Blu-ray Consumer Guide: Just-Under-The Wire April 2012 Edition

I got star­ted on this edi­tion nice and early, which I thought would afford me the oppor­tun­ity to review a LOT of discs, which as you see, I did. But I believe I bit off more than I could com­fort­ably chew, what with hav­ing to put this aside for things like my life and actu­al pay­ing work and stuff. Hence, its appear­ing on the last day of April. You see. Let me put out the ques­tion: how many titles a giv­en month make this a worth­while fea­ture for you, the read­er? One reas­on I decided to take on so many was that I wanted a diverse selec­tion, but, you know, one does get bogged down. So I’m think­ing of hold­ing to a strict twenty if I wanna keep this up on a monthly basis. Your thoughts, as always, are wel­come. Thanks.

Equipment: Playstation 3, domest­ic discs, OPPO BDP 83, region-locked import discs, Panasonic Viera TC-P50S30 the dis­play, Pioneer Élite VSX 817 AV the amp, Disney WOW the cal­ib­ra­tion disc.

9 ½ Weeks (Warner)

I acquired this disc for sen­ti­ment­al reas­ons. I know that sounds weird, but…well, this isn’t really the place to explain. Just trust me. In any event, among many oth­er things it does offer a short course in the visu­al aes­thet­ics of a cer­tain, um, strain of slick ‘80s film­mak­ing. Director Adrian Lyne did a lot of  NYC loc­a­tion shoot­ing with long lenses, push­ing the zoom, and you get a par­tic­u­lar kind of grain and a slight almost out-of-register feel in the col­ors. Lyne also stacked up very dis­tin­guished sup­port­ing play­ers for his S&M dreck, so here’s the pal­lor of Julian Beck and the rather shock­ingly blotchy com­plex­ion of Christine Baranski, of all people. Then there’s the “emo­tion­al” light­ing; near the end there’s a shot in which one of Kim Basinger’s cheekbones is prac­tic­ally blown out while the oth­er is under a cav­ern of black. Peter Biziou, the lenser, was a fre­quent DP for Alan Parker around this time as well. The disc, as you may by now have inferred, repro­duces this tony high-budge sludge, which oft oblit­er­ates the line between visu­al “style” and tetchy fussi­ness, very well. All this and Joey Silvera’s first legit screen cred­it! No extras. —B+

All Quiet on the Western Front (Universal)

I have to admit I’d always under­rated and under­ap­pre­ci­ated this film’s visu­al qual­ity before. No more. One of the 100^th Anniversary restorations/preservations from Universal, this is really quite remark­able. Like see­ing the film for the first time, as they say. What it intro­duces is a whole oth­er world, in a sense; this backlot-created World War I Germany in pristine sil­ver. The over­head shot of the mud, stun­ning. Suddenly vis­ible is the influ­ence of Murnau, the affin­ity with Borzage’s Liliom (e.g. the uses of frames with­in frames). Milestone’s repu­ta­tion as a great emo­tion­al dir­ect­or stems in large part from this film; again, this Blu-ray tells us why he was a great visu­al dir­ect­or. A must. —A+

Baba Yaga (Blue Underground)

Ah, 1973; the hal­cy­on days of Eurotrash lying around in psy­che­del­ic­ally appoin­ted liv­ing rooms read­ing the Village Voice and diss­ing Godard,  in English-language overdub…Still, dir­ect­or Corrado Farina’s pic­ture is pretty weak tea, exploit­a­tion wise, and view­ers seek­ing hubba-hubba appeal in the disrobing-vintage-Hollywood-onetime-starlets depart­ment should be advised that  Carroll Baker doesn’t show much skin and most of the heavy lift­ing, nudity-wise, is done by Angela Covello, who is not inapt to the task. (Covello being naked will con­sti­tute a minor theme in this column, as you shall see.) Still, the movie as a whole is pretty amus­ing in its pre­sump­tion: there’s a lotta faux-Blow Up stuff with the pix­ie­ish pho­tog heroine played by fetch­ing Isabella de Funès, and an Une Femme Mariee pas­tiche in a love scene, etc. The Blu-ray rendi­tion from Blue Underground is strong, as is their stand­ard. This might render all the more notice­able the fact that Farina seemed inclined to throw a fog fil­ter or some oth­er dif­fus­ing device on the lens for every shot of Baker. —B+

