A Christmas Story [Blu-ray]

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The Outlaw Josey Wales originally appeared on DVD in 1999, in a stripped-down edition from a film-to-video transfer dating from the mid-'90s, without any special features to speak of. In 2001, a new edition appeared without much fanfare as part of Warner Home Video's "Clint Eastwood Collection." The newer release is definitive, built on a sharper, brighter, and more detailed transfer (in the movie's widescreen 2.35-to-1 aspect ratio) of the movie, with much truer color; the older disc had a widescreen transfer with some problems in color tone and fuzziness in the finer details, which are all solved here. The advantages will be immediately apparent to anyone with a monitor bigger than 20 inches, and the bigger the better. Additionally, the disc includes a wealth of information and support materials that will please fans of Eastwood and this picture. The most basic component is the onscreen printed text explaining how the original story -- of which 75 copies had been printed, through a small publisher -- made its way unsolicited to Eastwood, and ultimately into production; and some aspects of the casting are covered, though one wishes that there had been more attention paid to the non-Native American players, fascinating though the latter are onscreen. The visual supplements, in addition to a new introductory monologue by Eastwood talking about the movie, also include the seven-minute featurette "Eastwood in Action," a 1976 promotional film; and "Hell Hath No Fury: The Making of The Outlaw Josey Wales," a much more ambitious 30-minute documentary from 1999, telling of the movie's history and production. It's a little too self-congratulatory in tone at times, but it also answers a lot of questions (as well as repeating some material) from the text panels, and it's great to see the surviving cast members talk appreciatively of their work and that of departed performers such as Chief Dan George; and Eastwood has some fun at the end of the short. The DVD goes to the simple, straightforward menu automatically on start-up, and the menus go to two easy-to-access layers of selection, including the language choices (English, French) and subtitles, and the special features. The 135-minute movie has been broken into 35 well-positioned chapters. The under-twenty-dollars price is also very attractive, especially given the extras that have been added.