Bowfinger Again, Why Not?

At the end of this summer, Universal 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?

Update 9/26/17 - 8/12/26: Whoopsie!  Best Buy doesn't even sell physical media anymore.  Fortunately now, if you wanted something more than a budget blu-ray, Shout Factory's got you covered, with their new 4k Collector's Edition BD/ UHD combopack.

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?

1) 2000 Universal DVD; 2) 2017 Universal BD;
3) 2026 Shout BD; 4) 2026 Shout UHD.

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, Universal's blu is a legitimate HD upgrade.  Click through to the fullscreen version of the first set of shots 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.  The DVD also 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 BD removes that bar, revealing a sliver extra picture on the right, and correcting the aspect ratio to its proper 1.85:1.

Shout's new scan is also 1.85:1, though it reveals tiny slivers of additional picture along the edges.  More importantly, it now preserves the film grain - a little uneven on their BD, but perfect on their 4k UHD - with slightly more natural colors thanks to the Dolby Vision.  Most importantly, however, is that the funky edge enhancement on the old disc is gone.  See that weird haloing light running down the right side of his tie in that first set of shots on the Universal discs?  Yeah, that should not be there... and now it isn't.  We can finally say goodbye to those hallmarks of an old master.

For the audio, the DVD offered both DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks, plus a French dub.  The Universal BD trimmed the fat to just the DTS 5.1, but of course in DTS-HD.  It also adds optional English and French subtitles.  Shout drops the French dub, keeps the 5.1 and English subtitles, and also throws in a stereo track, also in DTS-HD.

Extras-wise, there's no difference between the two Universal discs.  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.

And on the Shout set, something has changed.  First of all, everything from the Universal discs is still here: the commentary, deleted scenes, featurette, trailer and outtakes.  But now we also get a new on-camera interview with Oz.  And I'm happy to report it's not him repeating all the same things he said on the earlier stuff.  He does explain how they filmed the freeway scene, which he also did in the commentary and the featurette... but everything else is new.  Also, it's professionally shot in HD; it's not another webcam interview.  So I don't want to kick up too much of a celebration over this.  It's just over thirteen minutes and it's the only new feature.  But I gotta give credit where it's due, especially since so many labels lately have been cutting corners in this area lately.  Oh, and this edition also comes in a slipcover.

So we went from a solid DVD to a bare minimum blu-ray upgrade to a solid 4k edition.  It doesn't look like it's been getting much attention, but as a real fan of this film, I'm glad to see the previous release wasn't its last stop.  This might not be one for the showroom floor, but it really is a good improvement on what we had been given.

The Definitive Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid

Earlier this year, I started on a post about the three versions of Carl Reiner and Steve Martin's underrated detective comedy, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid.  That's the non-anamorphic DVD that's been the mainstay for years and years, the obscure anamorphic version that I would've recommended seeking out if this was five years ago, and finally the barebones, MOD BD.  But just as I was in the middle of it, Kino announced a new special edition coming out in September, so I waited.  And now we're looking at the best of four.

This 1982 starts off in in very familiar, comedy territory: making light of the traditional 1940's noirish gumshoe flicks.  Filmed in black and white, Our tough talking detective is working late in his office one night when a beautiful dame knocks on his door wearing a black veil in desperation to solve his husband's murder.  But Dead Men takes the homage one step further, by inter-cutting scenes from over a dozen Hollywood classics.  His down-on-his-luck partner is played Humphrey Bogart, accomplished by having Martin exchange dialogue with clips taken from The Big Sleep, Dark Passage and In a Lonely Place.  It's grounded by a lush, traditional score and an earnest, straightman performance by The Thornbird's Rachel Ward, though like all of Reiner and Martin's collaborations, it's not afraid to veer into wild and ridiculous places to find that extra laugh.

It's that clever and snappy writing that keeps this film moving.  The high-concept gimmick could wear itself thin real quick in other hands, but Dead Man's takes are always inventive and surprising.  It does run a little low on steam in the final act, where it gets a little too bogged down in wrapping up its convoluted plot to keep the laughs coming as fast and furious as they had been in the first hour.  But, clocking it at under 90 minutes, it's good natured and uncombersome enough to keep you at least smiling through to the end.  Just how convincing the inserted footage is varies pretty widely, from how contrived the connections are to the shifting picture quality; but none of that matters, because the film never asks us to take it so seriously that we require anymore immersion than it can deliver.  It's more of a giant comedy sketch than a story, but it sustains itself by never running out of fresh jokes.

