DVD Extras

I have one massive failing in my geekdom, my complete and utter lack of interest in 'extras' I don't watch Dr Who Confidential. I haven't watched a DVD extra since DVD's first came out. I'm just not that interested.

Thing is, if I want to see the film, I want to see the film. I don't particularly want to be distracted from the film by listening to the director or cast waffling over the top of it. You'd shoot them if they tried to do it while you were sat in the cinema after all.
Added to that, if I want to watch the film then I probably have a couple of hours spare in which to do it, not a couple of hours then another hour or so to watch behind the scenes stuff and blooper reels that frankly, aren't that entertaining or enlightening. I've seen the odd blooper reel that looked somewhat scripted too, what's the point?

Lets face it, extras were invented to encourage people to move over to DVD from VHS. Now it's being used to encourage people to move over to Blu Ray. I don't want to move over to Blu Ray, I've barely managed to replace my VHS collection with DVD! There is a limit too, to how much I care about the picture definition. I can see it, and see it clearly. That'll do me.

A facet of my grumpiness with regard to it all is how distributors and studios work so hard to exploit us all. This new habit where they release different versions of the DVD and Blu Ray with a variety of different extras to try and get complete-ist geeks to buy all of them and raise their revenues more. I know that the home cinema market has impacted on Hollywood profits over the last few years and there's a constant battle to recover from that but I can't help but feel there better ways to go about it. Less pointlessly expensive CGI which still fails to be as convincing as promoted would be a good start.

I'm probably wrong, I know Big loves his insights into the making of the films and tv shows he loves but I rather want to protect my ignorance. For me it's like the Golden Days of Hollywood in a way, back when studios despotically controlled what information on their stars' lives got out to the public. Perhaps it wasn't in the best spirit of press freedom but not knowing their every failing, every bad choice and what they had for breakfast all added to the experience. Sometimes it's better not to know and to let the story you love live on.


Oh and don't even get me started on 3-D!