Some Came Running

Blu-ray Consumer Guide: Special Holiday Gift Guide Edition, Installment #1 (Maybe)

"Since our last report many things have changed; indeed it would be foolish to assume that is could be otherwise."—Throbbing Gristle, sleeve notes, D.O.A. The Third And Final Report Of Throbbing Gristle, 1978.

Oy. 

When last we spoke, things were getting on track for this to be a monthly feature again, but then, you know, actual paying work, and my domestic player broke and all that. And then I started getting queries about am I doing a Holiday Gift Guide, which made me think, "Well, there's a hook," as if I needed a hook when the whole point was to get this back to being a monthly thing, and then...

And in the meantime as I'm getting new equipment and prevaricating the discs are piling up, bless them. And really, as you'll see, they've been of really high quality, which is always nice. So here's 34, reviewed and rated, and I've still got a pile to go, and I hope to get that done before the actual holiday itself, but I make no promises. Enjoy. 

Equipment: Playstation 3 (broken noisy fat model replaced by quieter skinny model) and OPPO BDP 83 the players, Panasonic Viera TC-P50S30 the display, Pioneer Elite VSX-817 AV the amp. 

3 Women (Criterion)

A pretty straightforward upgrade from the standard-def edition same extras) with a BIG uptick in image quality; Chuck Rosher’s cinematography here reaches the apogee of “impressionism” that most cinephiles with a minor in the ‘70s tend to associate with Vilmos Zsigmond; look at those aquas in the pool mural, etc. In its odd way this is one of Altman’s most perfectly realized films, that is, whatever it is, it’s exactly what he wanted to put across. My Lovely Wife: “It’s a very interesting film and I’m glad I watched it. I never want to have anything to do with it again.”— A+

The 10^th Victim (Blue Underground)

Elio Petri’s futuristic quasi-Marxist satire is no Death Lays An Egg, but it’s sharper and brighter and funnier than, say, The Running Man. You’ve heard of this, it’s the one where Ursula Andress wears a bra that shoots bullets, got pop-art sets, all that. It’s actually a good deal more substantive than its rep indicates, but the real news here is the transfer: So gorgeous, smooth, yet filmlike, And it’s a 1965 picture. Which somehow, to my mind, once again evokes the question of what the fuck is the deal with the Argento Blu-rays. One salient feature of the picture quality here is that there’s zero speckling in the whites, and there are a LOT of whites. — A

Le Beau Serge (Criterion)

Chabrol nuts (I’m one) are suitably gratified that Criterion is putting out this and Les Cousins (see below), the prolific, perverse maestro’s two opening features, a criss-crossing duo, thematically. This 1958 debut, in which frail city mouse Jean-Claude Brialy goes back to the provinces and reenters the life of his childhood buddy of the title, a dissolute and surly Gerard Blain, is deceptively simple and plain and very beautiful.   The Blu-ray image is impeccable; the winter-gray sky of the French village is so crisp it’s chilling. Very consistent throughout. The commentary by Guy Austin is informative albeit rather formal. —A+

Ben-Hur (Warner)

I understand the party line on big-studio sword and sandal and Jesus epics is that they stink because they’re all lifeless and such, and that the ones directed by one-time studio greats such as William Wyler stink even more because…well, I’m just not getting into all that again. As for me, I think my prior-stated sentiments of affection for the likes of Quo Vadis and even The Robe testify that I have a thing for this sort of stuff. And I do. And as Johnny LaRue would say, it’s not a gay thing, and even if it was, what business would it be of yours? I dunno, something about all that production value and the attendant/inadvertent cinematic inertia that result s in making sure it all gets on screen create in an atmosphere that I find perversely engaging. Also, I like Charlton Heston and I don’t care who knows it. This grand anniversary edition of the remake of the General Lew Wallace vision is a spectacular Blu-ray realization, for better and/or worse (check out the “swarthy” makeup on that Arab dude who yells “Roman pig” [no, he really does!] during the chariot race). Hence, that aforementioned atmosphere, perfectly transposed to home viewing. Hooray!— A+

Blue Velvet (MGM/UA)

It looks great, but given how many times I’ve seen this well-projected in a theater, I can’t say it’s revelatory. The big news here is the sole extra of note, almost an hour of deleted scenes, some of them so fully realized (scored and everything) that they must have come out fairly late in the post process. Good, weird, Lynchian stuff it is, too, and demonstrative in hindsight of what a resourceful recycler Lynch is: you see a lot of things that would go, in some form, into Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, those “Rabbit” sequences of his online videos and INLAND EMPIRE, and more. The odd thing, or really not so odd, is that you never get the impression that having these scenes in the film proper would have substantively improved it. (Admittedly the whole jettisoned subplot involving Jeffrey’s college girlfriend Louise IS pretty hilarious.) Great to see it though. — A+

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Paramount)

I’ve seen scads of prints of this, 16 mostly I suspect, and I’ve never seen it look down-and-out awful, but the brightness and detail of this rendering really is eye-popping and delivers a really great viewing experience. God DAMN Mickey Rooney is grating though.   —A+

Cape Fear (Universal)

Shot by Freddie Francis, production-designed by Henry Bumstead, directed by Martin Scorsese in an attempt of sorts at making a mainstream work (if not product), this comes across well on Blu-ray; the most salient feature for me is seeing Scorsese doing some of his signature camera moves and shock cuts with such slick surface material. This is maybe my least favorite Scorsese film; there’s something tense and unpleasant about it that has little to do with the tension and unpleasantness of the actual subject matter. Try as he might, Scorsese can’t quite key into the film’s “ordinary” characters, so he throws all manner of effects into his mix (image going to negative, etc), while simultaneously allowing DeNiro to turn his Max Cady into Freddie Krueger. By the end the whole thing seems like an exercise in masochism for pretty much everybody involved. There’s still striking stuff here, and the meagerly-appointed disc sports a first-rate image.—B+

Carlos (Criterion)

Vicissitudes of contemporary filmmaking: While director Olivier Assayas and cinematographers Yorick La Saux and Denis Lenoir shot this in 35, the U.S. theatrical run of this picture (a television mini-series originally), such as it was, never saw a 35 projection, and don’t quote me on this, but I don’t think there were a whole lot of 35 prints struck for the European market either. So the visual quality of your experience of this film (which, as you may have noticed, is one I’m pretty crazy about) is entirely reliant on the quality of its digitization, as it were. And the quality here is, as you might expect, first rate, as are the extras. It’s a common argument these days that the quality line between cinema and television is disappearing because Breaking Bad. There are corresponding (or is it concomitant? Or neither?) views that movies where there aren’t a lot of shots at Dutch angles aren’t “cinematic” because Some Dude™ doesn’t think The Descendants is all that. Sigh. I look at stuff such as Carlos, and at stuff like Fassbinder’s World on Wire (made for German television in the early ‘70s for heaven’s sake, and coming soon from Criterion) and think, well, hell; cinema is where you can find it. And Breaking Bad ain’t cinema. But that’s an argument for another time. This rules. —A+

Citizen Kane  (Warner)

This amazing rendition is not just the result of lessons learned about too much DNR application and such. Word on the street is that a new element was found, and given something along the lines of the Zhivago treatment. (See here.) The result is the most compulsively watchable version of the film imaginable, or close, I guess it depends on the limits of one’s imagination. What’s as impressive as what you see I what you don’t see—Welles’ old-age makeup for Kane doesn’t “pop” as makeup the way it did in the prior standard-def edition. One potential pitfall of the genius here is that you’re apt to start telling your spouse or roommate that you’re going to send him or her to Sing Sing, do you hear me, Sing Sing. —A+

The Collector (MGM)

Here’s a Wyler pic I’d be hard-pressed to accept any arguments against, although it is true that they don’t make ‘em like this anymore on any number of levels, so unusual is the balance between old school and new that it poises on (the year was 1965, and it was only Wyler’s second film after Ben-Hur). No way in hell they’d get away with the ending today, that’s for sure. This is a very handsome disc, solid…good hair detail on Samantha Eggar and better freckles! The film, or its making, is also the source for the cover of the Smiths’ 1984 single “What Difference Does It Make,” so, you know…—A

Les Cousins (Criterion)

Haven’t seen this puppy, Chabrol’s second feature, in maybe 40 years (I remember watching it as a kid on “Cinema 13,” my local PBS station’s invaluable film series) but it must’ve made a huge impression on me, as I remember the final shots almost exactly. Weird. Here the country-mouse/city mouse scenario is reversed, although Brialy and Blain play roles that both correspond to AND invert their roles in Chabrol’s first.  It’s great, it looks great, get it. The commentary here is licensed from the Australian issue of the film on the Madman label, and features Down Under quasi-tyro Adrian Martin, who really does sound almost exactly like whoever used to do the voiceover for the American Foster’s beer ads. At one point Martin translates the French title of Chabrol’s debut feature thusly:  “The Good Serge, The Good Lookin’ Serge, something like that.” Very funny. —A+

Despair (Olive)

Very solid, not a jawdropper, just consistently very good overall quality, no print damage, none of the soundtrack issues that have cropped up on prior Olive issues. I’m working on a longer piece about this interesting confluence of Fassbinder, Nabokov, Stoppard, Bogarde,Ferreol, et. al., so I won’t say much else here except that if you think you liked this movie back in the day, it’s worth another look; it seems even more interesting eccentrically multi-layered than it did back in the late ‘70s.  —A

Dumbo (Disney)

I’ve been waiting on this for Blu-ray for a long time and now I’ve got nothing to say about it. Just beautiful, everything I’d wanted it to be. I really wish the studio would reconsider Song of the South, not to mention putting some odder stuff—Three Caballeros, etc.—on to Blu-ray. And also uncensoring all the tobacco-based humor in the material. You can’t have everything. You SHOULD, however, have this. —A+

Fanny and Alexander (Criterion)

Whaddya know, another piece of cinema made for European TV. On the off chance that you know a lot of Bergman skeptics, I’d say this is the work of his that you’ll want to throw in their faces. It’s quintessentially Ingmar but by the same token so much more, well, well-rounded than the more severe (and to some, strained) Scenes From A Marriage. It’s also a film in which every frame seems more beautiful than the last, particularly in this thoroughly astonishing Blu-ray transfer. —A+

The Four Feathers (Criterion)

As adventure yarns go, this is hardly as rip-roaring as, say, Gunga Din; it’s a little more staid, a little heavier, which is one reason its rep is on the more subdued side. Still, it’s got its crackling bits, and the Blu-ray rendering is just beautiful. As opposed to Gone With The Wind, released the same year (1939), this is a study in the delicacy of Technicolor. Look at the blue of C. Aubrey Smith’s eyes. (There’s a sentence you’ve never read before, I bet.) Check out the wine glass, the pineapple in the early dinner scene. Whoa. —A

 Go West/Battling Butler (Kino)

Two very clean renderings of a couple of minor Buster Keaton classics, each one a great deal of fun. Like everything with Keaton attached to it, essential. —A

The Guns of Navarone (Sony)

Apparently restoring this was a real bear of a task, as materials were all over the place and originals of everything were, well, pretty much nonexistent. The resultant Blu-ray is of interestingly variant quality.  Skin tones are kind of all over the place relative to day/night scenes, and that goes whether shot with rear-projection or on location or not.  The storm at sea scene right after they kill all those poor Germans is a particular study in the malleability in appearance between effects shots and real-life stuntwork stuff. It’s all kind of fascinating, technically, if you look at it with an eye to that sort of thing. If you don’t, it’s still very satisfying in that old movie-movie fashion (the 5.1 surround soundtrack is mixed so as to sound appropriate to a 1961 film, if you follow me).—A

Identification of a Woman (Criterion)

The first shot-on-film feature Antonioni made in his native Italy in nearly two decades, 1982’s Identification is a bit of a puzzle film that, rather puzzlingly in and of itself, relates most directly to…well, Il Grido, if it had been made about an intellectual film director rather than a workingman. Visually, it’s got some striking stuff (not least of which is female co-lead Daniela Silverios), but, my friend John Powers’ booklet essay’s claims notwithstanding, it doesn’t hit, for me at least, the same highs as The Passenger, or Red Desert. Still. Seminal cinema in the highest home video format, it’s kinda like putting two and two together.  —A

 Island of Lost Souls (Criterion)

Awesome! The film itself is discussed by myself in some detail here. The Blu-ray presentation is quite impressive especially considering the picture is almost 80 years old. Where it really comes to life are in the darker scenes, those on the titular island, which itself seems plunged into what you’d call a Stygian absence of light. The varieties of shade and detail are fabulous. —A+

