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BDs and DVDs I bought or received in the month of January

11:59 PM / Blu-ray / No Comments

• Wednesday, January 13, 2010: Antichrist (BD, Region B, UK) - BD impressions
• Saturday, January 16, 2010: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (BD, Region ABC, UK) [review copy] - BD impressions, review
• Monday, January 18, 2010: Suspiria (BD, Region B, UK) - detailed impressions
• Friday, January 22, 2010: Mesrine (BD, Region B, UK)
• Tuesday, January 26, 2010: Red Road (BD, Region B, UK)
• Tuesday, January 26, 2010: Pontypool (BD, Region ABC, UK)
• Tuesday, January 26, 2010: Menn som hater kvinner (BD, Region ABC, Norway)
• Tuesday, January 26, 2010: Jenta som lekte med ilden (BD, Region ABC, Norway)
• Thursday, January 28, 2010: The Double Life of Veronique (BD, Region ABC, UK)

Holy crap, they fixed Gangs of New York!

1:02 PM / Blu-ray / 10 Comments

Clicky!

Once again, the "screenshots scientists" and everyone else who complained about the woefully sub-par first release have been vindicated. Now come on, Disney, do the decent thing and set up an actual disc replacement programme instead of expecting us to shell out for it again. Oh, and Paramount and New Line respectively, how about doing the same for Gladiator and Dark City?

Here are a couple of comparisons from AVS Forum's Xylon, the champion of screenshot scientists: [1], [2]. These have been saved with less compression than the blu-news.com ones and should be more reflective of the actual product.

Just arrived...

11:00 PM / Blu-ray / 2 Comments

The Double Life of Veronique (BD, Artificial Eye, Region ABC, UK)

BD impressions: Live and Let Die

12:45 PM / BD Impressions / 17 Comments

Live and Let Die: in which James Bond discovers that every single black person in the world really is out to get him, and that they're all secretly communicating with each other by radio, tracking the whereabouts of this "honky" (as they like to call him) as he traipses from Harlem to New Orleans to the Caribbean, threatening to put an end to their murderous, heroin-dealing ways. And yes, it does include the line "Get me a make on a white pimpmobile!"

What follows is a dully plotted, convoluted and (yes, you guessed it) far too long romp which sees Roger Moore, in his first outing as Commander Bond, doing his best to immitate Sean Connery without actually being Sean Connery. My dislike of Moore in the role is no secret (Connery, Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig are my top three, though I'm never quite sure in what order), but he's far from the worst thing about this film. (That would be Gloria Hendry. Good grief!) In fact, I'm rather inclined to go easy on him, given that, despite this being his first Bond film, he at no point comes across as an imposter. His banter with M and Moneypenny is spot on, and it's fairly clear that, here at least, he's playing the same character embodied so successfully by Connery. If memory serves me correctly, he would make the character more his own later, much to the series' detriment. Unfortunately, the puerile humour that would in many ways come to define his tenure as the character (whether fairly or not) has already begun to creep in at this stage, exemplified in a tortuously drawn-out boat chase sequence featuring a loud-mouthed local sheriff, who doesn't seem to have got the memo telling him he's supposed to be in a spy movie rather than a broad comedy.

Of all the Bonds I've seen of late, this is by far my least favourite. It's not without its merits - the uncanny atmosphere, particularly apparent in the first half, is pleasingly sinister and unlike anything in the rest of the series, and if Jane Seymour isn't the best Bond girl of all time she's at least easy on the eyes and far less annoying than the aforementioned Gloria Hendry - but it drags like nothing on earth, and for a film in which Bond has a near-death experience with alligators and screws a clairvoyant virgin, thereby robbing her of her fortune-telling powers (don't ask me how that works), is surprisingly forgettable.

PS. I noticed that the actor playing Felix Leiter in this film is the same one who'd go on to portray him in Licence to Kill - a nice bit of continuity for a character who has been recast more times than Bond himself.

