This week is definitely looking up.
First, the DVD picks:
- Alain Resnais: A Decade in Film: Includes “Life is a Bed of Roses,” “Love Unto Death,” “Melo” and “I Want To Go Home.”
- American Dad! Vol. 4
- Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad Complete: Basically this is the anime that started a trend of other rock-band based anime, leading to last season’s Detroit Metal City and this season’s K-On.
- Bizet’s Carmen
- Bride Wars
- British Cinema Volume 2: Includes “Our Girl Friday,” “Dentist In The Chair,” “Runaway Bus,” “Carry On Admiral” and “Time of His Life.” It’s a comedy themed collection.
- The Complete Frost/Nixon Interviews: It is what it says on the tin.
- Gankutsuou – The Count Of Monte Cristo Complete: Brick of Studio Gonzo’s Sci-Fi adaptation of Alexander Dumas’ novel.
- Hallelujah! – The Complete Collection
- Handel’s Tamerlano
- The Hit – Criterion Collection
- Hotel For Dogs: Yes, I really did review this. Short version: buy it only if your kids are dog lovers.
- In The Realm Of The Senses – Criterion Collection: Not even remotely close to family viewing. Also out on Blu-Ray.
- Inuyasha – Season 7 available with or without kitch. It’s the final season of Rumiko Takahashi’s last anime.
- JCVD: About Jean-Claude Van Damme
- Jetsons: The Movie
- Kanon – The Complete Series: Piro of Megatokyo cites the visual novel this anime is based on as the inspiration for the Sad Girl in Snow picture, which in turn lead to a bit of a meme-ish thing.
- Legally Blondes: Even after #2, they decided to make #3.
- Little Dorrit: I’ve never heard of it, but it seems to be selling really well, so I’ll point it out for those who have interest.
- The Looney, Looney, Looney Bugs Bunny Movie
- Mission: Impossible Season Six
- Project Blue Earth SOS
- Prokofiev’s War & Peace
- Pulling: The Complete First Season
- Rookies: Complete Season One
- Shaolin Against Wu-Tang – 10 Film Collection: 10 films on 1 disk equals bad dubs, poor transfers, and a mixture of original aspect ratio and cropped to 4:3 aspect ratio (which makes Shaw Scope look absolutely horrible)
- Spectacular Spider-Man Vol. 4: This wraps up the season one individual releases. When they put out a complete season release, I’ll pick it up.
- Spin City: Season Two
- Stephen King Presents: Kingdom Hospital – Complete Series
- The Third – The Girl With The Blue Eye Complete Collection
- UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie Seasons 1 & 2
- The Uninvited
- Verdi’s Aida: This performance features the late Luciano Pavarotti.
- Verdi’s Falstaff
- Wagner’s Der Kobold
- The Waltons: The Complete Ninth Season
- What Doesn’t Kill You
- X-Men: Volume 1: The first dozen or so episodes of the 1990s series.
- X-Men: Volume 2: The next dozen or so episodes of the 1990s series.
Now, the Blu-Ray picks:
- Bride Wars
- Da Vinci Code
- Da Vinci Code Gift Set
- Hotel for Dogs
- In The Realm of the Senses
- JCVD
- The Reader
- Saw
- Saw 2
- Star Trek: The Original Series Season One: I’m pretty happy with the HD DVD and DVD releases that already hit. The good thing about the Blu-Ray sets is that they include the modified and original versions, so you can choose whether or not to watch the original versions or the special effects updated versions.
- The Uninvited
- What Doesn’t Kill You
Finally, the picks of the week. AceCaseOR and Fiziko both select the Star Trek: The Original Series Season One remastered Blu-Ray.
I’m surprised it’s taken as long as it has for the X-Men cartoon to be released. I still remember sitting on the floor in front of the TV on Saturday mornings to watch this – it may actually be the last broadcast TV cartoon I went out of my way to watch, before I hit the dark years of teenagedom and tried to act cooler than I actually was.
As to the Star Trek, Tor.com has been doing a rewatch/recap of the original series for the last few weeks. They’ve made some interesting observations and pointed out a few things that I never picked up on – definitely good reading if you’re planning on grabbing this.
The X-Men cartoon from the 1990s had individual episode releases some years ago, along with the Fox Spider-Man cartoon from the era. Releases were suspended for years when Marvel took Buena Vista (Disney’s parent company) to court believing that they had underreported DVD sales, and therefore undercut their payments back to Marvel. After years of litigation, a settlement has been reached, though the terms of the settlement do not appear to be public. In any event, Buena Vista retained the license and releases are now continuing, so I assume the settlement was satisfactory to both parties.
Well, hopefully that means we have some Spider-Man collections coming too.
FYI, the Inuyaha release is actually the second half of the real season 6 – the season was so long that the US distributors decided to break it into two parts to they could sell two DVD sets thus make more profit than they would have otherwise. And, in addition, they don’t even get to the end of the story, there’s still a tonne left of the manga that will presumably never be made into an anime.
Also, it should be noted that they’re charging the same amount for this pack of 13 episodes as they normally do for a 26 episode pack.
Did anyone see all of Kingdom Hospital? My wife and I were hooked the first few episodes, then rapidly lost interest (as did most of the audience, I think).
Curious if anyone stuck through the series to the end.
Little Dorrit is the recent 14-part BBC adaptation of the Dickens novel.
See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1178522/
I normally don’t have much love for anime based on High school age kids anymore but Beck was surprisingly good. Probably one of the better anime series I saw last year. The amount of work done into dubbing the rock songs alone was quite impressive.