UKFilmNerd

Really!?

I find this really interesting. Especially the views from several people who in hindsight are completly wrong. 😁

Columbia Pictures is plotting a new Starship Troopers movie, setting District 9 filmmaker Neill Blomkamp to write and direct an adaptation of the classic sci-fi novel story by Robert A. Heinlein.

Showing my age here, I thought they were talking about the Sam Raimin original from 2002!!

The headline refers to Spider-Man: No Way Home. 😆

I'm a huge fan of old movies. Now, when I say old I don't mean movies from ten, twenty, or even thirty or forty years ago. I love movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood, specifically the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. I've always loved this period, and given how hard it is to find many of these movies on streaming, I've made an effort to buy as many of these movies on physical media as possible. As such, I have thousands of old movies on DVD, and among my most treasured titles are a few dozen DVD box sets Warner Bros put out in the mid-2000s, as they control the best library of classic film.

A few months ago, I dug into an old Humphrey Bogart box set to watch a favorite of mine, Passage to Marseille. After about an hour, the disc simply stopped working. The same thing happened with another movie from the set, Across the Pacific. I actually thought my old Blu-ray player was to blame, and given that I was in need of an upgrade anyway, I bought a new UHD player and just forgot about it.

Flash forward to about a week ago, when I decided to throw on an old Errol Flynn movie called Desperate Journey. The same thing happened. This was more concerning to me, as, unlike the other movies I mentioned, this has never gotten an HD release and was unavailable digitally. I did a little research online, and to my horror, I landed on several home theater forum threads (and a couple of good videos) confirming this was no fluke.

It turns out that virtually every Warner Bros DVD disc manufactured between 2006 and 2008 has succumbed to the dreaded laser rot, where discs simply stop working due to a rotting of the layers. Once it happens, it can't be undone. This was a frequent problem with laserdiscs back in the 80s and 90s, but it wasn't a huge problem with DVDs. The issue comes down to the way the discs were authored. Many of the titles affected, which range from classics like The Wild Bunch and The Shawshank Redemption to TV collections like The Dukes of Hazzard, have been reissued on Blu-ray or digital HD. Some of the titles, such as many of the titles in the Looney Tunes Collections and many of the Golden Age of Hollywood movies, have not, making them, in a lot of cases, lost media.

So, what can be done about this? Nothing. As stated in this RetroBlasting video, we had ticking time bombs on our hands, and the only way around the problem was to rip our faves to something like PLEX, but it's too late for the majority of discs. Warner Bros, of course, has yet to comment on this, so people like me have thousands of worthless discs cluttering our shelves. Here's the most comprehensive list of titles available.

So far, Blu-ray Discs aren't affected, although all HD-DVD discs put out by WB in this period are basically expensive coasters.

While it would be great of WB was to try to make good to consumers by at least offering us replacement MOD discs from the Warner Archive, I'm not holding my breath. Given that the discs only went bad after fifteen years or so, I'm sure they feel like we got our money's worth -- which we certainly didn't in my opinion. Special shout out to Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader, a superb Home Theater YouTube Channel that was way ahead of this story.

UPDATE: According to one of our readers, FilmFan-89, WB will replace some discs if you contact them directly, with a catch. They will only replace discs that are currently in print, and sadly, many of the defective titles are not. Reach out to them through the WB Store and keep us posted in the comment thread if they come through with replacements.

Taken from the official AmazonMGM Twitter account.

Here's a fun piece of Hollywood trivia for you. In 1981, a movie called Great White hit theaters, and made over $18 million domestically, before being yanked from theaters when Universal sued the filmmakers for ripping off Jaws. The movie, which was one of the many Jaws clones released in Italy in the wake of Jaws's success, was directed by Enzo G. Castellari and was seen as an even more blatant than usual rip-off, with it centring around a seaside community terrorized by a Great White shark, whose mayor refuses to take the threat seriously -- only for a crusty old shark hunter to team up with a nerdy landlubber to save the day. Sound familiar?

