admitted that it’s a piece of crap<\/a>. But it has a big budget and lots of visual effects, so it’ll probably sell pretty well on Blu-ray regardless. <\/p>\nSpeaking of bombs, ‘Mr. Popper’s Penguins<\/strong>‘ also comes out today. Why does Hollywood seem so intent on making the world believe that Jim Carrey is still a movie star? I’m certainly not buying it. <\/p>\nAnother thing I’m not buying: ‘The Help<\/strong>‘. The movie was a surprise hit and will probably win a dozen Oscars, but I have no patience for treacly, condescending middlebrow bullshit like this. Did you know that the Civil Rights movement in America was single-handedly saved by a spunky white girl who wrote a book that taught everyone how to get along with each other? Oh right, because it wasn’t. Screw this. <\/p>\n‘The Debt<\/strong>‘. Did anyone see this? Did anyone have even the slightest desire to see this revenge thriller with Sam Worthington and Helen Mirren? Me neither. Which is fortunate, because it’s supposedly pretty awful. <\/p>\n‘Point Blank<\/strong>‘ is not the Lee Marvin crime movie from the ’60s. Nor is it a remake. It’s actually a French thriller about a trainee male nurse forced to become a criminal to save his wife. Word of mouth is that it’s silly but entertaining. This could be worth a rental. <\/p>\nOn the TV front, I’ve seen a few episodes of Fred Arminsen’s IFC sitcom ‘Portlandia<\/strong>‘, and I still can’t figure out whether the show is supposed to be making fun of obnoxious hipsters, or celebrating everything about them. The parts I’ve watched have had a few sporadically funny moments, but nowhere near enough to convince me to own a season of it on video. <\/p>\nLet’s move on to catalog titles. Just in time for Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day tomorrow, Fox is issuing ‘Tora! Tora! Tora!<\/strong>‘ on Blu-ray today.<\/p>\nThose of you hoping that the ‘Mission: Impossible<\/strong>‘ Extreme Trilogy Blu-ray Collection<\/em> might finally see the three movies remastered, or at least provided with lossless audio, don’t get your hopes up. All signs point to this being a simple repackaging of the existing discs, timed to promote the new sequel in theaters. <\/p>\nThis is a pretty dry week, isn’t it? Fortunately, Criterion comes through with a couple of classics. This week, the studio gives us Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Lady Vanishes<\/strong>‘ and Ernst Lubitsch’s ‘Design for Living<\/strong>‘. These and ‘Tora! Tora! Tora!’ are the only titles of the week I’ve bothered to add to my wish list.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s an odd phenomenon, the way that certain movies somehow manage to rake in tremendous amounts of money even though nobody at all seems to like them. One of the year’s worst and most-reviled mega-blockbusters comes to Blu-ray this week, and no doubt will sell a gajillion copies to people who really ought to know…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":26526,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[140],"tags":[2241,67,6375,2276,666,4254,1448,999,2850,3094,4255,3575,3366],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26522"}],"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=26522"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50491,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26522\/revisions\/50491"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}