This Week in Blu-ray / DVD Releases: The 5th Wave, Joy, Top Gun, Easy Rider

By John Law

May 3rd 2016, 10:14am

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

This Week: Another wave of aliens, Jennifer Lawrence mops up in Joy, and 30 years of riding into the danger zone.

► THE 5th WAVE, based on the young adult books by Rick Yancey, was the latest contender to be the next Hunger Games franchise, but the lousy box office means a Part 2 is unlikely. Chloe Grace Moretz is an Ohio teen surviving on the road with what’s left of her family after a series of attacks on Earth by aliens known as The Others. The first three waves saw the power cut off, devastating earthquakes, and an airborne virus. The fourth wave has the aliens taking human form. Also stars Live Schreiber, Maggie Siff and Ron Livingston.

► David O. Russell directed Jennifer Lawrence to another Oscar nomination for JOY, as divorced mom Joy Mangano who invents the Miracle Mop out of desperation and becomes wealthy, but not without assorted disasters along the way. Russell regulars Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro co-star, with Melissa Rivers playing her mom. Didn’t get the raves Russell has grown used to of late.

► Grab your volleyball and lose the shirt, TOP GUN turns 30 this summer. Paramount’s anniversary blu-ray has commentary from producer Jerry Bruckheimer and late director Tony Scott, the making of doc ‘Danger Zone,’ classic videos by Kenny Loggins and Berlin, a behind the scenes featurette, and vintage Tom Cruise interviews. What it doesn’t have is anything new from Cruise about the movie that made him a superstar.

► One of the Criterion Collection’s biggest releases of the year is this week’s counterculture classic EASY RIDER. In addition to a new high def transfer, you get the ‘Born to Be Wild’ (1995) and ‘Easy Rider: Shaking the Cage’ (1999) documentaries, TV clips of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda at Cannes in 1969, and Hopper on two separate commentaries from 1995 and 2009. The film is certainly of its time, with several tedious stretches, but its impact was massive. Unfortunately, this isn’t the original 220-minute cut Hopper originally delivered – that extra footage is believed lost.

► Canadian filmmaking icon Atom Egoyan rebounds from his miserable child abduction drama ‘The Captive’ with REMEMBER. It has Christopher Plummer as a concentration camp survivor suffering from dementia who is convinced by another resident to find and kill four Nazis from the camp living in the U.S. and Canada. A much-welcome return to his ‘Sweet Hereafter’ form for Egoyan. Also stars Martin Landau and Jurgen Prochnow.

► Back in 1984, you’d have bet the mortgage on CITY HEAT. Two of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds, together for the first time in a crime comedy? It couldn’t miss, and yet it did. Spectacularly. Eastwood does his tough guy shtick while Reynolds goes for slapdash yuks in this miserable mess original director Blake Edwards was fired from, replaced by Richard Benjamin. It not only killed Reynolds’ career, it nearly killed him personally – his jaw was broken on the first day of shooting, leading to an addiction to painkillers. A truly cursed movie.

► Taking heavy cues from the ‘Battlestar Galactica’ reboot, TNT’s THE LAST SHIP follows 218 people aboard a U.S. Navy ship after a virus wipes out 80% of the world’s population. As Season 2 begins, they’ve found a cure and head back to the U.S. to try and mass produce it, but a new enemy stands in the way. Contains 13 episodes (there were 10 the first season). Season 3 starts this summer.

► Alas, TED vs. FLASH GORDON is not as awesome as it sounds. It’s just a repackaging of the two ‘Ted’ movies with the stoner buds’ fave flick ‘Flash Gordon’ thrown in as a bonus. But the hilarity of all three movies makes this a Mongo-sized bargain at just $22. Retains all the special features from the previous ‘Ted’ editions. The lovably awful ‘Flash Gordon’ offers a chat with comic book legend Alex Ross, insights from screenwriter Lorenzo Semple, Jr., and an episode of the 1936 Flash Gordon serial.

Also out this week: