This week, Amazon customers found themselves out of luck when trying to pre-order certain Walt Disney Company movies on DVD or Blu-Ray. The films include “Muppets Most Wanted," "Maleficent," "Guardians of the Galaxy" and "Captain America: The Winter Soldier." For those first three films, fans were told they can "[s]ign up to be notified when this item becomes available." Marvel fans are also coming up empty. A search for the new "Captain America" installment, also owned by Disney, yielded absolutely no DVD or Blu-Ray listings. Customers are still able to pre-order digital versions of all four films in advance from Amazon Instant Video. Amazon's been down this road before. Last May, it pulled pre-orders for the "The Lego Movie" and other Warner Bros. flicks before restocking them a few weeks later. Though we don't know exactly what the apparent dispute between Amazon and Disney is about, the technology blog Re/code reported that Amazon cut off Warner Bros. from its huge and loyal customer base in order to wrangle more favorable contract terms from the movie studio.
In that case, Amazon won, as it usually does. We reached out to Amazon and Disney for comment and will update if we receive it. Meanwhile, disc copies of all four Disney movies could be purchased in advance on Best Buy's website. The apparent tiff between Amazon and Disney was first reported by Home Media Magazine, a publication that closely follows the DVD business. Amazon's battle with book publisher Hachette is even more contentious, and hasn't been resolved yet. For months, Amazon has disabled pre-orders for some Hachette titles, reportedly to force the book publisher to lower e-book prices. Lately, Amazon and Hachette have been airing their dirty laundry in public. in an attempt to rally book lovers to take a stand against what it says are high prices for digital books. Meanwhile, over 900 authors have signed a petition against Amazon's tactics, which appeared in huge, two-page ad in this Sunday's New York Times. "As writers -- most of us not published by Hachette -- we feel strongly that no bookseller should block the sale of books or otherwise prevent or discourage customers from ordering or receiving the books they want," the letter reads.
"It is not right for Amazon to single out a group of authors, who are not involved in the dispute, for selective retaliation." The DVD Shelf Top Spots [Episode 5] To celebrate the recent release of The Lego Batman Movie, David counts down his top ten favorite animated Batman films! If you’re interested in purchasing any of these films, please help support Happy Dragon Pictures by using the Amazon links below: Buy Son of Batman Buy Batman vs. Robin Buy Batman: Bad Blood Buy Batman: Year One Buy The Lego Movie Buy The Batman/Superman Movie Buy Batman & Freeze: Sub-Zero Buy Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders Buy Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker Buy Batman: Under The Red Hood Buy Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Buy Batman: Mask of the Phantasm Happy Dragon Pictures Logo Music: “Look Who’s Back” Courtesy Immediate Music Scroll down to comment on this video...Making two great films in the same year is already an unusual feat – doing so from two categories as unprepossessing as "children's retail tie-in" and "TV spinoff sequel" is special indeed.
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller might be the most anarchic creative team currently thriving in big-studio Hollywood. Multiplex audiences are still laughing along to the dude-ish dadaism of 22 Jump Street, while The Lego Movie (Warner, U), which hits DVD shelves tomorrow, is 2014's highest grosser so far. Rarely have the masses grooved to something so peculiarly ingenious. Ostensibly a breakneck romp, in which an empty-headed construction worker (voiced by the ever-endearing Chris Pratt) must embrace his inner rebel to save his orderly society from permanent paralysis, the film announces itself as a fizzy, fiendishly self-aware paean to individual thinking long before its final, foxy reveal. The essential gimmick, of course, is that it's all acrobatically animated in Lego-brick format, placing the aesthetic halfway between Pixar's polish and Michel Gondry's experimentalism: it's a family film as endlessly rewarding and instruction-free as the toy that inspired it. (The Blu-ray package, as you'd expect, is packed with amusing extras, the best being a hilarious music video that extends the film's wry takedown of the Batman mystique.)
So good is The Lego Movie, in fact, that it effectively covers the bases of two contrastingly inferior releases this week. As a breathless action extravaganza based on an existing leisure franchise, it's certainly a lot more fun than Need for Speed (Entertainment One, 12), a functional knockoff of the Fast and Furious films that has the fast cars in place, but misses out on the knowing absurdity. Aaron Paul bids warily for post-Breaking Bad stardom; director Scott Waugh's hands never leave the 10 and two o'clock position. Meanwhile, if it's a geeky wallow in surreal postmodern fantasy you're after, stick with the Lego men over Terry Gilliam's dismaying The Zero Theorem (Sony, 15), in which the one-time iconoclast tries manically to re-conjure the dizzy dystopian satire of Brazil for the online age. The result, starring Christoph Waltz as an anaemic programmer assigned by a sinister corporation to prove the eponymous, unprovable theorem, is barely watchable: smugly circuitous economy sci-fi, the tin-foil futurism of which appears fixed in 1995.
There's melodic relief from that migraine-inducing chaos in 20 Feet from Stardom (Spirit Entertainment, 12), a smashing popular documentary that took unnecessary flak from critics for the cardinal sin of beating The Act of Killing to the Oscar. True, Morgan Neville's considered, compassionate and beautifully constructed tribute to the backing singers who helped shape the sound of the last half-century of soul music is no mould-breaker. But its modesty of form feels appropriate to a film that ultimately celebrates the sidelines, inviting us to look closer at artistry taken for granted: the vast-voiced women at its centre, irresistible former Phil Spector collaborator Darlene Love among them, are as magnetic as many of the stars they've served over the years. There's more feelgood fare in The Stag (Arrow, 15), a rather gentle Irish attempt at Hangover-style lad farce – as the title suggests, it's about a predictably disastrous bachelor weekend in the sticks – that charms almost entirely on the strength of a nuanced, heartsore portrayal by Andrew Scott – Moriarty in Sherlock – of a best man with a doleful crush on the bride.