So yeah, Universal originally released Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid on DVD in 1999.  It was barebones, but alright for its day, when TVs were all 4:3.  But after a few years, a non-anamorphic widescreen DVD was a drag, so I was happy to discover that the 2008 the 'Steve Martin: The Wild and Crazy Comedy Collection' DVD set quietly upgraded the film to an 16x9, and at discount prices.  That was my go-to disc until Universal eventually released it on blu in 2017.  It was an MOD release, but at least it was a pressed disc, not a BD-R.  Still, it was as no frills (not even a menu) as they come, so while I wouldn't call Kino's brand new 2021 blu a loaded special edition, I was happy enough to repurchase the film one more time.

1) 1999 Universal DVD; 2) 2008 Universal DVD;
3) 2017 Universal BD; 4) 2021 Kino BD.

It's easy to forget that not only do non-anamorphic discs not fit your widescreen displays properly, but they're actually a smaller, lower resolution format.  So the older DVD winds up looking even softer and dupier than the 2008 disc, by a considerable margin.  That and it's also probably taken from an older master.  Despite both DVDs being framed at 1.85:1, you can see the newer disc reveals a good deal more information along the bottom and both sides.  It even has a sliver more along the edges than the blu-rays, which are also 1.85:1 but a pinch tighter.  More important, of course, is the sharper, clearer image in the HD boost.  You can start to see hints of film grain in the 2008 disc, albeit in soft clumps, which is far more than what the 1999 DVD could deliver.  But it comes into real focus on the blus.  Both blus, because they're using the same master and are virtually identical, except for Kino's being a shade darker.  No new scan here.  And that's fine; the Universal blu already looked pretty nice and filmic, though it does (and, by extension, so does Kino) exhibit signs of what looks like edge enhancement, as is common with their older masters.

All four discs are good enough to retain the original mono audio with optional English subtitles.  Both blus bump it up to DTS-HD, and the 2008 DVD also threw in a French dub, while the 1999 DVD had extra French and Spanish subtitles.

Extras have always been a sad story with this film.  The 1999 DVD was barebones apart from an attractive insert.  The DVD added the trailer, which has some amusing narration, but nothing else.  And the Universal blu-ray didn't even keep the trailer.  Again, it didn't even have a menu.

But Kino has finally given us, well, something at least.  The chief extra is an audio commentary with director Allan Arkush and film historian Daniel Kremer.  Astute readers will note, however, that Arkush may be a notable director, but he's not the director of this film.  So what we essentially have is just an expert commentary, not one with any first-hand experience.  And that's still nice; there's a lot for them to help viewers with, what with all the vintage films being incorporated and all (though they get really bogged down just listing everyone's IMDB credits).  But that's mostly it.  Kino does bring the trailer back, along with some TV and radio spots.  Probably the most exciting extra, in fact, is a fun promo trailer Martin shot, which is an entirely original comedy bit.  It's great to finally have it with the movie again, but it's still a slim package all together.

So at the end of the day, Kino has given us the best Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid yet.  It's the definitive edition to buy, but with no advances in PQ or AQ, fans who bought the 2017 blu might not be in a big rush to replace it.  Still, to date, this is the definitive edition, and Kino does also include reversible cover art and a nice slipcover.  Plus their prices are always reasonable.  So it may not be anything to get too excited over, but it's worth it.

