DVD Watch

A shorter entry today, I think. It’s time for DVDs Ian will be purchasing over the next few months!, the first in an almost inevitable regular series. Anyway, on with the list:

• We’ll get the obligatory Audrey Hepburn films out of the way first. The Children’s Hour, War and Peace, and Roman Holiday are all coming out between now and Christmas. Only Roman Holiday has any extras beyond the trailer, but Paramount has gone to the expense of spreading War and Peace over two discs, and I’m impressed that MGM even considered releasing The Children’s Hour, so I’ll be picking up all three. Now if only Warner Brothers could be persuaded to release Wait Until Dark and The Nun’s Story. And Fox has been promising How To Steal A Million for a while now…


• Singing In The Rain: Special Edition. Warner Bros. has supposedly come up with an entirely new process for restoring old Technicolor films, and this DVD is the first title to undergo the conversion. It looks fabulous, and boasts a commentary featuring Stanley Donen. My order is already in with Amazon.


• Reservoir Dogs. No, I don’t care what colour the box is. I just need to replace the bad taped-from-Channel 4-on-a-bad-VCD copy I have at the moment, and this edition has a load of extras, so I might as well get this one. Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction are also high up on the video-replacement list.


• The My So-Called Life box set should finally ship later this month. It’s been a long and tortuous ride, but Jason Rosenfield has held fast like a rock, even after he was fired from BMG. Thanks to him, not only are we getting a full collection of the series, but we’ve shown that their is a big interest in collections of old TV shows, hence the myriad of new box sets coming out this Autumn (I’ll start buying Law & Order when it hits the fifth season set)


• The Back To The Future Trilogy. All three films, with director’s commentary, writer’s commentary, deleted scenes, and all-new documentaries? Excellent…


• Sunset Boulevard. God knows why it’s taken Paramount so long to release it on DVD, but they make up for the wait with a proper special edition, rather than a bare bones release.


• This is getting quite long, isn’t it? I’ll finish with my two upcoming Region 2 purchases; Battle Royale: This Time, Tartan Promises it Won’t Release Another Version in Three Month’s Time edition, which seems to contain all the features that the Japanese special edition had (hopefully with the addtition of English subtitles), and what’s hoped to be the definitvie version of John Woo’s The Killer. Maybe it’ll send the eBay prices for the Criterion edition down a little.

Why is my wallet screaming in pain?