Boeing Boeing (Olive)

Warning: The Coen Brothers might have been kid­ding when they cited this film as an influ­ence. It accrues a fair amount of ill=-will by mock­ing Thelma Ritter’s looks in the open­ing cred­its. There’s a cer­tain flush to everyone’s col­or that sug­gests the onscreen par­ti­cipants were drink­ing through the shoot, for which I would not blame them. It’s a pretty hand­some present­a­tion of this 1965 film, pos­sibly the first since Nutty Professor to fea­ture Jerry Lewis in a non-infantilized role. I don’t get why Olive didn’t go the extra yard and put it in 1.85 instead of full HD display-screen 1.78 but it’s not an overtly objec­tion­able dif­fer­ence. And the ways of Olive can be mis­terioso. —B

The Buccaneer (Olive)

Having little expect­a­tion of ever see­ing this goofy 1958 film—a rare dir­ect­ori­al effort from um, Anthony Quinn, who stepped in when father-in-law Cecil B. DeMille fell to ill to helm the remake of his own 1938 film (also out in stand­ard def from Olive)—again, I had even less expect­a­tion with respect to how it might look in Blu-ray. Hence, I can­not say that I am as dis­ap­poin­ted with this as was the DVD Beaver crew. Clean, good col­or, excel­lent early EG Marshall! For DeMille/Chuck Heston com­plet­ists only of course, but…. —B

Buck Privates (Universal)

The DNR applied to this, anoth­er in the Universal 100^th Anniversary series, does not con­trib­ute a hellishly unnat­ur­al sheen or make it look like a faux 3D present­a­tion or any such thing. It merely cuts down on grain, a lot. I can’t say in this case I object all that much. The visu­al integ­rity of every film is its own thing, of course, but I dare say that a “true” high-def present­a­tion of this movie might make it look a little, well, cheap. Because it was. Why NOT see Bud and Lou look beau­ti­ful, or some­thing like it, I say. There’s some great routines here, nice songs by the Andrews Sisters, and Shemp Howard. Low com­edy nev­er had such a refined pack­age. For that alone it war­rants an affec­tion­ate A+.

Casablanca (Warner)

Noticeably less shiny-bright than the pri­or Blu-ray, but WITHOUT  the cor­res­pond­ing down­turn of detail that you might expect from a less bright pic­ture. In face, a good deal MORE detail than the last one.  A won­der­ful nitrate sim­u­la­tion, maybe the best you’ll see on a tele­vi­sion dis­play. — A+

A Dangerous Method (Sony)

An excep­tion­ally strong image, from its dream-bright “Swiss” skies to its evoc­at­ive Viennese stud­ies, and a not unsur­pris­ingly very intel­li­gent Cronenberg com­ment­ary. If you’re a fan of this film, and it’s my opin­ion that one ought to be, this is desire­able.  —A

David Lean Directs Noël Coward (Criterion)

In her excel­lent essay on This Happy Breed, one of the four films in this box set, Farran Smith Nehme says that Lean and his col­lab­or­at­ors went for  “an almost washed-out look that emphas­izes the décor and envir­on­ment” of the plain dom­i­cile its char­ac­ters inhab­it, and fur­ther notes that “when bril­liant col­or does appear—flags at a vic­tory parade, the flowers on the women’s alarm­ing hats, the dresses at a Charleston dance—it comes as a blaze of pleas­ure.” Precisely. And it’s at these moments dur­ing the Blu-ray of Breed that the view­er is treated to how expert and painstak­ing the trans­fer to digit­al has been; in any oth­er video format the fast-waving mini­ature flags would have blurred and bled like crazy, and here they are rock-solid and def­in­ite and stun­ning. This goes for every oth­er film in the set; there’s anoth­er in col­or (the rav­ish­ing Blithe Spirit) and the two oth­ers, Brief Encounter and In Which We Serve, are abso­lute defin­i­tions of express­ive black-and-white. This set elo­quently argues that, pace Godard, David Lean “was” cinema as much as Nicholas Ray was, albeit with an entirely dif­fer­ent stress. But still. Essential, essen­tial, essen­tial. (And no, these movies ain’t badly writ­ten, either.) —A+

