Blu-ray Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The 20th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray and DVD of Say Anything came out yesterday, and to mark the occasion, numerous men with lots of free time dressed up in trench coats and hoisted boomboxes above their heads and marched throughout New York City serenading people with the strains of Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes," and a cover version of the same song by The Lloyd Dobler Effect. Check them out in the gallery below.

Damn, that movie came out 20 years ago? That makes me feel incredibly old. The first time I saw that movie will be forever burned into my brain since it was my first and only date with the captain of the women's volleyball team in high school. However, the movie on Blu-ray looks better than it ever did back in theaters, circa 1989, and hopefully it'll inspire legions of Lloyd Dobler fans for years to come that will fare better than I did.

The Blu-ray version of the movie is a 1080p high-definition upgrade of the original DVD release from 2002, along with a newly remastered 5.1 audio mix. In addition to the upgraded image and sound, this includes all the features from the previous version (commentary from Cameron Crowe, John Cusack, Ione Skye, deleted scenes, and more), along with three new featurettes. The best of the bunch is "An Iconic Film Revisited: Say Anything... 20 Years Later" featuring new interviews with Crowe, Cusack, Skye, John Mahoney, and Nancy Wilson.

The great opportunity with new presentation formats for established forms of entertainment is that newcomers can be introduced and experience them for the very first time; the burden with them is that longtime fans have to forage through multiple editions and decide which one is best. Enter "Making The (Up) Grade," Cinematical's examination of these new, alternate, special editions of films that have long since become favorites. This week's selection, Easy Rider, is one of those cases where people may or may not have purchased the film before, but because it's been so thoroughly discussed and dissected in cinematic culture for the past forty years, it seems almost a redundant choice for any person who considers him- or herself a cinephile.

Is this new 40th Anniversary Blu-ray really better? Let's take a look and see.

If you're a fan of the irreplaceable and wonderful Mel Brooks, chances are you've already got The Mel Brooks Collection -- a DVD box jam-packed with most of the directors classic films. I already double-dipped to get them all in one spot, in space-saving super-slim cases, but now there's a collection worthy of a double or triple dip. And -- darn you all! -- yet another reason to get a Blu-ray player.

As DVD Snapshot shares, there's a new The Mel Brooks Collection on the way, and this time in glorious Blu-ray. But it's not just the old collection in high definition. It's the same roster +1 -- the film that was surprisingly lacking from the first release -- Spaceballs. That means, vacuum cleaner intergalactic hijinx along with Blazing Saddles, High Anxiety, History of the World Part I, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Silent Movie, To Be or Not to Be, The Twelve Chairs, and the wonderful Young Frankenstein. On top of all that, there's a collectible book in the mix.

The bad side: DVD fanatics probably won't like the slide-in packaging, and it's not full of extras. The plus side: It's now available for ordering on Amazon for only $89.49. That's a $50 savings from the list price, and only $20 more than what the current DVD collection is priced at.

Can you resist Brooks in Blu?

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has become something of a calling card for my writing in 2009, and an albatross around my neck at the same time. There's little else I wrote this year that got as much attention, and yet it's by far the most misunderstood of my many, many reviews, primarily because one sentence published on Rotten Tomatoes, and later, literally one word used in the its advertising was employed to characterize my feelings about the film. Mind you, I'm not complaining, but it's made for a sort of fascinating study among my friends and colleagues, some of whom took me at those words and those words alone, while others read the actual review I posted here on Cinematical, and for better or for worse, agree or disagree, at least understood where I was coming from.

This week, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen arrives on Blu-ray, and in the interest of thoroughness, I decided to revisit the film to see (a) how I personally felt about the film a second time, and (b) if any of the objections of its critics were explained, justified or otherwise corrected in the bonus materials. After perusing the content on both discs of the Collector's Edition Blu-ray, I'm unsure whether or not its detractors will be any more appreciative of its artistic merits; but watching it again on the small screen and augmented by the thoughts and comments of the folks responsible for the film, I at least feel as if I know where the sources of some of those problems lie.

I remember strolling through my local Blockbuster 10 years ago, sure that they couldn't switch to 100% DVDs in a few years. The idea seemed ridiculously optimistic. But in the blink of an eye, DVD took over and we barely had time to wave goodbye to shelves of VHS tapes. It also set some ridiculously high expectations for electronic improvement. Now, a few years later, as The Wrap states: "Blu-ray was supposed to be the format that saved studio home entertainment." Problem is, it isn't.

It's been a good three years, and the format is only cooking up 6% of home entertainment sales (compared to DVD's revenue of 20% back in 2000). Most people are still buying DVDs, and renting, the latter of which doesn't help studios a whole heck of a lot, illustrating "continuing problems for the major studios, which have convulsed amid the lack of DVD revenue growth in recent years." The blame game zeroes in on low-price rental services and used disc sales, while noting Blu-ray's failure to become an essential piece of home entertainment. This is resulting in severe price slashing that will include Blu-ray players under $100 this holiday season.

If Hollywood's vast abundance of remakes, spin-offs and sequels weren't enough to kill your appetite for spending money on "new" entertainment, it seems like almost every one of these releases finds its way onto home video in multiple forms. Sometimes the studios issue different iterations of a film all at the same time, in a thankful moment of honesty that at least allows consumers the option which version they want. More often, though, the studios will re-release, expand and double-dip their top earners time and time again in order to wring out a few more dollars from the less dull entries in their back catalog. And especially now, during the still-early days of Blu-ray, there's even more new and different editions being released in stores, some of which are honest-to-Jah improvements on the presentation and packaging, while others are merely the next generation of mediocrity.

