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Second Thoughts: The Apartment

Second Thoughts | The Apartment

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The 4K release of Billy Wilder’s 1960 comedy/drama proves to be both a revelation and a bit of a mystery

by Michael Gaughn
September 5, 2022

After watching Billy Wilder’s The Apartment on Amazon Prime back in May, I wrote:

The Apartment looks . . . great. And this is in lowly 1080p. Apparently a 4K digital intermediate was created just this year, and I’m keen to revisit the film if it gets a high-res re-release. But, for now, this version gets just about everything right.

A higher-res version has recently appeared, which I checked out a few days ago on Kaleidescape—and it turned out to be another one of those elaborate puzzles, like The Godfather and Citizen Kane (and Chinatown and Psycho . . .), that shows just how adventurous it can be bringing older films into the 4K realm.

Let me first make it clear that, if you’re anything ranging from a casual to rabid fan of this movie (I sit somewhere on the more tepid end of that scale), you should make a beeline to this release. What it gets right it gets right so well that it overshadows any problems.

But there are problems, all subtle, in a sense, and likely to bother some people more than others. It kind of comes down to, do you watch it in 1080p off a streaming service where the experience is consistent but just good enough or do you go 4K and run the risk of occasionally being pulled out of the film?

This is a straight 4K transfer and yet it feels like an HDR grade was applied. The whites are frequently pumped up, resulting in scenes, like the first one in Jack Lemmon’s apartment, that feel very video-like, almost like what you’d expect from some early TV show like Playhouse 90.

I’ve calibrated—and recalibrated—my system to rid it of any artificial enhancements and to ensure that film looks like film. And just to make sure my perceptions weren’t distorted, I went back and spotchecked HDR titles like Shadow of a Doubt and Citizen Kane and the recent UHD release of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, all of which looked as I remembered—like film.

The wide shot of the office floor two minutes into The Apartment was pleasant, encouraging, and the first shot of Lemmon at his desk was startling, whetting my appetite for a whole film that looked that good. And there are long stretches where, even if everything doesn’t look exceptional, the transfer can in no way be said to be bad. But those overly emphatic highlights pop up randomly like gophers throughout, usually in scenes with bright accents, like the tinsel and lights on the Christmas tree in Lemmon’s apartment.

This has become a cliché, but some of the wide shots have so much depth you feel like you could reach into them, an effect that seems to come from a combination of sharpness and dynamic range, but something I’ve, until now, only seen happen with HDR titles, not UHD—which is why I’ve got to wonder what’s up here.

The whites are so hot in some places that parts of the image get blown out. The Kleenex that gets away from Lemmon as he stands outside the Majestic Theater becomes a featureless blob, a drifting ectoplasm, and Shirley McClaine’s face gets so blown out during parts of her Christmas Eve scene with Fred McMurray that it looks like she’s doing kabuki. (There’s evidence in the Amazon transfer that these same shots could get blown out, but they’re far better balanced there.)

That the transfer is derived from various elements is more evident here than in lower-res releases, which is what you would expect. The blacks, for instance, are pretty consistent up until the first scene in the Chinese restaurant where the image becomes flatter and grayish, almost brownish. While the first scene in Lemmon’s apartment has that early-TV look, it’s also sharp with a decent tonal range. But the Christmas Eve scene with McMurray and MacLaine in the same space is contrasty, grainy, and not so much soft as gritty. At other times, blacks can look smudgy, in a way that’s not at all filmlike.

But, again—quibbles, gripes, nits, not dealbreakers. Seeing this in the original 2.35:1 is so crucial to conveying not just the massiveness of the office space but also the stage-like blocking in Lemmon’s apartment that it becomes almost impossible to conceive ever again watching this movie cropped. And one advantage of the 4K was that I could finally confirm that that’s Ella Fitzgerald’s The First Lady of Song sitting in the pole position in Lemmon’s record rack.

Watching a movie in 4K on a well-calibrated reference-quality display can be a lot like putting it under a microscope. Recent films tend to fare well because they’re mostly digital releases and the flaws, aside from a tendency toward a certain clinical sterility, tend to be in their execution, not their presentation. Older films—classic and otherwise—are at the mercy of the guys at the knobs, who may or may have the sophistication to know how a film from a certain era should look or to know how to compensate for the inevitable flaws in negatives and prints. And there’s always the risk of being exposed to someone caught up in the current zeal to make everything look shiny and new, which without exception results in travesty.

The Apartment hasn’t been brutalized or sullied, just curiously handled. This release is less an assault than a mystery. And you can’t call the harm done inconsequential, but you can call it excusable.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtable, marketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

ORIGINAL REVIEW

Amazon Prime | The Apartment

Review: Double Indemnity

review | Double Indemnity

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The film that birthed a genre and put a serious dent in the Hays Code, this Wilder/Chandler masterpiece still holds up—but could use a major restoration

by Michael Gaughn
August 30, 2022

The definition of film noir is really simple and unambiguous—and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Noir is always about a schnook—a guy who’s full of himself and thinks he has the world by the tail only to find out, the hard way, that the world has got him firmly by the balls instead. There are no exceptions to this rule. People like to muddy the waters by conflating noir with stuff like crime dramas, psychological thrillers, horror films, and—Lord help us—goth, but if it doesn’t adhere to the above stated formula, it’s just not noir.

And noir, indisputably, began with Double Indemnity. And while Indemnity is as much the effort of Billy Wilder and, by supplying the source text, James M. Cain, it is best seen as an expression of the spirit of Wilder’s collaborator on the screenplay, Raymond Chandler. What’s best about Indemnity is all about Chandler and his preoccupations and his worldview. So it follows that Chandler, with an able assist from Wilder and Cain, created noir. I don’t see any good reason to believe otherwise.

Indemnity still works, at this late date, because the film is as lean and focused and witty and ingeniously crafted as Chandler’s printed prose. It’s a sordid drama, full of truly unappealing characters doing unspeakable things, but everyone expresses themselves with such verve and the wryly sardonic undercurrents are so constant and strong that you leave the experience feeling giddy instead of soiled.

It’s audacious from beginning to end but never gloats or otherwise shows off, instead taking that carefully honed script—which some consider, not without cause, the best ever written—and using it as not just a guide or a foundation but a bible. Wilder would almost match Indemnity six years later with Sunset Boulevard, but the latter just doesn’t have the redeeming grace Chandler brought to Indemnity. And Wilder’s career would be, from that point on, nothing but a slow slide down from the pinnacle of those two dramas—which really aren’t dramas, in the traditional sense, at all.

Wilder was able to break almost all the rules here—similar to the unthinkable transgressions Preston Sturges got away with the year before in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. The two leads—Fred McMurray and Barbara Stanwyck—are fiendishly duplicitous from the second they set eyes on each other, Stanwyck’s husband is a growling, boozing bear, her step daughter is pinch-faced and shrill, the step daughter’s boyfriend just a gigolo. Even the bit players—like the toad of a woman who bitches about having to reach up to the top shelf for baby food—are consistently unpleasant. The only character to display any integrity and meaningful intelligence is Edward G. Robinson as the scowling, grousing claims manager Keyes. An unabashed proto nerd, Keyes is clearly Chandler’s favorite character and in many ways like Chandler himself—far more so than Chandler’s idealized alter ego Marlowe.

