Welcome to what I hope will be a regular feature, one that won’t need too much explanation: a group of reviews of current Blu-ray titles in the style/format originated by the rock critic Robert Christgau, a format I trust will be more or less self-explanatory, what with the letter grades and all that. I’ve discussed my general philosophy of DVD reviewing elsewhere, revealing a bias of sorts—I’m more for the tech wonkery (how the damn thing looks) than the aesthetic-reassessment-of-the-movie…although some times, as we shall see, the two go hand-in-hand, and that’s where things get really interesting. I’ll be reviewing mpostly domestic releases here; what foreign discs I include (and this month I look at two) will be region-free issues. In the tradition of the early Christgau Consumer Guide, I kick off at top with sleeves from two “Pick Hits” and one “Must To Avoid:” the hits being Criterion’s spectacular By Brakhage set and Warners’ incredible restoration of David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago; the Must to Avoid, alas, a Blu-ray of Friedkin’s misfire Jade, which, believe it or not, deserves better. Okay, a little better. Full reviews below. (Incidentally, a good deal of the films I’m treating here were provided to me by the studios, but I’d say a third were paid for out of my own pocket, which I’ll likely continue to do, as I’m a compulsive consumer; this is my indirect way of pointing parties appreciative of this feature to the tip jar found elsewhere on this page. Many thanks.)
Avatar (Fox): “I was at a store the other day, and they were running this on all the displays, and I thought, ‘wow, this really looks like…television’,” an increasingly disillusioned-with-the-contemporary cinema friend complained about the 2‑D high-def presentation of this latter-day, um, cult classic. I think he’s being a little unfair. It doesn’t look like television, really. It looks like High-Definition Television. Which in a sense it is. The thing about motion pictures that are conceived and created in the digital domain is that you can basically put a clone of that motion picture on a disc. Now it’s a little more complicated than that, as the file of Avatar shown in a theater is much, much bigger than the file that goes on a Blu-ray disc. But if the video technicians don’t screw up the compression, you’re going to wind up with something that’s a rather staggering approximation of some iteration of the original experience. Which this disc absolutely is. One of the necessary side effects being that the thing, while dazzling, doesn’t look like film. At all. A quality…or a lack of quality…that is enhanced…or exacerbated…by the “flat” version, which doesn’t immerse you in the movie’s world in the same way as the 3‑D version does. So you can theoretically concentrate on all that grain that you’re not seeing. Welcome to the future, folks. I I fully understand why some people don’t think they’re gonna like it. —B
The Banquet (Mega Star import): When first I saw this picture, a rather unusual Hong Kong cinema reimagining of Hamlet, or at least some of its plot points, I thought it was one of the most visually sumptuous films of recent years. And I’m not just talking Zhang Ziyi’s butt, or its double. Really, this was a highlight of the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, and I was a little disappointed that the picture didn’t get more exposure here. Its standard-def release, via Dragon Dynasty with the more supposedly (note how I avoid the word “putatively”) dynamic title The Curse of the Black Scorpion was okay, but I wanted more, and I hoped this Hong Kong Blu-ray would provide that. It does: too much. The colors now look day-glo a lot of the time, particularly the yellows. Nothing kills a beautiful film more, I think, than digital overprocessing applied with a metaphorical trowel; and alas, this disc has got that in spades. And unfortunately the picture hasn’t acquired enough of a reputation to suggest this situation is gonna be corrected any time soon.— C-
Battleship Potemkin (Kino): Kino is a company that’s always had its heart in the right place, but its execution often seems to come from the poorhouse. Since it’s not directly responsible for its high-def transfers, and since high-def encodes aren’t things that you have to correct from PAL to NTSC, and also renders various other issues moot.…well, Blu-ray may be the firm’s road to being unconditionally loved by home theater cinephiles. The company’s Wong Kar-Wai Blu-ray discs have been so far so good, and this version of Eisenstein’s bit of post-revolutionary agit-prop, licensed from Transit Film, looks fabulous, is thrilling— A
By Brakhage (Criterion): Way back in the ’80s, a well-meaning company—I believe it was Hen’s Tooth Video, and yes, the firm was aptly named—put out Brakhage’s mythic mind-blowout of visual ecstasy Dog Star Man on VHS, and the critic Amy Taubin gave it a scathing review, complaining, rightly, that the low-resolution analog video format pretty much rendered Brakhage’s visions non-existent. Jonathan Rosenbaum once made similar complaints about Bresson’s work on video. Well. We’ve come a long way. Criterion’s work with the oeuvre of Brakhage, an indelible and unique film artist, is of absolutely breathtaking quality, and yes, the films, from The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes to 23rd Psalm Branch to, yes, Dog Star Man and beyond absolutely can live and breath and give nourishment and astonishment in this format. This Blu-ray box, incorporating the works from a standard-def collection issued a few years back and adding almost 30 new films, is a monumental piece not just of restoration and preservation but of scholarship. A staggering, beautiful thing, all the way through.—A+
Carlito’s Way (Universal): One of Brian DePalma’s better “normal” films boasting one of Al Pacino’s better late-career performances looks beautiful from stem to stern here; Universal must have had some really great materials of this 1993 film to work with. Sometimes, indeed, I think it looks a little too beautiful, but not in the overprocessed, DNR-slathered way most such discs look. There seems to be an insistence to its brightness, reminding me a little of some filmmakers’ complaints that digital intermediaries “film out” with a little too much luminance. But this picture was made prior to digital intermediaries, no? So maybe I’m just being paranoid. In any event, if the thing looks too bright to you, a quick and easy monitor adjustment will take care of it. Sometimes I do wonder whether I’m not looking too hard at something…— A
