Category: DVD & Blu-ray

Trey Parker fans can see a high def version of “Orgazmo” in May

Universal Home Entertainment is unleashing the 1997 cult comedy Orgazmo, when they will release this film by South Park-co-creator Trey Parker on Blu-Ray Disc in May.

Joe Young (Trey Parker) is a devout Mormon visiting Hollywood to convert the unenlightened. While spreading the word, Joe is offered $20,000 to play Captain Orgazmo in a porn director’s film. Mindful of the financial burdens of his upcoming wedding, Joe reluctantly accepts the role, not certain of what he’s in for! Written, directed and starring “South Park” co-creator Trey Parker and featuring his South Park partner Matt Stone, this hilarious send-up of the porn industry will have you laughing long after the credits role.

The release will be brimming with bonus materials, including a Drunken Commentary with Matt Stone, Trey Parker, Dian Bachar, Stan Sawicki, Andrew W. Kemler, and Jason McHugh. Also included is a Cast Commentary with Masao “Maki” San, David Dunn, Robyn Lynne Raab, Jason McHugh, Shayla LaVeaux, Farrell Timlake, and Matt Potter.
A third track on the release is a Wild Commentary with “South Park” Writing Staff (Pam Brady, Matt Pregger, and Kyle McCulloch), Weird Al Yankovic, Dave Foley, Bob Odenkirk, David Cross, Kevin Smith, and David Zucker.

In addition to these commentaries, you will find a series of Featurettes on the release, such as ”The Book of Orgazmo,” and “Behind the Scenes”. A Dragon Con Interview and EPK Interviews will also be included, as well as the movie’s Red Band Trailer and the Original 16mm Trailer. The release will be rounded out by a Photo Gallery.

“Orgazmo” will be in stores on May 12 for $29.98.

…Blu-ray Release Date Rumors: Lincoln, The Hobbit, Zero Dark Thirty and More

It’s time for another edition of Blu-ray rumored release dates. This set of titles is full of Academy Award winners and surefire bestsellers for the upcoming awards season.

Ang Lee’s Life of Pi is looking like it will wash ashore on Blu-ray 3D, Blu-ray and DVD on March 12, 2013. I don’t expect an official announcement to be made by Fox until well into February.

Sony is eying March 19, 2013 to release Best Picture nominee Zero Dark Thirty from director Kathryn Bigelow and starring Jessica Chastain on Blu-ray and DVD. That’s only two months out and it should generate some strong pre-orders and sales into its release.

A few days later on Friday, March 22, intel suggests Warner Home Video will release Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey on Blu-ray 3D and Blu-ray. We don’t expect a four-film set that includes The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but stranger things have happened.

The following week on March 26, Disney is expected to release Lincoln starring likely Academy Award Best Picture winner Daniel Day-Lewis. Look for a four-disc set loaded with bonus features fitting of this big release.

One of the trickier release dates to figure out has been Cloud Atlas. There is new evidence that suggests Warner Bros. will hold this film until June 11, 2013, possibly because of the lack of Academy Award nominations it received. The ambitious film would likely get lost in the shuffle amongst the previously mentioned titles.

Of these titles, only Life of Pi is currently available for pre-order. The others are expected to be added soon.

We hope to be able to confirm these rumored Blu-ray 3D and Blu-ray release dates in the coming weeks with each studio’s respective announcements. Remember, all dates are considered rumored until they are formally announced.

Metallica – Live On DVD

Metallica has announced details about the release of its live DVD, “Quebec Magnetic.” The band had its loyal followers in mind when planning the DVD – from the wallet-friendly price to the setlist, which was voted on by over 35,000 fans at Metallica.com last month.
“Quebec Magnetic” was filmed in fall 2009 over two nights at Quebec Colisee Pepsi in Quebec City. The shows were part of Metallica’s world tour in support of its 2008 album, Death Magnetic.

The DVD and Blu-ray are due out Dec. 10. Fans will be able to find the release at their local retailer, online store, Metallica.com or favorite digital provider.

In a statement on its website, the band says “Quebec Magnetic” is a first for Metallica because it will be released via its very own label in North America. That is good news for fans because the band was also in charge of setting the price for the double-DVD and single disc Blu-ray.

“There are still some ‘i’s’ being dotted and ‘t’s crossed, so we can’t give you a name or fancy logo just yet, but we’re pretty excited that for the first time we get to hold all the reins on a release from start to finish. Since we now get to call all the shots, the double DVD and single disc Blu-ray will be available for a price we thought was very Metallica fan friendly – suggested retail will be $15.98 for either format.”

Fans got to vote between two setlists and chose option No.2 as the main program on the DVD, including the songs “That Was Just Your Life,” “One,” “Welcome Home (Sanitarium),” “The Judas Kiss,” “Master of Puppets,” “Enter Sandman,” and “Seek & Destroy.” Tracks that were front setlist No.2 and not included in setlist No.2 will be included on the DVD as bonus footage.

