Disc News Digest: 2014-03-21

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April 1

Fargo is reissued on Blu-ray with a newly-remastered transfer and needlepoint cover art.

May 6

Sony is releasing four post-1990 Godzilla double feature Blu-rays just in time for Garth Edwards's revival of the franchise. Each movie is on its own Blu-ray disc. All movies include their original trailers, with the only other extras being a featurette on Tokyo S.O.S. and a behind-the-scenes featurette on Final Wars. The movies as they're paired:

• Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991) + Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle for Earth (1992)
• Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II (1993) + Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla (1994)
• Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995) + Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (2000)
• Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003) + Godzilla: Final Wars (2004)

May 13

Special ID, starring the incomparable Donnie Yen as a deep-cover cop on the inside of a gang. Wait until you see what he does with the chain wallet you see on the poster.

Spike Jonze's Her. Blu-ray featurettes include all of the following (DVD only has the boldface one):

• The Untitled Rick Howard Project
• How Do You Share Your Life with Somebody
• Her: Love in the Modern Age

Orange is the New Black: Season 1 comes to 3-disc Blu-ray and 4-disc DVD with the following features:

• “New Kid on the Cell Block” featurette
• “Mother Hen: Red Runs the Coup” featurette
• “It’s Tribal” featurette
• “Prison Rules” featurette
• Gag Reel
• Episode Commentary “I Wasn't Ready” with Producers Jenji Kohan, Tara Herrmann and Mark Burley
• Episode Commentary “Can't Fix Crazy” with Producers Jenji Kohan, Tara Herrmann and Mark Burley

June 10

The Spike Lee Joint Collection (Volumes 1 & 2) drop on Blu-ray. Volume 1 includes The 25th Hour and He Got Game. Volume 2 includes Summer of Sam and Miracle at St. Anna. According to the studio, each movie is on its own separate disc.

All four movies retain all previous DVD extras and add newly-recorded commentary tracks with Spike Lee and a cohort as follows:

• The 25th Hour: Spike Lee and actor Edward Norton
• He Got Game: Spike Lee and actor Ray Allen
• Summer of Sam: Spike Lee and actor John Leguizamo
• Miracle at St. Anna's: Spike Lee and screenwriter James McBride

March-April

Fox Cinema Archives is releasing another wave after wave of MOD DVD oldies starting this week. They star everyone from Cesar Romero to Linda Darnell (playing a version of herself in Star Dust) to Spencer Tracy to Adam West to Natalie Wood:

March 18

• Sodom and Gomorrah (1962)
• Esther and the King (1960)
• Dante’s Inferno (1935)

March 25

• Cardinal Richelieu (1935)
• I’d Climb The Highest Mountain (1951)

April 1

• The Gay Deception (1935)
• Bachelor Flat (1961)
• The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker (1971)

April 8

• The Pleasure Seekers (1964)
• Footlight Serenade (1942)

April 15

• Marry The Boss’s Daughter (1941)
• Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1948)
• That Other Woman (1942)

April 22

• Good Morning, Miss Dove (1955)
• Star Dust (1940)
• Decline and Fall of A Bird Watcher (1968)

April 25

• Kentucky (1938)
• Forever Amber (1947)

Disc News Digest compiles chunks of disc announcements, including relevant feature and version comparison information for the discerning collector.

After Downton (Frame 177)

Elizabeth McGovern in a Depression-era picture these days reads as Lady Cora from Downton Abbey having died and been reincarnated as a lady who is more…liberated. The King of the Hill Blu-ray from Criterion (which brings the movie back into print) checks all the boxes.

A review and big re-edit/re-posting of a Soderberghopolis article are forthcoming.

Screen Time #55: Recommended Reading & Viewing

Screen Time #55 begins a long-in-the-planning series of interviews with the people behind The Criterion Collection. Susan Arosteguy and her colleagues do amazing preservation, restoration, and appreciation work, and it shows in their beautiful special edition releases. In particular, Susan's eye as a designer results in a widely-varied array of striking aesthetics in her releases.

