Here comes the Bride

The Bride Wore Black (La mariée était en noir), 1968, Dir. Francois Truffaut, Blu-ray

The biggest problem for Francois Truffaut’s Hitchcockian thriller The Bride Wore Black is that, well, Truffaut isn’t Hitchcock, or anything close. I don’t know if Truffaut was indeed making some kind of homage to Hitchcock (like Brian De Palma seemed to in so many of his films) or actually deconstructing or lampooning Hitchcock. Brian De Palma had considerable success making his many odes to Hitchcock (reaching its zenith/nadir with 1976’s Vertigo homage/rip-off Obsession) because he had a certain wit and style to carry his films through but Truffaut’s direction is really too flat here. Its a very intellectual film (I’d almost go so far as to suggest its actually pretentious) leaving the film very cold and distant. Certainly  The Bride Wore Black lacks the humour, the charm, the wink at the audience that Hitchcock’s films always seemed to have. Filming a story that FEELS like an Hitchcock film isn’t enough, there was much more to Hitchcock than just having a great story and a Bernard Herrmann score  (although admittedly, Hitch definitely missed Herrmann following their falling-out and his films after suffered for it).

The Bride Wore Black is based upon a story by Cornell Woolrich (written under the pen name of William Irish) – again there’s a Hitchcock link here, as it was a Woolrich story that was the basis of  Rear Window. Woolrich’s stories have also been the basis for many more films, including The Phantom Lady, The Guilty, and Night Has a Thousand Eyes, so it has some pedigree.  It begins as a distraught Julie Kohler (Jeanne Moreau) makes some half-hearted attempt to throw herself out of a window, tells her concerned family she’s leaving town for a fresh start,  and proceeds to hunt down five men who are  either misogynists, cheats or weak-willed egotists (or some combination). We don’t why she is out on a murder spree until later, and there’s no real clues from dialogue; instead Herrmann’s score is left to carry the film’s early sequences, deepening the mood and mystery.

It (eventually) becomes clear that Julie believes these five men are responsible for the murder of her husband on their wedding day (albeit the specific details of that group responsibility are dubious, as it was actually one person’s action and even that was largely accidental). The film drip-feeds the cause of her homicidal rampage via flashbacks,  and I suspect the film would function just as well  (possibly better), had it just opened with the wedding and the shocking murder. which would have immediately assisted our empathy with Julie and her deranged (?) revenge. Instead, it appears as if the structure of the narrative is purely a concious attempt to pull an Hitchcockian twist later.

This film probably seemed quite radical back in 1968, and I wonder if a modern-day remake might actually seem camp or might even seem outrageous. From the vantage point of today’s wiser times its actually alarming to see all the French guys being such chauvinist jerks. They certainly seem to deserve what’s coming to them- one guy seems willing to cheat on his wife on the day of their wedding, another flirts with a woman who he thinks is one of his children’s teachers.  Cads, clearly, each of them.

The biggest problems with the film is that Julie is very one-note, portrayed as cold as a Terminator as she proceeds to track down and murder each of her unwitting targets, unfortunately leaving Moreau looking like a pretty piece of cardboard. I expect that she was a much better actress than Truffaut allows her to look in this- there are glimpses of a warm, hot-bloodied woman but on the whole Moreau is relentlessly impassive. Likely its intended to be a natural result of trauma considering what she experienced, but there again the structure of the film with its central mystery (why is this crazy woman killing these men?) being only solved by gradual flashbacks hinders how that comes across.  Regards the film’s success as a Hitchcockian  thriller I was expecting the film to show the police closing in on her and maybe showing her in peril, either from the law or those she’s hunting down, but she’s superior to all, which lessens any drama the film might have had. Instead the film coolly in episodic fashion shows Julie dispatching each of the (in)Famous Five and is rather uninvolving. Probably that was Truffaut’s intention, but it does leave the film feeling almost as much a mockery of Hitchcock as it does an affectionate homage.  Its like Theatre of Blood played straight: where’s the fun in that?

Black Adam is as bad as it gets

Black Adam, 2022, Dir, Jaume Collet-Serra, 125 mins, HD

The contender for worst super-hero film… well, its a long list that gets added to with every release of a new DC or Marvel movie, lately, but hey, there’s a new kid on the block and this guy’s taking no prisoners.  My freinds, we have a clear winner.

