Blu-ray Consumer Guide: November 2012

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is kind of the bene­fit of being handed a long stretch of time dur­ing which one is more or less obliged not to leave the house. Of course if I had lost power this would be an entirely dif­fer­ent blog post and don’t think I’m not appre­ci­at­ive of how for­tu­nate my house­hold was/is in this respect. 

Having con­trived to get back “on the ball” with this pro­ject, I made a set of rules, one of which I ended up not fol­low­ing. That would be to only review twenty titles per install­ment. As you see, there are 26 here; anoth­er bene­fit of a sort of enforced down time. I also embraced a cer­tain kind of ran­dom­ness, not really apply­ing a set cri­ter­ia to what was going in the pile. Once the pile was determ­ined, I stuck with it, save for one omis­sion, which was Dial M For Murder, which, unlike Prometheus, I thought needed to be looked at on a 3D sys­tem, which my home setup is not at the moment. The six I ended up adding to the pile could have been things I just incid­ent­ally wound up watch­ing (Moonrise Kingdom) or some­thing for which a ver­dict was so mani­festly obvi­ous that it sug­ges­ted itself almost as soon as the disc star­ted play­ing (the Fleischer Supermans).

I also endeavored to be more care­ful. I am mor­ti­fied to admit that I really fucked the mon­key with my cap­sule on The Color Of Money last install­ment. I might have been over-tired when first watch­ing it, or just believ­ing some­thing about it that I wanted to believe, but after read­ing Robert Harris’ evis­cer­a­tion of it and giv­ing it anoth­er look…well, I’m not as down on it as Harris but I don’t dis­agree with him either (if that makes any sense); it’s a shoddy disc and I was crazy to ini­tially grade it as high as I did. I’ll try not to let it hap­pen again. I believe the below assess­ments are a lot more accur­ate across the board. I ima­gine you’ll let me know!

Equipment: Playstation 3 for domest­ic discs, OPPO BDP 83 for import discs, Panasonic Viera TCP50S30 plasma dis­play, Pioneer Élite VSX-817 AV amplifier/reciever.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (Universal)

Why is the anim­ated open­ing (reputedly the work of Walter
Lantz) win­dow­boxed? That little quirk is my only com­plaint about this rendering
of a divis­ive com­edy clas­sic, cited by many genre fans as the point where
Universal just stopped tak­ing hor­ror movies seriously.
Lon Chaney Jr.
appar­ently hated it. Which makes the ten­sion between his Larry Talbot and Bud
and Lou that much more con­vin­cing. Anyway, the pic­ture here is attractive,
clean, shows good grain, and only occa­sion­al hints of noise (around the circles
formed by some klieg lights on plain walls, for instance). Greg Mank’s
com­ment­ary is very good, schol­arly, inform­at­ive, delivered in a style that’s
neither too stiff nor slop­pily cas­u­al. As a late boomer of Italian-American
her­it­age who grew up in Jersey I am of course prac­tic­ally genetically
determ­ined to be an Abbott and Costello fan, so take that caveat for what you
will.  —A

 Altered States (Warner)

I some­times have enter­tained a the­ory that this is Ken
Russell’s best film, which the­ory might have been influ­enced by the fact that I
first saw it dur­ing its the­at­ric­al run in 1980 on what they used to call a “hot
date” which the movie actu­ally enhanced, which was rare in those days so…I
dunno what to tell you.
It still holds up pretty damn well today and I think
there’s pretty much no movie that can’t bene­fit from the pres­ence of Bob
Balaban and Charles Haid play­ing against each oth­er. And Blair Brown, o dios
mio. William Hurt was quite a babe him­self. As for the Blu-ray, it looks good
for the most part but skin tones can be a little flush and over-bright in
“real­ist” scenes. There’s a little video noise here and there, some unwanted
shim­mer in “dust to dust” hal­lu­cin­a­tions sequence but for the most part this is
very nice indeed and the weird stuff really pops.  —B+

 The Aristocats (Disney)

