Blu-ray Consumer Guide: Face up to reality February 2013 edition

Well. Talk about the best-laid plans. Last time we spoke in
the con­text of this fea­ture, I was all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about
future pro­spects, hav­ing set up ground rules that were going to allow me to run
the Consumer Guide on a reg­u­lar basis. Almost four months later and with no
nat­ur­al dis­aster to REALLY keep me in the house, here we are, with a Consumer
Guide you’ll find to be pretty low on really NEW stuff.

What can I tell you? Among oth­er things, I found myself
con­sumed by what Jack Torrance would call “a new writ­ing pro­ject” which turned
into a nearly com­puls­ive pur­suit. That’s fin­ished, and now I am try­ing to, as
they say, mon­et­ize the res­ult. And while, to my sur­prise, I now find that I
have enough of a  new idea in my
head that I could just start on some­thing sim­il­ar now, for vari­ous reas­ons I’m
not going to. Which left me to come back to this. I might as well face it: the
only way this is going to become a reg­u­lar monthly thing is if I’m paid to do
it, and the format’s still too niche, and my approach still to ostensibly
cinepil­ic to make it some­thing any organ wants to pay for, let’s not even talk
about pay what I would want for it.

So I’m just going to accept real­ity, a spe­cif­ic real­ity, which is that this
feature’s only ever going to appear on a sporad­ic basis, a basis that will be decided
accord­ing to my whim and/or wheth­er I’m phys­ic­ally avail­able to do the work
neces­sary for the fea­ture to exist. Which isn’t to say I’m giv­ing up. There’s plenty
piled up in my home theat­er “sta­ging area” to look at, and things are going to
be chilly out­side for a good thirty days or so more. Who knows what could
hap­pen. In the mean­time, there’s a pretty impress­ive bunch of stuff considered
below. Thanks as ever. Before we start, here is a very amus­ing snap­shot of a bit of the end cred­its of the Streisand A Star Is Born.

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

Baron Blood (Kino/Lorber)

This movie is, I think, bet­ter than its repu­ta­tion as subpar
Bava would sug­gest, and I think that Bava bio­graph­er Tim Lucas agrees with me,
as his audio com­ment­ary on this early-‘70s item is affec­tion­ate as well as
inform­at­ive. This haunted-castle num­ber has plenty of baroque scares, lots of
icky gore makeup effects (what’s all that tis­sue hanging from the spikes in the
iron maid­en, ugh), and Elke Sommer run­ning around in a mini-skirt screaming,
which isn’t as excit­ing as Elke Sommer naked (see Lisa and the Devil) but noth­ing to sneeze at either. The Blu-ray has a
ter­rif­ic pic­ture, more impress­ive than that of Black Sunday, I must say: good sol­id col­ors through­out and a
con­sist­ently clean image. —A

 The Big Trail (Fox)

A cine­mat­ic curio: a 70mm widescreen pic­ture made in…1930,
pretty much the dawn of the sound era. The pro­cess here was called “Grandeur,”
and dir­ect­or Raoul Walsh also shot the film in reg­u­lar 35mm. The Fox
present­a­tion here is very con­scien­tious, includ­ing both ver­sion of the film,
from restored prints and trans­ferred well in either case. The story of a young
char­ac­ter played by recent dis­cov­ery John Wayne lead­ing a cara­van across the
West feels more like a reg­u­lar Walsh film in the 35mm ver­sion, which is
short­er, more dir­ect and narratively-oriented. The widescreen ver­sion is
stodgi­er, full of longer takes that don’t have much dra­mat­ic interest but show
off a lot of scenery and pan­or­a­mas and such.  But truth to tell, both ver­sions are pretty stodgy; neither
has the vul­gar dynam­ism that dis­tin­guished such Walsh clas­sics of the era as For
Me And My Gal or even Sailor’s
Luck. No, this movie’s pre­de­ter­mined fate
as a prestige item seems to have hemmed in the film­makers to an extent. Not
that this is a bad pic­ture; it’s cer­tainly of his­tor­ic interest for technical
reas­ons alone. But as an enter­tain­ment, it’s not even close to the first Walsh
or Wayne Western I’d pick off a shelf. For  cinephile col­lect­ors only. —B+

