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-

INLAND EMPIRE (Optimum U.K. import, Region B locked)

I remem­ber when this first came out and a lot of  would-be experts com­plained along lines of “Lynch can’t REALLY be happy with how this looks,” “how this looks” being an oft-smeary, muddy digit­al video, but hey, if you’ve seen the guys paint­ings, or the early shorts he made using the image sensors of video secur­ity cam­er­as, you don’t have to strain very far at all to appre­hend the pur­pose­ful­ness of the image and its qual­ity. Lynch may be an intu­it­ive artist, but he knows his eye, and what it wants. INLAND EMPIRE is what it is from its look down (or up). This look, this tex­ture, wheth­er you like it or not, is what he wanted, and a reflec­tion of how/what he sees, at least for the pur­poses of this par­tic­u­lar pro­ject. Deal. And in its indis­tinct smear­i­ness it is some­times quite beau­ti­ful. You get a lot of that early Sony cam shim­mer, only in high-def and in black and white and col­or. As might be expec­ted, the Blu-ray does a fine job of cap­tur­ing it. This image qual­ity is entirely appro­pri­ate to the con­tent, which makes a lot of Laura Dern’s fre­quently frozen anguished facial expres­sions. Watching this film this time around—and as Lynch films go, this is a pretty dif­fi­cult sit at times, but with real rewards—I dis­cerned  pos­sible influ­ence on Certified Copy, of all things. —A

Insignificance (Criterion)

This isn’t exactly at the top of the list of films I want to see get the Criterion Blu-ray  treatment—if I may be so bold, may I men­tion Bad Timing? Eureka?—but in mat­ters such as these I do gen­er­ally adopt the Bachman-Turner Overdrive atti­tude, that is, I’ll take what I can get. I’ve seen a few crit­ics bitch about the premise of this film’s scenario—you know, what if Marilyn Monroe met up with Albert Einstein who’s being hassled by Joe McCarthy who’s etc.—as being tire­some even as “what ifs?” go, and I am not unsym­path­et­ic. I also find Michael Emil a dis­tinctly unen­ga­ging per­former. Anyway: “What’d you see, did you see any­thing?” “I saw the face of God!” Such is the exchange between two tech­ni­cians under the grat­ing dur­ing a pas­tiche of the shoot­ing of the upskirt biz in The Seven Year Itch, so you can guess the con­clu­sion this pic­ture comes to about the nature of the cos­mos. Still. This looks really great, and the film does get bet­ter the fur­ther from the spe­cif­ics of the premise you can get from it. Then you appre­ci­ate the real charm, say, of Tony Curtis’ sweaty performance—he’s not doing Joe McCarthy, he’s doing J. J. Hunsecker. —A

The Island (Paramount)

My favor­ite Michael Bay movie, not least because it’s in essence a multi-million-dollar remake of a cheesy, hysterically-premised sci-fi B‑picture that wound up as an MST3K epis­ode. This concept appeals to the per­verse form­al­ist in me. Also because Scarlett Johansson looks espe­cially good in it. Also because it packs some rel­at­ively exhil­ar­at­ing action scenes into its cheesy hys­ter­ic­al premise, which is less inane than that of the Transformers movies. In any event the image is beau­ti­ful and the sali­ent extra, a com­ment­ary from the man him­self, is worth the price of the disc. On the cre­at­ive pro­cess: “That’s how you get ideas for movies, they come straight from real life.” On effects: “If you put a human being in a plastic bag with 150 gal­lons of KY Jelly in it…” well, don’t let me spoil that for you. On ScarJo:. “Not only is she a pain in the ass to work with and I mean that in the best way.” Finally, the maestro’s explic­a­tion of the word “dude” explains A LOT. Check it out. —B+

Kiss Me Deadly (Criterion)

