Blu-ray Consumer Guide: March 2012 Edition

Hello, remem­ber me? 

Equipment: Playstation 3, domest­ic discs, OPPO BDP 83, import discs, Panasonic Viera TC-P50S30 the dis­play, Pioneer Élite VSX-817 AV the amp. 

Anatomy of a Murder (Criterion)

Even in the wrong—that’s right, wrong—Academy ratio fram­ing of this 1959 film released on DVD by Sony many years back, this pic­ture main­tained a great deal of its flu­id multi-leveled visu­al com­plex­ity. The cor­rect 1.85 fram­ing and the boos­ted detail here (some of which, admit­tedly, conks out briefly for a shot or two at a time—look for decreased forehead-wrinkle levels in a shot in the first Gazzara/Stewart con­fab about 19 minutes in, for instance) AMPLIFY that qual­ity, which helps in turn to reveal why it is, in fact, one of the Great Films. The shot of Stewart’s char­ac­ter scop­ing out the awards and news­pa­per clip­pings on the wall of the Thunder Bay Inn here shows Preminger as a def­in­ite info-fiend pre­curs­or to David Fincher. Haven’t explored extras but don’t need to to award this a per­son­al:— A+

Annie Hall (MGM)

1970s New York in col­or is prac­tic­ally its own genre. What’s cool about the ima­gin­ary genre are the con­nec­tions with­in it; while the worlds of this film’s char­ac­ters and those of Taxi Driver are in a sense uni­verses apart, they’re not entirely unre­lated of course and you can sense that without much effort. The grit of Gordon Willis’ cine­ma­to­graphy here (and giv­en dir­ect­or Woody Allen’s dis­in­clin­a­tion to work with movie-adequate light in many scenes, it can get gritty indeed) well com­ple­ments Allen’s least roman­ti­cized vis­ion of New York, New York, and this disc deliv­ers that grit more than adequately. As it’s a release of a Woody Allen film the extras are a non-issue, but if the idea of a Blu-ray of this title means any­thing to you at all, you will not be dis­ap­poin­ted with this, image-wise. —A

The Apartment (MGM)

The sub-theme of this par­tic­u­lar install­ment of the guide could be “Preservation as opposed to Restoration.” This high-def upgrade of the less-than-entirely-insouciant (and all the bet­ter for that) 1960 Billy Wilder com­edy is a pretty straight thing: a com­pet­ent high-def ren­der­ing of a beau­ti­ful film made from obvi­ously sol­id mater­i­als. As such, it’s not what you’d call “eye-popping.” At least not imme­di­ately. Refreshingly, though, it doesn’t appear to have been screwed with over­much, with respect to still-somewhat dubi­ous tools like DNR. So this rep­res­ents an iter­a­tion of a con­scien­tiously under­taken pre­ser­va­tion of the film for your home view­ing pleas­ure, which will be sub­stan­tial indeed. That is, even though the image won’t make you say “Holy cats” imme­di­ately, you’ll have an almost uncon­scious appre­ci­ation of the qual­ity of the image. Sonics hew to the enhanced-but-not-redefined eth­os. Very nice. —A

The Ballad of Narayama (Eureka!/Masters of Cinema U.K. import, region B locked)

The Eureka!/MOC high-definitioning of the crazy world of Shohei Imamura (which is the crazy world of us all, in  a sense) con­tin­ues to yield stag­ger­ingly won­der­ful res­ults. This 1983 film, treat­ing a small moun­tain vil­lage cul­ture, is in the sense of set­ting a kind of inverse of 1968’s Profound Desires of the Gods, which depic­ted the inhab­it­ants of a small near-tropical island. Here we start out with a lot of snow and frozen breath, beau­ti­fully cap­tured by cine­ma­to­graph­er Masao Tochizawa, whose CV also boasts some nature docs but who, more import­antly, also shot Profound Desires. The movie itself is top-tier Imamura anthro-surrealism and, and one enthu­si­ast on the IMDB noted, “Teaches you how to love your par­ents and kids.” A twenty-minute video intro by Tony Rayns is excel­lent. —A+

Birth of a Nation (Kino Lorber)

