selling for the same price as a standard single-disc release, this lavishly packaged deluxe edition contains FOUR discs (including the excellent soundtrack album by Ennio Moricone). The digital restoration of the film is excellent, and the film itself makes for wonderful viewing, and would do so even if viewed on a scratchy old VHS tape. It's not hard to see why Cinema Paradiso won the Academy Award for 'Best Film in a Foreign Language' when originally released to cinema's. A full review will follow at some stage, but in the meantime if you're tempted to spend £12 on the DVD I reviewed today (Doctor Who and the Runaway Bride), PLEASE reconsider and get Cinema Paradiso instead. It's a masterpiece, and a bargain at any price, never mind the ludicrously cheap online price of not much more than a tenner!

And in other news, I finally got some feedback on this blog. Not in a comment, but in an email from an Australian using a hotmail account. I suppose I should have sent him a reply, but decided I couldn't be bothered and this blog footnote will have to do instead. What eloquent feedback did my Antipodean writer have to contribute? 'just read your review of 300. im now pretty convinced. your a wanker', it said. I don't know what's more impressive - the spelling, lack of capitalisation and incorrect use of "your" instead of "you're" - or the fact that someone's actually sad enough to waste time hunting out the email address of a stranger just to send an inane insult.

For some reason I am reminded of the English peer who was stopped by customs on trying to enter Australia as a visitor. 'Do you have a criminal record?', asked the official. 'Oh, I'm terribly sorry.', the Englishman replied, 'I didn't realise you still needed one to get in'.

Oh well! At least it makes a change from the daily spam that people keep trying to post on my Ice Age 2 review. Obviously someone somewhere has linked to that review as the whole world and his wife keeps trying to publish a comment on that one entry, alone out of hundreds of others, along the lines of 'Nice blog. I shall come back often. Get your Viagra from...'.

Ain't the internet a wonderful thing!