The DVD Report #201: March 29, 2011

It wasn’t until 1990 when critics began to reassess the films of the previous decade that Raging Bull came to be considered the best film of the decade in retrospect. Until then Ordinary People had generally been considered a most deserving Oscar winner and easily the best film of 1980. It had won most of the precursors for Best Picture and Director as well as Oscars for both, so what happened over the course of ten years for the critical consensus to change? Probably the fact that the deeply emotional territory of Ordinary People had by then become the province of TV movies whereas the raw edginess of Raging Bull had remained unique to the big screen. Anyway, that’s my theory.

Based on Judith Guest’s best-selling novel, Ordinary People marked the directing debut of acting superstar Robert Redford who was more than up to the task. Twenty year-old Timothy Hutton, the son of popular actor Jim Hutton who had recently died of cancer at the age of 45, was given the plum role of a suicidal teenager. Cast against type, TV’s perennially smiling Mary Tyler Moore was given the role of the cold, distant mother just two years after the deaths of her only sister from suicide and only brother from cancer following a failed assisted suicide attempt with Mary the assistant. Her only son, not much older than Hutton, shot and killed himself in what was officially ruled an accident shortly before the film’s release.

Despite the personal tragedies of the film’s two stars and the tragic story itself, the film is decidedly uplifting with superb performances from Donald Sutherland as Moore’s husband and Judd Hirsch as Hutton’s psychiatrist as well as those of Hutton and Moore. Moore and Hirsch received two of the film’s six Oscar nominations. The film, in addition to its Best Picture and Director wins it was accorded wins for Best Adapted Screenplay and Supporting Actor, Hutton, who actually had the film’s largest role.

Three films about real life people not only managed to secure a Best Picture nomination, they each received more nominations than the winner.

Nominated for eight Oscars, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull took home only for Robert De Niro’s superlative portrayal of self-destructive former boxer, Jack LaMatta and for Thelma Schoonmaker’s meticulous editing. Joe Pesci as De Niro’s volatile brother and Cathy Morairty as his breathy wife were also nominated for their performances, as was Scorsese for his direction. The other two nods were for Cinematography and Sound.

Matching Bull’s eight nominations, David Lynch’s The Elephant Man was about the life of 19th Century Englishman Joseph Merrick, played by John Hurt, whose disfiguring congenital disease hid the intelligence and sensitivity that was hardly evident in his career as a side-show freak. Rescued by a Victorian physician, played by Anthony Hopkins, he finds dignity at last. Based on two books about Merrick’s life, a successful play with the same title, but by a different writer, ran simultaneously on Broadway.

Nominated for Best Actor (Hurt), Director, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction, Costume Design, Editing and Score, the film to take home a single Oscar.

With seven nominations, Michael Apted’s Coal Miner’s Daughter was one of the more intelligent musical biographies, telling the life story of legendary country singer, Loretta Lynn, played by Sissy Spacek in her Oscar winning role. Also nominated for Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing, Art Direction and Sound, it failed to secure a nod for either its director or for the acclaimed performances of co-stars Tommy Lee Jones as Lynn’s husband, Levon Helm as her father and Beverly D’Angelo as Lynn’s fellow country superstar, Patsy Cline.

Based on Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Roman Polanski’s Tess filled out the list of Best Picture contenders, coming away with six nods and three wins for Cinematography, Art Direction and Costume Design. Polanski and the film’s score were also nominated.

Other films that Oscar liked this year included Melvin and Howard; The Great Santini; Resurrection; The Stunt Man; The Empire Strikes Back; Fame; Breaker Morant and My Brilliant Career.

Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard, which won the National Society of Film Critics award for the year’s Best Picture only received three Oscar nominations, but won for two of them: Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress, the delightful Mary Steenburgen who plays the wife of the truck driver who claimed to have been Howard Hughes’ heir. Jason Robards received the third nomination for his portrayal of Hughes.

The recipient of two nominations, Lewis John Carlino’s The Great Santini was originally released in a handful of theatres in the South in 1979, but was sold to television before it had a chance to open in any of the larger markets. Its showing on HBO in early 1980 met with such acclaim that Warner Bros. decided to open it in New York and Los Angeles later in the year. The result was a Best Actor nod for Robert Duvall as a gruff marine pilot and a Supporting Actor nod for Michael O’Keefe as his sensitive son. That couldn’t happen under current Oscar rules which do not allow a film to be nominated in any category if has been shown on television prior to its theatrical showing in Los Angeles.

