The Watchdog Barks LAST YEAR, I had the oppor- tunity to look through a collec- tion of very old comics. One of the most surprising discoveries, for me, was noticing that the
100th issues of SUPERMAN and BATMAN, for ex- ample, were issued with the same assembly line nonchalance you’d expect of the, well, 43rd issue of something. Hundredth issues, two-hundredth issues... apparently, these milestones didn’t begin to mean anything, at least not to publishers, until sometime in the 1970s. It took BATMAN 22 years to reach its 150th issue, in 1962, and likewise, there was no front cover fuss commemorating its milestone-and-a-half. It has taken VIDEO WATCHDOG 19 years to meet the same number, and we intend to have a party.
The first thing you’ll notice about this 150th
issue of VW is that we’ve brought you an unusually high quantity of top drawer review titles—block- busters like THE DARK KNIGHT, QUANTUM OF SOLACE, IRON MAN, TWILIGHT, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN and SAW V, just for beginners. You have read about these films in other magazines, of course, but I think not at this depth. This issue also introduces two new regular columns, “Video WatchBlog” and “AVI Watchdog.” The latter will focus on otherwise unavailable, sometimes tailor-made gems that can be down- loaded as AVI (or DivX) files from a variety of file- sharing websites online; these can either be converted to DVD format (ISO and VOB files) and burned to disc or uploaded directly to a portable viewing device. These may include long out-of- print Beta and VHS titles, alternate versions of films released in the US in different form, otherwise unavailable widescreen versions (sometimes sourced from Euro issues or broadcasts and wed- ded to English dub tracks), and pictures that sim- ply don’t have a large enough audience to inspire any company in this economy to put them out officially. The first installment finds Brad Stevens writing about a special cut of Jacques Rivette’s OUT 1; Brad will be back, but future columns are also open to other writers and may cover more than a single release.
“Video WatchBlog” will be a print version of my (twice) award-winning blog, where I and per- haps other contributors will take a single aspect of a film on video—it might be an actor, the score (even a single cue from a score), a supporting per- formance, a character or a recurring location— and really go to town on it. The idea behind this feature is that the standard review format, even at its most indulgent, doesn’t usually allow for minutae such as this, though the very essence of film appreciation lies in such particulars, which we may gloss over at first but cherish all the more as time passes. This is something that online reviewers and bloggers know, but an idea not often imported to the printed page. So this incarnation of “Video WatchBlog” will be a place to celebrate the facets of film and our own capacity to fetishize them. Some of you may have noticed that, in our previous issue, the reviews in both the Bytes and DVD departments were somewhat out of our usual alphabetical order. To be honest, this was an edi- torial error that somehow got overlooked, despite all our careful proofreading, till just hours before we were scheduled to send the layout to our printer. It would have put us another day behind schedule to correct the layout, so Donna and I decided it wasn’t worth it. In this issue, you’ll discover a similar alphabetic inconsistency, but this time it’s deliber- ate. We opened the DVD section two issues ago with STARDUST because we had some great photo material and it seemed to warrant the privilege of opening the department; this time, we decided to emphasize the most important releases first, to give you readier access to the reviews we think you’ll be keenest to read, and to make the cover- to-cover reading experience more exciting. We have also streamlined the grid that appears at the top of reviews and will now only indicate region code if a disc will not play on a DVD or Blu-ray player sold in the United States and Canada. It’s always a challenge, especially on our sched- ule as a two-person production team, to produce an issue we know is expected to be important. With the help of our wonderfully dependable core group of contributors, we think we’ve met that challenge with this 150th issue, and hope you will agree.
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Tim Lucas 3
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