As the dust begins to settle on this year's Oscar winners, this week's DVD Digest looks back at, among other releases, a super-deluxe special edition of the Best Picture winner of two decades ago.
DVD of the Week: What else could it be but Criterion's new edition of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1987 Oscar winner The Last Emperor? The fact that the film is back in print on DVD is cause enough for celebration, but that Criterion is issuing the film in a FOUR-DISC special edition is particularly wonderful. Chock full of interviews, documentaries, essays, and multiple cuts of the film, Bertolucci's majestic Best Picture winner is finally getting the DVD it deserves. The only drawback is that the transfer, supervised by Emperor cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, is in Storaro's favored aspect ratio of 2:1. As with the latest release of Apocalypse Now, Storaro has insisted on this new "compromise" aspect ratio for his films, which satisfies his own concerns but sacrifices a noticeable amount from the periphery of the image. I can understand Criterion giving in to Storaro's demands in this respect, but I do wish they could have found a way to release the film as originally photographed, so we can better appreciate the exquisite framing of the film. But I suppose this is quibbling — Criterion's The Last Emperor is surely the year's first must-buy DVD.
New releases coming to DVD include: Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf (Paramount), also being released in a "Director's Cut" that no doubt has more blood and nudity; David Slade's vampire thriller 30 Days of Night (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Wes Anderson's somewhat disappointing The Darjeeling Limited (Fox), the first of his films since Bottle Rocket not released by Criterion; and forgotten arthouse offerings Goya's Ghosts (Sony), Silk (New Line), and Slipstream (Sony).
In addition, this week sees the release of Warner's The Smurfs Season 1, Volume 1, Paramount's The Fugitive Season 1, Volume 2, and the direct-to-DVD animated feature Justice League: The New Frontier (Warner, also Blu-Ray).
Finally, the doomed HD-DVD format angrily but impotently shakes its fist at the marketplace with three new releases: Paramount's Beowulf and Warner's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and The Brave One. Now, I don't own an HD player or a Blu-Ray player so I don't have an opinion on their relative merits. However, despite not having a horse in the race, I can't help but think of David Huddleston behind a desk, screaming at the rapidly-disappearing HD-DVD format. Perhaps he'd yell out, "Condolences!", although I reckon "the goddamn plane has crashed into the mountain!" would be just as appropriate. Or maybe that's just the White Russian talking...