Harry Potter DVDs And Blu-Rays To Disappear On December 29th

For years the Walt Disney Company has employed a unique way of releasing DVDs. The studio will release its movies for a limited time only before taking them off the market and putting them in the “Disney Vault.” It’s a fairly brilliant idea, as it works perfectly with the concept of supply and demand: the less time a movie spends on the market, the higher instant demand will be. It’s such a good strategy that it’s a wonder why no other company has tried to mimic the style. Now Warner Bros. has apparently decided to do just that with one of the biggest franchises in its collection.

Reuters reports that WB will pull all Harry Potter DVDs and Blu-rays from the shelves on December 29th. Amazingly, this also includes Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, which is set to debut on home video on November 11th, giving consumers only 48 days to pick up a copy. On that same day a full box set – including all eight movies – will go on sale as well. The article says that this move may indicate that Warners is planing a release of the films, similar to what Disney did with The Lion King 3D (which ended up pulling in $92 million before the end of its run). It’s unknown if this means the studio is planning 3D conversions as well. The Harry Potter films will still be available digitally and on-demand.

As though DVD sales of the final Harry Potter movie weren’t going to be big enough, this should bring in a ton of cash for WB’s home video department. All those people who have waited to buy the movies as a complete set are now forced to act immediately.

The Incredibles hit hard in April
Pixar and Disney have just announced a Bly-Ray version of The Incredibles for release in April.
From the creative minds behind the Toy Story films and Ratatouille comes this hilarious, action-packed animated adventure about a seemingly ordinary family with an incredible secret. Experience like never before on Blu-ray High Definition! Known to the world as superheroes Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl, Bob Parr and his wife Helen were among the world’s greatest crime fighters, saving lives and battling evil on a daily basis. Fifteen years later, they have been forced to adopt civilian identities and retreat to the suburbs to live “normal” lives with their three kids, Violet, Dash and Jack-Jack. Itching to get back into action, Bob gets his chance when a mysterious communication summons him to a remote island for a top secret assignment. He soon discovers that it will take a super family effort to rescue the world from total destruction.
The release arrives as a 2-disc Blu-Ray/DVD combo that includes the movie in 1080p high definition with DTS 5.1 HD Master Audio. No bonus materials have been announced yet, but given Pixarís trac krecord, expect nothing but the very best!
ìThe Incrediblesî arrives on April 12 for $$45.99.

Roger Waters to release ‘The Wall’ live O2 Arena DVD?
Roger Waters could be set to release a live DVD of ‘The Wall’.
A notice on the former Pink Floyd man’s website – RogerWaters.com, reveals that all six gigs at the O2 Arena in London will be filmed next May.
No official confirmation about a DVD release has been made, although the notice goes on to tell fans not to use flash photography as “flash wipes out the images projected on ‘The Wall’, which are the most important part of the show.”
As previously reported, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters and David Gilmour are set to perform the band’s classic ‘Comfortably Numb’ at a selected gig on Waters’ tour.
The world tour, which will also visit Manchester’s MEN Arena and Dublin’s O2 Arena next year, features a 240-foot projection onto the wall built in front of audience members.

’24’ star Kiefer Sutherland turns back clock with 56-disc box set
Jack Bauer fans jonesing for a 24 fix can restart the clock: All 192 episodes of Fox’s groundbreaking thriller are due Tuesday in a complete 56-disc box set (20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, $349.98).
Included are extras such as a final unaired coda for the series, in which Chloe O’Brian (Mary Lynn Rajskub) is arrested for once again freeing beleaguered counterterrorism agent Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), as her 6-year-old son watches; 24: Redemption, the two-hour Season 7 prequel, filmed in Africa; a recent Comic-Con panel; a wrap-party highlight reel; and the usual cast-and-crew interviews interspersed with highlights of the series.
“Nostalgically, the first season will always feel special to me. We were really flying by the seat of our pants,” says Sutherland, who spent 10 years and eight seasons in his first TV series.
“And I have a real affection for Season 8” and its depiction of a battered Jack’s relationship with agent Renee Walker (Annie Wersching), which he calls “one of the most grounded story lines … and, as an actor, one of the most satisfying to play.” But “watching clips from Season 1 to 8, all I see is, ‘Man, we got old!’ ”
The show’s real-time conceit, each season representing a single day, was both radical and daunting. “Trying to do something in the thriller genre for eight years, trying to do a story that’s suspenseful and earnest, is an unbelievable challenge,” he says.
As it was for three winners of a Hollywood promotional stunt last weekend, who stayed awake long enough to set a Guinness world record for TV marathon viewing, watching more than 86 consecutive hours ó the first five seasons ó of the series, and claiming $10,000 prizes.
Though the series has ended, a feature film is still in development at Fox, and Tony Scott (Unstoppable) has been in discussions to direct. Sutherland is hopeful the movie will be released in 2012, though Fox has not yet committed to the project.
In the meantime, he’s due in sci-fi film Melancholia next year and is prepping his Broadway debut in That Championship Season, by Jason Miller, due next month. Sutherland says talks for the revival of the 1972 play came out of a conversation with pal Jason Patric, Miller’s son, with whom Sutherland shared a movie (The Lost Boys) and an ex-girlfriend (Julia Roberts).
“It’s four middle-aged men living off their high school success, which is really sad and funny at the same time,” he says.