It’s no accident McMurray and Stanwyck just aren’t that pleasant to look at, he, with his prominent brow ridge and vaguely simian muzzle, looming over the not just petite but tiny Stanwyck, she, with that intentionally silly blonde wig and a look on her face like somebody’s holding a heavily soiled diaper under her nose, exuding all the sexual charisma of live bait. It would be pretentious to call the effect Brechtian, but the upshot is the same—to keep us from identifying with the leads and instead see them clearly for who they are—two endlessly devious schemers ultimately just too dumb to rise above their fates.

That’s not to say there aren’t false notes—Richard Gaines as the pompous insurance company president feels like he wandered in from an early talkie, and Porter Hall just can’t seem to shake his screwball comedy roots, doing a couple of takes that would have been perfect in Sullivan’s Travels but feel like they dropped from the moon here.

It’s impossible to say enough good things about John Seitz’s cinematography. Not only does he perfectly express the gist and the nuances of Wilder/Chandler’s screenplay but he summons up an entire genre whole within a single film, creating all the iconography—rooms sliced by the light through Venetian blinds, shadows that are less shadows than doppelgängers, the constant imminence and threat of night, and so on—without ever once lapsing into mannerism, channeling German Expressionism while making it natural, inevitable instead of showy like it would be in a Hitchcock—or Tim Burton—film. There’s a shot two minutes in, as Neff’s car pulls up in front of the Pacific Building, with streetlights piercing fog and a web of interurban cables crisscrossing the frame, that’s so redolent of Stieglitz that you want to cry. But it’s not lingered on, instead kept up just long enough to establish a mood before the film breathlessly moves on. But that shot subtly sets the tone for everything to come and continues to resonate clear through to the final fadeout, and beyond.

Whatever transfer Amazon is leaning on isn’t great but good enough, apparently derived from a somewhat damaged print so that there’s some tonal fluctuation to the image throughout but nothing too distracting, and clean enough that you can appreciate Seitz’s cinematography—the same tepid recommendation I had to give the presentation of his work in Morgan’s Creek. Would I like to see a 4K restoration? Sure. Something that matches the resolution of the original would of course be a step up and judiciously tempering the flaws in the print is nothing anyone could argue with. But I’m not interested if it ends up looking sanitized, digitized, “improved.” If the result ultimately doesn’t feel like it came from 1944, why bother?

Anointing “greatest films” has always been something of a squeaky wheel phenomenon—driven more by hype and box office and fads than quality—a situation that’s only gotten worse as more and more holdouts succumb, like pod people, to Rotten Tomatoes’ statistically driven groupthink. Individual discernment and taste are on the verge of being pummeled into submission and dumped by the wayside, victims of the human weakness for cheap guarantees and the marketing-driven zeal for consensus. Double Indemnity isn’t mega-budget, isn’t littered with stars, doesn’t have any big action scenes, can only claim one poorly executed matte shot for a special effect, and thankfully didn’t spawn any sequels, let alone franchises. It exists about as far from the land of the blockbuster as it’s possible to be. It’s just a solid piece of filmmaking, as strong an effort as Hollywood has ever made or likely ever will make, a work that’s unlikely to ever date because it rests above social trends, changing fashions, and political agendas. It’s an escape without being escapist, artful without being arty, brutally honest without being preachy—something to be savored, not gulped or munched. By any meaningful standard, it’s one of the great American films. Maybe the greatest.

PICTURE | Whatever transfer Amazon is leaning on isn’t great but good enough, apparently derived from a somewhat damaged print so that there’s some tonal fluctuation to the image throughout but nothing too distracting, and clean enough that you can appreciate John Seitz’s genre-defining cinematography

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Review: Top Gun: Maverick

review | Top Gun: Maverick

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Living up to all the hype and expectations, Cruise et al. deliver a guaranteed crowd-pleaser that’s true to both the memory and impact of the original

by John Sciacca
August 26, 2022

I can’t remember a movie in recent times I’ve been as excited to see as Top Gun: Maverick. Maybe it was because it was delayed for what seemed like forever during the pandemic. Maybe it was because Tom Cruise went on and on about how they used specially fitted Sony Venice 6K IMAX-certified cameras to film the actors inside the cockpits of actual fighter jets to truly capture what it was like to fly and pull high-G maneuvers. Maybe it was because the original Top Gun came out in 1986 when I was a junior in high school and it just hit me right in the feels. Then when it was finally released this past summer and critics and fans started losing their minds over how good it was—scoring a 96% critics’ rating and 99% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes—I was even more excited to see it.

And I’ll be honest, I had every intention of seeing Maverick at a commercial theater—apparently the way Tom Cruise, Jerry Bruckheimer, and God intended—but after my lackluster experience seeing The Batman in a theater here in Myrtle Beach, with subpar black levels and anemic audio, I decided I’d just hold off until the home release where I could enjoy it in the full 7.3.6 Trinnov Audio-processed 4K HDR splendor of my home theater. And, boy, was it worth the wait! Seeing Cruise’s cocky Maverick swagger up on screen again was just fun.

Maverick is like a master class in how to make a blockbuster sequel. The casting and acting are great, the cinematography is fantastic, the plot is simple but compelling, and the action is fast-paced and (mostly) believable. It also totally understands exactly how to employ fan service. Remember, it’s been 36 years since Maverick (Cruise) jumped in his F-14 and shot down all those MiGs, and Ice Man (Val Kilmer) said he could be his wingman any day. Maverick employs so many cool callbacks, beats, and nods to the original film, you can’t help but revel in the nostalgia of it and smile at the warm fuzzies. But at the same time, you don’t have to be a fan of the original to enjoy Maverick. It serves up just enough backstory and exposition on Cruise’s character for you to understand who he is, even if you don’t already know.

The film picks up 30 years after the first, but the opening will immediately take you back to the original film, with the same text, music, and even Kenny Loggins taking you to the “Danger Zone.” Maverick is still in the Navy but due to his, err, maverick ways, has only managed to achieve the rank of Captain. His career has been somewhat protected by his friend—now Admiral—Ice Man, and he is now a Navy test pilot for experimental planes, but due to his unique real-world dogfighting experience, he is ordered back to TOPGUN to select and train a group of former graduates to execute the attack on this nuclear facility. Among the students is Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), son of Maverick’s former RIO (Radio Intercept Officer) “Goose” (Anthony Edwards). Jon Hamm plays Maverick’s new skeptical “boss” Admiral “Cyclone” Simpson, using his Mad Men sneer and contempt to perfection, and Ed Harris gives a brief but quintessential Ed Harris performance as Rear Admiral “Hammer” Cain. Maverick’s love interest this time around is Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connelly), who was name-dropped in a throwaway line during the first film but who helps to round out Maverick’s character.

Maverick also does a terrific job of staying in its lane and knowing what it is. It doesn’t try and get overly complicated or introduce side and sub plots. Someone else compared the film to a Star Wars movie that was just about the Death Star trench run, watching the Rebels assemble a team to make the strike, then watching them train over and over to make the strike, then making the strike, and then escaping. Turn Luke Skywalker into Maverick, turn X-wing fighters into F/A-18s, turn the Death Star into a hostile enemy nation trying to bring a nuclear enrichment plant on line, turn proton torpedoes into laser-guided bombs, and turn the ill-designed exhaust port into a, well, I think they even call it a “port.”

