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Site created 12/15/97.
page created: 7/30/08
 Barrie Maxwell - Main Page |
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I continue to experiment with the format of this column in an attempt to come up with a reasonable balance between depth and breadth of coverage. This latest installment leans on the side of the latter rather than the former. As always, your feedback is most welcome (barriemaxwell@thedigitalbits.com). Note that the old coming releases table has now been split in two with the release dates past now found in a separate table at the end. Current Fare - Bad News and Good, and Some in Between The most important issue yet to face Blu-ray now that it's won the high definition software war is the integrity of the film transfers it presents to us all. This has been brought to the fore by Fox's recent much-anticipated Blu-ray release of two highly-admired war films - Patton and The Longest Day. Many consumers will look at these discs and deem themselves well-pleased with what they see. And they'd be right were films intended to look like computer games or the pristine images of some of the Discovery Channel nature programs. Films, however, don't naturally look that way, particularly any made in the past century. They reflect the characteristics of the film stock they were shot on - characteristics that have varied over time depending upon the nature of the film stock then in use, including nature of the film base, emulsion make-up and the attendant varying amounts of resulting granularity evident, sensitivity to light, film gauge, etc. When we watch a film, the unadulterated effect of these characteristics gives the film a unique look that encompasses image sharpness, brightness, film grain, and fine-scale or high frequency detail. Of course this effect may also be modified by artistic decisions by the director and cinematographer. The highest accolade that a DVD or Blu-ray Disc can receive is that it has achieved a film-like look that successfully and accurately conveys to the digital medium the filmmaker's intent as seen on the theatrical screen. While many Blu-ray releases have achieved or come very close to this aim, some do not whether by accident or by misguided attempt to provide consumers with eye-candy rather than accuracy. Patton and The Longest Day are two such examples, apparently of the latter. The simplest way to describe the problem is to say that, apparently through the over-zealous application of digital noise reduction (DNR), both look like they've had the life sucked out of them. Although the problem is visually minimized on smaller screens (those below about 40”), larger properly-calibrated displays will clearly reveal such characteristics as a lack of both natural film grain and fine-scale detail in both fore - and background images (such as the texture on human skin, plants, walls, fabrics, etc.). The waxy results would make Madame Tussaud proud! The bottom line is that these two films don't look the way they did originally, by any means.    
Now, both of these releases happen to come from Fox but this is not characteristic of all or even most Fox Blu-ray product. For example, at the same time the studio was releasing these two titles, it was also releasing The Sand Pebbles - a film of similar vintage, but one presented magnificently on Blu-ray. So too is the studio's more recent film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Both are excellent ambassadors of how Blu-ray can present a film as it was intended to be seen.   
The excessive DNR problem is not restricted to Fox by any means. Paramount has seen some of its high definition titles similarly afflicted - most notably The Untouchables, and even Disney, normally the purveyor of excellent Blu-ray releases, recently delivered a very disappointing version of Gangs of New York. Only Warner Bros. and Sony appear to have avoided the problem to date, although I've not seen all their releases so can't be definitive in that statement. If Patton and The Longest Day represent the disappointing side of current Blu-ray releases, one need only turn to another Father's Day special - The Professionals, from Sony - for an example of Blu-ray done right. This exciting and engrossing western tale of four mercenaries (Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, Woody Strode) hired by a Texas cattle baron to retrieve his kidnapped wife from her Mexican captors looks magnificent with the film's rich palette of colours, rugged terrain, and craggy facial features of its principals all accurately captured. The modest grain of the original film is fully intact and the reality of the resulting image is a pleasure to behold. In fact, Sony continues to impress with its Blu-ray efforts regardless of the vintage of the title. You can put this effort on The Professionals (from 1966) along side the excellent work on A Passage to India (from 1984). Add to them recent similarly superb visual efforts on the rousingly entertaining King Arthur tale of First Knight (from 1995) and the beguiling Tudor drama of The Other Boleyn Girl (from 2008) (both incidentally nicely endowed with useful supplementary information).   
As suggested above, Warner Bros. seems to know what it's doing when it comes to Blu-ray. A current case in point is its Dirty Harry: Ultimate Collector's Edition. The original Dirty Harry film is given the lion's share of the attention in this case with a new commentary and documentary as well as various collectable extras, but each of the four sequels also gets a new commentary and featurette, with the “American Masters” profile Clint Eastwood: Out of the Shadows rounding out the package. The main thing to know though is that the films look as they should - crisp, clear, accurate colour, and with the modest grain that characterized them and contributed to the films' gritty nature intact. Similarly, the studio's Blu-ray release of Batman Begins is a superb representation, following up on its HD-DVD release that was highly rated when it first appeared.   
Finally we have an example of a recent release that straddles the above spectrum - There Will Be Blood - one of Paramount's first releases since it re-embraced Blu-ray. For me this was easily last year's best film, a Citizen Kane-like tale of power, greed, and madness in the early twentieth century California oil industry, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. It's a film with a wealth of detail and nuance buttressed by evocative cinematography and a haunting music score, and one that bears, in fact demands, repeated viewing to appreciate everything that's going on. Daniel Day Lewis's performance as the oil prospector and entrepreneur is a mesmerizing one, fully worthy of the honours bestowed on it. So powerful is it that it initially seems to dwarf all the other actors' efforts, but repeated viewings heighten one's appreciation for the work of Paul Dano as the rural preacher who is the Lewis character's nemesis. For those looking to the Blu-ray disc, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Much looks very good, with the moderate grain of the original retained. Yet some images are clearly sharpened to the point where edge haloes are quite evident. Given that the disc's supplements are modest at best, this is clearly a title that begs for a re-visitation on Blu-ray. Current Fare - Vignettes |
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