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The Card Player BD

10:51 PM / Blu-ray / 10 Comments

Another day, another Argento film makes the leap to BD. While everything from the classic period with the exception of OPERA is now at least available, if not necessarily in particularly good quality, much of his work from the 90s onwards has yet to show up. German label Edition Tonfilm are filling in a couple of the gaps, with the (somewhat overrated, in my opinion) "greatest hits" effort NON HO SONNO/SLEEPLESS coming out in November, while the underrated (my opinion again) THE CARD PLAYER came out last week. My copy showed up today, and I've taken a quick look. Note that these opinions are NOT final: I haven't watched it from beginning to end yet, so don't take this as a definitive review.

First impressions are actually pretty positive. I wasn't sure what to expect from this title, and the beat-up, low detail opening titles didn't exactly fill me with confidence. Once the credits are over, however, things improve pretty dramatically, and the results are definitely on the watchable side:

The Card Player
label: Edition Tonfilm; disc country: Germany; region code: ABC;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 1.78:1 (theatrical 1.85:1)

Clearly no LVR jobbie, this! A couple of points: Example 1 is the last shot of the opening credits sequence immediately before the image quality improves dramatically, and Example 5 is representative of a segment of approximately 24 seconds beginning at the 00:26:16 mark, where for some reason the film drops to ugly-looking upscaled standard definition footage. The aspect ratio also switches from open matte 1.78:1 to OAR 1.85:1 during this stretch. I'm at a loss to explain why this happens, and I can't guarantee that this is the only time this happens as I haven't watched the disc all the way through yet.

Changing the blinds

8:27 PM / Web / No Comments

You've probably noticed that there have been one or two cosmetic changes to the site in the last day or so, most significantly the new background image and larger text. This version of the site has looked more or less the same since its inception three years ago - a record length of time given that, back when I had time to spare and the inclination to constantly tinker, I was completely redoing the entire site on (at least) a yearly basis. In the past, I've found that the site sees the most activity in the months following the launch of a new design. So, I thought, let's see if doing so again will encourage a new phase of productivity.

Originally, my intention was to go with a completely new design, using a pre-existing Movable Type template rather than creating one myself - the logic being that I would have a swanky new design with only minimal effort required on my part. I actually started playing around with a rather nice-looking template on a separate Movable Type installation... but things went a bit pear-shaped and I ended up accidentally overwriting all the tweaks I'd made with the default template, and I decided it wasn't worth the hassle.

I've also made some significant changes to the way the category and monthly archives are displayed. When I first launched this design, I was with a different web host and was having severe performance issues. (If you've been following this site for a while, you'll probably remember a period three years ago when it would literally take upwards of two minutes just to post a comment.) In an attempt to lessen the load on the server I devised a drastically pared-down archive system whereby, rather than displaying full entries, only the title and a brief excerpt of each post would be displayed. In the end I ended up switching to LDHosting in July 2009, which has always been lightning fast for me. The old design remained in place, however, and to be honest I quite liked the fact that it was a bit different. I've come to the conclusion, though, that it's not exactly the most user-friendly way of displaying old posts, given that you have to open each entry individually in order to read it. As a result, I've gone back to a more conventional setup that looks more like the front page (see, for example, the BD Impressions archive). Much better, as I'm sure you'll agree.

I'll probably continue to tweak the layout as and when the inclination takes me, provided it doesn't result in any disruption. Any thoughts on the changes? Positive? Negative? Don't care?

BD impressions: 101 Dalmatians

11:17 PM / BD Impressions / 9 Comments

Disney's 101 DALMATIANS (or ONE HUNDRED AND ONE DALMATIANS, to use its more cumbersome on-screen title) still doesn't have an official release date for a US BD, but it has been available in numerous countries throughout the rest of the world for a couple of months now. I suspect the eventual US release will be preferable, if only because it's likely to include the original mono mix, removed from the international versions in favour of a multitude of dubs, but until it surfaces it's all academic. Mine happens to be the French one, but there's now a UK release if you don't fancy having non-English text on the cover (I know some people are picky that way).

The film: As far as I'm aware, this is the only instance where I've read the original novel on which a Disney film has been based before seeing the film. As such, it's perhaps not entirely surprising that, as an adaptation, I think this is a bit of a disappointment. It misses a great deal of the nuance of Dodie Smith's book in terms of dogs' behaviour and their interactions with humans, and for the most part turns previously intelligent characters into morons. Of course, it's an animated cartoon, and you can't exactly do a cartoon without exaggeration, but it's a shame to see a great character like the Sheepdog turned into a blundering, senile buffoon, and to lose great set-pieces like the Dalmatians getting their revenge on Cruella De Vil by tearing her collection of furs to pieces.