Shot on 6K and taken from a 4K digital intermediate, Maverick looks fantastic throughout. One thing you’ll either love or hate is that the image switches pretty regularly between 2.39:1 widescreen and 1.90:1 IMAX aspect ratios. Now, if you own a widescreen front-projection system, you’ll likely not love this choice. But if you have a traditional 16:9 aspect-ratio TV, what you’ll notice is that the screen fills vertically—gets larger—during the IMAX scenes which are nearly all when they are flying. Usually I’m not a fan of these changing ratios but the IMAX footage just looks so good and the footage is so exciting, it really does pull you into the action.

With far more access and cooperation from the US Navy—and paying the Navy $11,374 per flight hour for actual F/A-18’s and Naval aviators—along with the aforementioned suite of in-cockpit IMAX-certified cameras, Maverick features some of the best aerial filming ever. When an actor is performing some intense maneuver, you see the strain and effort on his face and body because they’re actually in the seat feeling the effects of those G forces. And this adds immeasurably to the realism and intensity of the moment and the scenes. You really get a sense of whipping through a canyon doing a low-level bombing run at 600 knots, and it’s exhilarating.

Images are sharp, clean, and clear, and while I wouldn’t say that the 2.39:1 images had that hyper-detailed overly crisp “digital” look, they instead looked like the best of what a great film transfer can deliver, without any of the grain but still providing plenty of fine detail like the gold braid in Maverick’s uniform hat or the pattern in Ice Man’s ascot/scarf. The IMAX footage is often closeups, and you can see every line, whisker, and pore in the actors’ faces. The HDR grade delivers natural-looking images, and bright, punchy colors in the pilots’ helmets, the blue lighting in the aircraft carrier’s combat information center, the flashes of sunlight, or the gleam of sweat on faces.

The Dolby TrueHD Atmos soundtrack on the Kaleidescape download sounds fantastic, with the thunder and roar of F/A-18 engines as they fire up producing bass that hits you in the chest. There are loads of overhead flyovers, with the sound of wind racing and ripping past on all sides or planes flying past and out into the back or sides of the room. Even in the non-flying scenes, there are the backgrounds sounds of jets flying around the air base off in the distance or using the overhead speakers for Mav’s voice talking to a ground station. There were a few moments where understanding dialogue was a bit challenging, when pilots are flying/dogfighting with jet engines shrieking, music playing, and they are speaking under the literal stress of flight behind oxygen masks.

Top Gun: Maverick plays terrifically in a luxury home theater. It looks and sounds great, is a near-guaranteed crowd pleaser for your next get-together, and has great replay value. In fact, I already can’t wait to watch it again, and it will likely have heavy rotation in your theater’s demo showoff reel! It is available now from Kaleidescape and other digital retailers—a full two-months before its November 1 disc release—making this a total no-brainer to recommend.

Probably the most experienced writer on custom installation in the industry, John Sciacca is co-owner of Custom Theater & Audio in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, & is known for his writing for such publications as Residential Systems and Sound & Vision. Follow him on Twitter at @SciaccaTweets and at johnsciacca.com.

PICTURE | Images look like the best of what a great film transfer can deliver, providing plenty of fine detail

SOUND | The TrueHD Atmos soundtrack sounds fantastic, with the thunder and roar of F/A-18 engines as they fire up producing bass that hits you in the chest

Review: The Sandman

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This Netflix series honors its supposedly unfilmable source material by conjuring up a convincingly otherworldly fantasy realm

by Dennis Burger
August 23, 2022

I missed the boat on Netflix’ adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman the first time around. Not that I didn’t watch it. I did. It’s just that by the time I finished savoring the 10 episodes initially released in early August, the conversation had moved on. The nerdier corners of the internet collectively lost their minds for like two days, mostly out of sheer shock at the fact that this supposedly unfilmable work of illustrated literature managed to make the leap to the small screen with almost all of its heart and soul (even if not quite all its depth) intact. By the end of that weekend, the conversation was dead. The internet had moved on. All good geeks had binged all ten episodes and given their collective thumbs up or down to every aspect of the adaptation, and there was nothing left to be said.

Until, that is, Netflix sneakily announced and released a bonus episode, two weeks after the first season concluded. And all of a sudden this wonderful meditation on the complexities of human nature, the importance of dreams, the power of hope, and our mothlike fascination with the flame of duality and binary thinking is relevant again, if only for a few days.

This deeply mythological fantasy series follows the story of Morpheus, aka Dream of the Endless—the lord of dreams and stories—who breaks free from a century of captivity and then strives to reclaim and rebuild his realm in order to save humanity, as well as to undo the damage done by his absence. That description alone will create impressions that don’t match up with the reality of this adaption or its source material. It’s simultaneously sillier and more substantial than anything the uninitiated might be imagining. It’s a serious story about serious subject matter than never takes itself at all seriously.

To wit: It contains a pitch-perfect adaptation of “The Sound of Her Wings,” perhaps the most poignant story Gaiman has ever written. It is, without question, the story that got me through the loss of my mother nearly two decades ago with my sanity intact, as it forced me to reconsider my attitudes toward death. On the other hand, the show features Patton Oswalt as a talking Raven named Matthew and Mark Hamill as a walking pumpkin named Mervyn.

It’s also a beautiful series to behold, especially in Dolby Vision, but as with everything else about this show and its inspiration, the imagery is a mix of the sublime and the ridiculous. The dynamic range is pushed to extremes in all the right places, with the intense eye-reactive brightness and impossibly deep shadows often working to sell the believability of environments that are so divorced from waking reality that they almost look cartoonish.

One visual element that I adore but which has been a source of outrage among the pixel-counting crowd, is that The Sandman was shot in a rather unconventional way. To my eye, it looks like it was shot with vintage anamorphic lenses but on modern digital cameras. Whatever the reason, despite being framed at around 2.4:1, the picture looks like it was stretched to that height from 2.55:1.

The stretched-thin composition gives the imagery an otherworldly quality that works to the benefit of the material, especially in making Tom Sturridge—who plays Dream of the Endless so convincingly that it’s sometimes easy to forget he’s a human being—look more like the original illustrations of the character by Sam Kieth and Dave McKean.

The sound, meanwhile—dominated by long stretches of hushed and brooding dialogue—nonetheless makes wonderful use of Dolby Atmos to build otherworldly environments, enhance the action, or just creep you the heck out or lift your spirits at exactly the right times. YouTuber Object Demo has done a wonderful job of illustrating just how active the Atmos mix is even in one-on-one character exchanges. Normally I would recoil at such busy overhead channels, but in the case of this series, it works with the material rather than against it. There’s also enough gob-smacking deep, body-rumbling bass to test the rigidity of your walls. But through it all, dialogue remains utterly clear and discernible.

One more thing worth noting about the show, independent of its presentation: If the first episode doesn’t land with you, give the second one a chance—and perhaps the third, but definitely the sixth. Much like the original books, each episode carves out its own territory, explores its own themes, digs deep for its own meaning. There’s a through-line, to be sure—several in fact—but although each episode is pretty tonally and thematically consistent, there’s a good bit of variation between them.

