Blu-ray Highlights for 10/26/10: In High-Def, Everyone Can See You Scream

It’s Ellen Ripley vs. Marty McFly in the battle for your Blu-ray buying dollar. This week sees the release of two hugely-anticipated franchise box sets. Unbelievably, there’s even more coming out that may be worth a look, too. Prepare to empty those wallets, folks!

Here’s the full list:

Obviously, the ‘Alien Anthology‘ and ‘Back to the Future Trilogy‘ are major releases that tend to overshadow anything else coming out this week. Can any serious movie fan resist either one? I sure can’t. The ‘Alien’ set even comes with approximately 872,000 hours of bonus features. That’s just a daunting package. It will surely qualify as one of the best Blu-ray releases of the year, if not ever.

Nonetheless, there are other titles worth buying this week too. The Criterion Collection gives us both Stanley Kubrick’s war classic ‘Paths of Glory‘ and the insane 1977 Japanese horror film ‘House‘. What a strange pairing of movies to release together.

The Girl Who Played with Fire‘ is the first sequel to ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo‘. (A third movie, called ‘The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest’, will complete the trilogy.) I know that Drew here at the blog isn’t a fan of this series, but I liked ‘Dragon Tattoo’ a lot. Both sequels were originally produced as TV movies, and are reportedly a step down in production values from the first. I haven’t seen ‘Fire’ yet, but I hear (from sources other than Drew) that it’s a worthy continuation of the story.

Fans of the ‘Star Wars: The Clone Wars‘ animated series will be happy to pick up the second season. Unfortunately, I just can’t bring myself to watch the show, even though I’m told that it’s pretty good. (Nate loved the first season when he reviewed it.) I saw that horrid theatrical feature and really can’t get over how astoundingly stupid it was. Seriously, Jabba the Hutt has a drag queen uncle who talks like Truman Capote. No, I’m sorry, I can’t do it…

The “Ultimate Collector’s Edition” of ‘Elf‘ also looks questionable to me. It’s not that I don’t like the movie (I do), but I’m not sure if the studio has bothered to remaster it. The original Blu-ray release was a smeary DNR mess. If this is the same transfer bundled up with new supplements, that will be truly disappointing.

Finally, I feel compelled to acknowledge ‘Sex and the City 2‘, only because my wife is a fan of the TV series and the first movie. And yet, even she couldn’t bring herself to go see the sequel, the trailers for which were truly ghastly. Something tells me that it will make its way into our home anyway, unfortunately.

21 comments

  1. Santa Clause: The Movie should be coming in today from Amazon. This was a crucial part of my childhood, and came at just the right time to lead me to believe for a few more years. I haven’t seen it since I was a kid though, and not really sure why. I hope I my memories of this movie are justified when I stick the movie in tonight.

    I REALLY want Back to the Future, but am going to wait a bit on it. I’m hoping to find it in a sale, but if I finish my other stack of movies before a good sale, I’ll go ahead and pick it up.

    • Patrick A Crone

      I saw Santa Claus: The Movie last year during the holidays. I loved the movie when I was a kid so it was really disappointing to see that it doesn’t hold up that well. Maybe seeing it in HD might breath some new life into it.

      • Santa Clause: The Movie (as there is no review yet)

        Vital Disc Statistics: Housed in a blue eco-friendly case. Upon inserting the Disc, you are presented with choosing United States or Deutscheland (Germany). Choosing either presents you with the same Interpol warning (not FBI), a preview for The Spy Next Door and a preview for the Epix movie channel. The previews cannot be skipped using scene skip or the Menu buttons, but luckily the Fast Forward button still works. The US menu presents you with options to Play, Scene Skip, and Extras. The German menu also offers a language screen, but this is pretty much useless, as the disc only has an English language audio track and German Subtitles, despite the fact that the German menu lets you choose a non-existant German track.

        Video (2.0 out of 5) – The movie is presented in an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. The top and bottom of the video seems to have a few pixels of a white line in it.

        The video on this movie leaves a lot to be desired. It pretty much looks like they took 2nd or 3rd generation copy of the film, scanned it without any enhancements, did a general DNR scrub over the entire movie, overcompressed the movie to fit it and its extras on a 25 gig disc, and then just threw the result onto a disc. This has to be one of the worst looking movies I have seen on the format.

        Film grain, while present, seems to stay static for a couple of seconds at a time on the screen. Detail is practically non-existant in many scenes. In scenes with heavy snow, there is a LOT of noise artifacts in the picture. Unfortunately, this movie has several snow scenes. There is zero depth to the picture.

        Colors seem to be slightly off too. Skin tones just seem to be not quite right, either too red, too orange, or too white, depending on the scene. Colors at the North Pole seems to be overly saturated, and overly-color-corrected to have this strange look which is supposed to be generated from fire light. Blacks are not black enough, yet the movie still feels too dark.

        Pans are absolutely horrible, with a jitter and detail levels dropping to zero. Any type of camera movement seems to produce similar effects.

        I am just going to state that the video portion of this disc is an epic failure. While I have never seen the movie on DVD, I doubt this is much better.

