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DVD player dead, The Wrestler, and the first episode of Lain

Last June, our DVD player died and I, upon the advice of a cinephile at work, purchased the OPPO DV-980H. An (otherwise) no-name player that, for $160, plays every fucking format ever conceived by the binary gods. Add to that the USB port on the front that allows you to browse and play anything from the contained file system and you have a pretty pretty pretty good player. Aha. Sadly, just last week it decided to stop recognizing DVDs (unknown disc) and so I searched for recompense and found (oddly) that my warranty was good for One More Month. On its way.

Watched The Wrestler [ 5/5 | IMDB | Rotten Tomatoes ] from Amazon download ($3.99). The most resonant shock was the unexpectedly painful scenes when he's wrestling. You need to really brace yourselves for those. The rest was a quiet film of a twilight of life. The beauty of these scenes was that they were tragic without being "precious." I feel like there's more for me to get out of Marisa Tomei's character, but that's for further consideration.

After fudding with video players and Vista's cruel cruel attitude towards DVDs, I finally got my HP+TV to play my new Serial Experiments Lain DVDs. First episode of 13: very sparse, abstract, and moody. Emphasis on powerlines as communicators of the spirit. One scene: Lain is on the metro and it stops for a wreck (that we don't see). She looks up at the cables above and sees blood dripping off. I approve of a fixed-length story.