A new View from the Cheap Seats, more BD reviews & A Trip to the Moon in color

Monday, 15 January 2018 17:54

A new View from the Cheap Seats, more BD reviews & A Trip to the Moon in color

by Bill Hunt

Good afternoon, Bits readers. Hope you’re all having a fine day. Obviously, this is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday here in the States, so there’s not a lot of work getting done today. But I’m having trouble concentrating today for another reason Minnesota Vikings fans will appreciate. Whew! It’s going to take me a few days to calm down after the end of that playoff game.

All right, we’ve got a pair of new Blu-ray reviews for you today from Tim Salmons: A look at Warner Archive’s Night School and The Sea Wolf, both of which are now available.

Our own Bud Elder has also checked in with a good new View from the Cheap Seats column in which he looks at some interesting deep catalog titles released on Blu-ray and/or DVD in recent weeks. [Read on here…]

I’ve also updated the 4K Ultra HD Release List today with news that Fox’s The Shape of Water and The Post are both going to be released on the format – they’re available for pre-order on Amazon.com now – along with Paramount’s Daddy’s Home and Daddy’s Home 2 on 2/20.

On the other hand, there are still no Amazon pre-orders up for Disney’s Coco, Thor: Ragnarok, or Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which suggests to me that Amazon is playing more games with Disney for any number of reasons, possibly including the fact that Best Buy and Target are being given retail exclusives and the fact that Disney’s expanded, multi-studio Movies Anywhere service is shaping up to be serious competition for Amazon Prime streaming. At any rate, there it is.

Meanwhile, the big announcement is that Flicker Alley, Lobster Films, and Blackhawk Films have just announced that they’re releasing Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon on Blu-ray/DVD Combo on 3/6 in its the original, hand-colored version, sourced from one of the most complex restoration projects ever. A print was apparently found in Barcelona, Spain in 1993, but was thought too fragile to be restored. From the press release “Three experts in film restoration-Lobster Films, Groupama Gan Foundation, and Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage-used the most advanced digital technologies available to assemble and painstakingly restore the film’s 13,375 fragmented frames. ” The disc will include both the color version and B&W, with The Extraordinary Voyage documentary, and 2 additional Méliès shorts including The Eclipse (1904) and The Astronomer’s Dream (1898). You’ll also get “two brand new scores by Jeff Mills and Dorian Pimpernel, as well as an improvised piano track by Serge Bromberg with optional narration written by Georges Méliès.”

And that’s pretty much it.

Here’s a look at the cover artwork for that and a few other BD and 4K titles...

All right, I’ll be back tomorrow with more reviews and some additional thoughts on the state of the home video industry post CES and also a little bit more on HDR too.

Stay tuned. SKOL!

- Bill Hunt

(You can follow Bill on social media at these links: Twitter and Facebook)

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A new View from the Cheap Seats, more BD reviews & A Trip to the Moon in color

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