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Films I saw for the first time in June 2011

11:54 PM / Cinema / 3 Comments

• Thursday, June 2, 2011: SOMEWHERE (USA/France/Italy/Japan, 2010) 4/10
• Monday, June 6, 2011: MONSTERS (UK, 2010) 9/10
• Saturday, June 11, 2011: MACHETE (USA, 2010) 6/10
• Sunday, June 26, 2011: CHLOE (USA/Canada/France, 2009) 5/10
• Tuesday, June 28, 2011: POSSESSION (France/West Germany, 1981) 8/10

BDs and DVDs I bought or received in June 2011

11:54 PM / Blu-ray / No Comments

• Wednesday, June 1, 2011: THE BIG BANG (BD, Region A, USA)
• Saturday, June 4, 2011: DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE (BD, Region B, Italy)
• Thursday, June 9, 2011: MONSTERS (BD, Region B, UK)
• Friday, June 17, 2011: THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE (BD, Region ABC, USA)
• Friday, June 17, 2011: THE SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS MOVIE (BD/DVD combo, Region ABC/1, USA)
• Friday, June 17, 2011: LEGEND (BD, Region ABC, USA)
• Monday, June 20, 2011: RIFIFI (BD/DVD combo, Region B/2, UK)
• Tuesday, June 21, 2011: TRUE GRIT (BD/DVD/digital copy combo, Region ABC/1, USA)
• Friday, June 24, 2011: THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE MOTION PICTURE TRILOGY (EXTENDED EDITION) (BD, Region ABC/1, USA)

Preliminary thoughts on the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition BDs

12:26 PM / Web / 7 Comments

Hello, beautiful people

12:56 AM / Web / 10 Comments

I picked up a webcam and did a thing with it:

Oh yes please

12:41 AM / Blu-ray / 3 Comments

Source: Cartoon Brew

#1069: The Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy (Extended Edition)

9:47 AM / Blu-ray / 14 Comments

(BD/DVD, Warner/New Line, Region ABC/1, USA)

Tenebrae redux

10:17 PM / Blu-ray / 48 Comments

My good friend Kentai has posted his thoughts on the curious case of the two distinct HD masters that exist for Dario Argento's TENEBRAE and what this potentially means for the current state of Italo-cult releases on BD in general. Well worth a read.

I do think it has reached a point where serious questions have to be asked about the way so many of these films look on BD and what is causing this. And, on a purely personal level, I hope that the developments regarding TENEBRAE can go some way towards vindicating my stance on the likes of the recent release of THE CAT O' NINE TAILS. Understand that I take no pleasure when any BD release - particularly a release of one of my favourite films - turns out to be substandard, but I hope that in the long run the existence of these two completely different masters, one with the strange grain/noise and one without, will prove to be a turning point and lead to some real answers instead of the confusion that has pervaded so far.

Above: Wild Side BD (my capture)

Above: Arrow BD (Mentasm's capture)

#1068: True Grit

7:46 PM / Blu-ray / 17 Comments

(BD/DVD/digital copy combo, Paramount, Region ABC/1, USA)

I plan to go on a Coen brothers binge at some point - amazingly, I've not seen anything they've done beyond BURN AFTER READING and their ill-advised remake of THE LADYKILLERS.

#1067: Rififi

3:02 PM / Blu-ray / 7 Comments

(BD/DVD combo, Arrow Films, Region B/2, UK)

This BD looks bee-yoo-tee-ful:

I also picked up Arrow's BD of SPIRITS OF THE DEAD (HISTOIRES EXTRAORDINAIRES), which I'm told also looks excellent, but I'm saving that one for my birthday.

BD impressions: M (80th anniversary edition)

2:09 PM / BD Impressions / 10 Comments

Few films can claim to have as troubled a history as Fritz Lang's M. Heavily cut by the censors, altered by a succession of distributors and subjected to numerous incorrect presentations on video, LaserDisc and DVD over the years, it's thanks to the efforts of various dedicated restorationists and preservationists that it survives at all, in any state.