The last anim­a­tion fea­ture the old man signed off on (although he died well before it was com­pleted, four years before its 1970 release in fact), and yeah, it’s a 101 Dalmations retread minus the scary edge and who cares.
The
anim­a­tion style, which some latter-day crit­ics, I see, have cri­ti­cized for its
ostens­ible crudity, is quite inter­est­ing, with its “sketchy” pen-and-ink
delin­eations cre­at­ing move­ment in the human char­ac­ters’ hair and faces, or the
kit­tens’ fur. The back­grounds are uni­formly gor­geous in design, col­or, and
draw­ing style. In the 1.66 aspect ratio that the stu­dio largely favored, I am
told (see also Mary Poppins).
Pretty much a per­fect high-def ren­der­ing; while the remastered 5.1 surround
soundtrack is fine it would have been nice to have the ori­gin­al audio here too.
A sweet short star­ring Pinocchio’s
Figaro, in which the kit­ten gets a bath from Minnie Mouse, is also included in
full HD and there are some enga­ging oth­er extras. —A

 The Big Heat (Twilight Time)

Wow. Very nice.
Twilight Time’s high-def stuff is nev­er not good, but this ren­der­ing of Fritz
Lang’s sizz­ling 1952 angry-cop-out-for-vengeance thrill­er is gor­geous. A supple
and sharp black-and-white image that really high­lights the
near-expressionist-with-a-lower-case-“e” light­ing: see the way Lucy Chapman’s
face stays a quarter-to-half darkened in close-up, in the bar scene where Glenn
Ford’s char­ac­ter grills the act­ress, who’s play­ing a B‑girl who coun­ted on a
now-dead cop as her tick­et out of B‑girldom. This keeps up through­out, clean as
a whistle and deep and dark and pretty much flaw­less. Isolated score soundtrack
is the only on-disc extra, and it’s a nice touch.—A

Female Vampire (Kino/Lorber)

Watching this Blu-ray sug­ges­ted to me yet anoth­er way of
look­ing at pro­lif­ic no-budget dir­ect­or Jess Franco, not as a genre dir­ect­or or
a half-assed por­no­graph­er but rather as an under­ground film­maker. That is to
say, this bare-bones “nar­rat­ive,” which is largely com­posed of
lengthy med­it­at­ive shots (punc­tu­ated with zooms, of course) of his walk­ing wet
dream of a lead­ing lady/wife Lina Romay feels, super­nat­ur­al trap­pings aside,
almost diar­ist­ic. Yes, in a Jonas Mekas Walden kind of way. The qual­ity of the Blu-ray image is superb through­out as
the movie itself changes in image qual­ity all the time, depend­ing on the
mater­i­als at hand and the meth­od of shoot­ing, and in this par­tic­u­lar too the
diar­ist­ic aspect is emphas­ized. It’s like a series of obsess­ive obser­va­tions of
Romay strung togeth­er with this super­nat­ur­al nar­rat­ive tem­plate applied to it,
the ele­ments of exploit­a­tion mov­ing its action close to hard­core without ever
get­ting there. (There is a ver­sion of the film fea­tur­ing hard­core foot­age, and
the pro­du­cers at Redemption appar­ently wanted to include that ver­sion in this
pack­age, but if they did they’d have had to kiss Amazon and big-box stores
good­bye, so no, and god­dam­nit I hate this fas­cist coun­try.) Good grain,
con­stant back­ground con­trast flick­er, skin tones all over the fuck­ing place; in
oth­er words, a very accur­ate trans­fer! I dug/dig it. You might not. —A

Letter From An Unknown Woman (Olive)

It’s one of Max Ophuls’ best U.S.-produced films, so it’s a
no-brainer, but this is no Criterion treat­ment. Then again, it’s not bad. It
appears to be mastered from same source as Second Sight U.K. DVD from several
years ago. Which looked decent, not great. This has the same scratch marks in
scenes so that’s why I’m think­ing the source material’s identic­al. That being
the case, the high-def upgrade IS notice­able. Detail is boos­ted, the pic­ture is
a tad bright­er, but not overly so; the clar­ity is wel­come. The audio track is
improved, too; at a “nor­mal” volume level (for instance, the ‑14dB read­ing on
my amp) the Second Sight soundtrack seemed over­mod­u­lated; here it comes out
nice and clear. —B

Mad Monster Party (Lionsgate)

You know there’s a prob­lem with a Blu-ray when the menu
image is far more vibrant than the screen image of the work itself.
This
ver­sion of the charm­ing puppet-animation monster-movie sen­dup, a charming
pic­ture to watch in a cer­tain mood, nos­tal­gic or not, looks ter­rible, and
that’s a real shame; it would have been kick­i­er to see it look­ing more like Nightmare
Before Christmas, a movie it most likely at
least par­tially inspired. Utter crap, and a real shame. On the oth­er hand, the
exper­i­ence of watch­ing it on a crappy col­or TV in the ‘60s is reproduced
PERFECTLY. —D

