News|Movies|BD & DVD|Writings|Other

Movie Matters Mini #3 - The Bridge

4:31 PM / Podcast / 1 Comment

In this Movie Matters Mini episode, co-hosts Lee Howard and Michael Mackenzie discuss various films and TV shows they've been watching recently before turning their attention to the critically acclaimed Danish/Swedish crime drama THE BRIDGE, the 10-episode first season of which sees a pair of mismatched detectives joining forces to stop a serial killer with an axe to grind against the complacency he sees in both countries' societies.

• Direct link
• iTunes

The music sampled in this episode is "Hollow Talk" by Choir of Young Believers, the main title theme to THE BRIDGE.

Created by Lee Howard & Michael Mackenzie
Edited by Michael Mackenzie

http://moviematterspodcast.blogspot.com

Happy birthday, children

11:15 AM / General / 7 Comments

These magnificent beasts are ten years old today... and they have absolutely no idea.

#1179: The Simpsons: The Complete Ninth Season

12:49 PM / Blu-ray / 10 Comments

(DVD, 20th Century Fox, Region 1, USA)

I've a feeling this is the season where everything starts to go south for THE SIMPSONS, but I got this set second hand for buttons and, judging by the Wikipedia entry, there are at least a handful of enjoyable episodes in it. And I'll be curious to see the seemingly universally reviled "The Principal and the Pauper" for the first time... though I note that, as a holdover from the previous season, it's actually a Bill Oakley/Josh Weinstein episode and not one that can be pinned on the fans' usual whipping boy, Mike Scully.

Four Flies on Grey Velvet: Shameless vs. Koch Media

5:42 PM / Blu-ray / 10 Comments

Once the most elusive of all Dario Argento's gialli, it now seems as if every man and his dog has a version of FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET either on store shelves or in the pipeline. While the likes of OPERA, SLEEPLESS and THE CARD PLAYER have yet to make their high definition debut, FOUR FLIES now has now been released twice on BD, first in the UK by Shameless Screen Entertainment back in January of this year, and now by German label Koch Media, who have treated the film to a deluxe 3-disc digibook (the film on both BD and DVD, plus a DVD for the extras), similar to their recent release of INFERNO.

FOUR FLIES has, to say the least, a troubled history. Originally, it was available only on horrendous-looking bootleg tapes and DVDs, owing to complicated rights issues. Then in 2007, German distributor Retrofilm somehow got their hands on a beat-up old print, scanned it and put it out on a DVD that was of questionable legality and both looked and sounded like a dog's dinner, but was by anyone's standards measurably better than any previous version. This was suplanted a year later by another DVD release, this time by US distributor Mya Communication. Although its English language audio track was botched beyond belief and it was missing around 40 seconds of footage at the start and end of reels due to damage to the source materials, it was a revelation: transferred in HD from the original camera negative, for the first time outside of a movie theatre FOUR FLIES actually looked half-way respectable.

I mentioned the January 2012 BD release by Shameless briefly, but didn't get a chance to do a fully in-depth review of it. In brief, Shameless used the same HD transfer as Mya, but filled in the gaps where footage was missing by dropping back to the grotty old standard definition source used by Retrofilm, offering viewers the option to watch this less than seamless presentation of the film or skip the damaged section in the same manner as the Mya DVD. It also featured a vastly better English audio track than any previous release, with significantly improved clarity and none of the excessively low pitch afflicting the Mya disc. It was a release with problems, however. Most egregiously, the English language track suffered from moments of severe distortion in the last 10 minutes of the film, and an attempt to remove a visual defect during the extreme slow motion shots at the climax (a black horizontal line running across the screen) simply made matters worse. There was also an issue with the gamma being slightly elevated throughout, resulting in some very noticeable posterisation in some of the darker scenes.

