various viewings

Watched the rest of Black Lagoon: First Barrage last night.

It really is very good. I can always tell by how quickly I get through it--some shows take me weeks and I can't watch more than a couple of ep's at a time. BL I've watched the whole thing in two evenings of 6 ep's each. One for a review in future I think, though obviously now it's a Funimation release, but one would hope they're essentially just re-releasing, rather than fiddling with it.

The animation is of a very high standard, which does seem to be one of the advantages of going the 12-episode seasons route. I wish the Japanese audio was 5.1, but there's an English 5.1 up-mix. The extras are a little wimpy for a whole separate disk, but I can understand why they went that route--3 releases but the steelcase book has 4 DVD slots.

One of the bizarre things is that just as Geneon packed up they were starting to release some really good stuff. Geneon always used to be stuck in that mode of squeezing as much cash out of the user as possible. 8 disk releases used to be their standard, with no extras and no frills. But just before the end they seemed to be releasing stuff with fewer disks, putting in plenty of extras, doing nice packs like the steelbooks.

I'm not sure if it's ironic or just annoying :/.

Last night I also watched "Britain from Above" which is a new short documentary series presented by Andrew Marr. It's quite entertaining if a little "documentary lite". There also weren't quite as many nice map views with stuff overlayed on them this time. But then it was mainly about agriculture and farm use, so it's not surprising there wasn't so much to show in that fashion.

Over the w/end I watched Pan's Labyrinth. It's a Spanish language film by Guillermo Del Toro. Apparently Del Toro likes to mix it up--he does one big Hollywood film (Hellboy, for example) and then one independent Spanish language film (I think he's actually Mexican, but I'm not sure).

It was good, but unfortunately it was a bit of a hype-victim for me. I'd heard quite a lot that it was amazing and read some good reviews and so it had that difficult job of living up to the hype in my head. Even so it was good--perhaps a smidge too long, but not exhaustingly so.

I'm guessing it was released as a 2-disker (I watched it on rental) as the extras were thin on the ground on this disk--just a commentary by Del Toro. But that's not a bad thing--Del Toro gives good commentary on the films of his I've seen before.