Far be it for me to shy away from writing when I'm feeling venomous, but what else can I say, I'm a moody muthafucker. I picked up Braveheart on blu-ray last week, part of Paramount's new Sapphire series, due in part of blu-ray.com's review of the release.I love Braveheart and own it on dvd, and shelling out the $27 or so took some deliberation. But I did it, and was expecting to be completely blown away. Don't get me wrong...it look good. But the transfer to blu-ray isn't, say, The Dark Knight good. Blu-ray.com gave the picture quality a solid 4.5 out of 5 stars; I'd bump that down to a 4.
Sometimes I feel the less I know about a movie star in real life the better off I am. It's the Tom Cruise syndrome. Huge fan of Tom up through Magnolia (or maybe even Minority Report), but really all the personal retardedness just got to me and I can't sit through his movies anymore. Same thing to a certain point with Mel though I've never been a big fan in general of his. Anyway, watching some of the dvd extras with him just talking make me want to shut the damn thing off. Case in point, he says dude a lot. You shouldn't be 60 years old and continuously using the term "dude". Especially like this: "Dude! You just have to film women over 28 frame per second because they're so beautiful". Ugh. In his interview, he's also off by about 150 years when speaking about the time in which Wallace lived. Just sayin'.
Also lacking...a huge amount of extras in general. Movie comes on one disk (with commentary that I haven't listened to yet) and the second disk contains a "brief" synopsis of the Braveheart battles, a shabby investigation into the "real" William Wallace, and a history on Smithfield (the part of London where he and many others were executed). The Smithfield documentary is the best one on there. Even though it's a bit lacking, I was enthralled with historian and author Lucy Moore. Brilliant and looks like Prince Williams girlfriend, only at age 40 or so.
One of my pet peeves is historical accuracy, so I had to sit through screenwriter and descendant Randall Wallace tell me he just wanted to capture the spirit of William and not particularly the historical truths...such as that the first battle happened over a bridge instead of a large field where they used those big ass pikes, and how he left Scotland after being defeated for something like 5 years before coming back and then being captured, and all that BS about an affair with the Princess of Wales. Screw the spirit of it all, I want to know what really happened. It's pretty sad to find out that in reality King Edward Longshanks died even before his gay son, the eventual Edward II, married Princess Isabella from France and so therefore she could have never whispered in his ear on his deathbed that she was carrying a child not of his lineage, which we're led to believe is the love child of William Wallace, and knowing our history we're thinking "wow, since the first born son of Ed II and Isabella is the eventual Edward III, one of the most powerful English monarchs ever, does this mean his daddy is really Wallace and every monarch since that time is from his line??" No, actually, it's all BS. Oh, and by the way, neither Edward Longshanks nor Edward the II actually spoke English; they only spoke French.