The show really hits its stride after the introduction of Dream’s sister, Death, portrayed with the utmost compassion, empathy, and levity by The Good Place‘s Kirby Howell-Baptiste. Then again, the best chapters of the original books always revolved around Death, so this is no great surprise. Howell-Baptiste is, without question, the last actor in the world I would have cast in the role but I would have been wrong. Of all the Endless portrayed in the series thus far, hers is the performance that makes you most believe you’re looking at the anthropomorphic embodiment of a force of nature.

At any rate, if you’ve already burned through the 10 episodes of The Sandman originally released as Season 1, don’t overlook the new bonus episode, which adapts two stories from the early days of the printed series. The animated “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” in particular is a good indication of how Netflix might adapt some of the material from the graphic novels that might otherwise be difficult to adapt to live action.

If you haven’t seen any of the show, now’s the perfect time to dip in. But don’t feel the need burn through all 11 episodes in a sitting. Sit with it, reflect on it, let it sink in. This series deserves your attention, but it deserves to be savored like a multi-course dinner, not scarfed down like a cheap bag of Taco Bell.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | The dynamic range of the Dolby Vision presentation is pushed to extremes in all the right places, with the intense eye-reactive brightness and impossibly deep shadows often working to sell the believability of the otherworldly environments

SOUND | The sound makes wonderful use of Atmos to build those environments, enhance the action, or just creep you the heck out or lift your spirits at exactly the right times

Review: Elvis

review | Elvis

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Fans of The Great Gatsby will likely enjoy the way director Baz Luhrmann deploys his trademark visual dazzle to update the Elvis legend

by John Sciacca
August 22, 2022

I’ll admit, I’m not a huge fan of Elvis Presley and don’t really know much about him or his life. I was aware of him growing up, but Elvis wasn’t really music that I “discovered” like The Beatles or Led Zeppelin. I think I remember my parents talking about watching his Aloha From Hawaii concert in 1973, the world’s first live concert via satellite, and I definitely remember when he died in 1977, but beyond that, I’m more familiar with Elvis from the caricatures of Las Vegas entertainers, the stories of his late-life weight gain and drug abuse, and the unfortunate truth of him dying on the toilet. Which is to say, I went into watching this movie with no preconceptions, expectations, or ideas on what it would be about.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Knowing that the movie was written and directed by Baz Luhrmann, I had an idea that Elvis—like Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge, and The Great Gatsby—would be a visual feast, with a penchant for blending a modern soundtrack into an older story. And literally from the opening gold-and-diamond-sparkling title screen, you could tell this had Luhrmann’s fingerprints all over it.

Before I even get into my review, I think it’s a pretty safe bet to say that Gatsby is a pretty good touchstone to see if Elvis would be right for you. If you liked the visual flash and style of that film, with its combination of frenetic action and slow, dreamy sequences, or the way he used Jay Z to executive produce the music, then you’ll probably like Elvis.

Now, as little as I knew about Elvis, I knew absolutely nothing of Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s manager. I imagine if you’re an Elvis fan, you’ll have strong feelings about Parker, but I didn’t.

It feels like Elvis’s life story was big, exciting, and cinematic enough to stand on its own, but Luhrmann chose to tell the story through the eyes of Parker, who “narrates” this film and has a near equal billing on screen time. The Kaleidescape synopsis perfectly sums up the lens of this film with, “In his final hours, Colonel Tom Parker reminisces over his volatile relationship with the King of Rock and Roll.”

Whether this is because Luhrmann found that angle a better way to tell the story or he thought Tom Hanks playing Parker would be a bigger draw than the relatively unknown Austin Butler as Elvis, I can’t say.

The movie opens with voiceovers telling us Colonel Parker is a liar, a cheat, a con man, accused of massive fraud and mismanagement, that he received as much as 50% of Elvis’s earnings, he worked him like a mule, and was responsible for Elvis’s death. Parker then steps in to tell us that’s all wrong, and begins telling Elvis’s story, which starts with him as a young boy and progresses up through his battles with censorship and segregationists, (briefly) his time in the Army, falling in love with Priscilla—though they don’t go into the fact that he was 24 and she was 14-years-old when they met—his stint in film, and into his final years of his Vegas residency at The International Hotel (which became the Las Vegas Hilton and is currently the Westgate, which still prominently features a life-sized bronze statue of Elvis in the lobby).

A theme that runs through Parker’s tale is that of being a “Snowman,” something he claims to have learned while working at the carnival. A Snowman can empty “a rube’s wallet while leaving them with nothing but a smile on their face,” and the best snow jobs “had great costumes and a unique trick that gave the audience feelings they weren’t sure they should enjoy—but they do.”

Butler is terrific as Presley, with a ton of energy and stage presence, especially as he gets a bit older. Not only does Butler have the moves and sneer down, he hits the right notes for Elvis’s speaking voice, he does his own singing for the early years, with his vocals mixed with the actual Presley during the later years. Hanks is often nearly unrecognizable in loads of makeup and prosthetics with a look that reminded me of President Lyndon Johnson. My biggest issue with Hanks’ performance is the accent he adopted. At first I thought it was a Louisiana Bayou affectation, then at other times it felt like Irish. After we looked up that he was trying to affect Parker’s Dutch accent, I kept getting flashbacks of Mike Meyer’s over-the-top voice for Goldmember.

Luhrmann keeps things visually interesting throughout, using a variety of different techniques like flashbacks to Elvis’s childhood presented in a series of animated comic-book panes, cuts to black & white, and dividing the screen into multiple blocks showing different images. He also does a good job capturing the energy and excitement that seeing Elvis live must have been like and gives a glimpse into his stage presence and command of the audience. Though Luhrmann’s parallel of Elvis’s earliest performances—with girls involuntarily drawn into near orgasmic ecstasy over his moves—to him getting the Spirit as a child at a church revival come across as a bit silly. As expected, the soundtrack also keeps things modern and fresh, including a song by Doja Cat that samples Presley’s “Hound Dog,” as well as Eminem, Diplo, Måneskin, and Kacey Musgraves.

Shot at a combination of 4.5 and 6.5K resolution, the home release is taken from a 4K digital intermediate, and the image quality is clean, sharp, and detailed. Closeups have tons of details, including every enlarged pore on Hanks’ made-up face, or the fine patterns, detail, and texture in Elvis’s outfits or the Colonel’s jackets. One scene later in the film has Parker wearing a hat, and you can see every bit of the thin construction around the brim. There is also great focus and depth of field letting you see all of the crowd at Elvis’s early shows or as he looks out into his Vegas crowds.

The HDR grade also really lets the bright neon lights of Vegas pop, the bright white highlights of the stage lights, the colorful explosion of fireworks (another Luhrmann hallmark), the vibrant outfits, colorful stage lights, or with sunlight streaming through windows into darkened interiors. There are several sun-drenched outdoor scenes at a carnival that also look terrific.

The Kaleidescape download features a lossless Dolby TrueHD Atmos soundtrack that puts the focus on the dialogue and music, as it should. Dialogue is always clear and intelligible, even when music is playing, and depending on the venue, music can be room-filling, with sounds spreading out into the sides, back, and overhead. There are also lots of little ambient moments like crowds cheering and clapping, fans shouting, and the snapping of camera bulbs around the room.