Bonfire of the Vanities (Warner)

This notori­ous fail­ure, the dis­astrous mak­ing of which was
chron­icled in the still sem­in­al and sat­is­fy­ingly dishy book The Devil’s
Candy,  seems an unlikely
can­did­ate for Blu-ray pre­ser­va­tions, but stranger things have made it to the
format. So how bad IS this, really? Well, it’s not good, but there’s a part of
me that thinks the smirky thing is exactly the adapt­a­tion that Tom Wolfe’s
shitty little book deserves. Some sec­tions, on the oth­er hand, give the DePalma
maven a sense of what a big-budget ver­sion of  Hi Mom! Might have
looked like. In any event, it has the most apt cast­ing of Geraldo Rivera of any
movie of all time. And a lot of vir­tu­oso cam­era move­ment and cheeky image
jux­ta­pos­i­tions, all of which is cap­tured quite nicely on the disc. The
Hanks/Willis subay meet-up makes the DeNiro/Pacino sum­mit in Heat look like the DeNiro Pacino sum­mit in Heat, on the oth­er hand. For DePalma nuts only. —C+

Bonjour Tristesse (Twilight Time)

One of my all-time favor­ite movies, or one of my all-time
favor­ite Preminger movies, what’s the dif,  a thor­oughly beau­ti­ful and auda­cious pic­ture that is still
struc­tur­ally and pictori­ally more vibrant any­thing you’d care to com­pare it to.
You’d fig­ure I’d be sat­is­fied with just a really good trans­fer of it…and I am.
Some of the black-and-white sequences are little more sepia than I’ve seen in
the­at­ric­al present­a­tions, but oth­er than that the image is clean and bright and
beau­ti­fully colored. —A

 The Boogens (Olive)

Stephen King, blurbed on the cov­er, is right—this really is
“wildly ener­get­ic mon­ster movie.” Okay, it’s an ener­get­ic mon­ster movie, at least.
It rep­res­ents one of my favored sub­genres, being an inde­pend­ent non-Hollywood
pro­duc­tion; region­al hor­ror pic­tures have intrigued me since Carnival of
Souls. While the title is still a problem,
this is a strong present­a­tion of the monsters-from-a-long-disused mine story. A
good clean image, not mind-blowing, but def­in­itely bet­ter than a step up from
standard-def in terms of detail, which always makes a dif­fer­ence with such
scares-in-the-dark mater­i­al. There’s some 
source-material based speck­ling about 15 minutes in, but this is not
entirely incon­gru­ous with what the the­at­ric­al exper­i­ence might have been like.
The com­ment­ary from dir­ect­or James Conway, co-writer David O’Malley, and star
Rebecca Balding, who’s mar­ried to Conway, is lively and dishy and pretty funny
on the sub­ject of de rigueur female nud­ity in ‘80s hor­ror movies .—B

Cinderella (Disney)

The 1950 anim­ated ver­sion of the
fairy tale came at a trans­ition point for Disney, who needed a big hit and got
one here; this was to be the last of his pic­tures dis­trib­uted by RKO the suc­cess of this pic­ture enabled him to set up Buena Vista and self-distribute a couple of movies later. The
anthro­po­morph­ized animals—goofy help­ful mice, a fussy fat cat named Lucifer
(boy, some people would have a field day with that name now)—show the pop
influ­ence of Looney Tunes on the stu­dio, and the lead char­ac­ters are crafted
for post­war teen appeal. Not par­tic­u­larly dar­ing, and nor would be the three
films that fol­lowed (Alice in Wonderland,
Peter Pan, and Lady And
The Tramp) 1959’s Sleeping Beauty, with its bold col­or design and use of widescreen,
has more appeal for Blu-ray buy­ers look­ing for Innovation In Animation. But in
terms of beauty this has a bunch, most not­ably the soap-bubble fantasy set
piece, very nice indeed. And kids love it!. The usu­al stel­lar trans­fer job,
gen­er­ous extras. If you like this stuff at all you can’t lose with these
pack­ages. —A

