To be certain, Miramax’s Kevin Smith 3-Movie Collection does feel like a pretty senseless cash grab on Disney’s part. For one thing, the studio has taken two of Smith’s finest films (Clerks and Chasing Amy) and bundled them along with one of his weakest (Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back); for another, of the three, only Chasing Amy contains an appreciable amount of new bonus content. But before you write it off completely, understand two things: One, these movies are all available separately, and two, the collection is available at a fairly steep discount. If you’re a Blu-ray owner and a Smith fan who somehow doesn’t own these movies yet, this box should be an instant purchase. If you do already own them, on the other hand, you’ve got some thinking to do.

As you’d expect, the visual element of this box is, across the board, not its selling point. Filmed on black & white stock for $30,000 at Smith’s real-life place of employment, Clerks is a seminal film for reasons that have nothing to do with the way it looks, and although work has definitely gone into upgrading it to 1080p — the bonus features include three featurettes explaining just how much — the movie on Blu-ray is just as silly as it was on DVD. Clerks is a film that doesn’t need anything more than a VCR and a single speaker to get its point across. Does it look better in hi-def? Absolutely. Does it matter? Absolutely not. (To his credit, Smith totally cops to this in a new introduction, saying the studio just wanted more money out of the movie and would have done it with or without his input.) The movie’s beauty lies in its reams of dialogue, which use a pair of disaffected twentysomethings (Dante and Randal, played by Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson) as proxies for Smith’s hyper-literate musings on everything from sexual ethics to the morality of blowing up the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi. It was the movie that awakened a generation of moviegoers to independent film, because Smith spoke in a (mostly quite filthy) language they could understand.

Fifteen years later, Clerks doesn’t have quite the same impact, but that’s mostly because its good bits have been so thoroughly subsumed into cinematic culture that its flaws have a lot more room to stand out. It’s an ugly movie, one with a lot of awkward acting and stilted delivery of lines that often feel unrealistic, and its influence was so tremendous that if you watch it for the first time today, you might actually come away thinking it’s a lame ripoff of some other movie. If you loved it then, though, chances are you still love it now — and between the new, mostly irrelevant transfer and the stacks of bonus content (the vast majority ported over from the 10th anniversary DVD), it’s never looked or sounded better than it does here. If you love it, though, you probably own that 10th anniversary DVD, and given that the only really new content you get here is Smith’s mea culpa introduction and a documentary on the making of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, it might be hard to justify the purchase.

Also making its Blu-ray debut is Chasing Amy, the 1997 dramedy that helped Smith rebound from the stinging failure of his Clerks follow-up, Mallrats. In terms of bonus content, Amy is the crown jewel of the box — Smith, always a huge proponent of extra features, has included a ton of them here, including a new commentary from Smith and producing partner Scott Mosier, a feature-length, very entertaining documentary about the making of the film, a reunion Q&A with the cast, and a reunion conversation between Smith and the movie’s star (as well as his ex-girlfriend), Joey Lauren Adams, plus the traditional deleted scenes, outtakes, and trailer.

Made for $250,000, the Blu-ray version of Amy is essentially, in terms of visual quality, a color version of Clerks — even if you’re not the type of viewer who goes over a film’s picture with a magnifying glass, you’ll quickly notice that the 1080p upgrade hasn’t done the movie any real favors. Most of the picture detail has been obliterated by excessive digital noise reduction, and although tonal consistency is adequate, that softness is distracting, which is a shame, because Amy is arguably Smith’s smartest film as well as his most emotionally resonant. He took a huge budget hit to be able to cast Mallrats vets Adams, Jason Lee, and Ben Affleck, and film fans should thank him for it, because it’s impossible to imagine a different trio bringing life to this material so beautifully. As Holden and Banky, Affleck and Lee have to play a pair of characters whose insecurities are amplified by their obvious intelligence; they aren’t unlikable guys, but they’re not particularly easy to root for, either. Holden, in particular, is a guy whose problems stem from painfully obvious and mostly rather lame places, and watching the movie, it’s not hard to just wish he’d grow up and get over it.

It’s still a movie with meaningful things to say, though, particularly when it comes to the unexplored feelings that can lurk below the surface of close male friendships. Its surface storyline depicts a pair of friends thrown off their axis when one of them falls in love with a lesbian (Adams), and that naturally received most of the attention, but beneath all that, Chasing Amy is really — as is pointed out more than once in the bonus materials — a tender, very intelligent bromance. Smith has gone on to make more ambitious films (particularly Dogma), but I don’t think he’s ever written a better script or gotten better performances out of his actors.