The version I'm reviewing here is the new 80th anniversary edition released by German label Universum Film, which features a new restoration created by the people at TLE Films. For the most part, this new version consists of a new scan of the 35mm archival preservation fine grain positive supervised by Martin Koerber in 2000/2001, which was also the basis for the Criterion (US) and Eureka (UK) BDs, though there are some quite significant differences which will make this release of interest even to those who own one of the previous versions. Perhaps most significant of all is the inclusion of additional, previously lost material, sourced from the French preservation negative and making this the most complete version of M released on home video to date - a cause for considerable celebration.

Much work has also been done to remove dust, tears and scratches, as well as perfect colour timing, reduce flicker and improve the stability of the image. The latter is particularly noticeable when viewed in comparison with one of the various earlier releases - in my case the Criterion 2-disc DVD set from 2004. While the DVD contains a significant amount of weave, both horizontal and vertical, particularly during cuts between different shots, this is largely negated on the Universum BD. A by-product of this has been the need to slightly crop the image in comparison with the Criterion and Eureka releases, but the effect is fairly minor (not to mention well within the safe action area, which defines the area of the frame that is meant to be visible when projected - see this reproduction of the SMPTE frame, kindly provided by Torsten Kaiser) and the improvements to the image's overall stability make it a price worth paying. The clean-up work, incidentally, extends to the film's audio, which comes in two flavours: a cleaned-up version in which the silent parts of the film truly are silent, as per Lang's intentions, and the preservation master created in 2001, in which age-related background noise is audible even during the silent sections.

The encode, which has a very healthy bit rate hovering at 36 Mbit/sec (excluding the audio tracks), is solid throughout, and for the most part detail is very impressive indeed. That said, it's worth noting that only around 70% of M's negative still exists, resulting in a need to draw upon other less optimal sources to assemble the most complete version possible. It's clear that as much as possible has been done to bring this footage in line with that of the bulk of the film, but it's fairly obvious whenever material had to be inserted from a poorer quality source. This is particularly apparent during the scene in which Gustaf Gründgens' Safecracker character is introduced (see Example 14).

A degree of damage remains visible, though never to the extent that it becomes distracting, and no doubt vastly preferable to the artefacts that would have resulted from attempting to create a completely "clean" image. (TLE Films' commitment to restore all 160,000 of the film's frames by hand, without resorting to any form of automated clean-up, can only be described as daunting.) More noticeable to me are instances in which the film grain varies in intensity around different parts of the screen - Example 4 shows a particularly clear instance of this. I discussed this at some length with Torsten Kaiser, senior producer at TLE Films and the guiding hand behind this new release, and he explained to me that in the case of Example 4, the inconsistency of the grain results from a heavily damaged frame having had to be reconstructed, with the "patchwork" effect stemming from inconsistencies in gradation and density between different frames from the same element. Torsten also mentioned that the effect is less pronounced on the master and is likely to have been accentuated to a degree by the encoding. Given the massive difference in size between the uncompressed DPX files (with a bit rate of over 1,200 Mbit/sec) and BD (with its upper limit of 36 Mbit/sec for video bit rate), "something's gotta give", as the saying goes - particularly with grain this coarse. To be clear, these issues seem to have been unavoidable, and I'm not for a moment suggesting that they hamper the presentation unduly. I noticed them during normal playback, but it's worth pointing out that, as far as I'm aware, no other reviewer has mentioned them. Unfortunately, not having access to either the Criterion or Eureka BDs, I'm unable to confirm whether similar issues occur on them.

It's incredibly difficult to assign a numerical score to a release such as this. M is eighty years old and that it looks as good as it does is quite miraculous. The presentation undoubtedly has flaws, and despite being unavoidable, unavoidable flaws remain flaws nonetheless. This, however, makes the review less an exercise in calling anyone out on perceived failings and more an opportunity to point out that the film must be understood within the context of its age and history. Basically, you can't compare this with, say, a modern DI title, and it would be foolish to try. The improved audio-visual presentation, coupled with numerous insightful extras (many of them in English or German with English subtitles), makes this a very impressive release of a landmark film. Strongly recommended.

