This Tuesday brings one of the most critically and commercially successful films of all time to Blu-ray: James Cameron's Academy Award-winning Titanic. The key to Titanic's enduring popularity lies in Cameron's skillful manipulation of disparate elements; his epic drama functions simultaneously as operatic love story, historical recreation, gaudy soap opera, and grand-scale disaster picture. As the old cliche goes, it really does have something for everyone, and it never seems as though Cameron is simply pandering for mass appeal. He believes in this doomed romance, and he makes the viewer believe it, too.
Paramount Home Media has orchestrated a grand HD rollout for the title with separate 2D and 3D Blu-ray editions. It's fitting treatment for a picture that Martin Liebman calls, "one of the most absorbing spectacles ever created...From the model makers to the digital artists, from the costume designers to the set decorators, from the actors to the director, from the cinematographer to the composer, this is a rare movie where everything is just right, where everything feels right, a movie in which every last little detail comes together with such precision that even 'seamless' is too weak a word to describe how all-encompassing it truly is."
Another highly anticipated title is Warner Home Entertainment's massive Harry Potter Wizard's Collection. This box set compiles all eight films in the Harry Potter alongside a vast repository of special features such as extended cuts of selected features, deleted scenes, behind-the-scenes documentaries, and interviews with cast and crew. By now, most viewers know whether they are Potter fans or not, and this package won't do anything to sway the haters over to the Hogwarts side, but for those obsessed with the movies and the J.K. Rowling fantasy novels that inspired them, the Wizard's Collection is appointment home media.
Kenneth Brown nicely sums up the decision for fans with his Blu-ray review, how "the beautifully boxed, thirty-one-disc Harry Potter Wizard's Collection is the stuff Christmas gifts are made of, and the sort of expensive, seemingly unobtainable collector's set a rabid fan might find himself drooling over in a store, wondering which of his credit cards could accommodate his sudden urge to splurge. The set, though, could have just as easily been called The Ultimate Edition Harry Potter Collection, as it collects the series' six previous UE Blu-ray releases as well as its upcoming Deathly Hallows UE releases...If you can't live without every Harry Potter special feature and collectible or haven't made the full plunge into the Potter filmverse, the Wizard's Collection won't disappoint."
Along similarly fantastic lines, Universal Studios' Snow White and the Huntsman streets this week. Filmmaker Rupert Sanders' feature-length directorial debut drew more attention for sparking an affair between Sanders and his leading lady, Kristen Stewart, than for the content of the film itself, so it's a bit of a shock to realize that Snow White and the Huntsman has on-screen strengths that outstrip its TMZ-friendly controversy. Working with the great cinematographer Greig Fraser (Bright Star, Let Me In), Sanders cultivates a magical aura both grimy and grand, and he gets terrific performances from the likes of Chris Hemsworth, Bob Hoskins, Ian McShane, and especially Charlize Theron, whose monstrously unstable and self-absorbed evil queen plays like the comic-book version of her masterful Young Adult heroine. Snow White and the Huntsman isn't perfect - the narrative tries to do too much in too little time, and Kristen Stewart's work as Snow White is low-energy and mostly unengaging - but it still deserves a better fate than the one the tabloids have consigned it to.
In his Blu-ray review, Kenneth Brown echoes some of those sentiments, writing that, "Snow White and the Huntsman isn't a mediocre film by any means. It's just overly ambitious, and slowly but surely [it] slips away from Sanders. This might even be the most critical I've been of a film I enjoyed quite a bit. It was that enjoyment, in fact, that I suspect made the movie's weaker elements as disappointing as they were. Flawed as it is, Sanders' Snow White is worth watching, if only for its visuals...The story, script and performances may be uneven on the whole, and the tone of the piece may be inconsistent, but it's still more than possible to be swept up in the magic of everything on screen."
Finally, we end the week with a TV-on-Blu-ray title: Spartacus: Vengeance. Anyone expecting the restraint or thoughtfulness of Stanley Kubrick's 1960 Spartacus interpretation might want to seek entertainment elsewhere; the Starz TV series exchanges complex political machinations and historical accuracy for stylized visuals straight from 300 and gobs of graphic violence and sexuality. As such, Spartacus: Vengeance is mostly indefensible from an artistic standpoint, but if you can stomach its excesses, it offers a pulpy, gory good time.
Martin Liebman's Blu-ray review evinces an appreciation for the show's trashy aspirations, the way "there are moments when it seems there's nowhere to go, no way to stretch things out, but Spartacus, more than any other show, makes nearly every scene a cliffhanger, each episode a dizzying collection of dramatic developments that keep things fresh even as it traverses a well-established course of action. The characters enjoy significant development, and the series never shies away from killing them off or setting them up for future victory or defeat. Ultimately, it's not much of a surprise where things are headed, yet the finale captivates with a barrage of killings and happenings, all of the drama and death and dismemberment and eye-opening shocks that viewers have come to expect...brought to a startling climax in a single hour of must-see television."