After regaining his stride with Chasing Amy and Dogma, Smith earned a bit of a reprieve, which he took with 2001’s irredeemably silly Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. It goes without saying that it’s the best-looking of the three movies here — and also by far the dumbest. Jay and Silent Bob is nominally a satire of Hollywood and Web culture, but you get a fart joke before the movie is five minutes old, and unlike, say, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, the subtext is mostly drowned under an avalanche of dumb gags and mugging. It’s a great example of what happens when Smith has a big budget to play with: He wanders off and forgets what makes his movies special. Smith has made some legitimately important films, so it’s hard to be mad at him for taking the opportunity to fool around with someone else’s $20 million — unless, that is, you bought a ticket when Jay and Silent Bob was in theaters.

Still, the movie has its fans, and it’s definitely the only movie in this box that actually looks and feels like a Blu-ray. It’s the same version of the movie that was released a few years ago, with the same minimal bonus features, so if you already own it, there’s literally no reason to buy it again. As a lighthearted tonic after a viewing of Chasing Amy, though, it sort of hits the spot, barn-broad humor and all. If it weren’t a studio-themed package, it’d be hard to understand why these particular movies were being lumped together, but as a decently priced gift for the Kevin Smith fan in your life, the 3-Movie Collection offers plenty of bang for your buck.

Cohen proved himself a blazing pioneer of 21st century guerilla comedy with 2006’s Borat, in which he played a mustachioed, childlike misogynist who travels to America as a cultural ambassador from Kazakhstan, wandering the country with a camera crew as he insults women and Jews, stalks Pamela Anderson, and embarrasses unsuspecting bigots. It was a shocking, deeply offensive film — one that left you doubled over and gasping for air with laughter even as you intellectually recoiled from what was unfolding on the screen, and the kind of phenomenon that really can’t be repeated.

He had to try anyway, of course. It didn’t work, but you can’t fault him for the effort.

What you can blame Cohen for is Brüno, a pale shadow of Borat that feels, at times, like the kind of hackwork perpetrated by people trying to ride a popular film’s coattails by putting together something that looks and feels kind of like it, but misses the point almost entirely. Like Borat, Brüno asks you to take its central character as seriously as his unwitting victims did, and begins with a prelude that’s supposed to establish his backstory. There’s a crucial difference, though — while Borat held some pretty vile views, he was clearly an idiot and more or less a friendly guy; Brüno, on the other hand, is little more than a fame-hungry elitist. Both Borat and Brüno are basically awful people, but Borat had a childlike quality that made it possible to enjoy his company. Brüno is just an asshole.

And then there’s the matter of Brüno’s comedy, which is even more uneven than Borat’s, and dishwater weak in comparison. Part of Borat’s brutal impact lay in the fact that the butts of its jokes deserved what they got, and the way it highlighted casual racism in modern America was something like a public service. Brüno, on the other hand, is just kind of confused — in parts, it wants to lampoon celebrity culture; in others, it’s a savage expose of prejudice against homosexuals. But Brüno’s celebrity targets haven’t done anything to deserve their treatment — you just kind of feel bad for Paula Abdul and Ron Paul during what are otherwise fairly inspired segments — and Cohen goes so far out of his way to antagonize his audience in the latter scenes, eventually making out with another man in a cage in front of an audience duped into thinking they were attending an MMA bout, that they don’t really work the way they’re supposed to. You end up feeling like the movie is perpetually warming up for something better, but it never gets there; in fact, it wraps up suddenly with a moronic, out-of-the-blue all-star music video. The end.

That said, Brüno doesn’t make for a terrible rental, particularly with the extra content, some of which — such as the very entertaining behind-the-scenes commentary from Cohen and director Larry Charles — is actually more entertaining than the film. You also get over an hour of deleted and alternate scenes, including typically absurd interviews with La Toya Jackson and Pete Rose, and since even the worst of Cohen’s fake interviews are better than the storyline bits that pad out the movie, these add quite a bit to the overall experience. Brüno seems to have been Cohen’s farewell to this style of “real” in-character comedy, and that’s obviously for the best; in fact, it really would have been better if he’d quit after Borat. But if you keep your expectations low, Brüno (also available on DVD and Video on Demand) offers a passable diversion for fans of rude and borderline pornographic comedy.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of Cameron Crowe’s directorial debut, Say Anything…, Fox has released the film on Blu-ray. In addition to the film itself, the disc includes some worthwhile new bonus features including a revealing documentary that looks back at the film 20 years later, a conversation with Cameron Crowe, and even a trivia track that includes over 200 questions about the film. There’s also a cast commentary which was originally recorded for the DVD version, and alternate, deleted, and extended scenes.