City Girl (Eureka!/Masters of Cinema): Even more so than the Eureka!/MOC Blu-ray of Murnau’s Sunrise, this gorgeous disc is kind of an object lesson in how intimate silent cinema can be; the images have a crisp immediacy that’s simply unsurpassable. From the ice cubes in a hash house’s bucket to the wheat fields where the film’s country boy brings his title bride, everything in this amazing film leaps out at the viewer. Some have expressed incredulity that this late ’20s picture can have a sharper image than the to-be-discussed below Blu-ray of 1939’s Stagecoach; well, it’s all in the materials, and Eureka!/MOC was working with some wonderful ones here. Absolutely essential. And to think, this was once considered a “lost” film…— A+
Django (Blue Underground): The oft-querulous online film writer Jeffrey Wells coined the admittedly clever term “grainstorm” to describe a DVD transfer that showed too much film grain; the film restorer/preservationist Robert Harris insists “the grain is the picture,” and never, really, shall the twain meet. I’m known as being in the Harris camp; a monk, Wells would say. But I have to admit, watching the first few minutes of this highly enjoyable second-tier Spaghetti Western with Franco Nero as the title troubled-good-guy (fellow drags a coffin behind him everywhere he goes, aiiee…), and seeing the very active swarm at work in shots of blue sky and such, I thought, “Man, this really is grainy.” There’s a high level of detail in the picture, for sure: Nero’s cheeks show some vestiges of what might have been an adolescent skin problem. And the colors are mighty vivid. And for all that, I still felt that as 1966 films went, this one looked unusually grain-laden. Of course, I like grain, and I love second-tier Spaghetti Westerns, so none of this is really much of a problem for me. But I still feel compelled to drop this caveat before any potential emptor. — A-
Doctor Zhivago (Warner): A really impressive example of what conscientious stewardship on the part of a studio can accomplish. Warner did a frame-by-frame scan of the camera negative in 8K resolution (see my interview with the company’s Vice President of Mastering Ned Price here), correcting for warpage and sprocket damage all along the way, and that was just the beginning. The result is a presentation of such consistent and near-overwhelming visual and sonic beauty that it effectively ameliorates, some might even say vitiates, the flaws of this admittedly problematic David Lean production. Or does one’s new admiration stem from the fact that they don’t even try to make ’em like this anymore? I can’t really say, but I could look at this thing forever. — A+
Dreamscape (Image): Which product implicitly poses the question: do engaging, interesting, post‑B genre pictures from the early ’80s really need the high-def treatment? The answer being: when done right, it can’t hurt. This inventive sci-fi/horror hybrid, a kind of Nightmare on Elm Street for grown-ups with extensive drive-in experience, is pretty engrossing thanks in large part to Joseph Ruben’s zippy, budget-defying direction. And man…were Dennis Quaid, Kate Capshaw, Max von Sydow and Christopher Plummer young then, or what? The look of the disc is quite quite good, very solid. A little soft-seeming at first, but once you settle in, a pleasure. Maurice Jarre’s synth-based score hasn’t aged particularly well, but then again, it’s not quite as insistently repetitive as his work for the above Zhivago… —B+
Dune (Universal): Nothing new or exceptional here, no Alan Smithee version or expansion thereof, or any new extras…no, wait, it’s “D‑Box enabled,” which means you can use it to make your specially-equipped chair vibrate, whoopee. No, what you have here is the theatrical version of the film (which at this late date we all might as well accept as the “director’s cut”), looking very, very good indeed. As problematic as David Lynch’s adaptation of the Frank Herbert epic is, narratively, it certainly has always been something to look at, and this version is sharp, bright where it has to be, and quite handsome overall.—B+
The Edge (Fox): Not remembered as any kind of masterpiece, and noted more these days as the source of a scabrously funny story about Alec Baldwin and his beard than for anything else, this men-who-hate-each-other-but-are-nonetheless-forced-to-face-the-elements-together thriller, scripted by David Mamet and directed by Lee Tamahori before he threw in the towel and turned semi-hack, is well worth rediscovering, and this superb disc is the best available way to do so. It offers an excellent image—fantastically sharp, with very accurate color. The video compression is better than competent: look at the gas lamp flares in costar Anthony Hopkins’ face as he explores an Alaskan cabin in the dark before stumbling into his own surprise party: they have the solidity and reality you’re looking for. True, in some of the aeriel scenes objects do pop against the background in that fake-3‑D way you sometimes get with overprocessing, but it doesn’t happen all that much and the effect isn’t as disorienting as it is in the legendarily problematic Blu-ray of Patton. Pretty skimpy in the extras department, though, I must say: there are none.— A-
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Sony): The rise of the digital intermediary in contemporary filmmaking means (not to mention implies!) a whole lot of things, one of them being that your home video version, particularly your high-def home video version, will be pretty difficult to screw up. Seeing as the digital intermediary can function pretty much as a video pre-master; as long as you get the compression right (and this is never guaranteed), you’re gonna have a down-converted duplicate of what you filmed. In any event, this 2009 Terry Gilliam extravaganza, the most overtly Pythonesque of his feature films since Time Bandits, was done right, and given that it barely got a theatrical release in the states, this really does turn out to be the way to see it. And worth seeing it is, for more than just Heath Ledger’s last performance, a sly, nasty, and poignant piece of work. —A
