Disgracefully Overdue Face-Saving Blu-ray Consumer Guide, October 2012

How did this hap­pen? With the best of inten­tions, I threw myself into the ostens­ible May Consumer Guide with rel­ish after post­ing the April edi­tion, and then, as Joseph Heller said, some­thing happened. More than some­thing, a few things. The neces­sit­ies of mak­ing a liv­ing. The warm­ing weath­er. Then the pub­lic pool opened. Then…I split my big toe open on a steel step and got twenty stitches in that toe, and, with no swim­ming options and lim­ited exer­cise options, I figured, “Well, great, I’ll finally get that Consumer Guide sor­ted. Hell, I might be able to get a COUPLE sor­ted if this thing does­n’t heal up quick.” But some­thing else got a hold of me. I was pos­sessed by an artist­ic impulse that con­sumed all of my atten­tion and I thus fin­ished a book that I’d been dick­ing around with for too long. So there was that. In the mean­time the discs piled up, the notes stagnated.

So, I took what was sup­posed to have been some time off to catch up and pro­duce this largely not-exactly-entirely-current-release-oriented assess­ment, to clear the deck and to main­tain the integ­rity of my brand, damn it. The main prob­lem with try­ing to pro­duce one of these things on a con­sist­ent monthly basis is that it’s not remu­ner­at­ive. I don’t under­stand why. Blu-ray mar­ket too eso­ter­ic? Writer too eso­ter­ic? Who can say. If things don’t get too dis­tract­ing I hope to have a nifty hol­i­day CG up before Christmas. I’ll say right now so far that Universal Classic Monsters box is look­ing good. Enjoy. 

Black Sunday (Kino Lorber) 

Eventually the enthusiast’s, or if you prefer, cultist’s cry
of “Fantastic! The chef d’oeuvre of [insert name of cine­mat­ic object of
rev­er­ence] is finally out on Blu ray, and it looks…fantastic” starts to sound
like an inver­ted claim of “Wolf!” even among the con­ver­ted, or at least the
curi­ous. But I’m not just being con­trari­an when I admit to being slightly
under­whelmed by this high-definition ver­sion of Mario Bava’s 1960 breakthrough
(auteur-wise) pic­ture. This is an excel­lent present­a­tion, don’t get me wrong.
Of an English-language only ver­sion, in not-quite 1.66 fram­ing, and…still
show­ing speckles, wear, dam­age. Film res­tor­a­tion has not quite caught up with B
pic­tures yet, and there were times watch­ing this when, for the first time in a
long time, I felt an aware­ness of the ways in which this pic­ture and its maker
were NOT able to tran­scend budget­ary con­straints. I don’t know if it’s the
high-def, I don’t know if it’s advanced age and/or aes­thet­ic cal­ci­fic­a­tion, I
don’t know if it’s because for some reas­on or anoth­er this movie resides in my
film memory a little too close to Murnau’s Nosferatu, but there you have it.
Still. It’s Black Sunday and it’s a good look­ing version—an excel­lent looking
ver­sion, above-mentioned imper­fec­tions notwithstanding—and it has an excellent
audio com­ment­ary from Bava bio­graph­er Tim Lucas, so, there’s all that. —A-

The Color of Money (Disney)

Hey, remem­ber that Popular Mechanics art­icle I did a few
years ago where I talked about Scorsese edit­or Thelma Schoonmaker agon­iz­ing a
bit over wheth­er to use the awe­some powers of digit­al to turn some aqua-felted
pool tables a little more green, and decid­ing that maybe it was okay after all?
Well, they stu­dio powers that be finally got around to run­ning off a Blu-ray
from that mas­ter. And it looks very delight­ful indeed. Scorsese has said that
he wanted to shoot this Hustler sequel in black-and-white but was soon resigned
to the fact that that wasn’t gonna hap­pen; what we have here is a movie with
muted, almost pas­tel col­ors and long shad­ows. But not a case of out-and-out
desat­ur­a­tion. Bare-bones in the extras depart­ment but very hand­some looking,
and a pretty good movie, too; its com­prom­ises do not look like a very big deal
at all, which is funny con­sid­er­ing the cries of sac­ri­lege that were raised by
some at the time con­cern­ing the very idea of sequel­iz­ing the earli­er poolhall
clas­sic. Now the pic­ture looks more like a product of The Hustler’s era than
this one. Bare-bones. —B+

UPDATE: In the wake of Bob Harris’ scath­ing assess­ment of this disc (http://www.hometheaterforum.com/t/321398/a‑few-words-about-the-color-of-money-in-blu-ray) I am giv­en pause, and won­der if my assess­ment was made in too much haste. Please take the above with a grain of salt, and I’ll invest­ig­ate fur­ther and post an update in a sep­ar­ate post in the near future, I hope.)