Lloyd and Diane are classic high school outsiders. She’s brilliant, and beautiful, with a bright future in front of her that includes a fellowship that will take her to England to study. At the same time she’s lonely, and insecure. Her parents divorced five years earlier, and when given the choice, Diane opted to live with her father, brilliantly played by John Mahoney. Lloyd, who lives with his sister (played by his real life sister Joan Cusack), has no really discernible future, unless kickboxing, “the sport of the future,” catches on (which of course it did). But he’s an eternal optimist, and you have the sense that he’ll land on his feet no matter what happens.

Say Anything… is a touching look at first love, complicated by Diane’s pending departure, and her father’s pending incarceration. He’s been bilking patients at the nursing home that he runs and the IRS is on to him. Diane, afraid of the depth of her feelings for Lloyd, dumps him. The boom box scene ensues. Her father goes to jail, but the lovers reunite in time to begin the journey to England together.

It’s the little touches that make Say Anything… an iconic film. If you’re only familiar with John Mahoney through his years as Frasier’s dad on television, his performance will be a revelation. And not only is Frasier’s dad in the film, his ex-wife Lilith (Bebe Neuwirth) has small part as a high school counselor. Eric Stoltz, who was a PA on the film, also gets a chance to play the guy who hosts the graduation party, in a rooster costume. A young Jeremy Piven is a member of Lloyd’s posse, and Barbara Streisand’s son Jason Gould appears as a very strange haircut. And I haven’t even mentioned Lili Taylor, who nearly steals the film as Lloyd’s friend Corey, who is in love with a vain prick named Joe, and has written 63 or 65 angry songs about him.

Entertainment Weekly ranked Say Anything… as the greatest modern movie romance in 2002, and it was number 11 on their list of the greatest high school movies. The Blu-ray looks terrific, owing in no small part to the original efforts of the great cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs. It’s great to hear “In Your Eyes” in 5.1 surround sound stereo. If you’re building your Blu-ray collection, Say Anything… deserves a place in it.

That’s how I felt, anyway, as I watched the new Blu-ray transfers of Logan’s Run (1976), Heat (1995), and Tony Scott’s remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009).

I’ve never understood why Logan’s Run, directed by Michael Anderson and adapted by David Zelag Goodman from the William F. Nolan/George Clayton Johnson novel, isn’t regarded as one of the worst sci-fi movies of all time. It takes a marvelous premise — in a postapocalyptic world, humans have retreated into domed cities where life is one big party until your 30th birthday, when you’re executed en masse for public amusement — and pisses it away in a grotesque orgy of bad acting, hokey special effects, and flimsy-looking sets. The story revolves around Logan 5, a member of the police force (or “Sandmen”) tasked with hunting down anyone who decides to take a hike rather than submit to the “Carousel,” a Roman Colisseum-like arena where the 30th birthday boys and girls are sucked into a vortex and blown up (or “renewed,” as they call it) while onlookers cheer. After discovering an ankh among the personal effects of one eliminated “runner,” Logan takes it to his city’s central computer, where he learns it’s a symbol of an underground resistance movement; the computer directs him to infiltrate the movement, and mucks with Logan’s lifeclock (a lighted jewel embedded in every resident’s palm) to make it look like he’s approaching his date with “renewal.” Unfortunately, the computer doesn’t tell anyone else what it’s done, so Logan becomes an unwilling de facto runner — thus setting in motion, um, Logan’s run.

As I said, it’s really a cool premise for a story; unfortunately, everything about Logan’s Run screams bargain basement, from the ersatz, stucco-ridden futuristic city, which looks like nothing so much as an abandoned mall, to the cheesy laser holograph special effects, to Michael York’s stunningly bad performance in the title role. It’s hard to blame York too much for his woodenness here — you try running around in silver and black pajamas while pretending to fire a laser gun at people in silly tunics, and see how convincing you are — and really, in terms of acting, he’s one of the best things about the movie. Taken in context, however, that statement doesn’t mean much; even if York isn’t as painful to watch as, say, Farrah Fawcett (playing the dumbest freedom fighter in the history of film), he still isn’t enough to overcome scenes like the one where he and Jenny Agutter battle a laughably fake robot in a snow cave that looks like it was borrowed from a high school production of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Logan’s Run strains for meaning, but it wavers between boring and unintentionally funny, and the transition to Blu-ray doesn’t do the movie any favors, either: the cut scenes that are supposed to depict the movie’s domed metropolis look more like low-budget models than ever, and the special effects (”the screen’s first use of laser holography!”) don’t benefit from added visual clarity. As distasteful as Hollywood’s current lust for remakes might be, this is one case where revisiting the source material might actually produce a better film. (Bonus features consist of a vintage featurette, a trailer, and a commentary track featuring York, Anderson, and costume designer Bill Thomas, who somehow escapes 118 minutes of merciless ribbing.)