The Koch Media release again uses the same incomplete HD transfer, but takes a slightly different approach so solving the issue of the missing footage. Commendably, Koch have gone back to a print source and actually retransferred much of this footage in high definition. The source isn't ideal, with a fair amount of print damage and an overly dark, contrasty appearance, but it's worlds better than the SD gunk used on the Shameless release (Shameless, Koch). Unfortunately, there are two instances in which Koch either haven't bothered to or haven't been able to replace the SD footage with the new, improved HD material: these are a few seconds of Roberto (Michael Brandon) walking past the river at 00:21:38 (Shameless, Koch) and, more problematically, 35 seconds of Roberto talking to Dalia (Francine Racette) starting at 00:52:19. The latter was less of an issue on the Shameless BD because the material in SD amounted to only a few seconds at the start of the scene, after which Shameless simply switched back to the HD version mid-shot. With the exception of the aforementioned river shot, however, Koch's approach has been not to jump between two different sources mid-shot. As a result, the Koch version remains in grubby, heavily cropped SD until the shot ends (Shameless, Koch). This approach is used throughout the disc, in all other instances, the switch is between two different HD sources rather than an SD and an HD one (Shameless, Koch). What it means is that, despite Koch's efforts to source a print and scan it in HD, their version actually ends up having MORE "compromised" footage than the Shameless version. I'm not really sure how I feel about that... or about the fact that, unlike Shameless, Koch haven't provided any means of watching the film with the compromised footage simply skipped over.

These discrepancies aside, the two releases are actually reasonably comparable in terms of picture quality. The Koch release improves on the Shameless version in most respects, but it would be a mistake to describe this as anything of a revelation because the Shameless disc already looked pretty good to begin with. It was certainly miles away from noise-riddled monstrosities like THE CAT O' NINE TAILS and CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD and... well, to be honest, the vast majority of all Italian cult titles released thus far on BD. The Koch release has the correct gamma, meaning that the image appears darker and the posterisation issues noted in the Shameless version are gone (Shameless, Koch). Colours are also slightly richer across the board, though to what extent that's a result of the gamma change isn't clear (Shameless, Koch). Neither release appears to have had any additional dirt and scratch removal or grain reduction applied, and both suffer from the exact same occasional DVNR errors (Shameless, Koch). Compression is slightly improved on the Koch release too, though the differences aren't significant enough to be a deal-breaker (Shameless, Koch). Bizarrely enough, for some reason there are two copies of the film on the Koch disc. The only one actually accessible from the disc menu is a 25.6 GB file of the entire film; the other is 13.6 GB, has no audio and cuts out just after the one-hour mark. I'm not even going to attempt to theorise as to why this is sitting on the disc taking up space - apart from the lack of audio and the fact that it cuts out part-way through the film (minor quibbles, I'm sure you'll agree), I can't see any difference in content between this and the 25.6 GB file.

Audio-wise, both versions have English and Italian language options, although only the Shameless release offers English subtitles of any kind. They're not perfect and suffer from some noticeable errors (the more blatant of which is that the film's title is subtitled as "Four Flies OF Grey Velvet"), but they're perfectly serviceable if you want to watch the film in Italian. With only German subtitles provided on the Koch release (they are enabled by default if you select English or Italian audio from the menu, but you can disable them with your remote), the Italian track is going to be out of bounds for those who don't speak the language. This also creates a slight issue when it comes to the killer's confession during the climax, some of which wasn't recorded in English, meaning that the English track dips in and out of Italian during this scene, much like DEEP RED. On the Shameless disc, the requisite lines are subtitled in English; on the Koch release, they predictably aren't. On the plus side, the extreme (and potentially speaker-damaging) distortion that was intermittently present during the final 10 minutes of the English track on the Shameless disc (primarily affecting the Italian dialogue segments but also a large explosion just before the end credits) is mercifully absent from the Koch version.