The greatest prob­lem film of our great nation’s his­tory on Blu-ray at last. (And still, those “cen­sored Looney Tunes” have yet to turn up from Warner Archive. ) Quite a pack­age, too; a new high-def mas­ter of the 1915 fea­ture on the Blu-ray, and two sep­ar­ate standard-def DVDs fea­tur­ing the Shepard res­tor­a­tion of ’93, a doc, a bunch of Griffith shorts (and boy you gotta love Griffith’s SHORTS); any­way, a cinephile pack­age of dis­tinc­tion. One aspect of film preservation/restoration that’s advanced almost hand in hand with the improve­ments in video tech­no­logy relates to our expect­a­tions as to how GOOD films of almost one hun­dred years of age can look. Well do I remem­ber show­ing William K. Everson the first laser disc of this film, and his intrigue, excite­ment, and slight skep­ti­cism. This ver­sion has a detail level that is pretty remark­able walk­ing almost hand in hand with obvi­ous arti­facts of digit­al “improve­ment.” As early as five minutes in, a shot of a pillared door­way covered by a drape, right before Lillian Gish’s entrance; the pat­tern­ing of the drape is extremely vivid, while the fur on the cat sit­ting on the stoop under the drape’s hem seems washed out. These little things rep­res­ent the give-and-take that neces­sar­ily goes into every such pro­cess. In the aggreg­ate, the choices made here, includ­ing the level of the tint­ing, FEELS cor­rect. The ulti­mate effect is that of…well, that of watch­ing a nearly one-hundred-year-old film. Only three years to go. —A+

Casino Royale (MGM)

Given the peculiar-to-say-the-least pro­duc­tion his­tory of the film, one might expect a Blu-ray of it to look a bit of a mess, and this IS mixed to be sure. But mostly on account of the optic­al and oth­er effects used in the film itself, which, along with the fact that the weird thing had almost a half-dozen dir­ect­ors, pre­vents the Bond, spoof from achiev­ing a really uni­fied look, and that’s kind of half the fun. As a Blu-ray present­a­tion this is really pretty damn good. I am par­tic­u­larly fond of how the much-bruited-by-audiophiles music soundtrack comes off on my sys­tem (NHT tower speak­ers for left and right chan­nels BOI!!!). And there are some gor­geous visu­al bits BESIDES the top-drawer female cast, with the cartoon-Expressionist Mata-Bond-in-Berlin sequence tak­ing the cake as it usu­ally does. I do love this pic­ture, so I’d be all over it even without the explan­at­ory doc chron­ic­ling how this movie got so odd. —A

Colombiana (Sony)

Hey kids! If you play this Sony Blu-ray on a PlayStation 3 there’s some doo­hickey that makes that pic­ture of Zoe Saldana pray­ing with/to a gun into your Playstation wall­pa­per or screen saver or some­thing. It’s kind of neat until you don’t want it or your wife’s think­ing you’ve all of a sud­den got this weird Zoe Saldana thing, and you don’t know how to get rid of it! Oh, and the disc of this quite enjoy­ably trashy Megaton con­coc­tion looks pretty fine too, and is of course damn loud. —A- 

Fort Apache (Warner)

As one movie site pro­pri­et­or has snarled on his own site, this is not one of Warner’s 8K frame by frame scanned repair jobs or any such thing; it’s a more stand­ard issue high-def trans­fer of mater­i­als in good over­all shape but show­ing a little dam­age here and there. That’s one reas­on you can get the thing for a little over twelve bucks on Amazon, and if you’re a fan of the film or of Ford in gen­er­al you abso­lutely should, because the over­all high qual­ity of the image is main­tained con­sist­ently through­out, yield­ing a very sat­is­fy­ing view­ing exper­i­ence of the movie itself. So there you have it. —A

The Helmstrom Chronicle (Olive)

One reas­on you gotta love the IDEA of Olive Films is that the out­fit will put this kinda arcane pop cul­ture arti­fact, a clev­er 1971 fake-doc in which the para­noid (or is he?) tit­u­lar sci­ent­ist uses a lot of awe­some insect foot­age to propag­ate a the­ory that the creatures are not going to just out­live us but in fact maybe KILL US ALL or some­thing. One reas­on you some­times gotta love the idea of Olive more than the real­ity lies in the too-pink fleshtones of act­or Lawrence Pressman as the tit­u­lar sci­ent­ist. And one reas­on you gotta hedge a bit on this issue is because you don’t remem­ber if that was a prob­lem with the film as screened back in the day, and also because the insect foot­age itself is pretty damn eye-popping. So you once again decide to accept and kind of cher­ish some­thing like this mixed gift. —B+ 

Manhattan (MGM)

Is this Allen’s abso­lute mas­ter­piece, or merely his most form­ally accom­plished film? Good ques­tion, one this column was not really designed to address, but in any event this disc is the best way for home view­ers to prop­erly grapple with it. Allen went for a bit more quasi-Expressionist gloss with his fol­low up to this, Stardust Memories, but here he and Willis get an ideal-but-not-(overtly)-idealized widescreen black-and-white view of the title town. This is the best I’ve seen it look since the­at­ric­al and FAR bet­ter than any pri­or DVD. Highly recom­men­ded if you’ve got any affec­tion for the thing at all. Another feast of supplement-withholding, of course. Can you ima­gine what will hap­pen if Criterion ever wants to do an Allen film? —A 