Jackie Brown (Miramax/Lionsgate)

A few months ago the missus expressed a desire to look at this, and I said, “Let’s wait for the Blu-ray.” A good idea, that. Very smooth, solid, punchy high-def presentation. And a terrific film, not just a high point for Tarantino but, along with Yates’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a kind of object lesson in how to transpose a first-rate genre novel to the screen. I could quibble about how not all of the extras are in 1080p, but what’s the point, beyond a docked notch? The play’s the thing, and this photoplay is quite the thing. Check it out. —A

Jurassic Park Ultimate Trilogy (Universal)

“I hate computers,” remember that thing that Sam Neill says at the beginning of the first picture?  Ha ha ha ha. Man, I’d forgotten how studio-generic a lot of the first one looked; Dean Cundey’s a solid pro, for sure, but man, this is workmanlike at the level of solid pro. And the opening: too much music, telegraphed thrills. For a groundbreaking picture, this is one of Spielberg’s weakest. The second one’s tighter and tauter and with less child-in-peril boredom, and a more distinctive look (thank you Mr. Kaminski) the third kicks out the jams with no waiting, paying homage to the B movies it was essentially inspired by, and which I myself still prefer. Not a bad looking (or sounding) set of Blu-rays though. — A-

Kuroneko (Criterion)

Certain critics/Asian cinema mavens aren’t all that crazy about this movie, and I can understand why; its stolid camera stylings aren’t exactly what you’d call cinematically distinctive. Still. It’s got spooky female corpses, black cats, evocative forest sets, and really fabulous atmospheric lighting for black-and-white, which this Blu-ray disc absolutely nails. Another study in atmosphere, then. —A 

Meek’s Cutoff (Oscilloscope)

Here’s the extent to which high-def television technology is trumping projection: I saw this for the first time in a Manhattan screening room and I actually found myself doing mental compensation for the image quality. That is, I just KNEW that what I was seeing was probably not as striking as what was supposed to be on screen. This wasn’t the first time I’d had this experience, and I actually know of at least one filmmaker who’s pulled a film from that room because they weren’t screening a particular picture at the correct resolution. In any event, the Blu-ray of this striking some-call-it-a-minimalist-Western makes the version I saw in that screening room look dingy and dishwaterish. This was one of the films cited by that Dan Kois character in his deplorable “cultural vegetables” piece; well, the brightness and the color values shown here make it a veritable VEGETABLE SALAD, there I did it please kill me now. But seriously, if you missed this in theaters and you’ve got the equipment, go this way as soon as possible. —A+

Meet Me In St. Louis (Warner)

A version of the immortal classic that we have always wanted. Very “filmlike,” down to the occasional feeling of softness; that is, not in terms of muddied or not-sharp detail, but rather the way a film feels when you’ve got that consciousness of light being thrown on the screen from some distance. Spectacular. —A+

Mutiny on the Bounty (Warner)

I’ve read some carping on this, that it ain’t 8K brilliant, or something. I was pretty sold on the version that was on the HD disc of the Milestone/Brando version way back in, when, 2007? So this, finally, would seem to be that version on a Blu-ray, and I’m still pretty sold on it. Vivid, colorful, never visually dull. The film itself a bit of another matter. Still, if you’re a fan of it, or of excellence in high-def generally, this is absolutely solid and worthwhile. —A

Mysterious Island (Twilight Time)

Ooh. A Cy Endfield picture! With Ray Harryhausen special effects! A sequel, of sorts, to 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, with Herbert Lom very apposite as Nemo. Boy, Gary Merrill looks TERRIBLE! In any event, once again the mavens at Twilight Time come through with a very entertaining package at a mildly unpopular price, presenting a studio semi-classic that the originating studio MIGHT get around to issuing on Blu-ray some time after the end of the world. The presentation itself is solid, with lots of what they call  “good grain” and the standard deviation when the stop-motion effects are optically printed on the live-action stuff. A first-rate presentation of an underrated picture. Love it. —A+

The Phantom Carriage (Criterion)

Super fucking awesome, a high-def version of what I believe was the transfer that was on foreign region disc, which I raved about back in 2008.  Original intertitles on this baby. Amazing detail through all the tints, no “digital” feel. It’s got that electronic KTL score and everything. Get this baby, confuse your friends; they’ll think they’re watching Murnau. And then, after discussing this confusion, you can all sit around and think about what other amazing stuff in cinema history has been lost, or languishes in canonical obscurity. Depressing. —A+

The Rules of the Game (Criterion)

A further upgrade of this staple of cinephilia, a picture which, I’ve been insisting since I was given a published platform on which to insist (around 1987, I think), is entirely accessible and pleasurable and watchable for anyone with eyes and a brain, cinephilic or not. While the disc is not the barn-burner that the Kane Blu-ray is, it’s damn fine. —A+

The Strange Case of Angelica (Cinema Guild)

This graceful and odd fantasy from 100-plus-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliviera is remarkable in both its vivaciousness and mournfulness, which is why it’s so, you know, odd. This is one of two recent Blu-rays from the adventurous firm The Cinema Guild, and I’m very positively impressed: the main feature looks great, beautiful pastel colors highlighted, overall a  lovely impressionistic palette presents itself.  No video noise, either. The special features, including a 1931 silent short from the director, are also uniformly excellent. Highly highly recommended. —A+

Strike! (Kino Lorber)

Eisenstein’s 1925 celebration of doing revolutionary stuff is a genuinely odd piece of cinema particularly in those juxtapositions that don’t quite constitute montage…you know what I mean, the animal identities of the provocateurs and all that. Also fascinating to look at are all the planes created in the shooting of the factory settings. Despite the, um, materialism of the subject matter, the vulgar vitality of its visual treatment yields to a kind of delirium; one can find a distinct influence from this film in Dreyer’s Vampyr, and that’s no accident on several levels. The Kino Lorber Blu is from a recent restoration and whole thing is so lovely it seems slightly churlish to complain about lack of original Russian intertitles. But still, woulda been nice. —A

Touch of Evil  (Eureka/Masters of Cinema, U.K. import, region B locked)

Talk about OPTIONS. Orson Welles’ 1958 beyond-noir masterwork was, like much of his other work, subjected to studio tampering, leaving its release version, um, compromised. A subsequent 1998 “reconstruction” from Welles’ notes yielded great satisfaction but of course also some controversy. And then there’s the bedeviling aspect ratio debate: is the film Academy ratio or 1.85, and just because Russell Metty made it 1.85 for Douglas Sirk doesn’t mean…and so on. So, in the spirit that animated Criterion’s wonderful omnibus edition of Welles’ Mr. Arkadin/Confidential Report, the MoC mavens give us FIVE versions of the film: the theatrical and reconstructed versions in your choice of 1.37 and 1.85 ratios, the “preview” version in 1.85. Four different audio commentaries are doles out over four versions. Transfer quality is superb throughout. Magnificent, a strong, credible candidate for Blu-ray of the year. —A+

Winnie the Pooh (Disney)

One of the too-unsung films of 2011, a really outstanding expansion/appreciation of the design and animation styles of the Disney Pooh adaptations of the ‘60s. The Blu-ray is about as beautiful and crisp as the film itself, which is to say, very.—A+

 Zombie (Blue Underground)

Quite a few of the Blue Underground Blu-rays have revealed values that we might not have appreciated on the first go-round of the films thus treated. For instance, the fabulous cinematography of The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue, yclept Let Sleeping Corpses Lie. Or the fact that New York Ripper, while pernicious exploitative garbage, had at one point been, and was now once more, pernicious exploitative garbage in focus! Etc. Alas, this long-awaited high-def digitalization of Lucio Fulci’s walking-dead, erm, classic, offers nothing like that in terms of revelation. Don’t get me wrong, it looks good, it mostly looks REALLY good, and Lord knows its set pieces—underwater zombie attacks topless girl, but is in turn attacked by a shark, who he then BITES! Jagged oversize splinter pierces unpleasant woman’s eyeball! Zombies walk across the Brooklyn Bridge!—still pack a punch. But it remains Zombie on Blu-ray, nothing more, nothing less. Worth noting is the pretty amusing 5.1 sound mix, the pans and reverbs of which are something like the aural equivalent of Italian horror cinema’s overuse of the zoom lens. As with that visual tic, it’s something you eventually get to like.  —A-

The law, part two

All due respect to Christine Smallwood, whose work I had never encountered before reading her booklet essay for the new and essential Criterion Collection edition of Erle C. Kenton's 1932 Island of Lost Souls, but her approach to the material at hand strikes me as a trifle...tentative. 

I can't completely hold her at fault for stating, more or less at the outset, that Island of Lost Souls "no longer has the power to shock." We do, after all, live in a world of Hostels and Saws and Human Centipedes and one Saló, blah blah blah blah blah. But I don't know. Bestiality films have yet to go mainstream, and this picture's plot, such as it is, hinges in part on a scheme to get a human guy to mate with an, ahem, "Panther Woman," that is, a woman who's actually somehow been surgically transposed into womanhood from pantherdom, not, as in certain Cat Peoples, a woman who shifts back and forth between feline and human forms depending on whether or not she's had sex. So, you know, that's kind of shocking, when you bother to think about it. Smallwood backtracks a bit and finds herself on more solid ground a little further into the piece: "[...]there is something striking and unusually fresh about Island of Lost Souls' sadism. We've seen and heard a lot of gross and weird stuff on-screen in the past eighty years, but I'm not sure any of it is significantly weirder or grosser than this." True, that, and holy crap, the movie really is almost 80 years old, isn't it? One reason its freakishly bizarre content still registers as strongly as it does is that it's got a real old-school ethos—call it Pre-Code, call it B-picture—in that the 70-minute picture throws you into its outré fray almost right off the bat: Boy gets rescued from sunken ship, boy unwisely picks fight with drunken captain, captain drops boy off on island ruled by mad scientist caught up in lunatic experiments to make men from animals, and trouble ensues. It certainly helps that the boy is stolid and conventionally macho Richard Arlen, whose mode hasn't dated as much as that of the likes of the somewhat more delicate David Manners, who starred in some somewhat similarly bizarre '30s horrors (okay, one, Ulmer's The Black Cat; but he was also in more standard classic horror fare, you know, Dracula and The Mummy).

What makes the film indelible from that point on is the entirely convincing "atmosphere of total perdition" (Robert Benayoun's immortal phrase) in which it is steeped. Witness the white-suited Moreau (a cunning performance by Charles Laughton that's also, for the most part, one of his most oddly understated) prevailing over these beast-men with an ethos he has no actual stock in (and that's apparently lifted from some Kipling), said ethos being repeated by a stentorian authority figure with an inexplicable Hungarian accent. The aforementioned alluring "Panther Woman" (Kathleen Burke), ideal in every particular, except for her killer instinct and, of course, the troublesome "beast flesh" that ever "comes creeping back." Is this the first film in which the natives are described as "restless tonight?" In any event, when future cinephiles of my generation were first exposed to this once-banned picture on late-night or even early afternoon television, the feeling was that we were entering a different world, not one boldly and imaginatively dangerous like the one in King Kong, but one considerably creepier and slimier, a world that could conceivably change and corrupt us. 

That was the feeling. After basking in that world again via the wonderful Criterion Blu-ray of the film, I looked for critical buttresses for the feeling and was a little surprised not to find much of use in my library. Trusty Carlos Clarens, in his seminal An Illustrated History of Horror and Science Fiction Films, more or less shrugs off the film, insisting that it "seldom convinces" before allowing that it "never bores." I am hard-pressed to find a reference to the film at all in my similarly trusty anthology of surrealist film criticism, the Paul-Hammond-edited The Shadow and its Shadow, which collects the also-seminal Benayoun essay "Zaroff, or, The Prosperities of Vice" from which the aforementioned phrase originated. (Erle C. Kenton is also excluded from the list of recommended directors in "Some Surrealist Advice," a rather parochial oversight given the accidentally surreal 1945 House of Dracula, but what are you going to do?) Where was I going to find a print confrere on this vital issue? Well, of course, in my old friend Michael Weldon's quite-unfortunately-out-of-print Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, which entry on Island reads, in part, "It was banned in England for years. H.G. Wells, who wrote the novel it was based on, condemned it as being vulgar. It's also probably the best horror film ever made." Is it only on viewers of my own generation that the film has such a grip? Weldon's pal and Cleveland music scene contemporary David Thomas, at the time known as Crocus Behemoth (among other things) evoked the Lost Souls in the Pere Ubu song "Heart of Darkness." Around the same time, closer to Akron, Devo was incorporating the Sayer of the Law's refrain "Are we not men?" into its mordantly comic musical theory of de-evolution. We laugh noe, but it's worth recalling that a large part of the impetus for Devo's formation was the Kent State massacre. The unwitting ambivalence with which the film views both the beast-men and their creator/authority figure is, I think, another large component of its queasy power, a component that was not as readily visible to Clarens and Ado Kyrou or Robert Benayoun as it might have been to an American kid growing up in the '60s. I don't, by any stretch of the imagination, intend to reduce Lost Souls to some sort of sociological tract avant le lettre. But in certain contexts you don't need to stretch all that much to make certain connection. In any event, I am delighted to be revisiting the film (have I mentioned enough how splendid the Criterion edition it?) and am slightly curious to see what kind of reception it elicits from the cool and badass of today. Or not. 

