The Academy Awards may have come and gone, but this year’s nominees for Best Picture are just now making their way to your home theater. Milk led the pack with a March 10 release date, followed by Oscar winner Slumdog Millionare, which hit DVD and Blu-Ray on March 31. April sees Amy Adams and Meryl Streep do battle with Philip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt (out today); Kate Winslet get swept up in Holocaust romance in The Reader (April 14); and the brilliant Frank Langella resurrects Tricky Dick in Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon (April 21). Sorry, Brad Pitt fans, you have to wait until next month to own The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which hits stores May 5.
But enough about these damn movies already! Frankly, after all the pre-Oscar hype, I’m sick of hearing about them. Instead, let’s talk about last year’s Best Picture winner: No Country For Old Men. The Coen Brothers’ dark, new-fangled Western starring Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem’s haircut finally gets the deluxe treatment today with a three-disc DVD and two-disc Blu-ray package.
Originally released last year lacking suitable extras, No Country is done up right this time, with about five hours of bonus material. In addition to the standard “making of” documentary and interviews, the set also boasts cast-and-crew holding forth on what it’s like to work with the revered Coens. One high-tech addition is the inclusion of a downloadable copy of the film for use on your iPod or Windows devices. It’s a cool feature, even though No Country’s bright desert photography needs to be experienced on a screen larger than a deck of cards to be appreciated.
ODDS & ENDS
A few more titles out today that are worth mentioning: Keanu Reeves’ remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still didn’t exactly tank at the box office, but it was no home run either. Skip it and check out the new Blu-Ray of 2010: The Year We Make Contact, director Peter Hyams’ better-than-expected 1984 sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. If neither of those floats your boat, grab Jim Carrey in Yes Man or an animated rat in The Tale of Despereaux, both out today.
This article appears in Apr 1-7, 2009.