Black Adam really is particularly, almost spectacularly awful, so bad that when it eventually ended its blitzkrieg of CGI  I was quite incredulous. Is this where Hollywood is now? Is this the limit of their creativity, their storytelling ability, their craft? Its so bad that if one cares about film as an artform,  and that a studio could spend a purported $195 million making it, and maybe a further $100 million trying to sell it, its enough to make one feel angry.  These jokers deserve to lose a fortune making junk like this, and make no mistake, this is utter junk. I’m aghast they they let these people go on to make more movies. Who are the producers, the writers, the studio execs, responsible for this? Years ago you’d see an ‘Alan Smithee’  credit on the titles on films as bad as this, but these days there is no shame when the paycheque is big enough.

Right from the start Black Adam makes both no sense at all, and doesn’t even try – even the ‘origin prologue’ feels like its being phoned-in.  It is so wholly reliant upon CGI visual effects it looks more an animated movie than the live-action one it purports to be. It’s so brazenly lazy it thinks it can get away with introducing the Justice Society – Hawkman, Doctor Fate, Atom Smasher, Cyclone –  without explaining who they are, what they are, or what their individual powers (or more importantly their limitations) are.  Instead we are quickly dropped into a huge action sequence with these guys taking on Black Adam not knowing what these peculiarly-dressed ‘heroes’ can or can’t do, instead LITERALLY  just left to ‘marvel’ at the utterly nonsensical stunts and effects work,  turning the whole thing into just CGI tokens, like you are sitting watching a videogame being played and trying to deduce what the game is.  As for Black Adam himself, I remain bemused regards where the drama is expected to be watching a superhero who is so over-powered and indestructible. What stakes are there when there’s not even a whiff of the Black Adam equivalent of Superman’s Kryptonite?

The craziest thing is, the entire film is like that. Nothing makes sense, really,  its just a marathon of absolute incompetence from a film-making standpoint.  When it ended (and the Superman/Black Adam coda got a titter from me considering how much hysteria there was about it at the time this film came out)  I was left with the realisation that Zack Snyder’s Justice League is like Citizen Kane in comparison.

Yep, its utter drivel.

The Cruellest Cut

Cutter’s Way, 1981, Dir. Ivan Passer, 109 mins, Blu-ray

Folks, this one’s a masterpiece.

Alex Cutter (John Heard) is absolutely consumed by anger- a double-amputee Vietnam vet, broken and embittered by the pointless war and his injuries that have ruined both his life and that of his long-suffering wife, Mo (Lisa Eichhorn). Mo is a hollowed shell of the woman she used to be, an alcoholic despairing at what her husband has become as he lashes out at her in his endless rage at the world. She won’t leave him in the desperate hope that her husband who went off to the war might really come back to her. Sometimes she sees fleeting glimpses of his old self that makes the suffering worthwhile.

Cutter’s high-school buddy Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) hangs around them all the time- he’s a beautiful, self-obsessed gigolo-cum-bum who’s starting to lose his youthful charm and virility and is wondering if a thirtysomething can still live like a teenager. He loves both Cutter and Mo but he’s unreliable, a flake, unable to face up to any responsibility or see what the real world is.  These are lives smashed by the American Dream turned Nightmare, three broken people trying to survive but utterly defeated.

One night after ‘entertaining’ a bored, middle-aged woman, Bone’s wreck of a car breaks down in a  rain-soaked back alley, where he witnesses someone dumping the dead body of a sexually assaulted cheerleader. Initially the police consider him a suspect but soon realise he’s their only witness, but Bone, typically, just wants to forget the whole thing.  A day later however when he recognises local oil magnate JJ Cord (Stephen Elliot) in a festival parade as possibly being the man he saw in the alley, Cutter seizes upon it as an opportunity to right all the injustice he feels, having finally found a way for one of the rich Elite, the America that grew rich from the suffering of everyone else to finally pay for one of their crimes. So Cutter convinces Bone to take on this rich and powerful capitalist; two lowly bums, one of them a cripple… if Cord is actually guilty, all the better, but Cutter doesn’t even care. Someone. Has. To. Pay.