Mean Streets (Warner)

One of the many things that make Martin Scorsese such a
dis­tinct­ive film­maker is a visu­al style that often splits the dif­fer­ence between
real­ism and a fever-dream impressionism/expressivity. That’s cer­tainly present
here, as in the “Rubber Biscuit” drunk scene, from which Spike Lee and Ernest
Dickerson extra­pol­ated their dolly-walk shot. But giv­en the movie’s limited
budget, the amount of arti­fice required to make some run­down pock­ets of L.A.
stand in for New York’s East Village/Little Italy, and maybe the fact that the
dir­ect­ive to make this break­through fea­ture was handed to Scorsese by John
Cassavetes, you have a movie that lands firmly, more often than not, on a
square most would label doc­u­drama real­ism. Which is also to say that the
movie’s fre­quently raw-looking. Some shots aren’t pre­cisely focused, some of
the hand­held work isn’t as assured as it might have been, and so on. This
Blu-ray, which also keeps an excel­lent Scorsese com­ment­ary from the last
standard-def edi­tion, gets the movie’s raw­ness but also its fre­quent beautiful
moments of mook lyr­i­cism visu­al­ized. A keep­er. —A

Moonrise Kingdom (Universal)

When a stu­dio gets a great movie right for the high-def
edi­tion (and this ought not be all that dif­fi­cult in the Realm Of The Digital
Intermediate, although bit­ter exper­i­ence has taught us that noth­ing is a sure
thing [what, for instance, can explain The Assassination of Jesse James… Blu-ray?]) there’s really not much you can say
besides “Bravo!” My own third time around for this won­der­ful pic­ture, and what
I noticed here was the pre­pon­der­ance of yel­low bathing cer­tain shots in the
movie’s front end, before the storm. Looked great. Certain of the pictorial
detail and light did bring home its ori­gins on Super 16 film more than the
the­at­ric­al pro­jec­tions I saw. As befits stu­dio issued product rather than more
con­scien­tiously cur­ated edi­tions ala Criterion, the extras here are mostly of
the EPK vari­ety, but as it’s a Wes Anderson movie, they’re
more-creative-than-average-EPK grade. No mat­ter. —A

My Son John (Olive)

Leo McCarey’s notori­ous 1952 anti-Communist fam­ily drama is
one odd duck of a film, a series of fraught, sin­cere dia­logue scenes in which
the increas­ingly effete, snotty and con­des­cend­ing John of the title, the
incred­ible Robert Walker, pat­ron­izes his All-American neur­ot­ic par­ents (Helen
Hayes and Dean Jagger) and is sub­jec­ted to ever more bizarre dressings-down
from them.
A film maudit in sev­er­al cru­cial respects, not least of them being
that Walker died dur­ing the shoot­ing, and McCarey was obliged to reconstruct
his cli­max. He built it largely around foot­age from Strangers on A Train that Alfred Hitchcock was kind enough to lend him.
Hence, we have shots of Walker in a phone booth talk­ing with no sound, and the
carou­sel death scene from Strangers optic­ally prin­ted in to a car-seat after a
fatal crash…oh, it’s just a mess that you’ve got to see to believe. And now you
can finally see it—this has been one hell of an elu­sive pic­ture over the years.
This is a sol­id unre­mark­able trans­fer but a really essen­tial title. Also, Frank
McHugh is in it. “Maybe…we’ll have a last­ing peace some time soon.”—A

The Naked Gun (Paramount)

From the com­ment­ary: “O.J. Simpson was in this?” “He was.”
“Where is he now, is he still acting?”
The open­ing scene of this very hilarious
1988 pic­ture, in which hero­ic­ally inept Frank Drebbin mucks up a meet­ing of
America’s enemies, now indic­ates what was prob­ably dir­ect­or David Zucker’s
then-inchoate con­ser­vat­ism, which led him to his dis­astrous An American
Carol. Such details aside this remains a
largely time­less hoot. Although at the begin­ning one is inclined to find the
image HIGHLY under­whelm­ing. Soon enough cer­tain things start registering
high-def-like; the detail on Leslie Nielsen’s white hair is pretty sharp, if
you’re into that, so one gets the impres­sion this is not merely an exer­cise in
pretty­ing up an out­dated mas­ter. It is not a movie that gets a really
sig­ni­fic­ant upgrade in pleas­ure via high-def, but if you’re fond of the movie
and have the equip­ment, this is a sens­ible option, par­tic­u­larly if you can
score it cheap, and you can. —B

