Kindred: The Embraced

Kindred: The Embraced is a show I've been interested in seeing for a few years, about three weeks ago I finally bought the DVDs and today I watched the first one and a half episodes and I've come to the conclusion this show really sucks.

While I was watching the pilot I was often reminded of mind numbingly bland Charmed ( well the few episodes I saw were incredibly bland so I gave up on it early on ), it's no that some of the ideas in Kindred: The Embraced weren't good but they were so diluted and the show chose to focus on soap opera aspects instead of proper storytelling.

My daughter is a big fan of Charmed and I suspect she'll probably enjoy Kindred: The Embraced as well, I was amused to discover that a lot of the same people were behind both television series, in fact you could almost look at Kindred: The Embraced as a early prototype for Charmed.

I think that unless you are a big fan of soap opera or concepts that are heavily dumbed down so as not to offend anyone then Kindred: The Embraced is a show that's probably best avoided.

Cowboys and Aliens

A couple of days ago my wife and I went to see Cowboys and Aliens, as movies go it was decent, I liked it but I didn't love it in fact my wife who doesn't usually enjoy science fiction enjoyed it more than I did but I suspect that may have had something to do with the male cast.

Cowboys and Aliens is certainly worth a look if you get the chance, it's probably not worth owning unless like me you have a wife who gets the screaming thigh sweats every time Harrison Ford walks on screen.

Customer Service

Well I'm sure if I asked pretty much anyone it wouldn't take long before I get some sort of customer service horror story, it seems that we've all come across that completely useless person who's only purpose seems to be to make life harder than it needs to be.

Well over the last week I've had one of the best examples of customer service I've experienced in ages and sadly I don't feel that I can say which company it was or the exact product that I had a problem with just in case someone might decide to take advantage of that companies generosity.

The company in question is a UK based DVD distributor who seems to have a less than optimal reputation when it comes to quality control, over the last year or so they have been re-releasing a classic 60's television series, one of the boxsets had a production error on all of the discs in the sets that meant the audio was mastered at the wrong pitch.

I'd bought the faulty boxset when I was first released but hadn't watched any of the DVDs and sure enough my boxset contained discs from the original production run featuring the flawed audio track.

The company in question has been happy to replace faulty DVDs with the corrected ones if customers returned the faulty DVDs to them which I was happy to do - well at least until I found out how much Australia Post wanted to charge me to airmail the faulty DVDs back to the UK.

I contacted the company in question and asked if I could just be sent the DVDs, I was happy to provide proof of purchase or pay a reasonable sum for the discs if this was a problem, while all this was being sorted out my computer died and along with it my proof of purchase.

Using my wife's laptop I contacted them again and said I no longer had access to my proof of purchase details and I would be happy to buy the replacement DVDs from them, they wrote back to me and said if I could send me a digital photo of the boxset they would send me the DVDs so I did as they asked but never heard any more from them but today a mere five working days later I received a package in the mail containing all of the replacement DVDs.

The truth is that I probably could have gotten a photo of the boxset online if I tried so in the name of customer service they ignored their usual return policy and didn't ask me to return the faulty DVDs, what they accepted as proof of purchase was almost nonexistent, passed up an opportunity to get me to pay for another set of DVDs and finally sent the replacement DVD priority air mail so that I received them on the other side of the world in less than a week - I don't know about you but I think that is pretty damn good customer service.

Frelling Computers

A couple of days ago my computer died a spectacular death and really it was probably time for a new one anyway, I've had a lot of crap going on recently and I really couldn't be bothered building a new system so I called up my local computer store and ordered a new PC.
Well it all seem to be going well so far but I'd forgotten what a pain in the ass it it to reinstall all those programs and handy little utilities that make life so much easier.

Crap crap crap etc

Fiona arrives home from her trip early this afternoon, I have a month worth of cleaning to do in a few short hours as well as hide all the Blu-rays I've bought over the last month, with any luck she will be too jet lagged to notice.

Universal Soldier

I picked up a guilty pleasure of mine on Blu-ray a couple of days and re-watched it last night and I have to say I still find Universal Soldier to be a lot of cheesy fun which is interesting to me since I don't usually enjoy the work of either Jean-Claude Van Damme or Dolph Lundgren.

Apart from a couple of dirt marks / scratches on the print they used to master the disc the Blu-ray looks and sounds pretty good, it's certainly a step up in quality over the DVD version I recently borrowed off a friend to watch.

Paul

A friend of mine came around to watch a movie last night, he really wanted to see Paul so we fired up the Blu-ray and gave it a watch.

Paul is a movie it would seem I was destined to love, I've always enjoyed the comedic partnership between Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in all their previous work especially Spaced but somehow despite it's subject matter Paul just doesn't work for me, maybe it was because Edgar Wright didn't direct the duo like he did in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz along with Spaced on television, perhaps it's because this was a larger budgeted production set in America so it lacks the atmosphere of their previous work or a combination of both but for me there just seemed to be something lacking.

Paul does feature some genuinely funny moments but they are few and far between but despite that it's still far from the worst movie I've seen recently and I'm still interested to see what Pegg and Frost do next.

Macross Plus

Well after wanting to see it for a few years I finally watched the four episodes of Macross Plus yesterday, overall I'd have to say I was disappointed, there were large chunks of this story that were just incredibly boring, I know the Macross Plus movie is a re-edited version of the four episodes with some new animations sequences that were created especially for the movie, perhaps with the re-edit they managed to salvage things and create an interesting version of the story.

More Movies

Over the last couple of days I've watched Conan The Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer and Ladyhawke on Blu-ray, given the time they were made and the technical limitations placed on the film makers at the time I thought they all looked and sounded great, of course the score for Ladyhawke is still one of the worst film scores I can think of and hearing it in HD audio hasn't made me appreciate it any more, to this day I don't know what on earth Richard Donner was thinking when they went ahead with that music, it couldn't be more out of place in that movie.

Fiona's UK Trip

So my wife was in London and riots started, she moved on to Birmingham and riots started there as well - suspicious ?, I'll let you be the judge.

Movies Movies Movies

It seems like ages since I last updated the blog so I'll try to get everything up to date over the next day or so.

I lashed out and bought a whole bunch of cheap Blu-rays over the last week or so and I've even managed to watch a few of them.

V for Vendetta
Constantine
Iron Man
Hulk
Starship Troopers

Until I saw them listed there I hadn't realised four of the five movies were all based on comics of some description, I guess old habits die hard.