Movies Archives - Page 27 of 30

Kaleidescape | Manhattan

After almost two decades, the Matrix is back, with a lot of flash, a lot of action, but not anything really new to say

by John Sciacca
December 23, 2021

(I don’t normally include this at the beginning but with this film being so new, and so many people being interested in watching it, I want to assure you this review is spoiler free!)

If you’re going to reboot and revisit a beloved franchise 18 years after the previous installment, you likely have one of two reasons to do so. One, you’ve got something new to add to the story that would otherwise be incomplete without it. Two, you’re looking for a cash grab.

I’m a huge fan of the original Matrix trilogy. The first film was startlingly fresh and original, gamechanging, and even genre-defining. While the second and third films didn’t push the boundaries of originality in the same manner, they definitely helped to complete the story. So I went into the latest film in the franchise, The Matrix Resurrections (which opened on December 22 both in theaters and streaming on HBO Max) hopeful and excited but also
. . . cautious. (Interestingly, this is the final film to get the HBO Max day & date treatment in Warner Bros.’ “Project Popcorn” experiment.)

While the Wachowskis—Lana and Lilly—showed incredible innovation with The Matrix, their subsequent films—Speed Racer, Cloud Atlas, and Jupiter Ascending—were all misses. While there were some amazing visuals (I can only imagine how Speed Racer would look in 4K HDR), the stories were plodding and just not interesting.

But this was The Matrix. And they were bringing back Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss). And after 18 years surely they had time to work up a fantastic story and develop some next-generation effects techniques, and really push the story to the next level.

Right?

I’m just gonna say it—this latest entry into the franchise is a miss. It’s not a bad movie—in fact, there are some fun moments and a lot of nostalgic high points—it’s just that it isn’t a good movie. It offers nothing new and is basically just a retread of the first film, but lacking any of the originality, constantly trying to remind us just how Matrix-y it is and playing on our nostalgia by flashing up loads of flashback clips from the previous films.

As much grief as Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens got for being a retread of Episode IV—A New Hope, at least it introduced us to new members of the franchise that tried to carry the story forward. Resurrections really doesn’t do anything new for the Matrix short of essentially starting it over at Square One with a literal retelling of the first film’s opening and then ending on virtually the same beat as that film. It also spends several long minutes making sure you know just how meta, hip, and self-aware it is, with characters explaining why the first Matrix was so good, fresh, and original and what it was really a metaphor for.

Where the original trilogy grabbed you right from the beginning, I just kept waiting for this new film to get going and show me something—anything!—that was new. Don’t get me wrong, it was great to see Neo and Trinity back together (though we barely get to see much of Trinity really being Trinity); there were some nice call-backs to other characters; and Neil Patrick Harris is a cool addition as Neo’s—I mean Thomas Anderson’s—analyst. But it felt like just as the movie was about to get good, that’s when it ended.

As mentioned, I’m going to be really careful not to spoil anything here, as anyone wanting to see Resurrections should certainly have the right to go in fresh. So let’s just say years have passed since the events that concluded with The Matrix Revolutions. Thomas Anderson (Reeves) is an incredibly successful video-game designer famous for developing a trilogy of games about the Matrix. He regularly visits a coffeeshop where he waits to watch a woman named Tiffany (Moss) he is oddly drawn to, but never approaches. Anderson struggles with reality and frequently visits his analyst (Harris), who prescribes him blue pills that help him keep his dreams/nightmares at bay. He also tries to balance the work demands placed on him by his partner Smith (Jonathan Groff), who wants to develop a new Matrix game.

One thing you can’t say about Resurrections is that it doesn’t look good. Shot in a combination of 6K and 8K resolution, this transfer is taken from a true 4K digital intermediate and has a Dolby Vision HDR grade, resulting in terrific picture quality throughout. Only during one scene near the very beginning did I notice a bit of posterization when characters were in a dark area with some haze and bright flashlights. This probably had more to do with HBO’s streaming compression than any fault in the source material. For the remainder, images were incredibly clean and clear, with razor-sharp edges and loads of detail.

Closeups reveal the most detail, and you can really appreciate the craftsmanship that went into the costume design. Notice the turquoise-blue collar stitching on one character’s suit or the individual swirling metallic spheres that comprise other characters. The special-effects work on things like the Sentinels has also progressed where they look more like machines than CGI, and that green tint/cast that overlayed the original films has been replaced with subtler, more suggestive lighting cues like neon lighting.

The Dolby Vision HDR grade is used to great effect to really pump the bright highlights and colors. Subtle things like the glinting reflection in a character’s eyes or the highlights from sweat glistening on sunlit faces have more pop, along with more overt things like spotlights, sparks, or blasts of electricity. I also noticed that scenes within The Construct are much cleaner now. Where they were riddled with bits of digital noise in the first film, here the all-white room is brighter, cleaner, and noise-free. Colors are also really saturated, with things like glowing neon lighting, fireballs, and explosions that are vibrant bright red-orange, or the glowing angry red lights of the alien machines, or the golden orange-bathed sunset scenes in San Francisco, or a room that glows with light from hundreds of candles. Near the finish is a large outdoor battle scene shot at night that just explodes with color and highlights.

Streaming audio can be a bit of a mixed bag, and while this was mostly good, I definitely felt it was missing the dynamics and punch compared to the disc or Kaleidescape-based Dolby TrueHD track. The dynamics were most lacking in gunfire, which just didn’t seem to have the same bang! Whether this was a limitation of the streaming or a choice made in the mix is a question we won’t be able to answer until Resurrections becomes available in a format that offers higher-resolution audio.

Even with that nit, there’s plenty in the Dolby Digital Plus Atmos track to make it entertaining. Vehicles flip up and overhead, objects fall out of the sky, helicopters swirl and hover, spent brass shell casings rain down from above, voices literally circle all around you or are placed high up in the room when appropriate, echoes help define the listening environment, and there are creaks and groans all around as an elevator descends. If you define the success of an Atmos mix on how much sound happens above you, then you’ll find Resurrections much to your delight. While the bullet cracks lacked dynamics, explosions had plenty of depth and authority, and your subs will definitely rattle the room and punch you in the chest when things blow up, concrete and stone shatters, columns collapse, and debris and destruction rains down around you.

The Matrix story was certainly complete without this latest entry but I don’t regret the nearly two and a half hours invested in watching. As Morpheus said more than 20 years ago, “No one can be told what the Matrix is . . .” Similarly, you should really check this out and make up your own mind about it. While it might not do anything to move the story forward, it was certainly great to see two beloved characters back on screen together; and for HBO Max owners, The Matrix Resurrections offers something visually dynamic and sonically exciting for your home theater. Take the Red Pill and give it a try. Maybe just wash it down with a nice glass of single-malt scotch.

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 | The HBO Max presentation is from a 4K digital intermediate and has a Dolby Vision HDR grade, resulting in terrific picture quality throughout.

SOUND | The audio is definitely missing some dynamics and punch but there is plenty in the Dolby Digital Plus Atmos track to make it entertaining.

Review: Stardust Memories

review | Stardust Memories

recent reviews

Kaleidescape | The Purple Rose of Cairo

Kaleidescape | Annie Hall

Kaleidescape | Blue Jasmine

Kaleidescape | Manhattan

The film that drove the masses away from Woody Allen’s work offers the deepest, most nuanced, portrayal of his persona

by Michael Gaughn
March 7, 2021

Having considered a handful of Woody Allen’s most significant films, we now approach his most problematic work (that is, the most problematic for anyone who’s not a prisoner of the irredeemable present). Allen had been on a roll with audiences after Annie Hall and Manhattan but ran into a massive wall with Stardust Memories, which effectively alienated the broader following he’d created with those two earlier films and left him with the small but blindly devoted fan base that would allow him to keep making movies for the next four decades. As perverse as it sounds, it seems possible—even likely—he deliberately created Memories to offend, in a maybe too successful effort to cull the herd.

