Well, this week my Blu-ray collection will get two additional titles – one that’s new-to-me, and another I-have-this-movie-already-but-I-like-the-packaging-variant-so-I-bought-it-anyway purchase.
The new-to-me title is not a newly released Blu-ray, nor is it a recent movie. It’s the 2018 Warner Bros. Home Entertainment issue of Far and Away, a Ron Howard film that turns 30 years old on May 22.
I’ve never watched Far and Away. I had no interest in it when it was released in theaters back when I was 29 years of age, partly because I am not a huge fan of Tom Cruise. I’m not a “hater” of Cruise, mind you; I’ve seen a few of his films since he became a hot-shot actor in the 1980s, and I own some of his later movies – Minority Report, War of the Worlds, the first three installments of the Mission: Impossible series, and Valkyrie – but I’m not interested in buying his entire filmography on home media.
I am, however, more of a fan of director Ron Howard, Cruise’s co-star Nicole Kidman, and composer John Williams. I don’t plan on buying every film that this trio has made, mind you, but I’ve been listening to themes by Maestro Williams from Far and Away for years now – the first time I heard his theme from the movie was in 1996 when I was given a CD of a Sony Classical album titled Cinema Serenade.
Since then, I’ve heard themes from Far and Away in several albums – most of them from the Sony Classical label, but also in Deutsche Grammophon’s Across the Stars, John Williams Live in Vienna, and the more recent The Berlin Concert – for over 20 years. And until this week, when I watched the aforementioned concert in Berlin by the world-famous Berliner Philharmoniker under Maestro Williams’ baton and I heard his Suite from Far and Away, I wasn’t exactly eager to see the Far and Away.
I’m not convinced that Howard’s 1992 movie about an Irish immigrant couple who gets involved in the Oklahoma Land Run of 1893 will bowl me over as a great film, but I do like the score, and Ron Howard is a good filmmaker. So….
The U.S. Postal Service has my package from Amazon with Far and Away marked as Out for Delivery, so it should be in our mailbox by 4:30 PM today.
Tomorrow, USPS will deliver another package. This one is from Best Buy, and it’s another packaging version of 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. In this variant, Lucasfilm’s art department created an image of a single X-wing fighter flying toward an armada of First Order Star Destroyers.
I wasn’t planning to buy yet another Blu-ray edition of The Rise of Skywalker, but I had bonus points in my Best Buy account that would expire if I didn’t use them. I looked at what Best Buy had available, but I couldn’t see anything else that interested me, so I chose the 4K UHD set from the ninth episode in the Skywalker Saga.
In other news, after I wrote yesterday’s blog post on the Lenovo laptop that I bought last year, Microsoft did its check for updates thing and – after seeing that my laptop was properly configured – asked me if I wanted to upgrade to Windows 11. I had already saved my blog post copy as a Word document, so I said. “Yes.” (Well, more accurately, I clicked on the Yes option.) I like doing the actual blog-posting process on this computer, so while the laptop downloaded and installed Windows 11, I went into my room and fiddled with Word and WordPress to finish yesterday’s post about how I did not watch the Oscars this year.
The download was successful, but I still have not spent too much time using Windows 11, so I don’t know if I like the new operating system yet. We’ll see what happens when I use the laptop again.
Well, other than that, I don’t have much to tell, so I will close for now, Dear Reader. Until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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