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Films I saw for the first time in August 2011

11:59 PM / Cinema / No Comments

• Monday, August 1, 2011: BLOW OUT (USA, 1981) 8/10
• Wednesday, August 10, 2011: AMERICAN GRAFFITI (USA, 1973) 6/10
• Friday, August 12, 2011: ROOM IN ROME (Spain, 2010) 6/10
• Sunday, August 14, 2011: THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF ADÈLE BLANC-SEC (France, 2010) 7/10
• Sunday, August 21, 2011: BLUE VALENTINE (USA, 2010) 6/10
• Sunday, August 21, 2011: RIFIFI (France, 1955) 9/10
• Monday, August 22, 2011: SOURCE CODE (USA/France, 2011) 7/10
• Sunday, August 28, 2011: THE HORSEMAN (Australia, 2008) 6/10
• Monday, August 29, 2011: HANNA (USA/UK/Germany, 2011) 8/10
 

BDs and DVDs I bought or received in August 2011

11:59 PM / Blu-ray / 2 Comments

• Saturday, August 13, 2011: THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF ADÈLE BLANC-SEC (BD, Region B, UK)
• Saturday, August 13, 2011: SOURCE CODE (BD/DVD combo, Region B/2, UK)
• Thursday, August 18, 2011: OBSESSION (BD, Region ABC, UK)
• Monday, August 29, 2011: HANNA (BD/DVD/digital copy combo, Region ABC/2, UK)

Computer fail

12:36 PM / Technology / 5 Comments

So I now have a shiny new laptop. Why? Reaching the end of my tether with my old ASUS UL30A, that's why. For the past three months or so, I've been getting random hard freezes when using anything multimedia-related - listening to MP3s, watching videos on YouTube, etc. When Lee and I recorded our Movie Matters giallo special with our friend Sandy Richardson back in June, the constant crashing caused us to have to postpone for a day while I desperately tried to troubleshoot the problem, and even after that, when we recorded a day later, my laptop crapped out mid-stream and the podcast only survived thanks to Lee's backup recording. Since then, the problem has continued. It's survived a BIOS update, a new hard drive, a complete reinstall of Windows... and I'd finally had enough. I'd been contemplating buying a more powerful laptop for a while (the UL30A has a fairly feeble CPU, which leads to great battery longevity but sluggish performance in the likes of the notoriously badly coded Final Draft 8 screenwriting software), and now seemed like as good a time as any to bite the bullet.

So I bought a Mac.

Just kidding. (Although I did recently pick up an aluminium Apple keyboard, so Mr. Jobs finally managed to squeeze some money out of me.) I actually bought an HP Pavilion DM4-2000EA. For £600, this gets me 4 GB of RAM, a 2.1 GHz Core i3 processor, a 500 GB 7,200 RPM hard drive, and a decent-ish "up to 7 hours" of battery life (though in reality you're not actually going to get that much out of it, unless you plan to use those seven hours to stare at the desktop wallpaper).

And you know, I'm pretty pleased with it. It's quite a bit noisier than my old ASUS, and the battery life isn't as impressive, but these are concessions I'm happy to make in the name of improved performance - you wouldn't believe how much smoother everything feels going from a mobile Celeron processor to a Core i3. Plus, the whole not crashing thing is a big perk. There are some niggles - the USB ports are so tight I almost wrecked my memory stick trying to pull it out, and I was having issues with keystrokes intermittently failing to register... though, oddly enough, removing the battery for ten minutes, acting on advice I came across on a tech forum relating to a different model, fixed this, and the problem has yet to recur (touch wood).

Of course, I'm now £600 out of pocket - not a good situation to be in with my university fees due to be paid before too long. I suppose now I need to get in touch with ASUS and see if they'd be willing to perform a repair on an out of warranty laptop. What d'you reckon my chances are?

#1087: Hanna

11:43 AM / Blu-ray / 5 Comments

(BD/DVD/digital copy combo, Universal, Region ABC, UK)

Heard very mixed things about this. This should probably have been a rental, but I actually pre-ordered it ages ago and completely forgot about it.

BD impressions: Rififi

9:35 PM / BD Impressions / 11 Comments

Sorry for maintaining radio silence for so long. You know how it is - busy busy busy! I've bought a new laptop (full story later - it's not pretty), been working on both my academic and scripterly writing ventures, and, y'know, actually watching the odd film! By the way, you'll probably have noticed that I've switched back to the tried and trusted 10-point scale for BD image quality ratings. I liked the idea behind the various degrees of recommendation ("Recommended but with issues" etc.), but in practice it proved to be too cumbersome and failed to convey the overall quality as clearly as a good old fashioned number. I'd still like to find some way of making it work, but for the time being I'm going to stick with what I know...