In the years since they blocked it, the film, which was called The Last Shark in Europe, has once again become available, and now it's getting a fully-loaded Blu-ray from British Label Treasured Films. One important thing to note though, is that while the artwork has a reversible sleeve that allows viewers to choose between the titles The Last Shark and Great While, the American re-cut by Film Ventures, which was the one blocked, is not on the disc. This version of the film has a score by Morton Stevens which was very similar to what John Williams composed for Jaws, and might be one of the reasons Universal was able to get the film pulled. Nevertheless, the extras, which were revealed by our friends at Blu-ray.com, are impressive:

• Presented in widescreen from high definition master
• NEW Audio Commentary with Eugenio Ercolani and Troy Howarth
• NEW Great White Enzo: Interview with Director Enzo G. Castellari (16:43)
• NEW High Tide: Interview with Actor Massimo Vanni (22:11)
• NEW Big Fishes in a Sea Full of Sharks: Interview with Producer Maurizio Amati (19:42)
• NEW Blood Tide: Interview with Producer Ugo Tucci (13:00)
• NEW Unfamiliar Waters: Casterllari Out of Action: Video essay by Mike Foster
• NEW Squali! A Brief Introduction to the Italian Killer Animal Current: Video Essay by Eugenio Ercolani
• Image Gallery
• Trailer and TV Spot
• Reversible Sleeve featuring two artwork choices
• Uncompressed English DTS-HD Master Audio
• English SDH Subtitles

Sadly, the disc is REGION B-locked, but will work fine if you have a multi-region player. It drops on June 6th!

Here's the artwork:

Amazon MGM Studios is set to take creative control of the James Bond franchise.

The shock announcement — which is sure to shake and, indeed, stir the industry — was made Thursday, alongside the news that long-time producers and custodians of 007, Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, would be stepping back.

As per details of the arrangement, Amazon MGM Studios, Wilson and Broccoli have formed a new joint venture to house the James Bond intellectual property rights. The three parties will remain co-owners of the iconic franchise but Amazon MGM will have creative control.

The director of Con Air is Simon West, and he’s got a new movie on the way. It’s called Old Guy, and has Christoph Waltz in the lead role. As part of the promotion for that, he’s been doing an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit, and the question of a Con Air 4K disc came up right from the off.

Simon West confirmed that he’d been involved last year in doing work on the film. “Last year we actually did a 4K upgrade of Con Air”, he wrote.

“We went back to the original negative, we remixed the sound, and colour-corrected it, so that’s in the works, there should be a 4K release coming soon.”

Presumably, that work is also what’s now available in the iTunes version of the film, but while there’s not been confirmation of a fresh physical media release, it’s looking a little more likely. Not unrelated, a 4K remaster of Michael Bay’s Armageddon, another Disney release, has also been completed. The Rock is another obvious candidate from the same era, and the hope and expectation now is that Disney, via Sony, gets these titles moving. Money hasn’t been spent on a 4K remaster for no reason.

The 4K Ultra HD of David Fincher's Panic Room arrives today. And while reviews by and large are praising the stunning transfer and color grading (there's even a special feature devoted to just that), some are pointing out other changes that only someone like Fincher would even bother to "fix."

As Film Twitter has been quick to point out, David Fincher has made some interesting -- yet very Fincher-esque -- changes to Panic Room for this 4K release. The two that are garnering the most traction and head scratches involve curtains and Coke cans -- and you just know these have been bugging him for 20+ years!

(I've included one example here. Visit the link for more examples via X\Twitter\Hellhole.)

As you can see, the original version of Panic Room has curtains that are a bit more casual, like pretty much any set you'd have in your home, whereas the 4K shows them more pressed and pristine (that is, very much how they would look in a modern Fincher movie). Other images go full product placement, with once-partly obscured Coca Cola labels now completely on display. And these are just two examples of what has been done to the Panic Room 4K; only more scouring will uncover Fincher's other changes.

Odd, sure. Unexpected? Hardly. David Fincher did similar things to the transfer of Seven, with those who have studied that transfer compared with the original theatrical version pointing out plenty of other examples of Fincher tweaking so-called imperfections, like a strand of Gwyneth Paltrow's hair or adding a door where there was once a curtain...This guy and his window treatments!

David Fincher is known to be a perfectionist and this Panic Room 4K is just the latest example. But he was pulling this sort of thing while filming, too, prompting a pretty amusing moment between the directors and his star. After one day of doing take after take after take, he asked star Jodie Foster which was best. Her response? "Honestly, you're a very sick man. There is nothing different between those last three takes." No word on if Foster has picked up her 4K of Panic Room...

Photos have appeared online of the first day of shooting the new Masters of the Universe film in London, with Nicholas Galitzine filming scenes as Prince Adam.

Apparently, this version of the story will have Adam on Earth not having any idea of whom he really is and will be taken back to Eternia sometime later in the story.

A leaked synopsis (if real) reads:

“10-year-old Prince Adam who crashed to Earth in a spaceship and was separated from his magical Power Sword—the only link to his home on Eternia. After tracking it down almost two decades later, Prince Adam is whisked back across space to defend his home planet against the evil forces of Skeletor. But to defeat such a powerful villain, Prince Adam will first need to uncover the mysteries of his past and become He-Man: the most powerful man in the Universe!”