Monday, August 24, 2009

BD impressions: Ghostbusters

12:53 PM / BD Impressions / Comments12 Comments

BD Impressions
Blu-ray

It's funny how many cult classics fall into the "you had to be there" category. I was born in the early 1980s, but Ghostbusters was never part of my childhood. Well, I did see a couple of episodes of The Real Ghostbusters, that dreadful animated series made by DiC, at a friend's birthday party once, but that's about it. Actually, come to think of it, perhaps seeing those cartoons is precisely the reason why Ghostbusters was never part of my childhood. (And I always thought it was stupid that the animated series was called The Real Ghostbusters when the live action film, featuring real people, wasn't.) While my friends were watching shows like Transformers and He-Man, all things that bored me to tears, I was always much happier watching real cartoons like the Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry shorts. I always found these stiff '80s shows (little more than glorified toy commercials) dull, depressing and frankly ridiculous, which has persisted into adulthood. It's no secret that, despite growing up in the '80s, I think that that decade would be best served by being confined to the trash heap, in part because of the sorry state of my beloved medium of animation during that period.

Anyway, I watched the original 1984 movie for the first time last night, and... yeah, it's was... fun... kinda. It made me laugh a few times and it more or less held my attention for its duration, but I found it completely and utterly disposable. I think my brother summed it up best when he said "I'm not saying it's bad or anything, but out of all the films that could have remained in people's consciousness, why this one?" or words to that effect. Like I said, you had to be there, I suppose.

Image quality: Ghostbusters looks great on BD, with a pronounced grain structure that appears unmolested (for the most part - see below). I'm aware that there has been some debate surrounding the colour timing of this release, particularly some of the effects shots, but not being familiar with the film in its previous incarnations I feel unqualified to comment on this issue. Watching it, I certainly didn't get the impression that anything was amiss, but again I must stress that I don't know the film well. It has the slgihtly soft focus look that I would expect of a film shot anamorphically during this period, but it's pleasing to the eye rather than the sort of digitally induced softness that just makes it look like you're watching with your eyes crossed. With the release of Braveheart, virtually every other catalogue title now seems to look positively underwhelming in comparison, but it's important to keep things in perspective and remember that not every film had that level of detail in the first place.

As is typical of non-digital intermediate productions, effects shots suffer a bit in terms of definition, which is slightly problematic given just how many of them there are in a film such as this. I suspect that they may have been degrained to some extent, as the level of grain is considerably less pronounced during these shots than during "regular" footage, when realistically it should be the other way round. 8/10

Ghostbusters
studio: Sony Pictures; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 26.1;average bit rate (including audio): 35.65 Mbit/sec

Ghostbusters Ghostbusters Ghostbusters Ghostbusters Ghostbusters Ghostbusters Ghostbusters Ghostbusters Ghostbusters Ghostbusters Ghostbusters Ghostbusters Ghostbusters Ghostbusters Ghostbusters

 
12 Comments

1. Kram Sacul said:

Looks great with the intact grain, pleasing colors, and unfiltered detail but it's been brightened and the blown highlights are annoying. Maybe the next remaster will be more accurate to the source.

Ghostbusters... Yeah, I guess you had to be there. I thought everyone that was alive during the 80s saw this film long ago though.

(Posted on Monday, August 24, 2009 at 1:33 PM)

2. David Mackenzie said:

I really shouldn't have started testing AVC encoders - I keep noticing the compression artefacts now. Only on still frames, thankfully.

(Posted on Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 12:29 AM)

3. Daniel Sardella said:

I won't start a pissing match.
All I'll say is that Ghostbusters is my third favorite movie of all time.

