A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Promotional photo of Buena Vista Home Entertainment's Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga box set. © 2020 Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) On March 31, Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm Ltd. released Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga , a 27-disc box set that collects the nine "Saga" Episodes set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" as a Best Buy exclusive. Dropped on the same day that Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was officially released on individual 4K UHD and HD Blu-ray sets, this huge box set marks the first time that the three Star Wars trilogies are collected in a single bundle. From a young Anakin Skywalker's descent into the dark side to the rise of the Resistance and their struggle to restore peace in the galaxy, the story that electrified a generation comes to a striking conclusion. The saga will end. The story lives forever. -  Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga  publicity insert. Star Wars: The Skywalker Sag...

A screenshot of my Blu-ray.com Collection Page (A-C). Notice that It: Chapter Two is in the "Ordered" category. Hi, there, Constant Reader, and welcome to another edition of Bloggin' On, my blog-within-a-blog where I write stuff that doesn't fall neatly into the usual categories of reviews or socio-political commentary. It's Thursday, December 12, which for most of us means that Christmas is only 13 days away.  (Have you finished your holiday shopping yet? I have!) Here it's still morning in my little corner of Florida; it's almost nine o'clock as I sit here tap-tap-tapping away on my keyboard. Right now, it's also quite cloudy and cool; the current temperature is 67℉ (20℃) and the sky (at least from what I can see through my writing room's window) is a leaden shade of gray.  According to my PC's Weather app, the high temperature is expected to reach 77℉ (25℃), and it looks like a cold front might be passing through this weekend; it w...

© 2018 Buena Vista Home Entertaiment (BVHE) and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) On March 27, 2018, Buena Vista Home Entertainment (BVHE, the home media distribution arm of Walt Disney Motion Pictures Studios) released Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi in various formats: Blu-ray, Ultra High Definition (UHD) Blu-ray, DVD, and digital download. And following the trend set by many of Disney's competitors, including the then-still independent 20th Century Fox Film Corporation and Viacom-owned Paramount Pictures, BVHE issued Rian Johnson's 2017 entry in the Star Wars Skywalker Saga in different editions, including exclusive releases for Disney retailing partners, including Best Buy.  As was the case with 2016's home media release of Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens, Best Buy's exclusive edition of The Last Jedi does not concern itself with the content, which is the first 4K UHD edition of a Star Wars film. Other retailers, including Amazon, Target, ...

From the Earth to the Moon finally gets the Blu-ray treatment. © 2019 Imagine Entertainment and HBO Home Entertainment  Yesterday marked the 50th Anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, the third manned flight to the Moon and the first to land on Earth's closest celestial neighbor and only natural satellite. There were the usual commemorative segments on the morning and evening newscasts, and social media was littered with tributes to Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.  Fittingly, Imagine Entertainment and HBO Home Entertainment chose July 16, 2019 as the "drop date" for the long-awaited Blu-ray disc (BD) set of From the Earth to the Moon, a 12-part docudrama about mankind's greatest adventure: Project Apollo.  Produced by Tom Hanks, Ron Howard, and Brian Grazer, From the Earth to the Moon premiered on HBO in the spring of 1998, seven months before the 30th Anniversary of Apollo 8's historic "first...

On Tuesday, July 16, the 50th Anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11 - the mission to land two astronauts on the Moon by the end of the 1960s - HBO Home Entertainment and Imagine Entertainment will release the 1998 miniseries From the Earth to the Moon on Blu-ray for the first time. Produced by Tom Hanks, Ron Howard, and Brian Grazer as a complement to Howard's 1995 film Apollo 13, this 12-part miniseries is a docudrama that chronicles the American effort to beat the Soviet Union in a Cold War-era Space Race by, as President John F. Kennedy said in a May 1961 speech, a concerted effort ""to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." Based in part on Andrew Chaikin's non-fiction book A Man on the Moon, the miniseries was originally aired between April 5 and May 10, 1998. Its focus was on Project Apollo, although Part One - Can We Do This? - also covered part of Project Mercury and ...