I wondered in an earlier review why Allen soon abandoned his nimble, well-rounded, creatively fertile persona to portray a thin caricature of himself in later films. The answer might lie here. Being too honest about himself and his perceptions created a backlash that might have been both personally traumatizing and a threat to his career. With his Zelig-like need to be accepted, Allen might have decided that, rather than continue to mine that tremendously and uniquely fruitful vein, he should play it safe—or at least safer—from now on.

Some have called Stardust Memories his best film. It’s undeniably a great film—it takes tremendous talent to go this picaresque and be this unvarnished and ambitious and still pull it off—but it just doesn’t hang together as well as the equally audacious Manhattan. And I think the fault might lie in the relationships he chose to portray and his too facile casting of his partners.

Allen tends to go for the Flavor of the Month with his actors, and while Charlotte Rampling might have photographed well, she just doesn’t have the chops to be believable as his deeply disturbed love interest. Marie-Christine Barrault fares slightly better as his more grounded alternative but, again, there’s just not enough depth there. Jessica Harper almost makes her part work, but she’s not a significant enough screen presence to care about. While Allen was likely just staying true to his actual situation, and famous directors undoubtedly do tend to flit from one stimulating but superficial relationship to another, the film needed a deeper emotional resonance there to balance its incisive but ultimately wearying examination of celebrity.

I don’t want to give the impression I don’t like this film—I do. I just wanted to pinpoint where it sags. Stardust Memories shows a fierce courage—and Allen paid a huge price for going there. Many felt he was too brutal on his fans, but that misses the point. He’s mainly exploring why we manifest the worlds we do and his intense dissatisfaction with his current state, which he was largely responsible for. The suffocating fans were just an inevitable extension of that.

It’s got the loosest structure of any his non-gag-driven films, with a “meet the director” weekend at a seaside resort supplying the armature for him to hang his diverse impressions on, and he makes it work well. The problem (to the degree it is a problem) is that people assumed it would be fun to be inside Allen’s head for 90 minutes and were thrown to find the experience jarring, even disturbing. It’s as if he took another stab at the deeply subjective, free-associational original premise for Annie Hall (called “Anhedonia”) and this time succeeded in landing all the blows.

And let’s not forget that Stardust Memories is a comedy, and a funny one—his conversation with a bunch of street-wise aliens (“I have an IQ of 1,600 and I still don’t know what you expected from that relationship with Dorrie”) might be the best bit in any of his films—but there’s not a single comic moment than isn’t deliberately troubled by darker currents—which is what makes the film so brilliant but also threw audiences so hard.

Allen does somewhat balance, or at least temper, his unflinching take on his reality with a deeply bittersweet romanticism, which he sees as a necessary buffer while realizing that retreats into fantasy always come at a price (something he would explore with far more nuance in The Purple Rose of Cairo). That romanticism permeates the film, in how the Allen character treats his relationships, in the Django Reinhardt-inflected jazz soundtrack, and especially in Gordon Willis’s cinematography, which takes the more epic style of Manhattan and gives it a deeper bite.

My comments about how Willis’s images fare in this Blu-ray-quality HD download will sound eerily similar to my comments about his work in Manhattan. Everything looks good, but not first-rate, and Memories really does need the subtlety of all the captured steps of grayscale to help soften the impact of the deliberately harsh material. The movie is perfectly watchable in this form—although intense pools of bright light are so harsh they’re distracting—but it would be not just better but a different experience in 4K HDR.

Stardust Memories remains a challenging film—partly because none of Allen’s other movies have pushed the audience as hard to consider the difficult, but valid, positions he’s putting forth. It’s hard to appreciate the risks he took here—especially when you consider that even he didn’t accurately anticipate the backlash he’d trigger. If you see this film and know exactly how you feel about it at the end, you weren’t really watching.

In hindsight, this was the pivotal moment in Allen’s career. One of the running gags in Memories is his fans’ preference for his “early, funny” films, a sentiment he acknowledges and, through this film, says he’s OK with because he knows that’s all behind him now. Time has since affirmed his judgment, exposing the many weaknesses of those early movies while revealing the many strengths of his mid-period work.

But this was also his first film in years without Diane Keaton as his leading lady, and although her presence can be felt in the Rampling character, his inability to make the romantic relationships interesting enough does weigh the film down. This is pure speculation, but it seems likely Allen would have continued making far more adventurous movies if the public hadn’t turned on him so viciously after Memories. Looking to regroup, he assumed he needed a leading lady to make his work more palatable—which is when a very eager Mia Farrow appeared.

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.

PICTURE | The movie is perfectly watchable in Blu-ray-quality HD—although intense pools of bright light are so harsh they’re distracting—but it would be not just better but a different experience in 4K HDR.

SOUND | You can hear all the dialogue and various vintage jazz cues just fine.

Review: The Purple Rose of Cairo

review | The Purple Rose of Cairo

recent reviews

Kaleidescape | Stardust Memories

Kaleidescape | The Shining

Kaleidescape | The Purple Rose of Cairo

This deeply bittersweet look at the consequences of escapist culture resonates more strongly today than when it was first released

by Michael Gaughn
March 13, 2021

Of all of Woody Allen’s many films, The Purple Rose of Cairo deserves to be in, or near, the Top 5. I doubt anyone has ever treated the subject of mass-produced fantasies and their consequences as incisively. And Allen does it without turning it into the type of cold-blooded, too-clever-by-half intellectual exercise that tends to rule the roost today.

In an initial viewing, Purple Rose can seem lightweight, in a charming and quirky kind of way. It’s Allen’s most successful attempt to translate the style of his S.J. Perelman-type short pieces for The New Yorker to the screen. But while those pieces, hilarious as they often are, tend to be little more than a kind of absurdist riffing, here he manages to interweave a decent amount of earned emotion with the absurdity; and when he veers into sentimentality, it reinforces his critique of pop fantasies and comes with a bite.

While Mia Farrow gives what might be her best performance, it’s Jeff Daniels who walks away with the film. It’s hard to imagine the one-note Michael Keaton pulling off playing two similar yet very distinctly different roles, let alone looking like a Hollywood actor from the ‘30s. And yet Daniels aces it, also bringing a bland Midwestern quality to his portrayal that makes Gil Shepherd’s eventual betrayal of Farrow that much more affecting.

Without that last-mentioned turn, the film would have been little more than a very funny confection. But Allen’s movies, as he emerged from his mid period, began to display a maturity, a grounded and often troubling depth, he’s never gotten enough credit for. If he had opted for anything resembling a traditional happy ending, Purple Rose would have been little different from the fluff it both embraces and skewers. Shepherd’s all-too-human duplicity is a bracing jolt that throws the dangers—and irresponsibility—of the easy retreat into fantasy into context. Nobody can stop you from escaping into fantasy worlds—something the culture industry has shifted into hyper drive to encourage since the grim turn of the century—but it always comes at a hefty price.

And you have to wonder if the contemporary masses aren’t so thoroughly indoctrinated, so caught up in the endless, indulgent, self-congratulatory, self-referential, and insanely lucrative exercises in overgrown child’s play, for anything like this to even begin to resonate anymore, if Allen’s point isn’t utterly lost on a world that just wants to be left alone with its toys.

After landing that blow, though, Allen does cheat a little with an unfortunate shot of Shepherd looking wistfully out a plane window as he flies back to Hollywood from Farrow’s bleak corner of New Jersey. That moment seems to let Daniels’ character off the hook way too easily. It’s not that Allen shouldn’t have gone there but something more ambivalent would have rung truer.