Cameron shows life on Earth in new ‘Avatar’ opening for extended DVD version
LOS ANGELES (AP) ó James Cameron is giving “Avatar” a fresh start.
Cameron unveiled a new opening scene Tuesday for an extended cut of his sci-fi blockbuster due out Nov. 16 on DVD and Blu-ray disc, the sequence offering a glimpse of life on crowded, polluted 22nd century Earth, where city dwellers are bombarded by digital ads and wear masks for protection from the foul air.
The sequence Cameron showed reporters depicts the dreary existence of his hero, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), before he’s invited to join the Avatar program on the distant moon Pandora.
An ex-Marine now in a wheelchair, Jake lives in a tiny, seedy room and hangs around boozing it up at a bar, where he starts a fight ó but for a good cause. Jake takes on a guy who had been slapping a woman around.
Cameron said he decided to cut that opening from last year’s theatrical release despite how “great that sequence of scenes is for his character, and showing how even though he’s paralyzed, he’s not a victim. He’s still a warrior. He’s a stubborn, scrappy, brawling guy, but also one with a conscience and a sense of justice.”
But Cameron said audiences eventually would find that out about Jake once he gets into action among the native Na’vi on Pandora. He said he dropped the opening on Earth to step up the pacing and land viewers more quickly on Pandora, where Jake falls for Na’vi warrior Neytiri (Zoe Saldana).
“The guiding principle for me was the movie doesn’t really start until we meet Neytiri,” Cameron said. “It’s about their relationship and where that relationship takes him. So every minute that we delayed meeting her we looked at with extra scrutiny.”
But for this latest video release, Cameron and producer Jon Landau wanted to offer something fresh.
“We didn’t want to start the movie with something people had seen before,” Landau said. “Right when people start to watch it, they know they’re getting something new, and it’s a whole new opening.”
The extended home-video cut runs 16 minutes longer than the original theatrical version of “Avatar,” the biggest modern blockbuster with $2.8 billion at the box office worldwide.
The three-disc DVD and Blu-ray release also includes the theatrical version and another extended cut, running eight minutes longer than the original, that was released in theaters in August.
The set also packs 45 minutes of deleted scenes, a feature-length documentary about “Avatar” and 17 short segments examining the technology, music, stunts and other elements of the film.

‘The Exorcist’ on Blu-ray shows every last demonic detail
The Exorcist has frightened movie fans spanning four decades. So just imagine what that spinning head and infamous demonic vomit will do to people in high definition.
The 1973 classic based on William Peter Blatty’s book, which many people consider the scariest movie of all time, arrives today (Warner, single-disc DVD, $20; Blu-ray, $35) on a two-disc Blu-ray loaded with a new commentary, a look at the film’s locale in Georgetown and a breakdown of the differences between the original and the 2000 extended director’s cut, both of which are included in the set.
It also includes a documentary that shows how director William Friedkin and his crew pulled off their haunting special effects. “What it will show you is that this truly was, as we have been saying for so many years, the greatest magic act ever filmed,” says Linda Blair, who was 13 when she made The Exorcist.
Blair garnered a supporting-actress Oscar nomination, one of 10 for the movie. But those get lost amid all the horrific details that went into the story of a possessed girl in Washington, D.C., named Regan (Blair) and the two Catholic priests ó Fathers Merrin (Max Von Sydow) and Karras (Jason Miller) ó who attempt to drive out the devil inside her.
Friedkin remembers his motivation for making the film. “What I was really trying to do was not to make a horror film but make a film that mostly dealt with some of the brutal mysteries of life and the power and mystery of faith.”
Owen Roizman, the director of photography, captured everything that went on behind the scenes, including Blair’s hours in the makeup chair, the creation of a dummy whose head turned 360 degrees, the device hooked up to Blair’s mouth that spewed green bile (a nasty mixture of pea soup and oatmeal) and the exorcism scenes in which you can see the actors’ breath.
Friedkin says that for the last effect, he ran four large air conditioners all night.
“My main goal was to make it as realistic as possible, and in the case of the special-effects sequences, they were real,” Friedkin says.
Some of the film’s most controversial and disturbing scenes involve Blair.
Friedkin acknowledges that Blair at first wouldn’t want to say or do things, but he’d kid her into doing them.
“If you look at the dailies, you’ll see sometimes she’s done the most horrific thing, and I’ll say ‘cut,’ and she starts to giggle and a prop man hands her a milkshake.”
Blair applauds Friedkin for doing the best he could to keep things normal around her.
“There were a couple of things they had boundaries on, and there were certain things they didn’t discuss what it exactly was because I was still a juvenile. They crossed the lines quite a few times, but not with me personally,” she says. “I needed this documentary to show that I really was just a child actor.”
Now, she has been focusing on animal rescue through her Linda Blair WorldHeart Foundation. And Friedkin starts filming the black comedy Killer Joe with Matthew McConaughey and Emile Hirsch in Louisiana next month.
And though all the cool kids are converting their movies to 3-D, Friedkin is not a fan.
“Some of the greatest films I’ve ever seen, like Citizen Kane and All About Eve and Singin’ in the Rain and 2001, I don’t think they would be any better in 3-D,” Friedkin says. “They would look different, but I’m not really interested in seeing a desk in the foreground looking like it’s sticking out of the screen.”

