1954 film with Judy Garland<\/a>, on Blu-ray a couple of years ago. This week, Kino takes us back to the 1937 original, with Janet Gaynor and Frederic March. <\/p>\nIn more experimental fare, the Criterion Collection gives us a double-bill of Chris Marker’s avant garde art films ‘La Jet\u00e9e<\/strong>‘ and ‘Sans Soleil<\/strong>‘. The former is perhaps most famous for inspiring the plot of Terry Gilliam’s ’12 Monkeys’. <\/p>\nClassics?<\/h5>\n
It had to happen eventually, so we might as well just get it out of the way. The most nauseating romantic movie of all time, 1970’s ‘Love Story<\/strong>‘, is now available on Blu-ray. The film is of course infamous for inflicting the phrase “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”<\/em> on the world \u2013 a sentence which, if you think about it, makes no sense at all. Much like the rest of the movie. Will high definition enhance our ability to scoff at this?<\/p>\nJames Bond completists may be interested in picking up the 1967 spy spoof ‘Casino Royale<\/strong>‘ (not to be confused with the later straight adaptation starring Daniel Craig), which finally expands to general retail after a few months of Best Buy exclusivity. The movie isn’t very good, or even particularly funny, but it marks an interesting footnote in the franchise’s history.<\/p>\nTelevision<\/h5>\n
On the TV front, we get the second season of the acclaimed ‘Downton Abbey<\/strong>‘ (Mrs. Z is a big fan) and the first season of the dopey ‘Hawaii Five-0<\/strong>‘ reboot. I tried to enjoy the latter for a few episodes, but it turned boring and stupid early on. <\/p>\nParamount also offers up a single (two-hour) episode from the fifth season of ‘CSI<\/strong>‘. You may ask what the point of doing this is. It’s the episode that Quentin Tarantino directed, of course. This show has had a very spotty release history on Blu-ray. I suppose that fans will have to stick this between their copies of the complete first and complete ninth seasons. <\/p>\nWhy?<\/h5>\n
The award for most pointless Blu-ray release of the week goes to Warner’s new Ultimate Collector’s Edition<\/em> of ‘The Town<\/strong>‘. The movie is OK, I guess. Ben Affleck’s heist thriller is reasonably entertaining, but certainly nothing special. And the previous Blu-ray release was as adequate as it needed to be. Does this movie really have fans eager to buy it again in a deluxe box set? I can’t imagine.<\/p>\n—<\/p>\n
Which discs are on your radar this week?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s February, and Valentine’s Day is coming up quickly. Love and romance are in the air. Oddly, the Blu-ray release schedule is loaded up with lovey-dovey movies this week, and basically none on Valentine’s Day itself. I suppose that’s intended to give us time to buy and watch them in advance. As if we’d really…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":29502,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[140],"tags":[3611,1257,67,6375,2758,4590,666,4593,4589,531,3709,4035,1341,987,4591,4588,4592,322,543,559,1254,557,1079],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29498"}],"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=29498"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50482,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29498\/revisions\/50482"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}