Grain-hater Jeffrey Wells wasn’t com­pletely off base in his reports with respect to the seem­ingly vari­able grain on dis­play here. The sali­ent dif­fer­ence is that in no part of the film does any­body look “covered with bugs.” But at cer­tain points the grain is heav­ier than it is at oth­er points. But the disc looks abso­lutely tops over­all,. The  sharp­ness under­scores just how the visu­als are cru­cial above all else to the thor­oughly mod­ern­ist sense of ali­en­a­tion the film is so inves­ted in—check out the shots of Mike and Velma framed in front of new­ish L.A. build­ings after he leaves hospital…they’re prac­tic­ally Antonioniesque—while nev­er los­ing the pulpi­ness of the sur­face con­tent. Indeed, the 1955 film’s por­trait of slick new L.A. in relief with its old quaint tendrils is a movie in and of itself.  And love that answer­ing machine!  The Alain Silver/James Ursini com­ment­ary is very good, no sur­prise, and oth­er extras are sol­id. You need this. —A+

The Lickerish Quartet (Cult Epics)

“Don’t take it so ser­i­ously, it’s only a film!” Sex-film pion­eer Radley Metzger’s arti­est pic­ture, a kind of Teorema-in-reverse crossed with undergrad-level Robbe-Grillet is pretty exquis­ite in this high-def ver­sion. One char­ac­ter wears a mohair sweat­er, and really, it’s as if each par­tic­u­lar hair is stand­ing on end like quills upon the fret­ful por­pentine. There’s a bit of audio-level dis­crep­ancy between music score and dia­logue track but not NEARLY as notice­able as what’s on the Olive Blus. Besides that, some scratches at what look like reel-opening points but noth­ing to com­plain about oth­er­wise. Also worth not­ing that Cult Epics discs ain’t cheap, so think about how much you really love ‘70s erot­ica before you com­mit to this.—A

The Long Riders (MGM/UA)
Damn, this is a really good movie. This Blu-ray some­times strikes me as little on the “bright” side, but over­all the image is very rich and burn­ished, look­ing best dur­ing, say, an over­cast funer­al scene. Watching Pamela Reed’s turn as a feisty pros­ti­tute, and enjoy­ing her dorsal nud­ity, I had a weird flash­back to work­ing at Video Review magazine and read­ing a review of something-or-other by Jeffrey Lyons in which Lyons referred to Reed, apro­pos of noth­ing, really, as a “quiet, shy act­ress.” What a doo­fus. With respect to audio, again, a pretty big dynam­ic range dif­fer­ence between dia­logue and music and it’s kind of annoy­ing. —B+

Lord of the Rings Extended Edition (Warner)

Wow. Look at that shire. So green.  So gor­geous. Okay, I’m just gonna  come out and admit it: I have not watched this set, which runs about 700 hours, in its entirety. But I’ve looked at a good deal of it, and have been thor­oughly impressed with every aspect of the present­a­tion. It’s beau­ti­ful. And some time this year I WILL look at the whole thing, and not without pleas­ure; while I can’s be said to be a fully-fledged mem­ber of Team Hobbit, or whatever you want to call it, I have a lot of respect for the pro­duc­tion achieve­ment this tri­logy rep­res­ents. Although I still hold with my old wise­crack that the first film, The Fellowship of the Ring, is the greatest slideshow of Led Zeppelin album cov­er art­work ever cre­ated. In any event, con­sider my grade pro­vi­sion­al. I’ll cor­rect it if I find any­thing wrong, or even “wrong” with this. —A+

The Makioka Sisters (Criterion)

I do love when Criterion plucks a title out of not-quite-nowhere and spruces it up with a fresh-as-a-daisy present­a­tion that renders it a com­mod­ity ripe for both dis­cov­ery and ree­valu­ation. Kon Ichikawa’s exquis­ite 1983 fam­ily saga isn’t really an unknown quant­ity, but it’s not revived here­abouts all that fre­quently. So this is a gift in many ways, one of which is evid­ent from the very first frames, which include some breath­tak­ing per­spect­ives of cherry blos­soms in bloom; the col­ors on this Blu-ray are some of the most gor­geous and dis­tinct­ive that you’ll see out­side of a vin­tage Minnelli pic­ture. Just beau­ti­ful.—A+

The Man Who Would Be King (Warner)

