Steven Spielberg’s D-Day epic Saving Private Ryan is heading to Blu-ray, today.  This is a pretty good film, but it’s reputation is much better than it deserves.  Like I said, it’s pretty good, but it’s not great.  It’s overly long and some of the casting and script choices were questionable at best.  If you want a really great war film from the same year, I would suggest Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.  Where Saving Private Ryan is the terse prose of war, The Thin Red Line is elegant poetry.  According to Amazon, Criterion is putting out a Blu-ray of it some time in the future, and that’s one I’m more excited for than just about anything.  But as far as Ryan goes, the only thing that gets into “great” territory is the D-Day invasion, and seeing it on Blu-ray is a must.

What I think is the third greatest of David Lean’s epics (behind Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge on the River Kwai) Doctor Zhivago comes out on Blu-ray.  Blu-ray is exactly the format that suits Lean best and this is a movie that is perfect for it.  It’s a sweeping epic with frames so dense with information, I daresay you’ll get more out of a release like this than the DVD.

In the geek department today, comes the fifth volume of the 90s X-Men cartoon series and the fifth volume of Wolverine and the X-men.  We should have full reviews up soon, but be sure to check out the contest we have going to give away a copy of the X-Men, along with the complete series of the 1994 Iron Man cartoon, which also comes out today.

I’m also terribly interested to see Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, starring Vincent Gallo.  I want to see what Coppola does in his quest for “small, personal” films.  They’re just so damned hard to catch.  His last, Youth Without Youth, starring Eric Roth, was here and gone in a flash and I haven’t picked up a DVD of that yet, either.  But you should check it out if you feel so inclined.

The last thing on my list today is a four pack Turner Classic Movies war collection.  It contains one of my favorite movies ever, Gunga Din, as well as Battle of the Bulge, The Dawn Patrol and Operation Pacific.  Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, Cary Grant, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. all together in one set for less than $20, that’s simply a deal you can’t beat.