These glitches aside, however, the English track on the Shameless disc actually sounds significantly better than its Koch counterpart in terms of clarity. I was struck by how crisp and clear the Shameless disc sounded when I first got it, not just in comparison to the notoriously botched Mya DVD but also compared to just about every other Italian cult title of this vintage. The Koch disc sounds, dare I say it, far closer to how I would have EXPECTED the film to sound. The Koch version also suffers from what I can only describe as a heck of a lot of "warbling" (not an audiophile, sorry) during the music that plays before and after the car crash that closes the film. (The Italian track is also affected on both discs, suggesting the music came from the same compromised stem.) Neither version sounds bad per se, but were it not for the almost crippling glitches in the final ten minutes, I suspect I'd be recommending the Shameless version unconditionally.

...So yeah, which version to recommend? They both have their ups and downs. The nature of the available materials being what they are, any presentation of FOUR FLIES seemed destined to be compromised. Myself, I suspect I'd be more inclined to overlook the more minor flaws of the Shameless release were it not for the crippling nature of the audio glitches in the film's final moments (and the situation has certainly not been helped by Shameless' jaw-droppingly ignorant response to viewer complaints, which among other inanities saw them try to claim that different BD players rendered lossless audio differently). It's a shame, because in every other respect the Shameless disc sounds much better. On balance, I'm going to have to lean towards the Koch release, both for the overall better image quality (though I'm still not happy about the increase in sub-optimal footage thanks to Koch's "no jumping between sources mid-shot" rule) and because their audio track won't potentially wreck your speakers, but it's not an ideal situation whichever way you cut it.

Shameless
country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 2.35:1

Koch Media
country: Germany; region code: ABC (incorrectly labelled as B); codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 2.35:1

Recent acquisitions

5:06 PM / Blu-ray / DVD / No Comments

My post-birthday acquisitions, because I'm too lazy these days to do individual posts for all of them.

What is this handsome product?

10:12 AM / Blu-ray / 18 Comments

BD impressions update

2:15 PM / BD Impressions / 7 Comments

It recently came to my attention that the BD impressions captures uploaded to imgPlace had, at some point, started being rescaled to around half their intended size, completely removing the point of uploading full resolution captures in the first place. I've just spent the last couple of hours transferring all the images in question over to ImageShack, which doesn't suffer from these limitations. As a result, the affected captures should now be displaying correctly once again:

• The American
• Die Another Day
• Licence to Kill
• The Lion King
• The Lord of the Rings
• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Extended Edition)
• Rififi
• Torso
• TRON
• TRON: Legacy

I suspect I'll be using ImageShack for all my full resolution captures from now on, with the exception of ones that contravene the terms and conditions... like ones with tits in them. Prudes.

BD impressions: Treasure Planet

11:38 AM / BD Impressions / 2 Comments

The film: Probably Disney's highest profile animated misfire after THE BLACK CAULDRON, TREASURE PLANET was in development for years (it was originally pitched in the 80s alongside THE LITTLE MERMAID), cost upwards of $140 million and bombed at the box office. I'd like to say it was an overlooked masterpiece, but in reality it's yet another wildly uneven post-renaissance effort that seems to be going in all directions at once, with an overarching concept - a mash-up of sci-fi and 18th/19th century swashbuckling - that doesn't work.

First, though, the good. The central relationship - that of young Jim Hawkins and the enigmatic Long John Silver - may be the most mature storytelling Disney has ever attempted. Silver is unique in the Disney canon, doubling up as both a mentor/father figure to Jim and the main villain - a villain who, flying in the face of every convention established by the studio, actually grows and is partially redeemed by the end. True, it's not handled with a great deal of subtlety, but Silver is a million miles removed from the moustache-twirling Captain Hook or the grotesque Ursula. The score by James Newton Howard is also great stuff, and there's plenty of wonderfully skilled character animation to be enjoyed. Sergio Pablos's Dr. Doppler is a particular standout - a complex, detailed construction that feels entirely three dimensional and looks consistent regardless of the angle from which you're looking at him...

