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Tuesday, July 13, 2010

BD impressions: 36

5:26 PM / BD Impressions / 1 Comment

Olivier Marchal's cop thriller 36 is downbeat, grim and melancholic in a rather browbeating way. The characters rarely crack a smile, the sky is always bleak and overcast, and barring the odd woman or child there are no good people, only degrees of badness. All of which, I assume, was Marchal's intention, but the modern-day French noir doesn't quite have the pizazz of the real thing. The plot is satisfyingly convoluted and there are a lot of interesting themes at play, particularly the ongoing strife between bureaucracy and actually policing the streets of Paris, and the extent to which petty rivalries can spiral out of control in a charged situation, but because it's all told with the same unwavering straight face, and because the mood is so downright monotonous, it eventually becomes wearying. Men scowl and avoid eye contact while speaking to each other in low, gruff voices, and it ultimately devolves into a long and plodding trawl through the staples of the macho cop thriller with no light at the end of the tunnel. Worth a look, but fairly unremarkable.

Image quality: This release from Palisades Tartan is a bit of a mixed bag, culled from a less than stellar masters which, in addition to some pronounced ringing, is affected by a bizarre fault by which the left hand side of the image is consistently blurrier and less defined than the rest of the screen. It seems almost reminiscent of when the various plates of a book have not been properly aligned and some of the colours bleed out of the black outlines (you can often find such a fault with comic books, particularly those that have been printed cheaply.) Example 14 provides a particularly striking example of this anomaly. Other than that, it's a watchable enough disc. Detail is for the most part acceptable, and the grain doesn't appear to have been interfered with. 5/10

36
studio: Palisades Tartan; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 19 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 24.56 Mbit/sec

1 Comment

 
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