My Two Cents
Thursday, 21 May 2020 17:13

Celebrating the 40th anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back, plus new 4K reviews, and The Snyder Cut lives!

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We’ve got some good stuff for you here at the site today! So let’s get right into it.

First of all, we’ve posted a trio of new 4K Ultra HD reviews...

Late last night, I posted my in-depth thoughts on John Landis’ The Blues Brothers, new in 4K Ultra HD from Universal. I love this film and the good news is that it’s never looked and sounded better. Check it out here.

Also today, Tim has posted reviews of Blue Underground’s new 4K Ultra HD editions of William Lustig’s Maniac (1980) and Lucio Fulci’s Zombie (1979). These too have never looked better, but do be aware that the cover artwork pictured here on The Bits is NOT the final artwork.

We have to censor the cover art on some of these horror titles or Google flags them as offensive, which crushes our advertising. And we need advertising to survive, so there it is. Anyway, enjoy the titles! Blue Underground does great work. [Read on here...]

CLICK HERE to BACK THE BITS in our fight to preserve Physical Media Shopping on Amazon? START HERE!

In (sort-of) announcement news today, here’s a surprise: Warner Media has announced that director Zack Snyder’s much fabled Justice League: The Snyder Cut will FINALLY see the light of day in 2021... exclusively on their new HBO Max streaming service. But hey, great news for the director’s many fans who have long been campaigning for the film. You can read more here at Variety. Zack is a good guy, by the way—I’m really glad to finally see this happen for him.

Also today, we’ve wrapped up our Tom Cruise 4K Ultra HD giveaway on The Bits’ Facebook page. We’ll be announcing the winners in a little while (and we’ll add them here when we do).

[Editor’s Note: All right, we’ve picked our winners in the Tom Cruise 4K giveaway on Facebook! First though, let me just say that you guys told some great stories about why you liked these films. We’re proud to have you all as Bits readers and Facebook followers. Now then... selected at random, here are our winners:

Patrick Murphy – Days of Thunder
Robert Corlew – War of the Worlds
Matt Fuller – Top Gun

I’ll contact each of you shortly to confirm and to get your mailing addresses. Thanks again to all of you for participating! We’ll try to do more of these giveaways in the weeks and months ahead, so be sure to stay tuned. Cheers!]

Here’s at the site this afternoon, we’re very pleased to bring you a great new retrospective feature from our own Michael Coate, looking back at The Empire Strikes Back on the occasion of its 40th anniversary today. The piece includes a look back at the original release, details of its 70mm exhibition, and a new roundtable interview with historians Justin Berger, W.R. Miller and Richard Woloski. You’ll find the feature in Michael’s History Legacy & Showmanship column here at The Bits. Don’t miss it!

And finally today, following up on my comments from earlier (and the other day), the collapse in online advertising caused by this pandemic means these are difficult times for websites like The Digital Bits. So whether you’re a longtime reader or new one, if you appreciate what we do here at the site, please consider supporting us by making a donation via this PayPal link (or by clicking on the image below). Every little bit helps us to keep the lights on, pay our server costs (etc)—we really do appreciate it.

CLICK HERE to BACK THE BITS in our fight to preserve Physical Media

And of course, whenever you shop for literally anything from Amazon after clicking to them through one of our affiliate links (like this one), that helps too. Thank you!

All right, that’s all for today. Stay tuned...

(You can follow Bill on social media at these links: Twitter and Facebook)

 

 

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