The Deer Hunter (Universal)

Since sev­er­al pur­vey­ors of what passes for arts writ­ing these days have done us all the favor of explain­ing (by both example and overt polem­ic) that cri­ti­cism is NOT the act of explor­ing and describ­ing a work of art and its func­tion, but rather merely a one-upping form of taste-mongering, with not much util­ity value bey­ond what a dog gets by sniff­ing anoth­er dog’s pos­teri­or, I’ll just come right out and say I’ve nev­er really liked this movie. Aw, I feel so much bet­ter, with my taste stub­bornly remain­ing my taste and all. Suffice it to say that the male dynam­ic artic­u­lated here is com­pletely ali­en to me (I CAN’T RELATE, in oth­er words), and for a Major Film On Important Themes I always felt it was a little on the sloppy side. (All that stock foot­age! The Godfather didn’t have all that stock foot­age! Oh, wait…) But hey, you know…it’s got some­thing, that’s for sure, even if I’m not entirely or even par­tially on its wavelength. The first hour really is pretty god­damn auda­cious wheth­er you “relate” or not. Very com­pel­ling. This is a pretty hand­some present­a­tion, to the extent that some­times I’m not sure what’s the DNR and what’s the  clas­sic  Vilmos Zsigmond diffusion/shimmer. When I can tell what’s the DNR, well, it  seems a little more evid­ent in the bright­er scenes than in the dark­er. I think rel­at­ive to the gestalt of the view­ing exper­i­ence, if I may be so pre­ten­tious, that the scrub­bing is judi­ciously applied. —A-

Four Flies on Grey Velvet (Shameless, region-free U.K. import)

If I believed in “The ‘Meh’ List,” or any such thing, this would be on it. I’ve nev­er been able to get into the movie, my sick Mimsy Farmer thing not­with­stand­ing, and this present­a­tion of it is largely admir­able if not hugely excit­ing. Of all the “good” Argento movies, this is my least favor­ite. But it’s a ver­sion good-looking enough that if I’m ever com­pelled to explore why I am not crazy about it, well, I’ll enjoy the delving. —B+

The French Connection (Fox, Best Buy exclusive)

After the débâcle of the personally-color-timed-by-Friedkin oddity of which we shall not speak again, a quiet reboot of the clas­sic 1971 polici­er arrives via some­thing Best Buy calls the Filmmaker’s Signature series, and here the dir­ect­or and Owen Roizman do it right. Which by the way does NOT mean slick­ing it up: grain haters are still not going to be pleased, the nightclub scene where Hackman first fin­gers LoBianco is still grainy as hell. Just not a snowed-out mess. The film’s finale quite con­vin­cingly feels like a pre­dic­tion of cer­tain scenes in Stalker, and what’s really strik­ing is how this really IS a kind of art film: it’s entirely phe­nomen­o­lo­gic­al, almost, which gives it a (false) under­cur­rent of amor­al­ity. But really, it’s all just beha­vi­or, no judg­ment, very dry, flat. And com­pletely engross­ing. (And the Don Ellis score is com­pletely “out,” as they used to say.) Now THIS is how it’s done. Whatever “it” is; there hasn’t been a film to even approx­im­ate what this one does since then.  —A+

The Geisha Boy (Olive)

Pace DVD Beaver, I found this very strong. Look, for instance,  at the pat­tern on Jerry Lewis’ jack­et in his intro­duc­tion scene, at the air­port.  There IS some fluc­tu­ation in the mater­i­al itself (the intro­duct­ory scene/gag of Sessue Hayakawa; unfor­tu­nate, but not fatal) but very clean oth­er­wise. Kind of a clas­sic of the sen­ti­ment­al Jerry, but not without great Tashlin touches and of course Suzanne Pleshette. Fans of Le Roi du Crazy (I’m one) ought to be pleased.—A

