If you’ve been looking for an excuse to make the jump from DVD to Blu-ray, look no further. Matter of fact, thanks to Disney’s brilliant strategy of bundling DVDs with their Blu-ray releases, you don’t even have to own a Blu-ray player to take advantage of the new face lift the studio has given its 1937 classic — but if you do have one, make sure you put a pillow under your mouth the first time you watch the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Diamond Edition transfer, because your jaw is going to drop.
There have been a fair number of catalog Blu-ray reissues at this point, and consumers have had to resign themselves to the fact that not all hi-def upgrades were created equal — when you’re dealing with source material from more than, say, 20 years ago, you’re going to see a fair number of defects, even after the most painstaking remastering job (see the Batman Blu-ray for an example). Given this, you’d expect the Snow White Blu-ray to be the kind of pleasant-but-not-remarkable upgrade you’d get out of most older films, but you’d be wrong — Disney has been rolling out some truly breathtaking restoration jobs in the last year or so, and Snow White might be the fairest of them all. Is it perfect? Probably not — you can go over any transfer with a magnifying glass and pick out flaws here and there, however minor. But watching Snow White, you won’t want to; you’ll be too busy marveling at just how incredibly lush and beautiful this hand-drawn classic remains more than 70 years after its release. Every feature-length animated film has its roots in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — along with quite a few live-action movies — and this set gives it the fawning respect it deserves. (more…)
One of the year’s most divisive films — and I mean that almost literally — writer/director Jody Hill’s Observe and Report had the misfortune of following the loathsome Paul Blart: Mall Cop into theaters, which, coupled with Seth Rogen’s face all over Observe’s posters, left people expecting a raunchy blast of cheerful lowbrow comedy. Even under the best of circumstances, I think this movie would have left audiences confused, but landing in Blart’s shadow made its uphill climb that much steeper. Ultimately, it was probably always the kind of movie destined to find its most appreciative audience on the home video market — which is where it lands today, arriving on Blu-ray, DVD, and Video on Demand.
Rogen stars here as Ronnie Barnhardt, head of security at Forest Ridge Mall, where he rules, purse-lipped and crazy-eyed, over a lazy and ineffective crew that includes John and Matthew Yuan (as the twin Yuen brothers, natch) and Michael Peña (as Ronnie’s hilarious, lisping second in command, Dennis). As the movie opens, Forest Ridge is dealing with the parking lot shenanigans of a profane serial flasher whose assaults provoke Ronnie by not only upsetting the object of his affection, perfume salesperson Brandi (a congested-sounding Anna Faris), but putting him in the shadow of the police detective assigned to the case (Ray Liotta). It’s a premise ripe with comedic possibilities, and Rogen is one of the few movie stars who can both carry a movie and make you believe he really works in a mall. Observe’s first act takes advantage of all of the above, wringing big laughs out of its outlandish characters (particularly Aziz Ansari, as an unctuous lotion salesman who has an axe to grind with Ronnie) while teasing the dark edges of Ronnie’s fraying psyche. (more…)
It’s been so long that I can’t remember where I first read it anymore, but there’s an old parable about a village wise man who meets with three couples, each looking for a place to settle down and wondering if this particular town is the right fit. Each couple asks him the same question: “What are the people in this village like?” He responds to each by asking, “How were people where you lived before?”
No matter what the couples tell the wise man, he responds by saying, “You’ll find that people here are basically the same” — the moral of the story being that your experiences with the people around you are, at some level, basically a reflection of who you are. It’s overly simplistic, maybe, but it’s also very true — and my mind kept returning to it during Away We Go.
Director Sam Mendes’ previous meditations on domesticity have run from the violently acerbic (American Beauty) to the unremittingly bleak (Revolutionary Road), so it came as something of a surprise when he emerged with this relatively sunny portrait of a young couple (played by John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph) trying to find a place to settle down before their baby’s impending birth. With a screenplay written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida and a brilliant supporting cast that includes Catherine O’Hara, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jeff Daniels, Allison Janney, and Jim Gaffigan, Away looked — on paper, anyway — like a perfectly low-key, drily humorous U-turn for a director who seemed to have become more interested in edification than entertainment.