Her latest Wes Anderson special edition, for Fantastic Mr. Fox, arrives in a Criterion Blu-ray/DVD Dual Format Edition tomorrow (18 February 2014).

Subscribe to the Electric Shadow Channel (iTunes/RSS)
Subscribe to the ESN Master Feed (iTunes/RSS).

Kirk Lawrence, Titanium Justice, and "The Feve" (Frames 169-174)

One of my best friends, whom I met in college, introduced me to a ridiculous amount of things that I now dearly love, from Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension to the majority of John Carpenter's filmography. At one stage, Kirk Lawrence and his roommates called their rental house "Chez DeLorean". Kirk had some of the absolute best taste of any geek or nerd I've known. At one point, he worked in a record store, surrounded by the media he worshipped.

My now-wife (then-girlfriend) and I dropped in to his Halloween party one of the last years we lived in Tallahassee. I was dressed as Ed Wood, she as an Alfred Hitchcock Double feature (The Birds and Psycho). Wearing a 60's-style business outfit, she had a plastic knife (partially embedded) glued into her shirt on one side, and a black plastic bird (wings spread wide) on the other.

Kirk was dressed as RoboCop. He and his roommates made a labyrinth stretching from their garage into their backyard. It was great. He seemed a little worn out. Later in the night, he just kept vomiting and his head was killing him in a way not related to alcohol consumption. He had a brain tumor that had its tentacles in him like an angry monster from a Lovecraft story.

They shaved his hair off and cut his head open to take out what they could. They sealed him back up with a titanium plate on the inside. All of his friends cheered this as a silver lining: Kirk had become a Robocop-like icon of justice and good. A few of us collectively dubbed him reborn as Titanium Justice.

Back then, MySpace and LiveJournal was where people "hung out" online, with Facebook on the ascendance. We had a sort of support group of friends unofficially knit together. We'd buy him DVDs when he was in the hospital,  One day, I put together a LiveJournal Group called Titanium Justice. The icon was the Robocop helmet photoshopped over his face.

Many cycles of hardcore treatment later, the brain cancer finally took him. Ever since, I've seen things like Watchmen and many others he would have wanted to see, and thought "I wish he could have seen…", and it goes the same way with rewatching favorites (Robocop especially), Blu-rays, and restorations.

One of my all-time favorite disc shops is Vinyl Fever, the iconic, now-closed shop Kirk worked at down in Tallahassee. Tallahasseans in the know called it "The Feve".

Knowing Kirk is the reason I'm as deeply into movies as I am. He's also most of the reason I spend more money than I probably should at used DVD/record stores. He taught me that discovery and presentation quality could be uniting, communal experiences in the way some people participate in their religions.

I miss "the good ol' days" not just because I miss him and because nostalgia is a human "thing", but because modern society has lost a lot of the joy in in-person, communal experiences that get to live within themselves in favor of constant broadcast and attention-seeking. I've changed the way I share and participate in (anti-) social media and my private life quite a bit over the last year. A lot of that has come from reflecting on friends I've lost to mortality, including Kirk, my brother, one of my mentors, and various others.

I've also doubled down on living up to a piece of North Florida resident George "P Funk" Clinton's wisdom that Kirk pulled out of his head one day:

"Give the people what they want, when they wants it…and they wants it all the time"

The new RoboCop transfer from a 4K remaster looks astonishingly good and is worth a reasonable price (like the $8 it cost its week of release). I'll post a screen grab comparison to the previous release soon.

If you really love RoboCop, note that the OOP Criterion DVD extras are all ported to the Blu-rays with the exception of the Criterion commentary. The Fox/MGM commentary features the same participants as the Criterion, but is a different recording entirely.

ALL HAIL THE KING Marvel One-Shot: Advance Clip

You need to have seen Iron Man 3 before watching this clip.