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Paramount)

Quite a pack­age. I think it’s worth the price just to hear Fincher coin the phrase “Fringe-line human” in the com­ment­ary. He seems like a per­fectly nice fel­low, have no idea where his rep comes from. Anyway, the disc is pre­dict­ably breath­tak­ing in qual­ity and pos­sibly too-comprehensive in extras.  —A+

Hugo (Paramount)

Very strong, not unex­pec­tedly. A good oppor­tun­ity to take in just how deeply nuts the col­or coördin­a­tion of the whole thing is, par­tic­u­larly with respect to the blues and grays. It’s still subtler than what Schrader did with American Gigolo/Hardcore/Mishima, but not so subtle that the com­par­is­on did not spring to mind.  I f you have the 3D gear, go for that ver­sion, which I assess here. —A+

It’s Only Money (Olive)

This is kind of my favor­ite Lewis/Tashlin pic­ture des­pite its being in black-and-white, which deprives Tashlin of one of his key tools. Although maybe that lack accounts for its strength, as the com­ic sur­real­ism here reaches near “Porky In Wackyland” pro­por­tions in com­pens­a­tion. The present­a­tion is very strong, show­ing NO noise and min­im­al dam­age. Not jaw­drop­ping stuff but hon­estly a bit stronger than what I saw at a rep screen­ing a few years back. Truly man­ic stuff with very little Sappy Jerry.  —A

The Last Temptation Of Christ (Criterion)

While the first Criterion standard-def disc was released, it was “fine,” as they say, but not as spe­cial as one felt maybe it ought to have been. This new Blu-ray IS all that. Utterly beau­ti­ful. Seeing it in this present­a­tion, with fresh eyes, it’s like a new film, and there’s so much to see IN it. This time around, for instance, for the first time I really felt its  Bressonian touches—the shots of hands, of ges­tures, of fig­ures walk­ing. The col­ors in this ver­sion , the  ever-so-slightly pink sand of the desert; amaz­ing. We can finally rev­el in this as one of  Scorsese’s very greatest films. A real bless­ing. —A+

 Legend (Universal)

“The lim­it­a­tions of the answer print are now even more appar­ent in high-definition”—Ridley Scott notes in an intro­duc­tion to the “Director’s Cut” on this Blu-ray, which fea­tures that and the the­at­ric­al cut, and which was released with little fan­fare that I could see. Which is too bad, because it’s a fas­cin­at­ing win­dow to an inter­est­ing film. And what he notes is true, and a shame: Scott’s pre­ferred sequence of Lucifer emer­ging from a mir­ror, about 1:16 in, is awe­some, much more elab­or­ate and Cocteau-inflected than in the the­at­ric­al cut, and it’s marred a bit by some answer-print blur­ri­ness. Damn. Skin tones are also bet­ter in the the­at­ric­al version…Tom  Cruise and Mia Sara being quite prop­erly peaches and cream in the final shot. —A+

Letter Never Sent (Criterion)

A sweet pre-I Am Cuba slice of the People’s Struggle (sort of) from Mikhail Kalatzov (“….and to the Soviet people this film is ded­ic­ated…”). Kalatzov loves his envir­on­ments, and a swampy Siberia gives him a lot to work with here.  The movie mixes typ­ic­ally gor­geous and unique Kalatozov imagery with typ­ic­ally sentimental/ideologically wacky (but Politburo-safe) con­tent. Some of you will just eat up the Soviet gloss on the only-girl-in-the-group-of-male-scientists dynam­ic, which sure as hell isn’t Hawksian. Beautiful trans­fer, inform­at­ive extras and an inform­at­ive book­let essay. A fun dis­cov­ery. —A+

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Sony)

Nicely grainy and atmo­spher­ic. Looks like the movie, which was win­ningly styl­ish in a decept­ive “not much to look at” way.  Good mul­tiple extras too; anoth­er lib­rary essen­tial. —A

