HTF BLU-RAY REVIEW: Funny Farm/Spies Like Us (Double Feature) - Page 2

I bought them at Best Buy in Toronto. They seem to be everywhere around here, but I guess they haven't been released Stateside yet.

  I guess its a good thing I'm going up to Canada next month!

Like most other exlusives , this will probably be available on amazon USA, and everywhere else by April at the latest.Id even bet on it.

I got the Presumed Innocent/Frantic disc a couple of days ago. I am more than happy with both presentations. Both prints are very clean and grain is intact on both and a good level of detail. Huge step up from the DVD versions. I hope when I get Funny Farm/Spies Like Us (as soon as Amazon has them available) they will be as pleasing.

HOPEFULLY Warner Brothers will announce a US release for Funny Farm / Spies Like Us VERY soon

picked this up at the local best buy today on my lunch break (and ponyo with the 10$ off coupon) it was listed at 24.99 but rang up 14.99, there were no signs saying it was on sale but it was in the new release bluray section  (a couple shelves above grumpy old men two-fer)

Not a bad release day, 3 bluray films for 30, and I might pick up the grumpy old men on my way home and make it 5/45. :D

Someone over at dvdtalk in Cali (unless that was you) picked this up today too.
Guess I'll head out tomorrow to check my local.

What is the AR of "Spies Like Us" BD?? It was shown theatrically in 2.35:1.

Also the film had several 70 MM blow up prints across the nation with a six track discreet sound. I wonder why the BD does not utilize that.

Spies Like Us was never 2.35:1. John Landis has never made a film in 'scope.

My guy at best buy showed me that the date in their system has it coming in next tuesday, oh well.

I decided to just order it from Amazon.ca and be done with it.  Yes, it will cost me a bit more but at least I know it's coming this week sometime.  I also know my luck in that, on the day it arrives, I will also suddenly find it at my local Best Buy. 

While IMDB indeed confirms the existence of 70mm prints with six track audio, it also clarifies that it was shot on 1.33:1 35 mm negative to be projected at a matted 1.85:1 aspect ratio:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090056/

Just found out Funny Farm & Spies Like Us double feature is now out in the US and picked up a copy at my local Best Buy! Me Happy!

This is a must buy for me too. I have had trouble tracking this disc down also. I called two different Best Buy stores and neither clerk could find it in their system. I finally found the SKU for it and called back one of them. It's SKU 9741425 in the Best Buy computer system. Hope that helps some of you that are having trouble finding it.

The clerk told me that the release date is 3/9 just as someone else here stated. He said that he had some in the warehouse but could not sell them until that date. I don't know how some of you have been able to buy it already. Oh well, I can wait until next week to buy it.

I would love for the studios to release all of the great 80's and 90's comedies starring Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Steve Martin, and Eddie Murphy on Blu-ray.

What did it ring up for? The other 5 double features are on sale for $14.99 this week @ Best Buy.

Just picked up my copy of Funny Farm/Spies Like Us from BB $14.99 + Tax. Just glancing through them they look pretty good. A little soft but that's how I remember them theatrically. Funny Farm shows some signs of compression artifacts but nothing too intrusive. For @  $8 per movie they're a nice upgrade from their DVD counterparts.

I called BB to see if they had them in stock and the lady on the phone looked for both titles and said they didn't have them on Blu Ray. I didn't trust her so I drove down to the store to see for myself. Sure enough there were 5 copies sitting on the shelf.

Thanks for posting the SKU Todd!  That made all the difference.  I called my local store and had them check stock on that SKU since it is still not available on their website and they had 10.  On sale this week for $14.99.  I grabbed one, that makes 9....

Found it at the Boca Raton, FL Best Buy! They had several copies out (in the "F" section) and I grabbed one. It rang up for $14.99.

I've never seen Funny Farm but the picture quality on Spies Like Us is... okay. It is what it is and probably won't look better anytime soon but strangely enough, there's always one section that looks slightly inferior than the rest. You can see it on TV and previous video versions.

There's a reel change during the classroom scene. The shot with Frank Oz walking back to his desk and saying, "You may begin... now" has always looked worse than the shots before and after it. I don't get it.

I think that whole classroom scene sticks out as looking much worse than the rest of the film for some reason.

Picked it up tonight.  They had a whole section of "get into Blu-ray cheap" titles and it was one of them.

Got a copy today. The hiss is really distracting.


Aren't the Double Feature Dirty Harry/Magnum Force discs BD-50s? I thought they were just the existing discs from the Dirty Harry Collection. 

 Yeah, so I haven't bought this (yet), but I was skeptical of a "widescreen" release of Spies Like Us at the outset as they never seemed to pull it off on DVD, even though they "released" it on multiple occasions...  Check out comparative screen shots from the fullscreen I sampled from my DVD, and then the "widescreen" blu-ray of the same frame...  Busted!!!  

You can't just crop the top and bottom off of a fullscreen and call it widescreen!!!

What a joke!  C'Mon Warner Bros.

DVD:

Edited by U2Joshua - 3/14/10 at 7:56am

Actually, you can -- if that's how the film was originally photographed and intended to be shown. The additional image on the 1.33:1 full-frame DVD wasn't intended to be part of the frame and was matted off when the image was projected in theaters. For TV broadcast and on the old DVD, the additional image was revealed so that the entire screen would be filled. The Blu-ray restores the intended aspect ratio and original framing. (And, as your screen caps reveal, it adds a bit of extra width to the image, which isn't uncommon when the proper framing is restored to films shot "open matte" but intended for display at 1.85:1.)

It's always a good idea to learn about the original photographic process before crying foul.

 haha...  that's cool.  Thanks for the tech lesson, Michael.  I did not realize that that was how it was done.  I recall other DVD's of mine that had both widescreen and fullscreen, and I thought I remembered the fullscreen being a trimmed up version of the widescreen (the sides cropped).

Anyway, thanks again.

There are many different ways a film is shot and then composed for theaters and home video. The open-matte example is above. There's anamorphic films which use special lenses to squeeze a wide image (2.35:1 mostly) onto 35mm film. When these films are transferred to full screen, roughly 40% of the image needs to be cropped off because there is no additional information on the film to open up for 1.33:1. Examples of these include the OT Star Wars films, Jaws, all of the Indiana Jones films, Die Hard, Pulp Fiction. There's Super 35 which is a process of shooting on 35mm film with no optical soundtrack which gives a 1.33:1 negative. For theatrical exhibition, a 2.35:1 image is composed from this 1.33:1 negative. When the film goes to video for full screen, the unused portion can be opened up to fill the screen like in the Spies Like Us example, but usually it's a combination of cropping and opening up the frame. Also, often special effects shots are done hard matted in the camera to the theatrical AR or close. Those scenes would need to be subject to the same cropping processes as anamorphic films. Examples of Super 35 films are Terminator 2, Titanic, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. There is also 3-perf Super 35 that is ofter used which has a 1.78:1 native aspect ratio, for a standard television set, that would be subject to cropping, but not as severely as an anamorphic film. The last major film process these days is digital. There's no film involved, but the native AR for those films are usually 1.78:1

Often that is how it's done. As Will explained at greater length, films have different aspect ratios, and there are many ways to achieve them.

Finally got around to picking this up on BR at Amazon.  Out goes my WAY old pan & scan DVD copy.  I dunno why I love "Spies Like Us" so much, but I do, I'll admit it.

Its one of those guilty pleasure movies for sure.  I was so happy to retire my P&S DVD.  Now they just need to release Protocol and I can retire that one too.

If only three amigos was the 2nd feature, I'd be all over this.