This week sees the Blu-ray release of one of the year’s billion-dollar blockbuster hits. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. I’m more interested in the catalog titles. What grabs your attention?
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Here’s the weekly release list, including a few titles that debuted on Sunday and Monday:<\/p>\n
Audiences apparently can’t get enough of Johnny Depp’s glam-rocker pirate act. They turned out in droves once again for ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides<\/strong>‘, propelling it to become the third highest grossing film of the year (so far). Personally, I checked out of this franchise about halfway through the second movie. If you’re still into it, Disney offers the title in both 2D or 3D options. As I understand it, the movie’s live-action photography was shot with real 3D cameras, but the CGI was rendered in 2D and then converted after-the-fact for some reason. That’s basically the opposite of how most post-converted 3D features are made. I haven’t seen it to judge the results, and honestly have little interest in doing so. <\/p>\n On the opposite end of the spectrum, Kevin Smith decided to use his new thriller ‘Red State<\/strong>‘ to finally break free of the Hollywood distribution model once and for all. He formed his own independent studio and distributed the film himself. It played at Sundance and on one screen in New York City, and made no basically money at all. Great job with that, Kev.<\/p>\n Other notable day-and-date titles include the R-rated comedy hit ‘Bad Teacher<\/strong>‘, Disney’s ‘tween-pandering flop ‘Monte Carlo<\/strong>‘, and the acclaimed documentary ‘Page One: Inside the New York Times<\/strong>‘. <\/p>\n The disc I’m most excited about this week is Martin Scorsese’s ‘Cape Fear<\/strong>‘. I just hope that Universal treats this one better than most of the studio’s underwhelming catalog releases. <\/p>\n I haven’t watched ‘The Crow<\/strong>‘ since its theatrical release. It’s kind of a dumb movie that’s reputation was elevated by the controversy surrounding its production. (This was the film that Brandon Lee died making.) However, it’s also very moody and stylish and kind of cool. Our reviewer Nate says that fans will be pleased with Lionsgate’s Blu-ray, which is an improvement over earlier import releases. <\/p>\n On the classics front, the Criterion Collection gives us the 1968 Japanese ghost story ‘Kuroneko<\/strong>‘ while RaroVideo offers Federico Fellini’s 1970 TV movie ‘The Clowns<\/strong>‘. The latter is a decidedly minor work in the artist’s career, but I’ll take any Fellini on Blu-ray that I can get. <\/p>\n If TV on Blu-ray is your thing, Warner has the third season of ‘Star Wars: The Clone Wars<\/strong>‘ and the second (and final) season of ‘V<\/strong>‘ on tap. I watched all of ‘V’ and occasionally recapped the show here in the blog when it was broadcast. It’s an enormously stupid series, but often campily entertaining, and that series finale is a doozy. <\/p>\n Warner has also taken to repackaging some titles previously released on the format. In this case, ‘The Goonies<\/strong>‘ has finally broken out from that ridiculous box set into a standard Blu-ray case. Meanwhile, ‘Willy Wonka<\/strong>‘ goes the opposite route and is now being reissued into a ridiculous box set. <\/p>\n Which of this week’s releases do you plan to buy?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week sees the Blu-ray release of one of the year’s billion-dollar blockbuster hits. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. I’m more interested in the catalog titles. What grabs your attention?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":23644,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3585,140],"tags":[198,3164,67,6375,3943,666,2246,1495,836,1148,3221,2278,1960,264,3944,3497,94,388],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23641"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23641"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50498,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23641\/revisions\/50498"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}