Lola Versus<\/strong>‘.<\/p>\nThe award for strangest movie title of the week is shared by the Sean Bean spy thriller ‘Clearskin<\/strong>‘ (seriously, doesn’t that sound like it should be a Proactiv informercial?) and the low-budget sci-fi mystery ‘Beyond the Black Rainbow<\/strong>‘, in which the son of director George Cosmatos (‘Rambo: First Blood, Part II’) follows his father into the family business. <\/p>\nIceberg, Right Ahead!<\/h5>\n
Realizing that it might be perceived as tacky to release a movie about a famous historical tragedy that claimed thousands of lives on today’s date, Fox wisely bumped the Blu-ray edition of James Cameron’s ‘Titanic<\/strong>‘ up to Monday. <\/p>\nThe film presents an interesting conundrum. Obviously, it was wildly popular in its day, enough so that it smashed box office records and remained the highest-grossing picture of all time for 12 years, until finally being toppled by Cameron’s own ‘Avatar’. It also won a slew of Oscars, and did quite well when re-released in a new 3D conversion earlier this year. I expect that it will sell briskly on Blu-ray. Yet if you ask people what they think of it, especially home theater nerds, most will tell you that they hate the movie.<\/p>\n
Well, I don’t<\/em> hate ‘Titanic’. Sure, the characters are one-dimensional, the love story is clunky, some of the visual effects are surprisingly shoddy, and that wretched Celine Dion song is an abhorrent stain on the history of music. But if you can set some of that aside, it’s also a grand spectacle and a great example of populist filmmaking at its finest. With that said, after one viewing in theaters and one more on Laserdisc, I haven’t watched the movie in a dozen years and am not in a big hurry to do so again. I’m mildly curious about the 3D conversion, but I’m not fond of Cameron’s decision to alter the aspect ratio to 16:9 (only on the 3D version; the 2D version is fortunately preserved in it is original 2.40:1 ratio). <\/p>\nAs a tie-in to this, Disney is rolling out a proper 3D edition of Cameron’s Titanic-themed IMAX documentary ‘Ghosts of the Abyss<\/strong>‘. I was never much impressed by this one, or any of the director’s attempts to play documentarian. <\/p>\nOther Catalog Titles<\/h5>\n
Disney continues to dump old Miramax titles into the hands of cheapo distributor Echo Bridge, which foists them onto double-feature discs with slipshod quality. This is a real shame, because some of the movies \u2013 such as the Sean Penn-directed drama ‘The Crossing Guard<\/strong>‘, Jim Jarmusch’s oddball Western ‘Dead Man<\/strong>‘ and David Twohy’s haunted submarine thriller ‘Below<\/strong>‘ \u2013 are genuinely interesting and deserve much better treatment than this.<\/p>\nBoutique label Twilight Time pairs up a couple of Southern melodramas with limited editions of the 1989 hit ‘Steel Magnolias<\/strong>‘ and the 1959 adaptation of William Faulkner’s ‘The Sound and the Fury<\/strong>‘. <\/p>\nMGM offers fans of schlocky horror the trifecta of ‘Jeepers Creepers<\/strong>‘, ‘Killer Klowns from Outer Space<\/strong>‘ and ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2<\/strong>‘.<\/p>\nAlso this week, a group of Paramount titles that were formerly Best Buy exclusives hit general release. These include ‘Airplane!<\/strong>‘, ‘The Naked Gun<\/strong>‘, ‘The Firm<\/strong>‘, ‘The Ring<\/strong>‘, ‘The Score<\/strong>‘ and ‘Road Trip<\/strong>‘.<\/p>\nTelevision<\/h5>\n
On the TV front, we get new box sets for the second season of ‘Spartacus: Vengeance<\/strong>‘, the third season of ‘The Vampire Diaries<\/strong>‘ and the fifth season of ‘The Big Bang Theory<\/strong>‘.<\/p>\n—<\/p>\n
As mentioned, I haven’t made up my mind about ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’ yet. I also feel like ‘Titanic’ is the sort of thing I ought to have in my collection, even if I don’t plan to watch it anytime soon. Perhaps I’ll wait for a price drop on the 3D edition of that one (but not the oversized box set, which is too much for me). How about you? What interests you this week?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Eleven years later, and this date still feels uncomfortable to write, especially when it falls on a Tuesday. How many years’ distance will it take before we’ve fully moved on, and Hollywood can go about its business of producing an overblown epic disaster movie about a pair of star-crossed lovers (one in each of the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":40614,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3585,140],"tags":[198,3601,1184,67,6375,4404,4626,673,5235,3602,194,4168,450,4429,1584,1175,4311,3710],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40611"}],"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=40611"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50451,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40611\/revisions\/50451"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}