On the upcoming Thor: The Dark World Blu-ray, word has it that this short will reveal something hiding in the shadows. In public interviews, it's been teased that the Mandarin's Ten Rings organization is real, and very unhappy with one person in particular.

Thor: The Dark World hits Blu-ray on February 4th in the US.

This Year: Complete Batman '66 TV Series on…Blu-ray?

In addition to this tweet from Conan O'Brien, I've reached out for confirmation regarding Blu-ray or DVD format ("no comment"), uncut/unedited ("no comment"), and new supplemental features ("no comment").

What I was told, that "everyone is going to be very happy", makes me comfortable placing a heavy bet that it will have been remastered from film source for Blu-ray, as the episodes originally aired (edited down previously for syndication), and with a boatload of extras. This is how WB can kick off their Batman 75th Anniversary Year in style.

Next on my wish list is giving Bill Finger long-overdue co-creator credit on the character and universe.

The reason this has taken so long is a longtime dispute between FOX (who own the show), and Warner Bros (who own the characters and overall license). I heard rumbling last summer that the two sides had finally settled on a split where one side would get toy licensing and the other home video and streaming rights, but San Diego Comic Con (which had Batman '66-branded bags yet again) came and went with no official announcement.

My baseless speculation upon prior rumor is that FOX somehow will benefit from SVOD/streaming rights, having relinquished physical media release and licensed product rights to WB. If FOX has good lawyers, they may still have some sort of interest or stake in the backend of both, but only lawyers and file clerks will ever know for sure.

Screen Time 53: I <3 LaserDisc

On the latest Screen Time, I'm joined by superstar Blu-ray/DVD producers Charles de Lauzirika, Robert Meyer Burnett, and Brian Ward to discuss the world of special editions and supplements, the inevitable decline of physical media, and the future of home video presentation. We take a moment to touch on 4K/UHD and what it means for the next few years.

We also get a couple of exclusive tidbits: The X-Files is being remastered for both 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios, and Shout! Factory's Pee-Wee's Playhouse set will not only be done before the holidays in 2014, but in all likelihood, much sooner.

In a bit of a new development, much of this WatchList is comprised of supplemental documentaries available on various Blu-rays, DVDs, and iTunes Extras packages.

Wreckage and Rage: The Making of Alien 3

As recounted by Charlie on the show, this doc has had more than one life, and took years to see the light of day in its original cut, resulting in Charlie initially having himself credited as Frederick Garvin, as in Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute. The complete and final version of this is included on the Alien Anthology Blu-ray box set.

Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner

Another great piece by Charlie, this truly completes the Final Cut version of the movie, and is thankfully included as part of the iTunes Extras download for those who've moved away from discs already.

Gladiator (3-disc Extended Edition DVD)

Charlie related how they hid an easter egg in this specific release teasing a Gladiator sequel that has still yet to come to fruition.

Brazil (Criterion Collection) - Docs and "Love Conquers All" version
The Last Temptation of Christ (Criterion Collection) - Martin Scorsese's Video Journal

Charlie cited these two as among his favorite Criterion releases, due to the incredible insight into the struggle to make both of these masterpieces.

Time Bandits (Criterion Collection)
The Seven Samurai (Criterion Collection)
The Rock (Criterion Collection)

Brian is particularly fond of these: the first for its infinite re-watchability, the second for the outstanding docs included, and the last in particular for the memorable Ed Harris outtakes that give a look behind the curtain.

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Criterion Collection)

Rob really loved being blindsided by the feature-length doc on the director, whom he was completely unaware of until watching this set.

"Missing Discs" longed for by the panel include Tuff Turf, Quick Change, Liquid Sky, Batman (1966 series), and did I mention Tuff Turf?

THE GRANDMASTER Blu-ray: US/International Cut Only

A freshly arrived press release confirms that the re-dated US Blu-ray for Wong Kar-wai's The Grandmaster does not include the longer Hong Kong cut. In an age of declining physical media purchasing, I think this is a big mistake (as usual with Asian releases) on the Weinstein Company's part.

