DX, would you really? That would be great! Thank you. I was planning on making them a joint gift with my brother, so I'm willing to pay as much as $60 for them.

Ok then, I'll take a look.

I want to get the My So-Called Life DVDs for my mother for Christmas, but when I checked Amazon, they only had them used, starting at $229!! Didn't they just come out last year, for a reasonable price? What happened?

It was a limited release. Not very many copies were produced, so now it's almost out of print.

I'm still wondering about the DVD/VHS differential pricing -- were VHS cassettes so expensive because of the cost of production? And DVDs avoided that initial high charge to rental because it's just cheaper media?

That's something crying out for a higher-priced re-release. One wonders whether manufacturers are smart enough to consult the used-item price index to decide their publishing strategies.

(There was a thing about OOP book demand on the radio this morning, and what furry little executive would fail to visit marketing research that has already been done for him! )

But enough about that. I just wanted to read more slagging of Oliver Stone, because I still haven't seen a movie of his that has made me swoon the way his fans seem to swoon. I am also kind of tired of getting to know a director's hangups so intimately.

It was a limited release. Not very many copies were produced, so now it's almost out of print.

Dammit. I really wish I'd known that at the time.

I liked Platoon a lot. Some of his other '80s movies I liked but they also annoyed me. Natural Born Killers I also liked a lot, but it annoyed me a lot so I haven't seen it since.

I'm still wondering about the DVD/VHS differential pricing -- were VHS cassettes so expensive because of the cost of production? And DVDs avoided that initial high charge to rental because it's just cheaper media?

I think that for small runs of VHS, they are expensive to produce. I know that you can still find non-fiction video put out by small companies that cost $100's of dollars for one tape. I believe that the initial cost of printing one DVD is more expensive than creating one VHS, but then the price of multiple copies is way cheaper.

I hated Platoon, although I also think I was born too late for its cultural moment. Ultimately, it's the sort of movie that glorifies what it is trying to interrogate, and loses its point without noticing.

Actually, in a similar way to the fact that, halfway through Blackhawk Down, I realized that the Somalis were being portrayed as just a half-turn away from zombies, all mob-like and Other and unknowable. I don't think that was intentional subtext of that movie, but whoops! Made me respect the movie less, and that was before I even counted the unnecessary flag-waving.

I hated Natural Born Killers with a white-hot passion. I think Stone could have gotten the same reaction by driving to people's houses and smacking them repeatedly in the face while saying "People are bad, mmkay?" Scrappy's right: the man is a dick.