News|Movies|BD & DVD|Writings|Other

Sunday, September 20, 2009

BD impressions: Subway

8:13 PM / BD Impressions / 2 Comments

In terms of sheer what-the-fuckery, Luc Besson's Subway, the film that allowed him to break into the mainstream, can't be beat. Working less as a conventional narrative than as an allegory for the feelings of France's disaffected youth in the 1980s, it barely makes a lick of sense and yet is oddly watchable in spite of it. It's very rough around the edges, and Besson's lack of experience does, I feel, show at times, particularly with regard to the ragtag narrative and the oddly emotionless performances he draws out of most of his actors, but on the whole I liked it.

Image quality: One of several BD titles released this month as part of Optimum's Luc Besson Collection, Subway looks rather pleasing but is not without its flaws. It's a nicely film-like presentation with no obvious manipulation in evidence. Grain is quite pronounced and, for the most part, fairly natural, although it does result in some artefacting (inadequate bit rate, perhaps?). It doesn't look particularly detailed, but I suspect that most if not all of the softness can be blamed on the original photography. Subway was shot in Technovision, using anamorphic lenses, and I have a feeling that the notorious depth-of-field issues associated with the process are to blame here. The image is noticeably too bright across the board, with the elevated blacks meaning that the shadows appear to be filled with noise as the grain in them gets magnified to an excessive degree. Whites also appear blown out at times, and I suspect that this title was subjected to the same contrast boosting that has been applied to the other Besson titles controlled by Gaumont (e.g. Léon). Overall, though, I was pretty satisfied with this presentation. 7/10

Subway
studio: Optimum; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 20 GB ; average bit rate (including audio): 28.08 Mbit/sec

2 Comments

 
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.