News|Movies|BD & DVD|Writings|Other

Friday, September 11, 2009

BD impressions: The Informers

7:07 PM / BD Impressions / 3 Comments

I've yet to work out whether Brett Easton Ellis loves the 80s, or hates them, or loves and hates them in equal measure. This film, co-adapted by him from his own novel, was supposedly recut multiple times, with a good 30-40 minutes ending up on the cutting room for. The director was also replaced shortly before shooting began, and Ellis' feelings about the finished product were apparently so mixed that he turned down the opportunity to attend the film's career at the Sundance Film Festival. These behind-the-scenes problems could account for the fact that the finished product feels muddled and ultimately rather inconsequential, filled with fragmented and unsatisfying narratives about a vaguely connected gaggle of assholes with too much money to spend on drugs, sex and generally fucking each other over. It seemed to set up a whole bunch of questions but ultimately didn't answer many of them. What, for example, was the deal with the British rock star punching a groupie in the face after she told him about a supermarket she used to work at (or something like that - I'm a little hazy on the details)? What was the point of the father/son storyline and why did it seemingly end with no conclusion? And why did Amber Heard spend a good 95% of her screen time without any clothes on? (Not that I have any problem with the latter.)

After watching the movie, I browsed through a few reviews, all of which turned out to be pretty scathing, but I must confess I didn't think it was awful by any stretch. The cast is good, it's nicely shot (some extremely dodgy green screen effects notwithstanding), and there's a palpable atmosphere of malaise throughout. I'm inclined to suspect that it's a victim of circumstances and that when ended up on the screen is essentially the remnants of a better film, the rest of which can be found lying on a cutting room floor somewhere.

Image quality: First impressions are not good, with cheap credits appearing on top of a series of crummy-looking location shots that are grubby, low resolution and plagued by ringing and combing artefacts. However, things quickly improve a great deal. The film, it seems, was shot largely in Argentina and Uruguay, with any location footage presumably having been picked up on the cheap or consisting of stock footage. Either way, establishing shots of Los Angeles look consistently poor, but the rest appears very strong indeed. Surprisingly, for a new release from a major studio (well, other than Warner), the film was slapped on to a BD-25, and there is certainly some visible artefacting on occasions, particularly in the backgrounds in lower lit scenes, where the somewhat dense grain structure causes problems for the encoder (see Example 15). The level of detail is inconsistent, with a few shots appearing to have been artificially sharpened (such as Example 6). The rest of the film looks considerably more natural, and overall I'm very happy with the presentation. 9/10

The Informers
studio: Sony Pictures; country: USA; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 16.5 GB ; average bit rate (including audio): 24.19 Mbit/sec

3 Comments

 
Note: to combat spam and simplify site maintenance, all comments must be approved prior to appearing on the site. This is a necessary evil due to the volume of spam the site receives.