When I die, I’m drafting a will, no doubt about it. It’s easier for everyone to have absolutely no say in the dividing of the remaining estate. You hear about it all the time. Brothers and sisters fight over possessions for sentimental or financial reasons, or whatever. If you care about your family (and if you’re smart), you will draft a will.

But as Hélène (Edith Scob) puts it, there’s very little reason to care about what happens after you die when you’re dead.

Summer Hours, from writer and director Olivier Assayas (Late August, Early September), tells the story of how three siblings decide to divide their deceased mother Hélène’s valuable estate and the family collection.

The film opens with Hélène’s 75th birthday party. Hélène’s three children; Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), Frédéric (Charles Berling), and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier); her two daughters-in-law, and her many grandchildren gather at her house (which she inherited from her famously artistic uncle) for what will be the last time.

There should be much to celebrate. It’s Hélène’s birthday. Her children, with their families and their busy lives, are all under one room for the first time in a long time. There’s life again in the house that Hélène spends mostly alone with just the longtime cook and housekeeper Éloïse (Isabelle Sadoyan), but that joy is fleeting. Hélène knows this all too well, even choosing to quickly discuss with her eldest son Frédéric what to do with her possessions when she dies.

Since Frédéric is the only one who still lives in France (Adrienne lives in New York, while Jérémie and his family live in China), it would make the most sense for him to deal with the handling of the estate. Frédéric scoffs at the notion of his mother dying anytime soon and tries to reassure her that the house will be kept in the family for her grandchildren to decide. But Hélène is wise and makes sure that he knows what should happen to the most valuable (and her most beloved) items.

I think the most poignant scenes are with Éloïse, which show how she exists in relation to Hélène and the house. Frédéric makes sure Éloïse is taken care of, ensuring she gets what money Hélène left her, allowing her to keep an item from house before everything is gone, and confirming that she has some place to stay (with relatives he’s told). But the siblings only know of Éloïse as part of the house, and once it’s sold they think less about her because they recognize little about her devotion to the family and what the family meant to her. There’s an incredibly touching scene of Éloïse surveying the empty house, only from the outside since she no longer has a key.

Assayas tells the story as matter-of-fact. This is how the handling of possessions is dealt with after people die; however, times are changing. When Hélène’s brother died, she kept the house and all of its innards exactly the same. When she died, her children kept what they wanted and sold the rest. This theme of generational gaps in attitude and perspective repeats.

Since Frédéric is handling the estate, you get much of his point of view. He wanted to keep everything the same, and it hurts him to see a future without the family house. That’s life, it’s sad, but it goes on.

Video/Audio

Summer Hours was filmed in 1:85:1. Assays supervised the high-definition digital transfer (which was approved by him and cinematographer Eric Gautier). The colors appear plain and surprisingly unlively (even during scenes at the house with the kids playing in the garden), which coincide with the film’s matter-of-fact approach to life and art.

The film features a DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack mastered from its original 24-bit audio files. The audio is extremely sharp, especially during the early part of the movie at the house where you can constantly hearing birds chirping in the background.

Features

Criterion Collection is one of the few remaining distributors that still include booklets with its releases. The booklet contains rich movie stills and an essay “A Time to Live and a Time to Die” by critic Kent Jones.

Also included are three video features. One is a thirty minute interview with Assayas who discusses his inspirations, his life, and how they all impacted his career and especially Summer Hours.

There is a thirty minute making-of documentary that has interviews with Assayas, Berling, and Binoche, as well as behind-the-scenes footage of the filmmaking process.

The last extra is an hour-long documentary “Inventory” that examines the approach of Summer Hours to art. The documentary was partly shot in Paris’ Musée d’Orsay, where some of Hélène’s possessions were finally housed and exhibited. The museum, as part of its 20th anniversary, decided to request artists to use the museum as a model for their art. Assayas discussed using the museum as part of Summer Hours, especially having some of its pieces as main characters in the film.

Note: Visit the film’s official site.