The film: Apparently they're remaking RIFIFI. If this comes to pass, there is something very wrong with the world. What's next? CASABLANCA? CITIZEN KANE? HOWARD THE DUCK? I'd all rather academic anyway, as I actually enjoyed RIFIFI more than any of these three films.* I saw it for the first time on Sunday night and found myself admiring it a great deal for its calm, measured sense of pacing and the manner in which it clinically documents the planning, execution and aftermath of the jewel heist around which the film revolves. I'd be inclined to suggest that things do sag a little immediately after the completion of the robbery, which occurs roughly two thirds of the way through the film, but it all comes together for a stunning violence and a car ride through the streets of Paris that I won't be forgetting in a hurry. I've always had a soft spot for "howdunits" - DIAL M FOR MURDER remains one of my favourite Hitchcock films for that very reason - and RIFIFI, released just a year later, unquestionably deserves to stand alongside it as one of the very best examples of the form. 9/10

* OK, I lied. I haven't actually seen HOWARD THE DUCK.

Image quality: After writing a string of lukewarm or negative reviews of BD releases from Arrow, it's a pleasure to finally be able to give credit where credit's due and praise them for the superb work done here. They were clearly given an excellent master to begin with, but there are no problems at the encoding end and I see no sign of the grain reduction that plagued the likes of INFERNO and PHENOMENA. Except in the various optical shots, detail is razor sharp, resulting in an image that I doubt looked this good even in first-run theatres. The only downside is what looks like some contrast boosting, resulting in clipped highlights in a number of shots.

There's not much more to say about this disc. It's one of the best presentations I've ever seen of a film of this age (looking at it here, it's hard to believe it's nearly 60 years old) and unquestionably the best-looking BD I've seen from Arrow. 9.5/10

Rififi
label: Arrow Films; disc country: UK; region code: B;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 1.37:1

Updated Monday, July 9, 2012 at 12:56 PM: Transferred images from imgPlace to ImageShack. Full resolution captures should now be loading properly again.

#1086: Obsession

10:29 PM / Blu-ray / 7 Comments

(BD, Arrow Video, Region ABC, UK)

BD impressions: TRON: Legacy

4:26 PM / BD Impressions / 14 Comments

The film: The original TRON left me cold. The sequel, oddly enough, impressed me more despite suffering from a raft of problems of its own. The plot is as generic as they come - augmenting the original's "defeat the evil emperor" with the overused "boy grows into man" framework - and Garrett Hedlund has got to be the most singularly wooden and uncharismatic lead I've seen in a movie in quite some time. But it has plenty of strengths too, not least an inspired (and more coherent) visual design for the Grid (though is it just me or do most of the visual and aural cues owe a debt to the MASS EFFECT game series?), as well as a more mature Jeff Bridges in grizzled sensei mode. It's actually a shame he's relegated to a supporting role - I'd much rather have watched a film about him, Olivia Wilde and her Louise Brooks wig than the personality vacuum that is Hedlund. Still, it never drags (unlike the original, and despite being nearly half an hour longer than it), and it stands up well as an actual film rather than the technology demo the original ended up resembling. Just don't mention the the uncanny valley Jeff Bridges CGI stand-in. 6/10

Image quality: A plea to all filmmakers: can you PLEASE stop making these multi-aspect ratio IMAX films, or at the very least stop releasing them on BD in this form? At least offer us an opportunity to watch the film in 2.39:1 from beginning to end, as we would have done had we gone to see it in a non-IMAX cinema. It's not clever, it destroys any sense of immersion and, most annoyingly of all, it draws your attention to the fact that, for home viewing, what you're getting with the 2.39:1 ratio is an image that is less tall rather than wider. TRON: LEGACY jumps between 1.78:1 and 2.39:1 throughout its running time, often seemingly arbitrarily (some dialogue scenes are 1.78:1, some action scenes are 2.39:1, and vice versa), and it adds nothing to the presentation.

With that little rant out of the way, TRON: LEGACY looks rather good on BD, though it's limited by the digital cameras used to shoot it in a way that its predecessor's 70mm photography wasn't. Interestingly, while the original TRON's "real world" photography was basically flawless and its "Grid" photography suffered slightly as a result of its heavy use of opticals, it's the other way round here: the digital photography lends itself well to the cold, artificial world of the Grid (and a lot of what we're seeing in those scenes is actually wall-to-wall CG anyway), but in the "real world" scenes, it has the feel of a cheap made-for-TV production. Shots occasionally look harsh and processed too - see Example 11. There's also a dead pixel visible in one shot, though I must point out I only noticed it after taking the capture.

