The only person who showed up to watch a movie was Alice. This is fine, since Alice is always good company, and I always enjoy having her around. Next week we plan to move the weekly movie night to Wednesday, since at least one person suggested that they had a permanent conflict on Monday, and the day was pretty arbitrary from our point of view.
We originally intended to watch Hot Fuzz, which I had seen on the airplane heading out to California, but ran into a technical snag. My very spiffy JVC multi-region DVD player won’t play the disc. Apparently, the makers of DVDs are upset that some of us found a way to watch our overseas purchases on our own televisions, and are now including logic on their discs that my player completely fails to recognize them as valid media at all. (This is my speculation, at least. I should pull out the PS2, which I think can also play DVDs, and see what it does with them. If not, I’ll have to go buy a cheap DVD player for these oddities, because, dammit, I want to watch my own movies in my own living room!)
At any event, we ended up showing Alice the other half of the first season of Coupling, since she had seen the first half while visiting kitanzi last week. We had a lot of good laughs, and some good conversation, and everyone had an enjoyable time.
gridlockjoe
The cheaper players usually tend to work better for multi-region playback, I have found.
That said, a friend swears by his Oppo.
Rob Wynne
Oddly, my JVC has handled everything I’ve ever tossed at it with the exception of homemade DL disks, with two exceptions: “Mr&Mrs Smith” and “Hot Fuzz”, both standard R1 disks I bought right here in town.
But they play on the computer, while the dvd player refuses to recognize them as being discs at all. It’s very frustrating.
arimathea
We really wanted to be there but had too much other stuff going on. We will definitely try to make it soon!
anaisdjuna
I would like to come watch movies with y’all. I was out of town last 2 weeks, but yeah…. look forward to next time. 🙂
kk1raven
Some DVD manufacturers are trying to force you to use a player for the proper region. Are you sure you can’t simply set the DVD player to region 1 to play the disk then switch it back to not being region-encoded? (There is no such thing as “multi-region”. What is called multi-region is a lack of region encoding, aka “region 0”.) The DVD players I’ve had that could be region-free have been easily switched back and forth.