Man of the West (MGM, German import, region B locked)

The 1958 Anthony Mann pic­ture a very dis­tinct­ive look to it, par­tic­u­larly in the sere and treach­er­ous final third. And at first I thought this German import Blu-ray wouldn’t live up to that look, because dur­ing the film’s open­ing cred­its the col­ors  are pretty damn dull and washed-out. HOWEVER, after said cred­its things perk up  QUITE a bit, and resolve into an extremely absorb­ing present­a­tion. Always nice to get two Arthur O’Connell films in the column in the same month.—A

Nothing Sacred (Kino Lorber)

This is a high-def trans­fer of a pre­served print from the George Eastman House. The Technicolor of this 1937 pic­ture is all over the place and gen­er­ally resolves in that kind of soft pink under­tone that’s about the last thing I actu­ally want in Technicolor. But for all that it’s still the best present­a­tion of the film I’ve yet seen.  I rather won­der if a full-bore res­tor­a­tion (assum­ing there are mater­i­als apt to be restored) would redefine this pic­ture, which in its cur­rent form looks more like some sort of cine­mat­ic anom­aly than a prestige pro­duc­tion of its time. —B-

Notorious (MGM)

Solid, unspec­tac­u­lar, and essen­tial. Of the three Hitchcocks com­ing out on Blu-ray from MGM, I sup­pose this is the one I WANTED to look the abso­lute best, and it’s not. (To find out which is, keep read­ing.) We recall that this is the film for which Hitchcock asked DP Ted Tetzlaff, as they were pre­par­ing a shot that was to cut from a trans­par­ency screen shot, “Don’t you think it would be a good idea to have a little light on the side, sweep­ing across the backs of their necks, to rep­res­ent the motor­cycle head­lights that are shown on the trans­par­ency screen?” to which a per­turbed Tetzlaff ini­tially respon­ded, “Getting a bit tech­nic­al, aren’t you, Pop?” As usu­al Hitchcock the tech­ni­cian was push­ing the stu­dio appar­at­us as far as it would allow and the high-def trans­fer shows it, much as it does on the Criterion The Lady Vanishes. Hence, the some­what silken feel that I asso­ci­ate with this movie is dif­fused ever-so-slightly. I under­stand this effect is mostly psy­cho­lo­gic­al. But it brings up a poten­tially new wrinkle in the trans­fer integ­rity issues that so bedev­il this par­tic­u­lar format. Still. A must. —A

On The Bowery  (Milestone)

Lionel Rogosin’s 1957 doc/fiction hybrid, a sear­ing por­trait of non-lush life with the lushes of lower Manhattan, was a kind of try­out reel for the socially-conscious filmmaker’s even more gal­van­ic Come Back, Africa. Terse but com­pas­sion­ate, thor­oughly unsen­ti­ment­al, it teems with views and moments that make it like an unwrit­ten Liebling piece or Luc Sante explor­a­tion set into motion. In utterly beau­ti­fully black and white and backed with a raft of fas­cin­at­ing extras includ­ing a mord­antly iron­ic ‘60s anti­war film by Rogosin, it’s the kind of pack­age that should be the reas­on every hard­core cinephile bought a Blu-ray play­er for in the first place. —A+

Rebecca (MGM)

THIS, as it hap­pens, is the best look­ing of the three Hitchcock Blu-rays on MGM, and for the most part, it is REALLY fuck­ing spec­tac­u­lar. Which some will find iron­ic, or at least some­thing of an irrit­at­ing coin­cid­ence, as they might con­sider this romance-with-thriller-elements com­pleted under the very press­ing aegis of David O. Selznick to be the least Hitchcockean of Hitchcock films. To which I say bosh, any­way. As much as I object, say, to yo-yos who insist that if only Terrence Malick had a strong pro­du­cer who’d inhib­it him from going all goo­fily New Age we could get anoth­er Badlands or Day Of Heaven, in ret­ro­spect it is quite inter­est­ing to see how an auteur such as Hitchcock occa­sion­ally asser­ted his prerog­at­ive from under the Selznick yoke. The “Hitchcock touch” applied to a job of work, as it were. It’s there from the very start, as in the dream track­ing shot through the gates of Manderlay, through the cari­ca­ture of the hor­rid “friend” (Florence Bates AS Edyth Van Hopper, apo­lo­gies and thanks to jbry­ant) whose “paid com­pan­ion” Fontaine’s char­ac­ter is, and so on. Kind of makes one want to look at Mr. and Mrs. Smith. And every sequin of Selznick’s opu­lent pro­duc­tion value glit­ters here. Pretty awe­some. —A+

 Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Fox)

The pic­ture is beau­ti­ful and the sound is over-loud  right off the bat. Story of your life when it comes to con­tem­por­ary sci-fi block­busters on Blu-ray, so what are you going to do? (And before you think go think­ing “if it’s too loud you’re too old,”  I’ll say that I still hap­pily crank the likes of Back in Black and/or Raw Power at levels well above the ‑5 dB set­ting on my  bigass amp whenev­er I get the oppor­tun­ity, which admit­tedly isn’t too often. What the issue here is of pro­por­tion­ate volume. And it’s too loud. Which is eas­ily fixed. And the pic­ture does the CGI effects the ser­vice of not mak­ing them look more like CGI than they already do, which does not obtain, for whatever reas­on, on many oth­er  Blu-rays of this sort of fare. —A

Seven Chances (Kino Lorber)

In the con­tinu­ing tale of the Kino Lorber Keaton Blu-rays, this one is excel­lent, super crisp, really beau­ti­ful, a good com­pan­ion piece to the company’s superb Blu of The General. Although it is not, over­all, as great a film as The General. In a way its not-being-as-great-a-filmness actu­ally enhances one’s appre­ci­ation of Buster’s abil­ity to enliven a film as a PERFORMER. This res­tor­a­tion also fea­tures an open­ing made in an early iter­a­tion of Technicolor  that high­lights the then-inchoate pro­cess as a kind of nov­elty. It’s all trans­ferred at a very high level, no more of this “inter­laced” B.S. like the Blu of Our Hospitality. Highly recom­men­ded. —A

 Silent Running (Eureka!/Masters of Cinema U.K. import, region B locked)

I love some of the off­beat pro­gram­ming choices the Masters of Cinema folks make. I remem­ber when this came out in 1972. Everyone thought a film dir­ec­ted by vaunted visu­al effects guy Douglas Trumbull was gonna be a mind­blow­ing sci-fi spec­tac­u­lar, but this was more an earn­est message-oriented cham­ber piece set in an envir­on­ment depend­ent on visu­al effects rather than defined by them. Put anoth­er way, the effects here are about con­vin­cing rather than wow­ing, and the dom­in­ant tone is set early on when lead act­or Bruce Dern is seen water­ing plants while wear­ing garb that puts one in mind of a Biblical proph­et, like Noah. I myself was delighted to redis­cov­er this eco-crusading cinema par­able, and your mileage may vary; it helps to be big on Bruce Dern. But (to para­phrase Robert Christgau) if you’re not at least a LITTLE big on Bruce Dern, why are you read­ing this blog. Anyway, as most Masters of Cinema products do, this disc not only provides a gor­geous present­a­tion for the film, but the whole pack­age makes a strong case FOR the film. Highly recom­men­ded. —A+

Spellbound (MGM)

Some glass-half-empty types were grous­ing about this before it was even released, spec­u­lat­ing that the transferers-that-be might flub the flash-of-red effect near the end, but the effect is there and the trans­fer is sol­id from stem to stern, that is, the scratches that the nym­pho patient leaves on the hand of Harry the attend­ant are quite vivid, the deglammed Ingrid Bergman drab in a very vivid way, and so on. It’s one of Hitchcock’s weak­est pic­tures not so much because of the picture-book Freud of Ben Hecht’s pat­ron­iz­ing script (although that doesn’t help) but because it’s so stead­ily humor­less. Really, Hitchcock shoulda let Dali go hog­wild on Bergman with the ants, that woulda been FUN. In any event, of the three Hitchcock/Selznick Blus under con­sid­er­a­tion here, you could call this the most skip­pable. Or buy it used. Or some­thing. —B+

A Star is Born (Kino Lorber)

Another Selznick/Wellman Technicolor clas­sic, a kind of What Price Hollywood retread that benefited from the per­son­al exper­i­ences of all the behind the scenes play­ers, and unspoiled on screens well before there was a Los Angeles branch of AA for poor Norman Maine to check out. I think. Another trans­fer from a George Eastman House print, and the col­or is in bet­ter shape than that on Nothing Sacred. Very watch­able but still a little curio-esque, which is too bad. Essential cinema for sure though. —A

Stars and Stripes Forever (Fox)