Jade (Lionsgate/Paramount): A lot of the time, a new Blu-ray of a cinematic misfire inspires thoughts along the lines of “well, how bad could it be, really?” Pretty bad, it turns out. This Robert-Evans-produced “comeback” picture for director William Friedkin’s main problem is Joe Eszterhas’ heavy-breathing script, another work demonstrating the man’s inability to get over the fact that Republicans sometimes enjoy kinky sex. But the problems don’t end there. Hint: if you thought David Caruso, only became completely insufferable with that awful CSI show, think again. The 1995 picture was handsomely shot by Andrzej Bartowiak, and this Blu-ray does his work a disservice. The transfer’s clean, for sure, not too much video noise, but the flaws don’t take long to reveal themselves. There are the too-pink flesh tones,then the orangey flames in the gas lamps; the “animated” quality of their flickering speaks to indifferent video compression. The whole thing has that sheen that big-box stores enjoy exploiting with their video displays; not terribly cinematic at all. Nice audio, though. Also amusing is the spectacle of “supermodel” Angie Everhart “acting;” her line readings of such awesome Eszterhas dialogue as “I do the fucking; I never get fucked” and “I’m more into women…” will make you see those new NutriSystem commercials in a different, exciting light!— C-
The Kids Are Alright (UMe): Usually when big rock docs such as this one are reconfigured for Blu-ray release they get a boatload of extras added; in this case, not so much. This freewheeling, archival-footage-rich, treatment of The Who, completed shortly after the death of drummer Keith Moon, gets a great audio upgrade—uncompressed 5.1 DTS, and yes, it’ll wake the neighbors —and comes with a fun “collectible” booklet, and a director commentary from Jeff Stein. All good stuff, but none of that deleted or expanded footage you find on so many such products these days. I consider what’s here more than sufficient. Avaricious Who-heads might not. — B+
M (Criterion): Another indication of how far technology has come in my lifetime. I first saw this seminal Lang film on a PBS station, a telecine from what must have been a 16mm dupe of a dupe with subtitles that were white-on-white illegible whenever there was a tablecloth in the shot, all that sort of thing. This new version is, I believe, Criterion’s second update of the title, a high-def transfer/encode of the latest Murnau Foundation Netherlands Film Museum restoration negative, and it is just thrillingly beautiful. “It’s like you’re in the room with them, all the time,” observed a friend who knows a thing or two about film restoration/preservation. A real “Holy shit!” Blu-ray if ever there was one. —A+
Minority Report (Paramount): The middle film in the Spielberg trilogy of greatness (the other two being A.I. and Catch Me If You Can, both of which could make great Blu-rays) has a very unusual look, one that can shift from scene to scene, from Monet-esque impressionistic to razor sharp to B‑movie murky. Quite the multi-pallette tour-de-force from cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, and I think this disc puts it across really nicely. As befits a big-label release, most of the supplements are more smash! bang! pow!/“I love this shot” than scholarly, but there sure are a lot of them. — A
Out of Africa (Universal): I haven’t got the new Universal Blu-ray of Spartacus, and based on Robert Harris’ thoughts on it, I may not even bother. He had similar misgivings about this Blu-ray, and I have to say I absolutely share them: this is a textbook case of digital overprocessing at its well-intentioned worst. Problems begin right off the bat. Over-brightness renders some blue screen work completely visible, as in, as “bad” or worse than those final shots of Marnie; no, worse, even, because there’s not even a question of whether it’s “supposed” to look like that. There is often shimmer in the backgrounds. The word for it all is “garish.” I was rather looking forward to revisiting this film, which I didn’t much care for back in the day but wanted to give another chance; this is hardly the optimum version for such a project. Too bad. What I find rather befuddling is that Universal can do such a creditable job on stuff such as Dune and Carlito’s Way and muck this up. Weird. —C-
Ride With The Devil (Criterion): Not just Ang Lee’s finest film, but maybe one of the last great films of the last century; that’s the impression I got watching this wonderful new rendering of this very unusual 1999 CIvil War film, a box office disaster that some thought very nearly spelled the end for Lee as an American filmmaker. It is, yes, a very different film than Malick’s Days of Heaven, but the visual textures that Lee conjures with cinematographer Frederick Elmes sometimes evoke that classic, and this transfer nails them, beautifully. The supplements are generous and essential. Another must from a company that’s not put a foot wrong in its approach to Blu-ray, as far as I’m concerned. There, I said it. — A+
Sherlock Holmes (Warner): I’m not an inordinately religious man, and God knows I’ve seen the Holmes mythos cinematically corrupted in some pretty wacky ways over the years (lest we forget, Basil Rathbone’s version of the character fought Nazis), so I got a bit of a kick out of this admittedly elephantine Guy Ritchie perspective on the character, not least because of Robert Downey, Jr.‘s witty portrayal. This is a very nicely-done disc, but it does point out a problem not unrelated to that of Avatar, which kind of stems from an advantage not unrelated to that of, say, Imaginarium or the below-considered Shutter Island. Which is to say that CGI special effects—which here extend well beyond creatures and action and such and contribute hugely to the overall production design, a “steampunk” conjuring of Victorian Britain—look even more CGI-ish on Blu-ray than they sometimes do on the “big screen.” I wound up being not so much bothered by this than amused: it was kind of like watching a dumber, more expensive iteration of Rohmer’s 2001 The Lady and the Duke, which wore its CGI backdrops on its sleeve out of both necessity and aesthetic choice. —B
Shutter Island (Paramount): Really nothing notable in the way of extras, but a beautiful digital rendering of a film that rewards repeat viewings in specific ways that a lot of other films never can. Again, partly a function of the existence of the digital intermediary. Although it’s often pretty clear here that the artificiality of some of the effects is in fact entirely deliberate; it’s rather interesting to contrast the different ways different effects are achieved, e.g., Ten Commandments-style hokey storm clouds versus an immediate and visceral and very real-seeming explosion, and how these play in the film’s complex overall scheme. —A