M (80th anniversary edition)
label: Universum Film; disc country: Germany; region code: ABC;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 1.19:1

A tale of two Tenebraes

11:59 AM / Blu-ray / 16 Comments

A few screen captures of Arrow's upcoming UK BD release of Dario Argento's TENEBRAE have materialised on the AVForums board. Much to my surprise, they show the Arrow BD to have been derived from a completely different master from the very good French release from Wild Side that I reviewed last November. Given how my reviews of certain BD releases of films like this have gone down in the past I feel somewhat disinclined to say much about this, except that it certainly pours cold water on the idea that the strange noise-like grain afflicting titles like CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD and THE CAT O' NINE TAILS - and now, it seems, Arrow's TENEBRAE - is simply how these films look.

Finally a free BD playback solution for Windows

6:52 PM / Blu-ray / Technology / 11 Comments

I would urge everyone with a BD-ROM drive in their PC to check out DAPlayer, as far as I'm aware the first of its kind: a completely free playback solution for BDs. Oh, and it plays HD DVDs too.

It's a fairly rudimentary program and not without its problems. It doesn't support menus of any kind - either HDMV or BD-Java. Instead, it simply analyses the disc and then gives you what it determines to be the main title (as far as I can gather simply the longest item on the disc), though it does read playlists rather than individual .m2ts files, meaning that titles that use seamless branching work just fine. It also gives you access to a playlist menu so you can access bonus features, alternate cuts etc. Additionally, I found that the audio was noticeably out of sync on my system. This can easily be corrected using the "Delay +" and "Delay -" controls in the audio menu (a setting of -3 worked for me), but quitting the program causes it to forget which setting you specified. Furthermore, at least one disc I tried (THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE) suffered from severely jittery motion, while another (KINGDOM OF HEAVEN) wouldn't play at all.

Still, DAPlayer seems very promising. It's not clear from the web site whether development is ongoing and improvements can be expected, but if they can iron out the glitches I'd be more than happy to switch to it full-time, forsaking the reliable but somewhat clunky TotalMedia Theatre 3.

BD impressions: Machete

7:06 PM / BD Impressions / 16 Comments

The film: MACHETE is probably about as good a film as can be expected from something that began life as a three-minute gag. That gag was a trailer for a non-existent "Mexploitation" film attached to the start of GRINDHOUSE, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's joint ode to the B-movies they grew up loving. While I felt GRINDHOUSE was worth it if only for the amazing half-hour that concluded Tarantino's half, DEATH PROOF, I'm of the opinion that both it and Rodriguez's piece, PLANET TERROR, were far too long for what they had to say, and the same is true of MACHETE. Yes, the sight of Danny Trejo running around dispatching goons left, right and centre while Robert De Niro and Don Johnson ham it up and Lindsay Lohan plays a drug-addled floozy (ha ha) is initially exhilarating, but the joke eventually wears thin and it comes hard to ignore the growing sense that Rodriguez is simply using the minimal plotting and hammy acting of the films he's spoofing as limp excuses for, well, minimal plotting and hammy acting.

It doesn't help that, like PLANET TERROR, MACHETE doesn't actually look like the zero-budget grindhouse flick it's pretending to be. While Tarantino had the sense to actually run DEATH PROOF's print through the grinder (well, the first half of it, at any rate), Rodriguez's love of CGI and digital cameras means that his films simply look like what they are: healthily budgeted modern day productions with a layer of artificial grain and print damage slapped over the top. At least here the fake print damage doesn't extend beyond the pre-credits prologue and the faux grain is largely unobtrusive, but you're left wondering how so much money ($10.5 million, according to IMDB) could be spent trying to make something look like it was shot on a shoestring. (Meanwhile, the likes of Gareth Edwards has managed to ACTUALLY shoot MONSTERS on a shoestring and make it look like it cost a hell of a lot more.)