Ellen Burstyn had her best role in years as a woman who dies and is brought back to life with amazing healing powers in Daniel Petrie’s Resurrection. She and Broadway legend Eva Le Gallienne as her grandmother both received acting nominations.

A surprise hit about movie making, Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man received three nominations for Best Director, Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor, Peter O’Toole as an egomaniacal director.

The second installment of the original Star Wars trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back,was nominated for three Oscars and won one for Best Sound along with a Special Achievement Award for its visual effects.

Before there was Glee, there was Fame, a popular TV series about gifted singing and dancing high school students, and before the series there was Fame the movie. Nominated for six Oscars, it won two, for its score and its rousing title song.

The Australian film industry, which had long been taken for granted by the Academy finally made them sit up and take notice with two films, Breaker Morant, nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, and My Brilliant Career, nominated for Best Costume Design.

All films discussed have been released on DVD in the U.S.

This week’s new DVD releases include Black Swan and Tangled and the Blu-ray releases of The Ten Commandments and King of Kings.

-Peter J. Patrick (March 29, 2011)

The DVD Report #200: March 22, 2011

It’s hard to believe this is my 200th DVD article for CinemaSight. It’s still harder to realize how much DVD and home movie delivery in general has changed since May 2007 when I started this.

Despite the availability now of streaming, i.e. downloading films over the internet, having a physical DVD in your possession is still the best way to be able to enjoy a film anytime you want. There probably never will be a time when you can download anything at any time. Studios can and do put films out there and then withdraw them at will.

One trend that is good for home viewers is that the window between theatrical releases and home video availability continues to shrink. All studios now make their latest films available on Blu-ray and DVD within a few months of their theatrical debuts.

It’s not surprising that DVD sales have slumped in the wake of the downturn in the worldwide economy, and that DVD production as a consequence has fallen. Not only are studios making fewer copies of their new films, they are for the most part not interested in delving into their vast libraries of old films.

What is surprising is that given the opportunity to derive profits from those old films though the sale of MOD (movies on demand) hasn’t whet more studio appetites than it has.

Warner Bros., which owns all of its own films as well as the complete film libraries of RKO and several small studios, along with films made by MGM prior to 1991, introduced movies on demand two years ago. Rather than pressing DVDs by machine and making them available for distribution through retail outlets, they copy their films on computers and sell them to customers via their on-line store. They now release a minimum of four titles per week.

The Warner Archive releases have run the gamut from silent classics of the 1920s to pre-Code gems of the early 1930s to forgotten films noir of the late 1940s to restored cinemascope epics of the 1950s and 1960s to classic TV movies and mini-series of the 1970s and 1980s to an occasional more recent, albeit neglected film of interest. Many of their releases have been restored versions of films that have only been previously available, if at all, in battered, difficult to watch versions.

Some of this stuff is really fascinating. For example, this year they have already given us a double disc set of the two versions of The White Sister; several synchronized sound films that bridged the gap between silents and talkies; four long sought after Vincente Minnelli films and most recently, several long requested musicals.

I had seen the 1933 version of The White Sister with Helen Hayes and Clark Gable years ago and remembered it as being pretty good for an old tearjerker. It still is, but the 1923 original with Lillian Gish and Ronald Colman is so much more than that, filmed on location in the wake of Mt. Vesuvius.

The synchronized sound films, Don Juan with John Barrymore and Mary Astor and The Merry Widow with Mae Murray and John Glbert give you a sense and feel of what it must have been like in that brief period between silents and talkies when films hasn’t yet spoken but were very much alive with the sound of the worlds around them.

Minnelli’s The Cobweb; Tea and Sympathy; The Reluctant Debutante and Two Weeks in Another Town, like all of Minnelli’s cinemascope films from the 1950s and early 1960s, are nothing if not beautifully designed and composed films, showing a true mastery of the then still new widescreen process.

