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Monday, October 18, 2010

BD impressions: Romeo + Juliet

8:43 PM / BD Impressions / 6 Comments

There are those who hate Baz Luhrmann's bawdy take on ROMEO AND JULIET. I'm not one of them. I can fully understand why people would react unfavourably to the idea of transposing Shakespeare's dialogue into a relentlessly contemporary setting, but in my opinion it works, and I can't really think of any other filmmaker who could have pulled it off quite so successfully. What can I say? I love Luhrmann's work, even the maligned AUSTRALIA - he's the sort of director who could probably find a visually interesting way of filming a telephone directory. Stylistically, ROMEO + JULIET bridges the gap between the comparatively restrained STRICTLY BALLROOM and the utterly outrageous MOULIN ROUGE, though I find it very hard to pick a favourite between the three. I'm almost inclined to give the nod to MOULIN ROUGE, but something about ROMEO + JULIET keeps bringing me back to it. Who knows? Maybe I've been bewitched by Claire Danes.

Image quality: A very good, almost excellent presentation, derived from a new master from the original negative supervised by Luhrmann. When it's at its best, this transfer holds its own against just about any movie fifteen years younger than it, with excellent clarity and natural, unmolested grain. The disc is packed full of HD extras, and perhaps as a result of this the encoding does suffer. Most of the time, it's not an issue, but on a handful of occasions problems do become apparent, such as the nurse's red outfit in Example 10.

Aside from the compression, my main complaint relates to some weirdness that is going on during the pool scene, where Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes' faces and hair look rather blurry and smeary despite the grain in much of the background remaining pin-sharp (see Example 13). I don't think this is simply a camera focus issue: the fact that the grain appears blockier and more smoothed over on the actors' faces leads me to wonder whether some sort of selective reduction was applied. Something similar appears to be happening during the wedding scene, with only the shots of DiCaprio and Danes affected (see Example 14). These are not insignificant issues, but they appear relatively briefly. 8/10

Romeo + Juliet
studio: 20th Century Fox; country: USA; region code: A; codec: AVC;
file size: 25.1 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 30.01 Mbit/sec

6 Comments

 
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