First, the DVD picks:
- Air America
- Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Season Four
- Angels and Demons: Gift Set with Bookends
- Angels and Demons (2 Disc Extended Edition)
- Angels and Demons (Single Disc Theatrical Edition)
- Bamboo Blade, Part 1: Series about a girl’s kendo team.
- The Best of Spike Jones
- Beverly Hills 90210: Season Eight
- Blade of the Immortal Vol. 2
- Buddies 4-Pack: Includes “Air Buddies,” “Snow Buddies,” “Space Buddies” and “Santa Buddies.”
- Dorm Life: Semester One: Amazon.com Exclusive
- Four Christmases
- Funny People (Unrated 2 Disc Edition)
- Funny People (Single Disc Edition)
- The Golden Age of Television (Criterion Collection)
- Gomorrah (Criterion Collection)
- Hogan’s Heroes: Komplete Kommandant’s Kollection
- Ichi 1: Alex: The prequel to Ichi the Killer, with Takeshi Miike (the director of Ichi the Killer) not being involved at all.
- Ikki Tousen Dragon Destiny: Alex: Fan-service heavy action series that takes Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and moves it to an alternate present, where instead of 3 kingdoms fighting over China, it’s the gangs of 3 high schools fighting over territory. Oh, and all the proxies for major characters in Romance of the 3 Kingdoms are gender-switched.
- Imagine That
- The Jerry Lewis Show Collection
- Kobe Doin’ Work: A Spike Lee Joint
- Laredo – The Complete Series
- Law and Order: Criminal Intent Season Four
- Life on Mars: Series 2 (UK edition)
- Melrose Place: Season Five, Vol. 2
- Mondovino: The Complete Series
- Nabari no Ou Complete, Part 2
- Nana, Vol. 2: Alex: Second volume of the anime series about two girls with the same name (Nana), one an girl from a small town and the other a city dweller trying to find their dreams.
- Naruto Uncut Season 1 Vol. 2
- Naruto Shippuden Vol. 3
- National Lampoon’s ROBODOC: Blaine: There seems to be a pattern here. National Lampoon makes a movie for direct to video release, and Amazon gets a couple of raving reviews posted with similar comments before the video even comes out. Then, the video release date actually passes, and a bunch of negative reviews appear with far more detail. I may check in on this one in a week to see how the reviews look.
- The Night Before Christmas… and More Classic Holiday Titles
- On His Majesty’s Secret Service: Not a James Bond movie.
- Santa Buddies
- Santa Buddies Gift Set: Includes the DVD and five plush buddies.
- Sgt. Frog – Season 1, Volume 2
- Shorts
- Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
- Superman: The Complete Animated Series: Blaine: This is the excellent series that was produced between the Batman and Justice League cartoons. I paid as much for each of the three volumes in the first release; it’s well worth this price.
- Tears to Tiara, Collection 1: Alex: Anime series based off a strategy RPG.
- Teknoman Complete: Alex: Originally released in Japan as Tekkaman Blade, this is a sort of combination between a super robot and a transforming hero (or henshin hero) anime from Tatsunoko (the same people who did Karas.)
- A Walk in the Sun
- WWE Bragging Rights 2009: Alex: The Pay-Per-View formerly known as Cyber Sunday, formerly known as Taboo Tuesday (formerly known as “Spin The Wheel, Make The Deal”).
Now, the Blu-Ray picks:
- Air America
- Angels and Demons Gift Set with Bookends
- Angels and Demons
- Blood the Last Vampire: This is the anime film that inspired the recent live-action movie.
- Cujo (25th Anniversary Edition)
- Four Christmases
- Frailty
- Funny People
- Gamorrah (Criterion Collection)
- Ghost in the Shell v2.0: Alex: This is sort of a a “Special Edition” in the Star Wars/Blade Runner: The Final Cut sense for the Mamoru Oshii film. Mainly, this consists of re-mastered video, as well as the CGI graphics being re-done, and some of the shots that were done in cell animation (like The Major on the roof ledge at the start of the film) being done in CGI as well. Though, from what I’ve heard on the Anime News Network podcast, the new extras from the Japanese Blu-Ray release weren’t carried over – instead we get upscaled versions of the extras from Manga Video’s last DVD release (which were dated at the time, and are even more so now), plus an upscaled version of the original theatrical cut. This particularly bears mentioning because the box says that we are getting the extras from the Blu-Ray release. Manga Video has yet to issue an statement to explain why this is happening, but the running theory is that Bandai in Japan put their foot down and refused to licence the bonus features, because Blu-Ray movies in Japan and in the US have the same region coding, and apparently US Blu-Rays are cheaper than Japanese Blu-Rays, cheap enough that some consumers were starting to import the US releases rather than buying them domestically (and rumor, also from ANN and Anime Vice, has it that future Blu-Ray releases of anime will be Dub only because of this).
- Ichi the Killer
- The Monster Squad (20th Anniversary Edition)
- My Bloody Valentine
- New Police Story: Alex: A new release of the latest installment of the Police Story series of martial arts films.
- Santa Buddies
- Shorts
- Sopranos: Season One
- The Way of the Gun
Finally, the picks of the week. Alex says, “On Blu-Ray, I’m going with Season 1 of the Sopranos if you don’t have it already. For DVD, I’d reccomend continuing with Blade of the Immortal if you picked up volume 1 when that came out, or waiting until next week.” Blaine says, “it’s hard to decide between Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the animated Superman and Air America, not because any are particularly great (though all are good), but because there are no titles that clearly stand out as being even better. It may be worth holding out for December 8 instead.”