Blu-ray Consumer Guide: September 2011

Call me paranoid, but I was beginning to get a little apprehensive of a "is this a blog about movies, or a blog about slagging movie critics?" backlash, so I figured maybe I ought to snap to it with respect to getting this puppy posted. Et voila. Enjoy. Equipment: Playstation 3 console and Oppo BDP 83 were the players, Panasonic Viera TC-P50S30 the display, Pioneer Elite VSX-817 AV the amp.

UPDATE: A Note On Grades

"What are the grades for?" asks Some Dude on Twitter™. "Movie or transfer or both? It would be much more helpful if you grade them separately, IMO." Like I'm doing this to be "helpful." (Hey, wait a minute—why am I doing this?) I thought I had explained this in a prior column, but it looks like I didn't. The grades I assign represent my assessment of the film's presentation as a Blu-ray disc. Obviously in my capsules I'll get into my opinions/observations on the film itself, but given my inclinations and the demands on my time, it's pretty likely that I'm only gonna look at Blu-rays of films I already have some kind of interest in. Obviously (or maybe not) my interest in something like Cobra is more along the lines of a cinema-historical artifact rather than as something I personally enjoy/cherish, but you get the idea.It always used to drive me nuts, when I was running the "Home Guide" at Premiere, when writers would try to use a DVD assignment as a pretext to "craft" their own "review" of a film itself, and not treat the commodity in hand, that is, the tape or the DVD or the Blu-ray. And I believe this philosophy informs how I create this column. So there you have it. See also here. Although entertaining as the prose is it doesn't really serve as much of an analogy to what's going on here. And thank you for your support.

 

The Battle of Algiers (Criterion)

Not much to report here: what was an exemplary package in SD has been transposed to high-definition perfectly. For some reason there are times I get off even more on a high-def rendition of something with this kind of pictorial and celluloid roughness. Which is not to say that I cheer when that bomb goes off in the café, in case you were worried about my moral state. —A+

The Big Lebowski (Universal)

A lot of the times this looks just jake, and I get off on the ultra-sheen of the bowling alley scenes and dreams, but in certain night scenes the DNR is too much and it’s a drag. Not fatal, but lousy, and in particular really obvious and obtrusive in the faces of The Dude and Walter during the drive-to-drop-the-ransom-money scene. A disappointment, then. I know the Coens are kind of disdainful of certain aspect of home vid tech wonkiness, but they might have thought to raise their voices here. Still. It’s Lebowski in high-def, what are you gonna do? Boycott? I mean, it’s a thought, but still. —B-

Cobra (Warner)

Wait, wasn’t Sylvester Stallone the biggest movie star in the world at the time this film was made? Then how come this looks about as slick as a William Lustig picture of the time? So grainy it’s grimy, which is at least kind of apropos, given it’s a picture that its contemporary critics deemed as “unimaginably degraded” (David Denby!) and “the foulest, greediest, most anti-American movie in ages” (my pal John Powers!). Oh, and wait, here’s the explanation: it’s a co-production of Warner and…Golan/Globus! Seen with a quarter century’s hindsight, it plays less like a Dirty Harry ante-upping than a failed Stallone grindhouse condescension. Still, poor director George P. Cosmatos brings his outsider’s competence and ESL straight face to the proceedings, which give this thing its own, um, integrity. Moronic integrity. Particularly risible are the script’s attempts at “ironic” humor, as when Stallone’s character “kids” a “goofy” sidekick: “You know what the trouble with you is? You’re too violent.” Oh, the hilarity. The movie also gets bonus points for casting Andy Robinson as a police department bigwig. It’s a good transfer, but I can only recommend as a library addition to those who enjoy confounding their friends with displays of cinematic perversity. —B

Coeur Fidèle (Eureka!/MOC U.K. import, Region B locked)

Like Feuillade, Jean Epstein doesn’t get enough respect. Although at this late stage in the game, what would he DO with it if he got it, right? The French director’s remarkable 1923 romance is precisely NOT the sort of thing that gets trotted out in garden-variety film appreciation courses and so on, and it’s in this particular respect (among many others, but bear with me for a second) that outfits such as Masters of Cinema do such important work, work that really deserves/earns the cinema lover’s support. In terms of imagery and what we can project as its influence, this film is a MAJOR revelation, and its sheer physical beauty—you can almost literally see the silver nitrate shining in every beautifully digitalized frame—is reason enough to own it. —A+

The Complete Jean Vigo (Criterion)

Regular readers of this blog may recall my telling of my childhood love for Vigo, and how the P. Salles Gomes biography of the man was the first film book I ever bought. I remember when I was ten having found a listing for a screening of Zero For Conduct at some local library and begging my dad to take me to see it and then crying like a baby when they didn’t show the film because the print never showed or was too damaged, and they screened some fucking French doc about wheat fields (or something) instead. So you can maybe imagine my exhilaration at the fact that now the compete oeuvre exists on one handy-dandy high-def disc. The thing is, after watching the work itself, I realize it’s not really all it’s cracked up to be…Nah, just kidding. Seriously, this is amazing.  To think that 40 years ago these films were nearly impossible to see at all, particularly in gorgeous or even watchable versions. And here they are. Almost enough to make one a kind of optimist.  —A+

Cross of Iron (Optimum U.K. import, Region B locked)

This widely misunderstood late Peckinpah was potent bait for critics who wanted to pursue the Bloody-Sam-is-a-fascist theme, because, you know, this picture features sympathetic treatments of German soldiers during World War II! It’s PRO NAZI! Of course it’s not, and in fact it’s so antiwar it’s practically pacifist, except of course it’s violent as hell. It’s also got moments that are strangely enervated, and Peckinpah’s really at his most Captain Obvious a lot of the time (that poor kid!), but, still. Never not watchable and often moving in spite of itself, it’s in a way less of a problem piece than Straw Dogs. And this disc looks damn good, WAY better than any video version I’ve seen retaining a gritty but autumnal palette. The digitalization involved in the transfer/restoration, however, does make itself plain in some of the foggier scenes, where the mist has a distinctly unfilmlike (but not disgracefully artificial-looking) quality to it. —B+

Damnation Alley (Shout Factory)

I was always fascinated by this picture merely by dint of the fact that in ten short years, Dominique Sanda had gone from debuting as a suicidal beauty for discoverer-of-non-actors Robert Bresson in Une femme douce to costarring with George Peppard and Jan Michael Vincent in this, un film de Jack Smight. Other Bresson stars that opted to remain in the film biz had even more bizarre career arcs, but Sanda’s was the most publicly conspicuous for a while. Of course this picture boasts other cult charms, including sorta-painted-in pink/green horizons, or, as a title card puts it, “skies lurid and angry.” Another way you can tell it’s after the apocalypse in the film is the way the synths take over the music score. It’s that kinda movie. And it’s brought to digital life very nicely, and with a lot of extras, in this edition. Of course you understand that the attached letter grade best applies if you Like This Sort Of Thing.—A-

Dead Man (Miramax/Echo Bridge)

I was all set to make this film a kind of object lesson in the difference between black-and-white films in the post-color 20^th century and black-and-white films in the period when such was the norm (c.f. the below-reviewed Orpheus) and discuss the sharp, detailed picture with a more smoothed-out gray scale when I encountered a nasty digital glitch only a minute or so into the movie. As you will see in the illustration, a snapshot of my display. At which point I went and exchanged the disc, and got a second disc that had the same glitch at the same point. Which leads me to suspect that glitch is on the master, and that someone at Echo Bridge isn’t doing his or her job. I’m looking into the matter but in the meantime I certainly can’t recommend.—D+

Dressed to Kill (MGM/UA)

Really looks pretty great overall; as someone who saw this thing in theaters one or two times too many when it was first released, I can attest that the sometimes creamy, sometimes grainy look is pretty much what we got back then, and that it’s entirely appropriate to the material at all times. The sole extra of note, the brilliantly titled doc “The Making of a Thriller,” is not in HD. But it hardly matters; this can be acquired at very good prices on line and elsewhere and if you’re a fan of the film (and why not? It’s got some bravura moviemaking in it!) it definitely warrants a place in your library.—A

Essential Killing (Artificial Eye U.K. import, Region B locked, region free)

Excellent image, from the desert caves of the opening to the blue/white snow of deepest Europe in winter where most of the rest of the film. Jerzy Skolimowski’s latest film is a tough, terse, blunt but not unempathetic thing; a small-scaled masterpiece of such grabbing immediacy that it’s practically a sin that it’s gotten next to nothing with respect to U.S. distribution at the time of this writing. Of course it helps if you can forget that the lead actor is Vincent Gallo. Who’s quite good actually, but still Vincent Gallo. Given this Blu-ray is the best way you can see the film as of this point, I feel like maybe you ought to. See it this way, I mean. If you’ve got a region-free Blu-ray player. (Correction: initially flagged it as region-locked, it will in fact play on any Blu-ray player worldwide.)—A

The Exterminator (Synapse)

The commentary track for the digitization of this grindhouse classic begins with producer/director James Glickenhaus trashing the film’s reviewers,  so you know it’s gonna be good. Overall this is a very solid presentation of a very visually flat film. A terrific test case for the not-quite eternal question “is this Blu-ray really necessary?” My answer: Why the hell not. Scummy criminals, senseless mayhem, Christopher George, and dialogue along the lines of , well actually what follows is a precise quote: “That ‘nigger’ was my best friend, you motherfucker.” Awesome. Later, during an outdoor cabaret scene, Glickenhaus notes, “Here’s old Stan Getz, that’s pretty neat.” He then complains that critics didn’t “get” that this was a Getz cameo and then, barely pausing for breath, allows that the Getz bit is “a throwaway.” Told you it was a good commentary. The Getz factor also makes it an exemplary half for a double feature with the new Warner Archive issue of Get Yourself A College Girl. —A

Fast Times At Ridgemont High (Universal)

Ohmigod the ugly mall lighting! You can tell it’s meant to be ugly mall lighting because the sun-lit scenes—oh, and you know which one I mean, really—are beautiful and dappled and have good, um, reds and, um, flesh tones, and all that. Seriously, overall a good sharp image for a generally foursquare visual piece (ah those reverse-angled cafeteria setups with the shallow focus…) . Movie’s still real good for the most part, practically a classic. Is it too old for “the new canon” or whatever the heck it is? —A

The Funhouse (Arrow U.K. Import, region-free)

Ah, an early work from blockbuster producer Mace Neufeld! And hey, remember Elizabeth Berridge? Boy, that’s cute, barely ten-year-old baby brother accosting his absolutely not-faking-it naked sister in the shower with a plastic dagger in the shower. Boy, the stuff you could get away with in the ‘80s. I took this Tobe Hooper item as a sample of Texas Chainsaw lite when I saw it in its 1981 theatrical release, and I haven’t thought of it since, but watching it recently in this stellar Arrow presentation gave me a real “they don’t make ‘em like that anymore” feeling. While not as depraved as corresponding Euro fare, it’s genuinely nasty rather than winkingly nasty, and kinda casually so, which makes a big difference. And here Tobe’s got a budget, and a crane, and anamorphic lenses, and he tries (and fails) to replicate the effect of that simple but killer under-the-porch-swing tracking shot from TCM. Like I said, he doesn’t, but it’s still a handsome little piece of work, about 39 minutes in, and the transfer is so specific you can track the focus anomalies created by the anamorphic lens in tandem with the moving camera. Whoo, and additionally, hoo. In other telling-detail related moments, the line of spittle hanging from lip of  that guy’s Frankenstein mask. Disgusting, and rightfully so. —A+

Orpheus (Criterion)