PPS. Interesting note about Moore: he is largely considered to have stuck with the role well past his prime. Conversely, I think he looks too young in this film.

Image quality: Discounting Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, this is probably the best-looking of the Bond BDs that I've seen so far. The usual problems with these Lowry restorations are present, namely the at times unnatural grain that warps and freezes around areas of movement, but on the whole I was happy with this presentation. There's some terrific detail (see Example 8 and Example 12) and, barring a few of the darker scenes, the wonky-looking dynamic range that plagued Thunderball is absent here. 8/10

Live and Let Die
studio: 20th Century Fox/MGM; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 33.1 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 39.05 Mbit/sec

For those keeping track, here are my Bond ratings so far:

• Dr. No - 7/10
• From Russia with Love - 8/10
• Goldfinger - 8/10
• Thunderball - 6/10
• On Her Majesty's Secret Service- 7/10
• Live and Let Die - 4/10

For Your Eyes Only is up next. Oddly enough I don't feel any great urge to rent the BDs of The Man with the Golden Gun and Moonraker, although I'm sure I'll come back to them eventually.

First post from my new laptop

11:43 PM / Technology / No Comments

My ASUS UL30A arrived first thing yesterday morning and I wasted no time in getting it up and running, which didn't take long, as I didn't have to install much - just OpenOffice, Google Chrome and a handful of other programs I use regularly. And of course reverting the taskbar back to its Windows 95-through-Vista state. This was never intended to be a heavy duty multimedia or gaming machine, just something light, portable and long-lasting.

And just how long-lasting is it? Judge for yourselves:

Obviously, that figure is just an estimate that Windows spits out based on your current usage, and it tends to yo-yo up and down like nobody's business. For instance, after installing a bunch of Windows Updates, it dropped to as low as four and a half hours on an 85% charge, but even that is light years ahead of my previous setup, the battery for which has just degraded to point that it's really only useful for checking my emails while sitting on the crapper. (Come on, laptop users, don't try to tell me you've never done it.)

I can't say I've run into any major problems yet. It's small without being overly tiny (I don't like squinting at minuscule screens, which is one reason why I didn't go the whole hog and get a netbook), the keyboard feels pretty nice to type on, and the thing resumes from hibernation pretty quickly (around 15 seconds, which is nearly double the 8 seconds ASUS boasts, but still pretty impressive). The quality of the screen, particularly its viewing angle, is several notches down from that of my old VAIO, but that was to be expected as the VAIO was built as a multimedia system (or as close as you can get with a laptop), and I suspect its display was responsible for the lion's share of the power suckage. In any event, image quality is rarely the first thing on my mind when I'm on the move, and when I'm at home I just hook it up to the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo 3230T monitor in my bedroom anyway.

Speaking of which, I did run into a slight problem with regard to compatibility between the laptop and the monitor. The laptop comes equipped with an embedded Intel GMA X4500MHD video card, hardly the most advanced piece of equipment out there. Its software is pretty substandard, and for some reason it detects my Amilo as a television rather than a monitor, and as such ends up sending video levels (16-235) rather than PC levels (0-255) via HDMI. Translation: severely washed out blacks. Unfortunately, there's no way to either tell it you have a computer monitor, not a television, nor is there any way to force it to use PC levels.

My (temporary) solution to this problem has been to use the VGA output instead of HDMI, which actually delivers a reasonably good image, albeit ever so slightly ringy, which isn't ideal when you're staring at scads of black-on-white text. That said, adjusting Windows' ClearType settings (a nice little unpublicised addition to Windows 7) has allowed me to alleviate the problem somewhat. I'm going to continue to explore the issue, but in the long run I suspect that, if I want to use HDMI and get the correct levels, I may have to look into a different monitor. I'd rather not have to spend yet more money... but then again, the laptop was pretty inexpensive to begin with. We'll see - it's not a life or death issue.

Just arrived...