That said, I suspect the disc is largely a faithful representation of the master. Mild compression artefacts are visible on occasions - see Example 2 - but otherwise it's a solid disc. Recommended.

TRON: Legacy
label: Buena vista; disc country: UK; region code: ABC;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 1.78:1 and 2.39:1

Updated Monday, July 9, 2012 at 01:16 PM: Transferred images from imgPlace to ImageShack. Full resolution captures should now be loading properly again.

#1085: Source Code

7:33 PM / Blu-ray / 5 Comments

(BD, Optimum, Region B, UK)

#1084: The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec

7:32 PM / Blu-ray / 1 Comment

(BD, Optimum, Region B, UK)

Signing off

5:13 PM / General / 5 Comments

Tomorrow, I'll be heading down south for a three-day scriptwriting course in Elstree. I'll probably be without internet access during that time and in any event am unlikely to have time to post anything. So, see you on Friday!

BD impressions: TRON

8:37 PM / BD Impressions / 5 Comments

The film: Pixar and Disney creative lead John Lasseter credits TRON as the film that inspired him to explore CG animation - if memory serves (and I'm paraphrasing here), not because of what he saw but because of the POTENTIAL he saw. And I think that's ultimately TRON's legacy, hardcore fans notwithstanding: a trial run, a launching-off point, a suggestion of what was to come later. Taken on its own merits, TRON is not a particularly good film, and I doubt it would have been any better even if the visual effects hadn't dated so much. As it is, they certainly don't help: the movie is so abstract in terms of its visual that I found myself incredibly distanced from the action to the extent that I struggled to care about what was going on. Underneath the admittedly arresting graphics is an archetypal "defeat the evil emperor" quest in the swords-and-sorcery vein, albeit transplanted into a sci-fi world. Like Disney's SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS, I find it more interesting for its historical significance than for any pleasure I derive out of watching the film itself, though it has to be said David Warner does make for a deliciously dastardly villain. 5/10

Image quality: In stark contrast to the way in which they treat their animated features, Disney have had the good sense to leave TRON completely alone, as far as I can tell. The film was photographed in Super Panavision 70, a 70mm process, and the benefits are clear. Given that every shot that takes place inside the Grid is an optical effect, often with several different layers, the increased resolution of 70mm provides an effective "buffer" against the detail loss incurred.

Unsurprisingly the material taking place in the real world, which for the most part is devoid of visual effects, looks the best, with detail often razor sharp (see Example 4. In his review, Adam Tyner stated that "there are plenty of moments in this thirty year old film that look like cameras were rolling last Thursday", something I concur with completely. Understandably, detail is less impressive on the material inside the Grid (though still very impressive), and various rendering and optical processing artefacts can be glimpsed in the form of blocking (see Example 35) and ghosted lines (see Example 45).

Still, though, an extremely satisfying presentation all round and one that actually offers more detail than the BD of the 2010 sequel (more on that in a subsequent review). Recommended without hesitation.

TRON
label: Buena vista; disc country: UK; region code: ABC;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 2.20:1

Updated Monday, July 9, 2012 at 01:31 PM: Transferred images from imgPlace to ImageShack. Full resolution captures should now be loading properly again.

Kentai on grain and noise

5:33 PM / Web / 2 Comments

My good friend Kentai has written a very informative piece on the whole "grain vs. noise" argument that refuses to die down with regard to the numerous recent BD releases of cult Italian titles - TENEBRAE, THE CAT O' NINE TAILS, ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST and the like. Be sure to give it a read.

BD impressions: The Lord of the Rings

2:06 PM / BD Impressions / 2 Comments

The film: As I suspect most people know by now, Ralph Bakshi originally planned to adapt Tolkien's THE LORD OF THE RINGS as two films, only the first of which ever saw fruition. Despite Part 1 being a box office success, distributor United Artists abruptly decided not to finance a sequel, meaning that the action only advances to the point of Frodo, Sam and Gollum setting off for Cirith Ungol and victory at the Battle of the Hornburg - coincidentally (or not, as the case may be) the exact same point in both story strands at which Peter Jackson elected to end his later adaptation of THE TWO TOWERS.