Very, very nice. Aside from being, you know, a classic and transportive film (eat it, ’49!)  this is a beautifully presented pertinent example of film texture of a certain age. The black-and-white textures have a kind of plastic solidity that the film stock of Dead Man simply doesn’t recreate, and here of course it’s combined with light and décor and makeup and effects creating this seductive but admittedly now anachronistic (by a certain perspective, at least) artificiality. Amaze your friends! Or at least the friends who might not find it boring. I’m sure you can divert one or two be directing them to the shot here that was used as a Smiths single cover shot. —A+

Paul (Universal)

Full disclosure: I’m friendly with this film’s director, Greg Mottola, and cordially acquainted with one of its costars. So, you know, take my endorsement of this film as a knowing, lively, albeit, yes, kind of vulgar delight with whatever grain of salt you believe the above knowledge requires of you. In a bit of inside knowledge that’s likely to be no surprise to anyone, Greg found the post-production process, wherein an entirely visually digital alien had to be seamlessly blended into the action, a hugely challenging part of the filmmaking process, and I think it was pulled off beautifully and it looks great in the digital high-def realm too. As digital is now an integral part of the process, the other good news here is that the film looks very much like it did in its theatrical presentation, which is very crisp and colorful. The real locations of the American West were clearly shot with a lot of love and appreciation. Lovely. —A

Pigs and Battleships/Stolen Desire (Eureka!/MOC U.K. import, Region B locked)

Whoa. This double dose of early Imamura is a pretty damn near flawless. The stunning, roiling 1961 Pigs and Battleships is the star of this set (Stolen Desire, the maestro’s debut feature, is very solid but comparatively constrained).  Some occasional print damage appears but overall it’s an incredibly stunning widescreen black-and-white image. The film is replete with amazing shots of long duration, such as an overhead crane following the film’s heroine walking with a group of friends while feckless hero Kinta follows parallel and eavesdrops on their conversation unseen from the other side of a fence. And of course the climax…well, seriously, a must-own, and another argument why an investment in a region-free Blu player would be worth it JUST for the sake of Eureka!/MOC releases in the format. —A+

Scarface (Universal)

Goddamn this is shiny, in that too shiny way that people complain about. No, it is NOT the best-looking version of the DePalma film ever. The DNR takes the sweat on the faces of the boatlift people and glues it to them so that they look like wax figures. If that’s your idea of enhancement, you’re welcome to it. Plus there are a lot of artifacts. Haloes,  black edges shimmers, all that kind of stuff. I usually go easy on taking issue with other people’s perceptions, but seriously, if you can’t see the problems here I worry you might not have eyes. On the plus side, the compression is well done overall. (See the bonfires in the riot scenes early on, if you can tear your eyes away from the hilarious evidence that DePalma is the most ineffectual director of extras EVER.) I don’t know if it’s a matter of one being able to get used to anything, or what, but the aforementioned problems diffuse, or at least are easier to take, as the film goes on. It winds up watchable. And it could have—should have—been more than that. —B-

Straw Dogs (MGM/UA)

This is one visually WEIRD film, right from the get go, where the children playing around the stone church look to be shot in forced perspective, so the buildings almost seem to be being dwarfed by them. And on it goes. Gray, gray gray. And then that dull, almost moon-like, autumnal sun. And then the ultra-violent climax, shot almost entirely in near dark, Peckinpah and cinematographer John Coquillon really pushing the film stock.  Really, it’s almost as daring visually as it is, um, thematically, and a lot more successfully so too. This Blu-ray is not blow-you-away sharp, but very solid. And a real representation of what the filmmakers GOT, for better of worse, tons of grain and all.—A

 

The Superman Movie Collection (Warner)

A pretty awesome one-stop-shopping package of sorts, featuring superb HD renderings of the Salkind films, the Singer reboot, etc.  The authenticity proof is in the pudding: you get more of the flushed ‘80s flesh tones I’ve been noticing on Blu-rays of films from that period on Lester’s Superman II. And dishy commentaries. Featuring odd semi-Zen pronouncements such as “This is the sort of thing that is funny, but at the same time not funny.” Rather irritating, though, that many of the generous and well-chosen extras, such as the Fleischer Supes cartoons, are NOT presented in HD. Grrr. They still look pretty good though. Still. Grrr. —B+

Tenebre (Arrow)

What is UP with this? Really. While the Arrow Blus of Inferno and Crystal Plumage Phenomena looked super terrific (correction; the Plumage to get is the U.S. Blue Underground issue, which goes against the Storaro Directive and presents the image in full 2.35), this, Four Flies, and in part Deep Red have these grain/speckling issues that detract severely from one’s enjoyment of the Argento baroque. One actually thinks of Jeffrey Wells’ mythical mosquitoes, if they had all flown through a shower of white paint prior to showing up on screen. My old Japanese laser disc had a solider grain structure than this. As with Dead Man, this is a case that requires further research that I might need a while to successfully conclude. In the meantime:—C

Vera Cruz (MGM/UA)

The title type at the beginning shows the film’s age in the way that it will (the picture was produced in 1954), as in those reds are a little blurred in the saturation, to coin a phrase. Soon things settle in nicely. Enjoy the unusual 2.00 aspect ratio. It’s a bright clean picture albeit with what seems a lot of sharpness variation with respect to long shots versus medium close-ups, but not QUITE as dramatic as what you’ll see in The Big Country, reviewed last month. A lot of variation from long shot to medium closeup. Really nice overall. Neat film, too. A Western with mismatched protagonists that’s also kind of a road movie and/or chamber drama in disguise, featuring double crosses galore. Quintessential Aldrich, in its way—pessimistic but simultaneously filled with a near-perverse good cheer. Highly recommended. —A

The Ward (Arc Entertainment)

Answer the question, John Carpenter: Did you shoot this anamorphically, for real? Alas, the maestro does not answer the question in his amiable, casual (but not quite as gonzo as the stuff he used to output with his old buddy Kurt Russell) commentary for this disc, which has male star Jared Harris sitting in with the director. This admirably crafted comeback film from Carpenter gets a very solid Blu-ray rendering, looking, as so many contemporary high-def discs do, like a chip off the old digital intermediary.  The diffusion of the light in the final shot of the shower sequence is one of the dead giveaways that this ain’t the summer of celluloid no more, but as J.C. says on that audio track, albeit in another context, “You can’t worry about older movies.” If you liked this picture—and I did—this is worth your time. —A-

Went the Day Well? (Optimum, region-B locked U.K. import)

I have an elaborate theory about how this sort-of alternate history fantasy of Britain in World War II is both a refutation AND a confirmation of all the snarly things Godard said about British wartime film in his Histoires, but I guess this isn’t the place for that. So I’ll just say that this crackling Cavalcanti piece, from a Graham Greene story, still works like mad as a yarn and a thriller, and looks great here. Good grain, a minimally scratched source, a particularly rich gray scale. A transfer from the 2010 restoration, one presumes. Not much in terms of extras, e.g., a BBC Radio 3 audio essay on the film. If you know the film, you know you want it. If you only know its legend, well, I bet you won’t be disappointed if you make the investment. —A

Win/Win (Fox)

Strong image, again probably straight from the digital inter; good detail, and again, not very FILMIC. On the very plus side, the dark parts of the image (and many of the film’s scenes take place in dimly lit living rooms and such, it’s that kind of cinematic entertainment) have no noise. As in, none. So if you like your indie comedy-dramas very clean at home, this is the way to go. Seriously, I found this one of the better films of its ilk this year, so I’m glad to have this version. —A

Women In Cages Collection (Shout! Factory)

Ooh, three Roger-Corman-produced women-in-prison films from the ‘70s in one convenient package. Which to watch first? Well, as helpful Roger points out, “Playing the ‘new fish’ in prison [in The Big Bird Cage] is the gorgeous Anitra Ford of The Price Is Right.” “New fish,” that’s classic. What we learn from watching Big Doll House and Big Bird Cage is that Jack Hill was pretty much Corman’s answer to Edgar G. Ulmer. Great basic but hardly unstylish or unstylized filmmaking in cheap-ass settings and situations. Gets pretty exciting in the outdoors, too. Hill’s commentary notes how Coppola destroyed some of the beautiful Bird Cage Philippines locations for Apocalypse Now, and Jack sounds a little ticked off about it. The third film, Women in Cages, is not directed by Hill, and looks the crappiest of the three, has sound sync problems, etc. As a result though it conveys something like a more AUTHENTIC 42^nd Street feel, again, if you Like That Sort Of Thing.—A

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Kino Lorber)

A quite gorgeous, warmly colored rendering of a rather…well, meh film. Something you could probably watch with your mom, except for Sophia Loren’s striptease scene, ay caramba. So watch Sunflower with your mom instead, and save this for a cold lonely winter night or something. —B

NEXT MONTH: Kane! Ben-Hur! Dumbo! Chabrol! Eisenstein! Edwards! Keaton! Altman! And more! It's gonna be legendary!

Ron Jeremy on Brian DePalma's "Dressed To Kill"

Ron Jeremy and I, some of you may be delighted to learn, go back a long way. Although maybe that's not the right way to put it, because that implies that Ron Jeremy and I have an ongoing relationship, which is not the case. I met Mr. Jeremy, who was then being introduced to people by his non-stage name, that is, Ron Hyatt, pretty much 31 years ago to the very day that I'm writing this, coincidentally enough. I had taken a two-week job as a production assistant on an "adult film" then entitled The Family Jewels, which would be released as A Girl's Best Friend. These were in the waning years of porno chic, when a good deal of production was still done out here in New York, and a large percentage of the "talent" "pool" subsisted of actual actors or at the very least trained performers who weren't quite making it in what Variety may still call "legit." Video had not yet rolled over celluloid, and Jewels, which was directed by the late Henri Pachard (Ron Sullivan) was in fact being shot on Panaflex cameras and the whole crew was a bunch of jaded moonlighting pros who had some time off from their regular gigs doing segment work for That's Incredible or some such series. When I got the job (the circumstances of which getting will be available for your reading pleasure in my memoir My Life In Pornography, provided I ever complete and/or sell the damn thing) I was informed that my P.A. work would not have me around during any sex scenes, which were supposedly shot on a "closed set;" some time later, during what I recall as being one of the hottest post-Labor-Day weeks I'd ever experienced, as I crouched behind a large potted plant, my hand poised above the switch of an electric fan that I was to turn on between takes as Mr. Jeremy and a performer nicknamed "The Singing Cocksucker" attempted a form of sexual congress, that promise seemed a distant memory. Anyway. 

Back in 1980 Mr. Jeremy was even more peculiarly delusional than he is depicted in the strangely poignant 2001 documentary Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy—albeit, perhaps, with better reason. A buff and boisterous 27 years of age, he was crowing to whoever would listen that he had just acquired his SAG card, and also completed some extra work in the new Woody Allen picture, which, as was even then the case with Woody Allen pictures, was as yet untitled. (My calculations put it as Stardust Memories, and I don't believe Ron made the final cut.) Because porno chic really still was a thing, and because of what was being perceived as the "new" or "newish" permissiveness in mainstream film, Ron believed that the porn thing would soon no longer be a stigma and that he'd be able to make a relatively painless and strain-free entry into the Hollywood firmament. I remember him waxing particularly eloquent on this topic with then-Playboy-writer David Rensin, who was visiting the set for an article and who sat around quietly dictating his notes into a mini-cassette recorder. Ron, I remember, had just done a threesome scene with two blondes that had sufficiently discombobulated him that he emerged from the bedroom set with his Fruit of the Loom briefs on inside-out. Warming to his topic, Jeremy ultimately decried the hypocrisy of the ratings system. "Did you see Dressed to Kill?" he asked Rensin. Of course he had; we'd all seen DePalma's Dressed to Kill, which had been released earlier that summer and was something of a succès de scandale. (Hey, look, I did the accent grave!!) I think I had seen it two or three times, 'cause me and my boys were big DePalma fans. Ron wasn't quite so sanguine about the picture. "I can't believe they gave that picture an R! It's total bullshit! I mean, come on. That shower scene in the beginning? I saw that finger go up there, you can't fool me. And they call US perverts."

Ron was referring of course, to the film's notorious opening shower-rape-fantasy scene, in which Angie Dickinson and, alternately, her nude double Penthouse Pet Victoria Lynn (and boy did Penthouse make hay out of THAT connection, if I recall correctly) are violently taken by an unknown hunky assailant. It was Mr. Jeremy's contention that the sex play in that scene indeed crossed the line into "hardcore," e.g., "penetration" and was getting away with something. Mr. Jeremy's subsequent public pronouncements, inasmuch as I've followed them, have not infrequently taken a similar why's-everybody-always-picking-on-me-when-somebody-else-is-doing-worse-stuff tone.

