This Week on DVD…

First of all (cue Heavenly choir)…

Still my favorite TV show right now. And like many great shows, its third season has it really hitting its sweet spot. And #12 on Amazon’s Movies & TV rankings today; I guess I’m not the only fan.

In other great TV news, there’s this (although it’s sad the ‘complete series’ fits on three discs):

Nostalgia fans of a certain age might also want to check out the earnest ’70s social drama Room 222, the first season of which hits disc this week.

The big movie release of the week?

Also in Blu Ray, natch.

Ark of the Sun God An Italian ’80s Raiders knock-off, starring (who else?) David Warbeck.

Last Metro One of FranÃ§ois Truffaut’s bigger films, brought to us by the fine folks at Criterion.

Locusts Surprise!! It’s a Sci-Fi “Original” Movie. Or is it Syfy yet. (Morons.)

Snakehead Terror More killer animals.

Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter/Under the Hood This is supposed to be pretty good, but divorcing it from the main events of The Watchmen comic kind of misses the point. Still, I’ll be giving it a look, anyway.

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jzimbert

Oh “Andy Richter”… I fondly remember that one month when it and “Greg the Bunny” and “Undeclared” were on. I’d gladly have let “Family Guy” stay cancelled if it meant those other shows would have had a serious chance.
Joe11

I liked Quantum of Solace better when it was called The Bourne Ultimatum. A James Bond film with very little fun or a sense of humor. I guess running across rooftops has replaced car chases as the most cliched thing to do in action movies these days.
Ken Begg

I thought the Bourne series had a terrific effect on Craig’s first Bond. In contrast, I thought it had an awful effect on Solace. It’s not the grimness that bothered me, it was the editing. The Bond series has always been carried on its amazing practical stunts. That gunfight in the museaum (or wahtever, the one on the scaffolding) looked incredible–or rather, looked like it would have been incredible had I been able to tell what the hell was going on. I can’t imagine how irritating it must have been for the stuntmen and set designers, et all to have worked that hard on the sequence, only to find that in the final edit you couldn’t make out a damn thing. Really, leave that jitter cam / flashcut crap for other movies.
Bruce Probst

Ken, I agree completely, and it’s my only complaint with QoS. Of course, since the point of a Bond film is the action, if you can’t work out what’s going on during the action sequences, why bother at all? That sequence boiled down to “there’s a fight between two men, one of those men is JB (but I don’t know which one), he’s not going to die, so I just have to wait until this sequence is over and JB walks away so the movie will continue.”

Maybe it will work better when I watch it at home, but if so, that’s not a ringing endorsement.
Ken Begg

Properly, editing tricks are usually used to cover weaknesses. People who can’t really dance (John Travolta in Staying Alive), can’t really fight (the female lead in Mortal Kombat), can’t really whatever, are usually covered via editing tricks that hopefully keep you from noticing this. Flash cutting allows you to film them doing one move at a time, and then disguising this by using a choppy editing style to muddy up the issue.

However, when you have a Gene Kelly or Brue Lee, that style of editing is moronic, and misses the point entirely. It would be one thing to flashcut that whole action sequence because it had been lazily put together or poorly filmed. It was tremendously frustrating, though, to just see enough to know that the scaffold fight in QoS was extremely well put together, if only they’d allowed us to actually WATCH it. Imagine, as an example, if the construction site chase scene in Casino Royale had been editing the same way. It’s a literally appalling notion.
Joe11

I agree about the Michael Bay editing for QOS. At least with the Bourne movies, director Paul Greengrass knows how to make the hyper-flash editing work so I can tell what the heck is happening on the screen.

There is the scene in Ultimatum where Bourne is fighting the hitman who was trying to kill Julia Styles character & there must been a 100 edits in that fight. Yet, I was able to see every move & after the fight was over, the whole theater gave it a clapping (well they couldn’t stand) ovation.

I still have a problem with QOS’s James Bond having this super-serious attitude. Didn’t they try that back in the late 80’s with Timothy Dalton & didn’t it fail after a couple films?

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