I can’t comment on how closely the film hews to actual events, or if Parker was truly as controlling and influential on Elvis as the film portrays, but I did find Elvis entertaining, though a bit long at 2 hours 39 minutes. If you’re a fan of Presley or Luhrmann, it’s definitely worth a watch.

Elvis has left the building.

PICTURE | The image quality is clean, sharp, and detailed, with the HDR grade really letting the bright neon lights of Vegas pop

SOUND | The lossless Dolby TrueHD Atmos soundtrack puts the focus on the dialogue and music, as it should, with the dialogue always clear and intelligible, even when music is playing

Review: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

review | The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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Calling this roguish Sergio Leone romp a classic western kind of misses the point—it’s something so much bigger and better than that

by Michael Gaughn
August 18, 2022

Most movies, especially contemporary ones, are first and foremost about genre, about making the audience feel snug within a certain set of expectations and conditions and never too radically disrupting the womb-like sense of security that induces. Sergio Leone is, of course, the guy who created the spaghetti western but by the time of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, he had moved well beyond the genre into a realm that can best be described as, for want of a better term, pure film.

While GBU has elements of the American western and its Italian offshoot, it’s just as much a war movie, an epic, and an action film; but it subsumes all of that into a much greater whole. It never stops to do a set piece and then smugly nudge the audience with a, “Hey, look what I just did.” Instead, Leone shows throughout an incredible, seemingly naive, love for making movies in that place beyond genre—and, like all the best films, beyond time. And it all just seems to pour out of him like a rustic but still elegant wine.

This movie is undeniably part epic but it’s an intimate one. Like Lawrence of Arabia, it’s about, first, the individual and the consequences of individual action and, second, about the larger stage those actions play out on. It doesn’t rise or fall based on its battle scenes or creating a sense of grandeur but on the crafting of the three principals. But there’s far less of a one-to-one relation between the individual and that larger stage here than in Lawrence. GBU is far looser, more picaresque, roguish, puckish. (It’s like a Cormac McCarthy novel—if McCarthy had a sense of humor, didn’t have an adolescent fixation on depravity, and allowed even a smidge of humanity into his work.)

Like all of Leone, this is 100% a director’s movie. The actors are basically marionettes to be positioned and manipulated, no more or less important than the settings, the score, and the endlessly inventive, often sinuous camera moves. His ability to so carefully and completely devise the action underlines just how little most actors’ performances have to do with their abilities and far more with how they’re shot, cut, and above all, directed.

Find me a great Lee Van Cleef performance anywhere outside this film—it can’t be done because he never worked with another director this good. Clint Eastwood has the acting range of a doorknob but he was savvy enough to surrender completely to Leone, who created the terse, snarling persona Eastwood was able to exploit throughout a long and lucrative career. The only real actor here is Eli Wallach—which explains why he gets almost all the lines and all the big scenes. Peer beyond the Eastwood aura and you realize this is really Wallach’s film.

Because GBU is more than anything an exceptionally pure projection of Leone’s imaginative world and not just an excuse for actors to strut in front of the camera, every aspect of the film carries equal weight. But first among those equals is probably atmosphere. The depiction of the fringes of the Civil War might not be authentic but, as far as creating the most evocative stage possible for the action, it feels authentic—in the same way John Ford’s vision of the west in My Darling Clementine and Fort Apache and (although there’s probably some kind of law against my saying this) D.W. Griffith’s portrayal of Civil War battles in The Birth of a Nation may or may not be accurate but are so compelling they become how we want that period to feel and be.

That ability to make atmosphere enthralling helps explain why this film was such a huge influence on Full Metal Jacket—in particular the odd commingling of silence and menace in the sequence in the abandoned town still being hit with cannon fire. Both Leone and Kubrick were masters of summoning up a palpable mood, so it’s not surprising they stole from each other shamelessly.

This is essentially a silent film—you could watch it with the sound off and still know everything that’s going on and, more importantly, feel the emotion. It’s also a deliberately paced film—surprisingly so for a western—and while Leone makes that work for the most part, the material is just too thin for those kinds of larghetto beats to be sustained throughout the extended cut here. With most films that would be a dealbreaker; here it’s just a quibble.

The transfer is astonishingly, seductively good. This is the way older films should look in 4K. The images are alive with grain, which is so essential to Leone’s style that it’s scary to think anyone would ever think of scrubbing any of it away—let alone all of it, à la The Godfather. This release is sans HDR but it’s hard to see where going there would do much to enhance its impact. It would likely result in the usual tradeoff of grit for polish, and if The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is about anything, it’s grit.

(I have to harp on this string again: If the main titles are any indication of what HDR would yield, then we should all pray that day never comes. There’s the usual attempt to enhance the title cards and turn them into a slideshow instead of doing the obvious and right thing of having them feel like they’re being run through a film gate—in other words, make them feel like they’re part of the movie. Fortunately, so much of the sequence depends on animation that some of the analog feel is still there, but it just makes the cleanup look that much more alien. And someone deserves to be eviscerated for ruining the film’s last, lingering shot by making “The End” look like something out of an iMovie project.)

There’s nothing wrong with the stereo and 5.1 mixes; they’re just not appropriate. And it continues to be a bone of contention that the original mono tends to get kicked to the curb with 4K releases of older movies that supposedly represent the filmmakers’ intent.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is, of course, a classic film, but not a perfect one—but its rough edges have a lot to do with its power. For as long and epic as Once Upon a Time in the West is—and that film doesn’t waste a single second of screen time—GBU actually has a more drawn-out pace, which sometimes drags, but more often than not is languorous in the most generous sense of that word. And there are moments when style lapses into affectation, like during the final showdown, where Leone cuts about five times too often to extreme closeups of shifting eyes and twitching eyebrows, to the point where it starts to feel like a Monty Python sketch. But you forgive him because of his Rabelaisian drollery and because he made it clear from the moment Eli Wallach crashes through the window at the beginning of the film that this was going to be a very tall tale indeed.

PICTURE | The 4K transfer is astonishingly, seductively good, with the images alive with the grain that is so essential to Leone’s style

SOUND | There’s nothing wrong with the DTS-HD stereo and 5.1 mixes but where’s the original mono?

Review: Prey

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This Predator sequel sets the action in Comanche territory in the early 1700s with surprisingly satisfying results

by John Sciacca
August 11, 2022

I like to think I have my finger on the pulse of upcoming attractions, but—perhaps fittingly—Prey snuck up on me almost out of nowhere. It wasn’t until just a few weeks before its premiere on Hulu that I saw an ad for it while my wife and I were watching Dopesick. Even from the trailer it was clear this was something entirely new and fresh for the Predator franchise, and, man, did it look cool!

The original Predator—from way back in 1987—was a terrific blend of action, sci-fi, and horror, and was a perfect vehicle to pit larger-than-life action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger against an enemy even bigger, badder, and more equipped than himself, locked in a hunt-to-the-death battle of survival in the jungle. While they’ve attempted to reboot, refresh, and relaunch the Predator franchise over the years, none of the sequels came close to matching the original.

Honestly, Prey was so good, I can’t believe it went directly to Hulu and bypassed a theatrical release, and the film had the biggest premiere for any TV show or movie in the streamer’s history. (Interestingly, it debuted on Disney+ in many markets outside the United States. The disappointing thing for US viewers is that Prey on Hulu doesn’t include HDR or Dolby Atmos while the Disney+ stream included both Dolby Vision and Atmos.)