Among the recently released musicals are Minnelli’s 1945 under-appreciated Yolanda and the Thief, which failed to make Lucile Bremer a star, but did give us Minnelli’s glorious compositions and his first collaboration with Fred Astaire. Also finally available is Little Nellie Kelly, with Judy Garland in a dual role as mother and daughter.

Warner Bros. has also been a leader in releasing their classic films on Blu-ray. They’ve already made available special limited editions of Gone With the Wind; The Wizard of Oz and Casablanca, as well as released these beloved films in stand-alone single Blu-ray disc editions. They’ve also released The Maltese Falcon; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and the original King Kong with more to come.

Their standard DVD releases of classic titles seem to be limited to repackaging previously released films in four packs under the TCM banner.

Fox, which was the first to release a bounty of their classic films in the early days of DVD in the late 1990s, has been a real disappointment in recent years. True, they gave us the monumental Ford at Fox collection, but the failure of the even more fabulous Murnau, Borzage and Fox collection to sell kind of put a damper on things. They’re since been content mainly to reissue the same title over and over. A rare recent exception was The Elia Kazan Collection which along with the reissues gave us five previously unavailable Kazan films including A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; Wild Riverand America America.

Fox still has a number of classics that they have not released, but seems content to just repackage the same films over and over. They have, however, stepped up their Blu-ray releases schedule of classic films. Recent releases include The Robe; South Pacific and The Sound of Music, but seem to be concentrating on the release of MGM (actually United Artists) film in their library before they lose distribution rights to Lionsgate later in the year. Films such as the original The Manchurian Candidate, presently Best Buy exclusives, will be given wide release before their contract expires.

In the meantime they have licensed a number of lesser known titles to Screen Archives, a CD manufacturer and distributer. Their first release is 1970’s The Kremlin Letter.

At the other end of the spectrum, Paramount continues to be the worst of the major studios at releasing the wealth of films they own. They don’t seem to have much interest in putting their classics out on DVD either. A rare exception was made for the 1969 version of True Grit to capitalize on the release of the remake last December, but the only classic scheduled for imminent release is The Ten Commandments. 

Disney continues to slow release its classic titles for limited periods, then place them on moratorium and re-release them roughly in seven year intervals. Bambi, which was just released on Blu-ray, is the latest to re-emerge. One wonders how long this can go on.

The class act of home video, the Criterion Collection, continues to grow. Recent releases include superb Blue-ray renditions of Paths of Glory; Sweet Smell of Success; Au Revoir Les Enfants and Yi Yi. Blow Out; the original 1955 version of Diabolique and Deadly Kiss Me Deadly are coming.

Both Universal, which owns all pre-1949 Paramount films, as well as its own vast library and Sony, which owns Columbia films, have set up MOD programs similar to those of the Warner Archive, but releases are slow in coming. Hopefully this will improve.

In the meantime there are still a few of the old independent shops, sometimes referred to as bootleg sites, where you can obtain a copy of a rare old film at a reasonable price if you look hard enough. Many of these are films that have fallen out of copyright, and are considered to be in the public domain.

A film that has fallen into in the public domain can still have a major restoration if the original elements, which are still for the most part owned by the studio that produced it, if demand is there or the studio or DVD company cares enough about a particular film to spend the money. Rescued and restored public domain titles include It’s a Wonderful Life; the title 1951 version of A Christmas Carol and Charade, all of which are now available on Blu-ray as well as standard DVD. Public domain titles that been restored for standard DVD include the 1936 version of My Man Godfrey and His Girl Friday. Make sure you seek out the superior restored versions if you want to see these classics in all their glory.

Happy hunting!

New DVD releases this week include recent Christmas releases The Tourist and How Do You Know and the Blu-ray releasse of Robe Reiner’s Stand By Me and John Huston’s The Bible.

-Peter J. Patrick (March 22, 2011)

The DVD Report #199: March 15, 2011

Women abandoning husbands and children for careers and fathers and sons bonding in the absence of a mother were hardly new to Hollywood in 1979. Films of the late 20s and early 30s were rife with such plots. What was new in 1979 was the sheer number of women in America who were putting careers ahead of family and men who were learning to be domestic. Robert Benton’s Kramer vs. Kramer tapped into that in a big way, being embraced both by the public and the Academy. It was so embraced by the Academy that they honored it with nine Oscar nominations and five awards, including Best Picture, Director, Actor (Dustin Hoffman) and Supporting Actress (Meryl Streep). Eight year-old Justin Henry had been nominated for Best Supporting Actor as their son, and Jane Alexander picked up her third nomination for playing their friend and neighbor.