A Night To Remember (Criterion)

Very crisp pic­ture, as crisp as the accents on some of the ship’s staff, at least as por­trayed in this very excel­lent telling of the Titanic dis­aster. A Criterion stal­wart, the Blu-ray on this one seems over­due; it’s entirely wel­come and won­der­ful. —A

Pal Joey (Twilight Time)

Clean, crisp  col­or pic­ture. Vintage George Sidney, the not-quite poor man’s Vincent Minnelli, always ener­get­ic and col­or­ful if a little light on nuance. Vintage Frank, the apex of his ring-a-ding-ding onscreen insouciance.  Great Rodgers and Hart  songs in snappy arrangements…AND Kim Novak, and Rita Hayworth. What more does a per­son need? An actu­ally GOOD adapt­a­tion of the stage piece, or some­thing true to John O’Hara? Come come now. —A

Phantom of the Opera (Image)

This, from which I expec­ted rather little, turned out to be a VERY pleas­ant sur­prise, present­ing a clean, vibrant image through­out. One is inclined to pooh-pooh this 1925 movie as a cheesy/creaky melo­drama dis­tin­guished by Lon Chaney’s performance/transformation, but in point of fact it romps along pretty briskly. And it IS a clas­sic story of a sort; I under­stand it inspired a pop­u­lar music­al theat­er piece, or some­thing. The tints are cred­ible, the Red Death sequence nif­tily. vivid, the vari­ous music scores from clas­sic to post-modern excel­lent and sound­ing excel­lent. —A

Rock-a-Bye Baby (Olive)

The best COLOR present­a­tion of the recent Olive Tashlin/Lewis pic­tures, which I sup­pose is at least par­tially attrib­ut­able to the VIstaVision dif­fer­ence. The Tashlin cheeki­ness is inspired in part by Sturges and had the way paved for it by Preminger’s The Moon Is Blue: “the white vir­gin of the Nile,” very funny. As is the con­ceit of Lewis as a TV repair­man (not for the first time), allow­ing for a lot of idiot-box lam­poon­ing bits, fea­tur­ing vir­tu­osos Jerry-pretending-to-be-on-television routines and fake movie titles like The Creature from the Lower Tar Pits. Tashlin vis­ion of sub­urb­an pas­tor­ale is also note­worthy, as is the line “don’t let him come over, he’ll do some­thing…” Yes, this devolves into the treac­li­est baby-and-Jerry-loving sen­ti­ment­al­ity on the books, but my uni­fied field the­ory of Lewis says you’ve got to take him whole or not at all. Connie Stevens looks so fresh here you barely register her as Connie Stevens, Jerry sings not once but twice, son Gary turns up and HE sings too, but not “This Diamond Ring,” alas. And the whole thing looks fab­ulous. —A

Scarlet Street (Kino/Lorber)

The second pan­el in the Fritz Lang/Edward G. Robinson/Joan Bennett Diptych of Sexual Masochism, and it’s a CORKER. The first, of course, was The Woman In The Window, made the year before this 1945 clas­sic, and those who (semi-spoiler alert!) thought Woman a bit of a cop-out in the dénoue­ment depart­ment get their own back, and change, here. Anyway, this looks quite good, while being hardly of  Casablanca grade. Put it this way: nev­er before on  home video have the implic­a­tions of Joan Bennett’s see-through rain­coat been made so thor­oughly mani­fest. What a tramp! And what a slob! Look at that kit­chen sink! And Dan Duryea, what a sleazeoid. This movie and the people in it are just RANCID! Jeepers! —A-

The Skin I Live In (Sony)

A super-strong, just look at the way the out­lined typeface on the title over­lays pop against the estab­lish­ing shots of over­ripe lux­ury. I think this is among Almodóvar’s oddest, angri­est works, and the cool­ness of the visu­al scheme makes the rage burn harder in the rumin­a­tion. —A

Swamp Water (Twilight Time)