L.A. Story and the Mystery Of the Missing Commentary

Someone in the extras describes L.A. Story as being a brilliant comedic love story for the oft-maligned city of Los Angeles, which it absolutely is, and also a deeply beautiful romance between writer/ star Steve Martin and Victoria Tennant, which it isn't.  Yes, L.A. Story is a delight, full of brilliant gags, one of the world's best supporting casts (Richard E. Grant, Woody Harrelson, Rick Moranis, Kevin Pollak, Patrick Stewart, Chevy Chase, Larry Miller, Terry Jones, George Plimpton and even Juice Crew Allstar MC Shan) and genuinely intelligent writing about life in LA.  The opening homage to Fellini's 8 1/2 and the way it retains but deflates the pretentiousness of its many Shakespeare references are genius.  But the romance is shallow and feels tacked on.  It doesn't get as much screentime as it needs to flesh out the relationship, so it's forced to lean on textbook meet-cutes and coincidence-driven RomCom cliches.  And another sticking point is that Tennant is alright but a clear case of nepotism (she was Martin's wife at the time) spoiling the opportunity to cast a truly funny leading lady, like Lily Tomlin or Bette Midler, who could've brought as much to the role as the rest of the cast do to theirs.

Writing-wise, it's under-cooked too, and feels like it's pulling against the thrust of the main story.  Like, we have to keep stopping examining Martin's relationship with LA every time the screenplay takes a pit-stop at Tennant's B-story.  Really, she should be tied to the A-story.  I think the five-pointed love pentagram is over-complicated, since this film's already packed with so much great stuff already.  They probably should've aged up Sarah Jessica Parker's character (who manages to breathe a lot of humanity into an otherwise one-joke character), and have her been the final love interest.  So instead of Martin falling for this quirky journalist who just flew in from London, he'd be falling for this quirky shop girl (wink), whose eccentricities as an LA local would be part and parcel with Martin's love for LA, so every scene is on-theme.  Marilu Henner could be the outsider, a NY woman whose misunderstanding and lack of appreciation for LA's spirit would dovetail with them realizing they're wrong for each other.  Maybe that's too on the nose?  That's how I would fix it, but even if you don't like that, the point is that there is a major problem that needed fixing here.

But thankfully - dare I say magically? - Martin's homage to LA is so good, that you can easily get past the problem.  The film is packed with so many great jokes it starts out playing more like a classic Zucker Brothers' romp (or perhaps more significantly, like Martin's early classic films with Carl Reiner), but then Martin and director Mick Jackson manage to bump enough sincerity into it that you can't help being touched by the film's heart, even if it is misguided and rickety.  When the music swells and Martin and Tennant turn into small children, it really is an effective moment... helped by the fact that it's possibly the one moment where their relationship stays on-message with the rest of the film: LA celebrates and nurtures the residents' youthful ambitions.  The fact that it's dated (car phone jokes in the age of the smartphone, yadda yadda), doesn't even work against it, because you sense that it's perfectly capturing, and occasionally skewering, a very specific time and place in our history and culture in need of preserving... and a particularly silly one at that.

L.A. Story debuted on DVD all the way back in 1998 as a non-anamorphic disc in an Artisan snapper, which was reissued three years later with a proper amaray case.  They sowed some confusion as to whether these were actually the same discs (oh, we're going to get into that in a bit), but yes, they were.  We got updated discs in 2006, though, for Lions Gate's 15th Anniversary Edition (itself reissued in 2010 with a new cover and identical disc), which boasted a healthy, anamorphic remaster and all new extras.  And that's a good thing, because that's as good as it ever got, at least here in the USA.  In other parts of the world, it's actually been issued on blu plenty of times.  Personally, I went with the recent 2020 German release from Koch Media.

2001 Artisan DVD top; 2006 Lions Gate DVD mid; 2020 Koch BD bottom.

So the big upgrade came between the original DVDs and the 15th Anniversary.  Not only, as you can plainly see in the first set of shots, did we make the leap to an anamorphic picture, but the aspect ratio's been corrected from 1.80:1 to 1.84:1.  That may sound slim, but it means a decent chunk of image around the edges has been restored, in addition to some light overall reframing.  Also, the saturation has been brought down to normal levels as opposed to being blasted off the charts, which was an interesting look, but ultimately not too lifelike.  Then Koch's blu makes things even nicer.  It corrects the AR a bit more, to a good and proper 1.85:1, which despite technically being a tighter matte, actually adds extra slivers of info as it undoes some vertical pinching.  More importantly, though, it's just a sharper, clearer HD image with some nice, untouched film grain for an old master.  I was expecting that bare minimum bump, but the old DVD looks downright soft and messy compared to this surprisingly clean BD.  It's a pleasant surprise.