8:54 PM / Blu-ray / 14 Comments

Red Road (BD, Verve, Region B, UK)

Pontypool (BD, Kaleidoscope, Region ABC, UK)

Menn som hater kvinner (BD, Nordisk Film, Region ABC, Norway)

Jenta som lekte med ilden (BD, Nordisk Film, Region ABC, Norway)

The last two are better known as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire respectively - movie adaptations of the first two novels in Stieg Larsson's posthumously-published Millennium Trilogy (the third film is to follow on BD in March). Alas, neither of these discs has English subtitles, but since I've already read the books (well, I've read the first and am about a third of my way through the second), I'm going to see how far I can get without the aid of a translation. At any rate, I didn't feel I could resist these after I saw the screen captures for the first one over at Hundland.org.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is released theatrically in the UK on March 12.

Cleaning up this site's act

9:28 PM / Web / No Comments

In an attempt to cut down on the spam that's been accumulating on this site recently, I've installed the Blog Janitor plugin for Movable Type and set it to disable commenting on all entries over 30 days old.

It's rather irritating to have to do this, but it should hopefully cut down on the amount of maintenance I'm currently having to do (most of the spam comments end up being posted in entries that were written several weeks ago), and in any event it's fairly rare for anyone to want to reply to anything older than that. If you want to comment on something from an older entry, you'd probably be as well leaving it on a more recent entry and linking back to the post you're referring to.

Amer and uncut A Lizard in a Woman's Skin playing at the GFT

7:20 PM / Cinema / 5 Comments

On Friday 26th and Saturday 27th of February, the annual Glasgow FrightFest is being held at the Glasgow Film Theatre. As per the official web site, the full list of titles being screened is as follows:

Friday:

• 7.00 pm - Frozen
• 9.30 pm - 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams
• 11.45 pm - Stag Night

Saturday:

• 2.00 pm - A Lizard in a Woman's Skin
• 4.15 pm - Amer
• 7.00 pm - [Rec] 2
• 9.00 pm - Splice
• 11.30 pm - Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre

I'll certainly be going to Amer and A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (which is being touted as a 110-minute "re-mastered, restored and never-before-seen fully uncut version" - which, if correct, would make it six minutes longer than the current longest available version), and perhaps some of the others as well, time and inclination permitting. Anyone else going to be there?

BD review: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

11:55 PM / Reviews / No Comments

I have nothing but admiration for Pixar's Wall-E and its push for realism, and I'll even grudgingly commend the heavily flawed 9 for its attempt to tell a darker, more mature story than we're used to with North American animation, but it always strikes me as something of a missed opportunity that so few animated movies, CG or traditional, fail to take advantage of the innate opportunities afforded by their medium - namely the opportunity to indulge in outrageous, broad acts of comedy that would be impossible in the real world. To that end, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs may very well bear the distinction of being the first CG animated feature to not be ashamed of being a cartoon.

[Continue reading...]

BD impressions: Antichrist

8:42 PM / BD Impressions / 5 Comments

The thing about a film like Antichrist is that, unless you were in the fortunate position of having viewed it at its premiere, every man and his dog will have expressed an opinion on it by the time you get around to seeing it, whether or not they actually saw it themselves. As such, I wonder to what extent my lukewarm reaction to it stemmed from having unrealistic expectations. Like just about everyone else, I knew all about "that scene" before going in (if, by some remarkable twist of fate, you don't know what "that scene" refers to, I'm not going to ruin it for you here), so its shock factor was dulled to a certain degree (it's still a squirmer, though). What I did realise was that "that scene", and the fifteen or so minutes surrounding it, were atypically arresting. The rest of the film is plodding and dreary, with powerful (or should that be unrestrained?) performances and some striking cinematography failing to liven it up. At times, von Trier seriously overestimates his viewers' (or at least this particular viewer's) suspension of disbelief, with a scene in which a fox talks to Willem Dafoe eliciting gales of derisive laughter.