I think I’ve seen the best film that I will see all this year. Ivan Passer’s strangely hypnotic, disturbing post-Vietnam neo-noir is so close to perfect its quite breath-taking. The opening credits are just so beautiful, the film immediately pulls you into its paranoid dream world.  Maybe Cutter’s Way ISN’T perfect,  but it seems to me that even its flaws are a pleasure, such as its shockingly abrupt ending (the ending is Lynchian-level nuts). There is a strangely disappearing character (the murdered cheerleader’s sister) that seems to add another layer of paranoia to the whole thing, as one thinks back and wonders if they were killed offscreen as part of the cover-up/conspiracy too. I mean, its probably just a slight of the editing room, but it actually adds to the film. We don’t even know who’s firing the last gunshot or who dies at the end. Cutter’s Way is dark and bleak and funny and oh so sad -this might be the saddest film I’ve ever seen- and the kind of film that just won’t leave you. They don’t make films like this any more. This might be the very last film of that grand era of 1970s American Cinema.

This film is so good, Lets start with the performances – John Heard and Jeff Bridges with career-best work, only to have the show stolen from them by Lisa Eichhorn who is just so quietly phenomenal.  The film looks utterly beautiful, with simply exquisite cinematography from Jordan Cronenweth (who was to shoot Blade Runner immediately afterwards), and it sounds sublime thanks to a music score from Jack Nitzsche that is heartbreakingly haunting and sounds unlike any other score you’ve heard.  Combine all this with a perfect script based on  strong novel and you’ve got lightning in a bottle that so cruelly crashed and burned on its initial release, immediately slipping into obscurity.  But great films always find their audience, eventually.

Yeah, eventually. I’m appalled its taken me so long to see this – over the course of forty years after its doomed original release Cutter’s Way slowly gained a cult following on home video. The film finally  got a HD remaster and a number of Blu-ray releases, culminating in a richly-appointed definitive release from FCE that caught my attention. Not the first time (or likely the last)  that I’m late for a cinematic party. I’m endlessly amazed by so many great films that I’d previously never even heard of.

Babylon 5 finally goes Blu(ray)

I’ll believe it when I can finally pre-order it (its available in the States but not anywhere here in the UK yet), but it seems we are finally getting all five seasons of Babylon 5 on Blu-ray. We’ve been here before, haven’t we? At least we have place-holders and box art this time around. and JMS himself has announced it via Twitter. So come this December…

That box art can’t be final though, can it? Okay, I prefer it to the usual actor’s heads things we usually get but really, no picture of the Babylon 5 station itself? Crikey. That’s like a Star Trek poster/cover not featuring the Enterprise.  What in the name of all things Vorlon is graphic design coming to? I know, I know, I’m sounding like some kind of over-entitled geek, but it does seem a little odd. Anyway, it’s presented in 4:3 ratio, betraying the show’s age while preserving the old CGI effects as best as is possible, and its got no extras. At all. Which, really, having waited for this HD release of B5 for so long, I suppose I’ll take what I can get, really, but frankly, Warner Bros, you need a visit from Mister Morden and his buddies for not making this the proper definitive release with numerous commentaries etc that this show deserves.

Just telling it like it is.

Trouble in Texas

The Hot Spot, 1990, Directed by Dennis Hopper, 130 mins, Blu-ray

Dennis Hopper’s neo-noir The Hot Spot is over thirty years old now, which, watching it last night for the first time, made for a particularly curious experience. On the one hand, its clearly inspired by the sensibilities of film noir of the 1940s and 1950s but as its a late eighties/early nineties-era film, is obviously far more graphic in its depictions of sex and violence than any noir of the classic period could ever dream of getting away with. As much erotic thriller as it is film noir,  this is a film caught somewhere between films like Body Heat and Fatal Attraction before it and Basic Instinct after it, brazen strains of misogyny, criminality, frequent smoking and drinking.  Regards glimpses of flesh the film does seem surprisingly restrained, suggesting more than it actually shows, yet I was still surprised at just how much Madsen and Connelly let director Hopper get away with.  Its almost endearing, all that decidedly non-pc excess, from the viewpoint of 2023. Its like some kind of time capsule.  I find myself wondering if I would have enjoyed this film half as much had I seen it when it first came out, and I have to admit, I probably wouldn’t. But in 2023? Couldn’t help but enjoy it, I had to suffer through Avatar: The Way of the Water just the other week, after all.

