News and Notes

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I really do have to stress that this fall / winter has and will be a very good season for Blu-Ray adopters. It's been a nice combination of new titles and studios dipping into their back-catalogs for some really impressive releases. Yes, every now and then you'll hit a hot mess like Fox's Predator double-dip (so digitally mucked with that most of the actors look like wax dolls), or a mixed bag like The Man with No Name Trilogy, but more often than not, we've been seeing some quality product since September. For example:

Forbidden Planet, Seven, The Twilight Zone, King Kong, The Exorcist, The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Alien Anthology, The Sound of Music, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Back to the Future, Three Kings, Psycho, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Metropolis, Apocalypse Now, Hamlet, The Evil Dead, The Mutiny on the Bounty, Spirits of the Dead, Delicatessen, and some bare-bones but worth checking out Troll 2, Return of the Living Dead, and Escape from New York.

Criterion started their Blu Rays strong, and have been getting better and better this year with titles like The Thin Red Line, Seven Samurai, House, The Darjeeling Limited, Breathless, Magician, Paths of Glory, Charade, 8 1/2, Black Orpheus, Crumb, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, Vivre Sa Vie, and the forthcoming Modern Times and The Night of the Hunter. Oh, and every film they've announced for January is simultaneously being released on DVD and Blu-Ray.

I haven't seen all of the BD's listed above, but I have sampled Apocalypse Now, Rocky Horror, Back to the Future, The Evil Dead, House, The Thin Red Line, and the massive Alien Anthology. The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Goonies, The Sound of Music, and a lot of Criterion titles are in the "to watch" pile, and I have to say that so far I've been very pleased with what I've seen. Blu-Ray has (fortunately) been embraced by many studios as more than a way to sell brand new releases (which also look very good, by the way), and the older titles have looked as good or better than some of the newer ones.

While it's important to note that nobody is paying me to say this, as the prices on HDTV's are dropping and Blu-Rays are getting cheaper (seriously, some of the TV series cost less than their DVD equivalents), I really do recommend making the move. While some bristle at the "perfect picture / perfect sound," it really is a huge difference when the disc is treated correctly by the studio.

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Finally, I have a general question to ask you, the readers: I've made it fairly clear that I have no interest in seeing Avatar (which is getting a - shocker - extended edition on DVD and Blu-Ray next week), but should I see it?

I don't mean should I see it on some kind of "is it worth seeing basis" - most of you that have seen it made it clear that Avatar is at least worth seeing in 3-D - but as the #1 Box Office ranked film of all time, do I have some obligation to watch Avatar if I want to seriously consider film criticism, study, or history? To qualify this, I refer you to the All Time Box Office numbers, world-wide, from IMDB (Please take a look and then join up in the next paragraph).

It's not a matter of the old "Box Office" validation that the Cap'n has joked about in the past, but more the fact that I've seen most of the movies in any of the "all time" box office lists. In fact, of the top 25, there are only 5 I haven't seen - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Shrek 2, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, and the number two and number one entries: Titanic and Avatar*.

Again, I must stress that I don't want to watch Avatar (or Titanic), and I probably won't; I've never been interested in either film, which several attribute to a personal dislike of James Cameron's body of work. On the other hand, as someone who has worked their way through many of the AFI lists, the Criterion Collection, seen most of the highest regarded films of all time - and has most certainly seen the other "juggernauts" of American cinema (not limited to The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Ben-Hur, and Casablanca) and tried to hit the "must see"'s of World Cinema, leaving out two of the most watched films of all time seems... strange.

So what do you think? In a theoretical sense, do I "owe" it to myself to see two films that clearly had a massive cultural impact, both in the U.S. and world-wide, particularly when I've seen most of the others, or is it much ado about nothing? Don't let your personal opinion of either film influence the answer too much (if possible), because I'm not looking for a "merit" based argument on the films themselves. This is purely an academic argument about the field I would like to enter.

* If you push it to the top 50, the number jumps to 13, and top 100 to 26.