I need to pause for a moment to acknowledge Danny Aiello’s performance. An actor all too often typecast, Allen plays off from that here, taking an archetypical abusive goon and making him, if not palatable, at last understandable. Consider the distance from Sylvester Stallone in a black leather jacket beating up old ladies on the subway in Bananas and you have an accurate gauge of just how much Allen grew as a filmmaker. And Aiello takes the opportunity and runs with it, without ever breaking a sweat.

Dianne Wiest deserves similar praise. If she hadn’t been able to bring depth to her portrayal of a roaming prostitute, Daniels-as-Tom Baxter’s sojourn in a bordello would have been little more than an extended cheap laugh. But she and Allen give her a basal dignity that keeps her and her fellow co-workers from becoming objects of ridicule.

And now we once again come to Gordon Willis. It would be impossible to decide which film represents his best work for Allen, but I would have to put Purple Rose really near or on par with Manhattan. He doesn’t really do anything bravura here, but it’s all strong. How he and Allen were able to take a closed-for-the-season amusement park in the autumn chill and turn it into a subtle metaphor for the film itself and for the torpor of America in the middle of the Depression remains both stunning and sublime.

As with A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, the cinematography holds up surprisingly well in Blu-ray-quality HD. Most of the subtlety is retained, only occasionally marred by excess noise and grain. Patches of bright light remain a problem, but not much can be done about that until the increasingly distant day when this film gets lifted up to 4K HDR.

The most egregious problem is the shots in the film-within-the-film that were radically enlarged on an optical printer. Allen obviously shot all of these as masters and then decided in editing that the other characters in the frame were too distracting. I don’t remember these images being this grainy and blobby when seen in a theater, but here they look like somebody spliced in some degraded VHS footage.

The weakest thing about Purple Rose is Dick Hyman’s score. It’s unfortunate Allen leaned so heavily on Hyman in his films, because, while he was a technically proficient musician, his work tended to be slick and soulless. Fortunately Allen’s material is strong enough to not be unduly weighed down by the seemingly arbitrary and often incongruous cues, but it’s a shame Allen couldn’t have cobbled together the entire soundtrack out of vintage music instead.

Many of Allen’s films are about characters who easily—and often, too easily—slip into fantasy worlds, and many of his protagonists are haunted by fantasy projections of the past. Key films like Annie Hall and Stardust Memories show Allen himself, thinly disguised behind fictional monikers, having a hard time, by his own admission, separating fiction from reality. His condition, which at one time was seen as an aberration, has since become desirable, is now accepted as the norm. While he frequently played that tenuous hold on reality for laughs, he never fully accepted it, and Purple Rose remains his most trenchant look into what has become the very heart of the culture.

PICTURE | The cinematography holds up surprisingly well in Blu-ray-quality HD with most of the subtlety retained, only occasionally marred by excess noise and grain.

SOUND | Come on, this is a Woody Allen movie, a lot of witty banter interspersed with music cues. It sounds fine.

Review: Manhattan

review | Manhattan

recent reviews

Kaleidescape | Stardust Memories

Amazon Prime | All Watched Over
by Machines of Loving Grace

Kaleidescape | Ratatouille

Woody Allen’s most ambitious and fullest film looks just fine in HD but cries out for a 4K reissue

by Michael Gaughn
January 31, 2021

Woody Allen has said his biggest regret is that he’s never made a great film. I’m not sure what his criteria are for determining that but by any yardstick I’m aware of, Manhattan is a great film, undeniably (to use a much abused and poorly understood term) a classic. It’s so strong it might even survive the efforts to erase his career, even though it’s frequently waved around as Exhibit A in the culture wars.*

Manhattan is Allen’s most ambitious work, the film where he completely rose to, and exceeded the level of, those ambitions. It and Annie Hall are his fullest movies. No matter how good any of his subsequent efforts have been, they’ve never been as generous, don’t have that same sense of flowing over. In no other film has he been as close to or confident with the material.

And yet Allen pleaded with United Artists not to release Manhattan. He’s never really explained why. It could just be that he doesn’t have a good perspective on his own work, which would help explain (and I’m not being facetious here) the shortcomings of many of his films.

While this is his fullest movie, nothing really happens in it—or it at least it seems that way if you’ve become addicted to melodrama and its crippled stepchild, adventure. But if you focus intently on each of the characters and can establish some common ground with them, their decisions and actions become significant and the film becomes a kind of intimate epic, with Manhattan, fittingly, as its landscape.

In any other city, this congruity between a handful of people and the totality of the urban environment would seem forced, but Manhattan being confined to an island allows Allen to put a frame around the action—literally. Doing a comedy in both 2.39:1 widescreen and black & white ran the risk of being gimmicky, but Allen and Gordon Willis pull it off partly because it’s a constant reminder of the city’s island status and mostly because it firmly establishes everything in the film as an extension of the Allen character, sealing the connection between individual and larger environment.

And the variety of the widescreen compositions is dazzling, ranging from macro—an elaborate fireworks display in Central Park South to Park Avenue in the snow to the justly famous image of the 59th Street Bridge at dawn—to micro: a group of creatives chatting at a reception at MOMA to the long take of Allen and Mariel Hemingway strolling through SoHo with Diane Keaton and Michael Murphy to Allen glimpsed at a distance through the slats of Venetian blinds as he sits on his terrace. By each composition being so apt and by creating such a seamless flow between them, Allen creates the sense that these people are New York (or at least best embody a certain, admittedly romantic, notion of the city.)

Maybe the most successful composition is the post-coital one of Hemingway laying on a couch in a pool of light from a lamp, bottom frame left, as Allen comes down spiral stairs almost in silhouette frame right. He and Willis turn a typical upscale apartment into both a stage set and a kind of palace without losing any of the intimacy—no small feat.

Their evocation of the city at night, of walking down deserted streets with most of the businesses closed for the evening as taxi cabs continue to stream down the avenues, is so convincing it’s uncanny. No one has ever done a better job of capturing the energy constantly simmering behind the quiet, that sense of possibility, of New York after dark.

This was Allen’s first comedy with traditionally structured scenes and a sustained narrative structure, and he applies the experience gained in the labored Interiors well. He was still learning the ropes of being an actor’s director, though, so while he and Keaton have no problems holding the frame, Murphy, Hemingway, and Anne Byrne (In a woefully underwritten role) don’t register as strongly as they should.

But those are quibbles. The film is so dynamic and so spot-on that it has a life of its own that makes its flaws seem inconsequential. That’s exceedingly rare in movies, and in a more just world, only those films where the cup runneth consistently over would ever be considered classics.

And now to the awkward part: Being able to savor Willis’s cinematography is a big part of the experience but Manhattan is in HD, and watching it on a 4K display will only make you ache to see it properly presented in UHD. Once you get past the opening montage, the irritating distractions of the upsampled high-def presentation are minimal and you rarely find yourself pulled out of the film (with one glaring exception). But that montage is so essential that it’s hard not to wince every time a large, uniform bright area in the frame becomes a crawling gnat infestation.

That glaring exception: The last three shots of Allen and Keaton walking through an exhibit at the Hayden Planetarium are so contrasty and over-processed they look like community-access chromakey. This isn’t even close to how these shots appear on film. Many of Allen’s movies deserve to be upgraded to 4K HDR but, given his current pariah status, that might take a while. When it finally does happen, though, Manhattan should be at the top of the list.

I know I’m a broken record about this but what can you really say about the sound in a movie where people basically just talk to each other for 90 minutes, offering a blissful retreat from the aural assaults we’ve unfortunately come to prize from surround sound? The all-Gershwin score sounds fine—although I wish Allen had been able to get just about anyone but Zubin Mehta to do Rhapsody in Blue.

