Bowfinger, Why Not? (DVD/ Blu-ray Comparison)

At the end of this summer, Paramount has upgraded a handful of back catalog titles to blu, including Problem Child, BASEketball, EDtv, For Love of the Game and my favorite of the bunch: Bowfinger.  At the moment, they're Best Buy exclusives.  It's just for a very limited time, though; they'll be available everywhere else later in October.  But for now, you can only get them from Best Buy.  And you can't argue with the price: $7.99.  So how does it look?
To a newcomer, I'd describe 1999's Bowfinger in four words: better than it looks.  Just based on the marketing, it just looks like another cartoonish, lame comedy, along the lines of stuff like All About Steve, Tammy, or even other Steve Martin flicks like Bringing Down the House.  But the difference is that this is actually written by Martin, so it's like a fun return to his crazier, earlier films with Carl Reiner, or even more so a return to material like LA Story.  So that's obviously not to say there's nothing cartoonish about this comedy; there's a lot of big, larger than life performances packed into this very goofy send-up of Hollywood.  Eddie Murphy plays dual roles, including one that makes Revenge of the Nerds look subtle.  But for this movie, it works.
Steve Martin is a struggling, independent filmmaker living in Hollywood, and Eddie Murphy is a major Tom Cruise-like movie star.  When Eddie's younger, charisma-less brother applies for a job with Martin's film company, Martin gets an idea for how he can get celebrity Murphy in one of his movies and make the big time.  He'll get his eccentric cast of starving artists to follow Murphy around and play out scenes around him while filming him without his knowledge.  Complicating things further, the movie Martin wants to make is a wacked out alien invasion movie.  It's not exactly a Whit Stillman flick, but it's smarter than you'd think, and is helped immensely by a terrific supporting cast including Heather Graham, Terrance Stamp, Robert Downey Jr., and the eternally underrated Christine Baranski.
Bowfinger came as a new release in the early days of DVD in 2000, and apart from being stuck inside a few budget combo packs like The Eddie Murphy Connection, hasn't been reissued since.  It's fortunate, then, since we never got any alternative choices, that it was a decent, widescreen special edition.  But now, finally in 2017, it's seeing its US HD debut (other countries have already gotten their blu-ray editions in the past year or so).  So is it a worthwhile upgrade?
2000 Paramount DVD on top; 2017 Paramount blu-ray below.
2017 Paramount blu-ray left; 2000 Paramount DVD right.
So, right off the bat, even though it's pretty damn old, it's a fine DVD.  It's anamorphic, not interlaced, and has essentially the same transfer that they kept for the blu-ray.  So it's definitely not a "need to replace" title.  But on the other hand, this is a legitimate HD upgrade.  Take a look at the close-up, and you can see how much clearer the detail on his skin and glasses is, and how much cleaner all the edges are.  Even the leaves on the left... everything is so much softer and flatter on the DVD.  You will appreciate the difference on a big screen.

One thing that's interesting: the old DVD has a strange pillar box on the left-hand side (I left the bars on the top set of comparison shots, so you can see for yourself).  Both discs are slightly letterboxed, but the bar on the right-hand side makes the DVD 1.83:1.  The blu doesn't removes that bar, revealing a sliver extra picture on the right, and correcting the aspect ratio to its proper 1.85:1.  It's not a huge deal; the DVD's left-side bar would've been pretty much hidden by older televisions' overscan area.  But it's nice that the blu-ray makes this little fix in addition to the basic HD boost in clarity.
Audio-wise, this film's modern enough that its always had a 5.1 mix.  The DVD offered both DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks, plus a French dub.  The blu-ray trims the fat to just the DTS 5.1, but now of course it's in DTS-HD.  It also adds optional English and French subtitles.

Extras-wise, there's no difference between the two editions.  We didn't get anything new, but at least none of the 2000 special features were dropped.  Director Frank Oz provides a quality audio commentary.  It's a little dry if you're expecting laughs on the Bowfinger commentary, but there's almost no dead air, and he's full of great info for fans of this flick.  There's a fundamental 'making of' featurette, which was clearly made for television, but gives you some decent interview clips and peaks behind the scenes.  Finally, there are some very brief deleted scenes and outtakes, plus the trailer.  The old disc had a few bonus trailers, text bios and an insert, but everything that matters from the DVD is still here.  The special features are so unchanged, in fact, they're still in SD.  You'd think they'd at least re-encode them to be anamorphic, but for some reason the major studios don't seem to like to do that.  Oh well.
So, hey, it's a respectable DVD to blu-ray upgrade.  It doesn't exactly go the extra mile to deliver a top of the line special edition, but studios aren't really doing that for their catalog titles anymore unless it's one of their top ten best selling classics.  So, for what it is: an enjoyable film presented with a fine blu-ray transfer and the legacy extras, you should be pleased.  Especially since these titles are being priced so cheap.  When I picked this up at my Best Buy, not only did they have it at the $7.99 price, but it was on their 'buy one, get one free' shelf with the other Paramount exclusives and a handful of other random discs.  So I'm not blown away, but I'm happy with it.

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