The Squid and the Whale / Running with Scissors Blu-ray offers decent video and solid audio in this enjoyable Blu-ray release
No synopsis for The Squid and the Whale / Running with Scissors.
For more about The Squid and the Whale / Running with Scissors and the The Squid and the Whale / Running with Scissors Blu-ray release, see The Squid and the Whale / Running with Scissors Blu-ray Review published by Michael Reuben on April 3, 2013 where this Blu-ray release scored 3.0 out of 5.
Mill Creek Entertainment | 2005 | 81 min | Rated R | Region A (B, C untested) | No Release Date
Based on the true childhood experiences of Noah Baumbach and his brother, The Squid and the Whale tells the touching story of two young boys dealing with their parents' divorce in Brooklyn in the 1980s.
Mill Creek Entertainment | 2006 | 122 min | Rated R | Region A (B, C untested) | No Release Date
Based on the personal memoirs of Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors is a wickedly funny, brave and moving tale of surviving a most unusual childhood. Augusten's (Joseph Cross) mother (Annette Bening) is a deluded aspiring...
So much happens in the course of writer-director Noah Baumbach's 2005 independent triumph,
The Squid and the Whale, that it's hard to believe Baumbach fit so much into a mere 81 minutes.
But the events register with such impact—by turns funny, painful, excruciating, sometimes all
three at once—that prolonging the experience any longer would be too much. Although the film
remains one of the most powerful American portrayals of how children react to divorce,
Baumbach also manages to encompass a frank depiction of the insecurities of male sexual
awakening and the even greater terror that accompanies the discovery, which everyone makes
sooner or later, that those omnipotent parental figures protecting us from everything frightening
in the world can barely hold it together themselves.
Because Running with Scissors is, at least in part, a child's story about divorced and
dysfunctional parents, someone thought it would make a good double bill with The Squid and the
Whale. Thus, the two have been released on a single disc by Mill Creek Entertainment. Scissors
was an early release by Sony in 2007, but it has been remastered for this two-film release. This
review is limited to an audio and video evaluation. As far as the film is concerned, I defer to the
comments of my colleague, Casey Broadwater, in his review of the Sony disc. There are few
movies that I have not finished by choice, but Running with Scissors was one of them. I
completed it on this Blu-ray solely for the sake of an audio/video evaluation.
The likely purchasers of this double feature are fans of The Squid and the Whale, because true
fans of Running with Scissors will want the original Sony disc for its extras. Despite the
superficial similarity in subject matter, the two films are worlds apart in style, attitude, tone,
temperament and (I would argue) quality. Squid and its fans would have been better served with a
single-film release featuring, at the very least, a new transfer, but for reasons suggested in the
separate review of that film, that course was deemed not economically advantageous. I
recommend The Squid and the Whale as a film, and this appears likely to be the only Blu-ray
version we will see anytime soon.