In his Kermode Uncut blog, Mark Kermode cites Andrzej Zulawski's Possession as the spiritual forerunner of Antichrist, which I'm inclined to agree with, with the caveat that Possession is the better movie. It's far more gung-ho in its balls-to-the-wall weirdness, and while its performances are similarly hysterical, nothing Charlotte Gainsbourg does in Antichrist can hold a candle to Isabelle Adjani's subway station meltdown.

Antichrist, or rather the ideas behind it, are interesting enough, and the aforementioned fifteen minutes, which combine cringe-inducing gore with nail-biting tension, make it worth viewing, but on the whole I was a little let down. Kermode claims that no-one reacts to this film with indifference. Well, I respectfully disagree. There's always one, I suppose.

Image quality: A real mixed bag. Antichrist is an at times striking-looking film. At other times, it's a rather cheap-looking one, owing to the varying shutter speeds employed by von Trier and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, which results in the look alternating between that of film and that of someone's home video. A major issue with the image is the crushed greyscale, with severe banding and blocking visible in most scenes that take place in low light (see Example 1 and Example 4). I don't know whether the problem lies with the encode or the source material, but either way it looks like ass. Further problems are evident in the form of what looks like a dodgy scaling algorithm, which creates pronounced aliasing on any diagonal edge (look at Dafoe's cheek in Example 3 and the child's sleeve in Example 8). By far the worst problem, though, is the encoding, which is dismal. The film occupies a mere 14.8 GB on the disc, and it shows in the form of the worst compression artefacts I've ever seen on a BD. Look at Example 5 and Example 14 and try to hold on to your lunch.

It's a shame, because there is plenty of detail in the image, and without these severe flaws I'm sure it would look great. 5/10

Antichrist
studio: Chealsea Films; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 14.8 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 20.43 Mbit/sec

I've ordered a new toy

10:46 PM / Technology / 4 Comments

When I bought my Sony VAIO VGN-FZ11Z back in Autumn 2007, I thought it was the bee's knees. It was actually the first laptop I ever owned, and it was a far cry from the variety of clunky old rustbuckets that my dad had owned at different points throughout the 90s. It also had a BD-ROM drive, which was a big deal at the time, mainly because it allowed me to take screen captures of my BDs for the first time.

Things have changed a bit now, however. I now have a BD-ROM drive in my desktop machine, and I've come to see that, in some respects, I may have allowed the VAIO's drive to wow me at the expense of its other shortcomings. For one thing, it's pretty bulky and heavy. For another, its battery life is absolutely dismal. That's not much of a problem when it's sitting in my bedroom plugged in at the mains, which to be fair is where it is to be found most of the time, but on long trips it's a nightmare. Even in Performance mode, I get just over an hour's juice out of the battery before it gives out - less if I'm doing something CPU-intensive like playing a video file. This is partly due to the simple fact that rechargeable batteries become less effective over time, but it was never great, and I must confess to being more than a little jealous of my brother, who gets a good 3-4 hours out of his MacBook when running Windows on it.

Tonight, after a semi-lengthy period of perusing reviews and benchmarks of various different laptops, I decided to order an ASUS UL30A. It's smaller and lighter than my VAIO, has double the RAM and a significantly higher capacity hard drive, and best of all its battery lasts for ages. ASUS boasts 12 hours, which I immediately suspected was puffery, but the reviewers who have benchmarked it have all reported figures of between 8 and 10 hours, which is nothing to sniff at and far and away superior to what I'm getting at the moment. I found a new one on eBay for a very reasonable £500 and will be selling my VAIO forthwith in order to recoup some of that.

I'll let you know what it's like when it arrives.

Just arrived...

2:32 PM / Blu-ray / 3 Comments

Mesrine (BD, Momentum, Region B, UK)

Suspiria: the good, the bad and the downright ugly

4:17 PM / Blu-ray / 42 Comments

Monday saw the release of the first English-friendly BD of Dario Argento's masterpiece, Suspiria. Already released on BD in Italy just under a year ago, that release was pretty much a disappointment all round due to its lack of English audio and, perhaps even more significantly, its thoroughly mangled video, sourced from Technicolor's "controversial" 2007 digital restoration.