Why is this 1952 screen bio­graphy of John Phillip Sousa on Blu-ray? Does it have a cult or some­thing? If so, where IS that cult? Maybe watch­ing the thing will help answer at least the first ques­tion. Well, the movie IS in Technicolor, and really pretty Technicolor, and it’s just gor­geously rendered here, almost (almost is an import­ant word) as rav­ish­ing and clean as what you get on a Criterion Powell/Pressburger. It also, believe it or not, fea­tures Debra Paget in a white leo­tard doing a hooch­ie dance almost as inflam­mat­ory as the one she does in Lang’s Tiger of Eschnapur. And here, the detail of 1080p really DOES make a dif­fer­ence, if you know what I’m say­ing and I sus­pect you do. It’s also rather inter­est­ing to see Clifton Webb, in the role of Sousa, try­ing to butch up a bit. At times he looks like Red-peri­od Robert Fripp, which is super weird. I really like this disc, but I have to admit it’s really only for Technicolor freaks, demo-disc seekers, Debra Paget drool­ers, and Sousa devotees. I may belong to three of those four cat­egor­ies. —A

Terrorizers (Sony, Taiwan import, region free)

You wanna know ANOTHER reas­on I hate that stu­pid Dan Kois “Cultural Vegetables” art­icle? Yeah, I know, “No,” but I’m gonna tell you any­way. This sen­tence: “Yes, there are films, like the 2000 Taiwanese drama Yi Yi (A One and a Two) , that enrap­ture me with delib­er­ate pacing, spare screen­plays and stat­ic shoot­ing styles. I’ve watched Yi Yi five times and nev­er once dozed off over 15 cumu­lat­ive hours of low-key Taiwanese domest­icity.” Goddamn. With this string of banal­it­ies that don’t even men­tion dir­ect­or Edward Yang, Kois attempts a defanging of the great film­maker. I ima­gine this attemp­ted defanging is inad­vert­ent because I infer that Yi Yi is the only Yang pic­ture Kois has seen. But the cozi­ness that Kois evokes in his descrip­tion of Yi Yi is NOT EVEN skin-deep and Yang him­self was of course a vital, rad­ic­al, angry film­maker, as one can glean from watch­ing as few as ten minutes of his 1991 A Brighter Summer Day, for instance. Or this amaz­ing 1986 pic­ture, which I still have yet to fully or even par­tially pro­cess crit­ic­ally. But man, about the region-free high-def ren­der­ing here: Wowsers. BEAUTIFUL pic­ture qual­ity; just an excel­lent cleanup without over stressed DNR or such. You almost nev­er see Asian films from the ‘80s look­ing this good; it’s part of a series of sig­ni­fic­ant Taiwan fea­tures restored for Blu-ray that also include Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’Amour, which I hope to get to next time. A VERY encour­aging devel­op­ment for Blu-ray here, for sure, albeit not a cheap one, par­tic­u­larly stateside. —A+

Two Lane Blacktop (Eureka!/Masters of CinemaU.K. import, region B locked)

There are some films that I’d hap­pily run on a loop in whatever view­ing envir­on­ment avail­able. This is one of them. It’s suf­fi­ciently per­fect, in my mind, that I almost don’t even want to know any­thing about it out­side of it. Which is not to say that the sup­ple­ments the Masters crew have attached to this are unwel­come. But the thing for me is the film, a very apt upgrade from the Criterion stand­ard def ver­sion of a few years back. An upgrade in which every dingy diner and gas sta­tion, every end­less hori­zon, every too-sun-bright small town, looks ever that much more…perfect. American clas­sic, Melville-worthy stuff, unim­peach­able, all that. —A+

Witchfinder General (Odeon, U.K. import,  region free)

Good God, how many video ver­sions have their BEEN of this under­ground not-exactly-horror clas­sic? All man­ner of vari­ous issues involving rights and mater­i­als appear to have been solved since back when poor Tim Lucas was bemoan­ing music cue replace­ments. I myself was not able to keep up and am still not sure of how up-to-date I am NOW, but I can report that in the recent Blu-ray ver­sion the film’s pre­dom­in­ant tex­ture resides in the realm of Wicker Man-redol­ent light dif­fu­sion. Which gives an impres­sion of soft­ness, as they say. The defin­i­tion isn’t ABSENT, merely dif­fi­cult to fully glean. Things perk up about 25 minutes in, with the ick-laden “you may come to my room tonight” scene. But hon­estly, the image qual­ity, while nev­er out and out bad, is rather vari­able, but it’s a fea­ture of the film itself, not of the trans­fer, which is first-rate. A really not­able film with a really top Vincent Price per­form­ance, but I’m think­ing you know that, so buy with con­fid­ence, as they say. —A