Top Shelf
Stand By Me (Sony, $17.99)
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The Movie: If you’re a male over the age of 25, chances are very good that you’re in love with Stand By Me. If you’re not, chances are it’s because you just haven’t seen it. If you have seen it and still don’t love it, then you probably didn’t spend much time exploring the world with your childhood friends.
Stand By Me is a movie to be treasured. Rob Reiner’s film is one of the best stories of kids growing up and away from each other ever told. Period.
The Features: I haven’t seen the disc, but if you already own Stand By Me on DVD, you may want to consider upgrading for this: 25 Years Later: A Picture-in-Picture Commentary Retrospective, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Buy It If: You like movies, period. Stand By Me is one of those rare gems that should be in any serious film fan’s collection.
Yogi Bear (Warner Bros., $19.99)
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The Movie: Woah, what is Yogi Bear doing in the Top Shelf section of this week’s Blu-rays? Surely there’s no way a live-action/CGI-hybrid adaptation of an animated series that holds little cultural relevance to today’s generation could actually be enjoyable, right? Well I may be shunned for saying this, but there’s nothing wrong with Yogi Bear and anyone who hates on it is just aiming for an easy target. It’s not even an issue of, “Well, what did you expect? It is what it is.” Yogi Bear is a legitimately entertaining film.
Not only does the CGI look pretty fantastic (on a nerd level, the compositing here is top notch), but Yogi Bear actually has some pretty elaborate and tangible production design going on throughout. It meshes together a cartoon world with a real world in this wonderful way that seems playful and self-aware but never outright silly. The comedy and plot is aimed toward younger ages, of course, but at least it isn’t brimming with poop and pee jokes, as so many films of this ilk are. Of course, it’s not something that adults are necessarily going to want to go out of their way to see, but if you have kids who like to watch a single movie over and over and over, Yogi Bear is far less of an endurance test than, say, Ice Age 3 or either of the Night at the Museums.
The Features: There are some pretty worthwhile making-of featurettes on the Blu-ray (which is also available on 3D Blu-ray, should you have the equipment to display it), but unfortunately they’re broken down into 3 minute segments and spread across a map-like interface. That’s fine if you are a kid who loves to constantly press buttons on a remote control, but it would have been nice if there was a way to just play them all at once.
Buy It If: You have kids and you’d rather they become obsessed with an animated movie that’s filled with as minimal 6-year old jokes as possible.
Middle Shelf
Skyline (Universal, $24.99)
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The Movie: It’s funny to see people’s reactions when they try to defend Skyline as a good movie. Their argument basically boils down to, “The bar is clearly low to begin with, it delivers some good action, what else do you want?” Well, for starters, having characters that you don’t want to have their brains ripped out as quickly as possible is a good launching point. An actual story would help (and no, simply being trapped is not a story, it’s a setting). Oh, and action that’s paced throughout the story and not just the last act would be nice to have as well.
Having said that, Skyline can be enjoyed. It’s not an irredeemable disaster, it’s just a movie that thinks it’s far cooler and smarter and inventive than it actually is. When the aliens are doing their kill-em-all thing, it’s fine, but as soon as you have to spend more than eight seconds with one of the humans, it makes you want to rip your own brain out. That’s a problem.
The Features: For a movie that’s so effects-laden, it’s disappointing to see such slim supplementals about the actual special effects. There is one 10-minute segment, but it’s not very thorough. There are about 8 minutes of extended/deleted scenes, none of which are worthwhile. And then there’s the commentary tracks, one from the directors and one from the co-writers, both of which boast sour grapes about the movie not connecting critically or commercially.
Buy It If: You’re obsessed with alien movies and can tolerate all human characters no matter how aggressively uninteresting they are.
All the Rest
Alien 2 on Earth (Midnight Legacy, $19.99)
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Anastasia (1997) (20th Century Fox, $20.99)
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Because of Winn-Dixie (20th Century Fox, $17.49)
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Devolved (Severin, $21.49)
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Dr. Dolittle (1998) (20th Century Fox, $17.49)
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Elizabeth/Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Universal, $19.99)
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Ernest Goes to Camp/Ernest Goes to Jail (Mill Creek,
$7.99)
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Flicka (20th Century Fox, $18.99)
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Galaxina/The Crater Lake Monster (Mill Creek, $11.99)
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How Do You Know (Sony, $18.99)
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Riddick Blu-ray Collection (Universal, $28.99)
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Robots (20th Century Fox, $17.99)
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The Sandlot (20th Century Fox, $17.49)
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Scary Movie 4 (Vivendi, $14.99)
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The Times of Harvey Milk (Criterion, $27.99)
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The Tourist (Sony, $22.99)
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The Vanquisher (Magnolia, $17.99)
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