KD^3C^3 - 20260329 Right up till I stop
Its hard to come up with something to write about here every week. One of the big things that can make it easier, however, is if I put some thought into it over the course of the week, rather than just sitting down at the computer and letting my thoughts spill out freeform on Sunday morning. I'm sorry in advance, but this is the latter kind.
It's the end of March, which means I did the thing where I remembered I started this newsletter back in march of 2018, but not the specific date so I have to go look up the original send date for the first one was March 11, 2018.
Eight years? That can't be right. But it is. I also took this opportunity to make an offline archive of all the newsletters I sent in 2025, so I have them for posterity. As a result of doing that I can also say I wrote about sixty thousand words last year, which also feels incorrect.
But the trick is to just keep putting the words down, and eventually they add up.
There are wild turkeys outside my office window this morning. The onomotopia of "gobble" really does a great job of conveying how they sound.
There was a Criterion Collection flash Sale this week, where all in-stock discs were 50% off for 24 hours. I must have put in my order quickly enough that I was near the top of the send list because I got my movies yesterday. As I almost alwasy do, I used a randomizer to pick a movie from the collection and buy it without necessarily knowing anything about it. This time the randomizer landed on Spine #100 The Beastie Boys Music Video Anthology. The Beastie Boys were a rather popular rap trio (and a DJ) that are popular enough I don't feel lke I need to introduce them here. But they were in that prime era of the 90s when music videos were a huge deal. The first 18 of their music videos are collected on 2 discs. But what's even cooler is that each video comes with multiple alternate versions of the songs, including remixes and acapella versions. And even cooler than that is each video comes with alternate angles as well.
One of the cool things that DVDs can do, but was never really taken advantage of even int heir heyday was alternate video and audio tracks. Because of the way the discs were (and are) made, you can seamlessly switch between different angles or audio tracks while watching. The most common use for this is commentary tracks on movies, which have sadly fallen a bit out of fashion except for the hardcroe movie nerds like myself.
I watched a nearly 3 hour long movie with it's directors commentary track this week and it gave me an even deeper understanding and enjoyment of the movie which I already liked. The Movie was Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy which is a dramatization of the original production of Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado, a comic opera set in feudal Japan that, as Mike Leigh puts it, is as Japanese as steak and kidney pie. It's a good movie, check it out.
But back to the Beastie Boys. The Beastie Boys Video Anthology takes advantage of the technical options that a DVD provides, the intention is that you can pick a version (storyboard, alternate angles, etc) of a music video and an audio track from the multiple versions of the song and watch them however you want, even switching between them as you go. This is very cool, and such an underutilized feature of DVDs as a medium. What's funny, is it was so underutilized, that the remote on my DVD player doesn't have an easy way to switch between them. My very first DVD player had an "Angle" button on it right next tot he "Audio" button because the expectation was that all DVDs would be using this feature in the future. but almost none of them do, so it has been depreciated to save money on an extra button I guess.
But hopefully I can still manage to figure it out. Worst case, the disc lets you preset a combination and watch them that way.
Two other movies I picked up were Basquiat and Nightmare Alley (2021) the first is an unconventional biopic about a painter in the 90s played by Geoffery Wright and the second is Guiellermo del Toro's remake of the older movie with the same name, about a carnival conman. What's important to note abotu both is that they are presented in both their original color forms, but also with Black & White re-gradings. Which means I am now very close to having a complete collection of all the movies with a black and white regrade of an originally color release. I have 18 movies that fit this definition, and I think there are (at most) 3 more in the wild. For the record, the ones I have, in the rough order I acquired them:
The Mist
Johnny Mnemonic
Logan
Parasite
Mad Max Fury Road
Texasville
Godzilla Minus One
Doctor X
Hush
Mother
Shin Godzilla
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Film
Head of the Family
Hideous
Nickelodeon
Basquiat
Nightmare Alley
You will note that Zack Snyder's Justice League is not on that list, and that is because there has never been a physical release fo the black and white version (Justice is Grey) so I will not be including it.
The last 3 are relatively unknown, and as such I'm keeping a lid on their names for the time being. I have it on good authority that one of them only had 75 blu-rays ever printed of the movie, which is ridiculous. What's more ridiculous is that I may be able to get my hands one of them, but it's far from guaranteed at this point. Frankly the one that only ever had a region B Japanese DVD release will be easier to get. I am possibly the only person in the world attempting to accomplish this task, and that makes it all the more exciting.