Stagecoach (Criterion): One has to be completely honest: unlike the discs for M and City Girl, this is not something that hits you with the force of revelation right out of the gate, something that makes you say “Holy cow” from the opening blare of the music and the first title card. No, really, you’re more likely to say, “Gee, hope the rest of this isn’t as scratchy as the credit sequence.” Your hope is rewarded, indeed; this is by far the best that Stagecoach has ever looked in any home format, supposed warts and all (which I went into here). Jeffrey Wells, who likes to trot out the fact that he worked as a licensed projectionist at some time during the Bronze Age as proof of his infallibility in these matters, has expressed some confusion over the fact that a disc of City Girl, a movie a good ten years older than Stagecoach can look more “pristine” than the film on this disc does…but the answer is obvious: materials count. For pretty much everything. The best available material for Stagecoach right now is a dupe negative, and Criterion made the eminently reasonable decision to not place digital caulk over the damage on it, particularly in cases where it would look like digital caulk. The result is a finally spellbinding and, yes, very frequently gorgeous version of the film. Is it possible that some day better materials will turn up, enabling the creation of a more “silvery” version that will give the shade of John Ford an…no, I can’t even bring myself to type the phrase, sorry. But the answer to that question is, it’s certainly possible, as the news of the recent discovery of a previously lost Ford silent (and over 70 other films once considered gone) attests. Speaking of Ford silents, the absolutely spectacular supplements on this edition include a good one, beautifully rendered: the 1917 Harry Carey starrer Bucking Broadway, previously only available on a French disc that was a giveaway with a print publication (which I reviewed here). Like all the other extras here, it is in the same high-def format as the film itself. This really is one of the most essential, and beautifully put-together, Blu-ray presentations you’ll see in many a year. — A+
Summer Hours (Criterion): Some home theater nitpickers with little better to do tsk-tsked at the deal struck between Criterion and IFC to release new IFC titles on both standard-def DVD and Blu-ray disc via the label “dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions of the highest quality.” “But what if we don’t like the movies that IFC puts out that are now gonna have to be Criterion titles? It’s gonna compromise the integrity of the brand;” so go some of the puling complaints, which are best rendered aloud whilst squeezing one’s nostrils together. To which I say, “What the fuck ever.” I’ve got zero problem with the IFC titles that have thus emerged on Blu-ray from Criterion, and you know what, I’m gonna have zero problem with a Criterion Blu-ray of Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me in the eventuality that it emerges, so wank me. (I don’t mean you. I mean the whiny folks.) I can unreservedly recommend the Blu-rays of Hunger and Revanche, am very much looking forward to looking at Everlasting Moments, and thoroughly adore this edition of Olivier Assayas’ sublime 2008 film about how art functions in the private and public spheres, among other topics. This Blu-ray looks especially good during the films’ pastoral and post-pastoral, as it were, scenes (you’ll understand what I mean when you see it) and has some very sweet and apt extras. —A+
Tetro (Lionsgate): I gain more affection for this thoroughly loopy, largely black-and-white 2009 Francis Ford Coppola creation every time I look at it. A kooky hybrid of Tennessee Williams, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Powell and Pressburger, and quite a few more influences, it still manages to be utterly Coppola in a way that his prior film, his disastrously self-conscious attempt to redefine himself as a European filmmaker, Youth Without Youth, wasn’t. It’s worth seeing, and it’s worth seeing on this disc, although I think that the 1.66 aspect ratio color sequences should have been allowed to expand to full screen, rather than playing in a letterbox within the film’s wider dimensions. That’s not a fatal flaw to this handsome presentation, which also boasts a typically voluble and fascinating Coppola commentary.— A
Vampyres (Blue Underground): Those put off by the graininess of Blue Underground’s Django will find this bloody-as-all-get-out sapphic horror romp a somewhat more congenial presentation. A symphony of not-at-all murky red and brown, it is; really a kind of classic ’70s Euro-horror look, presented crisply and truly throughout. The copious female nudity allows the demanding high-def viewer the opportunity to really thoroughly gauge the accuracy of the flesh tones. Such customers will not be disappointed. —A
Walkabout (Criterion): I haven’t read a whole lot of other reviews of this disc, and I rather expected it to be kind of controversial. It’s a beautiful disc, for sure, but to tell you the truth I had almost forgotten how raw the true look of the film was, how rough the desert landscapes—as opposed to the silken smoothness of the sands as depicted, say, in Lawrence of Arabia. For sure this look is right—it’s certainly a function of the film stock used, which I can’t name, but which defines the look of certain ’70s films—, and it’s essential to the film’s incredible, visceral impact. But it does represent a real return to first principles, as it were. Very much, finally, like seeing this masterpiece for the first time, again.— A+
The Wolfman (Universal): My old pal Ty Burr perfectly encapsulates my feeling about this film: “A misty, moody Saturday-matinée monster-chiller-horror special that hits the same sweet spot for moviegoers of a certain age (cough) as those snap-together Frankenstein model kits from the late 1960s.” Yes. And vintage horror fan Benicio Del Toro does Lon Chaney, Jr., and the whole tradition he sprang from sweet justice. This disc does wonders with the slightly sepia-ized, “antique” color of the film. One of the extras is a streaming HD rendering of the 1941 original (a rather tepid picture, truth be told, but still quite, um, iconic), and it looks spectacular. Recommended to those who…well, you know. —A-
Fantastic. This is pretty much my dream Blu-ray review guide.
