I Am Love<\/a>‘ director Luca Guadagnino. The premise, about a famous musician recuperating from vocal surgery at an Italian villa, sounds like your typical European art film stuff, but Ralph Fiennes (discovering a gift for comedy in recent years) is said to be hilarious as Swinton’s companion. <\/p>\n‘The Darkness<\/strong>‘ \u2013 I totally get Radha Mitchell starring in a low-budget horror flick about a family tormented by the ghosts of dead Native Americans whose cultural artifacts they’ve unwittingly stolen, but I guess I assumed that Kevin Bacon was above this sort of thing.<\/p>\n‘The Meddler<\/strong>‘ \u2013 In between bouts of annoying the hell out of everyone on both ends of the spectrum with her outspoken blathering about politics, Susan Sarandon still occasionally makes a movie every now and again. In a comedy from ‘Seeking a Friend for the End of the World’ director Lorene Scafaria, the actress plays a pushy mother driving her neurotic daughter (Rose Byrne) batty. Despite generally favorable notices from critics, I’m a little saddened that Sarandon has hit the stage of her career where this is the only type of role anyone would consider her for anymore. The way Hollywood discards talented older actresses is a terrible shame.<\/p>\nCatalog Titles<\/h2>\n
Why it took this long for Brad Bird’s much-beloved animated adventure ‘The Iron Giant<\/strong>‘ to come to Blu-ray is inexplicable. To help make up for the delay, Warner offers the movie in either a standard Blu-ray or one of those shelf-hogging Ultimate Collector’s Edition<\/em> box sets packed with art cards, a figurine and other swag. Both options represent the new Director’s Cut of the movie that adds back two scenes that didn’t previously make the final cut. I’m usually wary of that kind of revisionism, but I’m told that the additions here feel organic, as if the movie should have always had them.<\/p>\nAs part of the franchise’s big birthday milestone, Paramount’s ‘Star Trek 50th Anniversary TV and Movie Collection<\/strong>‘ bundles all three seasons of ‘Star Trek: The Original Series’ with the six “original crew” movies into one big, expensive package. While I’m sure that most fans already own all of that, the selling points of the box set are a new documentary and (more importantly) the exclusive Blu-ray debut of the short-lived 1973-4 ‘Star Trek: The Animated Series’. I would hope that the latter will get its own standalone Blu-ray release eventually.<\/p>\nTying in with its new sequel, Lionsgate would also like to get some extra mileage out of the original ‘Now You See Me<\/strong>‘ with a Best Buy exclusive SteelBook.<\/p>\nCriterion rides the ‘Night Train to Munich<\/strong>‘ for director Carol Reed’s WWII espionage adventure thriller. <\/p>\nDigging back into the 1980s, Kino hires ‘My Bodyguard<\/strong>‘ to protect its Blu-ray catalog, while Shout! Factory makes a return stop to the ‘Road House<\/strong>‘ to drop off a new Collector’s Edition<\/em> reissue of Patrick Swayze’s guilty pleasure classic.<\/p>\nBefore Kiwi director Lee Tamahori made one of the worst James Bond movies (‘Die Another Day’), and before star Temuera Morrison begat a thousand clones in the ‘Star Wars’ prequels, the two actually started their careers with the highly acclaimed Maori drama ‘Once Were Warriors<\/strong>‘. Way back in the day, the film was released on the Laserdisc format by the Criterion Collection, but its video rights have moved around a lot since then and the Blu-ray comes from Film Movement.<\/p>\nTelevision<\/h2>\n
The FX network’s very successful true-crime drama ‘The People vs. O.J. Simpson<\/strong>‘ is technically the first season of an anthology series called ‘American Crime Story’. The show scored big ratings and lots of acclaim, but I couldn’t get more than a couple episodes in. I just wasn’t interested in reliving the Simpson trial, and I found John Travolta’s incredibly mannered, almost kabuki-like performance as attorney Robert Shapiro to be hugely distracting. <\/p>\nThe wildly uneven second season of ‘The Flash<\/strong>‘ was a major letdown. I hope the show can recover for its third.<\/p>\nAlso available are the eleventh season of ‘Supernatural<\/strong>‘, the nineteenth season of ‘South Park<\/strong>‘, a couple of classic ‘Peanuts<\/strong>‘ specials, and HBO’s telemovie adaptation of the stage play ‘All the Way<\/strong>‘, in which Bryan Cranston plays Lyndon Johnson.<\/p>\nMy $.02<\/h2>\n
The standard edition Blu-ray of ‘The Iron Giant’ will do nicely for me. I don’t need the oversized box set. ‘Night Train to Munich’ will also go on my wish list, while I’ll wait for the eventual standalone release of ‘Star Trek: The Animated Series’.<\/p>\n
What new discs will you put on your shelf this week?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Welcome to September. Did you have a nice holiday weekend? In terms of Blu-rays, the new month looks more promising than the last one. This week starts off strong with a long-awaited catalog title.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":79862,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[140],"tags":[8732,8872,67,6375,666,8988,9084,2478,8888,8887,6058,7814,194,9083,2921,454,1428,3127,4605,5054,8880],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79858"}],"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=79858"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79895,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79858\/revisions\/79895"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}