Via Mobius comes word that the great Point Blank is finally arriving on DVD on July 5, with commentary by director John Boorman and admirer Steven Soderbergh, whose The Limey was very much influenced by Point Blank. Good news.

In other news, I picked up my PSP this last week and wow what a unit. It is first and foremost a games system, and it does games very well indeed. (My favorite so far is Lumines, which takes Tetris to a not-so-obvious next level, although the real jaw-dropper is THUG 2 on a handheld -- complete with fully interactive 3D virtual worlds and killer soundtrack (Rancid, The Ramones, Handsome Boy Modeling School, etc.).)

But what really proves that this thing costs Sony more than the 250 bones it'll cost you is the video playback capability. The bright LCD screen is to die for, and the quality on the bundled Spider-Man 2 disc — encoded at full DVD resolution, then resampled for the PSP's somewhat lower-quality display — is just phenomenal for a portable unit. (This means I can stop compressing MTV2's Subterranean to death just so I can watch it on the train on my little Clié.) And while I'd very much recommend against watching something like House of Flying Daggers on a handheld game system, I'm already thinking that if it proves to be not too difficult to rip DVDs to this thing (yes, you need an expensive and proprietary-to-Sony "memory stick" to do that deed) with the commentary track instead of the main audio, I may be able to catch up with my supplemental viewing on planes and trains instead of springing for a portable DVD player.

Posted by Bryant Frazer at March 27, 2005 10:38 PM

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