Welcome to the Renegade Rack, where clue you in on what is coming out this week on DVD and Blu-ray to help you with your shopping choices. Here is a look at the top choices you can spend your hard earned money on this week.

Epic

The recent animated feature from Blue Sky slipped right under the radar despite a great trailer, coming and going with little fanfare. Now, it hopes to get a second life on DVD. The movie features a girl who is shrunk and ends up in the middle of a war that takes place in the epic forest.

2-Disc Blue-Ray Special Features

  • Mub & Grub Intro – Join Mub and Grub for an epic tour through the special features of this Blu-ray!
  • Birds, Bugs and Slugs: Forest Explorer – Journey into the forest to meet the real-life counterparts of the Epic world!
  • Rot Rocks – Mandrake might be the bad guy, but his world of rot benefits ours in a number of ways, let’s discover how!
  • Bugs of Camouflage – Join us to find out how bugs use their environment to hide right under our noses, just like the Leafmen!
  • The Epic Life At Two Inches Tall – How would your life be different if you were only two inches tall? Aside from being small, there are some surprising and amazing benefits!
  • Mysteries of Moonhaven Revealed – Meet the incredibly talented filmmakers, artists, and animators at Blue Sky, and learn all about the making of Epic!
  • The World
  • The Leafmen
  • Queen Tara
  • Mub & Grub
  • Nim Galuu
  • The Stompers
  • Finding Moonhaven
  • Epic Coloring & Storybook Builder App – Color your own Epic story with exclusive pages on your iOS or Android devices. Then become the story teller by recording your own voice and share on your television with family and friends
  • Theatrical Trailer

The DVD only includes the Mub & Grub Intro, Rot Rocks, Bugs of Camouflage, Epic Coloring & Storybook Builder App, and the Theatrical Trailer.

Charulata (Criterion Collection)

Satyajit Ray’s exquisite story of a woman’s artistic and romantic yearning takes place in late nineteenth-century, pre-independence India, in the gracious home of a liberal-minded, workaholic newspaper editor and his lonely wife, Charulata (Madhabi Mukherjee). When her husband’s poet cousin (Soumitra Chatterjee) comes to stay with them, Charulata finds herself both creatively inspired and dangerously drawn to him. Based on a novella by the great Rabindranath Tagore, Charulata is a work of subtle textures, a delicate tale of a marriage in jeopardy and a woman taking the first steps toward establishing her own voice.

  • New, restored 2K digital film transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • New interview program with actors Madhabi Mukherjee and Soumitra Chatterjee
  • Adapting Tagore, a new interview program featuring Indian film scholar Moinak Biswas and Bengali cultural historian Supriya Chaudhuri
  • Archival audio interview with director Satyajit Ray, conducted by film historian Gideon Bachmann
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Philip Kemp and a 1980s interview with Ray by his biographer Andrew Robinson

The Big City (Criterion Collection)

The Big City, the great Satyajit Ray’s first portrayal of contemporary life in his native Kolkata, follows the personal triumphs and frustrations of Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee), who decides, despite the initial protests of her bank-clerk husband, to take a job to help support their family. With remarkable sensitivity and attention to the details of everyday working-class life, Ray builds a powerful human drama that is at once a hopeful morality tale and a commentary on the identity of the modern Indian woman.

  • New, restored 2K digital film transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • New interview with actor Madhabi Mukherjee
  • Satyajit Ray and the Modern Woman, a new interview with Ray scholar Suranjan Ganguly
  • The Coward (Kapurush, 1965), a short feature by Ray that also addresses modern female identity and stars Mukherjee and Soumitra Chatterjee
  • Satyajit Ray (1974), a documentary short by B. D. Garga
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by scholar Chandak Sengoopta and a 1980s interview with Ray by his biographer Andrew Robinson

Amour

The Academy Award  nominee that no one saw hits DVD and Blu-ray this week, so people outside of esteemed critics can finally see what the fuss was all about. The film tells the story of an elderly couple struggling to keep their love strong as they start to lose their mental facilities.

  • Jean-Louis Trintignant talks about Amour
  • Introduction by Philippe Rouyer.

 

Peter Pan: Diamond Edition

I still  don’t understand why Disney chooses to keep their fans from buying their favorite movies anytime they want to, and insist on returning the DVDs and Blu-rays to their “vault” making sure if you don’t own them, you can’t buy them until your kids are too old to truly fall in love with the magic as youngsters anymore. It is stupid. Anyway, Peter Pan gets its Diamond Edition release this week. Grab it before Disney takes it away again.

  • Growing Up With Nine Old Men
  • Never-Before-Seen Deleted Scene
  • Never-Before-Seen Alternate Ending
  • Deleted Songs
  • Commentary Track
  • Disney Song Selection
  • You can Fly: The Making of Peter Pan
  • In Walt’s Words ‘Why I Made Peter Pan’
  • Tinker Bell: A Fairy’s Tale
  • The Peter Pan that Almost Wasn’t
  • The Peter Pan Story
  • Disney Intermission — Press Pause And See What Happens!
  • Introduction By Diane Disney Miller

No One Lives

I know that a WWE movie is not something I should look forward to, but I will be honest with you – I really wanted to see this one. It isn’t because it is a WWE film (it stars Brodus Clay in a minor role) that had me interested. It is because it was directed by Ryûhei Kitamura, the amazing director behind the under-appreciated Midnight Meat Train. After he was completely screwed over on that previous movie, he dropped out of sight for a long time, a tragedy because he is a very visceral director with a ton of talent. Well, he is back here with the story of a couple terrorized by a violent biker gang – until it turns out the man in the couple is a psychotic serial killer and the tables turn.

The only known special feature is an audio commentary track.

Scary Movie 5

Is anyone really excited about grabbing this movie on DVD or Blu-ray. Well, if you are one of the people who has been looking forward to seeing Scary Movie 5 at home, now is your chance. Remember when the franchise used to parody actual horror movies? Well, other than movies like Paranormal Activity and Mama, this one also spoofs Black Swan, Fifty Shades of Grey, The Help and Madea. Be afraid, be very afraid.

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