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Tuesday, September 1, 2009

BD impressions: Sunshine Cleaning

11:10 AM / BD Impressions / 12 Comments

I really didn't know much about this film going in, other than that it starred both Emily Blunt (who first dazzled me in My Summer of Love) and Amy Adams (who, in Enchanted, took a character who could so easily have been infuriating and made her adorable), and that it was from the producers of Little Miss Sunshine (which I haven't seen yet). Oh, and that it was about two sisters making a living cleaning up crime scenes. I wasn't sure what to expect, but had a feeling it would be a broad, bawdy comedy with lots of outrageous jokes about death. I was half-right: the film is, at times, very funny, and draws a lot of its humour from the awkwardness and unpleasantness of the various locations the two sisters find themselves posted to. What I couldn't have predicted, though, was that it could also do "subtle" and "heartfelt", vividly depicting two very different but damaged siblings. I'm not sure who gives the better performance - Blunt or Adams - because they're both so damn good. All credit to the writer, first-timer Megan Holley, for giving them such good material to work with. The best film no-one saw of 2008? I'm not sure, given that I haven't seen many of the films no-one saw in 2008, but this is one blind buy I definitely don't regret.

Image quality: Censorship issue aside, I'm very happy with the way Sunshine Cleaning looks on BD. While the grain looks a little lighter than I would have expected, and doesn't behave entirely naturally, particularly in low-lit scenes (I suspect - although it's only a hunch - that it has been slightly reduced), tThere's plenty of fine detail in the image, and my overall impression is that this is by a wide margin the best disc I've seen from Anchor Bay. That said, it has the same problem as The Orphanage, whereby the master seems to have had a horizontal resolution of less than 1920 pixels, resulting in some stair-stepping artefacts on diagonal edges. The effect is pretty subtle here, far more so than with The Orphanage, and I must confess I didn't even notice it until I started going through the disc to take screen captures (of the images I've posted, it's most noticeable in Example 11). To be honest, there's actually more fine detail than in many "true" 1920x1080 images I could name, and the effect is so unobtrusive that I don't feel that it would be fair to mark the disc down overly harshly. I thought long and hard about what score to award it (and it's at times like this that I wish I hadn't adopted a scoring system at all, since it is by its very nature self-constricting), but eventually settled on... 8/10

Sunshine Cleaning
studio: Anchor Bay; country: USA; region code: A; codec: AVC;
file size: 22.9 GB ; average bit rate (including audio): 36.05 Mbit/sec

12 Comments

 
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