Its competition included two other domestic dramas, a war picture and a bizarre musical.

Probably the most fun was had by Peter Yates’ Breaking Away, a rare film that had audiences standing and cheering at the end. Set in Bloomington, Indiana, Dennis Christopher starred as a local bicyclist who along with friends Dennis Quaid and Jackie Earle Haley was looked down upon by the snobby well-to-do students at Indiana University. Paul Dooley and Best Supporting Actress nominee Barbara Barrie provide outstanding support as his parents. Nominated for five Oscars in all, it won for Best Original Screenplay. Dooley won the National Board of Review for Best Supporting Actor.

An unlikely heroine, and an unlikely star, Sally Field had broken out of her long time cutesy pie mold with TV’s harrowing Sybil a few years earlier, but Martin Ritt’s Norma Rae was her first major dramatic screen role. As the young mother and textile worker who helps organize for the union within her shop, Field is completely riveting. She’s also quite convincing in the home life scenes with Beau Bridges as her husband. Nominated for four Oscars in all, it won for Best Song “It Goes Like It Goes”, and for Field’s astonishing performance.

Nominated for eight Oscars, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now went home with two, winning for Best Cinematography and Best Sound. The film, which was adapted from Joseph Conrad’s classic novel, Heart of Darkness,moved the story forward several decades to the Vietnam War. Martin Sheen was the protagonist, Oscar nominated Robert Duvall the war crazed Lt. Colonel who loves “the small of napalm in the morning” and Marlon Brando the totally nuts Colonel Kurtz. Although the film is riveting for most of its length, the last section involving Brando’s character, which should have been its strongest segment, seems like an anti-climax. Still, the film is an experience well worth having.

The same cannot be said for Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, the open-heart surgery musical, with Roy Scheider as a mirror image of Fosse. Jessica Lange played the angel of death, while Leland Palmer and Ann Reinking were among the many women in his life. Lots of people loved this thing, including members of the Academy which granted it nine Oscar nominations including Best Actor and four wins, all in technical categories.

What puzzled me most about the acclaim for this wretched affair is that its nominations and wins came at the expense of a truly great musical, the film version of Hair. Milos Forman’s film was richer, bolder and bursting with great songs and stupendous choreography, but it wasn’t a major success. By 1979, hippies were considered passé and the nudity which helped make the stage show such a phenomenon more than a decade earlier was toned down and no longer shocking. Still, for anyone who bothered to see it, it was a much more rewarding experience than watching Scheider smoke, do drugs, hallucinate, have a heart attack and go through that vivid open heart surgery.

Other films that Oscar liked this year included The China Syndrome; Manhattan; Being There; La Cage aux Folles; Starting Over; The Rose; The Black Stallion; Agatha and The Tin Drum.

Benefitting from the timeliness of a real life nuclear incident just after the film’s opening, James Bridges’ The China Syndrome was a terrific film about the cover-up of a nuclear plant accident. Jack Lemmon as the whistle blower and Jane Fonda as the photogenic TV reporter who proves to be more than just another dumb blonde are both terrific and totally deserving of their Oscar nods. Michael Douglas is also quite good as Fonda’s cameraman. The film earned a total of four Oscar nominations.

Considered by many to be Woody Allen’s best film, Manhattan, surprisingly received just two Oscar nominations, for Allen’s screenplay and for Mariel Hemingway’s performance as Allen’s teenage paramour. Another well received comedy, Hal Ashby’s Being There also received just two nominations, for Peter Sellers’ starring role as a simple gardener unexpectedly thrust into the limelight and for Melvyn Douglas’ portrayal of a Washington power broker. Douglas’ performance won him his second Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

A surprise nominee for Best Director, Edouard Molinari’s La Cage aux Folles also picked up nods for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Costume Design. Jerry Herman’s musical adaptation of the farce set in a Parisian transvestite club became a smash Broadway hit several times over. It was even remade by Mike Nichols some years later as The Birdcage.