The big question about Manhattan is why, having developed his character, his persona, and the city so fully, in a way that suggested so many more creative opportunities, did Allen essentially retreat? After Annie Hall and this film, he never really went down that path again. His character is in the forefront of Stardust Memories, but that’s not really a New York film. And while he explores similar territory in Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Husbands and Wives, he reduces his character to secondary status, to a kind of comic relief that almost makes him superfluous. I’m not saying he should have just kept churning out Manhattan retreads, but there’s an unshakeable sense that we all lost something vital when he decided to close that door.

(* I’m going here reluctantly, which is why I’m relegating these comments to a footnote, but the whole “You shouldn’t watch Manhattan because Allen’s character has a relationship with a 17 year old” thing has become such a flashpoint that you can’t mention—let alone praise—the film without addressing it. Let’s just leave it at this: There’s been a lot of smug commentary along the lines of “Audiences at the time of the film’s release didn’t have a problem with that relationship but we, from our morally superior viewpoint in the present, do.” First off, contemporary audiences did have problems with that relationship, which Allen deliberately introduced into the film to make them squirm and to get them to rethink what defines a relationship—something we no longer seem capable of doing unless it’s framed in terms of a bland and stultifying androgyny. Second, when a certain entitled subset of society hopelessly confuses fiction with reality and then feels it can put fetters on expression and decide what can and can’t be portrayed, we are indisputably at the end of empire.)

PICTURE | Once you get past the opening montage, the irritating distractions of the upsampled high-def presentation are minimal and you rarely find yourself pulled out of the film.

SOUND | What can you really say about the sound in a movie where people basically just talk to each other for 90 minutes?

Review: Coco

review | Coco

recent reviews

Kaleidescape | The Alpinist

Kaleidescape | Beetlejuice

Kaleidescape | No Time to Die

This often subtle visual presentation of Pixar’s Day of the Dead tale makes a strong argument for HDR in digital animation

by Dennis Burger
September 10, 2021

It may seem strange to begin a review of Coco with a discussion of a man who had nothing to do with the film but hopefully this will all make sense in a few paragraphs. I am, to put it mildly, a magic enthusiast. I have a drawer in my dresser dedicated to all manner of illusions, from prop thumbs to Svengali decks to Scotch & Soda coins, and the list goes on. So it stands to reason I have an all-time favorite illusionist—a mischievous little imp known as James Randi, who performed for years as The Amazing Randi before transitioning into a career as a professional skeptic and debunker.

What makes Randi my favorite magician is that he was honest about being a liar, famously stating, “I’m a trickster, I’m a cheat, I’m a charlatan. That’s what I do for a living.” The one time I got to see him perform illusions in person, he explained his craft in detail. He walked the audience through his tricks, exposing not only the mechanics but also why the audience fell for them.

And all of the above is simply context for what I’m about to say: One of my all-time favorite magic tricks is Pixar’s Coco. And yes, it is a magic trick. It’s illusory, after all, packed with deception and misdirection and sleights of hand both subtle and coarse. But what makes it such a great magic act is exactly what made Randi such a great magician—even after you recognize and understand the deceptions, they still work, they still have power, they’re still artful and masterful.

And that is just one of the many reasons why Coco sits high on my all-time favorites list of Pixar films, and why it’s worthy of discussion today, some four years after its release. Another reason is the film’s thematic complexity—which I’m forced to contend with as I attempt to convey what the film means, what it has to say. The simplest I can come up with is that it’s ultimately about the struggle—the tug-of-war—between one’s intrinsic search for identity and obligation to family and society. But that’s too simple. It would be more accurate to say it’s about the complex way in which our identity is formed both from within and from without. More obviously, it also beautifully deals with death, legacy, and the afterlife in a way that feels mutually compatible with spiritual thinking and a more secular outlook on life. And somehow it manages all of this while feeling organic and spontaneous.

Of course, a more obvious reason to discuss the film at this juncture is that Kaleidescape is currently running a Pixar Fest through September 14, with special pricing on select films from the studio’s catalog. Coco currently comes in at $14.99 in UHD/HDR. I mean, come on. At that price, it’s irresistible, even if you’re a Disney+ subscriber—and I know that may be a hard sell, but let me explain why. Firstly, Kaleidescape’s download comes with so many of the bonus features that are missing on Disney’s streaming service, including a wonderful (but far too brief) documentary called “The Real Guitar,” which is otherwise only available on disc or Apple TV.

Kaleidescape’s UHD presentation is rich with subtle textures and the HDR10 color grade is a significant step up from the Blu-ray release. Coco is a gorgeous film at any resolution, mostly owing to its fantastic art design and animation but the HDR adds some meaningful enhancements that make the illusion all the more convincing. The expanded color gamut allows for a slightly more pronounced contrast between Miguel’s Día de las Muertas makeup and the actual bony flesh of the dead, for example, accentuating why the deception almost works, but not quite. The fluorescent glow that permeates the Land of the Dead also radiates with more intensity, making it all feel that much more magical.

Kaleidescape’s Dolby TrueHD Atmos soundtrack is a textbook example of object-based surround done right. Panning and object placement are perfect within the base soundfield and the overhead channels are used to expand and enhance the ambiance and reverberance of the world without thwapping you over the head with distractions.

It’s interesting to note that there are more significant differences between Kaleidescape’s presentation of the film and the stream available on Disney+ than would usually be the case. And that’s mostly because Kaleidescape relies on HDR10, while Disney+ has the film in Dolby Vision. It’s not a matter of which is better—in this case, it largely comes down to personal choice, as both have their merits. The Dolby Vision grade is more vibrant, with a more intense color palette and higher-intensity brightness in spots, making it obvious bait for videophiles. The HDR10 grade is more muted—at least in the land of the living—which makes the visual contrast between the two worlds stand out a bit more. Both look gorgeous, but again—and this is the main kicker for me—Disney+ only adds a few deleted scenes and one short featurette, whereas the Kaleidescape download comes with almost all the bonus goodies available on disc. Those supplements, as well as the more reliable access afforded by downloading the film once instead of streaming it on demand, make Kaleidescape’s release incredibly easy to recommend as a permanent part of your movie library.

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 | Kaleidescape’s UHD presentation is rich with subtle textures and the HDR10 color grade is a significant step up from the Blu-ray release.

SOUND | The Dolby TrueHD Atmos soundtrack is a textbook example of object-based surround done right.

Review: The French Dispatch

review | The French Dispatch

recent reviews

Kaleidescape | The Alpinist

Kaleidescape | Last Night in Soho

HBO Max | King Richard

This most Wes Anderson of Wes Anderson films has both color and black & white, lots of aspect ratios, and a massive cast but, oddly, no HDR

by John Sciacca
December 19, 2021

I’m not sure there’s another filmmaker working today with as distinct a visual and storytelling approach as Wes Anderson. You could look at a still frame from practically any of his films and recognize it from his trademark style, with his framing, composition, colors, angles, and even casting choices.

I’m definitely a fan of his work but I’m not a super fan. While I loved his nearly all his early films, including Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums, and even more-recent titles like Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel, some of his work—The Darjeeling Limited and Isle of Dogs—just didn’t work for me. When Anderson is “on,” his quirky humor, absurdity, and whimsy make for compelling viewing. But when he’s “off,” the viewer can be left sitting there looking at a beautiful but incomprehensible and slow-moving mess.

It’s possible his latest, The French Dispatch, is the most Wes Anderson-y title to date. It’s like he’s taken all of his favorite tools—actors; music; symmetrical framing; voiceovers; aspect-ratio and color changes; and odd people thrust into bizarre situations—and amplified them. Dispatch takes all he’s learned and combines it into an amalgam of the quintessential Anderson film. Which isn’t to say it all works all the time but it’s certainly always interesting, and visually stunning.

