At first glance, the week’s Blu-ray release schedule may appear to be dominated by the final adventure of a certain boy wizard. No doubt, young Mr. Potter will cast another spell and tear up the sales charts. However, if you dig a little beneath the surface, you’ll find a good selection of other important titles worth buying too.
\n<\/p>\n
Here’s the release slate, up through the end of this week:<\/p>\n
Let’s just get this out of the way up front and acknowledge that we’ll all be buying ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2<\/strong>‘ this Friday. It’s the final ‘Potter’ film and one of the best in the series. The franchise is a cultural institution and it goes out strong. Warner is only releasing the standard 2D version to general retail. The 3D editions of both this and ‘Deathly Hallows, Part 1’ are tied up in an exclusive bundle with Sony 3D products. [Update: Best Buy has the 3D discs as a retailer exclusive as well.]<\/em> I’m not personally bothered by this. I saw the last film theatrically in 2D, and plan to watch it that way on Blu-ray as well. The 3D version is a post-conversion effort that received mixed notices at best. Honestly, the last few ‘Potter’ movies have been photographed so darkly that watching them through 3D glasses must be a real chore anyway. <\/p>\n Other notable day-and-date titles include the Ryan Reynolds\/Jason Bateman body-switching comedy ‘The Change-Up<\/strong>‘, which received a terrible drubbing from pretty much everyone who saw it in theaters, and the much-more-warmly-received documentary ‘Life in a Day<\/strong>‘. <\/p>\n On the catalog front, we get some major works from important artists, including David Lynch’s masterpiece ‘Blue Velvet<\/strong>‘, Terry Gilliam’s fantastical ‘The Fisher King<\/strong>‘, Gus Van Sant’s delicious dark comedy ‘To Die For<\/strong>‘, and a Criterion Collection edition of Ingmar Bergman’s epic family drama ‘Fanny and Alexander<\/strong>‘. The latter includes both the theatrical cut and the five-hour<\/em> TV cut of the film. I’m down for all of these, especially ‘Blue Velvet’. Hot damn. <\/p>\n Marlon Brando fans will also want to check out the 1962 adaptation of ‘Mutiny on the Bounty<\/strong>‘ (finally making its way to Blu-ray almost exactly five years after being released on HD DVD) and the actor’s only directorial effort, the Western ‘One Eyed Jacks<\/strong>‘. <\/p>\n Which of the week’s titles will you be picking up?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At first glance, the week’s Blu-ray release schedule may appear to be dominated by the final adventure of a certain boy wizard. No doubt, young Mr. Potter will cast another spell and tear up the sales charts. However, if you dig a little beneath the surface, you’ll find a good selection of other important titles…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":25106,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[140],"tags":[67,6375,2912,3361,666,317,4068,930,571,4067,1099,2207,1943,1351,1109],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25104"}],"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=25104"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50495,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25104\/revisions\/50495"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}