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Films I saw for the first time in April 2011

11:59 PM / Cinema / 3 Comments

• Sunday, April 3, 2011: UNKNOWN (UK/Germany/France/Canada/Japan/USA, 2011) 7/10
• Monday, April 4, 2011: THE FINAL DESTINATION (USA, 2009) 4/10
• Monday, April 18, 2011: MARNIE (USA, 1964) 6/10
• Monday, April 25, 2011: UNSTOPPABLE (USA, 2010) 5/10
• Monday, April 25, 2011: LONDON BOULEVARD (USA/UK, 2010) 6/10

BDs and DVDs I bought or received in April 2011

11:59 PM / Blu-ray / No Comments

• Friday, April 1, 2011: MISERY (BD, Region A, USA)
• Saturday, April 2, 2011: CUCKOO (BD, Region ABC, USA) (competition win)
• Tuesday, April 5, 2011: SILENT HILL: Édition Collector (BD, Region ABC, France)
• Friday, April 8, 2011: BLACK SWAN (BD, Region AB, USA)
• Wednesday, April 13, 2011: THE FRENCH CONNECTION (BD, Region ABC, UK)
• Wednesday, April 13, 2011: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (BD, Region ABC, UK)
• Wednesday, April 13, 2011: THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE (BD, Region ABC, UK)
• Wednesday, April 13, 2011: THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST (BD, Region ABC, UK)
• Saturday, April 16, 2011: UNSTOPPABLE (BD, Region BC, UK)
• Saturday, April 16, 2011: SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD (BD, Region ABC, UK)
• Thursday, April 21, 2011: LONDON BOULEVARD (BD, Region B, UK)
• Friday, April 22, 2011: THE PROMISE (BD, Region ABC, UK)

Can't talk, writing

8:21 PM / General / No Comments

I'm currently doing my best to finish the first draft of Chapter 6 of my PhD thesis, which I'm intending to submit to my supervisor on Tuesday. I'm afraid I've done my usual thing of stretching the research and note-taking out over a number of weeks and cramming all of the actual writing into a few days - something I always promise not to do. As such, I wouldn't expect any significant updates to the site until Tuesday of next week... after which I'll be busy preparing for the annual postgraduate symposium on the 19th and 20th of May, at which I will present a 20-minute paper on my research.

So to anyone reading this who sent me an email in the last few days and is wondering why I'm being incredibly rude and not replying to it, this is why. I WILL get back to you, honest!

BD impressions: Unstoppable

9:30 PM / BD Impressions / 6 Comments

The film: OK, how to put this politely? This is a big ol' pile of shit. It's a passable enough distraction up to a point, but it's easily the most brain-dead movie I've watched recently. I've got nothing against but stupid action films that simply require you to check your brain in at the door, and when Tony Scott's on the ball he does that sort of popcorn fare better than most, but this is not one of his better efforts. Once you dispense with the ridiculous clichés (they even trot out a carriage full of giggling schoolchildren), the script is actually incredibly one-note, and to sustain what is basically an incredibly uneventful story, Scott compensates for the fact that nothing particularly interesting is going on by throwing every MTV-style trick he can muster at the screen. If the camera isn't spinning 360 degrees round the actors, it's doing that infuriating jump-zoom at the start of every shot, and while the actors scream and shout about how dreadful the situation is, we're never really given any reason to care. Everything is told in the same screaming in-your-face style that what should be the dramatic high points fail to make any impact.

When I first heard about this film, the premise sounded too ridiculous to pass up, but in reality it lacks the "so bad it's good" quality that could have propelled this beyond mediocrity. I can't say it bored me and, at just over an hour and a half, it's at least short enough not to linger like a bad smell, but I can't really think of a single good reason to watch it. 5/10

Image quality: Another superlative effort from Fox. UNSTOPPABLE is a Tony Scott film through and through - frenetic handheld camerawork, excessively pumped colours and contrast, a heavy blanket of grain - but none of this causes so much as a hiccup for the encoder. It's not what I'd call a particularly attractive film, but it's reasonably safe to say it looks as good here as it possibly can on BD. 10/10

Unstoppable
studio: 20th Century Fox; disc country: UK; region code: BC;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 2.39:1

#1056: The Promise

1:48 PM / Blu-ray / 2 Comments

(BD, Channel 4, Region ABC, UK)

#1055: London Boulevard

1:40 PM / Blu-ray / 5 Comments

(BD, Entertainment in Video, Region B, UK)

This title has the distinction of being my first ever Entertainment in Video BD.

EIV and their theatrical wing, Entertainment Film Distributors, are a British distribution company who at one point put out all New Line's titles in the UK and were renowned for their tasteless, tabloid-style cover art. Nowadays, things have changed somewhat. The tabloid influence is still there in the prominent quotes from The Sun and Daily Star (but then again you can find quotes from these gutter rags on the covers of BDs from pretty much any distributor), but it's more muted now.

Perhaps more significantly, the rights to the New Line library have reverted to Warner in the UK, depriving EIV of a heck of a lot of titles, meaning that nowadays they're more likely to put out independent features such of this, the directorial debut of KINGDOM OF HEAVEN and THE DEPARTED writer William Monahan. It's based on the novel of the same name by Ken Bruen (which I haven't read) and, as its title implies, it's something of a contemporary retelling of SUNSET BOULEVARD. Should be interesting.

