We’ve all done it. If you collect movies on DVD or Blu-ray, you’ve undoubtedly purchased a disc at some point that you later regretted. Perhaps it was a blind-buy that you expected to like, only to discover that you hated it. Perhaps you even bought the movie knowing that you didn’t like it, but needed to own it for collectible purposes (or because you wanted to watch the bonus features). In today’s Roundtable, we share our shame.
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Bonus features are still a big selling point on the DVD and Blu-ray releases of movies, but who actually watches these things? As reviewers, many of us on staff are actually obligated to sit through all the commentaries, documentaries, featurettes, gag reels and miscellaneous odds and ends on the discs we review. When supplements are well done, they can be fascinating. Unfortunately, as I can tell you from experience, these “extras” can also be a crushing bore when they’re done poorly. In this week’s Roundtable, we tell you about some of the lamest bonus features we’ve suffered through so that you don’t have to.
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In an act of stunning contradiction and irrationality, the Library of Congress ruled last week that, while it’s acceptable for iPhone or smartphone owners to “jailbreak” (to crack hardware limitations in order to install software not authorized by the device manufacturer) their phones, it is illegal to do so to an iPad, tablet computer or gaming console. Why one and not the other? Well, because they said so. So there. Also, if you’ve ever ripped a DVD or Blu-ray you’ve purchased to store on a media server, you’re also breaking the law, even if you only intend to keep those files for personal use while you still own the hard copy. The last vestiges of “Fair Use” have been tossed to the wayside.
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1990 was truly a banner year for David Lynch. Bursting with creativity at his artistic peak, Lynch had a hit show on TV, a weekly comic strip that ran in alternative newspapers across the country, and a new movie that won top prize at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Exhibitions of his paintings and sculptures drew further acclaim, and Time magazine even ran a cover story that called him a genius. This was quite a turn of events for a man who, just a few years earlier, had been derided as a Hollywood pariah for making one of the biggest box office flops of all time. David Lynch was back with a vengeance. In the midst of all this, the filmmaker also found time to stage a performance art concert called ‘Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted’.
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David Lynch has never been accused of doing anything in a conventional manner. Typically, when a filmmaker adapts a book to the screen, he or she must condense the text into a manageable length by removing inessential scenes or storylines. For his 1990 film ‘Wild at Heart’, Lynch took the opposite approach. Despite working from short novella that could be read from start to finish in a couple of hours, the director greatly expanded his script and shot enough material that his first rough cut ran over three hours long. He eventually trimmed that down to 125 disjointed minutes, but fans wondered for years what the longer version of the movie may have looked like. In 2008, Lynch actually released that extra footage, but did so on an obscure and expensive DVD that few have seen.
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It was time to get organized. My movie collection had gotten far too large for me to remember everything I owned, and I’d already lost at least one title [so long, '(500) Days of Summer'] when I let someone borrow it and couldn’t remember whom I lent it to. I needed a cataloging program. After weighing the options, I decided to go with Movie Collector from Collectorz.com.
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Over the course of this week, we’ve seen the release of the ‘Singin’ in the Rain‘ Blu-ray packaged in an oversized box set with an umbrella, as well as announcements for at least two more similarly elaborate sets for ‘Lawrence of Arabia‘ and a 3D conversion of ‘I, Robot‘ (the latter with a replica robot head!). Some fans love these trinket-packed collectors’ editions, while others deplore the waste of shelf space. In today’s Roundtable, we’ll give you our picks for some of the most notable video box sets we’ve come across over the years, both good and bad.
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As I noted earlier in the week, the big Criterion Collection sale at Barnes & Noble started on Tuesday and will run through July 30th. Since we already did a Roundtable about our favorite Criterion discs during the last one of these sales, today might be a good time to flip that topic around. Which titles in the esteemed Collection have you not cared for?
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As much as I may appreciate a good box set, even I have to admit that home video studios sometimes go too far in the attempt to turn a movie release into a valued collectible. Take, for example, the case of this ‘Infernal Affairs Trilogy’ box set from Hong Kong, which may be one of the most needlessly overpackaged collections of DVDs ever released. That didn’t stop me from buying it, of course.
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Of the many different DVD and Blu-ray box set configurations that have been released over the years, something about the idea of storing the discs in a metal lunch box appeals to me. I don’t even know what it is, really. Perhaps it’s just fond memories of the lunch boxes I carried to school as a child. On a few occasions (not too many, but a few), I’ve found myself buying disc sets simply because they’ve come packaged in nice lunch boxes – even though I probably could have obtained the lunch box separately though other means if I’d had enough interest. Such was the case back in the day with the DVD release of the anime series ‘Serial Experiments Lain’, which I knew little about at the time, except that I had the opportunity to grab a (supposedly) limited edition lunch box off the shelf at a Suncoast Video (or maybe it was a Sam Goody’s) while fans of the show were scrambling to find copies online.
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