Most of the big new releases this month were movies I didn’t particularly like, so I didn’t want to bother reviewing Mockingjay Part 1, The Hobbit 3, Exodus: Gods and Kings or Top Five. If you liked those movies, I’m sure the Blu-rays are fine. Even Night at the Museum 3 was fun and Wild has a great performance but I didn’t feel the need to revisit them. Eliminating those six did significantly narrow down my choices for the month, but I was still able to come up with 10 Blu-rays worth owning for the month of March.
Top 10 Must-Own Blu-rays of March 2015:
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
Blu-rays, March 2015
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10. Late Phases: Night of the Lone Wolf
I’ve been saying Adrian Garcai Bogliano is a filmmaker to watch and this is his first English language film. Drained of color, perhaps the film’s sepia tint represents the main character’s total blindness. To get any closer to his actual experience would defeat the purpose of making a movie about him. The aesthetic is certainly badass for the blind senior citizen to suit up and hunt werewolves. Bogliano is such a pro that he only shows the monster in glimpses, so that when you see it, it looks like a real animal even when it’s a man in a costume.
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9. Foxcatcher
In my review of the Oscar nominated Foxcatcher I commented on the film’s stark look. It is even more stark on Blu-ray, particularly because now it is one of the rare modern movies still shot on film and transferred. There’s a touch of the grain of 35mm. If not visible, you still feel it. The shadows seem more palpable in this aesthetic than similarly composed digital films. With an overall muted palette, the colors that do pop are more distinguished: the wrestling uniforms and arenas, John DuPont’s lavish house... All this is to tell a somber story in a world that seems just a little bit off, and it works.
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8. The Sound of Music
A word of caution for the 50th Anniversary Blu-ray of this classic. You don’t want to have your brightness settings up too high, because you’ll see a lot of grain. Not the film grain which we would welcome, but the digital grain holding the transfer together. On standard settings though, the epic musical looks, well, epic with its Technicolor palette and detail. The hills really do come alive (ha!) with lush greens and that ‘60s color always makes Julie Andrews look angelic. The detail in Castle Von Trapp is gritty too. Blu-ray features pop up while you watch the film, four different windows or subtitles you can toggle at your leisure, or watch the “Julie Andrews Returns to Salzburg” doc on another disc. They also kept previous DVD and Blu-ray features including the commentary from the late director Robert Wise.
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7. The Sure Thing
While The Breakfast Club (keep scrolling) celebrates its high profile 30th anniversary, this ‘80s rom-com is also 30 years old this year. Though it may have been the prototype for “falling for the girl you hate instead of the generically hot one,” it hasn’t remained in the pop culture conversation as much. This was before John Cusack had a type, and it is odd to see him playing uncharacteristically against type. The Shout! Factory Blu-ray looks great though, a perfect transfer of a movie that might have been a catalog dump for a major studio.
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6. Blacula/Scream Blacula Scream
These two blaxploitation horror movies look extraordinary in this double feature Blu-ray from Scream! Factory. The prints are totally clean and the transfers clear and smooth, so you can see all the flamboyant ‘70s color and a bit of that authentic film grain. Having never seen these films before, they took themselves a little too seriously for my tastes regarding movies with puns for titles, but I suppose the point was just to have a genuinely threatening, seductive African-American vampire.
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5. The Breakfast Club
The 30th Anniversary Blu-ray has been remastered. I didn’t actually see the old Blu-ray, but this one is stellar. That’s high praise, considering there’s a movie with the word “stellar” in the title this month and I’m using that adjective up on The Breakfast Club. The film itself is rather static, in a single location taking place in one day so the wardrobe doesn’t even change. But that picture is pristine and has nearly an hour of new bonus features. Emilio Estevez and Molly Ringwald are conspicuously absent (but we got Ringwald at SXSW), but the other three share specific memories, along with John Kapelos and other crew members. Most notably, we may want to stop calling them The Brat Pack. That was actually started in a derogatory article, although if nobody remembers the origin, what harm is there?
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4. Unbroken
Roger Deakins cinematography on Blu-ray is quite a beautiful sight, and Unbroken has some standout work. The aerial scenes and ocean survival scenes that dominate Louis Zamperini’s story are hyper-real on Blu-ray. As in, it doesn’t seem like the actual sky WWII planes are flying through, or the actual ocean Zamperini and his crew survive in. It’s more like printing the legend, if the legend is a picture we see. There’s still some beauty when Zamperini is taken to the Japanese prison camp, but more of a stark, gritty variety. All around, a collection of home theater demo images for over two hours.
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3. Song of the Sea
The beautiful animation of the Irish legend is completely evocative with its simple characters, and immersive with its impressionistic backgrounds. The round faced kids will break your heart, and you’ll see new detail in the cluttered worlds they inhabit, even if those details are simply brush strokes of the artwork. The colors are bright and the entire picture flawlessly clear, showing that two dimensional animation is still vital and there’s just as much artistry at work as there is with 3D CGI.
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2. Gravity
It’s a bit soon for another release of Gravity, but this Blu-ray Diamond Luxe Edition includes a “Silent Space” version of the film. That just means they took out the musical score, but it actually really works. I found the film more effective in the silent void of space. As great as the music is, the film doesn’t rely on the music to telegraph its suspense. The lack of music also draws more attention to the lack of sound effects where one wouldn’t hear them. Often the score would mimic crashes and banging debris, but now you feel what the astronauts feel when they can’t rely on their sense of sound to alert them to danger. I did hear one music cue though. You can’t sneak that by, you little tricksters.
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1. Interstellar
Christopher Nolan’s latest film has been his most divisive yet, so I hope people will revisit it on Blu-ray and consider some of its more spiritual themes, like the quantifiable scientific value of love. From a purely visual perspective, Nolan’s championship of the Imax format rises to new heights, pun intended, with Interstellar. The 2.35:1 letterbox footage looks good, a little blown out and grainy, but solid. It just opens up and comes to life in the full frame Imax portions. Whether portraying the accurate liftoff of the shuttle, or otherworldly visions like the ice planet or the wormhole, those sequences are rich and somehow manage to envelop you even on your home theater screen. I think it’s the angle of the Imax camera works even when it’s not several stories tall. One thing we can all agree on now is, thanks to subtitles, we can all finally understand what Michael Caine was saying in his last scene.