Beatles DVD remembers Sullivan appearance
A piece of television history is coming back to life with the release of a DVD marking the Beatles’ appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Almost as interesting as the British band making its musical introduction to America in 1964 is the context in which it is placed.
The DVD presents the programs exactly as they appeared that night ó complete with hapless magicians or comedians, commercials that would shame Mad Men and illustrations of how the pace of television has changed.
The first night, Feb. 9, 1964, is a landmark in television. An estimated 73 million Americans tuned in, the largest ever for a TV show at the time, or three times the number of people who watched the latest American Idol finale, according to the Nielsen Co.
A generation of musicians can trace their career choices to that night. One was Dennis DeYoung, former Styx lead singer, who told the Montreal Gazette that he watched it while at a high school dance.
“I looked at that and I went, ‘Oh, my God! What is that? And how do I apply for that job?”‘ he recalled. “That was it. There was never any doubt in my mind what I wanted in my life.”
Film clips of the Beatles on Sullivan have been available, but never the whole event until Tuesday’s release of The 4 Complete Ed Sullivan Shows Starring the Beatles. SOFA Entertainment, which owns the archive of Sullivan shows (a staple on CBS’s Sunday night schedule from 1948 to 1971), is putting it out after getting the OK from the Beatles’ Apple Corps Ltd.
Performance defines a generation
Cutaways to the audience show young girls who can barely stay in their seats from the excitement of it all. Older people look bored, annoyed and clueless to the generational change staring back at them.
The Beatles’ cheekiness, enthusiasm and talent was bracing.
“It’s like they were in colour and everybody else was in black and white,” said Andrew Solt, CEO of SOFA Entertainment.
Watching the magician with the hard luck of following the Beatles to the stage that first night is painful. Fred Kaps’s show biz career never really recovered from that moment, Solt said. It seemed his routine would never end.
The sense that television moves much more quickly today is one of the most interesting finds in the DVD time capsule.
Mitzi Gaynor, once the princess of musical comedy, gave a sweaty performance from Miami, and has enough time for costume changes. Comic Frank Gorshin’s routine with movie star impersonations was interminable.
The comic team of McCall & Brill, with a punch line about an “ugly girl,” would not have made it past today’s taste police.
One other performance in that first week came from the cast of the Broadway show Oliver, including a young Davy Jones, whose life was changed in the wake of the Beatles’ performance in a way he couldn’t have imagined. A few years later, he was cast as one of the Monkees, a prefab rock band that was a Beatles knockoff.
Sullivan “didn’t spend too much money on talent that week because he knew he had the audience,” Solt said.
DVD shows how TV has changed
Producers plainly believed people had an attention span then, certainly much more so than now. Perhaps the knowledge that viewers had to get out of their seats to turn the channel ó and then had a couple of choices, not north of 100 other networks ó was on their mind.
The same is true of the ads. Can you imagine a commercial break with only one commercial?
Maybe it was what they were hawking, but the ads are stunningly unimaginative. What were the Madison Avenue pitch men of the day thinking? Then again, even an image of waves lapping up on a tropical shore couldn’t save an instant pineapple upside down cake that was stocked in a supermarket freezer. Cold water detergent All was called “revolutionary.”
The DVD also contains Sullivan shows from Feb. 23, 1964, and Sept. 12, 1965, when the Beatles also performed. Twenty songs in all are performed, including three versions of I Want to Hold Your Hand. The DVD also has a short interview Sullivan did with the Beatles in London in May 1964 that hasn’t been seen since the day it aired.