Alas and alack — with Away We Go, Mendes forsook heavy-handed messages for a movie that isn’t really quite sure what it wants to say. (more…)
I Love You, Man (Paramount, 2009)
purchase from Amazon: DVD | Blu-ray
Guys are always trying to find new ways of meeting women, but it’s an often-ignored fact that it can be just as difficult for guys to meet guys — at least ones they feel comfortable hanging out with on a regular basis. If, for example, you’re a pop culture writer who moves to a rural part of New England and finds himself surrounded by men who work as plumbers and tree excavators, social gatherings tend to be one long blur of gulped beer and stilted conversation. The standard-issue romantic comedy, meanwhile, is awfully tired — which means John Hamburg’s I Love You, Man, starring Paul Rudd as a lifelong “girl’s guy” in search of platonic male companionship, is a film whose time has come.
Rudd’s character, Los Angeles Realtor Peter Klaven, is a happy guy; in fact, he isn’t even really aware of the sausage deficiency in his social circle until he gets engaged to Zooey (the very funny Rashida Jones) and has to start figuring out who’s going to stand up for him at the wedding — and balance out her gaggle of friends in the bridal party. This leads to a desperate search for a suitable best man — one that finds him fielding potential bromantic companions from his brother (Andy Samberg), the Web, and Zooey herself, but ultimately ends in a chance encounter with Sidney Fife (Jason Segel), a self-described investment consultant whose laid-back demeanor and love of Rush is the perfect match for Peter’s terminal awkwardness. (more…)
Watchmen (2009, Warner Bros.)
purchase from Amazon: DVD| Blu-ray
Others may have summarized Watchmen more eloquently, but my friend and colleague David Medsker struck right at the essence of the year’s first would-be blockbuster with three simple words: “Floppy blue cock!”
This is not to say there’s anything wrong with cock in the movies — floppy, blue, or otherwise — but the genitalia proudly displayed by Doctor Manhattan, Watchmen’s emotionless, radiation-powered superbeing, are the perfect visual distillation of the film, for three reasons: One, it’s hard not to get distracted looking at it; two, it frequently looks silly; and three — given Manhattan’s propensity for supersizing himself — it’s painfully, unbearably long.
Seriously. Seriously, you guys. If you plunk down the $21.50 it’ll cost you at Amazon to get Zack Snyder’s painstaking recreation of the classic graphic novel on Blu-ray, you will get plenty of bang for your buck, starting with the 186-minute director’s cut, and including sooo much more — a stack of featurettes tracing the book’s impact as well as its journey to the screen, a “maximum movie mode” that will allow you to watch the movie while Snyder raps at you, and the ability to link up the disc’s BD-Live features with Facebook so you can share your Watchmen experience with your friends. The package even includes a digital copy! The merits of the movie aside, this is exactly the kind of stuff that will make or break Blu-ray as a format; instead of pumping cheapo transfers of catalog titles onto store shelves, if the studios put more effort into stuffing their titles with added content with this much interactive coolness, I have to believe that even reissues of dreck like Indecent Proposal would enjoy healthy sales. (more…)
He’s played with Miles and the Brecker Brothers, netted multiple Grammy nominations, and generally helped redefine jazz guitar for over 30 years, but Mike Stern has never reached the “name brand” level of fame enjoyed by other upper-echelon guitarists (see: Frisell, Bill), or sales consistent enough to keep him from making a pair of label changes in the last decade — but he is talented enough to inspire a worldwide following, and long overdue for a hi-def concert movie besides. The recently released New Morning: The Paris Concert, filmed last year at the Paris club whose name graces the title, takes advantage of both of these things, and if you’re an HD-equipped jazz fan — or a music lover with a stomach for fusion that doesn’t suck — you’re in for a 105-minute treat.