I bring this up because I think about Ron Jeremy all the time, and I can't stop doing so. No. I bring this up because I've been looking at the brand-spanking-new Blu-ray disc of Dressed to Kill—the unrated version, yet!—and so of course with all the enhanced detail and stuff I thought, "I wonder if Ron Jeremy was right?" As it happens, no, I think not. But since I don't have the capacity to get Blu-ray captures off of my computer, and since, you know, I don't run a PORN WEBSITE, I'm not gonna run the frames to prove it. So take my word for it. I think Mr. Jeremy may have been a little confused; there's a shot near the end of the fantasy scene in which the attacker lifts Dickinson and/or Lynn by hoisting her up from the, um, groin area; the attacker's naked thigh is visible in the shot, and the whole thing goes by sufficiently quickly that the impression of penetration—not so much in a sexual sense, but the same sense of that bit with the meathook in the first slaughter sequence of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—is relatively strong. And that, as they say, is the Magic of Filmmaking Illusion! Whoop-dee-doo! I'll be rating the Blu-ray in the upcoming Blu-ray Consumer Guide, which, God willing, will be up before September's out, but I'll say here that I'm pretty happy with its look, which is VERY in keeping with what I recall of its theatrical appearance (and as I mentioned, I saw it more than once!), and I'm actually enjoying the film quite a bit, its idiocies of dialogue and plotting and its hysterical incidental racism notwithstanding. "Yeah, but what a kid!"

Blu-ray Consumer Guide: August 2011

Damn, got it in just under the wire. Man, I don't know how Christgau did it, month after month, for so many years. Fewer titles this month and probably fewer next month, if I'm gonna keep this up month to month. We'll see. In any event, enjoy. Equipment: Playstation 3 console and Oppo BDP 83 were the players, Panasonic Viera TC-P50S30 the display, Pioneer Elite VSX-817 AV the amp.

L’Age d’Or/Un Chien Andalou (BFI U.K. import, Region B locked)

It’s kind of odd that these two still-galvanic classics of surrealism in cinema are now by and large, as far as I can tell, perceived as objects for study rather than, you know, “real” movies; for me they’re still aesthetic touchstones and Age in particular a great hoot. So of course I was looking forward to this package with GREAT anticipation and I was not disappointed. Age looks largely great, although its restoration does show off its rough edges; startling and innovative as it is, it’s not the most consistently technically proficient film in spots (it’s worth remembering that it is, in a sense, almost an underground film). On the other hand, some crucial sequences (the ball scene) authentically/convincingly reproduce studio artifice and work, pastiche-wise, precisely as must have been intended. Cinema doesn’t get more essential than this, and I’ve never seen better presentations of either film. —A+

 Animal House (Universal)

A different kind of essential cinema, to be sure, but in a certain sense not that different. Among other things, this is a genuinely impolite and impolitic movie; its rather authentic-seeming mean-spiritedness (only slightly ameliorated by the cutesy “where-they-are-now” coda—which in itself isn’t all that cutesy in the larger scheme of such things) puts the sentimentality of most contemporary “edgy” comedies in what they call bold relief. Never the most visually beautiful of motion picture experience, it looks just fine here, although on certain of the picture settings of my new plasma display, the flesh tones look a little flushed. Hard to say if this is a function of the transfer or actually has to do with the cinematography/film stock but I’d actually guess the latter. This doesn’t look like it’s been screwed-around with digitally all that much. Nifty. —A

Battle Beyond The Stars (Shout Factory)

This rendering of Roger Corman’s biggest-budgeted production is both handsome and dinky! The cheap entertainment value extends to the cheesy effects and the 1980 haircuts and so much more. Even if you’re not a student of Corman practices, the solid, Seven-Samurai-derived story and snappy direction make this good popcorny fare, and the materials are clean and very nicely digitized. The set and lighting design presents an object lesson in how blue and green gels make everything look cooler and more “futuristic,” and these refracted hues come across with no video noise or nothing. The Shout! Factory Blus of the “Roger Corman Presents” series are, admittedly, a bit on the pricey side, but with respect to quality they do deliver. You’re gonna see more and more of this as Blu-ray grows even more long-tail in its market appeal, alas. —A

Beauty and the Beast (Criterion)

One of the reasons Criterion are the good guys of home video is their habit of updating already-released editions of their library when better materials/transfers arise. This Blu-ray represents the company’s third version of Cocteau’s ever-amazing 1946 picture, as exemplary and transportive and haunting a filmed fairy tale as ever was, and it is entirely remarkable and beautiful. It is, for all intents and purposes, merely a high-def upgrade of the second edition that was released in standard def in 2003, but the boost in detail is noticeable, and regardless of what you think of the Phillip Glass opera offered as an alternate soundtrack (it was written to sync up to the film, and FYI, I quite enjoy it), the 5.1 surround on that puppy is just exquisite. Overall, beautiful, a really wonderful way to experience a picture that just never gets old. —A+

The Blues Brothers (Universal)

Animal House did so well that Universal appears to have given director John Landis the key to the studio, or at least its garage, to concoct this
low modernist ode slapstick car chases and classic R&B.  Again, the genuine rudeness of much of the comedy is kind of bracing. As for the Blu-ray quality, it’s solid. As with Animal House, we have some noticeably flush flesh tones, in this case it seems a combination of the cinematography, display settings, and somewhat more noticeable digital manipulation than on the Animal House DVD. Like fried ice cream, digital manipulation is a reality, and it’s not going away, so we might as well meet it on its own terms. I didn’t find it all that noticeable or egregious in terms of “viewing experience” here, so if you’re a fan of the film this is a buy-with-relative-confidence call. —A

Boudu Saved From Drowning (Park Circus U.K. import, Region B locked)

Renoir in high-def is a potential home-vid trend I can totally get behind. This version of his 1932 celebration of being a filthy slob (okay, not really…okay, kind of…) is compelling evidence in support of such a thing.  Pictures such as this and 1935’s Toni are why some will insist that Renoir was the father of what many call neo-realism, as well as everything else good in cinema. Anticipating both Rossellini and Godard (and many others, but bear with me here; these are capsule reviews), he took the camera out of the studio and into the streets, the better to capture “real” life and its attendant behaviors (not just human behaviors, either; the way Renoir holds a shot of Boudu’s dog at the water in the Bois is, as you’ll see, an emblem of his genius.) The views of Paris don’t just have a documentary vividness here; they’re simply gorgeous. In fact the outdoor sequences are sharper than the soundstage bound ones in many cases; you get a little more diffusion/softness in the interior scenes, particularly in the medium close-ups. In any event, while skimpy on the extras (that is, there's a trailer), this is as a whole a really special disc. —A

Buster Keaton: The Short Films Collection (Kino Lorber)

Nifty. This presents 19 solo shorts by il miglior fabro, not just a performer of genius but as great and crucial a director as Griffith or Eisenstein or Feiullade or Godard. In what I believe to be a first, four of them, all personal favorites (including “The High Sign”) are included in both untampered-with (relatively) and digitally enhanced versions, which latter have noise reduction tech addressing all manner of scratches and other kinds of damage. Very considerate, I think, and honestly the digital cleanup on the enhanced versions makes for a cleaner viewing without ruining the look of the silent-era material. As for the rest…well, these are Keaton shorts. Even without the generous and pleasurable supplements, there’d be no excuse not to own ‘em. —A+

 Conan the Barbarian/Conan The Destroyer (Universal)

Early on in the first Conan title, I got a little worried at the stark contrast of rear projection and foregrounded characters in a scene; “Yeesh,” thought I, “is this gonna be a botch in the tradition of Uni’s ungodly Out of Africa?” But no—that’s kinda how it looked in the movie, I surmised, because the rest of John Milius’s Robert E. Howard/Marvel Comics adaptation—which looks as stately-paced by comparison to today’s “comic book” pictures as a, um, Tarkovsky film—has a lot of what they call “good grain” and doesn’t come off as having been digitally cleaned up to death. As a film it turns out on revisiting to be pretty damn satisfying in its anachronistic way, although the question “Why is that snake wearing a hat,” asked by my wife as she passed by the set at a crucial point in the film, remains troubling. Primo cheese for sure, and the subsequent Destroyer is cheesier still, its initial effect of Valeria in flames a rather charming relic of the unconvincing appeal of the now more or less optical effect. In some respects Destroyer is even more visually “impressive” than Barbarian but for sure it’s also an even goofier movie. Both of these will more than satisfy any high-def Vintage Arnold jones you’ve been nursing. —A

Cul de Sac (Criterion)

 “A film to reflect our taste at the time,” director Roman Polanski says (in an interview included as a supplement here) of his 1966 followup to the staggering Repulsion. It’s a sufficiently unyielding enterprise that some might argue that the verb in that sentence ought to be changed to “indulge” for accuracy’s sake. In many respects this deceptively austere exercise in cinematic acrobatics is a tough Beckettian sit, but in the right cranky mood it’s a tonic, and this is an absolutely gorgeous rendition, the oft sickly gray scale of Gilbert Taylor’s cinematography getting a genuinely staggering presentation. Extras are sparse but well put-together and well presented. A must for Polanski junkies—I’m one—and a calculated gamble for everyone else. Even so, I give it an…—A+

 Deep End (BFI U.K. import, Region B locked)

Long-buried films such as Jerzy Skolimowski’s 1967 1970 British production acquire such an underground reputation during the period when they’re incredibly difficult to see that they more often than not disappoint when they’re finally made accessible. This, I am delighted to report, is not even close to the case here. Deep End still packs a wallop; assuredly creepy and funny from the very beginning, with Diana Dors’ cra-zay-zy paean to footballer Georgie Best likely to be the convincer for you if you’re not immediately sucked in. London doesn’t “swing” in this movie; it roils with sexual tension and dribbles and jerks with sexual repression and aggression. One senses that it had a pronounced influence on Taxi Driver, and a less pronounced but very real influence on Rushmore. And it looks incredible, which is another thing about such long-buried pictures; it’s also kind of amazing when they turn up looking so great. Great extras, too.— A+

 The Egyptian (Twilight Time)

In the exciting tradition of MICHAEL CURTIZ IN WIDESCREEN, only it’s not that exciting a tradition, because poor Mr. C. didn’t quite figure how to adapt his ever-engaging baroque visual styles to Cinemascope dimensions. Dave Kehr detailed the ways in which the format kind of hogtied Curtiz in his typically perceptive and acute review of this pricey disc. And as much as his points are well-taken, I still find this to be a fascinating film visually, particularly in the way Curtiz falls back on DeMillean tableaux of Eisensteinean human triptychs when he’s stuck for a composition. And every now and again, particularly when there’s a reflective surface to be seen, a hint of the old-style Curtiz magic makes itself known. As for the disc itself, it’s the first Blu-ray venture for Twilight Time, a slightly Olive-esque concern making disc space for titles that Fox can’t be bothered to put out itself. Apparently the studio itself was responsible for the high-def master of this, and commissioned the excellent commentary from James Ursini and Alain Silver. In any event the picture is beautiful but also kinda soft in parts, hard to tell if it’s the transfer or having to do with early Cinemascope and lens issues. One senses the transfer could have been a bit better, but this is NOT a fake high-def rendition. The colors are VERY strong throughout, and they’re like half the movie. I’m looking forward to revisiting this peculiar melodrama as the weather gets cooler; it’s that kind of movie comfort food. —A

High and Low (Criterion)

Kurosawa in widescreen black and white (and, in this case, a couple of plumes of pink smoke) is always a kick in the head. This high-def upgrade of a Criterion classic looks real nice and crisp, displays good grain. This epic crime drama starring Toshiro Mifune as a bullheaded shoe manufacturer dealing with a kidnapping underscored for me, on this rewatching, that very often Kurosawa’s signal strength as a filmmaker is his LACK of subtlety (as in the on-the-nose bit early on where Mifune’s character instructs a couple of kids on how to properly play cowboy) combined with an innate security in just how far he can push the emotion or sentiment or even sentimentality (although this is absolutely one of his least sentimental pictures) of  given scene. In this respect he’s very CLASSICAL Hollywood (Ford, McCarey, etc.). He’s also not afraid to be epic…although it’s worth noting that for all intents and purposes this film doesn’t leave its first set for nearly an hour; anyway, who else then or now had the stones to do that? A very, very rich picture, in an exemplary edition. — A+