I’m so relieved that Universal have done a good job with the Carlito’s Way Blu-ray. Poor back catalogue transfers are what cheeses me off the most about the Blu-ray industry, and Universal are one of the worst offenders. It drives me nuts, and makes me wonder if the studios are actually trying to convince people not to buy the format.
Anyway, I’m crazy about Carlito’s Way. It has a very special place in my heart for all sorts of reasons, and now I’m all excited about buying it. Incidentally, this is the film where, as far as I’m concerned, it all ended for Pacino. The actor on screen, laying waste to all his competition with a fantastic movie star performance, is nowhere to be seen post-1993 (with the exception of The Insider),
I sure hope Universal don’t screw up the Blu-ray of one of my all time favourite films, Born On The Fourth Of July. A stunningly photographed film.
Informative and entertaining. Thanks for acknowledging The Edge. It is what some call a guilty pleasure, but there’s no need for feeling guilty about something this intelligently written and well directed. The greatest bear performance ever, too.
This is an invaluable guide. Of the discs you’ve reviewed, I already own Potemkin, City Girl, M and Stagecoach and share your enthusiasm for each. Based on your reviews of the other discs, I’ll be purchasing Shutter Island and at the very least renting the Blue Underground titles, By Brakhage, Doctors Parnassus and Zhivago, Walkabout and The Wolfman.
I noticed you didn’t review any New Line titles. From my experience, they seem to be the worst offenders of applying excessive “noise reduction”, which ends up making films shot on film look like films shot on HD – you know, shiny and smooth but also less detail. I’d like to see them called out on this more.
Anyway, I greatly look forward to future installments of this feature.
I don’t even own a Blu-Ray player and I read every word of this thing. Wonderfully done, sir.
Funny thing about The Edge’s Lee Tamahori. How can a director who dresses up in drag and gets arrested for offering to sell blow jobs on the streets of LA go on to make such bland studio fare?
I love THE EDGE. It’s a vastly underrated thriller, in my view. The bear attack that kills Harold Perrinau is genuinely disturbing, and it’s full of great little moments, like Hopkins trying to fish with his watchbob as bait. He’s kneeling over the creek, and nothing’s happening. You can tell he’s thinking “I may not know as much about this stuff as I think I do.”
Invaluable and exhaustive, this post recalls your consumer guides from way back when over at Première. Like I plan on doing with this one, I would photocopy those and bring them to the store if I was interested in picking something out for purchase. Not to belabor the point, but this is extremely well written,and relevant (I love how you worked in a reference to the recent unearthing of the silent film treasure trove).
Thanks for giving us the lowdown on CARLITO’S WAY, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, and DUNE in particular, films I was on the fence about because I own so many version of them already.
PS: “…a good deal of the films I’m treating here were provided to me by the studios, but I’d say a third were paid for out of my own pocket, which I’ll likely continue to do, as I’m a compulsive consumer…”
I’m definitely going to steal this quote whenever I have to justify a purchase to my wife. For that you definitely get a little something in the tip jar.
You know, Caruso gave a terrific lead performance in Kiss of Death, which I thought was a cracking thriller. I figured maybe he’d pull out of the PR mess his NYPD Blue tomfoolery had caused him.
Then Jade was released.
The movie did Linda Fiorentino no favors either.
These reviews are great, Glenn. Interesting point about Sherlock Holmes. When I was a kid I LOVED Dreamscape (and Innerspace, I just thought Dennis Quaid was so cool). I do hope this becomes a regular feature.
Doctor Zhivago always makes me think of “Dr. Z” subway ads.
Great reading.
I own a decent amount of these, basically some of the Criterions, City Girl and Tetro, and concur completely with your assessment of them. Wonderful stuff. It’s fairly expensive importing American releases, but (mostly) worth it. I definitely appreciate this feature.
But in regards to The Banquet, I was wondering, whether you knew if the MegaStar import has the same transfer as the British Metrodome (so far a Play.com exclusive, I think).
This excites me to no end. WOW.
Wow, if you keep these coming monthly (again, ala Christgau) I would be a very, very happy man. Excellent start
I believe M is not restored by the Murnau Foundation. It’s pretty much a coöperation between TLE-Films and Criterion.
All shall bow to JADE.
CARUSO POWER. Also awesome car chase, but the thing that’s low-rent about it is, in the old ’70s movies, they’d be driving some awesome CHARGER or LE MANS or something. Caruso’s all racing through SF in a FORD TAURUS. Fiorentino looks about 54 years old and like she should be working at Mel’s Diner, shot through enough cottony soft focus to clean the ears of collective America for three generations.
But it’s still got that angry, nihilistic, hopeless FRIEDKIN vibe. I hope he did a commentary for it where he rants MY MOVIES ARE ABOUT THE THIN LINE BETWEEN COPS AND CRIMINALS! for two hours.