Fast forward 19 years to Heat, which represents a uniquely wonderful convergence of a filmmaker deep in his element, a truly wonderful script with a cast to match, and technology being used as a subtle yet effective tool rather than a smothering device. Now this, people, is how you make an action movie: At 170 minutes, Heat should feel bloated and heavy, but it’s light and lean, with no wasted moments and no superfluous parts. Of course, Mann had the advantage of working with Pacino and De Niro, but if you were one of the unlucky souls who witnessed the horror of last year’s Righteous Kill, you know that just having those two on set doesn’t guarantee a watchable movie. You need a real script, and Mann’s is a doozy.

Pacino and De Niro star, respectively, as LAPD detective Vincent Hanna and career thief Neil McCauley, and their conflict — mostly carried out by proxies — is the fuel that moves Heat. Mann isn’t done there, though; what he takes pains to establish, sometimes very heavy-handedly, is how similar Hanna and McCauley really are. Not that McCauley is secretly a classy guy and Hanna is a sociopath, but that they’ve both sacrified their lives to their careers, and it’s that shared discipline that each responds to in the other. De Niro and Pacino famously only shared a couple of scenes in Heat, and by keeping them apart for so long, Mann ensured that their chummy tete a tete in a coffee shop would act as the dramatic hinge for a movie that features an epic shootout on the streets of Los Angeles.

Heat contains plenty of gunplay and other assorted violence, but Mann doles it out in chunks; unlike, say, Bad Boys — which also came out in 1995 — the action is merely part of the story, rather than the movie’s entire reason for being. And on top of all that, it’s seriously easy on the eyes. Mann has always been skilled at using urban landscapes as their own characters, particularly at night, and I don’t think he — or maybe anyone else — has ever made better use of Los Angeles. His camera glides over fluorescent-lit, crowded freeways, lingers over concrete and glass, plunges into seedy neighborhoods on the wrong side of the tracks. He makes brilliant use of light and darkness throughout, bringing that contrast to a head with the movie’s brilliantly filmed climax. Insofar as you can ever say this about any movie starring Pacino, Heat is subtle — where it counts, anyway, and not always where you expect it.

Heat’s 1080p transfer isn’t as perfect as the film itself, but it comes close. Although it struggles with some of the darker scenes and is subject to some noticeable shifts in contrast and brightness, overall, the disc looks tremendous, taking full advantage of Mann’s love for cold artificial light, hard lines, and pure, inky blacks. During the VHS era, it was one of those movies that cried out for DVD, and it looks even better here. Near as I can tell, pretty much all of the bonus features have been ported over from the double-disc special edition Warners released in 2005, but at least there are a lot of them, including five documentaries, a ton of additional scenes, trailers, and a commentary track from Mann. Currently going for $16.49 at Amazon, the Heat Blu-ray isn’t exactly essential unless you don’t already own some version of the movie, in which case it’s a steal.

And speaking of “steal,” here’s Tony Scott’s heist thriller The Taking of Pelham 123 (also available on DVD, Video on Demand, and UMD for PSP). A needless remake of Joseph Sargent’s 1974 adaptation of the Morton Freedgood novel, Scott’s Pelham sets itself apart with the title, which boils Sargent’s One Two Three down to numbers — and also boils the original’s sticky, grime-soaked aesthetic, leaving behind just another sleek, noisy thrill ride that loves its freeze frames, jump cuts, and cable news-worthy sound effects (text repeatedly pops up onscreen, always accompanied by a techno thunk) more than its characters. Which is a shame, because Scott had some fine actors to work with, including John Travolta as the scenery-chewing heavy, Luis Guzman as his main accomplice, John Turturro as a cop, James Gandolfini as the mayor of New York City, and Denzel Washington as the beleaguered dispatcher who’s forced into their orbit when Travolta and Guzman’s gang hijacks a subway train. It all goes down smoothly enough, and it’s fairly entertaining for what it is, but for more than a few of its 106 minutes, 123 feels like a quickly Xeroxed version of Die Hard with a Vengeance, and given how often people give me crap for thinking that’s a halfway decent action flick…well, you get the idea.

It lacks a soul, or even a reason to exist, but like most noisy and inane modern action thrillers, The Taking of Pelham 123 at least looks great — and never more so than on this transfer, which lets you see every gray hair in Washington’s goatee and pumps up the soundtrack until you’re practically sitting on the tracks as the hijacked train goes barreling down the tracks. Sony deserves credit, I suppose, for taking full advantage of the Blu-ray format, not just with Pelham’s video and audio, but through a stack of bonus content that includes Cinechat and MovieIQ capability, along with a pair of commentary tracks (one from Scott, one from writer Brian Helgeland and producer Todd Black) and a handful of featurettes. No one in the world needs to own it, but if you’re looking to give your home theater a little rental workout, you could do a lot worse.

