Welcome back from another long weekend, and welcome to 2013! As you recover from your holiday hangovers, the new year begins mostly with a lot of reissues of old Blu-ray titles. However, mixed in here somewhere may be a few new discs worth looking at.
As part of the new distribution deal between the two studios, Warner Bros. reissued well over 100 former Paramount titles on January 1st. Because these are simple re-pressings of previous discs, I have elected not to include them in the following poll, which only lists actual new titles, to the best of my ability to determine. If I’ve missed anything important, please tell us in the Comments.
Loading ...Rian Johnson’s clever time travel thriller ‘Looper‘, in which a young assassin (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) must hunt down his older self (Bruce Willis) turned out to be quite a surprise hit this summer, grossing over $166 million worldwide based on a modest $30 million budget. In fact, that makes it one of the most profitable movies of the year. I didn’t get a chance to see this in theaters, but have heard such good things that I’ve had a friend in Canada buy me the Future Shop SteelBook, which I look forward to watching as soon as it gets here.
Can Robert Pattinson actually act, once you get him out of those dreadful ‘Twilight’ movies? Respected director David Cronenberg believes so, and cast him as the lead in his adaptation of Don De Lillo’s ‘Cosmopolis‘. The film received mixed reviews, but I’ll always give Cronenberg the benefit of the doubt. I plan to check this one out as a rental.
In TV news, if you rush through them, you might be able to catch up on the third season of ‘Justified‘ or the second season of ‘Being Human‘ (American version) in time for their new season premieres on January 13th.
I also have to make note that Tommy Wiseau’s legendarily awful ‘The Room‘ popped up in a mysterious Amazon listing last week with a release date of December 28th, but almost immediately flipped to Out of Stock status. Was the disc actually released? Does it really exist? Is there any point to watching a movie so dependent on audience participation alone at home? These questions may ultimately be unanswerable.
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As I said, I already have a copy of ‘Looper’ on the way, and will put ‘Cosmopolis’ in my rental queue. Do any of these discs interest you this week?
William Henley
There are a couple of reissues I may pick up, simply because I didn’t pick them up the first time, but nothing that I am going to run out and pick up right away. I mean, I didn’t pick them up the first time, so its not like I can’t wait for them. Looks like a lot of these may be in the $10 rack soon, if they are not already.
EM
No new releases or reissues for me this week. The big acquisition I’m making is of the five-season Twilight Zone Blu-ray set, which Amazon.com is discounting to $150; it became an even better bargain in that I applied a $50 gift card I’d received for Christmas. At the same time I also ordered a Blu-ray of the Lon Chaney, Sr. crime melodrama The Penalty, which had also come down in price, albeit much more modestly.
Bob
Of the titles listed, only “Looper” comes to mind and after seeing it at the theater and being exceedingly disappointed, that one isn’t on my list either. I still have to catch up on some BDs I got during December after taking advantage of some “balck Friday” sales here and there, so no great set backs.
Julian
“The Room”!! One of the best “so bad it’s good”-movies ever. Hilarious through and through. The Amazon link now says it’s “in stock” and ready to order. The original asking price of $36 has since been lowered to $32. Still an offending price, no doubt spurred by the fact that no studio was willing to release it. I’m awaiting a price drop.
JM
‘Looper’ arrived last night, was less interesting than ‘Total Recall.’
Guess I’ll timeshift all my anticipation to ‘Dredd.’