This film has an awful lot going for it, and its possibly stuff we largely took for granted back in 1990. Detractors might suggest its too long by some thirty minutes, and there might be some traction to that argument, but I rather liked its languid pace and how it allowed one to just wallow in the film’s sense of time and place (strangely enough, it rather reminded me of some of Philip K Dick’s 1950s novels set in the Bay area).  The cinematography is excellent, often skewed towards the red to better indicate the feeling of unbearable Texan heat, and the bluesy soundtrack featuring John Lee Hooker, Miles Davis and Taj Mahal is fantastic.  The cast is a reminder of faces once familiar from films and television of the time – the supporting cast includes Charles Martin Smith,  William Sadler, Jerry Hardin, Jack Nance, all great character actors, but its the three leads that really impress. Don Johnson, coming from his great success with TV show Miami Vice, is in his prime here, Jennifer Connelly is  breathtakingly beautiful, and Virginia Madsen simply never better. If I had to bring up a negative from my first viewing of this film,  it’d be that I  actually thought the film’s biggest miss-step was the clunky title card for ‘The Hot Spot‘ that features over the opening credits, a horrible piece of ugly  typography that doesn’t work at all. I don’t know what they were thinking. Some amateur attempt at evoking the garish style of a pulp paperback?

Based on a 1952 novel titled Hell Hath No Fury (which, to hell with the marketing boys, is to my mind a far better title than what the studio went with) the film shows loner Harry Madox (Johnson) drifting into a remote Texan town quietly baking in the endless summer heat.  Clearly an opportunist likely running from some shady past, Harry  talks himself into a salesman job at a used car dealership while eyeing up the town bank. Harry falls into an affair with his bosses wife, the salacious Dolly (Madsen) who is clearly the film’s femme fatale and in the tradition of Double Indemnity and others, is a woman looking to use a man to scheme her way out of her marriage (albeit in this case, she actually kills with sex, laughing “I’m fucking you to death, George!”).

Complicating things is Harry’s involvement with a co-worker, the gentle and naïve Gloria (Connelly), who seems the direct opposite of Dolly and whose apparent innocence perhaps seems to Harry to be the chance of a fresh start, an opportunity to leave his past behind him. For Harry its like comparing a whore to an angel and while being unable to resist either woman, maybe  he sees in Gloria some kind of redemption.

Unfortunately for Harry though, the film eventually falls into the usual noir web of greed, treachery and ramps up the tension with several twists. Harry manages to rob the bank but becomes a police suspect, only being spared by an alibi given him by Dolly, who then proceeds to blackmail him into helping her dispatch her husband. Gloria, meanwhile, is herself being blackmailed by deadbeat Frank Sutton (Sadler) and things go from bad to worse in that great film noir tradition that promises that things really will not end well for Harry. 

A recent Blu-ray release from Radiance sporting great art design and a nice booklet/extras finally got me picking this one up and I really did enjoy it, if only because it felt such a breath of fresh air. 

I always find myself attracted to films with great soundtracks that evoke a feeling of time, place and mood, so I suppose its inevitable that I’d succumb to this particular films charm considering the credentials of the guys behind the music. Reminded me of Alan Rudolph’s Trouble in Mind in that respect, another film with a great noir feel and jazzy, bluesy soundtrack. Sometimes films can be enjoyed not because they are particularly great or sophisticated, but rather because they feel like those cheap paperbacks on carousel racks that could be picked up and lost oneself in, films that are like a late night spent listening to a blues CD while having a drink.  Films more mood than, well, fully-functioning narrative. Films, for all their darkness, of simple escapism, even if only an escape to the old faces and sounds of earlier film-making eras.  I’m a sucker for nostalgia, then, maybe.

Another Impossible Mission

What yonder breaks- is that a cinema screen I see before me? Why, yes it is- well, trust Tom Cruise to finally get me into the cinema again after Dune, the last film I watched at the cinema such a long time ago.  That’s a mission impossible achieved right there,  and I’ll refrain from commenting on how much the two tickets cost for an early afternoon screening (the days of spending 75p to see Blade Runner back in 1982 are, after all, ancient history now and I need to get with all things 2023 – like, hi there, inflation!).