To me, a Wes Anderson movie is a bit like receiving a fascinating and eclectic gift box. The box is beautifully polished and expertly crafted, and features attention to the finest details, and inside—cosseted into perfectly sized compartments—is a variety of beautifully wrapped and arranged curios that have no obvious connection to each other. There’s a straight-edged razor placed in a hand-carved whale-bone handle, a small pot of quince jelly, a hand-drawn map (in French!), a used (but lovingly cared for) fountain pen, and a single leather glove (size: ladies extra large). There’s often no rhyme or reason as to what is in the box but it’s a fascinating journey of discovery to see what will be uncovered under the next exquisite bit of wrapping and then trying to make sense of it.

He is also known for assembling ensemble casts, often anchored by actors that could be called “The Wes Anderson Players” for the frequency with which they appear in his films. If ever there was a director who embraced the motto, “There are no small parts, only small actors,” it’s Anderson, who fills even the smallest roles with big talent. The actors also seem to appreciate that he’s often reveling in the absurd and they lean into their roles with gusto.

In that vein, Dispatch features the deepest cast of any of his films to date. Of course, it wouldn’t be an Anderson film if it didn’t have a lengthy list of returning players, and Dispatch includes Benicio Del Toro, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Bob Balaban, Tony Revolori, Lea Seydoux, Willem Defoe, and (narrating) Anjelica Houston, along with those actors who most exemplify one of his productions: Jason Schwartzmann, Owen Wilson, and, of course, Bill Murray. Joining them are newcomers Liev Schreiber, Elisabeth Moss, Christoph Walt, Henry Winkler, Jeffrey Wright, Lyna Khoudri, and Timothee Chalamet. And that’s not even a complete list! Nearly every frame is filled with a star of some sort.

Even before the first image hits the screen you’re greeted with a classic Anderson title card letting you know you’re in for something unusual. It reads:

The following film consists of:
an OBITUARY,
a brief TRAVEL-GUIDE,
and THREE FEATURE ARTICLES
all from
THE FRENCH DISPATCH
(an American magazine
published in Ennui, France).

Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Murray) is the editor of a very New Yorker-esque newspaper/magazine called The French Dispatch. After dying from a sudden heart attack, Howitzer’s final wishes, revealed in his will, are that publication cease following a farewell issue in which three prior articles are republished along with an obituary. This sets up the series of stories, with each concluding with a brief interaction between Howitzer and the writer as he relays comments or suggestions on the submitted work.

The first featurette, “The Cycling Reporter,” follows Herbsaint Sazerac (Wilson) as he takes a cycling tour of Ennui, showing what has changed and what has remained the same in the small city over time.

“The Concrete Masterpiece,” the second tale, begins with J.K.L. Berensen (Swinson) delivering a lecture at an art gallery where she recounts a tale of the unlikely life and rise to fame of artist Moses Rosenthaler (Del Toro). Rosenthaler—imprisoned for a grisly murder—has spent 10 years without picking up a brush, and then paints an abstract nude of his muse, prison guard Simone (Seydoux), which catches the eye of art dealer Julien Cadazio (Brody) and becomes a sensation in the art world.

The third chapter, “Revisions to a Manifesto,” was the most meandering, uninteresting, and difficult tale to follow. Lucinda Krementz (McDormand) initially reports on—then becomes involved with—a student protest led by Zeffirelli (Chalamet) and ends up secretly helping him write his manifesto.

The final tale, “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner,” is perhaps the most classic Anderson of the bunch. It tells of the unlikely and inexplicable events that take place one evening with the Dispatch’s food reporter, Roebuck Wright (Wright), who recounts attending a private, gourmet dinner with the Commissaire of the Ennui police force prepared by legendary officer/chef Lt. Nescaffier (Steve Park). Nescaffier is an expert in the world of a highly specialized subset of haute cuisine meant to be consumed by working police officers, with all dishes designed to be eaten by the single, non-dominant hand to leave the other hand free. Before the first course can be served, however, a crime occurs that sends the tale spiraling off into a different direction, with Anderson switching to animation for some of the storytelling.

Shot on 35mm film, this transfer is taken from a true 4K digital intermediate. Curiously, Dispatch doesn’t seem to be available in HDR—my Kaleidescape download (as well as the versions available at Vudu and Apple) was in UHD, but not with HDR—which you can only assume is the way Anderson wanted it. While images were always clean and impressive-looking, I felt the black & white scenes—which make up most of the film—could have benefitted from HDR’s extra depth and range.

Images are clean and sharp but never look digital. Closeups certainly reveal fine etched lines and pores in actor’s faces, every wild hair in Del Toro’s beard, and the wispiness of Chalamet’s mustache. Clothing like the fine stripes and thin lines in plaid suits are sharp and clear. In fact, you actually see more fine detail and texture in faces and objects when presented in b&w.

Anderson plays with the combination of color and aspect ratio as a storytelling tool, opening the frame and switching to color when it benefits a moment, such as a dramatic reveal of Rosenthaler’s latest prison masterpiece in full, widescreen color following long minutes of constrained black & white. These dramatic bursts of color often felt brighter, more intense, and more saturated because you’ve been immersed in b&w for so long then suddenly thrust into a world bursting with yellows and reds.

Similar to in The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson once again plays with varying aspect ratios. While I almost always prefer watching movies on a large projection screen, an argument can certainly be made for viewing Dispatch on a premium direct-view display like an OLED, where blacks are truly black. Much of the film—I’d guess 90% of it is actually in 4:3 with black bars to the left and right of the squarish image, with the remainder of the film split into 16:9 (8%) and 2.4:1 (2%). Since he often plays with the ratios, quickly shifting between all three in a matter of moments, viewing on an OLED in a dark environment means that the black bars are never distracting. Also, there are several sudden cuts between scenes that almost jarringly plunge the room into complete blackness for a few moments.

As mentioned, not everything made perfect sense (to me at least), but it was frequently a case of just sitting back and appreciating the artistry of the visuals. The perfect framing, symmetry, and composition of shots; the impeccably crafted timing; and the use of lighting. (I was struck by how much of the lighting, framing, and angles of the beginning of “Private Dining Room” were reminiscent of episodes of The Twilight Zone, making me think Wright would make a fantastic Rod Serling in a reboot.)

Sonically, the 5.1-channel DTS-HD Master mix is really designed to preserve the dialogue, and it does that admirably. Dialogue is clear and primarily anchored to the center channel, with other sounds spaced widely across the front channels when appropriate to give some width to the presentation, letting you hear when things are happening well off screen. The surrounds are definitely used to enhance the space and openness of the listening room, with reverberant echoes, ambient sounds from the streets, the blowing and whistling of wind, sounds of footsteps, etc. There are a few dynamic audio moments—some gunshots and sparks of electricity—but this is not a film designed to test your audio system.

Anderson is also known for his wonderful incorporation of music, and here we mainly enjoy the original orchestral score of bits of classical music interspersed. (There are some more “jazzy” French tunes during the second act.)

If you belong to that subset that loves Anderson’s work then you’ll be in for a treat with The French Dispatch as it offers much of what you’ve come to love. If you aren’t a fan, I daresay there’s likely nothing here to convince you otherwise. And, if you’ve yet to form an opinion of his work, go in with an open mind—and wide eyes—and, as fellow reviewer Dennis Burger said, appreciate “his predictable chaos and eccentricity.”

PICTURE | The transfer is 4K but not HDR and while images are always clean and impressive looking, the black & white scenes that make up most of the film could have benefitted from HDR’s added depth and range.

SOUND | The 5.1-channel DTS-HD Master mix is designed to preserve the dialogue, which it does admirably, while the surrounds are used to enhance the space and openness of the listening room.

