Displaying items by tag: Johnnie Young

Greetings, Bits readers!

I trust you’re all having a lovely evening. This is Bill, and I just wanted to check in here tonight with a quick update.

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve posted fewer My Two Cents news columns in the last couple of weeks, despite the fact that there seems to be more disc news than ever as we head toward the finish line in 2025.

And it’s true, there have been fewer news posts here. The reason for this is simple: I had a pretty significant prostate surgery a week ago today. It wasn’t a serious issue, thank goodness—fortunately, not a cancer scare.

Rather, I’ve been suffering these past few years from straightforward prostate enlargement, which runs in my family and which, in fact, as much as 75% of all men begin to deal with when they reach their 50s.

Luckily, my doctor is fantastic, the surgery itself went very well, and my recovery has been ahead of the curve. I’ve still got about 6-8 weeks of healing to do before I’m back to normal. But I’ve spent most of the last week in bed resting. And of course, the week ahead of my surgery was stressful indeed. [Read on here...]

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...]