Theatrical Trailer

[photos via Living In Cinema (top) | The Auteurs (bottom)]

After weeks of thinking about it, I’ve decided that I don’t like it.

Having been bought out, the new owners gladly redesigned the formerly plain and simple DVDFile into a much more colorful — and slow — DVD resource site.

Probably to satisfy the Ben Lyons readers of the world, the new color scheme looks cheesy and cheap, as if DVDs, Blu-rays or good films need to be advertised as flashy.

As you can see, there are ads galore, and tons of wasted space to appease lots of inappropriately places images (and ads). I dare not use the term “white space.” Sadly, the disc news posts are few and far between. I enjoyed the breakdown, which is infinitely easier to read than the information dump on The Digital Bits (which could really use a redesign itself).

However, the biggest reason I stuck with DVDFile were their dead simple disc reviews. I didn’t care too much for the video or audio parts (the summary graphic worked nicely), since it was really the actual film review I liked to read. The reviews weren’t Roger Ebert-like, but I think the reviewers shared much of my taste.

I miss the days of a singular page review. Now I have to click three links for the final verdict.

Oh well. Now I can skip the lessening text and see low-res images instead. Yippee.

Video Business is ceasing publication this week, after 29 years of industry-leading coverage of the home entertainment business.

The Jan. 4 issue was the magazine’s last.

VB’s owner, Reed Business Information, is shuttering the magazine and its online operations, effective this week, as part of a larger, ongoing strategy to divest itself of most of its business-to-business publications in the U.S. The company also is closing MBT (Manufacturing Business Technology) and Industrial Distribution.

“I’m extremely proud of the role VB has played in the home entertainment industry, consistently breaking news, while providing important analysis and insight to our readers for almost three decades,” said Marcy Magiera, editor-in-chief and associate publisher. “Every staff member and regular contributor here is a first-class business journalist, and I will miss working with this smart, dedicated and caring group of people.”

VB readers can continue to get the latest home entertainment business and technology news at www.variety.com.

I assumed that Video Business would simply maintain an online-only presence, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I subscribed to VB for a few years before I became more accustomed to getting my home video news online. For some reason, VB didn’t seem like an authority on Blu-ray as it did on VHS or DVD. It tried to hard sell digital downloading as the future, but I guess I still subscribe to the physical disc format.

VB, it was fun while it lasted.

[image via VB]

Single-disc DVD

2-disc DVD

3-disc Blu-ray

I get why, but even the teaser theatrical poster was better than this?

Oh boy, the second I popped in these discs I was instantly transported back to my childhood youth when not missing afternoon cartoons were the top priority. Nothing else mattered.

It’s hard to believe that the live-action adaptations of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are really twenty-five years old, and it’s even harder to believe that I’m even older. I hope I don’t offend anyone considering I’m only in my mid-twenties, but these movies were ancient.

It seemed inevitable to film aficionados, but even this person is impressed that Warner Bros. went all out for the 25th Anniversary Collector’s Edition Blu-ray complete with a comic book, signed sketch, character cards, and a seemingly one-size-fits-all “Radical Beanie,” in addition to the discs for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret Of The Ooze (1991), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles In Time (1993), and TMNT (2007).

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)

I haven’t seen this movie in years, and re-watching it in the midst of a comic book movie adaptation explosion has given me a greater appreciation for the original 1990 movie. Sure, it shows its age way back when New York used to be a crime-ridden city and when words like radical and totally tubular were cool (if ever?).

But what it does well is bring the comic book characters of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael into the real world without any true instance of non-believability or complete fantasy, other than the fact that the heroes comprise of four mutated turtles and one mutated rat. Even the villain Shredder seems plausible as the leader of an underground band of ninja thieves.