The Navigator (Kino/Lorber)

After a dis­ap­point­ing (e.g., inter­laced) 2011 Our
Hospitality, the Kino/Lorber series of
Buster Keaton releases picked up quite nicely but quick, and this title is a
fur­ther reflec­tion of the stuff get­ting back on the beam. This 1924 title,
which strands rich Buster on a big boat with a girl who’s kind of not that into
him, is an invent­ive phys­ic­al com­edy that gets odder as it goes along,
cli­max­ing with an innov­at­ive sword (fish) fight. The image looks pretty damn
nice.  The inter­titles are speckly,
but the var­ied tints look good (I par­tic­u­larly enjoyed the isol­ated yel­low flag
on a quar­ant­ine ship). Recommended.—A 

The Penalty (Kino/Lorber)

As bor­ing fuck­ing black-and-white silent movies go this is
pretty weird.
(And not entirely black-and-white, either.) A study in star power
and per­form­ance mas­ochism, in which Lon Chaney dons a painful-to-wear
(appar­ently) har­ness to por­tray a leg­less gang­ster whose life of crime has been
lead­ing up to the oppor­tun­ity to get revenge on the doc who mis­takenly cut him
off at the knees as a child. Good sharp image qual­ity from a George Eastman
House res­tor­a­tion; the occa­sion­al tint­ing doesn’t seem over done. Aside from
Chaney’s per­form­ance, I par­tic­u­larly enjoyed “Lichtenstein, of the Federal
Secret Service,” and the movie’s double-whammy end­ing. —B

Private Hell 36 (Olive)

Relatively early Don Siegel.
This 1954 pic­ture is his eighth
dir­ect­ori­al fea­ture and finds him pretty firmly on the noir/crime drama ground
that he’d been spend­ing much time on. Co-written by cost­ar Ida Lupino (the
pic­ture was an inde­pend­ent pro­duced by a com­pany foun­ded by Lupino’s
then-husband Collier Young, who worked with her on the script), it’s mostly a
hard­boiled char­ac­ter study in which going-to-pieces cop Steve Cochran tries to
enlist his more straight-arrow part­ner Howard Duff into a
keep-some-stolen-money scam. The Dragnet-evok­ing
open­ing nar­ra­tion is kind of a key to the final plot twist, which isn’t bad.
The 1.77 present­a­tion from Olive isn’t bad: there’s a fly in the lock­er room
where Duff and Cochran have a little chat, and it’s very vis­ibly buzzing
around. There’s lots of vis­ible grain that seems to poise on the pre­cip­ice of
becom­ing noise but nev­er quite get­ting there. Fans of Ms. Lupino’s
idio­syn­crat­ic vocal styl­ings in 1948’s Road House will be happy to learn that
she sings again here.—B+ 

Prometheus (Fox)

I remem­ber one stoned col­legi­ate cinema dis­cus­sion many many
years ago in which a nit­picky friend com­plained about a con­tinu­ity error
involving a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t axe at the cli­max of The Wizard of
Oz, and anoth­er friend dead­pan­ning to the
com­plain­er, “So is that where the movie loses cred­ib­il­ity for you?” Which is
pretty much all I have to say about any and all of the whinges that the, um,
enthu­si­ast vari­ant of what Alfred Hitchcock calls” the plaus­ibles” have about
this movie. (Being that the enthu­si­ast demo is not eas­ily squelched, I can
prac­tic­ally hear all the “Oh, come on, what about X?”s indig­nantly rising in
response to this dis­missal.) If the fact that I respond very pos­it­ively to this
movie strictly on the level of visu­al spec­tacle makes me a bad…person, I can
live with that. Because it is a really amaz­ing visu­al spec­tacle pretty much
from stem to stern, and this Blu-ray get it. Pin prick sharp, astound­ing color,
the vari­ous ima­ging effects (the pinboard-animation-like dreams, the alien
race’s “secur­ity cam­era” mas­sacre replay foot­age) repro­duced gorgeously…you
can’t ask for bet­ter. A lot of the action in this takes place in dark murky
envir­on­ments and I can’t find an instance of crushed blacks or any such thing.
I don’t have full-time access to a 3D high def dis­play but the 2D Blu-ray is
pretty much per­fect to my eye and so I kind of wish I DID have a per­man­ent 3D
rig.—A+