Cleopatra (Eureka/Masters Of Cinema Region B U.K. Import)

I’ve had a weird thing for Claudette Colbert ever since I
saw a pic­ture of her in an old paper­back reprint of a bun­cha Photoplay
magazines, the photo depict­ing her in cos­tume as “Cigarette” in the movie Under
Two Flags. I’ve nev­er been able to see that
thing, come to think of it. Anyway, it wasn’t that weird a thing, except, you
know, she was 56 years older than me and a movie star. Anyway. She’s still the
greatest, par­tic­u­larly in her early work, of which this is a stel­lar, sexy
example, dir­ect­or Cecil B. DeMille in his cheeky-historical-epic mode.
Colbert’s present­a­tion to Warren William’s Caesar remains one of the all-time
clas­sic moments in dra­mat­ic depic­tion. The near-kitsch extra­pol­a­tions on
ancient world design are pretty spec­tac­u­lar too. This is a bee-yooo-ti-ful
high-def trans­fer with lotsa 
healthy grain  (which noticeably
upticks dur­ing optic­al effects such as dis­solves) and incred­ible detail. While
the movie doesn’t offer any moments quite as inef­fable as Colbert’s milk bath
in DeMille’s sub­sequent pri­or, even more out­rageous The Sign Of The Cross (can we have THAT in high-def, pretty please?), it’s
still got plenty of her sass, which is also very healthy. The inform­at­ive F.X.
Feeney com­ment­ary is impor­ted from the Universal 2009 domest­ic “Anniversary
Edition” DVD of the movie. —A+

Grand Hotel (Warner)

While it is undeni­ably true that digit­al tech­no­logy cannot
repro­duce that mer­cury glisten that makes a sil­ver nitrate print feel so
spe­cial, what it CAN repro­duce is not to be deplored, and this high-def version
of the old more-stars-than-there-are-in-heaven chest­nut gets a lot of at the
very least SILVER into the pic­ture. Which is to say it looks truly grand. My
most cher­ished memory of this movie is see­ing it at Paris’ legendary Cinema
MacMahon in May of 1990, and the way I remem­ber the film looking…well, what I
remem­ber, because of the theat­er and its cachet and the magic of Paris and all
that, may well have been an illu­sion, but this disc re-conjures it. —A

The Life And Death of Colonel Blimp (ITV Region B U.K.
Import)

One sup­poses that there will be a domest­ic issue of this
latest res­tor­a­tion in due time, but if you have a region-free play­er and can’t
wait, well, yes; this is remark­able. I was priv­ileged to see the res­tor­a­tion on
a 35mm print on the big screen up at Suffern’s Lafayette Theater. Every time
this gets anoth­er pass through restoration—and I’ve been look­ing at this on
home video since the Criterion laser disc—it’s like anoth­er pane of streaky
glass has been removed from in front of the image. The dif­fer­ence is palpable
from the open­ing cred­its tapestry. Really SO beautiful…although noth­ing beats
see­ing it in a theat­er, on a theat­er size screen, with an audi­ence will­ing to
be swept up by it. Like the Kazan film dis­cussed later in this guide, Blimp is a unique object. No oth­er film has pre­cisely what
it has. And this disc of it it impec­cable. (UPDATE: I missed the announce­ment, but this is indeed in the works from Criterion, here’s hop­ing the movie Scorsese/Powell com­ment­ary from way back makes it on to that edi­tion…)—A+

Looney Tunes Platinum Collection  Volume Two (Warner)