The original DVD includes the film's stereo surround mix with optional English and Spanish subtitles.  The 15th Anniversary DVD keeps all of that, but gets a bit showy by adding in a new 5.1 mix as well.  Well, happily, Koch has preserved both tracks in now lossless formats (PCM for the stereo and DTS-HD for the 5.1), as well as a PCM German dub.  The only downside is that they dumped the English (and Spanish) subs, replacing them with (naturally) German ones.

1998 US DVD top; 2001 US DVD bottom.

But doesn't the title of this post mention a "Missing Commentary?"  Yes, that's been the biggest drama in L.A. Story's history on disc.  See, the original 1998 snapper case listed its proper specs, but the 2001 re-release, which has the same UPC, featured new, updated specs promising a "Director's Commentary Track."  I can still feel how excited I was to upgrade, only to discover that inside was the same old, commentary-less disc, and the new information was some kind of crappy mistake.  Part of the reason it sticks with me is that this wasn't immediately obvious.  In those days you couldn't just pop a disc into your computer's DVD drive and analyze the disc's contents.  Finding obscure features and easter eggs was a slow, imperfect process that brought people like us together on online forums to puzzle it out.  It's not clearly demarcated on the menu and pressing the audio button during the movie doesn't work, but it certainly wouldn't have been the first DVD feature blocked from remote access.  And this disc WAS full of easter eggs tucked into obscure places that wouldn't even show up as distinct Titles in the disc directory.  So I know I'm the not the only person who wasted a lot of time hunting and pecking for that elusive commentary.  But no, it's definitely 100% not there. The 15th Anniversary Edition didn't come up with it either.

deleted scene... yes, John Lithgow is flying through LA in a jetpack

So instead let's talk about the special features that aren't dirty lies that conned us devoted double-dipping fans out of $20.  As you can see in the specs posted above, the original DVD had a featurette and easter eggs.  The featurette is your usual, brief promotional affair that doles out just the briefest interview soundbites and B-roll footage with a bunch of clips from the movie, almost like an extended trailer.  It's alright, but not much.  And the easter eggs, some easier to find than others, consisted of additional EPK interview clips with Jackson and the cast.  All told, there's a little over four minutes, which is nice but about as much as you'd expect for extras relegated to waster egg status.  It also has the trailer.

The 15th Anniversary was more of a special edition.  It still had the promo featurette, although in a slightly shorter form, cutting out about a minute of material including a clip from Roxanne, and a scene + interview clip with Sarah Jessica Parker.  But it adds higher quality stuff, including a detailed interview with the producer and an "interactive map," which basically amounts to an exploration of the film's shooting locations across thirteen video clips with the film's production manager.  These are both made with care and quite interesting.  But the jewel in the crown is the collection of over 20 minutes worth of deleted scenes, which includes a lot of great stuff.  There are whole subplots with John Lithgow and Scott Bakula who were completely cut out of the movie (though featured in the trailers), clearly just for time because they're great.  We also get an additional teaser, some bonus trailers, and a slipcover.

a brief, German-exclusive interview with Grant

And Koch's blu?  Happily, everything from the old DVDs is here.  Technically the easter eggs from the old DVD aren't, but all that footage and more is now spread across the other, newer extras.  The BD adds a collection of EPK interviews with the cast and producer, plus a collection of behind the scenes footage.  It also restores the longer version of the featurette... although that SJP soundbite, like the rest, are repeated in the extended interviews.  I'd actually recommend watching everything else and skipping the featurette, which is just redundant footage.  Anyway, the blu also now has five trailers for the film, additional TV spots and a stills gallery.  So yeah, it's nothing major, but it's everything from before and more.  The blu also comes in a slipcover and includes reversible artwork, so you can hide the garish yellow ratings icon.

So this blu is a strong recommend.  It looks better than I expected, with lossless audio and even some new extras.  But still no commentary.  I sometimes wonder if the session was planned but nobody got the memo that it had fallen through at the last minute, or if a commentary really was recorded and is still sitting in Artisan's vaults.  Maybe Jackson let it all hang out and the studio refused to release it, or maybe he was silent for more than half the picture, leaving the producers with a track full of dead air.  We'll probably never know.  But at least we finally have a home video edition that's worthy of this little gem.

