Warner Home Video is offering customers who own Warner HD-DVD titles the opportunity to trade them in for Blu-ray editions, a bit of goodwill extended to those who chose the wrong side in the early high definition format wars. The “Red2Blu” program is not exactly free – there is a $4.95 fee per disc, plus a shipping and handling charge – but it looks fairly easy to use and it’s a nice gesture. I hope some of the other labels will follow suit.

Here’s the press release sent out by Warners today:

WHV has announced a new program, “Red2Blu,” for those who want to upgrade titles they currently own on HD-DVD to Blu-ray. By visiting Red2Blu.com, consumers can trade up virtually any of their WHV HD-DVD titles (up to 25) for the same title on Blu-ray for a small fee plus shipping and handling. For details and restrictions, visit Red2Blu.com.  “Red2Blu” is available to residents of the United States only.

Wall-E on Blu-ray

I recently wrote up a kind of Blu-ray 101 – an introduction to the format and a list of stand-out discs for the essential library – for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It went live on Tuesday. February 17. Here’s a few of my picks:

STATE OF THE ART

WALL-E (Disney): Pixar’s robot love story is a joyous and gorgeous work of animation, and it practically leaps off the screen on Blu-ray. The picture is crisp and rich, the color iridescent and the sound mix a marvel of subtlety and aural depth. Beyond the movie, the supplements are magnificent, and the Blu-ray exclusive picture-in-picture video commentary is the best use of that technology I’ve seen yet.

THE DARK KNIGHT (Warner) / IRON MAN (Paramount): The second film in Christopher Nolan’s reboot of the “Batman” franchise made use of Imax cameras, the high-definition peak for film, for select scenes — the first studio feature to do so. Blu-ray is the closest you’ll get to that Imax experience on home video. “Iron Man” has no Imax scenes but, like “The Dark Knight,” features impeccably mastered image and sound.

ZODIAC: DIRECTOR’S CUT (Paramount): David Fincher shot this 2007 feature on state-of-the-art digital video. On Blu-ray, the stellar grain-free image is so sharp and pristine, it’s unreal.

The complete feature and the rest of the picks can be found at the Seattle P-I online here.

Criterion's debut release: "Citizen Kane" on laserdisc

Criterion’s name is synonymous with the gold standard when it comes to presenting the definitive editions of classic and foreign cinema on home video. The company began in the laserdisc era and essentially defined the “special edition” presentation as we know it with releases like Citizen Kane (their first laserdisc release ever) and the follow-up 3-disc DVD (which expanded the supplements) and the “director approved” collaborations with Martin Scorsese (whose commentary on Taxi Driver and Raging Bull) set the bar for director commentary tracks and inspired many aspiring filmmakers). They’ve carried their loving care for classic and contemporary movies to DVD, finding vintage supplements for classic films and contributing to the critical record with their efforts. What gives the Criterion stamp meaning is not that they create the “best” DVD editions around, but that that they lavish their efforts on films that don’t get that kind of attention from the studios.

Thus, the announcement earlier this year that Criterion was going to start producing Blu-ray discs was considered evidence that the new format was indeed something that serious film folk should consider. It’s not just for The Matrix and Transformers and The Dark Knight, but for The Godfather (Paramount), Casablanca (Warner) and No Country For Old Men (Miramax).

The smeared world of "Chungking Express"

The four titles that Criterion adds to the Blu-ray format limn the span of the gamut of their interests: The Third Man (classics from the canon), Chungking Express (contemporary international), The Man Who Fell to Earth (cult favorites) and Bottle Rocket (American indie). All the supplements from their definitive DVD editions are carried over to the Blu-ray disc, with the notable exception of the booklets (which are represented by smaller, thinner booklets with only some of the essays and interviews of the original DVD offerings), and the films are newly remastered for the 1080p high definition standard. What you get is a sharper, stronger image that is also more sensitive to preserving the textures of the chemical process of film. Yes, I’m talking about film grain, that reality of celluloid that modern films have been so effectively been scrubbing away in the new film-to-digital-and-back post-production process. It dances across the sc screen of The Third Man with such clarity you think something must be wrong. It’s startling, because we’ve seen so little of it on DVD, but the presence also warms the image, makes it a little more organic. Criterion isn’t the first to do this – The Godfather and Casablanca embrace the grain also – but it really jumped out at me in The Third Man and started me reevaluating what constitutes a proper restoration and mastering standard for classic cinema. It’s not quite so obvious in Chungking Express, but then that film, with its smeared colors and stuttery motion and images pushed and pulled to the extremes of film registration, is all about the texture. Criterion’s Blu-ray preserves that texture so well you can’t imagine seeing it without that kind of clarity.