The Conformist (Arrow, Region-B-locked U.K. import)

Blu-ray mavens very reas­on­ably take excep­tion to slathered
DNR and its echo arti­facts and more. But some­times, when call­ing atten­tion to
it, they don’t, to my way of seeing, 
take into suf­fi­cient account the fact that one doesn’t actu­ally watch a
movie on Blu-ray step­ping through it frame-by-frame, the bet­ter to catch
egre­gious digit­al image arti­facts. Motion pic­tures move. And so, des­pite there
being a cer­tain amount of DNR soft­ness on this disc, the over­all viewing
exper­i­ence of the visu­ally sump­tu­ous Bertolucci film is a pretty impressive
one. It is cer­tainly the best it’s ever looked in home video format. Do I hope
for a cor­rec­ted, more care­fully restored/fixed ver­sion some­where down the line?
I do. In the mean­time, I do not regret pur­chas­ing this, because when I feel
like watch­ing the movie, it offers a better-than-watchable present­a­tion. —B+

Demetrius and the Gladiators (Twilight Time)

The sequel to The Robe and a fur­ther demo of the Wonders Of
Cinemascope, it has a weird low-rent qual­ity that’s attrib­ut­able I guess to
Victor Mature’s pres­ence in the lead (sorry Victor) and a more pronounced
sword-and-sandal vibe that the pri­or pic­ture. In any event, it doesn’t push the
view­er to con­vert to Catholicism a whole lot, that’s for sure. Delmer Daves’
sure hand behind the cam­era not­with­stand­ing, this old “4:30 Movie” fave is one
goofy pic­ture. It com­pletely wastes Debra Paget, cast­ing her as a virginal
future mar­tyr who does ZERO snake dan­cing or any­thing.  But it looks pretty great on this disc:
Really sol­id col­ors. Good com­pres­sion. Check out Susan Hayward in lav­ender. A
little sub­dued in the sat­ur­a­tion depart­ment com­pared to The Robe, but still
pretty won­der­ful. —B

Desiree (Twilight Time)

This one, if you’ll excuse the inex­cus­able sex­ist metaphor,
really sep­ar­ates the men from the boys in the CinemaScope festishizing
depart­ment. Because it’s kind of a ter­rible movie. Marlon Brando gives one of
his least-engaged per­form­ances (he might have been tran­quil­ized, or think­ing of
buy­ing a house) as Napoleon in this Henry-Koster-directed snooze­fest. As he had
also helmed The Robe, this gig gave him fur­ther oppor­tun­ity to expand on his
the­ory of widescreen. In Contempt Fritz Lang fam­ously com­plains that the
ana­morph­ic format is good only for shoot­ing “snakes and funer­als.” Well, Lang
for­goes coron­a­tions. And recep­tions after coron­a­tions. This motion pic­ture seems
replete with them. On the plus side, it’s a beau­ti­ful trans­fer of excellent
mater­i­als; if one is suf­fi­ciently struck by the par­tic­u­lar­it­ies of a CinemaScope
frame, abstract or not, and has no need of a con­ven­tion­al movie to justify
them, this serves a fine func­tion. —B

Harold and Maude (Criterion)

I don’t remem­ber the movie being quite this beau­ti­ful when I
saw it as more or less a child, but I do remem­ber every video ver­sion of it up
to now being suf­fi­ciently ugly as to make me won­der what it was I saw in the
movie in the first place, even. Anyway, now I know. Such a won­der­ful autumnal
look through­out, impos­ing a sort-of real­ity prin­ciple on what is, I finally
real­ize, a work of magic­al real­ism. In terms of dir­ect­or Hal Ashby’s work, it’s
way closer to Being There than to The Landlord. That’s why I don’t mind the
kind of dated counter-cultureish anti-military stuff; it KNOWS it’s out­land­ish caricature
stuff. The lar­ger point being, that this kind of present­a­tion (not even getting
into the extras, which are won­der­ful) is so essen­tial because it can make you
see a movie with fresh eyes. It’s not a repeat view­ing, it’s a redis­cov­ery. I’m
grate­ful for Criterion for help­ing me redis­cov­er this movie and for everything
else they do. —A+