Okay, I’ll fess up. I haven’t sat through every minute of
this three-disc, six-hour-not-including (some not in high-def) extras package.
It is also worth recall­ing that the brash, not inor­din­ately nuanced style of
the Tunes, while it of course does bene­fit from the high-def treat­ment, is not
the sort of thing that yields incred­ible rev­el­a­tion in that format. (That’s an
argu­able point, I sup­pose, but that’s my assess­ment of the issue. I am willing
to enter­tain coun­ter­ing per­spect­ives.) But damn, any pack­age that includes
elev­en Tex Avery MGM shorts as an EXTRA is gonna get a pretty high grade from
me, even if those elev­en do not include “L’il Tinker.” (Can’t have everything.)
Not to men­tion the incred­ibly range of this thing—the enter­tain­ing and
inform­at­ive doc­u­ment­ar­ies, the appallingly vul­gar and racist Private Snafu
shorts, the atten­tion to detail in the choices of car­toons featuring
music-and-effects-only options. It’s really para­dise for fans, and it includes
the com­plete “Tortoise and Hare” and “Buzzards” series, and more, and yes, the
high-def trans­fers of the mater­i­al are eye-poppingly gor­geous if not
neces­sar­ily “rev­el­at­ory,” so hell yes, this gets an… —A+

On The Waterfront (Criterion)

The last DVD of this title was actu­ally a rather telling
example of how a trans­fer that some­how emphas­izes too much of the wrong picture
detail can skew the way a film reads. I hes­it­ate to use the word “wrong,” but
bear with me. The Sony DVD’s par­tic­u­lar qual­ity, which was overbrightnes,
ten­ded to washout the skin tone and boost the vis­ib­il­ity of the face makeup on
Marlon Brando, par­tic­u­larly his eye­brows, one of which has a scar cutting
through it. The dark eye­brows and the pal­lor of his face gave him a Kabuki-like
aspect which made the the fem­in­ized qual­it­ies of the character/performance
stand out more. Also, he didn’t look as if he had any facial hair. Interesting,
but per­haps not what the film­makers were going for. The new trans­fer corrects
this. I’ve taken screen caps from standard-def edi­tions. Look at Brando’s chin
in the Sony, left. It’s soft, white. Now look at the cap­ture from the Criterion cap­ture; he’s a man who shaves. The fem­in­iz­a­tion is not quite
gone, but it’s tempered. Given its prop­er place in the gestalt of the film as
it were, which remains a, yes, unique achieve­ment for as much pre­vi­ous films
informed it at the time.  As for the rest? Criterion at its best, and the aspect-ratio extra a con­cise edu­ca­tion. —A+

 The Passion of Joan Of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc’s lidelse og dod)
(Eureka!Masters Of Cinema Region B U.K. import)

Not just a 
great film but a film with its own lan­guage that’s nev­er been replicated
or used since. Which is one way of say­ing its bar­rage of intense close-ups is
in a sense very deeply weird and likely to flum­mox the inex­per­i­enced viewer.
This Blu-ray is remark­able not just in its fea­ture present­a­tion but its
schol­arly chops, as in its inclu­sion of the “Lo Duca” ver­sion of the film, the
critic-modified ver­sion that was the one first seen by much of this film’s
ori­gin­al audi­ence. Not to men­tion the 100-page book­let. To have the film like
this is one thing; the sup­ple­ments make it a genu­ine “crit­ic­al edition,”
rais­ing the bar for cre­at­ors of cinephile product every­where.  —A+

Rashomon (Criterion)

One can, if one is feel­ing par­tic­u­larly know-somethingish,
have a look at this 1950 pic­ture and pro­nounce it “minor Kurosawa” in spite of
the fact that its cent­ral trope was once part of what used to be called the
lin­gua franca. (I remem­ber when people who had not even seen the film would
talk about a “’Rashomon” situ­ation;” these days not so much…not to men­tion the
devol­u­tion to “he said/she said,” which is itself attached to a REALLY minor
film.) Something to do with…well, nev­er mind what it has to do with, it’s not a
fight I’m gonna get into in the con­text of this ser­vice journ­al­ism fea­ture. My
point is that if you watch this high-def disc of the movie, you will be almost
instant­an­eously dis­ab­used of the notion that the movie is minor ANYTHING,
because it’s just that pictori­ally beau­ti­ful, not to men­tion invent­ive. That
rain! That forest! Seriously Essential. — A+