The Killing (Criterion)

Interesting how young Kubrick the precocious master technician embraced in 1956 the notions that were soon to be adopted by the somewhat more emotional nouvelle vague a few years down the road, particularly with respect to realism in location shooting and stuff. Not quite a noir, not quite a procedural, this magnificently intricate and brisk heist picture exhibits mordant daring in some of its themes—a first-time viewer was kind of blown away by the blatancy of Jay C. Flippen’s man-love for Sterling Hayden—and is also a great source of Lucien Ballard black-and-white shooting, which this disc gets like nobody’s business. Incredible. And incredible extras. The French television interview with Hayden is particularly incredible. And oh so sad. —A+

 Leon Morin, Priest (Criterion)

I wrote of the film in 2007: “Melville's shooting-on-the-fly methods, use of actual locations, and inventive but hardly stately visual style all influenced the Nouvelle Vague, and the Nouvelle Vague influenced him in turn, as 1962's Occupation-set Leon Morin, Pretre, shows. The freedom Godard and Truffaut and others insisted on seems to have emboldened Melville a bit in that here there's more of the liberty-taking he showed younger filmmakers. A scene of young children preparing for mass is done in a series of quick dissolves. The use of once-seemingly outmoded visual devices that were joyously revived by the New Wavers is more pronounced, e.g. the optical wipe; some scenes last mere seconds; and so on. That said, this is one of Melville's quietest and most dialogue-heavy films, consisting largely of conversations between the title priest and a young atheist widow (Emmanuelle Riva, of Hiroshima mon Amour) about the nature of God and faith. Leon Morin is not the kind of Father today's Vatican would approve, what with his talk of "a larger Church" than the Catholic one. Melville's casting of Jean-Paul Belmondo in the title role was a piece of counterintuitive genius; having established himself as a supremely ironical performer in Godard's A Bout de Souffle, here he is asked to portray a paragon of sincerity. Belmondo's seemingly innate amiability enables him to do so without coming off in the slightest bit pompous. It's a remarkable performance.” If that sells you on the film—and I hope it does, because as “uncharacteristic” a Melville work as it could seem to some on the surface, it’s entirely key to the rest of his work—then this is the edition to see it in. —A+

Life During Wartime (Criterion)

Yikes! Full digital from camera to intermediary to filming out back to disc (compressed of course), so whatcha want? It is a beautiful picture that also gives you the sense of what we’re giving up by going fully digital—the PHYSICAL quality of it. It’s almost like there’s a layer MISSING. It isn’t so  much the lack of scratches, but the lack of the possibility of scratches. It’s quite interesting and a little disquieting. As for the content, I liked, and dealt with it here. —A

Monamour (Cult Epics)

More softcore filth from the fine folks at Cult Epics. Ah, Tinto Brass; in manners “erotic,” he’s the honest man’s Michael Bay. I like the way he dollies in—no cheap zooms for him!—far further than to merely the crack of his lead actress’s butt. Tasteful. Hard to believe this was made in 2006, it plays EXACTLY like Paprika or whatever the hell the last Brass movie I looked at plays like…was it Cheeky!? WAS there even a Brass movie called Paprika?... Then again, what do I know, a lot of the Brass fans in the IMDB comments feel this is just a retread, and the newbies weren’t’ impressed either, to wit: “There was no erotic, no thriller and no plot at all, just a poor actress committed to an old mans [sic] chauvinistic fantasies.” . “It is another movie full of Brass obsessions like hungry voluptuous women, impatient to be sodomized, to be unfaithful, to go with everyone but not their husbands.” Boy you say that like there’s something wrong with it. In other news, prosthetic penises look more prosthetic in high def. And said lead actress, one Anna Jimskaia, IS pretty easy on the eyes. And the image quality is reasonably snazzy. But people who tolerate your Radley Metzger advocacy won’t look so kindly on this item, I guarantee you. —B

The Music Room (Criterion)

I’ll admit it—I’m so far behind on my Satyajit Ray knowledge that for me to beat my chest about how his work is criminally underrepresented on DVD would be almost disingenuous. Suffice it to say that I’m very happy this version of his 1958 film exists. It’s a wonderful picture. Materials were clearly in rough shape (check out the scratches in the opening sequence) Sometimes the roughness is such that this almost registers as a document of the film rather than the film itself (c.f. L’Age d’Or). But there’s incredible detail in the transfer, and as the damage subsides, the cinematic storytelling takes over. Speaking of Buñuel, the lighting often resembles that of some of Buñuel’s Mexican films. Ray’s shooting style here is very straightforward but not lacking in verve. An object lesson in both universality and cultural specificity, with extensive and illuminating extras. Can I say with confidence that it’s an excellent and engaging entry point into Ray’s world? I think so. —A+

Naked (Criterion)

These subtitles are helpful, aren’t they? Mike Leigh’s controversial 1993 film is in English, British English yet, but so variously clipped and slurred and elided and grogged that, yeah, the subs are nearly as essential as they are on The Harder They Come. Also: It’s entirely appropriate that every person and every décor here looks like shit. The grey walls. The characters’ flesh tones almost uniformly alcoholically flush.  Even the chicken chomped by Greg  Crutwell’s ultimate yuppie scum Jeremy is incredibly nasty looking. Never before has such an unstitnting devotion to delivering high-def ugliness been manifested with such unfailing integrity. In all other respects, e.g. supplements, a repro of the standard def edition. So it gets an A rather than an A+ on account of being not quite such an event. —A

The Romantic Englishwoman (Kino Lorber)

A really scintillating Joseph Losey ‘70s picture, a followup of sorts to the sublime The Go-Between but altogether more odd and idiosyncratic and not quite as perfectly turned...and all the more intriguing for that. Another obscure item that kind of knocks you out of the box with its picture quality right off; Gerry Fisher, who also lensed Go-Between, shoots here, and his work with reflective surfaces at the very beginning testifies to a near-casual mastery. The aspect ratio here is 1.66,not 1.85 as is claimed on the box. And as is specified on the IMDB tech page. But I have to say it looks entirely fine and proper in 1.66, which as we know was maybe not an entirely uncommon ratio in Europe at the time and…aaaiieee. No, seriously, it looks fine and proper and is a Losey freak’s dream acquisition, or one of them.—A

The Sacrifice (Kino Lorber)

Beautiful…just the very first three shots, that is, the film’s first fifteen minutes…it’s just wonderful the way the opening shot starts out so gray and overcast and as man and boy walk home from the water’s edge the colors of even their clothing bloom and blossom.  I didn’t find the slight edge enhancement as distracting as the reviewer at DVD Beaver did, to be honest. The soundtrack is also aces,  I think,  very nuanced and tricky, telling so very much of this odd story in and of itself. What I DID notice very much this time around was the post-sync dialogue,, particularly in the case of British actress Susan Fleetwood, who I can now see is saying her lines in English. As Tarkovsky in high-def goes, it’s the second such item, and in terms of quality I’d say it’s a relatively close second to Criterion’s great Solaris. —A

Sands of the Kalihari (Olive)

Very nice, the best-looking Olive Blu-ray I’ve seen, I think, and completely bereft of the soundtrack modulation issues that plagued the two Olive Blus I reviewed in July. Cy Endfield’s nasty and tense 1965 plane-crash-survival potboiler-with-brains is tense and terse and engrossing enough to have earned its cult. ”A brutal critique of American self-interest in a Third World context,” Jonathan Rosenbaum posits; also, I might add, the first and last time Stuart Whitman was asked to represent American self-interest.  It never looks anything less than solid, and the twilight shots of wherever it is the charter plane that’s gonna crash is taking off from are just gorgeous. The swarm of locusts looks laughably phony, but the "actual" smashing locusts and their inner essences and guano are effectively gross. As are the primates, both the talking and screeching varieties.—A

Blu-ray Consumer Guide: July 2011

Once more into the breach. Equipment: For Region A domestic and import discs, Playstation 3 console. For Region B import discs, OPPO BDP 83. Display: Hitachi P50V701, 16:9 Standard 2 Aspect Ratio setting, Day (Dynamic) picture setting, reset by eye by author using Lawrence of Arabia film still in Kevin Brownlow's David Lean biography as guide. And the Hitachi set crapped out for good after I completed the viewing notes for this column, so I am again compelled to mention this blog has a tip jar, alas. 

Alice (BFI Import)

Surrealism-inflected Czech animator Jan Svankmajer has made a good number of outstanding, and eccentric and savagely beautiful films, but this cracked consideration of Lewis Carroll is considered his defining work by many, and not without good reason; the juxtaposition of Carroll’s gentle but sly oddball sensibility with the adapter’s often more visceral eccentricities makes for a uniquely bracing end product. This BFI Blu-ray looks pretty great. A key detail: the film is narrated by the title character (played by Kristyna Kohoutova) in a tight live-action closeup of her mouth, and the chapping on her lips increases and decreases visibly from narration sequences to narrations sequence. The tea party scene is particularly incredible, and what this high-def transfer captures so beautifully besides colors are the textures that are so important to Svankmajer’s art: Fur, paint slathered/dabbed on wood/cardboard, etc.—A+

The Big Country (MGM/UA Walmart exclusive)

This 1958 William Wyler semi-epic is the kind of picture that makes some people sit up and say, “Now THAT’S a Western,” but you know us auteurists and quasi-auteurists, even those of us who love, say, Dodsworth: when it comes to this genre, we put Mr. Wyler in line WAY in back of Ford, Hawks, Mann, Boetticher, et.al., and even then, when we get started we prefer The Westerner. But as I frequently say, this is a Blu-ray Consumer Guide, not a movie one, and this disc is beautiful. There is grain here, and the contrast between particular shots is pronounced in an interesting way that reflects the process of shooting such big-ticket action pictures; there’s a discernable difference between actual location master shots, wherein you can see the actors starting to sweat, and the close-ups where they appear more made-up, “composed,” as it were. Check out the initial confrontation between Peck’s and Carroll Baker’s characters and the hooligans led by Chuck Conners for a pertinent example. Another interesting wrinkle in the home-theater high-def realm. It doesn’t detract from the overall, you know, majesty of the viewing experience. —A

Big Jake (Paramount)

A lesser latter John Wayne Western, and not exactly a paragon of narrative sleekness either; fiery opening notwithstanding, it takes a while to suss out just what the heck it’s actually ABOUT, anyway. A bold, zesty, colorful picture, which boosts some, um, interesting detail, e.g. Richard Boone’s big, sunburned nose. Also, a pissed-off middle aged Maureen O’Hara looks even more pissed off (but not more middle-aged, bless her) in high-def. For Duke nuts with Blu-ray players, a must. For everyone else, optional. B+

Black Moon  (Criterion)

From my notes: “Damn, this twilight opening looks good! Agh, she killed a hedgehog! What’s up with that? There’s crappy radio reception. A commenter who sounds like Glenn Beck! Whoo-hoo! It’s all Hour of the Wolf, and La Chinoise and shit! Makes ya look at Malle a little differently, huh?” Louis Malle’s scrappy indie—a film he made, he said once, because he wanted to shoot something at his French countryside house—is another Alice In Wonderland rethink, this one a  post ’68, post-apocalyptic one. It is more successfully (and mordantly) eccentric than the other Malle film we’ll be getting into later in this column….and I haven’t really made up my mind about the whole thing yet, and maybe never will. Which is a good thing in my book. As for the disc, I don’t think “nearly unbelievable” is going too far with respect to sizing up its image quality. Less fulsome observers may settle for revelatory. This is one of those things worth checking out strictly on that basis. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Sven Nykvist’s color work look better on home video before. Particularly striking ARE the aforementioned twilight scenes. Dusk is hard on high-def; if you don’t do the compression right, you’ll get a video-noise effect that’s distractingly smeary, particularly on some flat-panel screen. Here the image is clean as a whistle throughout, and gorgeous. Also from my notes:  “REALLY REALLY BEAUTIFUL!” A+

The Cat O’Nine Tails (Blue Underground)

I’m not sure what the house is responsible for the high-def transfers of early Argento films that are going to Arrow and Blue Underground, and frankly I’m not sure if it’s a transfer issue or a material issue, but I’ve been noticing what strikes me as an odd consistency in the grain structure in the Blu-rays from both companies I’ve looked at of Deep Red, this film, and now Tenebre, recently from Arrow. That is, the grain is pretty heavy, to the point sometimes of looking like speckling. A good example on this particular disc comes about thirty minutes in; check out the hood of the blue Corvette in the scene, it looks speckled with white. Not to get all Jeff Wells or anything but I find this kind of distracting. I didn’t notice this so much on the excellent Blu-rays, from both Arrow and Blue Underground, of Argento’s Inferno, nor on the superb Arrow Blu-ray of Phenomena. But it is occasionally frustrating, to the point where it’s a bit of a fly in the ointment with respect to my enjoyment of the film. —B+