I first saw Bakshi's film at the age of nine while I was less than half way through reading THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (I believe I was still in the wilderness between Bree and Rivendell with Strider and the hobbits - at any rate, I had yet to discover the reason for Gandalf's delay). Suffice it to say that it made a big impression on me, and for some considerable time it shaped my impression of Middle-Earth as a land filled with gloomy, overbearingly drab landscapes; monstrous, ape-like orcs; and of course lots and lots of men with no trousers. Bakshi's take on the material is nothing if not idiosyncratic, and while we were ultimately spared the horror of what would have been John Boorman's take on what has been called the greatest novel of the 20th century, it goes without saying that the end result didn't exactly match many people's interpretation of Middle-Earth.

Which is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. Bakshi's film is unquestionably his own - I doubt anyone else could have come up with anything quite like this, and while many people decry his bizarre depiction of Aragorn as a Native American or Boromir as a Viking, it always amuses me that many of the same people happily swallowed Peter Jackson's far greater departures from the source. Actually, on a narrative level, Bakshi is incredibly faithful to the novel, though this is something of a double-edged sword as it requires a degree of pre-existing familiarity with the material in order to actually understand what's going on. A case in point, and an example that is characteristic of Bakshi's scattershot approach, comes when Gandalf, after asking Frodo if he sees any markings on the Ring, flings it into the fireplace at Bag End. In the novel, this serves two purposes: first, it highlights how attached Frodo already is to the Ring; second, it reveals that fiery letters on the Ring that confirm beyond doubt that it is the One. Bakshi gets the first part right: Frodo gapes in horror and has to be held back by Gandalf to stop him diving in after it. The fire-writing, however, never materialises, which begs the question as to why Gandalf brought up the subject of markings in the first place.

The answer, I suspect, is that Bakshi, an avowed Tolkien fanatic, was determined to be as faithful to the book as possible (unlike Jackson, he lifts whole chunks of dialogue with only minimal alterations) but knew he had to cut, cut, cut to get the running time down to a manageable length. Lacking the necessary distance from the material, he failed to see how incomprehensible certain deletions would make the film. In perhaps the most serious instance, I wonder if anyone who hadn't already read the book would actually understand precisely WHY the Fellowship was taking the Ring to Mordor. And yet, despite Bakshi's apparent love of the book, the film is littered with mispronunciations - witness the, erm, creative ways the actors find to say words like Minas Tirith, Sauron, Balin, Uglúk, Celeborn and Gríma... to say nothing of the White Wizard, who is alternately referred to as both "Saruman" and "Aruman", sometimes within the same scene. Apparently bean-counters were worried that audiences would confuse Sauron and Saruman and asked for the latter's name to be changed to better distinguish them. A valid concern, I suppose, but the end result only serves to make the situation even MORE confusing.

The result is a film that is at times as staggeringly incoherent as it is idiosyncratic... and yet it contains so many moments of brilliance, however fleeting, that it's difficult to dismiss it out of hand, even with the altogether more consistent Jackson adaptations now readily available. True, it frequently lurches from inspired madness to just plain awfulness, but a surprising amount of it genuinely works. The orcs in this version are truly hideous, far more effective than Jackson's comedy Cockneys, and the Black Riders are similarly chilling. I still remember the shiver that ran down my spine on seeing that low angle shot of the Rider on his horse while the hobbits hid from him in a hollow beneath the roots of a tree (a sequence shamelessly plundered by Jackson, along with a later scene involving the Riders raiding the hobbits' room at the Prancing Pony), and the "Flight to the Ford" sequence, in which Frodo's gradual succumbing to the poison of the Morgul-knife is brilliantly realised as something approaching a fever dream. Later on, the orc band's death march and the attack on them by Éomer and his riders are handled far, far better than in the Jackson version, and in his final appearance towards the end of the film, we get a brief glimpse of a run down, exhausted Frodo that perfectly evokes the toll the Ring is taking on him. I even like the oft-criticised Leonard Rosenman score a great deal, which may not be a patch on Howard Shore's work on the Jackson trilogy but has its own moments of brilliance.

The visual depiction of Aragorn is bizarre to say the least, but the vocal performance by John Hurt is exceptional, and his remains the voice that I hear in my head whenever I read the character's dialogue in the novel (just as I hear Michael Hordern as Gandalf and Ian Holm as Frodo, both from the later BBC radio adaptation). Actually the voice acting on the whole is rather good (and Peter Woodthorpe as Gollum and Michael Graham Cox as Boromir obviously impressed someone, as they were both subsequently cast in the same roles in the radio version), with the exception of Fraser Kerr's shrill, raspy Saruman (no Christopher Lee, this man). As for Sam, his characterisation sucks, but I'm not sure whether the blame lies with the voice actor, Michael Scholes, or Billy Barty, from whose performance the rotoscoped animation was derived. (Scholes certainly falls into the trap avoided by Bill Nighy in the radio version and Sean Astin in the Jackson films: he interprets the dialogue literally, meaning that the character more often than not comes over as a buffoon.)