Pursued (Olive)

In 1943, writ­ing of the film The Hard Way, James Agee observed “James Wong Howe’s first few
minutes with the cam­era, in a Pennsylvania mill town, all but floored me with
grat­it­ude. He goes on the list with Hitchcock as on of the few men of whom it
can be hoped that, giv­en the chance (and in Hitchcock’s case travel, and still
sharp­er advice from nat­ives), they may yet take advant­age of the $5,000 ceiling
on sets to use this coun­try as it ought to be used in films, and as it has
scarcely been touched.” We trust that Agee enjoyed Howe’s work for this 1947
Raoul Walsh west­ern, in which he some­times used infrared black-and-white film
stock to shoot New Mexico ter­rain, with strik­ingly beau­ti­ful res­ults. Said
res­ults come across well in the Olive Blu-ray (which retains the Martin
Scorsese intro that was on it back when vari­ous Republic pic­tures were issued
on VHS back in the day). See par­tic­u­larly a funer­al scene rel­at­ively late into
the pic­ture. The noted Walsh expert Dave Kehr finds this an uncharacteristic
pic­ture for the dir­ect­or, a little logy and humor­less and lack­ing the typical
Walsh rollicking-ness, but it’s hardly bad. And in some senses it’s pretty much
clas­sic. Robert Mitchum’s the male lead, that helps. Anyway, the sol­id picture
qual­ity keeps up through­out, with patches of the not-that-good only showing
near the end, as in a slightly washed-out wed­ding scene and some video noise on
a horse. But over­all a very pleas­ant sur­prise.— A-

Rogopag (Eureka!/Masters Of Cinema Region B U.K. import)

Just as I am besot­ted with the multi-country European
co-production (twas French money that landed Anna Karina and Macha Meril in
Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette) so too am
I highly diver­ted by the Euro-anthology film, of which this 1963 picture,
scin­til­lat­ingly sub­titled Let’s Wash Our Brains, is a primo example. Its main
title is short for Rossellini Godard Pasolini Gregoretti. The RR seg­ment is a
typ­ic­al expect-the-unexpected offer­ing from the rest­less geni­us, in this case
more rest­less than genu­inely inspired, but pleas­ingly astrin­gent. The main
func­tion of Godard’s seg­ment is to demon­strate the spec­tac­u­lar ver­sat­il­ity he
pos­sessed even rel­at­ively early in his career; and the Gregoretti bit is
better-than-average Italian/Marxist social satire. The jew­el of the bunch is
Pasolini’s “La ricotta,” star­ring Orson Welles (who bemoaned the fact that
Pasolini didn’t let him dub his own part, and it’s worth bemoan­ing; how I’d
love to hear the maestro’s oro­tund Italian) and send­ing up both movie­mak­ing and
reli­gi­os­ity with more insouciance than Pasolini gen­er­ally liked to con­jure up.
The image qual­ity is excel­lent: Godard’s seg­ment is the most pur­pose­fully gray black-and-white thing he ever put on film, and the
col­or seg­ments in “La ricotta” really pop. —A+ 

Rosemary’s Baby (Criterion)

Yowsa. Spectacular theatrical-run grade pic­ture qual­ity. And
still a real mas­ter class in suspense/horror movie­mak­ing. Subtler than Repulsion, less per­verse than Cul de Sac, almost as funny as Dance of the Vampires. And not as dated as you might think. Rosemary’s
snob­bish­ness about Minnie and her vul­gar pal played by Patsy Kelly still
car­ries a fris­son for a New Yorker of today, to the extent you almost feel
slightly grat­i­fied on behalf of the more lumpen char­ac­ters for man­aging to
knock up Little Miss Priss via Satan. Or not. Anyway, essen­tial geni­us cinema
and the making-of doc attached is mighty fine too des­pite it open­ing with
Robert Evans repeat­ing his god­damn “There are three sides to every story”
brom­ide in the begin­ning. (Mia Farrow’s exas­per­a­tion with Frank Sinatra is
still [under­stand­ably] mildly present, and kind of funny.) More added value is
presen­ted by way of a doc about composer/musician Krystof Komeda, who
tra­gic­ally died not too long after com­plet­ing the score for this movie.  —A+