The truly independent Steve Barron-directed film maintains a strong balance between many genuine themes and many more silly moments and jokes in the story of a father’s great love for his sons. The best scene is when Splinter meets Danny (Michael Turney) for the first time and instantly tries to mentor the troubled teen. When Danny is unconvinced that his dad loves him, Splinter’s line “All fathers care for their sons” is extremely heartfelt.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret Of The Ooze (1991)

The Secret Of The Ooze is the inevitable sequel that picks up (somewhat) right after the successful original left off. The Shredder is back, and he stands in the way of Slinter and the turtles finding out the truth to their origins.

I’m hesitant to mention more without revealing any potential spoilers, although the Blu-ray’s back cover ends up doing it anyway (think evil mutant counterparts). The sequel is an enjoyable follow-up, full of familiar jokes and similar light-heartedness from the original; however, both the depth and urgency are lacking from the first film, no doubt diluted in favor of more comedy and a cameo by Vanilla Ice.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles In Time (1993)

You can tell from the title that the film’s story takes an even more unrealistic turn. While still enjoyable, Turtles In Time delves farther from the real world and has the turtles traveling back in time to feudal Japan to rescue April O’Neil (Paige Turco).

I hate to say that there’s really nothing more to the movie than that.

TMNT (2007)

Hopefully, you can see the pattern here. Almost fifteen years since the last movie, TMNT does try to follow the same timeline and universe as the previous trilogy; however, it’s now a CGI-animated adventure that allows the story to take an even more wild turn.

The four turtles are no longer a team, but they will have to become one again to save New York City from an immortal tycoon (Winters), four 3,000-year-old stone warriors, and thirteen otherworldly monsters. Outside of a ridiculously hot animated April, there really isn’t much more to say except that it borrows some elements from The Lord Of The Rings and shamelessly sets itself up for a sequel.

The video quality for the first three films (show in 1:85:1 widescreen) is pretty sharp considering their age and low budget. It shouldn’t be surprising that TMNT (2:4:1) looks the best. Ditto for the sound quality, as all four have been re-mastered in Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital 5.1.

The three live-action films contain only theatrical trailers as their extras. TMNT contains a lot more in the form of a commentary track from writer/director Kevin Monroe; unfinished animations for an alternate opening (too wordy) and alternate ending (too long); deleted scenes; a side-by-side comparison of storyboards and the final CGI scenes (one with a longer Michelangelo introduction, and one with Raphael and Casey Jones meeting the monsters for the first time); and the promotional fluff First Look featuring interviews with Patrick Stewart, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Laurence Fishburne who provided the voices for Winters, April, and the Narrator, respectively.

Monroe provides commentary on virtually every extra, putting more emphasis on the storyboard and CGI sequences to better break down both their technological and storytelling aspects. In doing so, you get a better appreciation for how much thought and work he put into the movie, professing his love for the parts of the movie that ultimately got left out (Michelangelo secretly handing Splinter a piece of cake or a much bigger subplot involving the April and Casey romance) of the final cut.

[photos via Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.]

It doesn’t work on my work machine, even after downloading and installing updates. Here’s a screenshot:

Every time I try to turn on my radio for either ‘My Recommendations’ or ‘My Neighbourhood Recommendations,’ a starts and cycles through about five or six songs within the span of five or six seconds and shoot out this dialogue box.

Arg…

This is probably just remedied by a simple uninstall/reinstall, but man…
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The Economist redesigned its website on Sunday. I like it. It’s a small step up from its previous design. It definitely looks much cleaner, although that top row below the header looks cluttered, especially looking at the AJAX box with “Most Read” crammed in.

Blu-ray sucks.
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I know there are programs that deal with this, but this new service TuneUp looks promising in dealing with mp3 metadata and album art on the fly. I agree with Kincaid that a subscription service doesn’t look too appealing, especially when there are free programs out there. Advertising seems the best bet. I’ll try to grab a beta account and test drive it with my 10,000+ tracks.

DVD fanatics were waiting anxiously for what high-definition format Criterion Collection was going to release its catalog in. In what seems like a distant memory, the format war is long over and now Criterion is free to release its content on Blu-ray.