So how was Mission: Impossible- Dead Reckoning Part One? To be brutally honest, it was very good, but it was quite noticeably inferior to the previous entry (Mission: Impossible- Fallout) chiefly because, well, its how these things go, splitting films into two parts or trying to film two films back-to-back as one larger story.  Try as they might to give viewers a grand finale in this film -and they do, in many ways manage it- this film inevitably suffers because it just doesn’t have ‘The End’ in big titles at the end. Instead, there’s a ‘to be continued…’ and we know the proper conclusion of this story is still a year away. Its inevitable, then, that one leaves with a feeling of frustration? The curious emptiness of missing the cathartic release of a proper,  final finale? Threads are laid down and while some arcs are resolved, some are obviously  left hanging… it doesn’t help, either, that the plot is ridiculously convoluted, so many twists and suggestions and revelations that confuse that are never settled. So many secrets, so many lies. I still don’t understand how the keys got found under the ice and not recognised for what they were, and split up and cast out into the world, or even what they finally represent (if they are a way of controlling or destroying the Entity, surely the AI would just seek to destroy the keys, like, drop a nuke on whatever city they are in).

But there is such a lot going for the film. There’s some great spins on the familiar tropes of these films (now seven films in, you’d be forgiven for getting weary of yet more chases etc) and the stunts etc are genuinely jaw-dropping in places. There is no doubt plenty of bang for your buck (or pound sterling) but somehow I left the film with a feeling of disappointment. It was very good, just not Great, and I’d been hoping for Great. Maybe that comes in Autumn next year when I can watch Part One and Part Two over consecutive nights at home in 4K.

I think it has a very good premise- its very timely, and disturbingly well-realised; the threat of an AI (called The Entity) that changes Everything, and which makes all things in the digital realm untrustworthy and open to manipulation. This isn’t Skynet; its actually something scarier.  This thing could change your personal history, land you a criminal record, wipe out your savings, undermine democracy, bring down airplanes, blackout cities…. I actually think that would be enough, but they complicate things a little with a human stooge for the Entity in Gabriel (Esai Morales) who also turns out to be an old nemesis of Ethan Hunts just to make things more personal. Morales is very, very good, the best villain since MI:3‘s Philip Seymour Hoffman and was probably the highlight of the film for me.  I hope we get more depth etc to him in Part Two because he needs some more weight to his motivations other than simply being a crazy bastard, but hey, Morales is a great foil for Cruise. Hayley Atwell is very good as I expected (she’s surprisingly good at the physical action stuff, it doesn’t always come easy) and the rest of the returning cast from the earlier M:I films are fine as ever, albeit maybe a little over familiar now. That last point may be an issue- while its a strength its also a possible weakness, the formula settled on by the time the series reached its fourth film may have been hugely successful but one wonders how long it will be before staleness threatens.

On the whole though, a very good film, and Cruise managed to get me returning to the cinema at long last (Christopher Nolan will manage the same next week; enticing films are like buses, it seems- you wait ages and then two turn up pretty much at once). I’m sure this film will be a huge success and look forward to owning the 4K disc in the Autumn.

Procastranation is the enemy

Silo, Season One (Ten Episodes), 2023, Apple TV

Invasion, Season One (Ten Episodes), 2021, Apple TV

Three episodes in, Apple TV’s new post-Apocalypse sci-fi show Silo was genuinely great… but beyond that, well, not so much. By the time the first season finished, it was merely and at best,  ‘pretty good’ – unfortunately it fell foul of the curse  of so many TV shows of late: procrastination. Which is a little odd when one considers that we left behind 22-episodes of TV shows a long time ago. With prestige series (I guess that’s what they call them now) only running for sometimes eight, usually ten, episodes a season, you’d think they would be tightly-paced, all content, no waste.  Taking the serial-form of so much British drama of old, with narrative-arcs like chapters of a book, the idea is to hook audiences with the first episode or two and then keep them hanging for the remainder of the run, usually finally teasing audiences with a humongous cliff-hanger when something threatens to happen to ensure they come back for more with season two.

But a funny thing; slow-burn TV has increasingly, well, slowed… to a crawl, a state in which nothing really seems to actually happen. Even with only ten episodes to fill, the writers and showrunners seem to be at a loss… Much of this is the dreaded ‘mystery box’ horror that JJ Abrams championed (and had some success with, early on) and which has infiltrated every writers room.  Stuff is teased… and teased…. but there’s no pay-off. One gets the feeling that some new mystery is dropped and the shows not only fail to offer any solution, they actually decide to hold off on any solution/reveal until a third season a few years in the future, but don’t have the balls to admit it. Instead there’s an unspoken suggestion that, well, maybe the next episode… or maybe the episode after that… when really the writers know that its years away, if ever (and one wonders if they even have that solution or are winging it, hoping some good idea will come to them).