Prey takes place back in 1719 in the Great Plains of North America. While most women in the Comanche tribe tend to things around the camp and welcome warriors back from hunting parties, Naru (Amber Midthunder) wants become an excepted hunter in the tribe. She spends her days mostly alone, practicing her tracking and fighting skills while also gathering medicinal herbs. Her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers) is the tribe’s Great Hunter, and he doesn’t think she is ready to go on her first big hunt/trial known as a Kuhtaamia, where you hunt something that can also kill you. While out hunting a lion, Naru follows the hunting party, and notices some unusual tracks along with a skinned rattlesnake. When one of the hunting party is killed, Naru is convinced there is something else out there even more dangerous than the lion, and she goes off on her own to track it.

There is so much about Prey that just works. First, it feels authentic. Between the casting, the sets, and the wardrobe, you feel like you’re being dropped into this tribe and watching Naru on her quest to be accepted as a hunter. Second, the pacing knows when to go slow to let you actually come to know the characters and learn about them, and in the case of Naru and her brother, to actually care about them, and to see the Predator adapting to this new world. But it also knows when to put the pedal to the floor and not let up when the action starts. Director Dan Trachtenberg—who also co-wrote the screenplay—showed he knew how to develop slow tension in his debut with 10 Cloverfield Lane, and he deftly handles the build-up to action here. Third, like the original Predator, the plot doesn’t try to get overly complicated. The story doesn’t get bogged down in side plots or distractions, doesn’t try and get overly complicated with MacGuffins, and isn’t trying to offer a social commentary or force in some agenda. It’s simple and focused. Finally, Amber Midthunder is just terrific, cool, and fierce. Her goals and motivations are clear and consistent, she is focused, smart, and her fighting and skills are all believable.

Taken from a 4K digital intermediate, the Hulu stream is in 4K resolution and I thought it looked great. But there were definitely moments when I longed for an HDR grade to deliver more highlights and shadow depth. There were a lot of night scenes lit by torches that were just a bit flatter without HDR and the black levels not as deep and inky, and the Predator’s glowing green blood not as vibrant. Much of the film takes place outdoors, and the color palette is very natural, with lots of browns, tans, and earth tones lit by sunlight and warm red fires, with plenty of greens in fields and trees. Images throughout are sharp, clean, and clear with plenty of detail in the mossy ground cover, leaves, with individual strands of hair visible, along with the leather braids of Naru’s war outfit or fine patterns on clothing worn by French trappers.

Honestly, short of some minor banding at points, I had no qualms over the picture quality, only that I knew it could be even better with the HDR grade. It really just makes me look forward to watching it again when it becomes available in higher quality.

Prey makes a bit of history as the first film to be dubbed in the Comanche language, and Hulu offers the option to watch Prey with the Comanche language dub. I’m a fan of foreign films and don’t mind subtitles, and I thought this would be the best and most immersive way to enjoy it. Unfortunately, this is a dub, meaning that it is pretty clear the mouths and the words don’t match up, which is a bit distracting. And watching this dub required using the subtitles for the English translation. But, unfortunately, engaging subtitles on Hulu turns on all the subtitles, not just the translation. That means that you have to endure things like “(Dog barking),” “(Birds chirping),” and “(Predator growling)” which, on top of the dubbing, was just too much for me to endure.

Unlike the Disney+ stream, Hulu only offers a 5.1-channel surround mix, not the more immersive Dolby Atmos option. Even still, I found the audio to be pretty immersive and engaging when upmixed by my Trinnov processor, though I could tell it was lacking in the depth and dynamics of a TrueHD lossless mix, especially in the bass region. There are tons of little ambient sounds like birds chirping, wind blowing through the forest, or rolling thunder. There are also lots of strong directional cues like hearing Naru’s axe whistling in from the side of the room or hearing the Predator’s clicks move around the sides and back of the room helping you locate where it is even when you can’t see it.

The Trinnov Dolby Surround upmixer also did a terrific job placing sounds overhead, like the Predator’s ship sailing above and scattering dust and debris around the room or flies buzzing overhead as they circle around one of the Predator’s kills or little rattles of objects rubbing together overhead inside Naru’s teepee.

Dialogue remains clear and intelligible, though, similar to the way Steven Spielberg handled Spanish language spoken in West Side Story, the dialogue spoken in French isn’t translated on the subtitle track. The thinking is that Naru doesn’t understand what is being said and so neither should you.

While it is violent, it isn’t overly gruesome, and the camera often pans away, with the most brutal acts happening just out of view.

Prey most closely captures the spirit of the first Predator film, but also manages to put its own spin on the story, being both familiar but also wholly new. I highly recommend watching it, even if it means picking up a subscription to Hulu for the month. Really—it’s that good.

PICTURE | The 4K stream on Hulu looks great, but there were moments when an HDR grade would have helped to deliver more highlights and shadow depth

SOUND | The 5.1 audio is pretty immersive and engaging when upmixed but lacks the depth and dynamics of a TrueHD lossless mix, especially in the bass

Review: Luck

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Several Pixar alumni crafted this AppleTV+ offering, which features first-rate animation and a kid-friendly plot but lacks the adult sophistication of a Soul

by Roger Kanno
August 10, 2022

Apple TV+’s first major animated feature, Luck, is a collaboration with Skydance Media’s new animation division headed up by Pixar veteran John Lasseter and several other former Pixar producers. With a big budget, stellar cast, and a proven creative team behind the project, Apple TV+ looks to make a big splash in animated films starting with Luck, which began streaming on August 5.

The film’s novel premise centers on Sam (Eva Noblezada), an orphan who has aged out of the foster-care system and sets out to start a new job and live on her own for the first time. The problem is, she is incredibly unlucky and almost everything that can possibly go wrong in her life does. Then one day while eating a panini, her fortunes change when she meets Bob (Simon Pegg), a talking cat from the Land of Luck where good luck is created for everyone on Earth.

The cast also includes Whoopi Goldberg as Bob’s boss, a leprechaun who has it in for him, Jane Fonda as a dragon named Babe in charge of the Land of Luck, and Flula Borg, who voices Jeff, a unicorn and maintenance engineer in a place called the In Between. The voice work is superb, although I wished Babe’s character would have been a bit more multidimensional to give the legendary Fonda more of a chance to shine. And while the performances are very good and the initial premise is intriguing, the film never really stretches much beyond that, with Bob and Sam’s quest to obtain a lucky penny leading to further, more harrowing, but somewhat predictable adventures.

The whimsical and inventive animation, Sam’s perpetually upbeat mood in the face of adversity, and the movie’s overall positivity are charming and will likely appeal to younger children. I did find the visuals like the many tiny bunnies that appear throughout to be quite endearing, even though I thought them to be a bit reminiscent of minions. And while the movie tries really hard, even having John Ratzenberger voicing a supporting character like he did in so many Pixar films, it just can’t reach the same heights as some of its predecessors like the more thought-provoking and cerebral Inside Out or Soul.