For those not completely up to speed on the issues surrounding this restoration, a little light reading is perhaps in order:

• Wednesday, October 24, 2007: The digital restoration bandits claim another victim
   
• Friday, March 20, 2009: Suspiria BD (initial) impressions
   
• Sunday, March 22, 2009: Vandalism
   
• Thursday, March 26, 2009: Suspiria BD (final) impressions
   
• Wednesday, May 27, 2009: The colours, man... the colours!
   
• Monday, June 1, 2009: Suspiria colour query
   
• Friday, July 17, 2009: The Suspiria colour timing saga continues

[Continue reading...]

Amer redux

1:59 PM / Cinema / No Comments

I'm currently working on an in-depth write-up about the new UK Suspiria BD release. I can't promise to have it up today, but for now, feast your eyes on this exclusive clip from Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's Amer, courtesy of Bloody Disgusting.

Just arrived...

11:58 AM / Blu-ray / 4 Comments

Suspiria (BD, Nouveaux Pictures, Region B, UK)

BD impressions: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

11:37 AM / BD Impressions / 3 Comments

It's a shame I didn't see Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs before I posted my Top 10 UK Releases of 2009 or Movie Checklist 2009 lists, because it would have ranked pretty high on both. This may well be the first feature length CG animated feature that isn't ashamed to be a cartoon. Although the mandatory pathos is crowbarred in with all the subtlety of an icepick to the brain, I can't remember the last time I laughed this loud or this often at a modern animated movie. I love Pixar but what they do, but this highly entertaining and unconventional film from Sony Pictures Animation made for a very welcome change of pace.

Expect an in-depth review at DVD Times within the next week.

Image quality: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs has a somewhat soft look which I suspect is a deliberate stylistic choice to make the CG look less harsh and artificial. (Pixar and Disney tend to go for the same approach.) By and large, this is a nice presentation, although the softness - deliberate or otherwise - means that it doesn't scream "demo material" in the way that some titles do. More problematic are the compression artefacts that pop up in some of the busier crowd scenes (see Example 10 and Example 14). Broadly speaking, this falls a little below Sony's usual standard of excellence, but it's still a nice-looking disc on the whole. 8/10

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
studio: Sony Pictures; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 21 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 33.58 Mbit/sec

Just arrived...

6:20 PM / Blu-ray / 4 Comments

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (BD, Sony Pictures, Region ABC, UK) [review copy]

I doubt I'd have even given this a second thought had it not been for John Kricfalusi's review of it.

Today at work...

5:46 PM / Books / No Comments

...I came across a book with the title Slaughter in the Cotswolds, by Rebecca Tope. The contradiction of images struck me as so brilliant I just had to share it with you.

A few thoughts on On Her Majesty's Secret Service

10:36 PM / Cinema / 12 Comments

On Her Majesty's Secret Service can lay reasonable claim to being the odd one out in the official series of James Bond films (by which I mean everything from Dr. No in 1962 through Quantum of Solace in 2008, discounting the 1967 Casino Royale produced by Charles K. Feldman and the 1983 Sean Connery vehicle Never Say Never Again). That's not just because it was George Lazenby's sole outing as Agent 007: tonally, it is more or less completely out of step with its counterparts. Because so much of what makes it unique in the Bond canon hinges on how it ends, it goes without saying that major spoilers are contained herein.

This is, of course, the one in which Bond falls in love for real (like, for real for real) and decides to give up his philandering ways, only for happiness to be cruelly snatched from him at the last moment in the form of a well-aimed bullet to his bride's brain. "Wait a minute," you say, "Bond gets married?" Yes, he does, and it's actually almost convincing. Almost.

The iconoclast in me absolutely loves this. What better way to shake things up than to take one of the key foundations of the franchise (Bond's lack of commitment to anything but his job) and obliterate it?