Burt Reynolds was the star of Alan J. Pakula’s Starting Over, but it was Jill Clayburgh as his kooky new girlfriend and Candice Bergen as his even kookier ex-wife who Oscar favored with nominations.

Bette Midler, long a popular concert performer and record star, was finally given her first starring role in a dramatic film, Mark Rydell’s The Rose, in which she played a self-destructive singer modeled after Janis Joplin. The film received a total of four nominations including those for Midler as Best Actress and for Frederic Forrest as Best Supporting Actor.

Mickey Rooney made one of his umpteen comebacks as a horse trainer in Carroll Ballard’s The Black Stallion. The film, which earned Rooney his fourth acting nomination, was also nominated for Best Editing and won a Special Achievement Award for Best Sound Editing.

Vanessa Redgrave was marvelously cast as Agatha Christie in Michael Apted’s Agatha, about the mystery writer’s eleven day disappearance in 1926, but Dustin Hoffman was miscast as the reporter who pursues her. Nevertheless the costumes were exquisite, and they were nominated for an Oscar.

A profoundly moving film, Volker Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum about middle-class passivity in the wake of Hitler’s rise, deservedly won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film as well as a slew of international awards.

All films discussed been released on DVD in the U.S.

This week’s new DVD releases include David O. Russell’s The Fighter featuring the Oscar winning performances of Christian Bale and Melissa Leo and Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter with Matt Damon as well as the Blu-ray debuts of Louis Malle’s Au Revoir, Les Enfants and Edward Yang’s Yi Yi.

-Peter J. Patrick (March 15, 2011)

The DVD Report #198: March 8, 2011

The Viet Nam war ended in 1973. Five years later Hollywood finally came to acknowledge it in a big way with several films about the war, two of which were honored with seventeen Oscar nominations and eight wins between them, including Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director and Original Screenplay.

Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter about the devastating effects of the war on a small Pennsylvania industrial town had been nominated for nine Oscars including Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor Christopher Walken, Editing and Sound, all of which it won, as well as Best Actor Robert De Niro, Supporting Actress Meryl Streep, Original Screenplay and Cinematography, which it did not.

Walken’s haunting gradual deterioration to the point where he plays a game of Russian roulette that is ultimately responsible for his death was the source for much criticism at the time as there was no historical basis for it. It also resulted in several well-publicized copycat deaths.

The Deer Hunter’s chief competition was Hal Ashby’s Coming Home about the consciousness- raising of a career soldier’s wife who falls in love with a paralyzed veteran turned anti-war protestor. Nominated for eight Oscars including Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor Bruce Dern, Supporting Actress Penelope Milford and Editing which it failed to win. It did, however, win three big ones – Best Actor Jon Voight, Actress Jane Fonda and Original Screenplay.

Fonda’s win was a bit of a surprise as she faced strong competition from both Jill Clayburgh and Ingrid Bergman. Voight’s win, on the other hand, was a foregone conclusion, his having already won every extant precursor for his sensitive portrayal of a paraplegic, The dueling war films’ competition including a harrowing American-in-a-foreign-prison drama, a contemporary woman’s picture and a remake of an Oscar nominated comedy of 37 years earlier.

The true story of American Billy Hayes, imprisoned in Turkey for attempting to smuggle drugs of the country, was a sensation at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival, for which director Alan Parker received a Golden Palm nomination. The film was the first major starring role for Brad Davis, whose career had been mostly on TV. He was nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Actor and won as Best Newcomer. He did not, however, receive one of the film’s six Oscar nominations, which included those for Best Director and Supporting Actor John Hurt. The film won two, for Oliver Stone’s highly controversial screenplay and Giorgio Moroder’s pulsating original score.

Stone’s screenplay had come under fire for embellishing Hayes’ escape and making his Turkish captors seem more ominous than they were in real life.

So-called women’s films may have been a thing of the past, but films about newly liberated women were in vogue, with Paul Mazurksy’s An Unmarried Woman having the highest profile. Jill Clayburgh briefly became a top box-office star with her portrayal of the upper middle-class New York housewife whose husband suddenly dumps her for a younger woman. The performance earned her the first of her two Oscar nominations, one of three nominations the film received. Mazursky was nominated both as producer of the film and for his sharply observant screenplay, but not for his direction.