Really pretty nice, and a long-overdue upgrade of one of Huston’s best lat­ter films. Logo pur­ists rejoice: the old Allied Artists logo is untouched as the pic­ture! The image is pretty hand­some. The com­pres­sion job­bers did good work with the snow in par­tic­u­lar. I found the image a lot more con­sist­ent than the DVD Beaver review­er did. There’s some wear and tear vis­ible but really noth­ing that rep­res­ents a sharp fal­loff of qual­ity, so I would tell you to buy with con­fid­ence. —A

 New York, New York (MGM/UA)

Hey I for­got Casey Kasem was in this! Okay. So, there’s some aspect ratio weird­ness at the begin­ning of this; the open­ing cred­its are kind of win­dow­boxed, and then the pic­ture settles into….yup, 1.66. This is one of Scorsese’s really dif­fi­cult films; the delib­er­ate contrast/mixology between the emo­tion­al extremes of the con­tent and the push­ing of cine­mat­ic arti­fice some­times feels like the director’s try­ing to take the audi­ence off of a par­tic­u­lar with him; still, as Godard once put it, this finally is “un vrai film.” One that deserves a some­what bet­ter treat­ment than it gets here, image-wise, I think. The pic­ture is a little soft­ish, without seem­ing overly digit­ally manip­u­lated. But it hasn’t even got close to the bang I remem­ber upon see­ing it for the first time at the Ziegfeld when it opened. Though maybe that’s too much to ask. This is a good ren­der­ing for high-def, but not nearly as rev­el­at­ory as that of Raging Bull.—A

People on Sunday (Criterion)

The 1930 once-in-a-career throw­ing togeth­er of Siodmak, Ulmer, Zinneman, Wilder and Siodmak, is a sui gen­er­is sort of fake doc­u­ment­ary that sheds Expressionism like a loose skin and shim­mies toward a ver­sion of pre-neo-realism. Or at least it’s pretty (or maybe just easy) to think so. In any event there’s really noth­ing else like this beau­ti­ful and slightly eer­ie fake doc, and this is a beau­ti­ful edi­tion from the start (the res­tor­a­tion is not, as one might have expec­ted, a Murnau house deal but a col­lab between EYE Film Institute Netherlands and Criterion itself). Oh, man, what fab­ulous sil­very grain is evid­ent right from the start. It’s like look­ing at an hour and fif­teen minutes worth of anim­ated pre­cious metals. Just gor­geous! A real delight, dis­arm­ing for being a little unex­pec­ted. —A+

Rio Lobo (Paramount)

Another tri­umph for logo ori­gin­al­ists, this high-def mas­ter of Howard Hawks’ last pic­ture begins with the Cinema Center Films logo, YES! And boy, look at that cast: David Huddleston…Sherry Lansing (man, do not fuck with her)…George Plimpton…Terrific details through­out, includ­ing the stuff you’re not meant to notice, for instance you can see the scratches on the super­im­pos­i­tion text trans­par­en­cies they optic­alled into the guitar-picking mont­age for the cred­its! A most wel­come gift for Hawks fans, and if you’re not a Hawks fan, why are you read­ing this blog?—A

The Stunt Man (Severin)

Severin, like the Metzger-curating label Cult Epics, likes to put out much-sought after spe­cialty items at unpop­u­lar prices. Given the unpop­ular­ity of the prices, the product had bet­ter be pretty good, and this ver­sion of Richard Rush’s enga­ging meta-movie looks pretty good and has a bunch of extras attached. Perfection it is not: Some video noise is mixed with the grain…and Rush’s per­haps ill-advised infatu­ation with the tele­photo lens yields a real sense of  soft­ness when he’s hold­ing the shot at the tight­er end of the zoom lens. But it looks damn good over­all and even bet­ter dur­ing the out­doors scenes. Still hate that dinky score though. —A-

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (MGM/UA Best Buy exclusive)

The ori­gin­al, not that Tony Scott thing that know-somethingish cinephiles of a cer­tain stripe feel oddly com­pelled to stick up for. And so, a clas­sic, gray­ish, urb­an ’70 look, cour­tesy of cine­ma­to­graph­er Owen Roizman. VERY nicely cap­tured for high-def. Terrific com­pres­sion, excep­tion­al sharp detail. Under the fluor­es­cent light­ing of the sub­way cars and the grim MTA offices, every­one looks a little not-very-good at least, and that’s awe­some.  Hector Elizondo’s char­ac­ter, what a pig. With Jerry Stiller as “Rico.” In short, everything that fuck­ing French Connection Blu-ray SHOULD have been—A+