It's the end of March, which means I did the thing where I remembered I started this newsletter back in march of 2018, but not the specific date so I have to go look up the original send date for the first one was March 11, 2018.
Eight years? That can't be right. But it is. I also took this opportunity to make an offline archive of all the newsletters I sent in 2025, so I have them for posterity. As a result of doing that I can also say I wrote about sixty thousand words last year, which also feels incorrect.
But the trick is to just keep putting the words down, and eventually they add up.
There are wild turkeys outside my office window this morning. The onomotopia of "gobble" really does a great job of conveying how they sound.
There was a Criterion Collection flash Sale this week, where all in-stock discs were 50% off for 24 hours. I must have put in my order quickly enough that I was near the top of the send list because I got my movies yesterday. As I almost alwasy do, I used a randomizer to pick a movie from the collection and buy it without necessarily knowing anything about it. This time the randomizer landed on Spine #100 The Beastie Boys Music Video Anthology. The Beastie Boys were a rather popular rap trio (and a DJ) that are popular enough I don't feel lke I need to introduce them here. But they were in that prime era of the 90s when music videos were a huge deal. The first 18 of their music videos are collected on 2 discs. But what's even cooler is that each video comes with multiple alternate versions of the songs, including remixes and acapella versions. And even cooler than that is each video comes with alternate angles as well.
One of the cool things that DVDs can do, but was never really taken advantage of even int heir heyday was alternate video and audio tracks. Because of the way the discs were (and are) made, you can seamlessly switch between different angles or audio tracks while watching. The most common use for this is commentary tracks on movies, which have sadly fallen a bit out of fashion except for the hardcroe movie nerds like myself.
I watched a nearly 3 hour long movie with it's directors commentary track this week and it gave me an even deeper understanding and enjoyment of the movie which I already liked. The Movie was Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy which is a dramatization of the original production of Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado, a comic opera set in feudal Japan that, as Mike Leigh puts it, is as Japanese as steak and kidney pie. It's a good movie, check it out.
But back to the Beastie Boys. The Beastie Boys Video Anthology takes advantage of the technical options that a DVD provides, the intention is that you can pick a version (storyboard, alternate angles, etc) of a music video and an audio track from the multiple versions of the song and watch them however you want, even switching between them as you go. This is very cool, and such an underutilized feature of DVDs as a medium. What's funny, is it was so underutilized, that the remote on my DVD player doesn't have an easy way to switch between them. My very first DVD player had an "Angle" button on it right next tot he "Audio" button because the expectation was that all DVDs would be using this feature in the future. but almost none of them do, so it has been depreciated to save money on an extra button I guess.
But hopefully I can still manage to figure it out. Worst case, the disc lets you preset a combination and watch them that way.
Two other movies I picked up were Basquiat and Nightmare Alley (2021) the first is an unconventional biopic about a painter in the 90s played by Geoffery Wright and the second is Guiellermo del Toro's remake of the older movie with the same name, about a carnival conman. What's important to note abotu both is that they are presented in both their original color forms, but also with Black & White re-gradings. Which means I am now very close to having a complete collection of all the movies with a black and white regrade of an originally color release. I have 18 movies that fit this definition, and I think there are (at most) 3 more in the wild. For the record, the ones I have, in the rough order I acquired them:
The Mist
Johnny Mnemonic
Logan
Parasite
Mad Max Fury Road
Texasville
Godzilla Minus One
Doctor X
Hush
Mother
Shin Godzilla
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Film
Head of the Family
Hideous
Nickelodeon
Basquiat
Nightmare Alley
You will note that Zack Snyder's Justice League is not on that list, and that is because there has never been a physical release fo the black and white version (Justice is Grey) so I will not be including it.
The last 3 are relatively unknown, and as such I'm keeping a lid on their names for the time being. I have it on good authority that one of them only had 75 blu-rays ever printed of the movie, which is ridiculous. What's more ridiculous is that I may be able to get my hands one of them, but it's far from guaranteed at this point. Frankly the one that only ever had a region B Japanese DVD release will be easier to get. I am possibly the only person in the world attempting to accomplish this task, and that makes it all the more exciting.