Year: 2007

Monsters and Madmen DVD

Monsters and Madmen

My appreciation of Criterion Collection home video goes back to its beginning, when Citizen Kane and King Kong were released on the old Laserdisc format. The discs included a commentary audio track, and extras such as trailers and production stills. These features are now taken for granted, but 20+ years ago they were exciting and ground-breaking.

Criterion specializes in releasing high-quality specialty videos for titles that are hard-to-find and/or haven’t been presented properly. Mike Dobbs has posted some interesting background on a new Criterion set of low-budget horror and sci-fi movies, including a couple that feature Bill Pratt, aka Boris Karloff. I’ll be looking for these cheesy classics on Netflix, but when will there be a Queen of Outer Space DVD?

Star Wars – Missing Minutes

Biggs and Luke

A long time ago, seeing bloopers and deleted scenes from movies was a rarity. But along came DVDs and it started to seem that scenes were being shot solely for the purpose of padding out supplementary material.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/FEB07/SW.flv 400 175]

This post will be nothing new to die-hard Star Wars fans, but here are a couple of scenes that didn’t make it into the release of the first movie, which is coming up fast on its 30th anniversary.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/FEB07/Anchorhead.flv 400 185]

Beastly Studio Trick

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/FEB07/BeautyBeast.flv 400 263]

After I played around with the audio speed for the Ross Bagdasarian posts and South Park, my sister wanted to hear a speed correction of Robbie Benson’s voice from Beauty and the Beast. There’s a video clip above, and below is the audio sped up by 15%. Not sure if that percentage is exactly right, but it sounds close enough.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/FEB07/BeautyBeast.mp3]

Big Dig vs. Big Hole

Here in the Boston area, the so-called Big Dig has had more than its share of mismanagement, incompetence and outright fraud. The total price for the project, which is mostly done, is about $14 billion; an amount that has been rightly called an outrage and a scandal. How much of that is due to fraud and waste?

In Iraq the overhead for graft and corruption alone is estimated at $10 billion. Money that’s been skimmed right off the top by contractors, including Dick Cheney’s cronies at Halliburton. We need more outrage.

Audit finds $10 billion in fuzzy spending

Inspectors reviewed one-sixth of $350 billion U.S. has spent on Iraq

Dan Duray, Hearst Newspapers
Friday, February 16, 2007

(02-16) 04:00 PST Washington — More than $10 billion of the money paid to military contractors for Iraq reconstruction and troop support was either excessive or unsupported by documents, including $2.7 billion for contracts held by Halliburton or one of its subsidiaries, Congress was told Thursday.

The three top auditors overseeing work in Iraq told a House committee their review of $57 billion in Iraq contracts found that Defense and State department officials condoned or allowed repeated work delays, bloated expenses and payments for shoddy work or work never done.
Continue reading Big Dig vs. Big Hole