As the second week of big name releases in several weeks, this week would have been so much greater under different circumstances in the format war. While last week brought out only two titles, including the Oscar-nominated American Gangster, this week has over half a dozen movies.

The most notable title in the list is Beowulf, the Robert Zemeckis film, famous for being a really neat 3D experience in IMAX, and its “nude” shot of Angelina Jolie. I put that word in quotes because it’s just a computer generated version. There’s a review coming in the next day or two, so I’ll have more to say then.

This week also brings the latest installment in the Freedom series from Bandai Visual. They’re also putting out a box set of the first three episodes, which includes a toy vehicle. If you’ve followed this blog, then you know that I’ve always got a review of Freedom episodes as they come out, so keep your eyes open for that this week as well.

Starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford has quite the long title, and is Warner’s contribution to the notable titles for the week. The release slate is rounded out by a few opera and classical discs, and a rare martial arts flick.

Beowulf (2007) Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, John Malkovich, Crispin Glover, Anjelina Jolie Rated PG-13

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck Directed by Andrew Dominik Rated R

The Brave One (2007) Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard Directed by Neil Jordan Rated R

Vivaldi – The Four Seasons – Acoustic Reality Experience Not rated

Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 2 Resurrection Mahler, Skb, Boulez Not Rated

Cecilia & Bryn at Glyndebourne: Arias & Duets (1999) Cecilia Bartoli, Bryn Terfel Not Rated

Rain in the Mountains (2006) Steve Piere, Audrey Seymour Directed by Joel Metlen, Christine Sullivan Unrated

Freedom 4 Daisuke Namikawa, Directed by Shuhei Morita Not Rated Freedom 1-3 Set with Vehicle Figure at dot-anime.us

Dragon Tiger Gate (2006) Chen Kuan-Tai, Yuen Wah Unrated

The release slate for this week is really interesting because of its extremely wide variety. On one end of the spectrum, we have a classical music concert, and another installment in the 3-D sound series. This is the feast for the ears part, and it’s all very well-to-do.

In the middle, we have a The Amateurs (also called The Moguls), a 2005 comedy with some actors you already know. It’s a story about some regular small-town folks thinking they can make an adult film. Well, maybe they’re not all that regular or ordinary, but certainly a little crazy.

The Amateurs has a plot that’s sort of a segue into the week’s release that’s on the other end of the spectrum: the latest Girls Gone Wild video. Some might consider it a feast for the eyes, but we can all agree it’s more rough around the edges than the classical music discs.

I’m not saying that people who like one kind of disc won’t like the other, but just pointing out the diversity of interests that are being represented this week.

Of these four titles, Mountain Winds comes out on Feb. 13, and Vivaldi later in the week on the 16th.

(all links are to Amazon ordering pages)

Vivaldi – The Four Seasons Concertos for Double Orchestra David Juritz and the London Mozart Players Unrated

Mountain Winds Unrated

The Amateurs Jeff Bridges, Tim Blake Nelson, Joe Pantoliano, William Fichtner, Ted Danson, Lauren Graham, Glenne Headly Directed by Michael Traeger Rated R

Girls Gone Wild: Baby Bash Not rated

Movies, movies, movies! We need more of them and we need them now. The new theatrical releases pretty much come out on time just a few months later, but the slowdown in the last quarter of 2007 has taken its toll on the HD DVD releases for most of January and the start of February. The proverbial ball will get rolling in the weeks ahead, but if it wasn’t for the 50% off sale to keep us all busy with titles that came out months ago, I think many HD DVD owners would be extremely upset right around now.

A couple of sites are reporting that we have three titles released this week, but in my poking around I only found solid evidence of two of them. The big name title for this week is Oscar-nominated Elizabeth: The Golden Age, a sequel to 1998’s Elizabeth (which was also heavily Oscar nominated) starring many of the same actors, including Cate Blanchett as the Queen. A proper review of this movie is coming in the days ahead, so I’ll save some of the details for later. If you can’t wait, then click through to the links and read the product description at Amazon.

The other HD DVD title this time around is a box set of a Discovery Channel favorite, Deadliest Catch. This is a series that follows crab fishermen in the Bering Sea off the Alaskan coast, as they undertake what is among the most dangerous jobs in the world. I’ve watched a few episodes of this series and was spared from seeing the ones that featured some really nasty things, such as crippling injuries and death. You won’t have to miss out on any of that gory stuff in this season 3 box set, though.

That third, phantom title? It’s the horror film, Naked Beneath the Water which is being listed at High-Def digest as releasing today, and re-reported as such by EngadgetHD. But Amazon says this one comes out along wth American Gangster in a couple of weeks on the 19th.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) Cate Blanchett, Jordi Molla, Aimee King, Geoffrey Rush, Clive Owen Directed by Shekhar Kapur Rated PG-13

Deadliest Catch Season 3

Here’s a typical clip from Deadliest Catch. (more…)

January was an immemorable month for HD DVD movie releases. Compared to previous months that had such big hits like Transformers, Shrek the Third, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Harry Potter, January was a big zero. The month was characterized largely by releases from minor studios. Maybe the majors wanted to give us all some time to get caught up on our Netflix queues. Or perhaps this is just a reflection that the biggest hits of 2007 came out earlier in the year, leaving fewer hit movies from the last quarter to choose from at the start of 2008.