In a thankfully bold move, the company is releasing (as per its newsletter) its Blu-ray discs at the same price point as the standard DVDs, which makes it a no-brainer to simply buy the Blu-ray discs if you don’t already own the standard discs.

The new era begins with:

The Third Man
Bottle Rocket
Chungking Express
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Last Emperor
El Norte
The 400 Blows
Gimme Shelter
The Complete Monterey Pop
Contempt
Walkabout
For All Mankind
The Wages of Fear

Thankfully, I own none of these yet, and will now wait for The Third Man to come out before finally splurging. Actually, I think I own Walkabout. GRRR.

Who would have thought that one film studio would cause the billion dollar home video market to change almost overnight? Of course, the only studio that could would be Warner Bros. since it owns a 20% share in DVD and VHS shares. It stood the most to gain and lose from the format war.

Matt Paprocki pretty much summed this event up, and the only thing I might change is the title from “Possible HD DVD Death Looming” to “Probable.” Everyone is saying it.

Almost everyone wins with a single format. Of course, Toshiba is the biggest loser since it manufactures HD DVD, but it was either them or Sony.

Here are a few things worth noting:

• Matt correctly points out that the Playstation 3 has served as the white rabbit for the Blu-ray camp, something that this writer believed Sony had the wrong focus on. Sure, Sony appears to have won the high-def DVD war, but its victory seems to be at the PS3’s expense (but that’s another issue). The Playstation 3 has been a huge boost to the number of Blu-ray player households, and the HD-DVD didn’t get the boost it wanted from the Xbox 360, which only supported HD DVD via an additional add-on (i.e. no native playback capability).
• Blu-ray was surprisingly aggressive in its pricing promotions during the holiday season (e.g. 2-for-1 deals). All HD DVD could muster was free movies via mail-in rebate if you bought a new player. One of the reasons to buy HD DVDs were that they were supposedly cheaper to buy than Blu-ray discs.
• Blu-ray was also more aggressive in releasing more high-profile movies (i.e. fanboy flicks) than HD DVD was (Transformers aside). Video game console makers can tell you that blockbuster titles sell hardware.
• HD DVD hardware was cheaper than Blu-ray hardware, which made it less appealing for retailers to stock. Well, except for Wal-Mart, of course.
• THe porn industry has been sort of a non-factor in the war, with studios releasing movies on both formats.

The funny thing is that both formats still haven’t been able to deliver the features promised that would make either more attractive than regular DVD. Now that consumers can confidently buy Blu-ray players without the fear of investing in a dead format (sorry, HD DVD owners), they can now enjoy the headaches that early Blu-ray adopters experienced.

The whole format war was absurd from the beginning. Now, a host of reasons can be cited from WB jumping ship. DVD sales declined in 2007 from 2006, but that was predicted. Sure, consumer confusion could be blamed. You could take a stab at piracy and video games as well. But don’t forget about inflation, gas and oil prices (it finally hit $100/barrel), the banking and mortgage crises, and the general bleak global financial and political outlook.

In the end, a single high-def DVD format is a really good thing. But WB shouldn’t be praised for choosing a single side a few years too late. Everyone was greedy and everyone should be blamed for the war. The lone studio holdouts Paramount and Universal will probably switch sides soon and the war can officially be declared over.

It sucks because now I lost my bet and I owe my friend a Blu-ray player.

At long last, this really funny, yet campy pseudo horror movie is finally available as a two-disc DVD — all 82 minutes of it!
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HD-DVD doesn’t get any love.

1. Target has announced that it is only selling Blu ray DVDs from now on.

2. Thieves steal everything Blu ray from an electronics store, and leave everything HD-DVD. That’s not good. How do you pass up something that’s FREE!
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I switched off between watching two exciting baseball games last night: the San Francisco Giants against the Florida Marlins and the Atlanta Braves against the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Barry Bonds smashed his 754th home run. Barry Zito gave up six runs in four IP. But the Giants still won, even though the Marlins fought back from a 12–7 deficit in the 7th inning to lose 12–10. Our bullpen sucks.