Not long ago, buying food was a much more involved process — people had relationships with their butchers and grocers, they had a sense of which foods were in season during different times of the year, and no one celebrated their birthday by going to On the Border and eating a burrito as big as their head. Thanks to a number of factors I won’t bore you with here (including anti-poverty initiatives, developments in food technology, and the ever-more-tangled American farm subsidies program), all that’s changed in the last 35 years; these days, for more than a few of us, getting food is as automatic and thoughtless as the folks who dreamed up The Jetsons imagined it would be. And one of the results, for far more than a few of us, is an obesity epidemic that has made tons of money for Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels, not to mention pharmaceutical companies, Big & Tall franchise owners, and funeral homes.

We’ve reached the point where, as a culture, we no longer have a real relationship with our food. We haphazardly react to the conflicting streams of data we receive — eggs are good for you! Eggs are bad for you! Holy shit, there’s e. coli in the spinach! Get whole grains in your Wonder Bread without sacrificing that gummy white flavor! — without really developing an understanding of what it means. But here’s the thing: Food really isn’t any more complicated than it’s ever been. And thanks to a number of authors, including Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food), people have slowly started to take a more active role in what they eat. But book sales being what they are, a movie about the ugly underbelly of agribusiness is probably a more effective educational tool. Enter Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc., which wowed critics during its limited theatrical run earlier this year, and reaches DVD and Blu-ray today.

If you’ve read Fast Food Nation or either of Pollan’s books, much of what you see in Food, Inc. will simply reinforce what you already know; in fact, both Schlosser and Pollan appear in the film, touching on points they’ve addressed in their bestselling books. But that doesn’t mean you’ll be bored — far from it. Speaking as someone who was inspired to make substantial dietary changes by both authors, Kenner has succeeded in putting together a film that will shock and move you whether you’re a nutrition nut or a fast food junkie — and thanks to his breezy, slick direction, Food, Inc. feels less like a documentary than a really well-made piece of fiction about a land where people have given up control of their diets and happily subsist on corn, sugar, and meat from corn-fed animals raised and slaughtered on mind-bogglingly enormous factory farms.

Sadly, it isn’t fiction. And as Kenner makes clear early on, people stuff their gullets with crap because — in the short term, anyway — it makes the most economic sense. In fact, for people who don’t make a lot of money, vegetables and sustainably produced meat aren’t a realistic option — and scrutinizing your diet has been portrayed as a froofy political statement so often that even people above the poverty line often regard it as unnecessary. It’s silly. What’s more important than what you eat? Don’t you have 90 minutes to learn a little more about where it all comes from?

I think you do. And you probably know you do. The only reason to avoid Food, Inc. is fear of what you’ll learn. And it is pretty scary…but not knowing? That’s even scarier.

That’s the premise at the heart of writer/director John Hindman’s The Answer Man, which stars Jeff Daniels as Arlen Faber, a sort of cranky cross between Neale Donald Walsch and J.D. Salinger whose 20-year-old book, God & Me, became the kind of hit that enables an author to take the rest of his career off — which is a good thing, because even though God & Me was inspired by a supposedly personal connection with the Almighty, Faber doesn’t have another book in him; he hasn’t felt anything but anger toward God, and contempt for his fellow human beings, in many years. It’s really a pretty interesting idea for a movie, which is why it’s such a pisser that Hindman decided to turn it into a thuddingly obvious romantic comedy.

The Answer Man is the kind of movie that tells you almost everything you need to know — about its characters, about its various plot arcs, and about the likelihood of tripping over the movie on Lifetime six months from now — in its first 15 minutes. And even worse, it tells you even before it tells you: Watching Lauren Graham in her opening scenes as an overprotective mother who feeds her son soy bacon and plays classical music as she drops him off at school in her Saab, you just know she’s going to rev the engine and crank up some rock & roll as soon as the kid is in the building. And lo, she does. Hindman makes it clear from the beginning that he doesn’t trust his audience to draw its own conclusions, drawing with the kind of broad, dumb strokes you’d expect from a Matthew McConaughey movie. How do we know the struggling bookstore owner played by Thumbsucker’s Lou Taylor Pucci is an alcoholic? Because he tells us with his very first lines. So on and so forth.

What’s frustrating about all this lowest common denominator lameness is that, once Hindman finishes with the broad strokes, he sets about turning The Answer Man into more than your average brain-dead rom-com — and even though it comes too late to save the movie, it offers enough glimpses of what might have been that you’ll find yourself torn between feeling bad for Hindman and hating him. It’s obvious from the moment you look at the box art that Daniels and Graham are going to fall for each other, and their relationship is every bit as boring as you’d fear — but Hindman has given Daniels’ character some real reasons for his grudge against God, and he teases them out so subtly it’s hard not to suspect this script was written by two people who were actively trying to cancel each other out. Daniels, unsurprisingly, does a fine job with what little he’s given; he even manages to wring a few fresh drops out of the “grumpy old bastard meets cute kid” scenes you know are coming.

