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.

Disc News Digest: MEANING OF LIFE 30th, More Deep Catalog, and Even More Disney

• Just announced: Universal is releasing a 30th Anniversary Edition of Monty Python's Meaning of Life on 8 October. It retains all previous extras and adds a new hour-long reunion special with all surviving Pythons, plus a new Sing-Along mode.

• Criterion's July slate includes:

• 9 July Kenji Mizoguchi's big international success The Life of Oharu, which stars legendary actress (who also worked with Ozu) Kinuyo Tanaka. The disc features a 2009 documentary about the star (The Travels of Kinuyo Tanaka), along with an audio essay and commentary over the opening of the movie. 
• 16 July a new edition of previous release The Lord of the Flies, complete with new extras and cover art.
• 23 July brings both a Blu-grade of Ang Lee's The Ice Storm and long-antiicpated title Babette's Feast, which includes new interviews wirth the director and lead actress, a 1995 documentary about the source novel's author, and more.
• 30 July another long-awaited and long-rumored title The Devil's Backbone takes spine #666. All previous DVD extras are retained, adding a 2010 intro to the movie and new interview material from by del Toro, along with a new interview with composer Sebastiaan Faber and new subtitles translated by del Toro himself.

• Well Go USA has sequel Tai Chi Hero on 2 July and powerful Korean gangster drama New World on 23 July.

• 20th Century Fox has another wave of vintage classics hitting Blu-ray throughout July, including Tyrone Power matador movie Blood and Sand (9th), The 300 Spartans (23rd), and a pair of Marilyn Monroe movies (Niagara and Bus Stop) and Elvis in Love Me Tender on 30 July.

• 2 July also brings a trio of great titles from Shout! Factory: The Producers Collectors Edition, Kentucky Fried Movie, and Tower Block, which had the unfortunate timing of being released with very close proximity to both The Raid and Dredd. 

• 2 July TV titles worth noting are Portlandia Season 3, the DVD-only North & South (the BBC one, with Patrick Stewart) and the astounding box set of The UP Series, collecting the over half century of work done across eight films

• 9 July brings a couple of more obscure releases: Taika Waititi's Boy from Kino, and Shout! Factory has 1989's Roy Scheider/Adam Baldwin-starring Cohen & Tate (an adaptation of O. Henry's Ranson of Red Chief, previously on MoD DVD from MGM).

• 16 July is extremely varied, with everything from Ralph Bakshi's Heavy Traffic and another entry in the Jackie Chan Collection (Battle Creek Brawl/City Hunter double feature) from Shout! Factory, just-announced discs for Sony's new Evil Dead movie (director/writer/cast commentary & featurettes) and WB's Bullet to the Head (with just a single, lonely featurette), a pair of Mario Bava Collection discs (Black Sabbath and Kidnapped) from Kino, and finally, at long last, a US edition of Michael Bassett's genuinely pulpy Solomon Kane, starring James Purefoy.

• The week of 23 July is one of the most interesting of the month, including another batch of Olive Films titles: Harlow (1965), Tennessee Williams adaptation Summer and Smoke, Once is Not Enough starring Kirk Douglas, and WUSA starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Music Box Films has The Silence , Magnet has Xan Cassavetes' Kiss of the Damned, and Drafthouse releases both Grace Land and Piéta. One of my favorite docs of last year, The Bitter Buddha, arrives on DVD only. Shout! also has a 4-DVD, 27th edition of their long-running Mystery Science Theater 3000 sets. Rounding things out is a two-DVD SE of a Korean baseball movie I'd never heard of called Glove. I really want to track that one down.

• 30 July is packed with more Shout!: George Romero's Knightriders and a Scream Factory release of John Carpenter's The Fog, and more Olive: Angel and the Bad Man, That Touch of Mink, and Bullfighter & The Lady. New releases include DC Animated's Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox, Filly Brown, and Francis Ford Coppola's Twixt. Kino looks to be kicking off a new auteir "collection" series for Erich von Stroheim with Foolish Wives.

• 30 July TV titles hit heavy with HBO's Banshee Season 1, and yet another sure-to-be-amazing pair from CBS: Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 4 and Star Trek: The Next Generation - Redemption, a "telefilm" cut of the Season 4 finale plus the concluding first episode of the following season. This worked well for The Best of Both Worlds, and I bet this will be interesting as well.

• Joining Oliver & Company on 6 August are Blu-rays of Disney's Robin Hood and The Sword in the Stone, as 40th and 50th Anniversary Editions. Both retain all previous extras and add new features in the form of an alternate opening (for S&tS) and a deleted sequence (for RH).

• 13 August brings both HBO's Girls Season 2 and Shout! Factory's the Luc Besson-produced The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec.

Disc News Digest collects recent, relevant, and upcoming Blu-ray and DVD release dates in one place rather than fill your feed with a ton of individual stories for individual discs.

Disc News Digest: More Disney, FUGITIVE 20th, Another TNG "Movie", Godard, Fuller, UK Imports

•Disney is further shrinking the number of its Animated Classics not on Blu-ray by releasing Oliver and Company on 6 August and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh on 27 August. No notable new extras were announced for either title. Here's hoping we finally get Black Cauldron in HD at some point.

•Warner Bros. has announced a Blu-ray double dip of 1993's The Fugitive, with no mention of whether this is a new transfer. It does include new extras (marked in bold) alongside the held-over original Blu-ray supplements:

• The Fugitive: Thrill of the Chase featuring Andrew Davis, Harrison Ford, Tommy Lee Jones and more
• Introduction by Andrew Davis and Harrison Ford
• Commentary by Andrew Davis and Tommy Lee Jones
• On the Run with the Fugitive Behind-the-Scenes Featurette
• Derailed: Anatomy of a Train Wreck Behind-the-Scenes Featurette
• “The Fugitive" [2000 WB Pilot]
• Theatrical Trailer

•CBS is putting out its second "movie cut" of a Star Trek: TNG season-ending cliffhanger with 30 July's Blu-ray of Star Trek: TNG "Redemption", the end of season 4 and beginning of season 5. I guess The Best of Both Worlds did well for them.

•Scream Factory has announced an August timeframe for a Blu-ray release of Q: The Winged Serpent. Expect quality and extras to match the already-impressive slate from Shout!Factory's newest sub-label.

•Twilight Time is releasing a limited run of 3000 Blu-ray copies of Brian DePalma's Body Double on 13 August.

•Olive Films has announced four more June Blu-ray releases, including two from Jean-Luc Godard (How is it Going? and Keep Your Right Up), and Sam Fuller's Shark!, starring Burt Reynolds.

Import Watch

•Sony UK has announced a Blu-ray of From Here to Eternity for 7 October. It is a Region-All coded disc. The US disc has not been announced, but its release may coincide with the UK release. Then again, we could be left waiting for months like we have for Fox's Cleopatra, which they got last year, or Sony's own Lawrence of Arabia, which was Region-All, just like Eternity will be. Import without worry, as whatever extras it has (none announced as of now) are likely to mirror this one, just as with Lawrence.

•The BFI has announced additions to their July-August-September slate, with the most exciting titles to me being the 19 August release of The Adventures of Prince Achmed and Rosselini's Voyage to Italy (which they translate as "Journey"). Equally exciting is the 15 July Blu-ray debut of John Cassavetes' The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, complete with two cuts of the movie on one disc. All titles listed in the Blu-ray.com news piece are expected to be Region B-locked, but keep an eye on them as more information hits Amazon.co.uk.

Disc News Digest collects recent, relevant, and upcoming Blu-ray and DVD release dates in one place rather than fill your feed with a ton of individual stories for individual discs.