Blu-ray Highlights for 8/9/11 – Some Tasty Waves, a Cool Buzz, and I’m Fine

Stoners may, as a rule, be a pretty unambitious lot. For some reason, however, they seem to rule the Blu-ray release schedule this week. Party on!

It’s a pretty slow week overall:

Someone over at Universal seems to be hitting the bong this week. The studio kicks off its Blu-ray releases with the stoner comedies ‘Your Highness‘ and ‘Paul‘. Both received mixed reviews and were box office flops earlier this year. Of the two, I think I have slightly more interest in the one with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost babsitting a pot-head alien (voiced by Seth Rogen), but that’s mostly due to my fondness for ‘Shaun of the Dead’ and ‘Hot Fuzz’. Most accounts suggest that this one is nowhere near that league. As for the fantasy spoof ‘Your Highness’… well, it stars Danny McBride, which assures that I never, ever want to watch it. That guy is a comedy black hole of suckitude.

To tie in with this theme, Universal has also pulled the stoner classics ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High‘ and ‘Dazed and Confused‘ out of the catalog vault. ‘Fast Times’, of course, is the movie that shot an entire generation of young boys directly into premature puberty with its iconic Phoebe Cates swimming pool scene and Jennifer Jason Leigh deflowering scene. Said young boys are now precisely at the age where they’re likely to own Blu-ray players. These things seem made for one another.

While there aren’t any stoners in ‘Super‘, per se, Kevin Bacon does play a skeezy drug dealer. That counts, right? I’ve been talking up this dark (really, really dark) comedy since last year’s Toronto Film Festival. It never expanded beyond a limited theatrical release in the U.S., but director James Gunn claims that it has done gangbusters business in hotel VOD rentals. Weird.

I think that Robert Zemeckis must have been stoned when he greenlit the animated sci-fi flop ‘Mars Needs Moms‘. With a budget of $150 million and a total box office gross of barely $21 million, this turkey was such a huge bomb that the entire ImageMovers Digital studio was forced to shutter its doors permanently.

The rest of the week’s releases are a hodgepodge of random stuff. Notable titles include Disney’s ‘The Fox and the Hound‘, which sadly must be purchased with the direct-to-video sequel that nobody really wants. We also have Jim Jarmusch’s surreal cult Western ‘Dead Man‘, and Criterion’s restoration of the 1966 war film ‘The Battle of Algiers‘.

2 comments

  1. “I think that Robert Zemeckis must have been stoned”
    => haha, comedy gold! You wanted to tie in every release with the theme of stoners? Great stuff, Josh!