Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Batman Begins (Warner; Movie ••••, HD DVD Picture •••^½, Sound ••••, Original Extras •••, New Extras •^½). Batman Begins is the first disc I've heard with a Dolby TrueHD lossless soundtrack, and it does approach what you hear in a theater. Indeed, it's big and full, with great clarity - so that effects like the slamming of a prison gate behind Bruce Wayne are convincing. The first part of the film had me checking my surround speakers because, for a blockbuster movie, there was so little sound coming from them. Once Bat-man is born, however, all the channels kick in, and the score immerses you in menace - while the Batmobile slams through all obstacles with a floor-shaking bassy growl.

The picture isn't quite as impressive. Since much of the movie is filled with gloom, there are only rare scenes with any depth to objects or rooms.

Contrast is good, though, with colors dark and rich and Batman's cowl the deepest of black. There's also enough detail that you can see the pores on Christian Bale's face.

Batman Begins offers Warner's long-touted In-Movie Experience - interviews with the director, cast, and crew or behind-the-scenes footage appearing in a picture-in-picture (PIP) box that bounces between the two bottom corners of the screen. Here, the PIP comes up for only a half-minute or so and then disappears, leaving the voice talking on for another 1 to 5 minutes. There are long passages between the snippets - and if you want to switch this feature off and then turn it back on later, the film goes back to the beginning, which is frustrating. The rest of the extras are the same as those on the standard-def DVD: 105 minutes of featurettes that seem blurry after high-def but are still worth watching. - Josef Krebs

The Fast And the Furious: Tokyo Drift (Universal; Movie ••, HD DVD Picture •••^½, Sound •••^½, Original Extras ••^½, New Extras ••••). Now this is the disc to buy for real PIP pleasure! With the U-Control feature, you can watch a documentary on the bottom right corner of the screen for the whole length of the movie. At the same time, you can choose between other PIPs: storyboards of the shot playing at the moment, production stills, a GPS display showing the Tokyo streets that the cars are charging along, and Tech Specs that provide a running tally of the cars' damages and the cost to fix them. Listening to director Justin Lin while watching the film and jumping between those features is very cool, in a low-attention-span kind of way. And the great thing is, you can switch it all off or on again at the touch of a button without interrupting the movie.

The plot about a bad boy given the choice of either going to jail or going to Japan is just silly. But the picture looks very good, with loads of rich color and detail, so that the fast rides, bright lights, and hordes of micro-miniskirted Japanese girls can all fulfill their destiny as juvenile-targeted eye candy. The Dolby Digital Plus sound is crisp, and the surround channels are always active, submersing you in the roar of the engines and the urban environment.

Standard-def extras include 30 minutes of deleted scenes, giving more info on (but hardly fleshing out) the characters. An hour of fea­turettes teaches you all about drifting and the 200 cars that do it in the movie. You also get an easygoing commentary by the likable director and music videos by Don Omar and some funny Japanese rappers. - Josef Krebs

Blazing Saddles (Warner; Movie dddf; Blu-ray Picture ddd, Sound ddd; HD DVD Picture ddd, Sound ddd; Original Extras ddd, New Extras: None). For a dusty 1974 Mel Brooks Western, Blazing Saddles looks surprisingly good. Possibly that's because it's one of the first transfers made with VC-1 compression rather than MPEG-2. Hedley Lamar's vest is a rich black, other costumes are vibrantly colorful, and the suds on a naked bather are bright white. Grain is excessive at times, but you get lots of detail in patterned material, and some close-ups have a real roundness.

An uncompressed PCM soundtrack would've made the fart scene come across more like natural gas, but the effects are still resonant in Dolby Digital 5.1. And the Count Basie Orchestra sounds deep and distinct, reaching out nicely into the room.

Blazing Saddles is available on both Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD. Any difference? On first run-through, the two pictures seemed identical. On closer inspection, though, the Blu-ray images were slightly softer, and the HD DVD's close-ups were a little sharper and more three-dimensional. But the differences are slight.

Extras on each edition consist of 10 minutes of deleted scenes (some funny, some not), a forgettable F Troop-like TV spinoff, and an enjoyable director's commentary in which Brooks not only reveals on-set dramas but also tells anecdotes about his early career. - Josef Krebs

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