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.