Blu-ray highlights for the week of April 22, 2008

The title for this week’s entry might as well be “Three Horror Movies I Haven’t Seen, or: The Probably-Good, the Maybe-Bad, and the Almost-Certainly-Ugly”.

Let’s start with the probably-good: The Orphanage (El Orfanato), the first film from Spanish director J.A. Bayona. This movie is being marketed with the line “Guillermo del Toro presents” much in the same way that Eli Roth’s Hostel was with “Quentin Tarantino presents”. It is not surprising, then, that The Orphanage has been drawing favorable critical comparisons to del Toro’s own The Devil’s Backbone. That’s reason enough for me to give it a rental.

The lesser two of this week’s Blu-ray releases after the break.

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Twenty-four hours in the life of an aspiring filmmaker.

As a big fan of producer/writer/director Judd Apatow (Freaks and Geeks, Knocked Up, Superbad), I was really looking forward to seeing Forgetting Sarah Marshall on opening night, and then reviewing it on this site. Yes, the movie met my raised expectations, but ultimately ended up being just one highlight of a long, strange day. It all started with an earthquake.

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Blu-ray highlights for the week of April 15, 2008

Diablo Cody’s Oscar-winning screenplay and a slew of fantastic performances make Juno one of the best movies of 2007, and probably the best movie being released on Blu-ray this week. The film’s off-beat comedy lies somewhere between Napoleon Dynamite and Knocked Up, but with a more sympathetic main character, played by Ellen Page. (Though I must admit I do sympathize with Seth Rogen, perhaps a little too much.) By the time Juno reached wide release, it had become a victim of its own hype, leading many late-comers to cry “overrated!” So, if you haven’t seen it yet, lower your expectations and prepare yourself for the “the best movie of the year” (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times).

After the break, Governor Schwarzenegger has not one but two of his classic action movies given the high definition treatment, this week.

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Terry Pratchett, one of the most brilliant authors writing today (or any other day, for that matter), proposed that “Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.” (Guards! Guards!) I’d like to take his theory a few steps deeper into logical absurdity. At some point in the mid-1990s, the Internet amassed so much “knowledge” that it collapsed in upon itself, forming a supermassive black hole that can both read and write (mostly in broken lolcat English).

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If you’ve watched a movie in your local theater or on DVD in the past year, you’ve probably seen the MPAA’s obnoxious anti-piracy ad. It’s the one that goes, “You wouldn’t steal a car. You wouldn’t steal a handbag. You wouldn’t steal a television. You wouldn’t steal a DVD. Downloading pirated films is stealing. Stealing is illegal. Piracy is a crime.” It’s hard to argue with their logic.

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