prior Blu-ray release<\/a> had a controversial video transfer that failed to replicate the movie’s intended color palette. (While the story takes place in Illinois during Halloween, Carpenter had to shoot the movie in California during the spring, and used various color filters to evoke the fall season, which the Blu-ray transfer removed.) The anniversary edition sports a brand new remaster supervised by cinematographer Dean Cundey. You’d think that would make this the final word on the subject, but some fans have already started complaining that the transfer still isn’t right. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough personal investment with this film to know what its original theatrical prints really looked like. <\/p>\nMeanwhile, Scream Factory gives us a Collector’s Edition<\/em> of another John Carpenter movie, the lesser-known ‘Prince of Darkness<\/strong>‘. Also from Scream Factory are ‘Psycho II<\/strong>‘ and ‘Psycho III<\/strong>‘. Judged in comparison to the original Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece, these Hitchcock-less sequels kind of stink. But if you can view them simply as slasher movies, they’re actually pretty good for that genre. <\/p>\nShifting gears entirely from all this talk of horror, the Criterion Collection boxes up ‘3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman<\/strong>‘. At the time of their release, the affair and eventual marriage between Bergman and her director overshadowed talk of the movies themselves. With six decades of distance, the films (‘Stromboli’, ‘Europe ’51’ and ‘Journey to Italy’) should be easier to judge on their own merits.<\/p>\nSpeaking of box sets, Warner Bros. has bundled together the three movies in Christopher Nolan’s ‘Dark Knight Trilogy<\/strong>‘ with a handful of new bonus features and some physical swag (art cards, toy vehicles and the like) for an Ultimate Collector’s Edition<\/em>. Sadly, those hoping for a remaster of the second film’s problematic video transfer will have to keep waiting. Neither the studio nor Christopher Nolan is willing to admit that anything is wrong with the old disc, despite its obvious problems with excessive edge enhancement processing.<\/p>\nAlso reissued is Fernando Meirelles’ extraordinary Brazilian crime epic ‘City of God<\/strong>‘, now paired up in a double feature with its quasi-sequel ‘City of Men’. If you’re not familiar with the latter, be advised that, other than the setting, it shares very little direct continuity with the first film. Technically, it’s actually the 2007 feature film spin-off of the TV series also called ‘City of Men’, which was itself a spin-off from the original ‘City of God’. Confusing enough for you? The Blu-ray does not contain the TV series, which ran for four seasons on Brazilian TV. <\/p>\nTelevision<\/h5>\n
Going into it, no one could have been more skeptical of ‘Hannibal<\/strong>‘ than I was. The Hannibal Lecter film series had gone downhill after ‘The Silence of the Lambs’, and I couldn’t imagine network television (NBC, no less) doing proper justice to the original Thomas Harris character. Color me surprised, then, that the series (from ‘Pushing Daisies’ creator Bryan Fuller) is actually downright amazing, better even than any of the movies. This is easily the best new TV show of the year, and I can’t wait for Season 2.<\/p>\nIn other TV matters, Paramount catches up with the first three seasons of the dopey ‘Hawaii Five-0<\/strong>‘ reboot, BBC delivers the seventh season of ‘Doctor Who<\/strong>‘, Fox rolls out the fifth season of ‘Modern Family<\/strong>‘, and we all wonder how it’s possible that ‘South Park<\/strong>‘ has stayed on the air for sixteen seasons.<\/p>\n—<\/p>\n
As I said, my copy of ‘Iron Man 3’ has already arrived. I will probably also pick up the ‘Halloween’ remaster, and perhaps rent ‘Room 237’. The Rossellini box set will go on my wish list. In general, I’ve stopped purchasing TV box sets, but I may need to make an exception for ‘Hannibal’.<\/p>\n
What are your plans this week?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Zombies and superheroes \u2013 it feels like modern audiences will never get tired of either. Last week delivered a big zombie epic to Blu-ray, and this week brings us the first of this year’s many superhero spectacles. I’ll admit that I’m as guilty as anyone of buying into these things, but\u2026 I don’t know\u2026 isn’t…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":56501,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3585,140],"tags":[707,67,6375,4295,412,1574,6276,1341,188,6807,562,85,194,309,6553,6806,2921,2081,2780,1804],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56499"}],"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=56499"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56587,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56499\/revisions\/56587"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}