BD impressions: The Sound of Music

11:09 PM / BD Impressions / 10 Comments

The film: Supposedly, Christopher Plummer hated doing THE SOUND OF MUSIC. He called it "The Sound of Mucus", which I suspect many would agree is an apt description. And yet, in spite of its sickly sweetness, simplistic world view and blatant flouting of history - or more likely BECAUSE of those things - I'm an unabashed fan of this giddy, colourful musical, a remnant of a time when Hollywood still made giddy, colourful musicals. I don't really have anything to say about it that hasn't been said before by countless critics more eloquent than me, but I'll just add that, if a film can run for nearly three hours and STILL leave me disappointed when it finally fades to black, it has to be getting something resoundingly right. 10/10

Image quality: So good it's almost obscene.

THE SOUND OF MUSIC is a poster child for how to treat an older film properly on BD. OK, so it has the added advantage of having been shot in 65mm, but if all catalogue titles looked even a fraction as good as this, professional complainers like me would be out of an (unpaid) job. Detail is of the "OMGWOW!!!" variety, the fine but consistent grain is beautifully rendered, and the colours are as lush as one would expect. Optical shots show slightly less definition and there is some noticeable colour fringing in a handful of shots (see Example 5), but any flaws on display seem to be down to the source materials...

...with a single exception. At the beginning of the film, just before the opening titles, everything suddenly goes iTunes-tastic in a serious way, for a handful of frames. It's a noticeable gaffe that even an IMDB forum member managed to pick up on. Given how flawless the compression is elsewhere, it's bizarre that the encoder messed up so significantly on this one occasion. To put it bluntly, QC should have caught it...

But who am I kidding? It's a few frames in a movie that's damn near three hours long. I can hardly let less than a second of dodgy encoding pull down the final score. Otherwise, there'd be no such thing as a 10/10.

The Sound of Music
studio: 20th Century Fox; disc country: UK; region code: ABC;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 2.2:1

Movie Matters #7

4:27 PM / Podcast / 1 Comment

The long-overdue seventh instalment of the Movie Matters podcast arrives in the form of a Danny Boyle special, looking at the two latest instalments in the gifted director's diverse filmography: SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE and 127 HOURS. Co-hosts Lee Howard and Michael Mackenzie also discuss this year's Oscar results, take a look at this month's new DVD and Blu-ray releases, and induct another nominee into the Blu-ray Hall of Fame.

• https://rapidshare.com/files/457858110/moviematters-episode7-17-04-11.mp3
• iTunes

The music sampled in this episode is from 127 HOURS ("The Funeral" by Band of Horses and "Never Hear Surf Music Again" by Free Blood) and SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (by A.R. Rahman), as well as the latest addition to the Blu-ray hall of fame. Special thanks to David Mackenzie for audio support.

http://moviematterspodcast.blogspot.com

#1054: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

6:42 PM / Blu-ray / 1 Comment

(BD, Universal, Region ABC, UK)

#1053: Unstoppable

6:38 PM / Blu-ray / 2 Comments

(BD, 20th Century Fox, Region BC, UK)

Yes, I'm well aware that this film is likely to be incredibly stupid, but it looks so incredibly stupid it would be a shame to pass it up. Plus, like an increasing number of titles, LoveFilm inexplicably isn't carrying it for rental - a problem also affecting my next purchase...

#1052: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

8:10 PM / Blu-ray / 4 Comments

(BD, Momentum, Region B, UK)

#1051: The Girl Who Played with Fire

8:09 PM / Blu-ray / 2 Comments

(BD, Momentum, Region B, UK)

#1050: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

8:04 PM / Blu-ray / 1 Comment

(BD, Momentum, Region B, UK)

Shocking that this is me just getting down to picking up a version of this great film (#3 in my Top 10 of 2010) that has English subtitles. Originally, I planned to hold out for English-friendly versions of the extended TV cuts of the Millennium trilogy to show up, but I got tired of waiting and, spotting them at a good price, decided to just cave in and buy 'em. Of course, extended editions will invariably be announced tomorrow, knowing my luck.

#1049: The French Connection

7:58 PM / Blu-ray / 6 Comments

(BD, 20th Century Fox, Region ABC, UK)

I picked up some discounted BDs today at HMV. This one was worth the £10 for the jaw-dropping colour timing featurette on the second disc in which William Friedkin destroys the look of the film before our very eyes, turning it into something that resembles one of those colourised Ted Turner botch jobs. I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief that Friedkin didn't work the same "magic" on THE EXORCIST.

#1048: Black Swan

1:41 PM / Blu-ray / 4 Comments

(BD, 20th Century Fox, Region AB, USA)

Silent Hill quickie comparison

11:48 PM / Blu-ray / 5 Comments

This is a quick preliminary look at the differences between the German HD DVD (and BD) of SILENT HILL released by Concorde Home Entertainment in 2007 and the 2009 French collector's edition from Metropolitan Film & Video. Bear in mind that this is not a full, in-depth comparison - I've only sampled the first few minutes and taken a few captures at random, but they reveal some interesting things.