...special features include THE GRANDMASTER: From Ip Man to Bruce Lee, A Conversation with Shannon Lee (Daughter of Bruce Lee), THE GRANDMASTER: According to RZA and Behind the Scenes footage.

Those extras don't make me feel like I'm missing anything by having imported the Hong Kong disc. If they send me a copy, I'll cover it here, but I can't convince myself to shell out for this one.

I prefer the longer version by a wide margin, but according to a conversation I had with Wong at San Diego Comic-Con in 2013, the US re-edit was done with his direct involvement, and he likes it. Contrary to the alarmism of others, I like that there are two cuts the director is happy with, since it's the musical equivalent of a remix.

Wolverine monogatari (#167 & #168)

James Mangold's The Wolverine was said to draw a great deal of inspiration from ten films, including Ozu's Floating Weeds (a remake of the director's earlier silent classic). Mangold's camera never goes static like that of Ozu, far from it. His shot composition instead does a beautiful job of evoking Ozu's depth of field, where the very architecture of Japanese buildings dictates the geometry of the camera angle and position. The opening shot (above) is evocative of many landscape shots throughout Ozu's color films. Including this post, you'll see more from my chronological retrospective Discovering Ozu this week.

Mangold's commentary on The Wolverine, and the longer cut of the movie itself, improve on what I already considered the best X-Men movie in the series thus far. That the extended cut and commentary are only available on the most deluxe version of the movie doesn't bother me.

That there's a retailer exclusive, half-hour-long featurette doesn't bother me too much, since there's only one retailer exclusive extra. What does bother me is that you can only watch it through Target's flavor of UltraViolet storefront. It's more a retrospective of the X-Men series thus far than anything to do with this movie, so it isn't a huge loss.

Fievel, Hendersons, Coens, SOMEWHERE IN TIME on Blu March 2014

The following catalog titles are all getting Blu-ray releases from Universal Studios Home Entertainment on 4 March 2014. According to the info provided by USHE, no new special features are being added to any of them. I've noted in boldface the ones I think are the most noteworthy, including a long-desired (by me) Coen Brothers movie, my wife's favorite childhood movie, one of Don Bluth's greatest triumphs, and one of the most beguiling modern romances committed to the screen.

• An American Tail
• Big Fat Liar
• Harry and the Hendersons
• A Simple Wish
• Far and Away
• Fried Green Tomatoes
• Intolerable Cruelty
• Somewhere in Time

Criterion Collected: Martin Scorsese's WORLD CINEMA PROJECT for $65

I try to not flood this feed with "DEALS EXTRA! LOWEST PRICE EVER (UNTIL NEXT WEEK)!" sorts of posts, but this case is an important exception. This week sees the release of Criterion's other big end-of-year boxed set release: the six-film Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project.

Amazon is selling it for $65 at the moment, and there's no way of knowing when the price will suddenly skyrocket. I hope that a sales success with this installment means that we see subsequent editions down the line.

For just over $10 per movie, you get new digital restorations, introductions to all the films by Scorsese himself, interviews with filmmakers, a visual essay, and more, including booklet essays by some of the sharpest critics in the world, including my friendly electronic acquaintance Bilge Ebiri among other experts in the cinema of different regions.

A rundown of the included films, from Criterion's site:

Touki bouki (Senegal, 1973)
With a stunning mix of the surreal and the naturalistic, Djibril Diop Mambéty paints a vivid, fractured portrait of Senegal in the early 1970s.

Redes (Mexico, 1936)
In this vivid, documentary-like dramatization of the daily grind of men struggling to make a living by fishing on the Gulf of Mexico (mostly played by real- life fishermen), one worker’s terrible loss instigates a political awakening among him and his fellow laborers.

A River Called Titas (India & Bangladesh, 1973)
The Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s stunningly beautiful, elegiac saga concerns the tumultuous lives of people in fishing villages along the banks of the Titas River in pre-Partition East Bengal.