In The Mood For Love (Criterion)

This ended up in 
pretty high pos­i­tion in the Sight And Sound “50 Greatest Films Of All
Time” poll, and there was a lot of grumbling about this on blogs and social
media. And I got it. “Sure,” I said, “It’s PRETTY great, but it’s not Wong
Kar-Wai’s best movie.” Then I got this Blu-ray upgrade and watched it. In the
immor­tal words of Billy Strayhorn, “oh yes I was wrong.”  Well, not WRONG, exactly. This still
might not be Kar-Wai’s best film. But damn, is it strong, and unusu­al, and
beau­ti­ful. I under­stand that a lot of his sig­na­ture visu­als have been picked at
by so many carrion-esque com­mer­cial and music video dir­ect­ors, but that’s not his
fault. And the fact is that they work here, and that he builds up such a
tender, fra­gile, and yet very def­in­ite, emo­tion­al cli­max with his uncannily
beau­ti­ful images and mag­ni­fi­cent manip­u­la­tion of sound that this cer­tainly does
achieve great­ness, and the disc’s high-def upgrade is at times almost literally
breath­tak­ing. Watch it and tell me I’m wrong now. —A+

Jaws (Universal)

Helluva movie, that’s for sure. Interesting to hear that
even back in the day John Williams couldn’t res­ist lay­ing it on thick…not with
the scary music stuff so much but with the borderline-insipid Gorton’s
fish­er­man sail­ing music every time Quint pulls in and out of port. Said music
is ever more envel­op­ing on the oth­er­wise very well-mixed  sur­round soundtrack. The image has been
un-fucked-around with to the extent that you’d think a very pure filmmaker
super­vised the trans­fer. An excep­tion­al pack­age. —A+

 Lady for a Day (Inception Media)

Even going to the web­site doesn’t tell you much about who
this “Inception Media” out­fit is, but this seem­ingly anom­al­ous release from the
com­pany is a gift horse cinephiles do not need to look in the mouth. Unlike a
lot…hell, almost ALL…releases of TCM-type movies that aren’t actu­ally put out
on disc in con­junc­tion with TCM, this rendi­tion of a too-little-seen 1933 Frank
Capra movie is really quite beau­ti­ful, very sharply detailed black-and-white
with that lus­cious sil­very qual­ity rel­ished by many of us. And  it’s  crackerjack pic­ture, too. Adapted from a Damon Runyon story with the untransferable-to-Hollywood-title Madame Gimp, it’s an
exem­plary mix of pre-code sass and Capra corn filled with mem­or­able char­ac­ters played by ace char­ac­ter act­ors. Massive. I’m not ask­ing ques­tions: I’m
just pre­order­ing the company’s next vin­tage title, the British com­edy On
Approval.—A

 The Last of England (Kino Lorber)

Derek Jarman’s magis­teri­ally pissed-off  cine­mat­ic cri de couer contra
Thatcher’s Britain is an assemblage of foot­age mostly shot on smal­ler gauge
formats and blown up to 35mm, and this was of course entirely purposeful.
Oversaturated col­ors, lots of grain, com­prom­ised focus; that, among other
things, is what these images are made of. This disc presents a trans­fer that is
not as entirely spe­cif­ic as I might have liked: often the amp­li­fied grain gives
way to a more digit­al  vari­ety of
smear. If it happened too often it’d be annoy­ing, but…As Godard demon­strated in
In Praise Of Love, digit­al smear has some of the same express­ive qual­it­ies as
amp­li­fied grain. Hence, this rendi­tion works damn well. A para­dox of  the medi­um, for sure. —B+

The Lost Weekend (Eureka!/Masters of Cinema Region-B-locked
U.K. import)