 The Sound and The Fury (Twilight Time)

In which the pion­eer­ing label con­tin­ues its unusual
tra­di­tion of tak­ing great care in issu­ing oddly mar­gin­al major stu­dio movies in
very view­able edi­tions. This one has sunk into suf­fi­cient obscur­ity that I had
to cre­ate a page for it in order to log it in to my Letterboxd view­ing diary.
One would like to say that while it ain’t Faulkner, it ain’t noth­ing, but by
the same token, a movie that switches the gender of one major char­ac­ter, then
casts Yul Brynner as Jason and Jack Warden as Benjy has prob­lems that go beyond
stand­ard adapt­a­tion issues. If you can for­get its source mater­i­al, it’s not a
bad ‘50s big stu­dio Southern melo­drama, but, come on. Stuff like this weighs
heav­ier for the “Martin Ritt was a minor dir­ect­or” argu­ment than No Money Down
weighs for the “no he wasn’t” argu­ment, at least in my book. So are you ready to
buy this yet? Well, this IS a hand­some edi­tion of a film that rep­res­ents a certain
apex of stu­dio craft, although if it indeed was a Fox Four-Track Stereo sound
record­ing, it’s too bad the disc doesn’t repro­duce that, and instead goes with a
two-channel soundtrack and an isol­ated track of Alex North’s score, also in
two-channel ste­reo (hell, Fox itself put the four-channel soundtrack on its
standard-def disc of House of Bamboo).
Don’t knock three-or-four chan­nel mixes ‘til you’ve tried ‘em, they’re pretty
sweet. —B-

 A Star Is Born (Warner)

What is the mat­ter with me? Why did I look at the high-def
iter­a­tion of this almost universally-derided iter­a­tion of the alkie-showbiz
clas­sic before even crack­ing open the Blu-ray of Cabaret, which is at least a
decent movie and also fea­tures a truck­load of Liza Minnelli side­boob? Who can
say. Maybe I had a repressed memory of Montrose’s “Rock Candy” being on the
soundtrack, and that attrac­ted me. No, that’s not it. Anyway, the good news is
that it looks pretty good: Robert Surtees in his grit­ti­est ‘70s mode, lots of
edible blacks and an envel­op­ing warmth that nev­er suc­cumbs to gloss. This is
reputedly the first pic­ture with a Dolby sur­round soundtrack and some of the
But Jesus, this movie. Do Joan Didion fans give her a pass for this kind of
crap? Because the stuff that’s most irrit­at­ing and false in this movie’s
depic­tion of its milieu (e.g. the Rolling Stone “journ­al­ist” who beds
Kristofferson’s char­ac­ter in a bid to get an inter­view with Streisand’s) practically
reeks of Didion, or of Eve Babitz try­ing to chan­nel Didion, which makes no
sense, I know. On the oth­er hand, Ms. Streisand’s com­ment­ary, while digressive
in that way that can be a little dif­fi­cult to listen to,  is also REAL inter­est­ing. I like the way
she laughs at the begin­ning when speak­ing the words “Jon Peters, who wanted to
be a pro­du­cer.”  —B+

Taxi For Tobruk (Olive)

This 1960 WWII adven­ture of some Free French troops driving
through the desert with a German officer who toggles between reluct­ant ally and
cap­tive is like a more down­beat, fatal­ist vari­ant on the ami­able 1958 Ice Cold
In Alex. If that lat­ter name means any­thing to you, you’re likely to eat this
up. The film is also an excel­lent source of Lino Ventura, Charles Aznouver, and
Hardy Kruger. The trans­fer of this wide-screen (French-bred Dyalliscope, same
pro­cess as The 400 Blows, not CinemaScope…although…oh nevr mind) black-and-white pic­ture is pretty
much crys­tal clear so con­nois­seurs of the format will also be pleased. —A-