They Live (Eagle Pictures Italian import, Region B locked)

Good details (in the tra­di­tion of Richard Boone’s bulbous nose, here we have real­ist­ic­ally pock­marked Roddy Piper), very sol­id if unspec­tac­u­lar. And a fab­ulous motion pic­ture. The fact that Universal hasn’t put this mas­ter out domest­ic­ally speaks very poorly of Universal, but also indic­ates a prob­lem with respect to the act­iv­ism of our con­sumer class. Fabulous.—A

Those Daring Young Men In Their Jaunty Jalopies/Houdini (Legend)

In the tra­di­tion of my review of the double-disc/double-feature Blu-ray of The Skull and The Man Who Could Cheat Death, I’m gonna rate this based on a view­ing of only one of the films, so there. Not to say I’m NOT look­ing for­ward to check­ing out Ken Annakin’s very agree­able Jaunty Jalopies, but the under­ground cinephile pick is the very enjoy­able biop­ic that most cred­it­ably pairs Tony Curtis with Janet Leigh and boasts one of Curtis’s most enga­ging, com­mit­ted per­form­ances. The pic­ture is great fun right from its “meet cute” open­ing for the leads. The mas­ter was clearly made from imper­fect mater­i­als (there are some col­or regis­tra­tion issues in cer­tain scenes), but over­all it’s pretty hand­some and vivid. It rep­res­ents a small but appre­ciable boost in detail from the standard-def ver­sion, and there’s a whole oth­er movie attached, the price is low, so yeah, this is a good value for the Curtis/Leigh lov­er. A-

True Grit (Paramount)

We’ve already argued as much as I care too about the film, which I think very highly of, but I can’t ima­gine there being any argu­ment over this Blu-ray of it, which is just  “Holy crap” flaw­less. Just beau­ti­ful. The col­or, the detail. The flame! The night scene(s). There’s a lot of difficult-to-resolve stuff here that’s resolved and depic­ted bril­liantly. A true demo disc show­case piece.—A+

Wild At Heart (Universal U.K. import, region free)

Good detail and col­or. Grain skews toward noisy at times, which is a little bit of a sur­prise. Largely pretty good. Excellent sound. Which is, or should be no sur­prise. There’s a lot of grain increase/breakup dur­ing cer­tain optic­al effects, such as the dis­solves from  Diane Lane’s wicked witch to burn­ing win­dow, but it’s not overly dis­tract­ing. Also notice­able is dif­fu­sion (or is it vas­el­ine on the lens) in the early exchanges between Ladd and Harry Dean Stanton. But over­all the look is sol­id and vivid. A lot of people like to talk shit about this movie and its lack of, I dunno, coher­ence (or was it intel­li­gence?), but who cares? As a sheer spec­tacle it’s AWESOME!—A

You Only Live Once (Eagle Pictures Italian import, Region B locked)

Another Italian job, that is, it’s from the same out­fit that had the brains to put out They Live. I ima­gine the actu­al extant mater­i­als for this 1937 film, one of Fritz Lang’s best in Hollywood, are not pristine, but this ver­sion looks very sol­id through­out and this is likely the best it’s gonna look in a video format unless new mater­i­als are found or an extens­ive res­tor­a­tion is done.  So Lang freaks with a multi-region play­er, you know what to do.—A

Zazie dans le metro (Criterion)

Whimsy might not have been Louis Malle’s most con­geni­al cli­mate, and his attempt to trans­pose the antic word­play and pata­phys­ic­al atti­tude of one of Queneau’s most enjoy­able novel’s to the screen is not always on the mark—it’ll strike many as kind of con­ven­tion­al in its “Paris when it’s zany” trap­pings. Which might not be an entirely bad thing; the movie’s pretty access­ible as a res­ult. And it looks, in this ver­sion, like the pla­ton­ic ideal of a bright and beau­ti­ful col­or ‘60s “new wave” film com­edy. Intoxicating, in oth­er words. Good extras too. Fun.—A