I’m done. I’ve met all of my holiday deadlines, filed my copy, fulfilled all my commitments. There are no movies left to see until the new year. It’s time to do other things for a while — family stuff, mostly — and possibly fall back into “Homicide: Life on the Street”, which Kate’s finally started watching after a year of increasingly irritating recommendations from me.

I’d forgotten how good that show was. And how uniquely weird. What the hell happened to Barry Levinson, man?

Oh, and if you were thinking about picking up a high-definition player on Boxing Day, well, Future Shop just put up its sales flyers, and the high-def format war is quietly at the center of its online sale.

Toshiba’s entry-level HD-D3 player (basically a rebadged A3, with a maximum output of 1080i rather than 1080p) will be selling for $99.99, which includes “300” and “The Bourne Identity” and five additional discs by mail, making the player effectively free.

That’s a hell of a door crasher, and no Blu-ray player can compete with it; the cheapest players in the online sale are Samsung’s BD-P1400, at $299.99, and Sharp’s BD-HP20U, at $349.99. Both players also include mail-in offers for five discs, but “effectively free” and “that’s like saving another hundred bucks!” are worlds apart.

Further, the HD DVD units can be carried home from the store, while the Blu-ray players are online exclusives, which plays against the whole instant-gratification thing. I wonder how many HD-D3s are available chain-wide, and how much Toshiba is losing on each one.

(Incidentally, the links above will take you to Future Shop’s dedicated product pages, which post the pre-sale prices; click ’em after 8 pm tomorrow for the sale prices.)

Back tomorrow with more reviews …