Dry Summer (Turkey, 1964)
Metin Erksan’s wallop of a melodrama follows the machinations of an unrepentantly selfish tobacco farmer who builds a dam to prevent water from flowing downhill to his neighbors’ crops.

Trances (Morocco, 1981)
The beloved Moroccan band Nass El Ghiwane is the dynamic subject of this captivating musical documentary.

The Housemaid (South Korea, 1960)
A torrent of sexual obsession, revenge, and betrayal is unleashed under one roof in this venomous melodrama from South Korean master Kim Ki-young.

PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE from Scream Factory, Summer 2014

This is biggest news in catalog Blu-ray bringing something long-awaited back into print in the USA. The only way to get Phantom of the Paradise on Blu-ray (or at all, for that matter) has been an all-region French import that I insist could look better and include better extras. Scream Factory will undoubtedly knock it out of the park, based on their amazing track record.

Brian DePalma's Phantom of the Paradise is a favorite film of not only fussy film writers like myself, but brilliant filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro, who spoke to me about it briefly on Screen Time #18 (Subscribe: iTunes/RSS). The brief Phantom bit comes while discussing Phantom star Paul Williams' work on the upcoming Pan's Labyrinth stage musical.

Screen Time #46: How We Get Kryptonite

I'm joined this week by Badass Digest's Devin Faraci, USA Today's Brian Truitt, and DVD/Blu-ray producer Robert Meyer Burnett to discuss the death of Paul Walker, the future of Fast & Furious, the casting of Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, the growing slates full of comic book blockbusters coming from major studios, back channel chatter about X-Men: Days of Future Past, and where (or if) we will hit a saturation point. Are Avengers-scale blockbusters the next bubble in filmmaking?

At the end, we get some nice dirt from Rob Burnett about the work he's been doing on the Star Trek Blu-rays, both The Next Generation and Enterprise.

Horse Trading (#166)

There was a time when courting was quite transactional. Giant is one of my favorite restorations of the year. I'm finally chewing through the rest of the James Dean Collection chocolate box this long holiday weekend.

BREAKING BAD Barrel Includes All Retailer Exclusives

This is tremendously refreshing, partly as a result of the series creator shilling for his own product, but mostly because this is a truly definitive "ultimate" set. Retailer exclusives bit hits at about 5:20 mark.

I Don't Know When, I Don't Like How (#160-163)

The first movie I saw in a movie theatre saw a major digital restoration…but the final product has a noticeable, major editing mistake during "Part of That World" of all things (along with a couple other places). Make sure you get a replacement disc through Disney's program that they rather quietly and begrudgingly issued. There are no copies currently available that aren't screwed up.

I went through the process today. Here's a shortcut and a quick rundown of what it was like and what to expect (get ready to be angry):

1. Start by calling: 800-723-4763 (U.S.), 888-877-2843 (Canada)
2. select these menu options in this order: 1 then 5 then 6
3. they'll get some info from the disc packaging and discs themselves from you and ask for a phone number and mailing address
4. they'll mail you two things, a "Consumer Form" and a return label
5. fill out the form when it arrives and put only the discs into something suitable for shipping (keep the case), slapping the label they provided on, and mail
6. wait 4-6 weeks (as of this writing in mid-November 2013) for your replacement discs

color looks muted here as compared to the first frame above, but that's how it's supposed to look

I was on the phone for a total of about nine minutes, with basically no wait time other than menu-hunting. They asked for an email address (which you don't have to give them), and promptly asked if they could use mine to contact me for future offers (which is why I gave them a dummy email).

The thing most people would be galled by was when at the end of the call, I was told about the upcoming Blu-ray release of Mary Poppins, which they could "take a pre-order for right here over the phone". I'm sure this is a compulsory part of the call flow forced on their phone reps, but it's disgusting to tell someone that the product they paid $25+ for retail (mine was a review copy) will be out of their hands for at least a month, and in the same breath ask them to trust you with more money for a product that could be screwed up in the same way.