Harry Segall’s play, Heaven Can Wait, was first filmed as Here Comes Mr. Jordan in 1941. Two years later another film was made using the play’s original title. Warren Beatty’s 1978 was a remake of the 1941 film, not the 1943 film. Confused? Don’t worry, a lot of people were at the time.

Beatty received four of the film’s nine Oscar nominations, as producer of a Best Picture nominee, as co-director (with Bucky Henry), as writer (with Elaine May), as well as for his portrayal of a race car driver who dies before his time and comes back in the body of a millionaire who is about to be murdered. Robert Montgomery had been a prizefighter in the original version, for which he, too, received a Best Actor nod.

Jack Warden in James Gleason’s previously nominated role and Dyan Cannon in Rita Johnson’s old role received supporting nods.

Other films Oscar liked this year included Autumn Sonata; Interiors; California Suite; Death on the Nile; Days of Heaven; The Boys From Brazil; The Buddy Holly Story; Pretty Baby; The Wiz; Grease; Thank God It’s Friday and Superman.

Sweden’s legendary, albeit unrelated, Bergmans – director Ingmar and actress Ingrid – combined their talents for the first time on Autumn Sonata in which Ingrid played a world famous concert pianist reuniting with the daughter (Liv Ullmann) she had precious little time for while at the peak of her career. Both Bergmans were nominated for Oscars, Ingrid having already won the National Board of Review, New York Film Critics and National Society of Film Critics awards for her performance. Ingmar’s nomination was for his screenplay, not his direction.

Woody Allen, one of Ingmar Bergman’s greatest admirers, was nominated for both writing and directing the Bergmanesque Interiors about three women (Diane Keaton, Mary Beth Hurt, Kristin Girffith) in the wake of the divorce of their parents played by Geraldine Page and E.G. Marshall and Marshall’s unexpected marriage to Maureen Stapelton. Page as the control freak mother and Maureen Stapleton as her complete opposite, were both nominated, Page in the lead category, Stapleton in support. Many felt that had Page been nominated in support she would have had a better chance at winning on what was her sixth nomination.

The supporting actress Oscar went instead to former winner, Maggie Smith, playing an Oscar losing actress in Herbert Ross’ California Suite. The episodic comedy, written by Neil Simon, featured four couples staying at a California hotel the week of the Oscars. The other three segments were at best okay, but Smith and Michael Caine as her gay husband of convenience were at the top of their game and Smith’s win was extremely popular.

Smith’s other film this year was John Guillermin’s film of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile in which she played Bette Davis’ secretary. Itwon an Oscar in the only category it was nominated for, Best Costume Design. It did considerably better elsewhere, with Smith, Peter Ustinov (as Hercule Poirot) and Angela Lansbury all nominated for BAFTAs. Lansbury also won the National Board of Review award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of a too talkative mystery writer.

One of the most beautifully photographed films of all time, Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven won Nestor Almendros a much deserved Oscar for Best Cinematography. The film was also nominated for Best Director, Costume Design, Original Score and Sound.

Laurence Olivier received his tenth and final acting nomination for his fearless Nazi hunter in Franklin J. Schaffner’s film of Ira Levin’s The Boys From Brazil. He had also been nominated for Best Director for Hamlet, and had previously won two Oscars including one for Best Actor in Hamlet, and an honorary Oscar for acting, directing and producing 1945’s Henry V. He did not go home empty-handed this year either, having received an honorary Oscar for career achievement.

At the other end of the spectrum, Gary Busey received his first and only Oscar nomination for impersonating 1950s singer Buddy Holly in Steve Rash’s The Buddy Holly Story, which won for Best Adapted Score over Pretty Baby and The Wiz. The year’s most successful musical, Grease, was not nominated in this category although it was nominated for Best Song, “Hopelessly Devoted to You”, losing to ‘Last Dance” from Thank God It’s Friday.

The megahit Superman, directed by Richard Donner, was nominated for three technical Oscars and won a Special Achievement Award for its stunning visual effects.

All films discussed have been released on DVD in the U.S.

This week’s new DVD releases include the Oscar winning documentary, Inside Job and the Blu-ray debut of Excalibur.

-Peter J. Patrick (March 8, 2011)