(Posted on Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 1:10 AM)

4. Christopher D. Jacobson said:

From these screens and the ones I've seen from Xylon, it certainly looks like a good transfer--good but not perfect. It definitely appears to be too bright; some of the matte lines are a little too clearly visible. I'm not expecting the effects to look fully integrated with the regular shots, since the film never looked like that--but there are some things that are brought out a little stronger than I believe they ought to be. The smoke/fog during the scene with Gozer is too bright and blown out, leaving little detail, judging by some screen grabs I've seen. So again, while the transfer looks great, it certainly is less from perfect, as far as I can tell, and is too bright, not representing how the original film looked.

That's all based on screencaps, though. I've never been too terribly fond of the movie, even as a kid, but I do intend on picking it up eventually. Amazon had it for $13 for a while, and I was ready to pick it up, but I believe it's up to $17 or 18 now, so I'll wait.

(Posted on Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 6:49 AM)

5. Christopher D. Jacobson said:

Also, on The Real Ghostbusters name, though perhaps you already know this bit of (worthless) knowledge:

At the time, there was already a cartoon named Ghostbusters, unrelated to the film, but rather based on an earlier live-action TV series called The Ghost Busters. Something like that, anyway; hence the need to differentiate the cartoon based on the film as The Real Ghostbusters.

(Posted on Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 6:52 AM)

6. avanze said:

One of my favourite comedy films too.

(Posted on Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 2:40 PM)

7. Peter Capaldi said:

I spend my spare time reading, not watching *chortle* Ghostbusters.

(Posted on Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 3:32 PM)

8. Geoff De'arth said:

Michael, I dunno if you've seen the US BD of Big Trouble In Little China yet (or whether you've any interest in it at all, actually) but it has the same degrained look to the FX sequences that Ghostbusters has. They've done a grand job in both cases, but it's still odd to see FX shots look cleaner than the 'regular' footage around them.

(Posted on Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 8:51 PM)

9. Erik said:

Hmm, I spotted a lot of dirt on many of the optical shots in BIG TROUBLE, but perhaps the grain is a tad "finer" in those sequences. Odd that they didn't sweep up the usual muck at the same time though, unless there's some other explanation for this...

As for GHOSTBUSTERS, it's a wonderfully realized comedy; the premise still works, likewise for the majority of the jokes, the characters (obviously Bill Murray and Murray/Weaver in particular -- terrific chemistry), down to the late, great Elmer Bernstein score.

(Posted on Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 9:38 PM)

10. Jeffrey Allen Rydell said:

It's possible there's not been as much DNR as one might first assume from the less-pronounced grain of SFX shots here (and in BIG TROUBLE). It was common during the '80s to shoot elements on VistaVision or 65mm cameras for that very reason: even though the optical compositing took the image down a generation, they were starting from a larger gauge. Richard Edlund certainly did this as a matter of course, and his company handled both films under discussion here.

This isn't to say the shots haven't been massaged somewhat for HD, just that it may not have been all that 'deep' a massage after all. I'll avoid taking the metaphor into the realm of happy endings, however, and for that all should be grateful.

-Jeff

(Posted on Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 2:32 AM)

11. Author Profile Page Michael said:

Thanks for the (possible) explanation, Jeff. That certainly sounds feasible. And thanks also to Chris for the explanation regarding the "Real Ghostbusters" name - I should have known the answer lay somewhere along those lines.

(Posted on Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 9:56 PM)

12. Christopher D. Jacobson said:

I read some info on Wikipedia and it turns out it's much more complicated than that (regarding The Real Ghostbusters name). Lots of legal reasons and such. If you care to fill your noggin with information you'd never care to learn, check it out, ha ha.

(Posted on Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 11:42 PM)

 
To combat spam, commenting is automatically disabled on entries older than 30 days.

Did a comment you tried to post accidentally get eaten by the spam filter? It happens from time to time. I get upwards of 200 spam comments every day and unfortunately don't have the time to weed through all of them in case something genuine ended up there by mistake. If one of your posts gets incorrectly flagged as spam, email me at whiggles[at]ntlworld[dot]com and I'll do my best to retrieve it.

 
Archives
Categories
Recent posts