During the Braves game, there was a strange play in the 9th inning. A lead-off walk to Yunel Escobar by Jose Valverde led to a steal for second base when every DB infielder weren’t paying attention. By the time Valverde noticed what was going on, Escobar had already grabbed second base. The next batter Willie Harris hit a bloop single to score Escobar and tie the game 7–7.

You could see the look of utter disgust in DB manager Bob Melvin’s face. On the flip side, if Escobar was thrown out to end the game, everyone would have been like “what the f*ck was he thinking?”

For Valverde’s sake, the DB eventually won in the 11th inning, so his blunder didn’t cost the team a victory. But a very heads-up play by the rookie Escobar.

Sony has invested almost everything it has in Blu-ray, although you would think that the company should bank its future more on the Playstation 3. The video game industry shifted from the once dominant Nintendo to Sony when Sony released its landmark Playstation console. Selling over a hundred million units over its lifetime, the PS helped guide the industry into mainstream society. The Playstation 2 currently has a 60% share in the video game hardware market while Microsoft and Nintendo both lag behind.

Microsoft released its Xbox 360 platform last year and is on track to sell four to five million units by June. Nintendo has yet to release its next generation console or set a firm release date, while Sony has just announced that it would delay its PS3 until November from its previous summer date. In the video game industry, timing is everything. One of the reasons people think that the PS2 won the console war was because it had such an overwhelming head start over the Xbox and Gamecube. But the portability of the original PS games to the PS2 didn’t hurt either.

Sony knows that timing is crucial, and that giving Microsoft too much of a head start might be devastating. But instead of rushing its console to store shelves, Sony decided that further developing the PS3 would be better for its long-term value. The main reason is that the development of its Blu-ray drive has taken longer than expected. The real heart of the PS3 is the inclusion of the next generation optical drive.

The digital encryption has delayed both the Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats. Movie studios are terrified of piracy (not rightfully so, I might add) and the specifications of the AACS (Advanced Access Content System) DRM standards have been tweaked and modified numerous times so that only recently the final hardware units have been cleared to sell. Toshiba HD-DVD players and Warner Brothers HD-DVD launch titles have both been delayed from their original March 28 release to April 18.

Sony has had a rough decade, losing hardware dominance from increased competition in televisions, music players, etc. Its once landmark Walkman players revolutionized music with stylish personal cassette and CD players, but lost the digital music market to Apple’s iPod. Sony’s original DVD format lost to Toshiba’s eventual DVD standard and has been researching Blu-ray ever since. With 100 million DVD players sold in the United States, Sony lost an opportunity at all of the royalties paid for the technology. The one thing that keeps DVD players above the $30 mark is that about $20 is earmarked for royalty payments.

With so much competition in the electronics market, Sony is banking on both the video game and DVD markets. If Blu-ray won the HD video format war, then Sony would get royalties for years. Developing hardware is always costly, and getting the R&D costs back is almost never a possibility. It is rumored that Microsoft loses $200-$300 on every Xbox 360 sold. Sony’s PS3 is supposedly more advanced, and might have the company losing more money on every console sold than the Xbox 360.

But Sony is in a tight spot. It has brand reputation, but its products are no longer the most popular. It might win the console war despite the head start that Microsoft has. There are over a hundred million PS2 consoles in the world and considering that that many original PS consoles were sold, it’s a good bet that that many PS3 will be sold as well. The PS3 will be enormously popular, but Sony wants the PS3 to be a living room media hub. Microsoft tried that route with the 360, but that has stalled. Nintendo decided against that with its “Revolution” console, citing costs to both the company and the consumer. Sony has taken a no-holds barred approach and the company’s entire future rests on the success of the Blu-ray drive.

Microsoft was smart in choosing to release either a HD-DVD or Blu-ray drive as a separate add-on rather than wait to make it standard in the 360. Sony will use Blu-ray as its optical drive, but if Blu-ray doesn’t win the format war then the company will have lost the war and lots of money.