[Pyrrho]

Originally Posted by VinylHanger

I was just posting on the movies watched thread and realized I had spent a good part of the weekend watching movies, but if I listed them it wasn't really that many. However, I realized I tend to watch the movies through once and then watch it again with the comantary on, and some of the Blu-rays have 2 or more commentary soundtracks.

I suppose it is a way to soothe the movie wonk in me.

Are there any other fans of the "extras"?

I watch some of the extras on most discs, but I rarely will watch a film listening to a commentary. I have started quite a few commentaries, only to shut them off after a few minutes, because the people talking are usually both boring and stupid. Evidently, it does not take much intelligence to make a film. Many directors seem to be as empty headed as the typical pretty faces on film. They obviously don't follow the advice of Mark Twain: "It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."

However, there are notable exceptions, such as Werner Herzog, who is fascinating, and whose commentaries are generally about as interesting as his films. But he did interesting things in making his films, like putting actors in armor on a raft in a river in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, and pulled a boat over a mountain, and all sorts of other dangerous and unusual things. He is also more intelligent than most people who make commentaries, and is able to tell an interesting story. So with him, I always watch the commentary. But with most popular movies, watching the commentaries are, in my opinion, a waste of time. (Naturally, I do not object to other people wasting their time that way if they want to do so.)

From watching deleted scenes, in most cases, the decision to delete them was obviously the right one. That has caused me to mostly stop watching deleted scenes.

Frankly, I wish they would, instead of including extras, use less data compression on the picture, so that the film would look better. Extras, if desired, could be put on a second disc (other than commentaries, of course, though commentaries will tend to take up much less space on the disc, as video takes up much more space than audio). That is why I liked the "SuperBit" DVDs, which don't have fancy menus that waste one's time and waste space (and sometimes even contain "spoilers" for the film), and don't have extras (on the disc[s] with the movie). Those tend to look about as good as a DVD can look. My experience with Blu-Ray is too limited to comment on picture quality issues with it in practice, but since they still use data compression for the picture, it is likely that they can degrade the picture by compressing it too much to leave room for a bunch of extras on the disc.