Building a DVD library—the Warner way: the Warner Home Video backlist, with more than a dozen of the American Film Institute's 100 Best American Films, is a treasure trove for collectors - Entertainment

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 2003 by Robert S. Rothenberg

Dog Day Afternoon (124 minutes, $14.98) is Al Pacino in full manic mode as a bungling bank robber trying to steal enough money to pay for a sex-change operation for his male lover. When everything goes wrong, he and his accomplice (John Cazale) wind up holding everyone in the bank hostage while negotiating for a plane to fly them out of town, all of which turns into a media circus, including the off-shown highlight scene of Pacino taunting the cops who have surrounded the bank with cries of "Attica! Attica!," referring to the storming of the upstate New York prison wherein hostages and rioting prisoners were killed. The fact-based film earned six Academy Award nominations in 1975, winning just for Frank Pierson's original screenplay. It ran into the "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" sweep, losing for best picture; Pacino dropping the best actor prize to Jack Nicholson; and director Sidney Lumet trailing Milos Forman. In addition, Chris Sarandon, as Pacino's flamboyantly gay lover, was defeated for best supporting actor by George Burns ("The Sunshine Boys"). The DVD has no special features.

APOCALYPTIC VISIONS

Blade Runner (117 minutes, $14.98), in this Director's Cut Special Edition, is restored to Ridley Scott's original concept and, as such, is far different from the version shown in theaters in 1982. The studio bigwigs obviously felt the movie was too dark and complex for prospective audiences, especially since it is set in 2019 in an unrecognizable Los Angeles constantly inundated by murky rain, with no explanation of how Earth had reached this stage, with outer space colonies where the labor is performed by replicants--genetically made humanoids with a four-year lifespan. Blade runners, in turn, are bounty hunter/police officers whose job it is to track down replicants who have illegally returned to Earth. So, the studio inserted a voiceover by star Harrison Ford to try to explain all this, and, for good measure, tacked on an optimistic ending to replace Scott's darker one. The restored version removes both the narration and happy ending, while padding out Ford's love affair with replicant Sean Young. However, there are no special features to explain this to viewers of the DVD, which may leave them puzzling over why this is not the same picture they remember seeing two decades ago.

The Road Warrior (95 minutes, $14.98) sets its post-nuclear war vision in an undated future in Australia where gasoline is the prime prize for the grotesque characters who seemingly spend their entire lives on the roads in search of it. The middle film in the trilogy begun with "Mad Max," this 1982 Mel Gibson starring vehicle is one long stunt-filled demolition derby, mindless and bloody, with but a modicum of plot patched in to provide some motivation for it all. Nevertheless, it is viscerally thrilling and ranks high among movies of this genre. The sole special feature of any significance is the remastered soundtrack, which makes the dialogue legible to an American audience, unlike the original 1980 "Mad Max" that, between the Australian dialect and muddied sound, was sometimes shown with subtitles so that U.S. viewers could make some sense out of it.