The year’s first major box-office success, The Hunger Games has been released on Blu-ray and DVD with almost as much fanfare as the film itself. It went on sale at midnight the night before its official release date of August 18th at any retailer who cared to either stay open or open its doors at that hour.

Based on the first book in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, the story takes place in a post-apocalyptic dystopian world in which the totalitarian government selects two adolescents from each of twelve districts to compete to the death in a televised game. The beaten down populace supports the games because the players or “tributes” are chosen by lottery and the chances of their own children being selected are slim.

The narrative centers on the tributes form District 12 – a coal mining region where bow and arrow champion Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) has volunteered to take the place of her younger sister, and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), the son of the local baker who has a crush on her, has also been selected.

Although most of the action is very modern and state of the art, the concept is as old as the that of the gladiators of Rome and the film reminds one more of the sword and sandal epics of the 1950s and 60s than the modern fantasy films which attract today’s large audiences.

Lawrence, Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth as Lawrence’s friend back home, all provide fine performances, as do many in the supporting cast including Woody Harreslon as the pair’s mentor; Lenny Kravitz as Lawrence’s trainer; Wes Bentley as the administrator of the games; Stanley Tucci as the seedy TV host; Donald Sutherland as the country’s duplicitous president and little Amandla Stenberg as a sympathetic player. If another player named Marvel, played by Jack Quaid, looks familiar, it’s because he closely resembles his famous parents, Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid.

This was only director Gary Ross’ third film in fourteen years behind Pleasantville and Seabiscuit.

The Hunger Games is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Futuristic films do not always do as well at the box office as The Hunger Games, the recent remake of Total Recall being a case in point. At the same time, the original 1990 version based on Philip K. Dick’s short story, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” remains a popular and potent entertainment. Lionsgate has reissued it on a spruced up Blu-ray that restores the Arnold Schwarzenegger-Paul Verhoeven commentary from an earlier DVD release that was missing from the first Blu-ray release.

Schwarzenegger, never a great actor, was nevertheless a great action hero in his heyday. Here he is at his best opposite Rachel Ticotin and Sharon Stone. Who can forget his great line after killing the evil Stone, “consider that a divorce”?

Summer has always been a great time for movie box-office, but even summer releases of major films prior to 1975 were generally released to just a handful of theatres at a time. That all changed with the mass market release of Steven Spielberg’s second film, Jaws, based on Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel. The film, which started a worldwide fear of sharks, opened to critical acclaim and lines around the block which was great for the industry. This film, along with the even more popular Star Wars two years later, also led to the gradual dumbing down of films in which action and special effects became more important elements in cinematic story-telling than well-drawn characters and situations.

Jaws is basically two films in one, the unsettling real life horror of the first part and the dangerous great white shark hunting of the second, reminiscent of Melville’s immortal Moby Dick with police chief Roy Scheider; marine biologist Richard Dreyfuss and grizzled fisherman Robert Shaw taking to the high seas. There is, of course, a downside to the film’s popularity, which is finally available on Blu-ray, namely the grade Z sequels that followed over the years which made it not only acceptable, but downright obligatory for every box office hit to have sequels, warranted or not.

While action genre films are still in demand, musicals, a staple since the early days of talkies, have all but died out except for the occasional blockbuster such as the forthcoming Les Miserables. While there are still numerous old-time musicals that have yet to make their appearance on DVD, even those are now limited to special releases. Twlight Time has just released limited Blu-ray editions of two, High Time and Bye Bye Birdie.

Blake Edwards’ 1960 film, High Time is more a comedy than it is a musical, but with Bing Crosby and musical heart-throb of the day, Fabian, several songs are sung, one of them, the Oscar nominated “The Second Time Around”, becoming an instant standard.

The plot is the old one about a middle-aged man (Crosby) going back to school with room-mates (Fabian, Richrd Beymer, Patrick Adiarte) young enough to be his kid,s and falling in love with one of his professors – Nicole Maurey. It’s all very amusing, but except for the musical interludes, it places more of an emphasis on the physical comedy Edwards was famous for than situation comedy. Still, it’s nice to Crosby reunited with Maurey, who played his murdered wife in the flashback scenes from the superior Little Boy Lost, still missing on DVD.

A Broadway smash hit in 1960, Bye Bye Birdie is a musical that has not stood the test of time very well. Based on the then hot topic of Elvis Presley’s induction into the Army, the musical centers around a song-writer (Dick Van Dyke) and his secretary (Janet Leigh) who convince Ed Sullivan (as himself) to showcase one of Van Dyke’s songs sung to a Midwest girl (Ann-Margret) whose name is picked out of a hat. The film version, which begins with a sexy, out-of-character Ann-Margret sashaying to the title tune written for the film, however, still charms.

While we are still on the subject of musicals, it should be noted that Warner Brothers, mostly through the Warner Archive, has now released all of Mario Lanza’s films on DVD, including his last two – Seven Hills of Rome and For the First Time.

Lanza does a lot of singing in Seven Hills of Rome including good imitations of Perry Como, Frankie Laine and Dean Martin and a bad one of Louis Armstrong. He plays a hot-headed TV tenor staying with his starving artist cousin in Rome while waiting for his American showgirl girlfriend to breeze through. In the meantime he fails to notice the romantic interest of a young Italian girl he met on a train. It’s all very predictable, but the filmed in Rome locations add zest.

The unfortunately named For the First Time was the last time we would see Lanza who died a mere weeks after release of the film. The actor/singer had suffered from weight problems throughout his career with his ballooning size very noticeable in this film in which he plays a world-renown opera singer who falls in love with a beautiful deaf girl while hiding out incognito in Capri. She awakens from her typical movie plot operation to Lanza singing Schubert’s “Ave Maria”. Once again, the beautiful locations trump the story.

This week’s new DVD releases include the Oscar winning A Separation and the controversial anti-Communist treatise, My Son John.