Review: Ratatouille

review | Ratatouille

recent reviews

Kaleidescape | Coco

Kaleidescape | Beetlejuice

Kaleidescape | The Shining

The best of the Golden Age Pixar films beats the “all animation looks good in digital” cliché, showing off the subtle virtues of HDR

by Michael Gaughn
September 21, 2021

On the heels of Dennis Burger’s review of Coco—probably the best of the recent harvest of Pixar films, likely because it was a holdover from the Lasseter era—comes this review of Ratatouille, probably the best of the films from the studio’s initial, defining Golden Age. Anointing a “best” Pixar film is almost impossible, especially when you’re talking about that early period when they could do no wrong—well, except for Cars.

Why Ratatouille? Mainly because nobody should have been able to create a mass-market cartoon about the world of gourmet cooking, let alone use it as a springboard for portraying that world in depth and at length, with both insight and affection, then draw a big enough audience to reap almost a billion dollars along the way. No live-action film could venture into that territory and expect to earn enough to even cover the crew’s car fare.

Making it even more miraculous is that Brad Bird and associates portray this rarified and exclusive world without succumbing to the Bay Area’s provincial snobbery, Silicon Valley’s endemic hubris, and the insufferable know-nothingness (and -everythingness) of the then emergent hipster movement. This movie should not exist—and yet there it is.

Fourteen years on, Ratatouille still holds up for the most part. The visuals don’t have the depth and photorealistic microdetail of Pixar’s more recent fare, but the production design and animation are so inventive that those technical improvements would be superfluous here. About the only thing that comes up short are the fire effects, which look smudgy.

Remy, Skinner, Ego, Emil, and Django are all still solid, Colette still feels perfunctory and obligatory, and Linguini is still consistently annoying, a sop to the youngest part of the audience that never felt right and hasn’t aged well—which brings up the biggest differences between this and earlier viewings of the film. It’s becoming apparent there’s a flaw in the Pixar formula that is going to become more obvious as time passes, a tendency to periodically amp up the action way beyond what the story calls for out of fear of losing the audience. This especially sticks out in Rataouille because it’s so unnecessary, the themes, characters, and plotting being so compelling (with a glaring exception) that all the little action set pieces jump out as arbitrary and disruptive.

That glaring exception is the third act, which, for all their genius at plotting, the Pixar team badly bungled here. Not having properly balanced the various narrative threads, the result was something just short of chaos when they tried to pull them all together. Or, to shift metaphors, by the time Ego arrives at the restaurant for his dinner, they have so many balls in the air that you can sense their arms getting tired.

The time that elapses between Ego’s arrival and when he’s finally served is so drawn out that it stretches plausibility to the breaking point, even for a cartoon. Instead of maintaining the tension created by his presence and taking advantage of the momentum it creates, the movie jerks along in fits and starts as it tries to check off the boxes of all the various subplots, wreaking havoc on any realistic (or dramatic) sense of time.

For instance, we’re supposed to believe that Linguini has his freak out, then defends Remy, the entire kitchen staff quits, Remy becomes reconciled with his father, Colette reconsiders, the rats come to the rescue, the perpetually bumbling Linguini becomes a supremely coordinated skater, and they all conjure up a ratatouille while the most important food critic in France, with the power to ruin the restaurant, just waits—and waits, and waits. It doesn’t help that they too conveniently place the deposed and banished (and distinctly diminutive) Skinner in the middle of the dining room where he would have been instantly spotted by the wait staff. Poetic license can be a beautiful thing but this is all too much to swallow. You naturally give a cartoon a lot of leeway—but not when it squanders a natural point of dramatic energy because of shoddy plotting.

None of this fatally flaws the film—far from it. It’s just another aspect of Pixar being so hyper conscious of serving the audience that they didn’t fully invest themselves in the material—which would have led to a better, and likely just as successful, film.

So let’s jump to the “modern animation always looks great on digital media, whether HD, Blu-ray, or 4K” cliché. I can see the merits of that argument but would then have to point toward what HDR brings to the presentation here. It’s a consistently restrained application but a consistently compelling one that takes full advantage of Paris’s reputation as the City of Light. Probably the best example is the shot toward the end of Ego standing looking out his tall study window at the skyline as he’s heard reading his review on the soundtrack. The deft enhancement of his desk lamp, the dimly lit chandelier, and the city’s glow is both subtle and dazzling. This is why animation is worth seeing in HDR.

I’m sometimes intrigued by Michael Giacchino’s work but wouldn’t call myself a fan. His scores are too often both ingratiating and derivative, and too big for the project at hand. But Ratatouille is one of his less turgid efforts—aside from those gratuitous action set pieces—with the scaled-back narrative causing him to rein in his usual excesses, leading to some evocative, and even graceful and restrained, flourishes from time to time.

The TrueHD Atmos mix is appropriately atmospheric, convincingly placing you out in a field, in a farmhouse, in the sewer, in a gourmet kitchen, etc. But it does get a little too cartoony doing those moments when all involved felt obliged to goose the action.

The reputation of Pixar’s films is so strong it’s damn near invincible, so pointing out that some cracks might be starting to emerge is unlikely to trigger any kind of reconsideration. And it doesn’t make those early years any less of a miracle—the animation in the original Toy Story is really starting to show its age but that hasn’t yet had any real impact on enjoying the film. The same thing applies here, sort of—the animation in Ratatouille is still strong, and the Pixar team gets the expressive aspects so right that that third act fumble, which would have sunk a lesser film, triggers little more than a passing twinge. It’s hard, even at this late date, not to be in awe of what Pixar wrought here.

PICTURE | A consistently restrained but compelling application of HDR that takes full advantage of Paris’s reputation as the City of Light.

SOUND | The TrueHD Atmos mix is appropriately atmospheric but gets a little too cartoony doing those moments when the folks at Pixar felt obliged to goose the action.

Review: Spartacus

review | Spartacus

recent reviews

Kaleidescape | A Clockwork Orange

Kaleidescape| 2001: A Space Odyssey

This sword & sandal Gladiator precursor proudly struts its stuff via a restoration and 4K HDR transfer

by John Sciacca
October 19, 2020

Of the stable of movie reviewers here at Cineluxe, I’m probably the least qualified to review Stanley Kubrick’s epic historical drama, Spartacus. I certainly don’t possess the encyclopedic film knowledge or ability to dissect filming styles like Mike Gaughn nor have the ability to draw wide parallels and comparisons like Dennis Burger. But what I can bring to this review is a fresh set of eyes and perspective since this was my first viewing. What I can hopefully answer is the question, “Is it worth my time/money to watch Spartacus?”

Doing even the slightest bit of digging into the film reveals it wasn’t the smoothest production. After failing to get the title role in Ben Hur, Kirk Douglas was looking for a major project for his production company, Bryna Productions, and optioned Howard Fast’s novel Spartacus. Fast was initially hired to write the screenplay but was replaced by Dalton Trumbo, who was on the Hollywood blacklist at the time writing screenplays under pseudonyms. Trumbo apparently turned the script around in two weeks and Douglas insisted that Trumbo be given onscreen credit for the film and publicly announced Trumbo as the writer.

Douglas fired the original director, Anthony Mann, after the first week of filming and replaced him with the 30-year-old Stanley Kubrick (who had worked with Douglas on Paths of Glory three years earlier). But this is the only film where Kubrick wasn’t given complete creative control and it included a significantly higher budget—$12 million (equivalent to $105 million today)—and far larger cast than anything he’d worked on befroe. Disagreements persisted throughout the production, based on Kubrick’s shooting style, pacing, the screenplay, and choice of location.

Despite all that, the film was a massive box-office success, receiving seven Academy Award nominations and winning four, including Supporting Actor, Art Direction, Cinematography, and Costume Design.