I applaud the U.K. label’s burst of enthu­si­asm for
golden-age Hollywood fare: this is one of three such pic­tures Blu-rayed at the
same time by MOC, the oth­er two being Lifeboat and Double Indemnity. Here’s
also to John F. Seitz, one of the very best cine­ma­to­graph­ers Billy Wilder ever
worked with, and the guy who made the blacks in the shad­ows of this dark film
prac­tic­ally palp­able. There is a back­ground con­trast flick­er thang going on
here, and it’s very much in keep­ing with the
film-going-through-a-shutter-at-24-frames-per-second issue, so it has its
integ­rity and place. And once you’re absorbed in the drama you don’t much
notice it. I have yet to look at the afore­men­tioned titles that were part of
this par­tic­u­lar release spurt but I’m awfully excited to. Extras are extensive
and offer some unex­pec­ted stuff, as is cus­tom­ary for this com­pany. —A+

Magical Mystery Tour (Apple)

Richard Lester, after dir­ect­ing the Fab Four in A Hard Day’s
Night and Help!, opined in a sub­sequent inter­view that the fel­lows make their
next movie them­selves, divorced from the “cult of film.” This tele­vi­sion film,
pulled togeth­er to rally the cre­at­ive forces in the wake of man­ager Brian
Epstein’s death, shows that Lester’s idea was maybe half-good. “We made it up
as we went along,” Paul McCartney says right off the bat in his, good lord,
director’s com­ment­ary. This pos­sibly lysergic-inflected takeoff on a British
tra­di­tion (the mys­tery tour, a day’s out­ing where the pas­sen­gers don’t know
where they’re going) is a mess, and at every turn you’re reminded of how much a
surer hand and eye behind the cam­era and lights would have helped things.
Hence, an arti­fact for Beatlemaniacs only, which cat­egory I am proud to almost
fall into. The movie looks the way it looks, which is very casually-deployed
16mm style, where the lens flares are wholly acci­dent­al and no less lovely for
it. The Surround ver­sions of the (great) songs are pretty hap­pen­ing, Macca’s
com­ment­ary is relaxed and not all that cutesy (he sounds, well, old) and the
oth­er extras, which include a genu­inely inform­at­ive “About The Supporting Cast”
short film with awe­some Ivor Cutler foot­age,  and a cut Traffic num­ber (as in the band, with young fresh-faced Steve Winwood), are pretty hap­pen­ing too. —A 

The Mizoguchi Collection (Artificial Eye Region-B-locked
U.K. import)

I can hear you now: “A four-film Mizoguchi box set on Blu-ray?
What the fuck is up?” But don’t get too ter­ribly excited. This British issue
duplic­ated two of the four titles in the domest­ic, standard-def
Criterion/Eclipse col­lec­tion Mizoguchi’s Fallen Women. And, going by A‑B
com­par­is­ons of those pic­tures, 1936’s Osaka Elegy and  Sisters of the Gion, both are the same trans­fers. The beauty
of the movies them­selves aside, they’re not much to write home about: so soft
that the improve­ment provided by the HD upgrade on the British mater­i­al is
barely dis­cern­able. (Of the two Sisters of the Gion has the over­all better
pic­ture, which kinda bites if you prefer Osaka Elegy, as this review­er does. It
is not entirely sur­pris­ing that the post­war (1946) Utamaro And His Five Women
looks the best in this batch. 1939’s The Story Of The Last Chrysanthemums, alas,
is super blotchy. But it’s also The Story Of The Last Chrysanthemums. —B-

Project X (Olive)

I maybe shoulda waited to fin­ish this Guide and taken the
time and filled in a more “dis­tin­guished” release from Olive, some­thing like
The Sterile Cuckoo or even My Son John, but let’s face it: releases such as
this, a late William-Castle-directed sci-fi item made in 1967, are part of the
appeal of the Olive brand. And we’ve got a couple more respect­able Olive titles
down the ways  any­ways. This, Project X matches a sub-Dickean plot­line to a very-television friendly cast
that included Harold Gould, of all people, as some­thing of a bad guy. The
time-travel hijinks are abet­ted by very pecu­li­ar pre-psychedelic effects by
Hanna-Barbara. These have to be seen to be believed. In a sense the whole movie
does. The look is a little gar­ish, evok­ing TV-movie-of-its-time-ness.
As nov­elty Blu-rays go, not ter­rible by a cer­tain stand­ard, but some of your
friends might look at you funny for own­ing it. —B-

Re-Animator (Image)