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Francis Ford Coppola and Paramount first put out The Godfather Trilogy in a special edition in 2001, at a time when the archival materials at hand had yet to be extensively restored. The original negative was worn out and the prints used for mastering were not accurate to the original release. The new release The Godfather Collection: The Coppola Restoration, released on both DVD and Blu-ray, is a corrective.

"Now who's being naive, Kaye?"

Is it overkill to claim that The Godfather on Blu-ray is a sign of the format coming to maturity? Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Mario Puzo’s bestseller remains the great American epic of the immigrant dream turned family business. Al Pacino stars as Michael Corleone in this dark side of the American dream story, rising from clean-cut son of New York Godfather Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando in an Oscar –winning performance) to ruthless mob leader to modern American businessman trying to pull his family’s tentacles from the criminal world. The Godfather (1972) has become the great evocation of the dark side of the American Dream (“I believe in America,” it begins) and The Godfather, Part II (1974) is less a sequel than a further exploration of the family business that both reaches back from and looks beyond the story of the first film, contrasting Michael’s increasingly ruthless rise with the life of young Vito Corleone (played by Robert De Niro, who won his first Oscar for the role). Both films won multiple Oscars, including “Best Picture, Coppola picked up a Best Director award for Part II. Separately the films are masterpieces. Together, they are a landmark work of American cinema.

Francis Ford Coppola oversaw this DVD and cinematographer Gordon Willis personally supervised the restoration and mastering of the film for DVD, and new featurettes on the film and on the restoration process supplement the already rich collection of supplements carried over from the previous special edition.

Read the complete review on my MSN DVD column here.
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Or so it looks.

I’m not one to make sweeping pronouncements (really, it’s not in my character), but the momentum is pretty indisputable. Netflix and Best Buy threw their support behind Blu-ray earlier this week, and on Friday Wal-Mart announced they would stock Blu-ray as their exclusive high-definition video format. Here’s the Wired report on the announcement. The New York Times has already provided HD DVD’s obituary.

I like to think of it in terms of the primary campaigns. Just a couple of months ago, the format war resembled the Democratic campaign, with studios split between the Blu-ray and HD DVD. When Warner and Fox committed to Blu-ray exclusively, it tipped the balance and the metaphor jumped parties. Now it’s akin to the Republican primaries with Blu-ray as the John McCain campaign. Now everyone’s just waiting for the HD-uckabee to toss in the towel and give in to the inevitable momentum.

A few friends have been keeping much closer tabs on the politics of high-definition. Seattle film critic Jeff Shannon sent me this link from the US News and World Report blog about the Netflix decision earlier this week.

Nils von Veh followed up with this E-mail, which I reprint with his permission. Read more »

Have you been waiting for the industry to settle on a standard before committing to a new high definition DVD system? Warners, the last of the studios to release its HD offerings in both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats, has tipped the balance (ostensibly past the point of return) by announcing its commitment to the Blu-ray format solely. They will honor their HD DVD commitments through the end of May, and then drop the format, leaving only Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, and Dreamworks Animation supporting HD DVD.

“The high-definition DVD war is all but over,” opens the New York Times piece by Brooks Barnes.

Hollywood’s squabble over which of two technologies will replace standard DVDs skewed in the direction of the Sony Corporation on Friday, with Warner Brothers casting the deciding vote in favor of the company’s Blu-ray discs over the rival format, HD DVD.

In some ways, the fight is a replay of the VHS versus Betamax battle of the 1980s. This time, however, the Sony product appears to have prevailed.

“The overwhelming industry opinion is that this decides the format battle in favor of Blu-ray,” said Richard Doherty, research director at the Envisioneering Group, a market research firm in Seaford, N.Y.

You can also get more information in this Variety article:

Warner Bros. will throw all its weight behind Blu-ray later this year, a decision that could serve as a death blow to the rival HD DVD format.

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