Holiday videos are being released in force now that Thanksgiving is behind us, chief among them "The Mask of Zorro," which has its DVD release scheduled for Tuesday, the same day it comes out on videotape.
From the rash of "DVD is here" notices in store windows, it's obvious that the digital CD with a movie on it is gaining ground. How much ground is debated by hardware dealers and video distributors, but there's no arguing that after a year of generally desultory performance, the new format has enough players and titles to claim a future and perhaps a substantial one.Industry figures generally put the number of players in use at 500,000, with hundreds of thousands more stocked in stores. About 2,000 movies are on disk. The numbers are infinitesimal compared with VHS, but there is evidence that DVD has spread beyond a tight little band of early adopters and is infiltrating a broader group of video enthusiasts, many of whom have moved over from laser disk.
They are buying large numbers of movies to go with their new machines, dealers report. In some stores, the disks have begun to challenge cassettes for shelf space.
Studios say they are releasing most of their big films on DVD more or less at the same time they appear on cassette. But not wanting to cut into tape sales, they make notable exceptions. Video, for example, has yet to see a DVD of "Titanic."
More interesting perhaps is the degree of participation by some smaller distributors who find that their customers are buying DVD players and who go to some lengths to provide disks along with their cassettes.
Last week, for instance, Fox Lorber, a medium-size distributor of art-house and foreign features and documentaries on videocassette, released 10 titles on DVD, a large number for a relatively small company. Feature films include "Tampopo," Juzo Itami's comedy-satire on food; "Pierrot le Fou," Jean-Luc Godard's romantic adventure with Jean-Paul Belmondo, and "The Official Story," Luis Puenzo's film about Argentine repression and an Oscar winner as best foreign film. "Leonard Bernstein: Reaching for the Note," a PBS American Masters production, and "Can't You Hear the Wind Howl," a documentary about the blues musician Robert Johnson, are also available.
"We gravitate toward specific groups, and we know that these groups have enough DVD hardware to make it very interesting," said Michael Olivieri, president of Fox Lorber's video division. Much of the company's inventory, from Akira Kurosawa's "Ran" and Eric Rohmer's "Chloe in the Afternoon" to the documentaries "Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business" and "Timothy Leary's Last Trip," have been released on DVD.
Dealing with the disk has meant working with different production houses. "We've had to learn to speak a new language," Olivieri said.
NEW TO VIDEO THIS WEEK:
"The Mask of Zorro"
That Z on the wall is old news to Don Rafael Montero (Stuart Wilson). Years before, he brutalized the peasants as the Spanish governor of California and tangled with the first Zorro, the high-born Don Diego de la Vega (Anthony Hopkins).
These days Montero brutalizes the peasants at his gold mine and puts up with a new Zorro (Antonio Banderas), a rascally and impertinent former bandit schooled in swordplay and barely passable gallant behavior (no nobleman, this one) by the old Zorro.
For smolder, there is the ravishing Elena (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a welcome addition to a dauntless adventure, Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times, "so earnestly retrograde that it seems new."
1998. Columbia Tri-Star. $22.95. 136 minutes. Closed captioned. PG-13. Release date: Tuesday.
"The Negotiator"
When the police hostage negotiator Danny Roman (Samuel L. Jackson) is accused of stealing from a disability fund, he goes crazy like a fox and takes his own hostages in an effort to clear himself. That leads to a standoff with Chris Sabian (Kevin Spacey), the only negotiator who can deal with the negotiator.
Directed with brisk momentum by F. Gary Gray, the film suffers from making its stars such bland nice guys. Flat dialogue doesn't help either, nor does a script "that doesn't leave much to the imagination." (Maslin).
1998. Warner. $107.37. 138 minutes.