mike | 24 Jan 2012 | 192 Views | 1 Likes | 0 Dislikes

The DVD/Blu Ray Shed: January 24th

Forgiving I hope the weird mistake I made in this week's newsletter, we will this week be looking at some Hitchcock classics (althought the idea of Woody directing Ingrid Bergman in a taut psychological thriller is kind of funny) that are getting the Blu-Ray treatment this week, as well as some debateably beloved '80s comedy stylings from one of the all-time weird comedy pairings. And Real Steel too I guess.

Real Steel
Dir. Shawn Levy

Hugh Jackman carries this spiritual-successor-to-weird-'90s-robot-movie Robot Jox far enough down the road to Pretty Entertaining Town that it succeeds despite it's massively hare-brained premise. He's a washed-up ex boxer with a cute kid and custody issues and also an underdog robotic boxing machine that competes in underground robot boxing matches, and she is a woman played by Evangeline Lilly from LOST, and the whole thing is a lot of stupid fun.

Spellbound, Notorious, and Rebecca
(Dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

Three of Hitchcock's David O. Selznick-era flicks get the Blu Ray treatment today, all of them fantastically good and growing more and more underappreciated as time goes on and folks focus on the work he started producing in the '50s.

Notorious stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in a classic espionage thriller/love story, while Spellbound and Rebecca, the earlier films, are archetypal psychological mysteries. There's nary a pissed-off bird or cross-dressing murderer in either that I can recall (though Spellbound features the really cool and much-ballyhooed collab with Salvador Dali) and they're great nonetheless.

Stir Crazy + See No Evil, Hear No Evil

The stuff you learn doing research on films you vaguely remember seeing in the early '80s can radically alter your worldview entire. Did you know, for example, that Sidney Poitier directed Ghost Dad? Seriously. He also directed Stir Crazy, which starred Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor as wrongfully-convicted bank robbers and was an absolutely enormous hit (and for good reason, it's really really funny).

The duo's follow-up nine years later was the not quite as good See No Evil, Hear No Evil, in which they played friends with hilarious handicaps. One is blind, the other is deaf. Get it? The title is a play on words. It's not as funny as Stir Crazy but it's always worth watching Pryor and Wilder even if they are miming legitimate physical disabilities for laughs.

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