Plus it’s one of the few American movies ever that explicitly about anal sex.
SEE IT.
Just what the doctor ordered…
Good luck with the new column. Based on your comments pertaining to the new “Django” release, I believe you and I are seeing the same things with regards to this new format. It will be nice having another set of “trusted” eyes out there helping me with decisions.
@ Andy Li: actually, we’re both wrong, at least in terms of what I was saying in the capsule. The actual photochemical restoration was done at the Netherlands Film Museum. The TLE website discusses the company’s work on the Eureka!/Masters of Cinema Region‑B locked version but not the Criterion. My Murnau snafu was a result of a mixup in my notes.
@ LexG: hey, I’m not saying “Don’t see ‘Jade’;” just that this ain’t a particularly good way to see it…
You’re still a bit mixed up about M, Glenn. TLE’s website is talking about the old Eureka DVD edition of M from 2003. TLE created the HD master that was used for both the Criterion and the MoC BD, except they did extra tweaking on the Criterion version. MoC didn’t do any further work on it, and there’s a whole thread on it at the Criterion Forum about why. Thanks for a great article and your kind words about CITY GIRL!
Well I can say one thing in Jade’s favor: It’s not Blue Chips.
Will there ever be a better Seth Rogen moment than him saying, “Be David Caruso in JADE”?
I was going to ask which version of JADE this is, but I guess it doesn’t matter. Why is Linda Fiorentino, essentially the lead character, almost entirely absent for the first hour? Was she stuck on another shoot? Why was a Federal law passed in 1995–96 which said that Chazz Palminteri had to be in every movie? When David Caruso observes, “Cristal, Baluga, Wolfgang Puck…It’s a f***house,” don’t you wish they would cut to The Who singing “Won’t Get Fooled Again”? And I think Fiorentino looks better than Lex does, but isn’t she the worst screamer ever?
I say all this, but I still enjoy rewatching it every now and then.
Caruso was great in HUDSON HAWK. Yeah, I said it.
Seriously, a great overview, and while I’m not quite ready to go diving full-blast in the Blu-Ray waters just yet– I own precisely four of them, one of which is STAGECOACH, which my darling wife gave me for the upcoming annual celebration of my birth– it does give me a couple titles I’ll want to pick up, such as ZHIVAGO.
Also, I think I may have seen VAMPYRES before, unless there’s another lots-of-red-and-brown-and-ridiculous-amounts-of-female-nudity vampire movie out there.
I picked up the Brakhage set and have been loving it, hadn’t expected to care about the Dr. Zhivago release but now I feel like it’ll get picked up, thanks for the insight.
And why is Universal so slow in putting out their catalog stuff? There’s Touch of Evil and a whole crapload of Hitchcock movies that deserve the HD treatment.
The one thing I would like to add to your review of “The Wolfman” disc is please stay with the unrated director’s cut and avoid the theatrical release. It is a much better paced and character defined version of the picture (in particular the relationship between Benicio Del Toro and the lovely Emily Blunt).
Hens Tooth is still around. They released Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron, complete with Stephen Prince commentary.
http://www.henstoothvideo.com/
My favorite snarky line about the collection of tics that is Caruso’s “performance” in CSI, paraphrased from a fella on a chatboard from a few years ago, whose name I forget: “He shuffles around, shoulders slumped and crooked, eyes perpetually watery, as if after all these years he still carries the weight of the American public’s failure to make him a box office star on his shoulders, and he cries himself to sleep every night over it.”
Great article, Glenn. My opinion of the image/sound quality on these titles pretty much aligns with yours.
Thanks, Glenn. When it comes to this stuff, ya bring out the big guns. The “Dune” Blu-ray made me fall in love with the film, and nearly made my sister lose her dinner over the clarity of the Baron’s boils.
I can’t wait for “The Man Who Would Be King” to hit Blu-Ray.
And “Sorcerer”.
I agree with you about the Walkabout disc Glenn. Part of that rawness is the visual grain quality of the opticals – notably those surreal travelling mattes of brick wals into the desert, or the page turning wipes as the boy recites his book text to Agutter during their early journey. The labwork (which may well have been done by Roeg at an old, long gone Sydney facility called Ajax films) is flawless, with a higher registration of grain that is just dead right.
The Stagecoach disc is sublime. The shot of the cavalry escorting the wagon train through Monument valley is so sharp and detailed and perfect it made me cry out. And Im blowing these things through a PJ onto 130 inches diagonal of white paint.
I’m also astonished WALKABOUT didn’t get more notice. Part of me wonders if it’s because it’s one of those “revamped” Criterion releases (that is, it was already released on Criterion, but with not as many extras), and part of me wonders if Nicolas Roeg has fallen that much out of favor (BAD TIMING, which I will defend to the death, was similarly ignored). At any rate, I’m glad you mentioned it.
Dear God, I hope you didn’t have to pay for JADE. My candidate for worst movie ever made. Friedkin may be a good technician, but he has little to no taste in scripts, and this proves it.
I got into a disagreement with a customer over SUMMER HOURS – I said it was much more than “the stereotypical French family drama,” by comparison to A CHRISTMAS TALE, which I thought was just another family drama, and it turned out the customer preferred the latter. At any rate, I’m glad Criterion decided to spotlight Assayas’ deceptively simple film. Oh, and by the way, the reason why I don’t mind Criterion’s deal with IFC is before this, IFC had an exclusive deal with Blockbuster, which meant any other video store was shit out of luck when it came to getting their movies (our store still doesn’t have Chabrol’s A GIRL CUT IN TWO).