The most obvious difference is in the black levels - the whole reason I bought the French version in the first place. All previous releases of SILENT HILL that I'd seen - DVD, HD DVD or BD - suffered from raised blacks, giving the image a greyish, murky appearance. For the French release, the blacks have been brought back down to their correct levels, so the completely black screen against which the opening titles appear is "true" (or close to true) black as opposed to dark grey. This appears to introduce some clipping (see the German vs. French versions of the title card). My guess would be that the source of the French version was also at one point affected by the raised blacks and that they were corrected at least partly by pushing up the contrast, achieving richer blacks at the expense of some shadow detail.

For the most part, it would be fair to say that the French version is punchier than its German counterpart, but the alterations (approved by director Christophe Gans, as per the sticker on the front cover bearing his signature and the legend "Édition supervisée par la réalisateur") were not simply achieved by pushing the contrasts across the board. In the scene immediately after the title card (Radha Mitchell and Jodelle Ferland in the field), the image has been slightly desaturated (German, French), and in the next scene (Sean Bean in his office), there is more of a green push in the French version (German, French).

That's as far as I've got so far, and I'm sure there will be a more all-encompassing follow-up post at some point, but from this brief comparison it's clear that quite a bit of work has been done to subtly alter the look of SILENT HILL. It's nothing like as extreme as, say, the greenification of THE MATRIX or the dramatic re-timing of Blue Underground's INFERNO, but it's noticeable nonetheless.

Oh yeah, and while the VC-1 encoding on the German release is pretty damn good (and a big step up from the artefact-afflicted MPEG-2 version Sony put out in the US as one of their BD launch titles), the AVC encode on the French disc is clearly superior. This is particularly noticeable in the aforementioned field scene, where the numerous blades of grass cause some problems on the German disc.

Silent Hill
studio: Concorde; country: Germany; region code: N/A;
codec: VC-1; aspect ratio: 2.39:1

Silent Hill
studio: Metropolitan; country: France; region code: ABC;
codec: MPEG-4 AVC; aspect ratio: 2.39:1

Dragon Age II post-mortem... and play Mass Effect 2 for free

7:41 PM / Games / 2 Comments

I'm currently making my way through Bioware's recent DRAGON AGE II for the second time and am rapidly coming to the conclusion that it lacks anything in the way of replay value, even when playing a different character class and going out of my way to make different decisions regarding quests and storyline progression. If, like me, you played the game and are feeling rather let down by the whole thing, you might be interested in John Walker's "what went wrong" post-mortem over at Rock Paper Shotgun, where he does a great job of picking apart the game's myriad flaws and highlighting precisely where the biggest mistakes were made (not always an easy task when you have 25-40 hours of playable content).

In happier news, if you own a copy of DRAGON AGE II, you can now download the PC version of Bioware's previous game, MASS EFFECT 2, absolutely free. This strikes me as an absurdly good deal. Not only is the PC version the best available - in terms of graphics, controls and, if your machine has moderately decent specs, frame rate (a flat cap of 30 FPS on consoles vs. uncapped on the PC) - MASS EFFECT 2 is also a vastly superior game to DRAGON AGE II. In fact, I'd be inclined to suggest that both games started out with their respective development teams trying to accomplish the same goals - to deliver a character-driven, action-oriented RPG with a cinematic quality and meaningful decisions to be made - but where one got almost everything right, the other fell flat on its face. Obviously one is an epic space opera while the other is medieval fantasy, but comparisons are valid, not least because they show that the unpopular changes Bioware made between the original DRAGON AGE and DRAGON AGE II didn't necessarily have to be a damaging as they ended up being.

My review of DRAGON AGE II is here, by the way.

#1047: Silent Hill

10:09 PM / Blu-ray / 14 Comments

Édition Collector (BD, Metropolitan, Region ABC, France)

Thanks to FoxyMulder for pointing out that a version of this film had finally been released without the raised blacks issue that has affected every version I've come across so far. Now I can finally retire my German HD DVD.

This 2-disc French edition from Metropolitan is ridiculously generously stacked in terms of bonus content, with exclusive documentaries, two commentaries and two picture-in-picture modes, one of which allows you to watch the entire film pre-colour grading and digital effects. Best of all, everything is either in English or in French with English subtitles.

#1046: Cuckoo

10:55 PM / Blu-ray / 1 Comment

(BD, Verve Pictures, Region ABC, UK)

Another freebie, although I actually won this through a competition on Twitter organised by the film's producers, Punk Cinema. To the best of my knowledge, it's the first time in my life that I've ever won ANYTHING.

#1045: Misery

10:34 PM / Blu-ray / 5 Comments

(BD, 20th Century Fox/MGM, Region A, USA)

I qualified for another freebie through the PlanetAxel (the new name for AxelMusic) rewards scheme and chose this. I've been meaning to see it for ages, and now I've got the perfect excuse.

(My good friend the Baron recommended the Stephen King novel on which it's based nearly three years ago. I still haven't got round to reading it, but hey, here's the film adaptation.)