With a run time of three hours and 17 minutes, watching Spartacus is a significant time investment. While its 1960 opening ran 202 minutes, 41 minutes were trimmed for a 1967 re-release. It received an extensive restoration in 1992, backed by Steven Spielberg, and while the cut footage—including the “infamous” bath scene between Crassus (Laurence Olivier) and Antoninus (Tony Curtis)—was restored, the prints from the premiere were apparently lost and there are two short scenes that no longer exist.

The film was given a major restoration for its 55th anniversary that included creating a new true 4K digital intermediate. A title card at the conclusion notes, “2015 Digital Restoration 6K scan from original large format Technirama Film Elements 4K color correction and digital restoration, 7.1 channel audio by NBCUniversal Studio Post”. The 4K Blu-ray includes a DTS:X soundtrack, while the Kaleidescape version reviewed here features Dolby Atmos.

Born into slavery, Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) is saved from death when purchased by Batiatus (Peter Ustinov), who runs a school that trains gladiators to fight and die “for ladies and gentleman of quality, those who appreciate a fine kill.” While in training, Spartacus meets and falls in love with another slave, Varinia (Jean Simmons). After she is sold, Spartacus leads a revolt and overthrows the soldiers at Batiatus’ camp. The revolt grows into an idea to rise up to free all the slaves of Italy, to create an army of gladiators that could fight their way to freedom to leave Italy forever to return to their homelands. After the slave army conducts a variety of raids on Roman garrisons where they gather treasure and more freed slaves, the Roman Senate enacts a plan to send Legions to crush Spartacus’ army.

Spartacus is classic old-school, epic Hollywood filmmaking. It opens with a four-minute musical overture, followed by another near four minutes of credits, and includes a mid-film intermission with a two-minute Entr’acte. Given its length, there’s plenty of time to develop characters’ stories, appreciate Spartacus’ rise to power and march across Rome, and delve into the political intrigue happening in Rome, though the pacing does feel a bit slow at times.

What drives Spartacus is the performances of the leads. Obviously motivated to turn in a strong performance, Douglas does much of his acting with his eyes, saying more with a stare, glare, squint, or furrowed brow than he does with his mouth. Olivier’s Crassius is a strong foil to Douglas but the star of the show for me was Ustinov, who seems to revel in his role as successful citizen turned sycophant to the Empire, tossing in off-handed comments and jokes that bring a bit of levity to the story, and example of which: “A gladiator is like a stallion that must pampered. Oiled, bathed, shaved, massaged, taught to use your heads.”

Spartacus’ influence on Gladiator is clear, though that later film relies far more on gladiatorial-battle set pieces and the CGI spectacle of recreating the Roman Colosseum. What Spartacus lacks in modern computer trickery it makes up for in sheer numbers, augmenting its cast with eight thousand Spanish soldiers to double as Romans for the climatic battle and doing much of its shooting on location (including California’s Hearst Castle—and anyone who has ever been on the tour will recognize the swimming pool at what is supposed to be Crassis’ estate), which looks fantastic captured in the 35mm Super 70 Technirama format.

The quality of this transfer is apparent before the film even starts, as the title credits are razor-sharp, clean and clear. The opening shots reveal a natural bit of film grain in the blue skies, but images have incredible depth and sharpness, letting you see for miles into the distance. Resolution is impressive, letting you see individual pebbles and stones in the rocky ground, or the frayed edges on the sleeves of the slaves’ tunics, the detail of the embroidery, or the scuffs and wear in leather. The detail lets you know what the fabric of each actor’s costume would feel like, and reveals the quality differences between classes. The resolution also reveals incredible facial detail in closeups, clearly showing every pore, wrinkle, and line in Douglas’ leathery, sunburnt face.

One of the downsides to suddenly revealing everything in a film—especially one that is now 60 years old—is that some of the filming techniques and shortcuts of the day are apparent. For example, there’s an interior scene where it’s obvious the brick and mortar of the walls is just set-dressing façade. It’s also clear when they’re shooting on an interior set rather than on location—and that the groups of Roman soldiers in some long-focus shots aren’t actually groups of soldiers.

Also curious is the filming decision to nearly always defocus the camera when showing Varinia. The sharpness of every other scene makes this especially apparent. This had to have been a creative decision of the day, as Simmons was beautiful and had no apparent skin imperfections. (Though her acting was fine, her casting made me think they really wanted Elizabeth Taylor but instead used the closest substitute they could.)

While the grand battle scene is impressive, I was surprised there weren’t more lengthy shots revealing the entirety of the fighting force. But there are plenty of scenes that show off an innumerable amount of people either marching, preparing for battle, or starting to charge.

The training at Batiatus’ gladiator camp is also impressive. It’s clear the actors are doing their own stunts, some of which required a fair bit of dexterity and stamina, and it appears some people are actually being injured. For example, at the 54-minute mark, Spartacus fights Marcellus (Charles McGraw), and the higher resolution and color reveal that McGraw is actually bleeding from a wound and you see Douglas actually smashing his face into the cooking pot.

This new transfer greatly benefits from the HDR grading, with interior scenes having deep shadow detail and inky, clean blacks. We also enjoy added highlights from sunlight glinting off sweating skin or in burning firelight. Having never seen the film prior, I can’t say for certain but it appears they took a pretty conservative pass with the HDR, and definitely remained true to the film’s original look. The wider color gamut brings out the richness of the crimson of the Roman soldiers and Senators, the gleam of shining gold, the red-orange as villages burn at night, and just a more natural quality to skin tones.

Sonically, it felt like about 90% of the audio came from the front three left, center, and right speakers. If the surrounds were ever employed, it was sparingly, and not in a way that ever caused distraction or drew undue attention. The sweeping score is big and dynamic with its soundstage given a chance to open up across the width of the front speakers with a bit of the strings mixed up into the front height channels for added dimension. The only other time I was aware of any height-channel activity was during a thunderstorm were a bit of the storm is mixed overhead. They also use the subwoofer to bring weight to the musical score and to punctuate some of the battle scenes or marching. Dialogue is kept to the center channel, and it is clear and intelligible throughout.

Spartacus remains a spectacle and triumph of its time, and it’s the kind of massive Hollywood epic we don’t often see any longer. The care and effort that went into this restoration are simply stunning to behold, letting you appreciate details audiences 60 years ago likely missed. Getting back to my opening question, “Is it worth your time/money to watch?” Absolutely.

PICTURE | This 4K transfer greatly benefits from the HDR grading, with interior scenes having deep shadow detail and inky, clean blacks, and with added highlights from sunlight glinting off sweating skin or in burning firelight.

SOUND | About 90% of the audio in the Atmos mix comes from the front speakers. Surrounds are employed sparingly and not in a way that ever causes distraction or draws undue attention.

Review: My Fair Lady

review | My Fair Lady

recent reviews

Kaleidescape | The Alpinist

Kaleidescape | A Clockwork Orange

The big-screen translation of Lerner & Loewe’s perennial still holds up for the modern viewer, with a nice boost from a stunning 4K transfer

by John Sciacca
December 8, 2020

Much like Spartacus, My Fair Lady is a gem from the early ‘60s that I had yet to see. Also like Spartacus, it’s available in a gorgeous new 4K HDR transfer that’s available for streaming from sites like iTunes. But to experience the transfer in its full glory, the 89.8 Gigabyte download from Kaleidescape is the best option.

A third trait My Fair Lady shares with Spartacus is it was restored by Robert Harris (who also restored Lawrence of Arabia, Vertigo, Rear Window, and the first Godfather films). Harris originally restored the film in 1994 but was then hired by CBS in 2015 to perform a full digital restoration to prepare the film for its 50th Anniversary Blu-ray release.

This was a lengthy process that took more than six months and started by creating an 8K scan of the original 65mm negative. There was a good bit of repair to scratches, tears, and splices; color correction; cleanup; and dust removal. Some 12 million glitches were said to hav been digitally moved and faded colors were returned to their original vibrancy using an archival print from the Motion Picture Academy as a reference.

