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Monday, July 5, 2010

BD impressions: The Box

5:17 PM / BD Impressions / 5 Comments

There was a point when everyone in this country seemed to love Richard Kelly's debut film, DONNIE DARKO, but the craze seemed to die out pretty quickly and I honestly can't remember the last time I heard anyone mention it. His follow-up, SOUTHLAND TALES (which I haven't seen), was more or less universally panned, to the extent that there was really nowhere for him to go but up. THE BOX, based on a Richard Matheson short story which was previously adapted as a TWILIGHT ZONE episode, is an intriguing and atmospheric piece, even if the questions it raises in the first half are more interesting than the answers it provides in the second. Beyond the nifty central premise - man offers husband and wife $1 million is they press a button which, so he tells them, will result in the death of someone they don't know - it's probably best if you go in without know anything about how the plot unravels, so I'll leave it at that and simply say that this was a rather pleasant surprise and one of the better films I've seen recently.

Image quality: Apparently, Richard Kelly once dismissed the possibility of shooting a 70s period piece digitally. He seems to have reneged on this claim, if THE BOX is anything to go by (or perhaps budgetary factors came into play?), but having seen the end result, I can't help suspecting that his initial instincts were probably the correct ones. THE BOX looks good, but there's something rather anachronistic about the overly video-like appearance, which all the diffusion filters in the world can't hide. Detail is impressive once you take into account the deliberate sheen of softness, and compression is largely fine across the board. Blacks are slightly raised, which can be clearly seen during the white-on-black text crawl at the very beginning, but beyond that I have no complaints about the technical presentation. 9/10

The Box
studio: Icon; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 29.5 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 36.61 Mbit/sec

5 Comments

 
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