Remembering The Man With Two Brains

Carl Reiner has a long and storied body of work, from The Dick Van Dyke Show and the 2000 Year Old Man to Fatal Instinct.  And if you've never seen Where's Poppa?, you really should.  But the first thing that springs to my mind whenever I hear his name is his classic series of comedies with Steve Martin.  Four brilliant films in a row, each of which is represented to various degrees on home video...  The Jerk finally has a decent special edition by way of Shout Select, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid is available on barebones MOD blu and sadly, All Of Me still only has a fullscreen DVD to its name.  And The Man With Two Brains?

"Two brains" is apt here, as the pair did their best work together.  Reiner's penchant for non-stop gags and parody combined with Martin's gifts with the absurd form a uniquely silly voice that hits brilliant peaks.  Even if they don't manage to quite sustain it the entire running time, they always keep things cheery and fast paced to hold your engagement the whole time, which is still more than you can say for most of the competition.  Honestly, the older I get, the fewer comedies I really feel like I need to keep in my collection... the same old jokes dipped in barely different contexts, different faces doing the same acts.  But every time I revisit once of these four, I'm freshly impressed and cracking up all over again.

This time, Martin plays a brain surgeon in their most madcap venture yet, about mad scientists, love, brain transplants and of course... murder.  They've assembled an impressive supporting cast including Kathleen Turner, horror legend David Warner, a disembodied Sissy Spacek, Merv Griffin and yes, that is Jeffrey Combs preparing to operate.  Production designer Polly Platt gives 1983's TMWTB a stylish look, too, which sticks with you like none of its peers have managed.  This film got knocked around pretty roughly by critics in its time, but I think they'd all sing another tune trying to find a comedy that delivers comparable laughs today.

In 1999, Warners first released TMWTB on DVD as a basic, barebones fullscreen release in an infamous snapper case.  And for almost a decade, that was pretty much our only option.  But in 2006, Warners quietly released it on the UK... with a remastered widescreen transfer!  I was psyched when I figured this out, and if DVDExotica existed back then, you'd've had a post all about it.  But since then, Warner Bros brought that widescreen transfer to the US, first as a 2014 MOD DVD in their Archives collection, and much more excitingly, as a proper blu-ray in 2017.

1) US 1999 WB DVD; 2) UK 2006 WB DVD; 3) 2017 US WB BD.

The one thing you can say about Warner's original DVD is that at least it was mostly open matte.  Their 1.33:1 transfer does trim a little off the sides, but it's mostly just revealing excess vertical information.  At 1.78:1, both the widescreen DVD and blu are probably revealing a bit of excess vertical information, too; but we're close enough.  The blu-ray corrects a little vertical stretching, though, bringing back a bit of that vertical image along the bottom.  Moving beyond the framing, the blu is clearly using an old master, so it's not the most perfectly captured fine detail, with grain often MIA.  But getting rid of all that smudgy compression weighing the DVDs down alone is a big improvement.

Each disc features the original English mono, but it's bumped up to DTS-HD on the blu.  The original DVD doesn't have any subs, but the import has a bunch of options, including the English, a second English HoH track, French, Icelandic, Italian and an Italian HoH track.  The blu-ray boils it down to just the one English HoH track, which is fine.

Unfortunately, no matter which edition you go with, this film is barebones.  The US DVD has nothing (and the same goes for that 2014 Archives DVD), while the UK DVD just has a random commercial for their James Dean Collection.  The 2017 blu-ray at least finally gives us the proper TMWTB trailer, but it's pretty paltry when you think about the kind of delightful special edition we could've had: Reiner's done some great commentaries, and this film has some cherished deleted scenes ("You've cooked her Z's!") that are being left woefully unavailable to the fans.

So I do recommend Warner's blu; it's unquestionably the best edition going of a movie everybody should own.  And while Warner Archives is great in that they get good, quality editions of a lot of films that've been in need of them, it's a bit of a curse, too, in that it means almost no WB titles will get licensed to the boutique levels that would really give them the special care they deserve.  So it's also the best this film's going to get in a very long time, if not forever.  R.I.P. Carl Reiner.