As with much of Apple TV+’s recent programming, the Dolby Vision presentation is absolutely first-rate. The picture is bright and punchy, as you might expect from a film set mostly in a place called the Land of Luck, with deep saturated greens in the intricate herring-bone patterns on the leprechauns’ uniforms and the foliage consisting of four-leaf clovers found on every type of tree and plant. Bob’s black coat ranges from deep black to dark gray depending on the realistic reflection of light off his coarse fur, which appears quite different in texture from the fuzziness of the bunnies. The picture is always razor-sharp, which reveals plenty of fine detail in the intricate animation, such as reflections in the visors of the bunnies’ hazmat suits and the shiny surfaces of the many whimsical vehicles zipping around the Land of Luck. The CGI visuals of Luck will look excellent on a high-quality HDR display.

The soundtrack, presented in Dolby Atmos, is engaging with some very catchy songs but could have benefited from a more aggressive mix. For instance, the opening credits begin with a delightful cover of Madonna’s “Lucky Star” with a clean and open sound spread evenly between the front speakers, but there isn’t much use of the surround and height channels or much bass energy either. Later, when Sam follows Bob through a portal to the Land of Luck, the swirling sound effects make much better use of all the available channels. Except for a few instances, scenes with such immersive sonic bombast are mostly absent from the rest of the film until the climactic scene featuring sweeping orchestral music and plenty of raucous directional surround effects.

Luck is a rare near miss for Apple TV+, whose strategy of providing limited content comprised of only original films and shows allows them to concentrate on quality rather than quantity. However, this film still looks great and will be suitable for younger children with its positive themes and kid-friendly content.

Roger Kanno began his life-long interest in home cinema almost three decades ago with a collection of LaserDiscs and a Dolby Surround Pro Logic system. Since then, he has seen a lot of movies in his home theater but has an equal fascination with high-end stereo music systems. Roger writes for both Sound & Vision and the SoundStage! Network.

PICTURE | The Dolby Vision presentation is absolutely first-rate with a bright & punchy picture and CGI visuals that will look excellent on a high-quality HDR display

SOUND | The Atmos soundtrack is engaging with some very catchy songs but could have benefited from a more aggressive mix

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966)

Review: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

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A brilliant and still hilarious translation of the stage hit—that is, until you get to the second half

by Michael Gaughn
August 8, 2022

This is going to be a tough one. Anyone who loves comedy and is openminded enough to check out efforts beyond the current flavor of the month and has never come across A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum owes it to himself to make a beeline for this film. But, be warned that while the first half is a pitch-perfect farce, the second half eventually collapses under its own weight—unless you’re into madcap ‘60s chase scenes. I’m not.

You can also approach this as an important historical document, as the last real manifestation of schtick, adroitly and vigorously performed by Phil Silvers, Jack Gilford, and, of course, the larger-than-life Zero Mostel, and lovingly captured by the seemingly ill-suited Richard Lester. Most of the jokes are on the level of “My dog has no nose,” but the verve and punch are in the timing—not just the individual delivery but the breathtaking synchronization between the three principals and how they manage to bring the almost entirely British supporting cast up to their level and into their world.

All that scenery-chewing causes some collateral damage, but they’re acceptable losses—up to a point. For instance, Michael Hordern’s droll turn as the henpecked husband with a keen eye on the courtesans next door would have stood out in a traditional British comedy but is unfairly drowned out by all the American hamming here. And putting almost all his eggs in the Mostel/Gilford/Silvers basket backfires on Lester when he has to bring the pompous Miles Gloriosus onto the stage. Actor Leon Greene just can’t generate a fraction of the energy summoned up by the three tummlers and his hunky wooden presence manages to suck almost all the life out of the production.

Richard Lester was a curious case. He’ll likely always be best known for his first major film, A Hard Day’s Night, which gave him a bit of a free ride on the Beatles’ coattails but which he took full advantage of, translating Nouvelle Vague filmmaking techniques into the mainstream, changing the look and feel of movies forever. But he proved to be wildly inconsistent, doing intriguing surrealist comedies like How I Won the War and the now ignored but well worth reviving Julie Christie drama Petulia—works that garnered some praise but didn’t draw audiences. He didn’t have another big hit after Hard Day’s Night until he did the Musketeers films for the Salkinds, which led to them enlisting him to reshoot Richard Donner’s Superman II, which then led to the truly dismal Superman III.

Just off the Beatles’ Help!, Lester was a hot director—maybe the hottest—when he took on A Funny Thing, and while the things he does well he does brilliantly, you can sense his reach exceeding his grasp. It would have been easy to completely bungle translating a frantic stage farce to the screen—a dubious honor he managed to earn 10 years later, making a train wreck out of The Ritz—but here he gets almost all of it right, freely mixing up and reinventing the conventions while showing them a deep respect. That is, until those massive miscalculations in the third act. (To be fair, some of the blame for that lies in flaws in the Broadway source material, but the producers never should have allowed Lester to indulge his weakness for silly chase scenes.)

It’s astonishing he was able to maintain the stage-friendly pacing of the lines and bits of business—in other words, didn’t screw up his core ensemble’s inimitable timing—while doing all his experiments with composition, blocking, and cutting. And while he takes the obvious path of turning the production numbers into music videos, he does it playfully and without running roughshod over the source material—like, say, Ken Russell with Tommy. The standout is “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid,” which he treats as the throwaway it is, using it to unleash a cascade of gags that often break the fourth wall.

He was also wise to align himself with DP Nicholas Roeg (Doctor Zhivago, Fahrenheit 451), who documents the squalor of the action’s “less fashionable” quarter of ancient Rome without having it become a drag on the comic mood, conjures up some striking compositions without making the film feel affected, and manages to keep up with, and is sometimes one step ahead of, Lester’s freewheeling approach to the material.

Before mentioning the picture quality, I have to digress for a moment and point out that A Funny Thing was, when I previously saw it about six months ago, one of the films that showed me Amazon had seriously upped its game with HD delivery. It was literally unwatchable a year ago on Prime. Some of the scenes with elaborate action broke up so badly they looked like ravenous paramecia darting under a microscope. All of that is in the past now and the streaming quality has become consistently first-rate. Of course, the quality of Amazon’s transfers is still all over the map (I only made it about 30 seconds into Hangmen Also Die before I had to bail), and it remains about a 50/50 crapshoot whether whatever title you pick will look acceptable in HD. But, all told, a huge leap forward for what was once a joke of a service.

This transfer falls toward the middle of the gamut. It’s relatively faithful to the original film but looks like it could use a little cleanup and color correction. The source seems to have suffered from benign neglect, but a few of the sequences are vibrant enough to suggest what some judicious and respectful attention could yield, likely significantly upping the film’s impact.

The audio is another instance of that phenomena I’ve been coming across lately in films from the ‘60s and early ‘70s—pristine stereo music tracks with decent dynamic range sounding all out of proportion to relatively flat all-but-monophonic dialogue tracks. Since this movie was originally mixed in stereo, it’s possible this is faithful to the initial release, but the disparity is a little jarring.

Comedy has gotten so jaded and brutal that it’s become fashionable to dismiss anything older as sentimental and naive. That’s a mistake in general, but a serious mistake here. A Funny Thing’s roots stretch all the way back to Plautus, traveling, among other places, through the French farceurs and the often hardknock worlds of vaudeville and early TV to arrive at Broadway and then the movies. It’s a hell of a genealogy and tradition—which this film both honors and aggressively mucks around with without once acting like it feels superior to its heritage or its material. In the current stifling climate, just being exposed to something that uncynical can be bracing.