        Audio (2.0 out of 5) – Sadly, nothing improves in the way of audio. We are presented with ONE audio track (despite the fact that the German menu gives you two choices), and its an English 2.0 PCM audio track. Choosing the German audio track gives you a warning before the movie saying something along the lines (meine Deutsche ist nicht gut)of there is something wrong with the German audio, and it will be presented with German Subtitles only. That being said, even if you choose the German subtitles, once the movie starts, you have to choose the subtitles using the Subtitle button on your remote. The audio, whether you choose German or English, even using the remote, gives you the exact same English audio track.

        The English audio track also leaves much to be desired – and I am not just refering to the fact that we are only given a 2.0 audio track. The recording levels seem inconsistant from one person talking to another, especially with the opening scene. In fact, it sounds like a few voices were done with ADR (is that the right acronymn)with different equilization and background noise being present.

        Dialogue is NOT clear, and sadly, there is no English subtitle option. Sound effects and music often over-power dialogue, and they sound flat. It sounds like NOTHING was done to clean up the track.

        Worst yet, and I may just be imagining this, is that in some shots, audio and video seem to be ever-so-slightly out-of-sync, even after viewing the same scene multiple times. Its slight, and I could probably fix this if my reciever offered the ability to adjust the delay, however, this does not seem to be consistant throughout the film.

        Bottom line on the audio – I have DVDs that have better audio tracks than this.

        Extras – haven’t had a chance to check these out yet.

        Final Thoughts – This Studio Canal release leaves much to be desired and it seems as if the studio put no work whatsoever into restoring this film. Pretty sad, as this is the 25th Anniversary Edition. I am going to mark this For Fans Only

        • Patrick A Crone

          I kinda figured that the disc would be a let down. When I saw it last year it was on ABC family in “HD”. The picture looked so washed out and blurry that I only watched the first half of the film. The one thing you didn’t mention was what you thought of the film itself. I thought it was still an interesting take on Santa Claus, but it really seemed cheesy for the most part. Granted, I was 11 when I saw it last.

          • I was 8 last time I saw it before this. I was sick yesterday, but my roommate is also demanding to watch it with me, and we have different schedules. We are only about half an hour into it.

            I thought I would let the actual staff member who gets this movie, though, do some work. 🙂

  2. BostonMA

    Paths of Glory. waiting for the solo releases of Alien and Aliens and i’ll need to see House when the DVD becomes available

  3. Jane Morgan

    ‘Slings & Arrows’ is a pretty fantastic UK Dramedy. I streamed it via netflix and loved it longtime.

    • Tim

      Pretty sure this is a Canadian production. Forgive me, but there’s not a lot of decent stuff we can take credit for up here.

      • Jane Morgan

        Sorry about that. I can’t believe I never put that together. I even made the trip to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival while at university.

        I loved ‘Lost and Delirious’ too.

        And you guys made great villains in the South Park Movie.

        • Patrick A Crone

          I really loved Lost and Delirious as well. I don’t know anyone else who has seen it besides myself. I saw it at the Valley Art theater in Tempe back in 2001 and own it on DVD. One of the little known films with Piper Parebo in it. It’s been pretty cool to see Jessica Paré show up in projects in the last year. She had a small role in Hot Tub Time Machine. But it was really a pleasant surprise to see her show up on Mad Men this last season.

  4. Patrick A Crone

    I can see why the Back to the Future trilogy is sold as a set. It’s one of the few film trilogies that has the same director and producers and it shows. There is a lot of heart in those movies. But I refuse to buy the Alien Anthology. The first 2 films were excellent. The 3rd was a good effort from Fincher who had to a daunting task of getting a derailed train of a 3rd film back on track. The forth was just horrible. I’ll wait until FOX releases the films individually.

  5. DieHard

    Already bought and have Alien Anthology (for $90 CDN), and Back To The Future Trilogy (for $40 CDN) on my shelf. Have Maniac on order. Unfortunately I can’t find the blu-ray of The Frighteners anywhere even to order. It looks like it was postponed…

  6. motorheadache

    Just in case anyone hasn’t heard, you should really buy the Alien Anthology from Amazon U.K. They’ve been confirmed to be region-free and cost about 40 dollars less than the American/Canadian release. It’s almost like getting the Back to the Future set for free if you’re buying both.

  7. Seann

    “The ‘Alien’ set even comes with approximately **872,000** hours of bonus features”

    How is that possible!? Haha just kidding, did you mean 872 minutes? I’m curious as even that sounds like a lot of bonus feature, let alone 100 years worth.

    • Josh Zyber
      Author

      The sticker on the shrinkwrap claims, “Over 50 Hours of Bonus Material.” I’ve only begun to touch the set, but I believe it. The volume of content here is overwhelming.

      With that said, I think that some of the “MU-TH-UR Mode” stuff involving “data tags” is needlessly confusing and not really as useful as the studio might believe.

  8. seann, there is a SINGLE bonus feature on a Blu-ray in the review queue that has an extra that is over 5,000 minutes long. one single extra.

    if any set can have nearly a million minutes (yes, exaggeration), it’s the Alien set.

    josh- Ziro Desilijic Tiure, also known as Capote the Hutt, has only appeared in two episodes of the show, in two seasons. he/she/it is scheduled to appear in another in the third. the episode per FAAAABULOUS HUTT ratio is still pretty high.