Displaying items by tag: Happy New Year

Welcome to 2024, Bits readers!

So this exercise started out as an effort to compile Ten Favorite Discs of 2023 lists from each member of The Digital Bits team. But one thing led to another… and how do you pick just ten?

What we have instead is essentially just our individual picks for our favorite titles of the year that was in 2023. And with so many great titles to choose from—many of them all arriving at once—it’s almost certain that we’ve overlooked worthy titles.

But what follows is at least a great start for discussion. There are lists from each of us, along with any comments our team members felt like including with them.

And if you can think of great titles we’re missing here, please share them with us on social media! [Read on here...]

On this final day of 2022, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past year and, really, on the past twenty-five years here at The Digital Bits website.

First though, our own Michael Coate has just delivered one final History, Legacy, and Showmanship retrospective for the year, a look back at Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in celebration of the film’s 40th anniversary. The piece features another epic and multi-page roundtable interview with film experts and historians. Note that the piece will also be updated early in the new year with additional images and information, but the interview as it is is thorough and well worth your time, so be sure to check it out.

Now then… it’s an extraordinary thing to look back at twenty-five years of this website, a site I first started back in 1997 to cover the advent of DVD and to introduce the appreciation of cinema to a wider audience. As a film student at the Universal of Wisconsin in Madison, I had the honor of studying the subject under two of the finest film historians and theorists working today, David Boardwell and Kristin Thompson, not to mention the pleasure of discovering not just the Hollywood classics but the wider world of international cinema. And it’s been my goal—both then and now—to share that love and joy of discovery with everyone who might be interested. [Read on here...]

All right, this is our final Bits post of 2020. And it’ll be a quick one.

This has certainly been a difficult year for all of us here and no doubt it has been for all of you, our readers, as well. But a new year at least brings the hope that things can and will get better on Planet Earth going forward.

On a personal note, I’m pleased to say that—though it’s been a struggle—The Digital Bits is still here. We’ve made it through some difficult times, we’re still alive and ticking. And we intend to keep cracking on in 2021 and beyond.

I’ve also been working on a second science fiction novel, and hope to see my first actually published sometime in 2021—something I’ve had to put on the back-burner this past year in order to keep the site going. But the writing process has certainly been personally satisfying, and it’s kept me going in dark moments. That, plus having a telescope to look at the stars a few times a month, and of course great family and friends—even though we’ve only been able to see them from afar.

In any case, I know I speak for all of us here at the site when I say that we’re grateful to have each and every one of you as readers of The Digital Bits.

So with that, we’d like to wish you all a very happy and safe New Year! And together we’ll make 2021 a better time for all of us.

See you back here on Monday. Peace out!

(You can follow Bill on social media at these links: Twitter and Facebook) 

All right, this is just a quick post with three things in mind:

First, I’ve posted a review of Fox’s recent Kingdom of Heaven: Ultimate Edition Blu-ray – a worthy upgrade of a previously fine DVD special edition of a great film by Ridley Scott. Do give it a look.  [Read on here…]