It's too bad the animation so rarely matches the quality of the vocals. In choosing to rotoscope the entire film (i.e. shooting live action footage first and then tracing over it), Bakshi delivers a film that looks as wildly inconsistent as the script itself, occasionally impressive but more often than not sloppy, jittery and overly pantomimey. In this regard the increased resolution of the Blu-ray version doesn't do the film any favours: I remember being a lot less distracted by the ropey animation when I was watching it through the haze of a second-generation VHS copy. Particularly in the film's second half, a decision seems to have been made (whether as a cost- and labour-saving measure or for more creative reasons) to simply copy much of the live action footage to celluloid with the contrast ramped up, foregoing the tracing process altogether. Ironically, this process is far more effective than the rotoscoping, not least because it is largely restricted to the orcs and Black Riders (at least until the Rohirrim show up) and gives them a palpable otherworldly quality. On the whole, though, it's a spectacularly ugly-looking film, with even the locations that are meant to appear lush and striking, such as the Shire, Rivendell and Lothlórien, looking grim and depressing.

Bakshi's film concludes unsatisfyingly and self-contradictingly with a voice-over that states both that "the forces of darkness were driven for ever from the face of Middle-Earth" and that here ends "the first great tale of THE LORD OF THE RINGS", and for all its faults I wish the film hadn't been cut off so abruptly. Had Bakshi got a chance to make his second part, a number of lingering questions could have been answered. Would Faramir have shown up? Would Boromir's fellow Gondorians have been similarly attired in Viking-like garb? How would Bakshi have resolved the problem of not having bothered to introduce Arwen at all? (Perhaps he would have gone with Tolkien's original plan to make Éowyn Aragorn's love interest.) Would the Scouring of the Shire have been depicted? And perhaps, most importantly of all, would we have got to see an army of giant carrots destroying Isengard? (If you've seen how Treebeard is depicted in the film, you'll know what I'm talking about.) Bakshi's THE LORD OF THE RINGS is one big, frustrating "What the fuck?" but a fascinating work all the same, in spite of (and indeed in many cases BECAUSE OF) its numerous flaws. 6/10

Image quality: THE LORD OF THE RINGS is a film that looks its age on BD, for better or worse. No Disney-style grain obliteration here, and despite what look like occasional mild DVNR artefacts (though given the extent to which the images and pencil lines wobble and flicker it's often hard to tell) a surprising amount of print damage. I can't say I'm overly thrilled by the framing: it looks on the whole too tight vertically, with some compositions coming off as rather wonky. The film almost certainly had a theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1 (so slightly less tall than what we're seeing here), but I remember the framing on my old open matte (1.33:1) VHS copy looking a lot more comfortable.

Detail levels are acceptable, and as with the rotoscoped animation itself, the effect improves somewhat in motion. However, it's certainly no stunner, and the fact that numerous sequences are essentially one giant optical presumably doesn't help matters. Still, on the whole the presentation is considerably better than I was expecting. Recommended, but with significant issues.

The Lord of the Rings
label: Warner; disc country: USA; region code: ABC;
codec: VC-1; aspect ratio: 1.78:1 (theatrical 1.85:1)

Updated Monday, July 9, 2012 at 01:45 PM: Transferred images from imgPlace to ImageShack. Full resolution captures should now be loading properly again.

Movie Matters #10 - The Lord of the Rings special

7:28 PM / Podcast / 1 Comment

In the latest episode of the Movie Matters podcast, co-hosts Lee Howard and Michael Mackenzie embark on an adventure as they set off on the long journey of discussing and reflecting upon the strengths, weaknesses and enduring cinematic achievement of New Line Cinema's THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, THE TWO TOWERS and THE RETURN OF THE KING. In addition to reviewing the films themselves, the hosts also share how they first became acquainted with the world of Middle-Earth, cast their eyes over the recent Extended Edition Blu-ray Disc release of the trilogy, and read out listener comments on all things LORD OF THE RINGS.

• https://rapidshare.com/files/16704125/moviematters-episode10-02-08-11.mp3
• iTunes

The music sampled in this episode is all from THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS and THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING by Howard Shore. Special thanks to David Mackenzie for audio support.

Please note that this episode suffers from some unavoidable audio interference during its first half as a result of a technical gaffe (a.k.a. not plugging the microphone in properly). We hope that these imperfections don't impair your enjoyment of the episode.

As mentioned in the podcast, here is the summary of the screenplay for the aborted John Boorman adaptation of the books.

http://moviematterspodcast.blogspot.com