[Continue reading...]

BD impressions: Orphan

5:15 PM / BD Impressions / No Comments

As yet another take on the venerable "scary child" branch of the horror genre, Jaume Collet-Serra's Orphan has a handful of aces up its sleeve, primarily believable performances by Vera Farmiga as a recently bereaved mother who adopts a creepily precocious young girl and Isabelle Fuhrman as that girl. There is of course little that you wouldn't find in recent movies in the same vein such as Godsend and the remake of The Omen, but the performances, and Collet-Serra's knack for creating an eerily foreboding atmosphere, lift it above its stable-mates. The usual problems with these films, most notably characters acting in a completely bone-headed manner and refusing to see what's right in front of their noses, are readily apparent, but you can argue that this merely goes with the territory. It's definitely not, in my opinion, "the horror film of the year" (as the quote on the front cover from The Times would have you believe), but it's streets ahead of The Unborn or My Bloody Valentine 3D, which make up the arse-end of the genre's output for 2009. Even the unusual length for a genre picture of this sort (over two hours) is not the bummer it could so easily have been, with the director's decision to take things slow and build up the characters in the first half paying dividends in the second, as everything slowly unravels.

Image quality: Orphan is owned by Warner in the United States, and I assume their BD release features a middling bit rate VC-1 encode, as per usual. In the UK, thanks to Studio Canal having partially funded the film, the distribution rights ended up with Optimum, who have done one of their characteristic (at least for their BD-50 titles) high bit rate AVC jobs. Not that you'd necessarily know it from looking at it, as the fairly heavy grain seems to often choke the encoder, resulting in noticeable artefacting and causing the grain to take on a "stucco" appearance. Detail is impressive, although a number of shots have an over-sharpened look, with the finest details seeming to have an unnatural prominence. Also, as with an alarming number of Optimum titles I've come across, the levels are elevated, meaning that the darkest hue is not true black but dark grey. 7/10

Orphan
studio: Optimum; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 29.6 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 34.56 Mbit/sec

Just arrived...

6:41 PM / Blu-ray / 18 Comments

Antichrist (BD, Chelsea Films, Region B, UK)

My first disc of 2010.

Satellite image of Britain from a few days ago...

3:40 PM / General / 2 Comments

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/8447023.stm

Book review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2:59 PM / Reviews / 1 Comment

In its original Swedish, the title of the first part of Stieg Larsson's posthumously-published Millennium trilogy is Män Som Hatar Kvinnor, a literal translation of which is "Men Who Hate Women". It's unclear precisely why the English translation was titled The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, although perhaps the publishers believed the original title to be too off-putting in its pointed aggressiveness.

In any event, misogyny is a theme that weaves its way throughout this lengthy but densely plotted crime thriller, along with broader motifs of corruption and the abuse of power. This first instalment introduces us to Mikael Blomkvist, journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium and an outspoken critic of mainstream investigative journalism. As the story begins, he has just been convicted of libel, making accusations about a rival publisher but being unable to back them up. With his reputation in tatters, Blomkvist is contacted by Henrik Vanger, head of the Vanger Corporation, with an employment offer for what initially appears to be a futile endeavour: to dig into the dynasty's mysterious past and uncover the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Vanger's granddaughter Harriet forty years ago.

So far, so Agatha Christie. It's the conventional "locked room" scenario, with the suspects - all members of the Vanger family - marooned on an island at the time of Harriet's disappearance. Larsson is (was) clearly a fan of the novels of Christie, Conan Doyle et al, and these, in addition to the works of everyone from Astrid Lindgren to Val McDermid to Enid Blyton, are referenced copiously throughout the novel. At times it gets a little too arch: Blomkvist is so acutely aware that his situation parallels that of many a crime thriller that Larsson comes dangerously close to breaking the fourth wall (shades of Scream and "It's as if we're in a horror movie"). Still, it's an intricately constructed mystery and one that does reach a genuinely satisfying and (to me at least) unexpected conclusion...