I also share a fondness for TETRO (a nice combination of small film made in THE GODFATHER style), though I disagree with you about the color sequences – I think they play fine in widescreen.
Caruso deserves better.
First Blood, An Officer and a Gentleman, China Girl, King of New York, Mad Dog and Glory, the first (and best) season of NYPD Blue, Kiss of Death, Session 9, Proof of Life…
He’s always had a ’40s-style character actor intensity that most people don’t seem to know how to appreciate.
I’ll take the pulp-trash fun in a CSI: Miami marathon over the jokiness of either NCIS show. (Caruso can act circles around Mark Harmon.)
Hey, I bow to no one in my admiration for Caruso in the likes of “China Girl” and particularly “King of New York.” But he’s bad in “Jade,” and he’s worse on “CSI.” And yes, of course “NCIS” is ghastly. But that’s neither here nor there.
Very cool stuff. When I get around to settling down and buying a blu-ray player and requisite HD set, this will be revisited with alacrity…
Got to chime in with the Edge love – excellent, tight script, two actors kicking ass at their craft and having heaps of fun, and it all hangs together despite the lapses in credibility, such as when they skin the bear, tan the hide, and stitch coats/smocks overnight. As quotable as any Mamet joint: “And today…I’m gonna kill the mothafucka!”
And yeah, Caruso is a sad story. So good in NYPD Blue (although I think Smits eventually bests him, which never would have happened if Caruso hadn’t been such a king-sized pain in the balls).
I’m really, really interested in seeing the Brakhage disc. This is at least one area where I still have a great reserve of film chauvinism…but I’m willing to believe that there might be a way to do it justice.
Props to Mr. Aradillas for listing all of Caruso’s best performances, but I must add one he missed. His performance as an ill-fated hood on Michael Mann’s CRIME STORY pilot (directed by Abel Ferrara) basically kicks off the series antagonists’ two-year death-match.
This would be more authentically Christgau-like if nothing rated above a B-.
Otherwise, very informative!
You may not have read Xgau for some time…his monthly Guide has been capsule reviews of nothing but A’s and high B+‘s (with one Must to Avoid and lower-graded stuff mentioned by name at the end) for 20 years now.
And even allowing for humorous exaggeration I don’t think he’s ever been THAT hard of a grader. His stinging reviews are damn stinging indeed, though.
I remember Christgau dismissing Wu-Tang Clan and Black Moon as Onyx rip-offs back in the day. His ear for hip hop was somewhat lacking.
Hopefully, no one will try to set Glenn on fire as some hooligan allegedy tried to do to Christgau at a Replacements gig at CBGB’s back in the early 80’s.
Grant, you called it … my knowledge of Christgau (and, to only a slightly lesser extent, of popular music) ends around 1980. One of these days, I’ll catch up!
Personally I don’t think there’s any shame in it, Stephen…I’ve had to let plenty of stuff I just don’t have the time to get to fall away myself over the years, with actually more of a sigh of relief than one of regret.
Jake Leg, I’ll do this quick and then shut up before being accused of being defensive (which I definitely am being):
http://robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?name=wu-tang+clan
He also gave high marks to ODB, Raekwon, the great Ghost Dog soundtrack, the great RZA Hits (I think that’s what it was called) comp, and nearly every album Ghostface Killah has released to date.
A later-day Christgau classic (On Stone Temple Pilots first album):
Core [Atlantic, 1993]
Once you learn to tell them from the Stoned Tempo Pirates, the Stolen Pesto Pinenuts, the Gray-Templed Prelates, Temple of the Dog, Pearl Jam, and Wishbone Ash, you may decide they’re a halfway decent hard rock act. Unfortunately, sometime after they’ve set you up with their best power chords, you figure out the title is “Sex Type Thing” because it’s attached to a rape threat. They claim this was intended as a critique, kind of like “Naked Sunday“ ‘s sarcastic handshake with authority. But at best that means they should reconceive their aesthetic strategy–critiquewise, irony has no teeth when the will to sexual power still powers your power chords. And if it’s merely the excuse MTV fans have reason to suspect, the whole band should catch AIDS and die. B-
Simultaneously his worst and best review.
The first two collections, the 70’s and ’80’s are nothing less than great criticism and a wild autobiography. An American institution he is. Hard to think that the rag that is now the Village Voice once had Christgau and Giddins writing in the music section, to say nothing of what the film section once was.
Please do look up the Christgau conumer guide to beer: http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/misc/beer-oui.php
And while he may have been rocky at one moment on hip-hop he has been quite good at times as Grant says. And he has been excellent on African music for quite some time. Hell, even Sonic Youth forgave him as he was one of the few critics to give a positive view to their most neglected record: Experimental, Jet-set, Trash…a far cry from “I Killed Christgau With My Big Fucking Dick.”
Forgot to mention that he’s so in love with Lil Wayne that, if Carola would OK it, he’d probably be up for a conjugal visit…
ONYX POWER HELLZ YES.
THROW YA GUNS UP POWER. You will all BOW to ONYX and proclaim them the most awesome shit ever. What’s with all the white film guys who didn’t grow up floating an aqua hat, smoking Newports and dressing like N2Deep? HOO RIDE POWER.
Also: Walkabout is one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen.