The Answer Man isn’t the worst 90-minute piece of fluff you’ve ever seen, and if you’re hurting for rental options, you might be able to escape with a smile on your face. But fluff isn’t what Hindman was aiming for; in one of the movie’s bonus featurettes, he talks about being inspired to write the screenplay after pondering the emotional impact of his jazz pianist father’s musical legacy, and wondering, after 9/11, what might happen to a person who got so angry with God that he couldn’t come back from that anger. The Answer Man is harmless enough, but I wish Hindman had been brave enough to use more of that inspiration to finish the final product.

And you know what? From where I’m sitting, it’s actually worth buying again — at least on Blu-ray, where Northwest is the first of Hitchcock’s films to receive the hi-def upgrade. Warner Bros., which has been busily schooling its competitors with lovingly assembled Blu-ray transfers for months, has come close to outdoing itself here; I think only its Wizard of Oz reissue is better, and that’s at least partly due to the fact that the Oz Blu-ray comes in a giant box with reams of bonus material and a watch my daughter is wearing right now.

Warners invested heavily in the refreshed Northwest — supposedly $1 million went into the studio’s painstaking 8K transfer — and every penny shows. Conventional wisdom says that the older the movie, the worse it’s going to look in 1080p, but it ain’t necessarily so; to date, I think the crappiest-looking Blu-ray I’ve seen is the Indecent Proposal reissue, and that only came out in 1993. It’s all about the time and effort that goes into cleaning up the film, and in this case, a wonderful movie has gotten its due.

If you’re somehow unfamiliar with North by Northwest, here’s the synopsis: Cary Grant (as the ultimate man-on-the-run in his fourth Hitchcock teaming) gives a superlative performance while Eva Marie Saint (perfect Hitchcock heroine Eve Kendall) is at her sultry and sexy best in this heart-pounding thriller. Grant plays Manhattan adman Roger Thornhill, who is at once plunged into the world of spies and counterspies, abducted, framed for murder, chased, and (in the signature set-piece) crop-dusted. At the films’ end, he hangs on for dear life from the facial features of Mount Rushmore’s Presidents. If you’ve seen the film, you know it’s kind of a stupid way to set up one of the classics from Hitchcock’s torrid late ’50s-early ’60s run, but you get the gist — some shenanigans are going on, the wrong man is wanted for the crime, he’s got to find a way to clear his name, and you’ll watch him get there in singular style. Besides, how much do you really need to know about the plot? It’s Hitchcock and Cary freaking Grant. If you haven’t seen it yet, you need to. The end.

What you’ll want to know if you’re a film buff — besides how spectacular the transfer looks — is what kind of extras Warner Bros. has decided to stuff into this handsomely bound package. Aside from the collection of essays that comes standard with every Warners digibook, North by Northwest comes with an impressive stack of bonus content. Most 50-year-old movies don’t have many extra parts lying around the vaults, and Northwest is no exception, but the 50th Anniversary Blu-ray makes up for it by packing in a tall stack of featurettes. Some of them are previously released, like the enthralling, nearly 90-minute Cary Grant: A Class Apart documentary that aired in 2003 on TCM, and the making-of doc, hosted by Eva Marie Saint, that was included in the last reissue. They still belong with this package, though, and you do get a pair of brand new features: the nearly hourlong The Master’s Touch: Hitchcock’s Signature Style, which looks (duh) at Hitchcock’s directorial style and includes interviews with modern directors such as Guillermo del Toro and Scorsese, and the 25-minute North by Northwest: One for the Ages, which takes a similar approach, but focuses on the film instead of Hitchcock himself.

Also included (and ported over from the DVD reissue) are a (somewhat sleepy, but still very interesting) commentary track from screenwriter Ernest Lehman, an audio track devoted to Bernard Herrmann’s score, a stills gallery, and vintage trailers. And the whole kit and caboodle is selling for less than $21 at Amazon as I type this. It’s easy to be cynical about reissues — and about technology in general, given that most of us were just buying DVD players 10 years ago, and the movie industry is already looking for the next best thing — but Blu-ray has a lot of wonderful possibilities for film lovers, and packages like this one are a great example of why the format is the best way to get your movie fix. Unless Warners finds a way to celebrate Northwest’s 60th birthday by plopping Cary Grant onto your couch while you watch the film, I can’t imagine how we’re going to see a better version anytime soon.

