Fearless
As part of my VHS replacement programme I've been struggling to track down Peter Weir's 1993 film Fearless, which seemed to have dropped totally out of circulation. I am consistently fooled by Sky's listings when they near-constantly show the Jet Li martial arts flick and have been on patrol, surfing the channels for a good 18 months. IMDB also has a "tv schedule" listing, which is always empty.
Despite being a pre-dude 90's high point for Jeff Bridges, the film was never available on UK DVD and the only US DVD is a 1993 fullscreen historic artifact. That's available on Amazon's marketplace for £2.36 however, and since it's only shot on standard 35mm the fullscreen will actually show more than the widescreen (due to softmatting) - so I figured it was worth a punt, as if it's well encoded I could crop or zoom it myself. It's horribly encoded. It seems to have been an early test run for the eventual digital revolution and the picture is made up of about 10 jumbo-sized pixels, but it's mildly better than the VHS and at least is capable of being ripped onto my computer - so until the double disc director's cut blu-ray mega edition is released I was mildly satisfied.
While flicking trough Sky last week (the day the DVD arrived in fact) "Fearless" popped up as usual, and I smiled with smug satisfaction at not falling for the old Jet Li trap and flicked it on to see what all the fuss is about. Turns out TCM have the rights to the Jeff Bridges version after all.
5th Nov 2007 - Tumblr