Crack in the World (Olive)

The quality of certain Olive masters hasn’t always been anything to write home about—to call the disc of Preminger’s Such Good Friends serviceable is almost overstating the case, frankly—but let’s face it, the label’s work largely indicates what the market will bear, as it were, so…anyway, I was a little surprised with how well I liked the look of this. DVD Beaver rates it pretty not-great, and I can see their point, but as I watched, I thought, Wow, this doesn’t look bad at all. It’s certainly not the most pristine in terms of pinpoint sharpness, but it does have substantial detail and color. As with certain other non-pristine Blu-rays in my experience, the overall look brought the Proustian rush of Saturday afternoon projections in the late ‘60s at Bergenfield’s Palace Theater. For those not familiar with said experience, I’ll say that it looks like good/decent vault print projected at proper brightness levels. But what’s with the soundtrack? There’s a lot of irritating discrepancy between the dialogue and music levels, aargh. Be advised, though, a lot of the disaster stuff is stock footage!  There’s noticeable video noise at the world-turned orange finale. And there’s also chipmunk stock footage. And apparently the aspect ratio’s off, 1.78 rather than 1.85, but it’s not much of a bother. Lot of caveats for a disc I’m gonna recommend. What can I tell you, I’m a sucker for halfway decent cult items in high-def.  —B

Don’t Look Back (Docurama)

Cool. Grainy. Scratchy. But awesome; beauteous documentary clarity. Dylan, what you’d call a legendary performer, to be sure. And a classic document, too. God, the London journalists are assholes, and as those of us who follow such things are well aware, the situation didn’t get a whole lot better when actual “rock critics” came into existence. But there was some improvement. Anyway, if you ever gave a damn about Dylan or the ‘60s or anything, you really ought to invest in this, as it seems a definitive home version. — A+

Drive Angry (Summit)

This proud-to-be-idiotic grindhouse pastiche really IS as dumb as it wants to be, and as bombastic, and is thus moderately impressive. The image quality on the disc is such that it almost (ALMOST) makes one wish one had a 3D display, Blu-ray player, etc. But this gets the job done without stereoscopic enhancement, and is a demo-disc hoot. —A

The Fall of the Roman Empire (Anchor Bay U.K. import, Region B locked)

Regulars of this blog know what a big Anthony Mann fan I am, and how highly I value this understated, elegiac epic. So of course they won’t be surprised that I sprung for a Blu-ray of it first chance I got, regardless of unpopular prices/exchange rates. And I’m glad I did. This looks real nice. There’s just a little color registration issue in some of the long shots, which is likely a materials issue or even a source issue stemming from anamorphic lens distortion or something. Nothing particularly major/distracting though. There’s a little shine/brightness in female lead Sophia Loren’s skin tones from time to time, she’s pretty heavily made-up and her natural olive complexion is covered and very white in certain shots. But the overall impression this gives is of just what a great VISUAL film this is throughout, always. Every shot is an impeccable composition and the flow from image to image is just breathtakingly effortless seeming. The diffused light in the forest battle about 50 minutes in is as spectacular an effect as Kurosawa himself ever captured. Everything holds together, remains solid, and as for beautifully telling details, check out the whites and pale blues of mad emperor Christopher Plummer’s eyes. —A

Hair (MGM/UA)

Talk about movies that don’t get better with age. You can see what director Milos Forman wanted to do with this—create something that seemed as free and loose and spontaneous as he imagined the American ‘60s counterculture might have been, should have been, whatever—but the intransigent material bests him. Thus, this 1979 film is a curio that just gets curiouser. This looks okay, nice autumn-in-Central-Park tones. But it doesn’t PLAY at all. And Treat Williams’ wig, or whatever it is. And that dude who ended up replacing terry Kath in Chicago. And it’s still better than Across the Universe. But not as inadvertently funny. —B-

Hannie Caulder (Olive Films)

This far-less-comedic-than-usual Burt Kennedy picture, a brisk  1971 revenge Western with a career-high performance from Raquel Welch (poor woman is set upon by Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam and Strother Martin, all at their skeeviest) and a turn by Robert Culp that makes you wish he’d been way more prominent as a film actor, doesn’t look too shabby at all. A clean, detailed image for the most part —little video noise on the sand in a desert ride sequence but nothing to complain about past that on the visuals. The soundtrack is another matter. It’s even more all-over-the-place than that of Olive’s Crack in the World Blu-ray, with music WAY louder than dialogue throughout. It’s almost impossible to find a consistent volume level where you can hear the dialogue clearly but not be overpowered by the score. I’m an old hand at remote manipulation but that’ no way to watch a film and this disc gets docked down to its current grade from what might have been a solid B+ on that account. So: —C-

Heavy Metal (Sony)

A VERY handsome presentation! Too bad the film itself still kind of stinks. Well, mostly. Haven’t looked at this since its theatrical release, which I recall through a certain cannabis haze as a bit of a disappointment best exemplified by the fact that the title song was a solo turn by the member of The Eagles nobody gave a shit about. When was that, 1981? Yep. This time around, I notice a lotta what they call “Canadian content,” that the  “Harry Canyon” segment set a lot of precedent for The Fifth Element, which Element largely picked up and ran with a lot better. And goofy art direction and limited animation and a lot of edgy-for-the-‘80s content, which subsists of lovingly drawn giant female breasts. Oh well. The aspect with the most entertainment value is John Candy’s voice work in the “Den” segment, in which he says things like “There was no way I was gonna walk around this place with my dork hanging out” in  his Jerry-Mathers-as-The-Beaver tones. The disc is very crisp looking and the soundtrack, ostensibly an important aspect here, is solid.—B-

Stanley Kubrick's letter to projectionists on "Barry Lyndon" (with update)

I admit that my comportment during the recent online debate concerning the aspect ratio of Stanley Kubrick's 1975 Barry Lyndon and its new Blu-ray version was not always entirely pleasant or reasonable, or that it yielded entirely reliable findings. This is the sort of thing that can happen when one allows one's (entirely understandable, I'd say) desire to tweak Jeff Wells to override concerns of etiquette and/or common sense. I did try to employ due diligence in my research and turned up some documentation supporting a 1.77 or so aspect ratio, and I did ask for other citations that would demonstrate otherwise.

And now I have a document that should clear up quite a bit with respect to Kubrick's desires and intentions: a letter to projectionists signed by Kubrick. It came to me through the courtesy and kindness of screenwriter and critic Jay Cocks, who writes: "I knew Stanley pretty well for a while, but at the time of the Time Barry Lyndon cover I was in LA beginning preliminary work on Gangs of New York. So I had no hand in the Time  cover, but still managed to let Stanley know how great I thought the movie was. He replied with his usual gracious, funny note and enclosed this letter, because he thought I'd be interested. Bet you will be too."

Indeed. I thank Mr. Cocks. And I reproduce the letter below. 

 

I shared this document with a representative of Warner Home Video, who responded, "We stand firmly that we are 100% in compliance with Mr. Kubrick's wishes and edict" and that "the letter from Kubrick to projectionists was the reference for our 1.78 aspect ratio call."

UPDATE: Playing Hardcastle to my McCormick, Jeff Wells tracks down Kubrick aide de camp Leon Vitali and receives a detailed response that's well worth reading; check it out here. Nice work, Jeff. 

Blu-ray Consumer Guide: June 2011

These things are always fun at the start ("Yay! I'm gonna watch a shitload of discs!"), daunting in the middle ("When am I gonna find time to watch all these damn discs?"), and a pain in the ass at the end ("Christ, I've got to write about all these fucking discs!"). But I'm trying to manage my time better, and I've got a pile of discs ready to go for the next installment, which I should be well into before the Red Hook pool opens, at least watching-wise.

You may notice I included the Blu-ray of Lolita but not Barry Lyndon. As it happens, I'm still gathering, um, data, on the whole, um, aspect-ratio, um, thing. I will say the image quality of the disc is such that if you can, as Roger Corman might put it, swing with the 1.7-something frame, it's pretty damn good. And that's all I'm gonna say at the moment. In the meantime, enjoy. And as this is the most service-journalism-ish feature on this blog (ground rules: for the most part a subjective but informed image-and-home-theater-experience assessment) it's the one wherein I mention that the blog does have a tip jar widget. Thanks, and again, enjoy. 

Equipment used: Players: For Region A domestic and import discs, Playstation 3 console. For Region B import discs, OPPO BDP 83. Display: Hitachi P50V701, 16:9 Standard 2 Aspect Ratio setting, Day (Dynamic) picture setting, reset by eye by author using Lawrence of Arabia film still in Kevin Brownlow's David Lean biography as guide.

A.I. : Artificial Intelligence (Warner)

Possibly my personal favorite Steven Spielberg film, looking very good indeed on high-def.  That diffused lighting thang the director and his cinematographer Janusz Kaminski so enjoy is rendered very nicely.  The slightly inhuman sheen of the cyborg characters seems more evident/pronounced…but the effects stuff looks pretty seamless, at least as seamless as they were at the time. This is the first of several films I’ll be rating in high-def that my wife will never, ever, in a million years let herself be talked into watching—emotional child-abandonment trauma, don’t you know. —A

 All The President’s Men (Warner)

Cinematographer Gordon Willis has gone on record calling this hi-def version a botch, and complaining, quite justifiably, at not having been even contacted with a notion to being consulted on it. And it’s true—if the cinematographer’s alive and still has eyes and so one, he or she ought to be consulted. And then you get Vittorio Storaro and his unusual ideas concerning aspect ratios and you…oh, never mind. In any event, the Blu-ray of this classic and still extremely engaging thriller DOES render colors little toward the hot side, particularly in the  scenes set in the Washington Post offices—the red filing cabinets do look as if they’ve been freshly painted. Redford IS very golden and blonde. And so on. On the plus side, I have to say that this only really registers as a distraction when you’re concentrating on these details. In a lot of other respects, the new detail really enhances the absorbing viewing experience. But still. Come on. — B-

Le Amiche/La Signora senza Camelie (Eureka!/Masters of Cinema Import)

Two separate packages, Region-B locked imports from a great label; both spectacular looking black and white ‘50s 1.37 films; both correctives to the conventional (and fortunately now-fading) wisdom that Michelangelo Antonioni only became a major filmmaker with L’Avventura, and the equally incorrect notion that L’Avventura represented a major break from his prior films.  Both insanely good films. Ostensibly '50s melodramas, with Le Amiche being the ostensible "women's picture" and Signora a not-quite avant le lettre quasi Daisy Clover showbiz exposé. Both Antonioni to the bone, in fact—brilliant, detached, virtuosic but ampathetic constructions. Have I mentioned the image quality is remarkable?  The very astute Gabe Klinger’s smart video discussions (shot, and not badly at that, by one Joe Swanberg, making these quite possibly the only Swanberg-related products besides that Criterion My Dinner With Andre that I’ll ever be able to whole-heartedly endorse, although hope does spring eternal) are engaging extras on each of the discs, although be aware, Mr. Klinger is sufficiently youthful-appearing here as to perhaps inspire some envious “Doogie-Hauser-of-film-crit” grousing. But he really knows his stuff, and contextualizes it and communicates it in an engaging, direct way. Really remarkable image quality, have I mentioned that? No kidding, it's like a newly struck print on Signora. Same with Le Amiche. A new excuse to buy a region-free Blu-ray player. For real. —A+

Betty Blue (Cinema Libre Studios)

First thoughts upon popping in the disc, almost literally: “What the fuck is up with this MENU?” Ugly typeface, poor navigation. The trailer preceding the menu, advertising this upcoming group of high-def releases of films by director Jean-Jacques Beineix, also flummoxes, being all over the place in terms of image quality. Once you get past the menu and into the film, though things improve. It looks pretty damn good, there’s SOME noise evident at intervals in shadow-pocketed areas of the image, but nothing overtly egregious. The summery golden beach glow of the early idyllic scenes is very nice. The subtitles are shadowed for easier reading. There were weird pauses when skipping chapters on my player, but other than that, this was a nice surprise. —B+

 The Beyond (Arrow)

Lucio Fulci’s provocative meditation on the challenges of hotel renovation gets the elaborate cultists-gone-wild treatment courtesy of Arrow. An import at an import price, but a region-free one. A pretty much perfect rendition of the never-not-opportunistic horror cheapie: Grungy. Viscous. Disgusting.