It is what it is, more or less, and if you enjoyed PLANET TERROR chances are you'll get a kick out of this too. Myself, I found it a pleasant enough way to kill 105 minutes, but it's not something I can see myself ever watching again. 6/10

Image quality: A difficult one to rate, this, since like the film itself, many of the flaws are essentially deliberate (or at least a convenient excuse). With that in mind, I suspect Sony Pictures' encode is pretty much faultless, while the inconsistent detail, noticeable colour fringing (see Example 7) and occasional harshness (see Example 6) clearly stem from the photography itself. (Rodriguez used the Panavision Genesis HD Camera, footage from which has generally impressed me the most out of all the various shot-on-video productions I've seen, but the footage has been manipulated in post to such an extent as to make it hard to decipher what it originally looked like.) Recommended.

Machete
label: Sony Pictures; disc country: UK; region code: ABC;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 1.85:1

#1066: Legend

1:31 PM / Blu-ray / 22 Comments

(BD, Universal, Region ABC, USA)

A very curious state of affairs: the director's cut opens with a text disclaimer by Ridley Scott warning that the image quality is less than optimal, but to my eyes it actually looks better than the (disclaimer-free) theatrical cut. The theatrical cut suffers from the sort of overly harsh grain that afflicts quite a few catalogue titles of this vintage, but the director's cut (the transfer for which I assume Scott supervised) looks both smoother (and not in a DNR-like way) and more detailed. This will be an interesting one to compare.

By the way, sorry for my recent silence. I'm doing my best to get the second draft of Chapter 6 of my thesis finished before the end of June, at which point I'll be taking a couple of weeks off from both it and work.

#1065: The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie

1:29 PM / Blu-ray / 4 Comments

(BD/DVD combo, Paramount, Region ABC/1, USA)

If you don't love SpongeBob, you have no heart. Incidentally, this was one of the first titles Paramount ever announced for release on HD DVD and BD, back in 2006. Five years and one dead format later, it's finally materialised.

#1064: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

1:25 PM / Blu-ray / 1 Comment

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

The original classic, not the remake with John Travolta and Denzel Washington. It's a Best Buy exclusive, but I was able to source it from Blu-rays For Everyone.

A cursory glance suggests pretty good image quality. It's not exactly what you'd call detailed, but it looks like film and the grain appears unmolested. Given how variable MGM's catalogue releases tend to be, it looks like we've struck reasonably lucky with this one.

#1063: Monsters

2:18 PM / Blu-ray / 10 Comments

(BD, Momentum, Region B, UK)

An absolutely brilliant film - I rented this one, watched it earlier in the week and decided to buy it based on how good it was.

Movie Matters #8 - giallo special

3:40 PM / Podcast / 25 Comments

In this special giallo-themed episode of the Movie Matters podcast, regular hosts Lee Howard and Michael Mackenzie welcome special guest and giallo enthusiast Sandy "The Gialli Fan" Richardson of the Dark Dreams web site to discuss that unique brand of Italian murder-mystery thrillers from the 70s. In addition to delving into three films by the "big three" giallo directors - Mario Bava's BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, Lucio Fulci's DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING and Dario Argento's DEEP RED - Lee, Michael and Sandy also count down the top 10 giallo films as submitted by the listeners, reveal their own personal favourites and suggest some must-have giallo DVD and Blu-ray Disc releases.

• https://rapidshare.com/files/1836899168/moviematters-episode8-07-06-11.mp3
• iTunes

Please note that this podcast contains spoilers for the films featured.

The music sampled in this episode is from DEEP RED (Giorgio Gaslini and Goblin), OPERA (Claudio Simonetti), BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (Carlo Rustichelli), THE STRANGE VICE OF MRS. WARDH (Nora Orlandi), DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING (Riz Ortolani), WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? (Ennio Morricone), STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER (Berto Pisano), THE CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS (Bruno Nicolai) and THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (Ennio Morricone). Special thanks to David Mackenzie for audio support.

http://moviematterspodcast.blogspot.com

Updated Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 07:53 AM: Fixed a couple of glitches in the initial upload. Redownloading is recommended.