The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse)
(Eureka!/Masters of Cinema Region B U.K. Import)

Amazing. This 1930 Prophetic Book Of Fritz Lang is still
start­ling in its odd auda­city. Not just tech­nic­al auda­city; everything about it
is off-the-wall in its par­tic­u­lar geni­us. This edi­tion makes it all palpable.
Because Lang’s  exper­i­ments with
sound and cut­ting were so bold, they’re not as seam­less in their effects as
they might have been, but they make the movie crackle with elec­tric discovery.
Some of the images are so crisp and spec­tac­u­lar the restoration
feels like a mir­acle. And it is, because the film itself is a kind of
mir­acle.  —A+

Universal Classic Monster Collection (Universal)

The core col­lec­tion, all giv­en superb res­tor­a­tion and
cleanup treat­ments and one of them dis­play­ing over­in­dul­gence on digit­al noise
reduc­tion and all that. Everything here is beau­ti­ful in its way. The 1931 Dracula
is the biggest rev­el­a­tion. The cleaned-up
frames reveal more depth to the mise-en-scene and more detail in the performances
them­selves. The movie takes on a more accur­ate dimen­sion and feels less stodgy
and leaden than the latter-day cri­ti­cisms of it chide it for. Freund’s The
Mummy is also remark­able, sil­ver and shadow
meld­ing in creepy grandeur. Which isn’t to take away from the mag­ni­fi­cent two
Frankensteins. The Wolf Man is
hand­some but not my favor­ite of the Universal hor­rors. People love to slag the
Claude Rains Phantom of the Opera
because it’s really an oper­etta music­al instead of a hor­ror movie, but that
Technicolor still is glor­i­ous (although in cer­tain shots some registration
prob­lems are vis­ible). The Creature From The Black Lagoon is what it is. I only wish for a Blu-ray collection
of the sequels, the B‑horror pic­tures (Ulmer’s The Black Cat, come on!), pretty much everything else in this mode
that can be upgraded. Not gonna happen. 
—A+

Weekend (Criterion)

Wowsers, I have nev­er seen this movie look­ing so good! I
know, I say that all the time. But this is genu­inely a rev­el­a­tion. The early
scenes with Mireille Darc and her ther­ap­ist or boy­friend or whatever the hell
he is (the new pic­ture clar­ity doesn’t answer ALL of the movie’s mysteries)
going over the sup­posedly dis­gust­ing erot­ic anec­dote (frankly I’ve heard worse)
was pretty much impossible to SEE in just about every pri­or home ver­sion. Here
it is entirely vis­ible, albeit in its prop­er ali­en­at­ing sil­hou­ette. The rest
looks pretty hot, too, if you can take it; people talk about Joe D’Amato movies
and the anim­al killing in those, but caveat emptor, pres­ci­ent social commentary
rad­ic­al des­pair or no, some of the stuff at the end of this would get Godard in
big trouble with PETA if there were any cinephiles in PETA. —A+

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Warner)

Between this and The Legend of Lylah Claire you almost gotta
won­der where Robert Aldrich got his dog-food-ad hard-on from, but he certainly
did put an edge on it, and then put it to good use. This really is anoth­er Warner home run on a classic
title. Ohmigod that face makeup on Davis—like she put it on with a trow­el. And
yes,in this case it IS sup­posed to be vis­ible. Every frame is crystal-clear
without giv­ing the impres­sion it’s been killed with DNR, and the added detail
provides new things to really see; I nev­er before noticed the very visible
silent “bitch” Bette David artic­u­lates after “you miser­able” early in the film.
Not so much a camp clas­sic as one of the most know­ing, and sad­dest, movies
about Old Hollywood, not to men­tion alco­hol­ism, ever made. —A+