Immediately following the film, a vibrant pink title card proclaims, “Paramount Pictures has made a High Dynamic Range version on [sic] this film based on the efforts of Robert Harris, Fotokem, Audio Mechanics and the many others who helped with the original restoration.” (20th Century Fox’s press release on the restoration is pretty interesting reading.)

As mentioned, this was my first viewing and at first blush Lady seems like a lot to ask of a modern viewer. It’s not exactly like a 56-year-old musical set in early-1900s London that lasts just under three hours (170 minutes) is something you’d plan for your next movie night. Also, the plot of a priggish linguist taking on the challenge of teaching a poor Cockney street girl “the majesty and grandeur of the English language” to fit into polite society doesn’t really grab modern eyeballs (though I do love Kaleidescape’s concise synopsis, “A London guttersnipe transforms herself into a proper lady under a language professor’s stern tutelage.”)

However, as intrigued as I was about the quality of the 4K HDR transfer—especially after how impressed I was with Spartacus—it was really Audrey Hepburn starring as Eliza Doolittle that sealed the deal. She is truly a timeless beauty and it is just a treat to be able to watch and appreciate her—a testament to her charms, talents, and classic style that she is still such a draw so many years later.

A little digging reveals some pretty interesting things about Lady. With a production budget of $17 million dollars, it was the most expensive film shot in the US at the time. Based on the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, it had been adapted into a stage musical in 1956 that played on Broadway and in London. The stage version had Rex Harrison cast as Professor Henry Higgins (which he reprised in the film) with Julie Andrews playing Eliza. The film was nominated for 12 Academy Awards though Audrey Hepburn was notably snubbed from receiving a Best Actress nomination, rumored because many wanted Andrews to have the lead (she wasn’t considered well-known enough to star in such a big film) and because nearly all of Audrey Hepburn’s singing was dubbed by Marni Nixon. (Hepburn was told she would be able to do most of her singing and worked on the vocals for some time, but 90% of her lyrics were dubbed.) The film won eight Oscars including Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Cinematography. It also has extremely favorable critics and audience scores from Rotten Tomatoes, with 95% and 90% respectively.

As a musical with 25 numbers, including the overture over the opening credits and a finale (all lovingly pre-bookmarked for easy and instant access by Kaleidescape’s Movie Guide team), I was thinking this would be a near-three-hour song-fest with all of the dialogue sung, but that (pleasantly) isn’t the case. In fact, quite a bit of the movie is spoken, with characters breaking into song as the moment calls. I was also surprised how many of the songs I was familiar with, just not knowing they were from Lady: “The Rain in Spain,” “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “Get Me to the Church on Time,” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.”

While I find myself still humming “Wouldn’t it Be Loverly?” even a couple of days later, my two favorite numbers were “With a Little Bit of Luck” and “Show Me.” “Luck” is performed by Doolittle’s father, Alfred (Stanley Holloway), with some humorous lyrics extolling the benefits of how some luck can get you out of tricky situations like doing hard work, getting hooked by a lady, or helping out a neighbor in need. “Show Me,” performed by Eliza, is about how a potential suitor needs to show his attentions with actions, not words.

One character that does take a bit of getting used to is the surly Professor Higgins. He is in love with himself and linguistics, and shows large measures of disdain to all around him but mostly Eliza whom he meets after overhearing her extremely Cockney accent as she’s trying to sell flowers outside an opera. After a chance encounter with Colonel Hugh Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White), we have the opening number “Why Can’t the English Learn to Speak?,” which basically establishes the premise/bet that Higgins could teach anyone—even Doolittle!—to speak so not even the King could tell she didn’t belong, which would be then the key to them having a better life.

But Higgins hurls a constant barrage of verbal assaults at Doolittle throughout the film, including calling her creature, baggage, garbage, guttersnipe, squashed cabbage leaf, deliciously low, horribly dirty, draggletailed, barbarous wretch, and more. Some of these are off-handed descriptions while others are shouted insults. His feelings are also pretty well summed up in the number, “A Hymn to Him (Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?)”. I would say that his character is incredibly misogynistic. However, someone online argued that he’s actually a misanthrope (“a person who dislikes humankind and avoids human society”), which actually seems more accurate.

That Higgins shows not the least interest, compassion, concern, or care for Doolittle—even on a human level, let alone a romantic one—makes the ending feel that much more forced. But what is more classic Hollywood than the leads coming together at the end?

So, how’s it look? In a word, stunning.

Images are incredibly clean and detailed, with razor-sharp edges. Cobblestones in the street are clearly outlined and detailed, as is the distressing and texture in cement columns. Early on, Higgins is wearing a hat with a very fine check plaid, and the tight lines are clearly defined and visible. In another scene, he is moving about his grand library and even from a lengthy camera shot you can just about read the fine print on the books’ spines. Near the end, he sits in a white rattan chair that has incredible detail to its tight lines and pattern.

We also get terrific depth of field and focus. Shots such as at the Ascot Gavotte race or at the embassy dance show dozens of actors at once, all in crisp focus. You can also appreciate the costumes—especially Doolittle’s Ascot outfit and embassy gown—and other little attentions to detail and set dressing. It really demonstrates the benefits of being able to extract every bit of detail from the 8K scan of the original 65mm negative and Super Panavision 70 process. I was only occasionally aware of any grain, and it was never distracting, but at the same time it didn’t look like it had been scrubbed away, softening the picture.

They took a light touch with the HDR grading but we do get some nice bright whites, especially in men’s crisp tuxedo shirts and Doolittle’s race dress. Blacks are also dark and noise-free, whether in nighttime street scenes or tuxedoes. The added contrast also provides more realistic and lifelike images throughout.

Don’t expect to use the 5.1-channel DTS-HD Master audio mix as demo material to show off your sound system but it keeps the attention and focus up front where it should be. If there was any audio mixed into the surround speakers, I didn’t notice it. I did notice that the mixers used the front three channels to give characters some room to move, not locking voices just to the center channel but letting them move left and right of center. This was also noticeable in the horse-race scene—the film’s most dynamic sonic moment—as the horses race from far right to far left. The orchestra is also given a lot of space to play in the front, with music having a nice tall soundstage helped by some processor upmixing to the front height channels.

Dialogue was mostly intelligible but I did have some trouble early on when Doolittle is speaking in her heavily accented voice. Whether this was just difficulty with the dialect or the mix or a bit of both I can’t exactly say.

My only quibble with the audio is in the dubbing of Hepburn’s lyrics. I know it was a huge musical of the time and that audiences expected professional singing quality, but dammit if Gerard Butler can be The Phantom of the Opera then Hepburn could have sung for Eliza. We know she can sing from “Moon River” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But even taking the dub-snub away, it is the fact that the musical numbers have a noticeably different tone and quality to them, and the voice change just pulls you that much more out of the scene, but especially so in the numbers “Just You Wait” and “The Rain in Spain,” which has her singing some of the lines and Nixon clearly coming in and sounding vocally and tonally different.

I can’t imagine My Fair Lady looked or sounded any better even on the night of its premiere. This transfer has images that look great for a modern film, let alone one that’s 56 years old, and it dazzles up on a big home theater screen. While the near three-hour runtime is a serious commitment, I found it thoroughly entertaining and definitely see why it’s considered a classic.

PICTURE | This 4K transfer has images that look great for a modern film let alone one that’s 56 years old.

SOUND | You won’t use the 5.1-channel DTS-HD Master audio mix as demo material to show off your system but it keeps the attention and focus up front where it should be.

Reviews: Gladiator

review | Gladiator

recent reviews

Kaleidescape | Batman Returns

Kaleidescape | The Shining (1980)

Kaleidescape | The Alpinist