[Continue reading...]

BD impressions: Defiance

4:44 PM / BD Impressions / No Comments

In some respects I'm almost tempted to look on Defiance as a more po-faced Inglourious Basterds, as least in so far as it belongs to the underpopulated "Jews who fight back" sub-genre of World War 2 films. I'm led to believe that this "true story" plays hard and fast with the facts about a group of Jewish partisans who survived in the woods in Belarus for the bulk of the war's duration, effectively building a community for themselves to replace the one that had been taken from them. It does at times stumble into mawkishness (Daniel Craig on horseback giving rousing Braveheart-esque pep talks to his followers, not to mention a rather saccharine subplot involving a romance between two young partisans), and I get the impression that things weren't as cut and dried as the film would have us believe (the Bielski brothers are said to have been considerably less egalitarian than they are portrayed as being here), but as a straightforward dramatisation and a piece about refusing to surrender your humanity despite your enemies' attempts to dehumanise you, I found this to be a riveting and for the most part well-told movie. It's also stylishly shot by Edward Zwick and cinematographer Eduardo Serra (with Lithuania standing in for Belarus) and features compelling performances by Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber.

Image quality: Excellent work from Momentum, who provide a solid high bit rate VC-1 presentation with plenty of fine detail and some pronounced yet well encoded grain. It falls shy of perfection thanks to some noticeable but not overly distracting compression artefacts in some of the wider shots (see Example 10 and Example 16 - curse that snow and these dense woodlands!), but on the whole this is an extremely pleasing presentation. 9.5/10

Defiance
studio: Momentum; country: UK; region code: B; codec: VC-1;
file size: 36.8 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 38.51 Mbit/sec

BD impressions: Ne le dis à personne

10:28 PM / BD Impressions / 5 Comments

Ne le dis à personne is an adaptation of Harlan Coben's novel Tell No One, which I haven't read. I'm not entirely clear as to why an American novel ended up being made in French first of all, but I can imagine the US version that is slated for release in 2011 through Miramax being considerably altered to simplify the rather tortuous, multi-stranded narrative and make things a bit clearer.

Is that a complaint about the film? Are you kidding? I thought it was a top notch thriller, populated by an array of plausible and intriguing characters, and with sufficient twists and turns to keep me guessing right until the end. Focusing on a paediatrician whose wife was seemingly murdered, only for CCTV footage of her, seemingly very much alive, to materialise eight years ago, it toys with classic Hitchcockian "wrong man" tropes but in fact seems to be more interested in the psychology of the bereaved protagonist. François Cluzet is excellent in that role, evoking a fortysomething Dustin Hoffman and providing just the right combination of vulnerability and dogged determination, while the supporting cast, which includes Kristin Scott Thomas as his sister's wife and the director himself as a decidedly less than savoury individual, is uniformly excellent. Certain elements of the plot do require a considerable suspension of disbelief (particularly those regarding a substituted body), but go with the flow and I suspect Ne le dis à personne will go down a treat.

(Incidentally, how refreshing to see a same sex couple being portrayed as just that - a couple - without a massive issue being made of it. That's not to say that I have anything against such "issue movies", but there's something rather gratifying about the fact that the filmmakers don't feel the need to constantly point and cry "Look! Look! Homosexuals!")

Image quality: A fine-looking disc from EuropaCorp, showcasing a pleasing amount of fine detail, natural-looking grain and few overt problems with the compression. I spotted a bit of artefacting in the shadows in a few of the darker scenes (see Example 20), but other than that I was most satisfied with what I saw. 9/10

Ne le dis à personne
studio: EuropaCorp; country: France; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 32.6 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 35.69 Mbit/sec

PS. In case you're wondering, yes, this French release does indeed feature English subtitles. Given that the UK version from Revolver is sped up to 25 fps and features burned-in subtitles, while the American release by MPI is filtered (going by the captures here) and doesn't feature lossless audio, the French disc is clearly the one to go for.

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