© 2016 MGM-UA, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment; 007 logo and related James Bond Tradeworks © 1962, 2015 Danjaq, LLC and United Artists Corporation On September 20, 2016, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment and MGM released The James Bond Collection, a 24-disc Blu-ray box set which collects all of the EON/Danjaq James Bond films now in existence. Starting with 1962's Dr. No and continuing on to 2015's Spectre, this collection allows fans of Ian Fleming's famous creation, British Secret Service Agent 007, aka "Bond...James Bond" to bring home all of his various missions as recreated by six actors, many writer-director teams, and spanning over 50 years of globe-trotting spying, romancing, and using his "license to kill" in Her Majesty's Secret Service. (As of March 2019, this box set contains all of the Bond films to date; presently, director Danny Boyle of Slumdog Millionaire fame is working on the untitled film known as  Bond...

(C) 2018 Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)  On Tuesday, September 25, 2018, The Walt Disney Company’s home media division, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, released Solo: A Star Wars Story in four formats – DVD, Blu-ray, UHD 4K Blu-ray, and digital download. The home media release of Solo – the 10 th live-action entry in the Star Wars franchise and fourth produced in the post-George Lucas era – comes six months after the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi on home media; it is widely seen as Disney’s attempt to recoup the financial losses from Solo’ s underperformance at the box office earlier this year. Board the Millennium Falcon and journey to a galaxy far, far away in Solo: A Star Wars Story , an all-new adventure with the most beloved scoundrel in the galaxy. Through a series of daring escapades deep within a dark and dangerous criminal underworld, Han Solo meets his mighty future copilot Chewbacca and encounters the notorious gambler Lando Calri...

(C)2018 Warner Home Entertainment, Village Roadshow Pictures, and Amblin Entertainment On Tuesday, July 24, Warner Home Entertainment released director Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One on Blu-ray and DVD, three weeks after the digital download release and nearly four months after the theatrical premiere of this imaginative adaptation of Ernest Cline’s best-selling 2011 novel of the same name. Director Steven Spielberg’s science-fiction action-adventure reveals a chaotic, collapsing world in the year 2045. Salvation lies in the OASIS, a fantastical virtual-reality universe created by the brilliant and eccentric James Halliday When Halliday dies, his immense fortune is left to the first person who can find a digital Easter egg hidden in the OASIS. Joining the hunt is unlikely hero Wade Watts, who is hurled into a breakneck, reality-bending quest filled with mystery, discovery, and danger.  Although Warner Home Entertainment released Ready Player One in several dis...

(C) 2011 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)  The Lucasfilm Limited/20th Century Fox Home Entertainment team has, over the past 10 years, released the six live-action Star Wars Episodes which make up"The Tragedy of Darth Vader" on DVD several times; the Prequels initially as individual 2-disc sets (2001-2005) and the Original Trilogy (or Classic Trilogy, if you prefer) originally presented in a four-disc box set (2004). These initial DVD releases have been followed by two more re-releases, the first being the 2006 Special Limited Edition re-issues of the Classic Trilogy which include the "transfer from laserdisc" theatrical versions of Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) because fans weren't thrilled that they had only the 2004 "for DVD" versions of the 1997 Special Edition re-edits. Two years later, Lucasfilm re-issued both trilogies in separately-sold box sets with slimmer ...

(C) 2015 PBS Home Video This review focuses exclusively on the techie features of the 25th Anniversary Edition. For a review of Ken Burns' documentary, please see: 'The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns - DVD Review.' On October 13, 2015, PBS Distribution and American Documentaries, Inc. released “The Civil War: A Ken Burns Film – 25 th Anniversary Edition,” a six-Blu-ray disc (BD) set that presents the widely-acclaimed 1990 series on high definition video for the first time. To commemorate both the series’ Silver Anniversary and the 150 th commemoration of the Civil War’s bittersweet end, Burns’ Florentine Films and PBS digitally remastered the series’ nine episodes and its assorted extra features from standard definition (SD) to the state-of-the-art Ultra-High Definition 4K format. This remastering project was carried out as a joint effort between Florentine Films and the George Eastman House, the repository where “The Civil War’s” original 16 mm negative...