Oy, how many video ver­sions of this have there been, anyway?
And why do we con­tin­ue to keep buy­ing them? I don’t know the answer to the
first ques­tion, and the answer to the second ques­tion has the ini­tials “B.C.” This is a movie that it’s likely impossible to see with fresh eyes, and
as an excep­tion­ally well-made low budget enter­prise, not shot in such a way
that upping the defin­i­tion is going to res­ult in any­thing rev­el­at­ory. But it’s
a hor­ror clas­sic in excel­lent digit­al shape so if you’re ever loved it,
or B.C., you should def­in­itely get it. —A

Rio Grande (Olive)

This 1950 pic­ture is argu­ably the slight­est in the informal
Ford “cav­alry tri­logy” that also include Fort Apache and She Wore A Yellow
Ribbon. Ribbon is not yet out on Blu-ray, but Apache is, and as it is like Rio
Grande in black and white, it makes a good point of com­par­is­on. Fort Apache, on
Warner, has deep­er blacks. Rio Grande doesn’t exactly tend to the soft side,
but in some scenes one feels a bit sharpness-deprived. But I’m being picky
here. This is pass­able through­out, and often quite a bit bet­ter. Ben Johnson
and Harry Carey, Jr. at their cutest, and a rip-roaring Dale Evans song, “Aha
San Antone” sung by Ken Curtis/Sons of the Pioneers. (UPDATE: In my haste to men­tion the par­ti­cip­a­tion of the Sons of the Pioneers in this motion pic­ture, I elided a cru­cial point and said the Sons of the Pioneers sang this song. It is depic­ted in the film, rather [as a terse com­menter points out], as being sung by Curtis, Carey, Jr., and Johnson. Who know’s who’s REALLY singing it, though.) What more do you want?
Extras? Forget it, this is an Olive title… —A

The Royal Tenenbaums (Criterion)

For home use, Wes Anderson’s movies need Blu-ray like the
flowers need the rain, like the winter needs the spring, etcet­era. The only way
the com­pany could have improved this pack­age would have been to get the rights
to that Anthology rendi­tion of “I’m Looking Through You” and slap it back on
the final scene. Anyway, buy with con­fid­ence. —A+

Summer Interlude (Criterion)

I’m very much in the midst of explor­ing early Ingmar
Bergman, and the takeaway I’m get­ting is that from the very start of his
movie­mak­ing career in the 1940s, he had com­plete con­fid­ent con­trol of his
tech­nic­al appar­at­us. Every shot, every cam­era move­ment, every cut, is
abso­lutely sure and abso­lutely right. This 1951 tragi-romance is his tenth
fea­ture film, and it moves along like a sail­boat cut­ting through the calmest of
waters on a fleet but quiet wind. The digit­al res­tor­a­tion here is absolutely
stun­ningly beau­ti­ful You see how gor­geous the cov­er shot is? Every frame of
this disc looks that good. Incredible. —A+ 

Too Late Blues (Olive)

In which John Cassavetes, fresh (kind of)  from the very raw and real and fraught
Shadows, tries to bring his pre­ferred mode of film­mak­ing to Hollywood. The result
is an odd, not at all bad pic­ture about jazzbo Bobby Darin’s quest not to sell
out…an actu­al con­cern for Darin, so he brings some real insight to the role.
The Olive Blu-ray is sol­id, not very pic­tur­esque. But the pic­tur­esque was never
Cassavetes’ bag any­way. If you are/were build­ing a J.C. lib­rary, this fills a
very sub­stan­tial hole in it. —B+ 

Yellow Submarine (Apple)

This charm­ing trifle doesn’t boast the most technically
advanced eth­os of anim­a­tion you’ve ever encountered, which in a way is why a really
tech­nic­ally advanced digit­al ren­der­ing of it is the only way to go. A lot of
the scenes, as befits the psy­che­del­ic moment in which this was made pit very
strong almost primary col­ors against each oth­er and on top of white
back­grounds. For the optim­um effect, stuff bleed­ing into oth­er stuff is
dis­cour­aged. This Blu-ray is bril­liant at that, and the res­ults are gorgeous,
eye-popping. The remixed soundtrack is well-executed and, again, exceptionally
appro­pri­ate to a trippy gestalt. The ori­gin­al mono mix con­tin­ues to work well.
While its cute­ness isn’t to everyone’s taste, again, if you’re a Beatle person,
essen­tial. —A