Ew, and additionally, ick. As such, pretty great. —A-

Bicycle Thieves (Arrow)

Awesome U.K.-based label Arrow isn’t just about the exploitation films, you know, and this high-def rendering of a DeSica picture you might have heard of is thrillingly beautiful. Really sharp and beautiful for the most part, displaying a little material-related softness in some areas, but overall a complete gift. This is Region-B locked;  I don’t know if a domestic rendering of the film in Blu-ray is in the works, but if you’ve got the set-up for it this release is a must. —A

The Black Pirate (Kino Lorber)

As great Douglas Fairbanks silents are concerned, no, this isn’t The Thief of Bagdad, but it is frisky and full of derring-do and has incredibly interesting two-strip Technicolor sequences. This Blu-ray’s from a master made from the restoration negative and has an abundance of what we sometimes call “good” grain. It’s a touch on the bright side… and largely pretty beautiful. The colors often have a muted pastel feel that’s not at all displeasing. The detail reveals a good deal of the movie-magic involved in concocting this seafaring fantasy, e.g., painted backdrops on the desert island, pancake makeup on Fairbanks. A nifty package. More, please. —A-

Blow Out (Criterion)

Not my favorite DePalma by a long shot, not even at the time, even though I saw it in theaters something on like a half dozen occasions during its 1981 release. What can I tell you, I must have had a weird and/or insufficient social life back then. In any event, this new, director-approved presentation has more grain on it than I actually recall. Detailing and colors are very strong, very consistent. This isn’t the place to get into a debate on the relative merits of the picture itself but I do have to say that the blasted thing does move right along and holds together on its own terms. In other words…they don’t make ‘em like they used to? Who knows. Also, the guy who plays cranky-on-television dude  “Jack Matters” (Maurice Copeland) looks an awful lot like future-suicide-on-television Bud Dwyer, which is weird. In all, a package to delight even the skeptical on this picture, I’d say. —A

Misapprehending Tarkovsky

Tokyo, or something like it, in Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972

Aside from being a bit of a dick about it on Twitter, because being a bit of a dick about things on Twitter is kind of how it works for me in that format, I've been staying mostly clear of what the no-doubt very pleased new York Times person Adam Sternbergh has called a "film critic food fight" over the Times' Magazine piece by Dan Kois about, you know, that whole "cultural vegetables" thing. The reason I'm steering clear of it is that it's way too personal for me, in that it gets me too angry, as note my own characterization of Kois's unflattering characterization of Derek Jarman's Blue, below. There's a difference between being a dick on Twitter and going around dropping napalm on professional bridges; and I can only hope that by the time I've successfully completed the steps that will enable me to walk away from this you-know-what business (if indeed I ever do, which is doubtful), I'll have at least acquired the measure of grace that'll make me no longer even want to napalm anything. But right now I'm stuck. 

I would, however, like to address an unfortunate misapprehension that has arisen in the discussion. In his original piece, Kois describes some of his difficulties with Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 Solaris. "In college, a friend demanded to know what kind of idiot I was that I hadn’t yet watched Tarkovsky’s Solaris. 'It’s so boring,' he said with evident awe. 'You have to watch it, but you won’t get it.'" Kois relates that he then sought out the film "because the intimation that there was a film that connoisseurs knew that I’d never heard of was too much to bear" but that it was terribly removed from his "cinematic metabolism" and that he zoned out on it but when asked by his friend what he thought of it  replied “That was amazing,” I said. "When he asked me what part I liked the best, I picked the five-minute sequence of a car driving down a highway, because it seemed the most boring. He nodded his approval." Leaving aside the fact that the anecdote makes the author and his friend look like utter tools even by the lax standards we allow for the callowness of college students, and that Kois did in fact seek out and watch the film for all the wrong reasons, leaving aside the annoying habit that so many critics have of presuming that THEIR threshold of boredom is in fact THE threshold of boredom (I stole this from a critic friend who I won't make trouble for by naming here), leaving aside the category error that elevates actual boredom, that is, irritated disengagement, as a condition necessary to high-art profundity...leaving aside ALL of that, let's look into the notion that boredom was the condition that Andrei Tarkovsky was aiming for in his work. That's what Andrew O'Hehir (who's a friend, or at the very least a very friendly acquaintance) more than implies in his response to Kois' piece in Salon, where he praises boredom as a positive value (in a way) and speaks, at the end, of "works of art that are deliberately and intensively boring, in the Tarkovsky mode."

I believe that Tarkovsky would object to the idea that his films were "deliberately" boring. Although Tarkovsky made intensely personal films that hewed uncompromisingly to his own vision, he was very invested in engaging his audience and extremely proud when his 1975 film The Mirror, considered here in the West to be one of his most obscure, even gnomic movies, was something of a popular hit in Russia. His definition of film, as given in the title of his book of strung-together essays on the art of filmmaking, was "sculpting in time," and thus pacing was extremely important to him. And yes, he was interested in slowing things down, and did so quite often, as in the looong shot of the three main characters in Stalker as they make their way into the "Zone," with, among other relentlessly repetitive features, its droning, maddening click of their conveyance travelling over the railroad tracks. And this shot was possibly meant to strike the viewer as odd, or even aesthetically querulous, but still did not constitute, entirely, a form of negative engagement. I'm reminded of one of the a phrase David Foster Wallace ascribed to his sister Amy in the acknowledgements of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: "Just How Much Reader-Annoyance Are You Shooting For Here, Exactly?" and its implication that sometimes a little reader-annoyance can be a not-bad thing, at least in terms of bracing the reader. Tarkovsky's pronouncement pronouncements [somebody get this guy a proofreading intern-Ed.] on film art were/are idiosyncratic enough to strike some as either maddening or perversely impractical, but this chunk from his essay on editing in Sculpting makes good sense: "The dominant, all-powerful factor of the film image is rhythm, expressing the course of time within the frame. The actual passage of time is also made clear in the characters' behavior, the visual treatment and the sound—but these are all accompanying features, the absence of which, theoretically would in no way affect the existence of the film. One cannot conceive of a cinematic work with no sense of time passing through the shot, but one can easily imagine a film with no actors, music, décor or even editing." Wait, did I say "makes good sense?" Hmm. Of course, today one doesn't HAVE to imagine a cinematic work with no sense of time passing through the frame; in the works of Michael Bay, there is no time for time to register itself passing through the frame, rather, the frames themselves are instead keeping/constituting time. 

But let's not get into that here. What the pace of Solaris and Stalker and Andrei Rublev want of the viewer is not for him or her to feel boredom, but to feel time; its passage through the frame. I have literally never been bored watching an Andrei Tarkovsky film because there is so very much to see in every single shot, and in the way every single shot relates to the next and the one before and so on. Take the scene Kois mentions, the so-called "five-minute sequence of a car driving down a highway." It is indeed five minutes, and it does indeed for the most part depict a car driving down a highway. But it also depicts the character doing the driving, the haunted and nearly ruined ex-astronaut Burton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky), who has just been at the countryside dacha of Kris Kelvin and his father, describing his own harrowing experience on the film's title planet. Actually, Burton's not doing the driving; the car seems to be driving itself, and Burton''s talking on a car video phone, and being worried about his son who's being restless in the car; and these shots depicting Burton and his fretful state are, yes, alternated with long shots of highway, a tunnel, and so on. And interestingly enough, a bunch of the highway signs, we notice, are in Japanese. Why would that be the case if Burton was just at a Russian dacha? We never find out; and at the end of the sequence there's a aerial shot of what looks like 1972 Tokyo by night (above). Between Burton's worries and the bizarre sense of displacement created by his seeming to be driving in Japan, the sequence never, for me, registers as in the least boring; rather, it's uncomfortably tense and suffused with an anxiety that's never resolved (as it happens, this is the last we see of Burton). 

Allow me to suggest, as politely as possible, that maybe if you are bored by this, your best course of action would be to just leave it alone. Dana Stevens' and other Kois supporters' assertions that the piece was a "confession, not a manifesto" notwithstanding, the essay does intend to set an agenda, and right now I don't want to articulate the agenda I believe it wants to set because it'll look paranoid. But I'm convinced this is not an "innocent" piece. And again, if I continue I'll just get angrier. But I just wanted to put it out there that, whatever it is that Tarkovsky wants from you, boredom's got nothing to do with it. 

Notes from an abandoned Blu-ray disc Consumer Guide

So. To return to my problems: how fucking busy I am? Pretty fucking busy. This morning I was thinking, "I've gotta do more with the blog, maybe I should go back to my last batch of notes for a Blu-ray disc Consumer Guide, see if I can spruce 'em up a little, run with that, and then really buckle down and put together a FRESH guide." So I got home and looked at my last batch of notes and discovered that A) they really were very sketchy notes, and while I understood exactly what was required to make them into actual "entries," I absolutely did not have the time to expand/refine/distill them into such and B) the discs in question are pretty, well, out of date. 

And, BUT. This is, after all, a blog, not a professional endeavor, which means I can do pretty much whatever the hell I want, and as I'm kind of neurotic (not cripplingly, but kind of) about starting up one particular task without having completed a related prior particular task, I thought, maybe I'll just put up the notes, sketchy as they are, because they might amuse some readers who are interested in my "process" such as it is. So that's what I'm gonna do. These are the notes, exactly as I left them, only with a little formatting and the names of the discs' labels added. An further explanatory note is at bottom. 

Fall Blu-ray CG Notes 

Alien BOX (Fox): Alien, really fabulous…

Space is boring/2001

Good work with the nuances of lighting, blue and purple flashlights and emergency lights… 

Aliens/Excellent too

Antichrist (Criterion) More impressionistic, less “sharp” than I remember it. A very burnished look that’s kind of video looking any way.  B-

Beauty and the Beast (Disney): Not as revelatory as, say, Sleeping Beauty, but damn fine looking in any case.

Black Orpheus (Criterion):Once the sine qua non of color! Looks lovely! Not garish! Very strong. The settings..mountains, beauty, etc. A

Chloe (Sony):Man, Julianne Moore has a lot of freckles. And you can count them. B

Cronos: Very clean and detailed. Beautiful.

Date Night (Sony):Looks good, fakey sets/Kind of painful/dopey

A Fistful of Dollars (Italian) (Ripley's Home Video) Superb! A+

Grindhouse (Vivendi):Great looking scratches! "If he’s so in love with me, why did he fuck Darryl Hannah’s stand-in?"

Humanoids From The Deep (Shout! Factory): Looks EXACTLY like it did at the Plaza! Better, even!  Awesome Alien ripoff ending! A-

Inception (Warner): A

Night of the Hunter (Criterion): Really beautiful, every shot counts and is gorgeous/Cortez’s slowness cost him Chinatown!

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Kino Lorber): A fucking gem! Just beautiful, not overdone.Great production design.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (Universal):Nifty

Seven Samurai (Criterion): Nifty

Sex and Lucia (Palm) Looks like…it was shot on video! Yes! It was! Looks good, but still…looks like it was shot…on video!

The Sound of Music (Fox): Beautiful! Lovely throughout!

Videodrome (Criterion)

Vigilante (Blue Underground):Icky!

"I’ve never been through anything like this before, so you’ll just have to tell me what to do."

Make stuff up in terms of procedure.

Looks nifty though.

"At this point in Joe’s life, he began to…put it this way…drink too much"

Notes on Notes: Yes, I know I used the term "sine qua non" incorrectly. Sorry about that. "The Plaza" was the actual grindhouse theater where I first saw Humanoids From The Deep. It was the first and only time I brought my then-girlfriend to the venue. A curse-filled knife-fight broke out a few rows in front of us, and was interrupted when one of the participants paused and looked at my then-girlfriend and said, "'Scuse the language, miss." I am not making this up. Overall this was a pretty good-looking batch of discs, the notable exception being the too-boosted Date Night, which had other problems as well. Blu-ray mavens ought to be well-pleased with the remainder. Absolute musts, as in no-"taste"-exceptions-allowed, are the Italian Fistful, Night of the Hunter, Seven Samurai, and Videodrome, for which my notes are admittedly VERY sketchy. Musts in the "if you like the genre" category are the Alien box, Beauty/Beast, Cronos, Grindhouse, Humanoids, Inception, Pandora, Scott Pilgrim, Sex, Sound, Vigilante. The rest is elective. 

There. Now I can maybe put together a "proper" Guide before June. Lemme pull out that Criterion Blow Out...