If jazz makes you gag, let me try and put Stern’s sound into perspective: In the fall of 1991, a year I spent mostly listening to Van Halen’s For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, Atlantic sent me a promo copy of Stern’s Odds or Evens, and it kicked off a fascination with his music that has stayed with me to this day. This is not to say Mike Stern sounds like Eddie Van Halen — far from it — but as that album (and much of what has followed) proved, Stern is the rare jazz guitarist who is consistently able to walk the line between pure entertainment and sheer technique. He’s got a signature tone that’s stunningly pretty, and he isn’t afraid to use it in the service of uncommonly melodic songs — but he’s equally at home tracing skittery lines in the sand between skronk and lite FM. As an example, here’s the opening cut from Odds or Evens: (more…)
It’s an established fact that the core members of Spinal Tap (David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel, and Derek Smalls) are not fans of the 1984 film that bears their name, or of the film’s director, Marty DiBergi. This first became apparent on the commentary track for the DVD release of the film, which is nearly as funny as the film itself. There, Tap (they hate being called Tap) takes many people to task, including former manager Ian Faith, Polymer records publicist Bobbi Flekman, midwest promo man Artie Fufkin, and former record company president Denis Eton-Hogg, who is said to now be running a summer camp for pale young men. Keyboard player Viv Savage and drummer Mick Shrimpton are not spared. There is much discussion about whether these, and other people who appeared in the original film, are alive or dead. The most intense vitriol, however, is reserved for DiBergi, and his fake beard, not to mention his obviously changed name.
Now, in celebration of the 25th anniversary of This Is Spinal Tap, the film has been released for the first time on Blu-ray. The package not only includes all of the extra features that were on the DVD version, but there’s a second disc of brand new bonus features, including Spinal Tap’s “Stonehenge” performance at the 2007 Live Earth Festival, and a National Geographic Stonehenge interview with Nigel Tufnel. Finally, the great English band gets a full chance to have their say about that exploitative film, and to demonstrate that they are indeed a great band, and not the bumbling idiots that the bastard DiBergi portrayed them as.
There’s a reason why This Is Spinal Tap is a favorite movie among musicians. The film hits very close to home. To one degree or another, we are all Spinal Tap. Every tour involves some unbearable, cringeworthy moments, along with some triumphant ones. It’s when you get to the point that the latter outweigh the former that you know that you’ve made it. (more…)
With those few syllables, a very low budget, and buckets upon buckets of brightly colored fake blood, producer/director/writer Sean S. Cunningham laid the foundation for what has got to be one of the most ridiculously profitable film franchises in history. Between 1980 and 1989, watching Jason Voorhees hack people to bits was an almost annual ritual for filmgoers of a certain age and temperament, and though the ’90s and early aughts weren’t as kind to the series, Friday the 13th has undergone a bit of a renaissance this year, thanks to the Platinum Dunes-produced reboot that scared up a $90 million worldwide gross, and Paramount is celebrating by reissuing the first eight films on DVD and/or Blu-ray. They passed me over for the first installment (don’t they know who I am?), but sent chapters II through VI, plus the reboot, so I’ve spent the last week or so reliving my Camp Crystal Lake memories with a series of Deluxe Edition discs. It’s been an exhausting journey, but now it’s over, and I’m here to tell you about it.
Though I was only six when the first Friday the 13th debuted in 1980, the series quickly attained enough pop culture clout to attract the fascination of grubby young boys all over America, and by the time Lar Park Lincoln used her telekinetic powers to dredge Jason’s corpse from Crystal Lake in 1988’s Part VII: The New Blood, the lumbering, hockey-masked killer had already been on a first-name basis with me and my friends for several sequels. I was never much of a slasher fan, but there was always something undeniably fascinating about the Friday films; inspired directly by John Carpenter’s Halloween, they were proudly crass and cynical, and they never earned the kind of critical respect enjoyed by peers like A Nightmare on Elm Street and the first Poltergeist, but as each of those franchises withered away, Jason continued lumbering on. Hell, even Halloween had to take most of the ’80s off after the producers fucked things up with Halloween III: Season of the Witch, but not Jason — no matter how desperate his handlers grew, he kept popping up on the big screen. He went to Manhattan in ‘89, Hell in ‘93, and all the way to outer space in 2002. He even managed to drag Freddy Krueger out of retirement for 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason. (more…)
Gran Torino (2009, Warner Bros.)
purchase from Amazon: DVD | Blu-ray
I enjoy a nice Unforgiven viewing as much as the next guy, but I’ve never really bought into the whole cult of Clint — for movies that are supposed to disassemble and analyze the various aspects of American manhood, Eastwood’s films often strike me as curiously dull. During A Perfect World, for instance — a movie I went to see knowing full well that Kevin Costner was Eastwood’s co-star, and hoping two negatives would produce a positive — I’m fairly certain I had an out of body experience, during which my spirit floated to the ceiling of the nearly empty theater and took a long nap. I went into Gran Torino, in other words, expecting very little; I certainly didn’t plan to feel a bitter swell of nostalgia as the closing credits rolled. But life is full of surprises, and as it turns out, Clint — and by extension Gran Torino — has a few too.