Reviewer has problem, needs help

7:40 PM / Blu-ray / 16 Comments

I'm currently working on a review of Universum Film's 80th anniversary German BD release of Fritz Lang's M, kindly supplied to me by Torsten Kaiser, senior producer of TLE Films and the guiding hand behind this new release. Although it should be finished before too long, I must confess that it's giving me more trouble than these sort of things usually do and, while a lengthy conversation with Torsten cleared up the various questions I had about the film's restoration, the one I'm currently pondering is one that only I can really answer.

For a while now, I've been toying with the idea of abandoning the 1-10 numerical scoring I use to rate the image quality of BDs. I've used this system since I started writing reviews in 2003 for the site formerly known as DVD Times (now The Digital Fix) and, while it can be a useful way of giving people a ballpark idea of how a disc looks, I've always found it to be a rather inelegant system. Titles like M demonstrate this admirably: no-one would deny that, even with all the work TLE Films have put into the restoration, M's presentation has "issues" - issues derived from the age, condition and availability of materials and, in cases, issues derived from attempting to fix these problems. Place M alongside some of the discs to which I've handed out 9 and 10 ratings and it understandably falls short, but at the same time we have to bear in mind how good the film could reasonably be expected to look. M was released in 1931, was treated dreadfully by both censors and distributors, and the surviving elements suffer from varying degrees of damage, so it seems altogether unreasonable to compare it to a modern DI-sourced title like THE INTERNATIONAL or UNSTOPPABLE... or even an carefully preserved Hollywood classic like THE SOUND OF MUSIC. And yet that's precisely what having a unified scoring system does: it assumes a level playing field and leads to some tough choices having to be made when the condition of the elements or artistic intent prevent a film from looking like what the AVS Forum's exasperating Blu-ray picture quality tier list would call a Tier Zero title.

10/10

Another title that recently caused me problems, albeit on a lesser scale, was Darren Aronofsky's BLACK SWAN. Aronofsky chose to shoot the film primarily on 16mm film (with the subway scenes shot with consumer-level Canon digital cameras and processed to look like film). The result is gritty, grainy and, compared to something like ALIENS or the re-release of GLADIATOR, understandably lacking in detail. And yet I doubt that there's anything wrong with the way the film is presented on the disc. At the moment, I consider 20th Century Fox (who released BLACK SWAN) and Sony Pictures to be by far the best of the major studios when it comes to BD releases (isolated blips like PATTON and the re-release of PREDATOR notwithstanding). To be blunt, I doubt they fucked with it. I don't think anything could have been done to make it look any better, short of sending Aronofsky off to reshoot the whole thing on 35mm. I ended up giving the image quality a 9 - a decision that still doesn't rest well with me, and which has been queried by a least one of this site's visitors. Why not a 10? Well, because it has "issues". Intentional issues, but issues nonetheless.

0/10

Under the current system, I doubt M would score in the top "tier"... and yet that just doesn't seem fair. The question is how to proceed from here. Should I in fact have TWO scoring systems - one a completely objective score that ignores historical context, artistic intent etc. and simply rates a disc based on its value as (ugh) "demo material", and another that tries to take these factors into account? Or should I drop the scoring system completely and just let the text speak for itself? I must admit that I don't particularly want to do that - when you've reviewed a large number of discs, you want some way of telling at a glance how a particular title looks without having to read paragraphs of text.

???/10

So I'm going to open this up to the floor. Does anyone have any thoughts on this issue... or better yet, any solutions?

#1062: Dellamorte Dellamore

6:19 PM / Blu-ray / 6 Comments

(BD, CG Home Video, Region B, Italy)

This article...

4:10 PM / Technology / No Comments

...is required reading if you're having trouble with colour profiles in Windows 7 or Vista:

Stop Losing Display Calibration with Windows 7

I have a new monitor

12:16 PM / Technology / 3 Comments

My birthday isn't till next month, but ever mindful of the potential for cock-ups to occur when technology is involved, if I'm planning on getting anything computer-related I generally make a point of buying early in order to (a) pre-empt any potential returns/replacements and (b) ensure that everything's up and running the way I want it by my actual birthday. Last year, this prudent thinking came in hand when my new motherboard inexplicably died, so I decided to take the same approach this year.