Granted, mine is a review copy provided by the studio and I'm a grown man, but to think that people with kids could be without a proper corrected copy until after the holidays at this point is shameful.

I mean seriously…they've got gadgets and gizmos a-plenty. Whozits and whatsits galore.

I guess what I'm saying is…I want more (in terms of their caring about their customers).

I'll update as The Process continues. This mess aside, the disc looked and sounded really great. I hope corrected copies actually get put on store shelves at some point.

The Cure for Love (#159)

I prefer Chaplin to Lloyd and Keaton, and I think at least part of it is due to my not thinking much of the latter two's use of black people in stereotyped or buffoonish caricatures, where Chaplin never did. White people will look at me funny when I say something like that, usually responding with "not like you're black", though it turns out I am, in part. I'm also part Chinese and part Latino on top of being half-white. I don't hold the racial mores people grew up with against them, but I do award extra credit for being ahead of one's time.

Whatever Chaplin's other indiscretions or flaws were in life, at least he was beyond progressive on race, and that's something. I like very much that biographer Jeffrey Vance makes a particular point of talking about this on the Criterion commentary for City Lights. I may be teetering back toward calling it my favorite Chaplin, over Modern Times.

Steel Resolve (#158)

I re-watched Man of Steel with my wife last night. It's a movie that I tried to defend and found myself disliking more as I talked about it on The Incomparable. I should have been a bit more forthright in my stance on a few things. I've been proven quite right since we recorded in June, in that Man of Steel was literally the foundation for expanding their DC Cinematic Universe and Goyer has publicly alluded to exactly the Lex Luthor framing I guessed. I would still defend the character choices Kal-El makes, but I'm more emboldened that the destruction porn was overboard.

I've also examined the respective retailer exclusive extras available (from Target and Walmart) in the US, just as I did Star Trek Into Darkness. I'm angry again, too. "Disappointed" may be a better choice of words. Guess what I'm posting about either later tonight or in the morning...

Return to Soderberghopolis

Criterion is not only returning Soderbergh's King of the Hill to print on home video in February 2014, but they're also including his The Underneath in the same package. I knew it was only a matter of time before we got KOTH, but I'm more grateful to see them having convinced Soderbergh to do an interview about his film that he (allegedly) dislikes the most.

Regarding The Underneath as I wrote about it in the third numbered installment of Soderberghopolis:

"I don’t see the complete clusterfuck he apparently does. I’ve had personal artistic catastrophes others have seen as successes, so I get it. I just don’t agree that it sucks. Imperfect work from a great director is better than what hacks can do on their best days with a papal blessing. I’ll concede that it isn't drenched in Soderbergh's cinematic DNA, but it couldn't have been directed by just anyone. The cinematographic flourishes and this first pass at a non-linear narrative are distinctly Soderbergh."

My "Soderberghopolis" series stalled out once I hit the point I needed to re-watch his two TV series from the early/mid-aughts. Booking time to not just scrub through (as I have with some of the movies) ground it to a halt.

It's finally restarting soon, and I may push that forward even sooner with this tremendously happy news.

I hope this means that not only we'll see the Kafka "Midnight Cut" next year, but maybe a Blu-ray of Schizopolis and at long, long last…The Limey.

I wonder if Extension765 will do a "Perennial Security" t-shirt...

Small Warrior Need Father (#157)

I finally cracked open Paramount's recent restored and remastered Blu-ray of Hondo a couple of nights ago when my wife came across it on the over-the-air MOVIES network. The SD, stretched and distorted picture on the channel was like watching a third-generation VHS copy compared to the rich, bright, crisp colors and details of the Blu-ray.

Watching the extras, my wife said "I would pay to go see this in 3D. Why didn't they remaster it in 3D?". I told her, "because, like when this movie came out, 3D is dying again."