Billed in advance as a sort of unofficial sequel to the Dirty Harry movies, Torino stars Eastwood as Walt Kowalski, a retired auto worker who, as the movie opens, is in attendance at his wife’s funeral. It quickly becomes clear that aside from his dearly departed better half, Walt wants very little to do with anyone — not his kids, nor their kids, nor the young, well-meaning priest that reluctantly promised Walt’s wife he’d look after him. And certainly not the families on his street, which no longer have familiar Polish surnames; Walt’s neighborhood has changed, with an influx of Hmong immigrants replacing the solidly Caucasian blue-collar demographic with which he identifies. He’s a grumpy, openly racist old man, but Nick Schenk’s screenplay does a better job of generating empathy for the character than you might think; surrounded by clueless kids, grasping grandchildren, and neighbors who seem to have no pride in their homes, Walt comes across at first as a sort of seething, epithet-spouting version of Dick Loudon, the character Bob Newhart played on Newhart, a guy who feels like the last oasis of sanity in a world gone mad. (more…)
Okay, I confess. I’ve never had to review as massive a project as massive as Neil Young Archives, Volume 1. I was fortunate enough to get a Blu-ray set, which is all of 10 discs long. What I didn’t get was the fancy box and anything that might be in it, so I can’t speak about that stuff. What I did get was the ten discs in an ordinary folder, and a somewhat inaccurate document of the track list, especially as it pertains to the hidden tracks.
I will also say that unlike many other would-be reviewers, I listened to and watched every minute of every disc, both the main elements, and the bonus features. I searched every menu for Easter eggs, I clicked on every hidden track that I could find. I wasn’t satisfied until I was sure that I’d seen and heard everything on each disc. Talk about a journey through the past!
Just think, Archives only covers Young’s career up until 1972. There are more than 35 years worth of archives still to be released. (If the future sets take as long to reach the public as this one did, I probably won’t be around to review the next one.) A number of video clips throughout the set show Young reviewing his archives with photographer/archivist Joel Bernstein and art director Gary Burden. These clips are from February, 1997. So why is it that it took 12 years from that point to assemble the first volume? There’s no doubt that a lot of work went into this, and I’m sure that there were clearances to be worked out, but 12 years’ worth? After immersing myself in this work, I’m prepared to give Young the benefit of the doubt and believe that he waited for the technology to catch up so that he could release this material in the highest quality format. Apparently the advent of Blu-ray marked that point for him. (more…)
![61KEUnRRkcL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/61KEUnRRkcL._SCLZZZZZZZ_1.jpg "61KEUnRRkcL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]")
If you’ve been looking for an excuse to make the jump from DVD to Blu-ray, look no further. Matter of fact, thanks to Disney’s brilliant strategy of bundling DVDs with their Blu-ray releases, you don’t even have to own a Blu-ray player to take advantage of the new face lift the studio has given its 1937 classic — but if you do have one, make sure you put a pillow under your mouth the first time you watch the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Diamond Edition transfer, because your jaw is going to drop.![61828zJuGAL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/61828zJuGAL._SCLZZZZZZZ_11.jpg "61828zJuGAL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]")
One of the year’s most divisive films — ![61kScnGWIDL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/61kScnGWIDL._SCLZZZZZZZ_1.jpg "61kScnGWIDL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]")
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I Love You, Man (Paramount, 2009)![61OQtfp2ndL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/61OQtfp2ndL._SCLZZZZZZZ_1.jpg "61OQtfp2ndL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]")
Mike Stern – New Morning: The Paris Concert (2009, Inakustic)
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Chee-chee-chee. Ah-ah-ah.
Gran Torino (2009, Warner Bros.)