...unlike Jim, a bafflingly poor piece of character design that seems to be (badly) aping anime with its triangular chin and floating eyes, eyebrows and nose. The character looks completely different in profile and front-on views, and any attempt to turn his head involves a cheat of some sort as the animators attempt to bridge the two different looks. There's no real sense of dimensionality to him, and when your protagonist's animation is outshone by every secondary character, something's seriously wrong. The character is also completely unlikeable for the bulk of the film's running time, and while I get that the filmmakers were trying to capture teenage angst in an animated form, a lot of the time he just comes off as obnoxious for no apparent reason. He butts shoulders with a bunch of characters who all look like they were designed by different people and belong in different movies, from the gelatinous Silver (a bear-like creature with computer-generated cyborg appendages and an uncharacteristically messy bit of design from the normally excellent Glen Keane) to the infuriating BEN, a flamboyant homosexual (at least that's what I'm inferring) robot voiced by Martin Short who is a perfect illustration of the fact that "he's MEANT to be annoying" is not a valid defence. The heavy use of CG for the backgrounds and props jars too - some of it almost looks like pre-viz work, while shots where the viewpoint weaves around the 3D sets invariably lead to the 2D characters wobbling and stobing as the animators try valiantly to "keep up" with the camera.

It all feels like a case of "too many cooks in the kitchen", with teen angst, fart jokes (this was back when SHREK was considered the bee's knees) and a cute little pink blob called Morph all butting heads. It doesn't know what it wants to be and as a result doesn't end up really feeling like anything. Its 2002 stable-mate, the lower budget, less ambitious but infinitely more focused LILO & STITCH, outclasses it on every level. 5/10

Image quality: TREASURE PLANET is the only film I've seen projected in IMAX and, aside from giving me a headache, it also showed up the limitations of the source material, with the low resolution nature of certain elements being lade bare for all to see. These are less noticeable on the BD, but numerous 3D elements appear blocky and aliased (e.g. Jim's solar surfer in Example 3, making them jar even more with the pristine hand-drawn elements. These shortcomings aside, it's a strong presentation and I really can't fault the disc at all... except for one area: compression. While for the most part it looks fine, there are a handful of moments that completely choke the encoder. One of these is when Jim unlocks the star map for the first time; another is this - yikes! There's also some occasional TARZAN-style blotchy noise (see Silver's stomach in Example 22) and some banding (Silver's stomach again in Example 14). The latter was far more severe on the DVD, and was even apparent in the 35mm version I saw at the cinema back in 2003 (I can't remember whether the IMAX version was affected, but I'd be inclined to suspect that it was). When all said and done, it looks very good, but inferior to the likes of THE LION KING. 9/10

Treasure Planet
label: Buena Vista; disc country: USA; region code: ABC;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 1.66:1

Note: Full size captures are hosted on ImageShack and may take a while to load.

Letterboxd invitations

11:59 AM / Web / 10 Comments

I've got three invitations for Letterboxd to give away. Let me know if you want one. It's first come first served, and remember, I'll need your email address to send the invite. If you don't want to post it publicly, you can contact me at m.r.mackenzie[at]gmail[dot]com.

Sayonara BD & DVD section

4:55 PM / Blu-ray / DVD / Web / 7 Comments

As part of my ongoing efforts to streamline this site and give me a few less lists to keep up to date (see my removal of the film diary back in May), I've decided to junk the "in-house" BD & DVD section and simply have that page redirect to my DVD Profiler page from now on. Their site isn't as purrty as mine, but it's much less of a hassle for me to update, and it contains more information on each disc, including bonus features, audio and video formats, and even (if you're in the mood for a giggle) parental advisory information.

Please note that the DVD Profiler page doesn't show discs that I've since sold or given away, so a number will have disappeared.

Birthday swag

10:15 AM / General / 10 Comments

A good haul. And yes, I have succumbed to the dark side and become a Kindle owner. ;)