I've wanted to get a new desktop monitor for a while. The Dell UltraSharp 2709W I bought back in February 2009 has served me reasonably well, but I've never been 100% happy with it. Its input lag is pretty noticeable, its gamma curve is way off in the lower values (which tends to bring out compression artefacts on BDs and DVDs that wouldn't be visible on a properly calibrated system), and I've already had to get it replaced once when, after less than a year of use, it developed a fault whereby a vertical magenta line, a single pixel wide but running the entire height of the display, would appear upon start-up and not disappear until the monitor had been running for 20-30 minutes. Over the last few months, the replacement has developed a similar problem, this time cyan rather than magenta and running the gamut from a single line to four. Clearly it's a fault with this particular model. I'm going to haggle with Dell to get it replaced (though the fact that it's now out of warranty will probably make this very difficult), but if so will end up selling the replacement as, quite frankly, I've had enough.

Enter the Hazro HZ27WB:

Hazro is a UK-based company that primarily caters towards creative and multimedia professionals, as well as medical and military organisations. The HZ27WB, a 27" 16:9 S-IPS display with a native resolution of 2560x1400, is the sort of stripped-down no-bullshit device I've been looking for. There's no scaler, in fact no support for anything apart from the native resolution (which, in case you're slack-jawed with horror, is not a problem - it just means using the video card rather than the display to scale lower resolutions to the correct size). There are no controls on the monitor besides a power button and a mechanism to raise and lower the backlight (which means using a custom Windows colour profile to achieve a properly calibrated image rather than changing any settings on the display itself). The only input is a single dual-link DVI connector.

What all this means in practice is very low input lag, because the monitor isn't doing anything to the image beyond simply displaying what the video card sends it. Over the years, I've observed that, broadly speaking, the more inputs a display has - DVI, VGA, DisplayPort, HDMI, component and the like - the worse the input lag will be. TFT Central, probably the best monitor review site out there, measured an average input lag of just over 11 milliseconds - a fabulous result and one that you'd need to be superhuman to actually detect. As a result, everything just feels much more responsive. I can now play STARCRAFT II, a game that relies on lightning-fast responses, without that annoying feeling that my brain is responding faster than the game to my commands. I'm really surprised to see lag this low outside of a TN panel.

I'm not done yet. I've created a colour profile with a demo of ColorEyes Display Pro, and will probably run the calibration again once the monitor has had a few dozen hours of use to age it. And of course there's the fact that Windows colour profiles are a colossal headache. I've managed to get most of my software to play nice with the profile ColorEyes created, including Photoshop and even - to my surprise - TotalMedia Theatre 3, which I use when watching BDs on my PC. But I've come across a couple of inconsistencies - the Windows Photo Viewer, for example, shows desaturated hues compared to everything else. As such, I won't be writing any BD reviews based on what I see on this screen until I'm satisfied that what I'm seeing isn't distorted in any significant way. (Though I should point out that, whenever I review a BD, I also look at it on a Panasonic Plasma and JVC rear projector, both calibrated by an ISF-certified technician.)

But I'm very pleased with the monitor so far. I haven't found any stuck or dead pixels yet (though to be honest I'm not going out of my way to look for them - that's just a recipe for frustration, and Hazro don't have Dell's "premium pixel" guarantee, whereby they'll replace the display if even a single defective pixel is found), the backlight seems reasonably uniform for an S-IPS display (there's a bit of blooming in the bottom right hand corner, but on the plus side none of the "pinching" that affected my 2709W). After using my previous monitor for so long, which had an unusually large pixel pitch (a 27" computer monitor with a resolution of "only" 1920x1200 is pretty rare), it's taking me a while to get used to how small everything now looks, since despite the higher resolution, this display is actually the same physical size as my last.

And then of course there's the fact that native resolution 1080p content now looks tiny:

Suddenly the resolution of a Blu-ray Disc doesn't seem quite as massive as it once did. :D

#1061: The Big Bang

6:25 PM / Blu-ray / 3 Comments

(BD, Anchor Bay, Region A, USA)

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