In 2009, Land of the Lost was a crappy, overblown Will Ferrell movie that tanked at the box office, suffered the wrath of critics, and even earned a condemnation from the American Medical Association for daring to show Ferrell’s character holding a pipe — a case study in how to take $100 million and piss it away on all the wrong things. In a deeply ironic twist, the new Lost is twice as cheesy, half as entertaining, and infinitely more expensive than the old one. Gotta love Hollywood, right?

The show, for those of you who don’t remember, related the adventures of scientist Rick Marshall and his kids, Holly and Will, following their accidental deposit in a strange parallel dimension that almost (but not quite) resembled prehistoric Earth. Because the filmmakers were smart enough to realize that Will Ferrell needs at least a PG-13 rating to be the least bit funny — and because it isn’t a Ferrell film unless his gross, fumbling sexual advances are being inexplicably accepted by a woman far more attractive than he is — there are no kids here; instead, Ferrell’s Rick Marshall is joined by a fellow scientist named Holly (played by Anna Friel) and a hygienically deprived gift shop owner named Will (played by a clearly coasting Danny McBride).

Love him or hate him, Ferrell is very good at playing self-righteous morons, and his shtick, as one-note as it tends to be, is flexible enough that you can make an easy $100 million just by dropping that character into a ridiculous situation and letting him run with it. Will Ferrell on TV? Anchorman. Will Ferrell driving a racecar? Talladega Nights. Will Ferrell on ice skates, for the love of God? Blades of Glory. You get the idea, and so did Universal: pitting Ferrell against dinosaurs and lizard men had all the makings of a lowbrow home run. They could almost get away with simply letting the cameras roll.

Which is essentially what director Brad Silberling did, stitching together his Land of the Lost from a series of barely connected (and seemingly barely scripted) skits. There’s a nominal plot, sure, but it exists only as a prop for holding up a barrage of gags. I tend to enjoy Ferrell, and I laughed a few times during the movie — I defy you not to at least chuckle at the sight of Matt Lauer spraying Ferrell in the face with a fire extinguisher, for instance — but by the time Ferrell and McBride wake up from a hallucinogenic bender on the desert floor, spooning with Chaka the apeman, you’re apt to have long since checked out. And not only is it not funny, it’s barely even connected to the show: Despite the presence of the Kroffts, who served as producers, Lost is literally just a Will Ferrell movie with dinosaurs. You get your total boob (Ferrell), a male foil who’s almost as stupid as he is (McBride), and the aforementioned female character with inexplicable man-child fetish (Friel). Screenwriters Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas seem to have been operating under the assumption that if Step Brothers could break $185 million, a movie with a sweet CGI Tyrannosaurus Rex would have to make twice as much no matter how lame it is. Thankfully, they were wrong, but you have to feel bad for all the longtime fans who hoped in vain for a film adaptation that captured the essence of the show. This didn’t need to be a Land of the Lost movie — they could have just called it Caveman Will and it probably would have earned just as much.

Matter of fact, they probably could have skimped on the special effects, too; unlike a lot of big-screen duds, Land of the Lost doesn’t benefit from the transition to the home market, because even if it has the middling quality that’s the hallmark of a brainless rental, its visuals are so expensive-looking that they’re actually intrusive. Watching it feels like watching money burn, and it’s more than a little disconcerting.

If you make it to the end of the movie and you’re still somehow in the mood for more, the Land of the Lost Blu-ray comes loaded with a fairly hefty chunk of bonus material, including deleted scenes, an interview with the Kroffts that does not contain the question “Why did you do this?” or any screaming, a whopping 83-minute making-of documentary, a commentary track from Silberling, and a couple of behind-the-scenes featurettes hosted by McBride, who should be ashamed of himself. The disc is also enabled for D-Box, which is, sadly, not a box for imprisoning the dicks responsible for this film, but instead simulates motion and other crap via a special chair. Like the movie itself, it’s a stupid waste of potentially useful technology.

I can’t imagine a scenario in which someone would want to spend $27.99 to own this film, but if you fit that description, you can at least take comfort in the knowledge that Land of the Lost looks and sounds great, and includes enough added features to keep you stranded with Ferrell and his partners in crime for several hours. You’d be better off just donating the money to a charity and punching yourself in the head for 90 minutes, but to each his own.

It begins with an empty stage. Enter David Byrne with his acoustic guitar and boom box. Byrne treats us to a solo version of “Psycho Killer” that has all the dementia and danger you want out of that particular song. While Byrne is playing, Tina Weymouth’s bass riser is rolled on, followed by Weymouth herself, joining Byrne for “Heaven.” So it continues until all the core members of Talking Heads, including drummer Chris Frantz, and guitarist/keyboard player Jerry Harrison are present. The band is augmented by guitarist Alex Weir (of the Brothers Johnson), keyboard player Bernie Worrell (Parliament Funkadelic), percussionist Steve Scales, and backup vocalist Lynn Mabry (Brides of Funkenstein), and Edna Holt. Once everyone has arrived on stage, the full band blasts through a torrid version of “Burning Down the House.”