Whatever the reason for the low-profile release slate, things start picking up in the weeks and months ahead. As February rolls in, it brings a couple of higher-profile 2007 titles with it. First off is American Gangster on February 19, which came out in theaters last November. Directed by Ridley Scott, this film features Oscar-winning stars Denzel Washington and Russel Crowe portraying the real-life story of a 1970s crime lord’s drug empire and the police officer who dared to bring him down. This isn’t an action flick like The Bourne Ultimatum or a new Scarface, but something that concentrates more on Scott’s strengths as a storyteller (he’s the director behind Bladerunner, Gladiator, Alien and more). The movie has two Oscar nominations: one for art direction and another for best supporting actress (Ruby Dee – who already won the SAG award for this role), although many were surprised it didn’t get more.

Beowulf, the other big title for February, was also a November 2007 release. Continuing (and hugely improving!) his foray into computer graphics films, Director Robert Zemeckis (Polar Express, Forrest Gump, Back to the Future) brought the classic story of Beowulf practically to life last year in 3D at IMAX screens. Alas the home version is not in 3D, but should still boast really good picture quality owing to its digital roots. This film is also famous for it’s “naked” Angelina Jolie segment in a PG-13 movie. This rating happened because it’s really computer generated nudity, but famed critic, Roger Ebert, said it’d be plenty real enough for him if he was 13.

There’s much more than this coming out in February, and we’ll try our hand at reviewing more of the movies instead of just previewing or announcing them. You can see most of the February release slate in this page at Amazon, and they’ll be highlighted here as they get released each week.

The January movie doldrums continue this week with nothing incredibly spectacular in the few disc releases that managed to squeak through. It would have been this way even if Warner hadn’t chosen this week to start their “We’re going to screw HD DVD by putting out the movies three weeks later” policy (The Invasion should have come out today, but will come out in February instead). Interestingly enough, this policy caused them to modify their plans: Warner recognized that I Am Legend would probably sell reasonably well on HD DVD, and they had to extend their May deadline by a few weeks so that the movie would be available on our format. Huh? Isn’t that admitting that the format is worth releasing on?

We’ll have to wait a few more weeks before the releases start to get interesting on a more consistent basis. This time around, we’ve got a couple of music-oriented titles, one being a Strauss operetta and the other is a three hour benefit concert by Dispatch. Both of these discs are from studios that use Warner to distribute their titles. The BBC has indicated that they’re going to keep putting out discs on HD DVD, so that’s going to be another interesting situation with at least those Warner discs continuing to be made beyond Warner’s own deadline.

Die Fledermaus is actually comedic, but there’s also a more traditional comedy this time around. The King of California stars Michael Douglass as a dad who’s just been let out of a mental institution, and tries to convince his daughter that there’s a magnificient treasure buried beneath a Costco.

The last disc is scheduled to release on January 31, according to the Amazon ordering page, and it’s another in the series of landscape/nature discs, this time focusing on Costa Rica.

(all links go to Amazon ordering pages)

Dispatch: Zimbabwe – Live at Madison Square Garden (2008) Dispatch Not Rated

Die Fledermaus (2004) by Johann Strauss II Pamela Armstrong, Thomas Allen, Lyubov Petrova, Malena Engman Sirected by Vladimir Jurowski Not rated

King of California (2007) Michael Douglas, Evan Rachel Wood, Willis Burks II, Laura Kachergus, Paul Lieber Directed by Mike Cahill Rated PG-13

Living Landscapes HD Costa Rica

Painfully slow. That’s how I’d describe the long wait between Bandai Visual’s releases of Freedom episodes, where each one comes out about two months after the last. Continuing in this tradition, Freedom 4 has been slated for a February 26 release, with Freedom 5 to follow the customary two months later on April 22.

If you’ve followed the site for a while, then you already know I’m invested in this series and look forward to each new installment. These discs are notable because they’re the only anime series on HD DVD in North America (there are more in Japan, naturally), and also because they use the TWIN format disc technology where the DVD and HD DVD versions of a movie are on the same side, but on separate disc layers. Unlike the combo discs from Universal and Warner, you don’t have to flip these over to choose between the HD DVD and DVD versions.

There’s actually a third cool feature on these titles, and that’s their unique implementation of HDi where the picture-in-picture (PiP) commentary window can be moved, resized, and made transparent. If you’ve ever used PiP on an HD DVD before, then you might appreciate how nice this feature ends up being. I don’t think it requires any extra weight-lifting on the part of the HD DVD player to do these extra things with the PiP, and I look forward to seeing it on more discs in the future.