This was a dif­fi­cult film for its dir­ect­or, Jean Renoir, who fled from France to Hollywood dur­ing the Second World War. This was the first film he made in the States, and giv­en the Okefenokee setting/location, one gath­ers he was going for some­thing more in the vein of Toni than Rules of the Game.  What he got that was his, and that remains in the film, is still open to ques­tion: while his remin­is­cences of the shoot and his troubles (“Here again we were in the king­dom of Père Ubu”) in his book My Life And My Films are very inter­est­ing and mov­ing, they’re not, you know, time-code spe­cif­ic. In any event, any pic­ture with Walters Huston and Brennan is likely to be of interest regard­less of the dir­ect­or, and the image here is very strong studio-grade black and white. Worthwhile. —A

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Universal)

DO NOT turn up the bright­ness on your dis­play! The sky is SUPPOSED to be that gray, all the time! —A

To Catch A Thief (Paramount)

More VistaVision in high-def digit­al, and holy cow, is it amaz­ing. I under­stand that there’s a con­tin­gent that insist that this is minor Hitchcock, but man, even if you con­sider your­self immune to its many die­get­ic and per­son­al charms (in which case I kind of feel bad for you), you have to rev­el in the Master rev­el­ing in his tech­nic­al mas­tery in the most deluxe of set­tings and the most deluxe of cel­lu­loid formats. Brilliant, in every damn sense of the word. —A+

 To Kill A Mockingbird (Universal)

Churls and stu­pid people (and the two cat­egor­ies aren’t neces­sar­ily mutu­ally exclus­ive) who dis­miss this film as weak lib­er­al gruel are the kind of people who listen to a film without ever really look­ing at it. So much of the del­ic­acy and dig­nity and poignancy and hor­ror of this piece is con­tained in the light and shad­ow of the frame. And that light and shad­ow gets a gor­geous present­a­tion here. Super beau­ti­ful. A great film by a great dir­ect­or. —A+

Tom And Jerry: The Golden Collection Volume One (Warner)

This is pretty awe­some in every respect that counts; the car­toons look gor­geous, they’re presen­ted whole and unex­pur­gated, the extras are enga­ging and schol­arly but not dry, and so on and so on. For my own pleas­ure it would help if I liked Tom and Jerry more, know what I’m say­ing? A Blu-ray set that expen­ded this much care on, say, the col­lec­ted works of Tex Avery, I would cer­tainly be all a‑drool for. A man can dream, or beg, or what have you. In the mean­time, I grade accord­ing to the stand­ard the pack­age achieves with not resort to my per­son­al slighted feel­ings. —A+

Virgin Witch (Redemption/Kino Lorber)

I’m pleased as punch that Kino Lorber is bring­ing big chunks of the psy­cho­tron­ic­ally adept Redemption fare to the U.S. on Blu-ray, and I’ve been kind of stuck try­ing to write about their Jean Rollin reis­sues, but I’ll say here that if you like that sort of thing you should just get them all, imme­di­ately. As for the non-Rollin stuff, well, I picked out this one to treat for a CG, and I’m sim­ul­tan­eously glad and sorry I did.  This laugh­ably oppor­tun­ist­ic 1972 hot-chicks-in-sorcery-trouble item is seedy and tech­nic­ally shoddy (the sound record­ing is par­tic­u­larly poor), badly acted, and  slackly dir­ec­ted (dig those bizarre unmo­tiv­ated dis­solves). Definitively unwhole­some through­out, it’s not really my par­tic­u­lar cup of squal­id, and the Blu-ray would seem to faith­fully cap­ture the film’s bright reds, skin tones have that flor­id flush, flat light­ing, and all the oth­er indi­vidu­al flawed fea­tures that enhance the for-trash-junkies-only feel of the enter­prise.  “The entire advert­ising industry is witch­craft bound.” Okay then. —B-

Torso (Blue Underground)

