Film
Finding “Ol’ Blu-eyes” on Blu-ray
Frank Sinatra is best known as a singer, but appeared in a number of movie musicals and proved himself as a serious actor in acclaimed films like “From Here to Eternity” (1953), “The Man with the Golden Arm” (1955), and “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962).
Burton and Depp Lurk in the Shadows
The eighth collaboration between Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, “Dark Shadows” ranks much closer in corporatized sheen to “Alice in Wonderland” than the exuberant labor of love “Ed Wood.” With its massive budget and gorgeous production design directly at odds with the legendary thrift and grind of the 1,225 episodes of Dan Curtis’s 1966-1971 daytime soap opera, “Dark Shadows” operates more like a parody or burlesque than a reverent homage. Burton, who has been accused more than once in recent years of straying from the intensity and conviction of his most personal projects to deliver lukewarm adaptations of established properties, is running on Gothic autopilot.
Classic Hollywood Classical History on Blu-ray
Two massive 1960s epic film recreations of ancient history came out on Blu-ray in the past year, but currently can only be bought from Europe. Luckily the better of the two not only has magnificent picture quality but is also all-region compatible, while the slightly lesser film has a substantially lower-quality transfer and is locked to Region B, requiring a multi-region Blu-ray player. The enormous budgets of both films and their subsequent box office disappointments had disastrous effects on their studios.
Distressing Damsels: Stillman’s Latest Doesn’t Measure Up to ‘Metropolitan’
Whit Stillman’s feature debut “Metropolitan,” which received an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay, is an object of love and desire for a cultish collection of cinephiles who came of age in the early 1990s. Many of those fans, having waited fourteen years (the date of “The Last Days of Disco”) for new Stillman, may be slightly let down by “Damsels in Distress,” a comedy so willfully detached from dreary reality that its attitude, manner, and appearance resemble a nostalgia-burnished relic from the New Frontier.
Three Memorable Art Films Available From Britain
Three major British video distributors have aggressively devoted themselves to “art house” titles both obscure and well-known, often releasing them on region-free Blu-ray editions that can easily be imported (often at the same or lower prices than new Criterion or Kino discs).
‘The Five-Year Engagement’
The story of chef Tom (Jason Segel) and academic Violet (Emily Blunt), plays out in “The Five-Year Engagement” with a mixture of novelty and familiarity akin to the plots of countless romantic comedies produced since at least the advent of synchronous sound.
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