The way that Bandai Visual’s discs get distributed has changed in the last few months, and that makes these discs just a little harder to find. While just about all HD DVD discs are available via Amazon and Netflix, Freedom 3 wound up only being available through anime sites. At this moment, that story remains the same for the upcoming volumes, and you’ll have to head over to the company’s official online store or another anime dealer for preordering.

Customers will come out in droves to adopt the high-def formats when there are a ton of neat movies to watch on them.

The releases for this week help towards increasing the total count of available movies, but the low number sends a mixed message from the big studios about how much they’re really into all of this. The release slate is short this week, even for the other guys though they’re supposedly better supported. It was like this many times last year as well.

We’ll never know what goes on in those studio boardrooms and how they decide to put certain movies out before others. Oh well. (By the way, some HD DVD supporters are trying to see if they can get Warner’s attention through an online petition. I’m not necessarily convinced that the goal will be accomplished, but don’t let my jaded ways obstruct your enthusiasm – visit the petition here.)

On tap for this week are two music related discs, one is a concert by Wu-Tang Clan’s emcee, Method Man, and the other is a 3D audio experience disc — the latest in that series which has also included jazz and classical music. The third HD DVD disc is a good old movie. All of these titles are, just as with last week, from smaller studios that support the HD DVD format, but don’t count in the bigger picture when people make lists of major studio support. In fact, it’s going to be more of these smaller players filling up the release slate for at least the next few weeks.

Since I’m mentioning movies, don’t forget that Amazon’s got a little sale on about two dozen catalog titles, like A Scanner Darkly, at around $16 each.

Mysterious Aqua – Music Experience in 3-Dimensional Sound Reality Composed and produced by Alexander Jero (disc will be released later in the week) Unrated

Method Man: Live from the Sunset Strip (2007) Directed by Devinn DeHaven Unrated

Channels (2008) Ed Asner, Kimberly Oja, Nat Christian, Taylor Negron, Joan Van Ark Directed by Nat Christian Rated R

According to an article at The Hollywood Reporter, Paramount’s HD DVD release slate for the first quarter of 2008, originally to be unveiled at CES, will be presented on Thursday, January 17, 2008.

From past statements and educated guessing based on 2007 releases and delayed discs, we can pretty much guess what many of these movies are going to be, but the formal announcement should make things a lot clearer. For example, we can already guess that Beowulf, Bee Movie, Into the Wild, and Things We Lost in the Fire will be mentioned (since they’ve been mentioned before), as will an update on last year’s The Jack Ryan Collection which was recalled due to problems with the discs not containing any of the advertised bonus materials. We’ll report on the release slate after the information is made available.

Meanwhile, fellow HD DVD-exclusive studio, Universal, has been busy with a couple of movie announcements in the last couple of days. They’ve announced that the critically acclaimed, American Gangster comes to HD DVD on February 19, and Elizabeth: The Golden Age on February 5. They had also previously announced Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution for February 19.

Warner still has HD DVDs to crank out for at least the first half of the year, such as Invasion, and I Am Legend among others. As a side note related to Warner, it’s been reported that BBC titles will continue to be distributed on HD DVD. Though BBC discs are released through Warner, the BBC has some independence in asserting their support for HD DVD. After all, the BBC is not a Time Warner company — they’re just a studio that needed a local distributor for their discs, and the HD DVD version of Planet Earth has outsold its Blu-ray counterpart any way.

So that’s a little bit of a peek into the movies coming in the future. If all of that has whetted your appetite to pick up a few movies, you can click on any of the movie links above to get to the pre-order pages (if available) on Amazon. For more instant gratification, you can check out these sales on movies that are already out:

• Amazon still has their sale on 84 HD DVD movies with plenty of titles at $14.99
• Circuit City has 34 HD DVD and Blu-ray titles at $17.99 until Saturday, Jan. 19
• Tower Records has a sale similar to Amazon’s but on lots more movies and slightly more discounting
• Deep Discount has plenty of HD DVDs under $20

It’s not a reflection of the times but just a demonstration of how the studios have always been slow at releasing high-def discs. We only had one official HD DVD release for January 15, The Ten, with both the HD DVD and DVD of The Lawless getting delayed. Both of these are from smaller studios that usually don’t get counted when people add up the studio support for HD DVD.

As for the low number of releases, I can understand how the smaller players take their time, but the bigger studios with their large catalogs and bank accounts are another story. You often wonder how they choose which discs will come out on high-def next, and this is true on both formats.

This week’s official release, The Ten is joined by Galaxina which finally came out after being delayed from last week, so at least we do have more than just one movie to choose.

The Ten features an ensemble cast in a comedy about a very unlikely hero being chosen to introduce the Ten Commandments. He’s got quite a lot of issues trying to uphold those principles in his own life, and this comedy has received some really great reviews.

Galaxina is a classic B-movie. It’s a comedy that came out a little after Star Wars and Alien and tries to parody them and others. It’s one of those titles that’s a guilty pleasure, meaning you enjoy it even though most people look down on it.