Blu-ray Movie Reviews

The Paramount Presents line kicked off last April, reintroducing viewers to some of the most enduring titles in the studio's vast library in reverent new Blu-ray editions. Thomas J. Norton recently reviewed the 13th release, The Court Jester, and three more are now available, spanning quite different eras of filmmaking. Elizabethtown and The Greatest Show on Earth are making their Blu-ray debuts, whereas Love Story has previously snuck onto the format but now benefits from the most welcome perk of the PP line: restoration from a new 4K film transfer—using the original camera negative when possible—on the way to these 1080p presentations. An HD digital copy is now included with each title, although the full 4K versions are typically available as a separate 4K rental/purchase via various digital retailers. All arrive in attractive, above-average packaging.

Arguably Cameron Crowe's most sentimental film, Elizabethtown leans hard into the quirks of its many colorful characters, with a series of misfortunes befalling hapless Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) and a budding romance with a bubbly flight attendant (Kirsten Dunst) helping him to bounce back. Lensed by the great John Toll, the movie is a mix of travelogue Americana and everyday life with appropriately nuanced color despite a slightly dim 1.85:1 image that's unexpectedly soft in many scenes. The stars of the soundtrack are the dialogue and the thoughtfully selected tunes that lend mood and subtext to the proceedings, and both play admirably within the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundfield. Elizabethtown is the only release in this group that originated with a multichannel mix, but it's by no means showoff material.

Love Story, which successfully reinvented bigscreen romance for a new generation emerging from the turbulent '60s, offers an endearing blend of sweetness, frankness, and ultimately heartbreak. The new Blu-ray displays the gritty look common to films of the era: almost naturalistic at times, as if the camera just happened to show up in the couple's apartment or on the streets of NYC, but interspersed with too-bright, network-TV-style lighting. Blacks can appear a little crushed, and noise can taint brick buildings and chain-link fences, but it's still superior in every way to the 2012 disc. The "restored" 5.1-channel remix is the demonstrably more spacious option, while the Dolby Digital 2.0 presentation of the original mono soundtrack, also restored, pleasantly immerses us in the sounds of a college campus, a big city, or a hard-fought hockey game.

As you might expect, The Greatest Show on Earth takes us behind the scenes of the Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey Circus, revealing the unglamorous inner workings of this massive machine as well as some downright dark aspects of a unique form of live entertainment. A stellar cast is enhanced by fun cameos in this "event" picture that also took the top Oscar when it was released. (DeMille's Charlton Heston-starring biblical epic Ten Commandments is also being reissued on March 30, the same day as Greatest Show, that one in a full 4K Ultra HD disc release no doubt timed to Easter.) The candy-hued three-strip Technicolor beautifully captures the excitement of a bygone era in its 4:3 window, revealing a healthy layer of film grain while maintaining the unavoidable telltale incongruity of the old-school blue-screen composite effects. The DTS-HD Master Audio two-channel mono soundtrack, meanwhile, works overtime to deliver the carefully balanced blend of dialogue, music, and effects, although voices can sound a little strained in high-resolution.

The stalwart critic Leonard Maltin chimes in with a fresh "Filmmaker Focus" segment whenever the director is unavailable. For Elizabethtown, Mr. Crowe offers up a decade's hindsight, along with 20 minutes of deleted and extended scenes plus a handful of vintage featurettes. Love Story ports some existing vignettes plus a commentary by the late director Arthur Hiller.

Your guess is as good as anyone's as to what future titles might emerge in this wonderful series, but I certainly hope Paramount's emphatic, eclectic support of physical media continues.

All Discs
Blu-ray
Paramount

Elizabethtown (2005)
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Audio Format: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Length: 123 mins.
Director: Cameron Crowe

Love Story (1970)
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Audio Format: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Length: 100 mins.
Director: Arthur Hiller

The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1
Audio Format: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono
Length: 152 mins.
Director: Cecil B. DeMille