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New Releases<\/h5>\n
M. Night Shyamalan is the king of second chances. And third chances. And fourth chances, and so on. Despite how badly received his last several movies have been with both critics and audiences, and despite how reportedly difficult the director is to work with, Shyamalan keeps convincing studios to give him money \u2013 often a lot of money. And somehow, his movies keep making money in return, even though nobody seems to like them anymore. This summer’s ‘After Earth<\/strong>‘ was the closest that Shyamalan has had to an actual flop, and even that did well overseas and will likely turn a profit on video. The sci-fi survivalist tale was promoted on the basis of starring Will Smith, who’s really only in the movie for a short period of time. His son Jaden Smith spends most of the time on camera, and even viewers who liked him in the ‘Karate Kid’ remake found him annoying here. Allegedly, development of the storyline was guided by the senior Smith (who’s a producer on the project) to act as a vehicle to convey the tenets of Scientology. And yet, with Will Smith’s face on the cover art and the promise of lots of visual effects, the film will probably sell pretty well on Blu-ray, mainly to people who will watch it once and then file it away on their movie shelves to collect dust forevermore. <\/p>\nHollywood’s obsession with turning every hit movie into a franchise has long since gotten out of control. The first ‘Hangover’ movie from 2009 was a reasonably amusing but wildly overrated comedy. No one seemed to care much for the second entry in 2011, yet it made tons of money anyway (even more than the first), and so now we have ‘The Hangover: Part III<\/strong>‘, which promises to be the grand conclusion to this epic trilogy. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, director Todd Phillips forgot that alleged comedies are supposed to at least try to be funny. This one doesn’t. I’ve read at least one critic who argued that this was a deliberate and subversive attempt to make audiences question the things they liked about the first movie, but pretty much everyone else just said that the new sequel sucks. <\/p>\nOn the opposite end of the spectrum from these two bloated wannabe blockbusters is Joss Whedon’s very small and intimate ‘Much Ado About Nothing<\/strong>‘, which the director filmed at his own house during downtime while ‘The Avengers’ was in the middle of post-production. Starring a lot of familiar faces from Whedon’s TV shows and movies, this new adaptation of Shakespeare’s beloved comedy transplants the setting to modern times but retains the Bard’s dialogue in its original iambic pentameter. Many of the transpositions between old and new are quite cleverly done, and Nathan Fillion is riotously funny as Constable Dogberry. <\/p>\nThe current theatrical release of ‘Gravity’ isn’t the only movie this year with pretensions of depicting space travel with some degree of scientific accuracy. The low-budget, found-footage thriller ‘Europa Report<\/strong>‘ stars Sharlto Copley as a member of an expedition traveling to one of Jupiter’s moons, where they find\u2026 something<\/em> waiting for them. After an intriguing trailer, word-of-mouth was generally mixed, with many complaints that the story devolves into a generic horror flick. <\/p>\nSpeaking of horror flicks, the latest entry in the ‘Child’s Play’ franchise, ‘Curse of Chucky<\/strong>‘, has gone direct-to-video. While that may sound like a bad sign, our reviewer E. says that original creator Don Mancini has brought his franchise back to its roots, and the results are much better than expected. <\/p>\nEthan Hawke has had a busy year. Between ruling the arthouses with ‘Before Midnight’ and crashing spectacularly in the car chase flop ‘Getaway’, the actor also starred in the high-concept thriller ‘The Purge<\/strong>‘, which posits that society of the near future will flourish so long as crime is allowed to run rampant unchecked for one day each year. This sounds like a completely implausible premise to me, but audiences ate it up. Budgeted at a mere $3 million, the movie grossed more than 20 times that amount, to become one of the most profitable films of the year.<\/p>\nFinally, Quebecois director Xavier Dolan (‘Heartbeats’) tells a complicated transgendered love story in the French-language drama ‘Laurence Anyways<\/strong>‘.<\/p>\nCatalog Titles<\/h5>\n
If just one ‘Child’s Play’ movie isn’t enough to satisfy you, Universal has boxed up the entire set of six (including the latest) in ‘Chucky: The Complete Collection<\/strong>‘. In addition to that, Universal has also finally ported ‘Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life<\/strong>‘ to Blu-ray more than six years after its release on the now-defunct HD DVD format.<\/p>\nIn time for Halloween, Warner Bros. takes a second stab at ‘The Exorcist<\/strong>‘ with a new 40th Anniversary Edition<\/em> that adds a couple of featurettes to the prior Blu-ray. Whether the video has been at all remastered remains to be seen. (I would tend to doubt it.)<\/p>\nAlso from Warner Bros. comes Billy Wilder’s classic WWII prison camp drama ‘Stalag 17<\/strong>‘, the not-so-classic spoof ‘Airplane II: The Sequel<\/strong>‘ (which had no involvement from the team that made the original), and the 1990 Richard Gere cop thriller ‘Internal Affairs<\/strong>‘ (not to be confused with the much-superior Hong Kong cop thriller ‘Infernal Affairs’)<\/p>\nMGM gives us Steve Martin’s very goofy and fun con artist comedy ‘Dirty Rotten Scoundrels<\/strong>‘, while Fox takes a trip back to the ’60s for the sci-fi duo of ‘Fantastic Voyage<\/strong>‘ and ‘Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea<\/strong>‘.<\/p>\nThe latest addition to the Criterion Collection is Ren\u00e9 Clair’s classic screwball comedy ‘I Married a Witch<\/strong>‘. <\/p>\nTwilight Time unearths the 1992 post-apocalyptic sci-fi tale ‘Mindwarp<\/strong>‘, starring Bruce Campbell, and the 1972 horror chiller ‘The Other<\/strong>‘.<\/p>\nTelevision<\/h5>\n
Just in time to gear up for each show’s return, Fox delivers the second season of ‘American Horror Story<\/strong>‘ (subtitled ‘Asylum’) and the eighth season of ‘Bones<\/strong>‘.<\/p>\nOn the animation side of things, Warner has the sixth season of ‘Robot Chicken<\/strong>‘ and Shout! Factory gives us the unwieldy-titled ‘Transformers Prime: Beast Hunters \u2013 Predacons Rising<\/strong>‘.<\/p>\n—<\/p>\n
Getting past the duds, there are actually some interesting titles in this week’s batch of discs. I’m definitely down for ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ and ‘Stalag 17’, and will put ‘I Married a Witch’ on my wish list for the next big Criterion sale. Having reviewed the previous Blu-ray of ‘The Exorcist’, I’m scheduled to take a look at the reissue of that as well.<\/p>\n
Will you buy anything this week?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s a battle of the bombs on Blu-ray this week, as two of the most critically and audience reviled films of the year come to home video. If we take a closer look, however, we might also find a few titles actually worth buying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":56986,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[140],"tags":[5976,3601,3716,67,6375,3891,1922,4858,666,6852,6432,5069,1448,6446,909,6851,680,920,6465,194,6854,6853,1111,6400,302,6332,3333],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56959"}],"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=56959"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57019,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56959\/revisions\/57019"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}