PICTURE | The transfer is relatively faithful to the original film but looks like it could use a little cleanup and color correction, which would likely significantly up its impact

SOUND | The pristine stereo music tracks exhibit decent dynamic range but sound out of proportion to the relatively flat all-but-monophonic dialogue tracks

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Review: Lightyear

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Although it’s got a distinct straight-to-streaming feel, the latest Pixar offering does raise the bar on photorealistic animation

by John Sciacca
August 6, 2022

Pixar Animation changed the world of filmmaking in 1995 when it released Toy Story, making it the first entirely computer-animated feature film, and creating a new frontier for storytellers to explore. Beyond that, they proved that animation didn’t have to be a forum reserved for kids’ movies. Through rich storytelling, character development, smart humor, and broad themes that transcend ages, Pixar showed that animated movies could be enjoyed by kids and adults alike.

Since then, we’ve seen three followups in the Toy Story franchise, with the most recent, Toy Story 4, released back in 2019. And along with watching these beloved characters grow, evolve, and change, we’ve also witnessed continual improvements in the quality and detail of Pixar’s animation, which we can appreciate now more than ever with modern 4K HDR displays.

While Toy Story 4 was kind of a sendoff and farewell of sorts to Woody, with Lightyear, Pixar gives Buzz a spinoff of his own with a bit of an origin story. As the opening titles proclaim:

In 1995, a boy named Andy got a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday.
It was from his favorite movie.
This is that movie.

So, don’t expect any of Woody’s roundup gang here as this is a completely separate animal about the character Buzz Lightyear, not the toy Buzz Lightyear based on that character. (Kind of like if we had been watching a movie called Skywalker Saga for years where a boy played with his Kenner Star Wars action figures, and now we are seeing Star Wars about the actual Luke Skywalker. Make sense?)

This is also why we don’t have Tim Allen returning to voice Buzz, rather having him voiced by Chris Evans, who sounded more like George Clooney to me. According to Lightyear producer Galyn Susman, “Tim Allen is Buzz Lightyear the toy, and he’s the embodiment of Buzz Lightyear the toy. We weren’t making a Toy Story movie. We’re making Buzz Lightyear’s movie, the Lightyear movie. And so first and foremost, we just needed to have a different person playing that Lightyear, separate from the toy.”

More than anything else, Lightyear is a sci-fi adventure that takes place on an uncharted planet 4.2 million light years from earth that just happens to star a version of a character we’ve become pretty familiar with over the past 27 years. There are scenes, designs, and moments that are reminiscent of Wall-E, Star Trek, Starship Troopers, Star Wars, 2001, Alien, and more.

While it is a wholly different kind of movie, you can expect Buzz’s familiar gadget-laden spacesuit, and callbacks to some of his popular Toy Story catchphrases and quirks like “To infinity and beyond” and “Buzz Lightyear to Star Command, come in, Star Command.” Or, you know, the kinds of things that would make a Buzz Lightyear toy really cool and fun to play with.

After landing on an uncharted planet, Space Ranger Captain Buzz Lightyear and commanding officer/best friend Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba) begin exploring, only to discover the planet is filled with hostile vegetation and lifeforms. After damaging their ship during retreat, the crew is forced to stay on the planet while performing repairs and while also trying to develop the formula for the crystallic fusion fuel necessary for hyper-speed travel so they can leave the planet.

While testing the fuel, Buzz discovers he is gone one year for every minute of space travel, meaning the lives of his friends back on the planet blink past in time-lapse moments with each subsequent test. After many years of failed testing, a new formula has Buzz returning after 22 years have passed, during which time the planet has been invaded and overrun by robots, and Buzz must work with a new team to try and take back the planet.

Lightyear gives Pixar a chance to introduce us to a new set of characters, including Mo Morrison (voiced by Taika Waititi), a clumsy, accident-prone member of Buzz’s new crew, and SOX (voiced by Peter Sohn), an emotional-support robot cat given to Buzz to help him cope with being alone after so much time away, which I found to the most entertaining and humorous character.

Visually, Lightyear is stunning and continues Pixar’s tradition of raising the bar of what is possible with computer animation. While the studio has kind of settled on a look for human characters, the remaining visuals of backgrounds, ships, textures, and clothing can be near photorealistic. When you remember that every pixel up on screen was deliberately drawn/shaded/rendered/lit by a digital artist, it is even that much more stunning to appreciate all the fine details that are visible.

Instead of a glossy and shiny digital look, there is an almost film-like grittiness or softness to some of the images. (Remember, according to the opening, this movie happened back in 1995 . . .) But this gives the film a more cinematic look. Color is also used to define different environments, with the planet exterior shots having a rusty color palette by day and a blue-ish purple by night, with interiors of the space port and ships leaning grey and blue.

Taken from a 4K digital intermediate, there is incredible detail in every frame. Look at the thick metallic texture and detail on the space suits, with bits of wear and scratches, or the flaking and pebbling in the paint or the texture on buttons in the space ships or the scape and scale of some of the colony facilities or the massive external shots of spaceships.

The visuals also greatly benefit from the HDR grade, giving us not only true, inky blacks but also with many scenes producing bright, often eye-searing, visuals. Whether it’s red-hot balls of stars, the glowing streaks of hyper-speed travel, fire-orange sparks and flames, gleaming blue-white lights, raging red robot eyes, or probing lights in dark nights or interior corridors, Lightyear pops off the screen in HDR.

The Dolby TrueHD Atmos audio mix on the Kaleidescape download is one of the biggest arguments for buying Lightyear over just streaming it on Disney+. Right from the get-go, you experience big, furniture-rumbling bass, with the big spacecraft engines letting you feel their massive power or loud cracks and groans as things collide. The sound mixers also use the sound to establish different environments, like the really expansive nature of the planet’s soundscape and atmosphere, letting you hear the subtleness of the large, open outdoor space or the spacious, echoing sounds in the large hanger bays or the heavy whirr and whine of machinery as big launch doors open up. There are also plenty of moments with creatures and ships flying about overhead or high up on the front walls.

Any time you’re dealing with time travel, the plot can get a bit shifty and complex, and there are a lot of scary-ish scenes that might be a bit much for a younger audience. (My six year old took a pass.) While it was generally entertaining, the plot and whole of Lightyear just feels a little thin, and doesn’t really tread any new ground or give us any real insight into the Buzz Lightyear character we’ve grown to love, or produce the heart and feels Pixar usually delivers. Honestly, it feels a bit more like a straight-to-streaming film rather than the latest big feature in Pixar’s canon. Which is probably why it is the lowest-rated Pixar film that doesn’t have the word Cars in its title.

For me, a Pixar movie is as much about the technical merit and evolution of computer animation, and for that reason alone Lightyear deserves a watch. Whether you’ll want to go back and visit it a second time remains the question.

PICTURE | Lightyear continues Pixar’s tradition of raising the bar of what is possible with computer animation, displaying incredible detail in every frame and with the whole greatly benefitting from the HDR grade

SOUND |The TrueHD Atmos mix on the Kaleidescape download is one of the biggest arguments for buying Lightyear over just streaming it on Disney+

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