So these tv shows, even if they only run eight or ten episodes, have actually become an increasingly frustrating experience. The first three episodes of Silo had actual events with repercussions on the narrative, teasing mysteries which, while not only immensely intriguing or suggestive of great possibilities,   actually seemed to offer glimpses of answers. But further episodes just dug deeper cul-de-sacs, not particularly going anywhere, really. Which was such a pity. The truth is, the entire ten-episode run could have been edited down to just six episodes, and nobody would have noticed anything missing. In fact, if it wasn’t for the obvious copyright issues,  it would be a curious project for someone to make some six-episode fan-edit and put it up on YouTube.

Invasion, meanwhile, is a total crock of shit. Its the ultimate bullshit mystery box, taking an interesting fan-favourite premise -alien, invasion!- and somehow making it the most boring, nonsensical and appalling piece of rubbish one could imagine while chucking an improbably large budget at it. Its all surface gloss and zero content. Maybe the clever idea of Apple was to see what a bunch of soap writers with zero genre knowledge could do if handed a big budget and told to make a series about aliens attacking Earth, because that seems to be what we’ve got. The procrastination thing is taken to obscene levels of taking the piss, frankly – easily summarised by the first episode, in which the promising casting of Sam Neil results in an episode largely devoted to his character and back-story, only for him to be killed( possibly, it can’t even be clear about even that), not appearing or mentioned of again in any of the further nine episodes. Its rather sums up the whole shebang. The fact that Sam Neil’s character is actually the most interesting and believable of any of the shows characters only adds further insult.

Blade Runner 2033 & more Babylon 5? Oh, my!

Here’s a surprise from Annapurna Interactive, a new Blade Runner videogame, and one that looks genuinely interesting- the last thing we need is a Blade Runner shoot-’em-up, and I’m pleased to note this does seem far from that. Annapurna are the folks that brought us the sublime What Remains of Edith Finch,  which was as much an intoxicating work of art as it was a videogame, so much so that I wrote about it here. Blade Runner 2033: Labyrinth looks to be very much in the same vein as Finch and I couldn’t be more thrilled.  I must say, Alcon Entertainment, who own the Blade Runner IP, definitely know their ‘franchise’ (I hate associating the term ‘franchise’ with Blade Runner, it just feels wrong) and seem to be treating it with due care and attention, something rare enough these days, considering how Disney have trampled over the Star Wars and Indiana Jones IP.  Alcon must have been frustrated by how BR2049 performed financially but they seem to have held firm- I’ve still not yet seen that anime they did, Blade Runner: Black Lotus, which looked to be trying just too hard, and  I’m really not keen on that CGI-anime art style (and if the makers of that couldn’t get me onboard, it was definitely in trouble).  The writers strike that’s currently going on has delayed the Blade Runner 2099 television series that should have been filming anytime about now, and maybe that series will never happen, these strikes have ways of cancelling proposed series when too much time goes by. But how strange that anyone is even thinking about a Blade Runner television show. It just goes to show how powerful nostalgia and old IP is in our current creative climate, and just how much the studios keep looking back at what they own and have done before.

Which brings me to some news to get my wife Claire feeling nervous (she had to put up with my obsession with all things B5 back when we were courting and then into the early years of our marriage, and I still have the Tee-shirt, mug and B5 watch etc to prove it). Of all the strange things going on lately, perhaps strangest of all is the recent announcement of this new Babylon 5 animated movie coming in just a few weeks -incredibly, on 4K UHD too (and how weird is THAT when we’re still waiting for The Abyss and 1982’s Conan the Barbarian)?

Babylon 5: The Road Home is written by JMS and features several of the original cast (at least those of them still with us). It certainly seems to look, sound and have the feel of the original Babylon 5. I dare say it will probably suffer the same fate as all the other abortive spin-offs from the B5 show that have come out over the years, and again, I’m not really a fan of this kind of straight-to-video animation that Warner do (of all those DC animated movies, the only one I ever bought was that Dark Knight Returns adaption and I wasn’t all that impressed with it).  But hey, beggars can’t be choosers and one never knows, if interest/sales are deemed good enough, we might finally get that B5 remaster on Blu-ray… and maybe a fresh impetus behind that B5 reboot that JMS was working on which seems to be stuck in development hell. Naturally my copy of the 4K disc got pre-ordered immediately and Claire on notice that trouble is afoot.