As such, welcome to the second installment of "Making The (Up) Grade," a comparison of some of the more high-profile (or maybe just personally-preferred) blu-ray releases with their previous home-video iterations. This week, we're taking a look at Snow White, which Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment is releasing in a three-disc Diamond Edition.

If Hollywood's vast abundance of remakes, spinoffs and sequels weren't enough to kill your appetite for spending money on "new" entertainment, it seems like almost every one of these releases finds its way onto home video in multiple forms. Sometimes the studios issue different iterations of a film all at the same time, in a thankful moment of honesty that at least allows consumers the option of which version they want. More often, though, the studios will re-release, expand and double-dip their top earners time and time again in order to wring out a few more dollars from the less dull entries in their back catalogue. And especially now, during the still-early days of Blu-ray, there's even more new and different editions being released in stores, some of which are honest-to-Jah improvements on the presentation and packaging, while others are merely the next generation of mediocrity.

As such, we're launching the first installment of "Making The (Up) Grade," a comparison of some of the more high-profile (or maybe just personally-preferred) Blu-ray releases. And with Warner Brothers' deluxe reissue of The Wizard of Oz arriving in stores this week, it seemed like a good place to start to let readers (and eventually, consumers) determine with a little more specificity what you will be buying (or not buying) if you trade in an older edition for a newer one. To wit:

This is what I bought a blu-ray player for: the ability to relive great movie memories in the highest possible quality. So it was with no small sense of enthusiastic nostalgia that I ran out to buy the new blu-ray edition of Nick Castle's The Last Starfighter. This unassuming 1984 space adventure (which is equal parts sweet, funny, exciting, and family-friendly) showed up in the summer of Gremlins and Ghostbusters, and while it certainly wasn't a FLOP, it's safe to say that The Last Starfighter should have done a little better than its $29 million domestic haul. (I remember seeing it on a double feature with Richard Franklin's Cloak & Dagger. Fun night!!)

But solid movies (particularly solid sci-fi movies) tend to stick around for a good long while, and this fan favorite has been earning new friends over its 20+ years of cable re-runs and home video releases. (In case you haven't seen it, The Last Starfighter is about a bored but decent young man who has a gift for video games ... and quickly finds himself stuck in an interstellar battle between good and evil.) As with many mid-'80s space adventures, TLS adopts a rather "Spielbergian" tone, but also manages to tap into a cinematic innocence that predates E.T. by a few decades. I thought I loved this flick when I was a kid, but after more than two decades since I last saw it, I can now say the "grown-up" me likes Starfighter even more than the kid did.

More at Sci-Fi Squad!

Have you ever wondered how on earth rent-by-mail DVDs manage to get so scratched up? Take a close look at the photo above, from Boston.com, and notice how carefully a gloved Netflix employee is scratching up a DVD so it has that "used" appearance we've all come to know and love. Isn't that considerate of them?

Bad jokes aside, the gallery of images below provides a behind-the-scenes look at "an unmarked warehouse" in Northborough, Massachusetts, where about 50 Netflix employees "sort through and repackage more than 60,000 discs every day." To be fair, it's the customers who manage to scratch up DVDs, and Netflix appears to make a good-faith effort to discard DVDs that have become unplayable -- at least to the extent they can, since they're sorting them at the rate of 500-700 per hour.

Netflix angered some customers this week with the announcement that it would be increasing the $1.00 per month surcharge for Blu-ray customers, which was just added last fall. They explained in an e-mail that they had "increased significantly" the number of Blu-ray titles they stocked, and "as you've probably heard, Blu-ray discs are substantially more expensive than standard-definition DVDs." How big an increase depends on how you look at it: Information Week described it as a "300% increase," since the surcharge would increase from $1.00 to $4.00 for customers on the "three disks at a time" monthly plan. Overall, the same plan would cost 24% more per month.

I don't have Blu-ray capability (it's a long, sad story), so I'm wondering what your experiences have been renting Blu-rays, either online or in person. Completely satisfactory? Are you downloading / streaming more movies to watch on your computer or TV? Or do you prefer to buy your DVDs and Blu-rays?

Usually, when an elaborate DVD set is released within the packaging of a character's skull (see: Planet of the Apes or Alien), they include multiple movies in a franchise. But not with Lionsgate! In an unsurprising effort to cash in on the anticipated release of Remember When Christian Bale Yelled at People Months Ago?, the studio is re-issuing their Blu-ray release two-fold... or should I say, six-fold? (Cue musicus dramaticus.)

The one-disc release will boast an 1080p presentation "with English lossless 6.1 DTS-HD Master Audio for multiple versions including a theatrical and a special edition." (I haven't yet figured out the tech side of my Blu-rays, but I can't help but think that sounds like an improvement over the current $10 edition.)

The SIX-disc set will have that disc, the previous DVD editions (both cuts of which are technically included on the Blu-ray), and a digital copy, all wrapped up in a 14" T-800 Endoskull that lights up and makes noise every time you open your wallet.

We've included the promotional trailer below, and thanks to DVD Active for all the low-down. I'm digging through my couch cushions for change already...