The film was shot by director Demme (”Silence of the Lambs,” “Philadelphia”) over three nights at Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre. It’s surprising that a production which was so meticulously planned (the staging was created by Byrne, and among the bonus features are his original storyboards and notes) can appear to be so spontaneous and fresh, even 25 years later. The band is smoking as they run through a litany of their greatest songs including their hit cover of Al Green’s “Take Me To the River,” “Life During Wartime,” and the scintillating “Once In A Lifetime.” Byrne demonstrates why is he one of the most interesting and provocative frontmen ever to appear on a stage.

It’s worth noting that Stop Making Sense is the first film ever made entirely using digital audio techniques, and the sound on this new Blu-ray edition is fantastic. Among the other bonus features are a previously unavailable 1999 Talking Heads press conference to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the film. It is a rare appearance by the four together, and at times the tension seems palpable. They were asked several times, in several ways if they will be getting back together, and as far as I could tell, the question was ducked each time. There is also the comically bizarre David Byrne interview with … David Byrne, and two extra songs that were not included in the original film.

When it comes to Blu-ray, the question always seems to be whether it’s worth buying something again if you already own it on DVD. In the case of Stop Making Sense, I would answer with a resounding yes.

Synopsis:

A movie about a wild-eyed reclusive madman who sends the entire world into a candy-scrabbling frenzy as part of an elaborate mindfuck culminating in the transfer of his candy empire to a child, 1971’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is one of the odder “children’s” movies ever made, and one whose survival as a cult favorite was largely dependent on Gene Wilder’s tremendous work in the title role, as well as the movie’s natural appeal to the type of weirdos who grow up to be film directors (see: Burton, Tim). Willy Wonka wasn’t terribly successful when it was released, least of all among parents who questioned its dark overtones and smattering of scary moments (just ask poor Spike Jonze about those folks), but it’s become accepted as a sort of minor classic over the years, particularly since Burton fumbled his Johnny Depp-led Wonka remake a few years ago.

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory has made the jump to hi-def before as part of Warners’ HD DVD catalog, but with that format dead and buried, it’s time for a new reissue, which the studio has taken care of by making Wonka part of its Blu-ray Book series, which also includes Falling Down and 300. Like the others, Wonka comes as part of a handsomely bound book containing information about the film — in this case, (uncredited) essays about the movie, biographies for some of the stars, and lyrics for the songs (which include the classic “The Candy Man”). The packaging will make you crazy if you’re a stickler for organized-looking shelves, but I think it adds a little something extra to the upgrades — some of which, frankly, don’t look like they’ve been improved much.

Thankfully, Willy Wonka doesn’t fall into that category; the Blu-ray transfer is bright and crisp, and the audio, though about as center-heavy as you’d expect for a movie this old, is rich and full. I haven’t seen the HD DVD transfer, so I can’t compare the two (or even vouch for whether this is a new remaster or simply a Blu-ray version of the transfer they did for the dead format), but I can tell you it looks and sounds better than a lot of younger films I’ve seen reissued in the last year. If you’re a Wonka fan, you’ll want to own this version, no questions asked.

The bonus features are disappointingly minimal, although what is included manages to be more informative than your average batch of featurettes. Pure Imagination: The Story of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory takes you behind the scenes of the movie, detailing the unsurprisingly haphazard way Roald Dahl’s classic book made its way to the screen — it was essentially a $2 million commercial for Quaker’s new Willy Wonka line of candy bars, which makes it all the more remarkable that the book’s stranger elements (and Dahl’s rather misanthropic worldview) survived the transition. You also get to catch up with the grown-up child stars of the movie, including Peter Ostrum (who played Charlie and now works as a veterinarian in upstate New York) and Wilder, who remains as quietly captivating as ever (at one point, he sells out Paris Themmen, who played Mike Teevee, as a troublemaker on the set, then pauses, looks at the camera, and says “You know I love you now, but…”). The commentary track is also a treat, featuring contributions from the men and women who played the boys and girls.

It’s an uneven film — the ending, in particular, feels like the last-minute affair it was — but one whose slight undercurrent of darkness and danger feels wonderfully refreshing in this era of bubble-wrapped entertainment for our bubble-wrapped boys and girls, and in any event, Gene Wilder was five times the Wonka that Johnny Depp could ever be. If you’ve got a Willy-shaped hole in your collection (snicker), fill it with the Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory Blu-ray book.