The Sterile Cuckoo (Olive)

“This is going to be poignant, isn’t it?” My Lovely Wife
asked at this 1969 movie’s open­ing in which Liza Minnelli’s Pookie (rhymes with
“kook­ie”) way­lays inex­per­i­enced stiff Jerry (Wendell Burton).
A little later,
cringing a bit, she asked, “This is gonna land on the unbear­ably sad side of
poignant, isn’t it?” I can­not tell a lie. Alan Pakula’s dir­ect­ori­al debut,
which might also have made an exem­plary pro­ject for part­ner Robert Mulligan,
whose stuff Pakula pro­duced, hits that par­tic­u­lar note with near-awe-inspiring
acu­ity, even as the treacly wet-noodle strains of “Come Saturday Morning” are
repeated often enough to drive you insane. Pakula’s cam­era is steady, assured,
unob­trus­ive. (How the guy ended up mak­ing a mess on the level of The Pelican Brief remains bey­ond me.) And while I am not a proponent
of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl the­ory of film char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion, Minnelli’s
char­ac­ter and per­form­ance provide an excel­lent counter to that train of
assess­ment.  Anyway…a fascinating
pic­ture that doesn’t get quite its due in the Olive Films Blu-ray. The
picture’s real soft, to the point that some­times I wondered if it was
inter­laced. The col­or looks okay mostly (about a half hour in, when the two
prin­cip­al char­ac­ters vis­it the grave­yard, you can see purple seem­ing into the
earth tones), but there’s an over­all over­bright­ness to the flesh tones. Detail
is pass­able (see Burton’s tweed jack­et in the early scenes). It’s a film that’s
been hard to see for too long so it’s wel­come. But don’t watch it in a
vul­ner­able mood, for heaven’s sake. Those last two shots. Jesus. —B-

Strangers On A Train (Warner)

This much-awaited upgrade looks a little soft dur­ing opening
cred­its, but picks up quite nicely. Check, for instance, the pin­stripes on
Bruno’s suit in the first dia­logue scene, the way their altern­at­ing shades show
The increase in detail is par­tic­u­larly awe­some in the spe­cial­ized optic­al work,
for instance, the reflec­tion of 
Bruno strangling Miriam in Miriam’s eye­glass lens. The multifarious
extras from the 2004 standard-def ver­sion are all here, although the “pre­view
ver­sion” is only in stand­ard def. Still, a must.—A+

Summer With Monika (Criterion)

Ingmar Bergman’s United States break­through, albeit not for
the “right” reas­ons; one of this disc’s many superb extras details how this
lyrical-but-daring 1953 film was recut and mar­keted by exploit­a­tion king Kroger
Babb as Monika, Story Of A Bad Girl. In
the early grind­house cir­cuit it proved quite pop­u­lar among non-auteurists. And
one under­stands why, giv­en Harriett Andersson’s erot­ic ripe­ness, which combined
with the know­ing­ness and occa­sion­al petu­lance of the char­ac­ter must have
provided ‘50s raincoat-wearers with some sweet hubba-hubba value. The thrifty
brave clean and rev­er­ent Bergman cut of the film is a lyr­ic­al and lovely thing
and almost kinda sorta an unabashed weepie. It’s a beau­ti­fully assured piece of
film­mak­ing and the image qual­ity is pretty much the same as that of the
Criterion of Bergman’s Summer Interlude, reviewed in the last CG. That is, gor­geous through­out, every frame a
gor­geous sil­very image. Andersson is the sub­ject of a lengthy new inter­view and
her English is excel­lent and her recol­lec­tions mov­ing. —A+ 

Max Fleischer’s Superman Collectors’ Edition (Gaiam)

This should be some­thing to get very excited about, and it
is not, for one very simple reas­on. While these appear to be
excellent-to-beautiful trans­fers of the Fleischer Superman car­toons (some of
the mater­i­als have occa­sion­al blotchi­ness, but I didn’t see any­thing utterly
ruin­ous) they are dis­figured by the ever-present GAIAM logo, which is burned
into the lower right corner of each Academy Ratio “frame.” What a fucking
waste.—D- 

This Is Cinerama (Flicker Alley)

