Musings on films and video releases and such

Tonight I watched Dario Argento's Dark Glasses, which is his most recent film from 2022. As someone who I think can be considered a still recent yet growing Argento fangirl, I've slowly made my way through various nice blu-ray and 4K releases of the classic era of his oeuvre, and so I'm starting to move into the not-quite-so-acclaimed more recent end.

For what I thought of the film, there's a review on my letterboxd, but in summary I liked it well enough although it's nowhere near the heights of the really good ones from the 70s and 80s.

I want to talk here though about discs. Most of the classic Argento films have got very nice 4K releases from various boutique labels, like Arrow, Severin, or Synapse. I think there was a zine article where I went through them all in a recent issue, but the short version is that in general they'll be 4K, with audio commentaries by genre experts, big piles of extras, sometimes an essay booklet, and such. Very much nice premium releases.

With Dark Glasses, we've instead got a fairly bare-bones disc. RLJ Entertainment put the disc out with Shudder Original branding - both companies are apparently divisions of AMC Networks. And it's a totally serviceable disc. Just a standard bluray, no 4K, it's got the original Italian audio with subtitles, and the sole extra is a 5 minute EPK-style featurette. Only a single-layer disc, but with only 90ish minutes of material on the disc that isn't really a problem. It is an acceptable way to watch the film. But compared to the extravagant releases of Argento's earlier work, it feels, well, cheap. To be fair, it IS a much cheaper disc than those, it can be picked up for fairly cheap whereas the boutique label efforts can be quite pricey.

But yeah it is just interesting to compare between "boutique label throwing all their effort into a premium release of a classic" vs "small studio putting a disc out of a film that they had direct-to-streaming on one of their streaming apps".