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Tuesday, May 3, 2011

BD impressions: London Boulevard

10:03 PM / BD Impressions / 2 Comments

The film: There are some good ideas in LONDON BOULEVARD, William Monahan's adaptation of the Ken Bruen novel of the same name - itself something of a take-off of SUNSET BOULEVARD, mixing the story of a man who becomes infatuated with a reclusive movie star together with an east end gangster plot. Unfortunately, it all gets a bit muddled, with what should have been the main focus - the growing bond between Colin Farrell's en-con and Keira Knightley's skittish starlet - being given short shrift, playing second fiddle to the hackneyed gangster storyline, which revels in the sort of movie stereotypes most people will call to mind when they hear the words "east end gangster".

The supporting cast is top notch, with Ray Winstone bringing some genuine menace to the role of crime boss Rob Gant, despite the character being a walking, talking cliché - right down to the casting of Winstone himself. Anna Friel does a nice turn as Farrell's flighty, drugged-up sister, and David Thewlis is amusing as an unemployed actor-turned-producer ("I was on a kid's show... then I was on methadone... then I was a producer"). Knightley is good if sadly underused, and as another reviewer noted, it's nice that directors have started to acknowledge the fact that she has a very odd-looking face (in the best possible way) rather than hiding it. Farrell, however, feels like the weakest link. He's the glue that's supposed to hold it together, uniting the various disparate plot strands, but he's a fairly ineffectual presence, and as a result I suspect the film's failure to come together as a whole is largely because of him. 6/10

Image quality: MPEG-2. In 2011. Huh. Still, I don't think any would deny that it's very impressive-looking MPEG-2 - better even than KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, the previous reigning champ of MPEG-2 encodes (and, as coincidence would have it, also penned by William Monahan). Detail is very good, taking into account that some shots are naturally softer than others due to the focus, while the light grain is rendered very well for the most part, with some slight artefacting in the shadows visible on occasions. Regardless of the codec, it's a very good result. 9.5/10

London Boulevard
studio: Entertainment in Video; disc country: UK; region code: B;
codec: MPEG-2; aspect ratio: 1.85:1

2 Comments

 
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