“Play with Eli Roth introduction/Play without Eli Roth intro­duc­tion,” says a par­tic­u­lar option on the top menu. I played the Roth intro so you don’t have to.  Eli talks about how great and influ­en­tial and dis­turb­ing this is, blah, blah, blah. “Una Produzione Carlo Ponti,”  announce the open­ing cred­its; go Carlo! The scen­ario of this has four young women lit­er­ally lock­ing them­selves in a villa in a bid to escape a seri­al killer, and you can guess how that turns out. Lead act­resses, inter­na­tion­al star­lets Suzy Kendall and Tina Aumont, once again del­eg­ate the sub­stan­tial nud­ity to lesser-known cost­ars, includ­ing, well what do you know, Angela Covello. The pic­ture is of a very good qual­ity, has that groovy European 1.66 aspect ratio, so no com­plaints, except that this is my least favor­ite Sergio Martino quasi-giallo of this era and I will con­tin­ue to pray for a Blue Underground Blu-ray of All The Colors Of The Dark, at least. —B+

War Horse (Dreamworks)

This Blu-ray present­a­tion is really exquis­ite, every shot a fant­ast­ic­ally detailed visu­al feast, remark­able. And it gave me a dif­fer­ent per­spect­ive on the film that I’m try­ing to work out, and hope to write about at length later. Two stray thoughts on that per­spect­ive; one, Spielberg really is an inter­est­ing adapter of oth­er mater­i­al in that he has an almost sub­lim­in­al respect to the emotional/thematic core of any giv­en piece, regard­less of where he overtly diverges from the ori­gin­al. Two: This movie is about movies almost as much, or maybe even more, than Hugo and The Artist are. In the mean­time, if you’re an admirer of this effort, the Blu-ray is an impress­ive continuation/iteration of it. —A+

Where Love Has Gone (Olive)

In which Betty Bette Davis, Susan Hayward, and Joey Heatherton reen­act Harold Robbins’ ver­sion of the Johnny Stompanoto case. Sounds like a John Waters wet dream, and it is, in spite of hav­ing been pro­duced by Joseph E. Levine rather than Ross Hunter. The movie’s juicy as hell in that way, but the present­a­tion here is incred­ibly blah, soft as clay really. Hence I can really only recom­mend it to Heatherton, Jack Jones, and Edward Dmytryk completists.—C-

Who’s Minding The Store (Olive)

This 1963 pic­ture rep­res­ents the weak­est of the Olive Jerry Lewis Blu-rays. Relative to the format, it’s blurry, soft, and offers little detail. It’s still watch­able,  and a pretty neat film. In case you’re won­der­ing where the Lewis “type­writer” bit was immor­tal­ized on cinema, it is here, dear read­er and/or Martin Short fan. As with Connie Stevens in Rock-a-Bye Baby, Jill St. John in ingénue mode here is almost unre­cog­niz­able.  —B-

Wings (Paramount)

The Top Gun of its day comes to Blu-ray just as a half-dozen of the smarter Twitterific Kidcritz™ are eager to tell you about their dis­cov­ery of William Wellman and how that Sarris book needs to watch its back. I know, I know, you’re grate­ful in SO MANY ways.  As for the actu­al object, well, this res­tor­a­tion is quite some­thing, very sump­tu­ous, the tint­ing on the machine-gun flare from the fight­er planes very…interesting. Interesting enough to nag me a little bit with respect to how faith­ful a recre­ation of the ori­gin­al this rep­res­ents. But my old-man-doubts/carping have, again, little to do with how this plays as a home view­ing exper­i­ence, which is spec­tac­u­larly. —A+

Wizards (Fox)

Quentin Tarantino is quoted as call­ing this 1977 Ralph Bakshi dream pro­ject a “cross between The Hobbit, ‘The 2000 Year Old Man’ and Howard the Duck.” You know how some­times a film wants to be a cer­tain thing, and you want it to be that thing too, so in spite of its short­com­ings you sort of men­tally fill in the blanks and make it that thing for your­self? I think that’s what’s going on in that quote. Which is not to say that anim­ated myth­o­logy pisstake/tribute Wizards is bad, or badly botched. It’s just that its reach sure does exceed its grasp wheth­er you’re root­ing for it or not. I root for it, and find its designs and char­ac­ters kind of trippy, and its ren­der­ing in this col­lect­ible Blu-ray abso­lutely first-rate. —A