And by that I mean JENNY AGUTTER, Oh MY GOD, when I first saw Walkabout and beheld Jenny A. in her SMART BLUE HAT I was in LOVE. Of course I’d seen Werewolf and some of Logan, but this was like FRESH OUT OF THE OVEN Agutter.
So dreamy.
I demurred from mentioning this in my intro to the piece because I thought, for some reason, it would sound like a form of name-dropping, but Bob was one of my first editors and absolutely the best of them—my proudest moment as a writer was, and still is, publishing a review of Peter Blegvad’s “The Naked Shakespeare” in the Voice back in 1984, and Bob and I worked together often pretty much until his Voice ouster, even after he left the music editor post—and he is now an old and dear friend who I don’t see often enough. (Although Claire and I did have a lovely dinner with him, Carola, and our common friend Mr. Carson a month or so back.) Nice to know that some of my readers are avid followers of the man…
Grant L,
Christgau’s dismissal of Black Moon and Wu-Tang Clan as Onyx knockoffs appeared in a Voice article circa ’94, arguably East Coast hip hop’s greatest yeear ever. It has always stuck with me as a prime example of a writer being blind (or, in this case, deaf) to the excitement going on around him, kind of like a film writer in 1959 slagging BREATHLESS as a ripoff of American film noirs. Obviously, Christgau came around to appreciate the Wu. As Evelyn points out, he did much the same with Sonic Youth. Christgau definitely made his chosen subject matter exiting to read about and exciting to argue about, arguably the most important function of any critic. I just sometimes found him a bit blinkered about the music – underground rock, underground hip hop – I cared most about.
These are such useful and handy reviews … and what helpful guides for purchasing! You have a really handsome site here. The presentation is just great, as is, of course, the writing …
Aaron: Caruso really was great back in the day. I wish he himself would realize he deserves better. It’s said he behaves like a real ass on the CSI Miami set (Defamer had a very amusing article on this last year). It would be nice if, like Ray Romano, he used the capital off Miami to make something artistically interesting, but I doubt he will. Then again, I had no idea Romano had something like Men of a Certain Age in him.
Great article!! Just a quick comment though, when you mentioned the IFCfilms releases, Revanche is actually not part of that group, it was released by Janus Films (criterion) 🙂
xxfrank
p.s. I completely agree with that sentence though, I own both Revanche and Hunger on blu-ray!
JL, though of course the factors are different with each artist/genre, one part of Xgau’s makeup is a semi-frequent oversensitivity (hypersensitivity?) to what he perceives as hype, be it coming from the record company, the fans, or his fellow critics. Which can certainly cause the blinders to go on, to a large or small degree. In SY’s case, another factor was that he just felt it took them a little while to start making interesting music, which I sorta half-agree with.
And apologies, Glenn, in all of this I forgot to mention that I loved your first CG too…though I haven’t the wherewithal to pick up even half the titles sight-unseen, a great deal of them have been Netflixed.
History repeats itself: Dune was the first (and for a long time only) Lynch film to make it to DVD, too.
@ Frank: Oof. My bad. But speaking of Janus Films…I was at the gym yesterday, and I put on IFC because I saw Resnais’ “Mon Oncle D’Amerique” was gonna be on, and there really is nothing like doing a five mile run to that picture. Anyhow, when it came on I saw that it now had the Janus Film logo as its leader—its prior American distrib had been New Yorker. I don’t know how Janus came to acquire the picture, but I did notice that what IFC was showing seemed like a new transfer of the film. Which made me wonder if a Criterion DVD…or, dare I wish for it, Blu-ray disc, was in the works. I’ll have to look into that…
Grant, Taking a skeptical/iconoclastic attitude toowards hype is certainly of value. I’m just not sure the artists who made ’94 such a classic year for hip hop – Wu-Tang, Black Moon, Nas, Biggie, Jeru da Damaja, etc – were all that hyped at the time. If you look at the Voice Pazz and Jop poll for ’94, you’d never know what a great year for hip hop ’94 was. Christgau also sometimes attacked other critics for not buying into hype, once he himself had bought into it. I remember a conversation between himself and Gerard Cosloy that appeared in an old issue of SPIN where the pair discussed Sonic Youth’s DAYDREAM NATION and the first, self-titled Royal Trux album. Cosloy said something to the effect of listenining to DN for him was like catching Sonic Youth in Madison Square Garden – he just couldn’t connect to it at all. Christgau argued that Sonic Youth was better now because they made more accessible music that appealed to more people. Cosloy countered that he doesn’t live with those people, so why would he possible care if the music appeals to anyone but himself. In the end, I think Christgau had an objection to music he found excessively solisistic, which likely turned him off to a lot of underground rock from the 80’s and to some East Coast hip-hop as well…
IFC has such a bad reputation for the indifference with which they present their films that I skipped MON ONCLE D’AMERIQUE. Now I’m kicking myself. Personally, I like to do my running to Fassbinder flicks…
Geez, a Blu-Ray of TETRO almost tempts me to finally break down and buy a player… and TV. The script is big and operatic, and either you’re down with it or you’re not. But jesus, what a beautifully shot movie! Maybe the first to really convince me that DV was not just going to take over from 35 mm, but that it could actually provide as good an image.
Agreed with your first two sentences, JL…I think that particular instance falls more under perceived hype than actual.
The Edge: Yes!
Ride With The Devil: A thousand times yes!
I cannot imagine a world where “second-tier” spaghettis like Django aren’t grainy. Its like the grain was in the air in Almeria…
Great as always