Blu-ray Highlights: Week of June 30th, 2013 – Here’s to Failure

Holidays are a slow time for new Blu-ray releases, and this one almost brutally so. Honestly, I have very few titles that I can call “highlights” this week. Unfortunately, because of the lack of discs worth giving away, we also will not have a new contest this week. Hopefully, things will get better soon.

Which Blu-rays Interest You This Week (7/2/13)?

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Catalog Titles

There are no new day-and-date titles this week worth mentioning. The most appealing of the catalog releases would be Mel Brooks’ hilarious comedy classic ‘The Producers‘. I’m referring of course to the original version, long before it became a watered-down Broadway musical or a dreadful movie remake based on that play. Shout! Factory brings us a new special edition that will make a nice addendum to Fox’s previously-released Mel Brooks Collection.

Also on offer from Shout! Factory is the goofball sketch comedy ‘The Kentucky Fried Movie‘, directed by John Landis and written by the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team. It’s a crude comedy in many senses of the word, kind of funny but not nearly as refined to perfection as later Z-A-Z productions like ‘Airplane!’ and ‘The Naked Gun’. I just don’t know that I need to own this in high definition, personally.

While I’m not familiar with the work of avant garde filmmaker Curtis Harrington, the summary description of ‘The Curtis Harrington Short Film Collection‘ has me somewhat intrigued. It might be worth a gamble, but $40 seems like a lot for a blind buy.

If you missed your shot to own the Digibook edition of ‘E.T.‘ while it was briefly in print last year, Universal will reissue it this week.

Television

Has the IFC sitcom ‘Portlandia‘ really been on the air for three seasons? If you ask me, the joke wore thin halfway through the pilot episode. I guess it’s nice that Kyle MacLachlan still gets work, though.

Finally, Image breaks out the fourth season of ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show‘ to an overpriced separate release, even though the Complete Series box set continues to be a much better value. We have one more of these to go.

I guess ‘The Producers’ will go on my wish list. That’s about it for me. Does anything tempt you this week?

2 comments

  1. Barsoom Bob

    Boy, are we having some pretty thin weeks lately. Out of deperation I have purchased such titles as Hansel and Gretle: Witch Hunter, made Van Helsing look like a Guilermo Del Toro film. Jack the Giant Slayer, silly but pretty fun and beautifully shot in native 3D. Upside Down, where as Cloud Atlas weas a glorious failure that you could love, this one is so lame story wise that it just sucks. It was incomprehensible visually in 2D but when I went to finish it up and my TV started it up in 3D, the spatial conceits between the two worlds became way more interesting but it still was a very bad movie.

    I have seen the South Korean movie The Tower. It is their recent big budget, diasaster spectacle, basically a version of Towering Inferno with all the modern bells and whistles. Story wise, pretty cliche, but it was fun especially if you like looking at beautiful Korean women and diasaster adventures.

  2. William Henley

    Just the American Girl movie for me. I’ll admit – I’m a sucker for a good kid movie