I don't have Blu-Ray, but it is worth mentioning how poor the Dark Knight DVD transfer was. Noisy and grainy in some scenes, and very over-smoothed and blocky in a few places. I wouldn't pay money for such shoddy work. Forget the extras. Give me good visuals on the feature product! I'm sure the Blu-Ray is nice, but that's no excuse.

I don't have Blu-Ray, but it is worth mentioning how poor the Dark Knight DVD transfer was. Noisy and grainy in some scenes, and very over-smoothed and blocky in a few places. I wouldn't pay money for such shoddy work. Forget the extras. Give me good visuals on the feature product! I'm sure the Blu-Ray is nice, but that's no excuse.

I don't have Blu-Ray, but it is worth mentioning how poor the Dark Knight DVD transfer was. Noisy and grainy in some scenes, and very over-smoothed and blocky in a few places. I wouldn't pay money for such shoddy work. Forget the extras. Give me good visuals on the feature product! I'm sure the Blu-Ray is nice, but that's no excuse.

The smaller companies tend to put bigger effort into their DVDs. Those I'll look at more closely.

My pet peeve: Double-, triple-, quadruple-dipping on the same hits. I don't care what the extras are, I'm not rebuying it, anymore…I like catalog releases, which are receding on standard DVD as Blu-Ray becomes the new spawning ground.

Fox has done some stellar work with special editions: The Alien box set comes to mind. But all the majors studios seem to have abandoned that level of commitment. I'm happy just to get something older than 1980 once in a while.

(As for Milk, I'm sure the DVD specs were set in stone before Penn won his Oscar. Some actors/filmmakers are bad at commentary, which is an art form all its own. And some, like Woody Allen and Steven Spielberg, are simply indifferent, or prefer to maintain radio silence.)

And don't get me wrong, I love extras too, provided they give me something. As a former, frustrated film-school wannabe, I want depth in what they're discussing. I want a full disclosure on how the movie makers put the movie together, from script to screen. Most of the time though, you get actors saying how tough it was to wring “honest tears from myself in service to such an amazing script” (actors use the word 'amazing' to describe every damned thing) and CGI artists exclaiming how their work almost “broke the rendering processors!” But that's it. No real inside look at the process.

Now, Robert Rodriguez always used to do cool things with his releases. His Ten Minute Film School bit on the El Mariachi disc is great. Even the featurette on Star Wars Phantom Menace, where the cut waterfall sequence is put together digitally at ILM is good. These are all at least ten years old by now.

Don't get me wrong. This is no defense of Fox and what you're saying makes a lot of sense, but I can't help but say they don't make 'em like they used to… And they haven't for quite awhile (and no, Easter eggs don't count. They should put everything up front and not jerk the consumers around.)

I like knowing that the first part of the effects shot in The Dark Knight where Batman and the criminal he abducts from China using Operation: Skyhook was done FOR REAL, and shot 88 stories above the ground.

I also don't really have a problem with actors getting paid for doing commentaries and such, because it's time out of their day which they have to slot in, and schedule between other film shoots they could be doing. When Warner Bros. was preparing to do the commentaries for Babylon 5's DVDs, the company tried to get creator J. Michael Straczynski to talk to the actors and convince them to do it for free. Straczynski didn't like it, so his solution was to call the actors and say, “Hey…I'm talking to you about it, just like I promised Warner!” The end result: the actors got paid for doing a JOB, which legally…you're supposed to get paid when you work. It's one of the great joys of justifying having to get out of bed in the morning.

I also think that commentaries from stars of films add a lot to the DVD, and such was severely lacking on the DVD for Milk, since Sean Penn didn't do one, and didn't appear in any of the bonus docu-features. Did he deserve his Oscar? Yes…but the fact he didn't do any commentary on the DVD smacks of “Well, I already got my statue…what've you done for me lately?”

I don't think all the studios have ruined their DVD sets per se, as you can still find gems here and there…but Fox is certainly on its way to causing a deep disturbance in the Force regarding retail rentals…and hopefully, other studios won't follow their lead.

But then two things happened: first, the film participants wanted a cut of the cash for kicking in with special features. They wanted a redistribution clause for their EPK interviews so that as a part of the DVD, they could legally consider it an acting job and expect equal pay for it.

The second thing is that there aren't any real surprises now in film making, so those lengthy documentaries on the whole special effects process can now be summed up in a sentence: the computer did it. There isn't a lot on which you can expound upon when it comes to the latest talking animal cartoon, or the latest psycho-killer, torture porn flick or the latest heart-breakingly earnest costume drama about Heartbroken Ernest. While I enjoy my full-blown special editions like nobody else, whatever they tell me now is unlikely to be anything I haven't heard.

As for Fox, what's one more pearl on their string of mistakes? I'm surprised they didn't sink a bunch of money to make another one of those awful Ice Age movies.

What???