God bless Flicker Alley for everything it does, but in par­tic­u­lar for put­ting out this piece of block­buster eso­ter­ica. This 1952 pic­ture is essentially
the most elab­or­ate demo reel ever con­cocted, a col­lec­tion of far-flung vistas
and exper­i­ences rendered in the super-wide-and-high format of three-projector
Cinerama, which proved a hugely imprac­tic­al way of mak­ing and see­ing pictures.
The Blu-ray is a wonky his­tor­ic­al delight, presen­ted with remark­able integrity
and filled with extras that con­tex­tu­al­ize (and jus­ti­fy, in a sense) this
bold/foolhardy ven­ture. The SmileBox format­ting for disc, sim­u­lat­ing the 146˚
depth of the ori­gin­al present­a­tion, works like a charm. Not for
everyone…particularly not for people who prefer movies with char­ac­ters and
storylines and such, you know, those bor­ing movies about people….but for those
it’s for, a com­plete trip. —A+

Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines (Twilight
Time)

I don’t often wish I had a big­ger video dis­play, but this
makes me want one. Sure, this isn’t Lawrence of Arabia but rather a fun
affec­tion­ate 1965 slap­stick on the early days of manned flight. That just
hap­pens to have been lensed in 70mm by Christopher Challis (The Battle of
the River Plate, hello?). Lord, what an
abso­lutely beau­ti­ful Blu-ray image it presents. Just immacu­late. If you watch
this after anoth­er Blu-ray disc you might notice a slight blue cast to the
over­all pic­ture but since so much of the action takes place in the sky anyway
it’s not as if that isn’t under­stand­able. The movie’s a great deal of fun,
can’t emphas­ize that enough, and the com­ment­ary by its dir­ect­or Ken Annakin
(from the 2004 stand­ard def release; Annakin died in 2009) is pretty
delight­ful. These Twilight Time releases do offer real high-def value. —A

 Les Visiteurs
du Soir (Criterion)

The remastered Les Enfants du Paradis was the thing that was gonna get most people who are
excited about this sort of thing excited, so I thought I’d check out the
Criterion release of Carné/Prevert’s pri­or pic­ture, a medi­ev­al maybe-allegory
in which two rep­res­ent­at­ives of Satan come to a castle dressed as minstrels;
instead of wreak­ing the evil hav­oc they were con­trac­ted for, one of them falls
in love with a mor­tal. I
anti­cip­ated a visu­ally sump­tu­ous exper­i­ence, and I got one.  The mater­i­als of this 1942 pic­ture look
exquis­ite, and the trans­fer seems to repro­duce every nuance of cinematographer
Roger Hubert’s often gossamer-delicate light­ing per­fectly. There is not even a
hint of video noise at any point. The sound is bell-clear mono.  At a cer­tain point I turned off the
sub­titles, the bet­ter to enjoy the spec­tac­u­lar B&W image. The movie itself
is excel­lent and inter­est­ing, both as a thing itself and as an example of
French cinema dur­ing the German occu­pa­tion of World War II. Not a
“mas­ter­piece,” pre­cisely (at least by my lights), but bet­ter than sol­id, and a
must for Carné fans.—A

World On Wire (Criterion)

This rel­at­ively early (1973) Fassbinder has been the stuff
of legend among his stateside coter­ie that has found it (under­stand­ably)
dif­fi­cult to see. The very concept—a three-hour plus made-for-German-television
movie adap­ted from an American sci-fi nov­el that would later serve as the basis
for the less reput­able Hollywood product The Thirteenth Floor—was pretty mind­blow­ing in and of itself. The reality
of it actu­ally did not dis­ap­point in the least: for this view­er, it exceeded
very high expect­a­tions, as I dis­cuss here. I feel like it’s both quintessential
Fassbinder and excel­lent RWF for begin­ners. But I’m some­times kind of not-right
about that sort of thing. But give the the­ory a shot any­way, as this is an
excel­lent ren­der­ing of a not-exactly-polished (but hardly crude-looking) movie.
In a 50-minute doc­u­ment­ary that’s one of the sup­ple­ments, the great lensman
Michael Ballhaus gives some insight into the shoot­ing, which was done in 16mm,
and still looks it—that sat­ur­ated vibe with res­ol­u­tion that doesn’t have the
par­tic­u­lar res­ol­u­tion of 35 but con­veys a rough integ­rity of its own. A truly
beau­ti­ful image. A gal­van­ic movie exper­i­ence, abso­lutely essen­tial. —A+