So why do I still rate it so highly? The art. It's an absolute pleasure to look at. After SLEEPING BEAUTY, Disney was on a cost-cutting mission and developed the xerography technique as a means of keeping the budgets down. While the scratchy, ragged look that resulted would become something of an eyesore in later films as budgets decreased even further, here it goes hand in hand with Ken Anderson's gorgeous, heavily stylised production design... and let's be honest, there's no way they could have made a film called ONE HUNDRED AND ONE DALMATIANS without the ability to photocopy their drawings. The animators are at the top of their game here, with some wonderfully observed caricaturing of animal behaviour, while Marc Davis' animation of Cruella (done more or less single-handed, if the official accounts are to be believed) is a tour de force, and never bettered in the pantheon of Disney villains.

It's a vibrant, jazzy, energetic film with impeccable craftsmanship, and a lot of the time that's enough to make you forget that, as an adaptation of a classic children's novel, it's a bit of a let-down... and even then, there's every chance I'd be saying the same thing about PINOCCHIO or LADY AND THE TRAMP (my #1 and #2 favourite Disneys) if I was more familiar with the source material. 8/10

Image quality: Surprise surprise, this is another of those degrained jobs Disney seem to love so much, though I guess it's preferable to RESCUERS/FOX AND THE HOUND-style blotchyvision. In any event, detail is resolved considerably better than on the downright blurry release of THE ARISTOCATS from a few months back, which I'm inclined to think indicates that considerably finer grained source materials were used for DALMATIANS. Some shots do appear softer than others, but this is probably down to the photography itself rather than any foul-play. Oh, and it's in its intended ratio of 1.33:1 as well, which is a plus given that a number of Disney titles from this era have been cropped to 1.66:1 or 1.75:1 for recent DVD and BD releases.

Given the high level of digital manipulation involved (to tell the truth, I'm actually slightly surprised they didn't try to correct the varying brightness of the Dalmatians' coats resulting from multiple layers of cels within the same shot), there are understandably some glitches. These vary from the largely imperceptible (you probably won't notice the ugly cut-out artefacts around Cruella in this shot as it flies by pretty quickly) to the more obvious, of which this curiosity is by far the worst example. Although the grain has largely been obliterated, it does poke through now and then, particularly during the snowstorm sequence in the second half of the film, where the swirling fog plays havoc with the degrainer and allows the original texture of the film to come through in clumps.

I'm going to sound like a broken record, but I really wish Disney would stop going down this route of grain obliteration on their classic titles. Studio Ghibli have the right idea, and for the most part so too did Gaumont on their ASTERIX releases, in spite of some intermittent DVNR artefacts. PATTON is getting a re-relase in November to correct precisely this sort of shabby treatment; why can't we get the same for the Disney classics? 7/10

101 Dalmatians
label: Buena Vista; disc country: France; region code: ABC;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 1.33:1

Decloaking

12:46 PM / Blu-ray / General / 9 Comments

Greetings, programs!

It's been nearly a month since my last post, which must stand as some kind of record in the Land of Whimsy annals. I never intended to leave it this long, but for a variety of reasons I've let this site go to the wayside.

The first and most significant reason is that I've been busting my hump over the last six weeks or so working on a chapter for my thesis. This chapter, Chapter 2, is both the most important of the bunch and the most difficult to get right, given that it serves as both a historical overview of the years leading up to the giallo boom of 1970-1975 (basically I give a potted history of sociocultural developments in Western Europe in the years 1945-1970 - no small undertaking) and an explanation of the theoretical frameworks (mostly derived from criticism of film noir) with which I engage in my analysis chapters. I finally handed in a draft a little over a week ago and will be meeting my supervisors to discuss it on Tuesday, but there's still a fair bit of work to be done with this chapter and, once I'm done with it, the rest of the thesis still has to be redrafted. Basically, I'm unlikely to have significant quantities of free time any time soon.

There's another reason, though, and if I'm being honest it's that I don't get the same amount of enjoyment updating the site as I once did. For a number of years, most of the site's content consisted of screen captures of and reviews of the video quality of Blu-ray Discs. These subjects still interest me a great deal, but the actual act of writing about them and in particular the laborious process of going through entire discs to select captures that are representative of the image quality as a whole were starting to feel like more and more of a chore. It's entirely possible that I'll feel differently when I have some free time on my hands, but I don't want to promise anything. In the meantime, I'd recommend Matt Paprocki and Adam Tyner's BD reviews if you want insightful criticism coupled with accurate screen captures.

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