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Buried somewhere deep in the heart of this unholy mess lies a movie actually worth watching

by Michael Gaughn
January 31, 2022

So little of Rifkin’s Festival coheres that you basically have two choices: Turn away or mentally cobble together the bits that add up to the film Woody Allen seemed to be trying to make. Just passively toughing it out as presented really isn’t an option.

Which explains why I almost took a pass on reviewing this. But the more I thought about it, the more I sensed that there was a bit of a rough diamond buried deep in its dungheap that might be worth trying to pluck out, no matter how dirty and unpleasant the task. So here we are.

Allen’s previous film, A Rainy Day in New York, was an even bigger mess that had practically nothing going for it and probably never should have been released. So expectations—mine and of the remaining smidglet of the curious—were really low here.

The thought of spending 90 minutes with Wally Shawn at the center of a cinematic world induced a sense of dread. And, unfortunately, my expectations there were more than met. The casting of Shawn was misguided, if not disastrous, basically because he never had much of a range to begin with and, now that he’s older, has practically no range at all. His character is so thinly sketched in, and Shawn himself is such a negative screen presence, that he (both the character and the actor) just can’t provide the badly needed glue to bring it all together. A little more effort here, both with the conceptualization and the casting, would have made all the difference.

But Rifkin’s Festival is, once you start groping around in that pile, primarily about someone who exists almost wholly divorced from the real world trying to make whatever tentative connections he can with reality. And, viewed from that angle, Shawn couldn’t be more apt, even iconographic. Allen frequently emphasizes that gulf by framing and editing him so he’s ignored by the other characters. Even though he’s clearly a part of the action, he comes across as a passive spectator and an ineffectually ironic commentator.

And this is where the film begins to get interesting. The stuff with Shawn almost invariably falls flat, while just about everything with female leads Gina Gershon and Elena Anaya is surprisingly strong, even compelling. Rifkin is most engaging when it veers toward drama, when it sheds its irony and allows the characters to interact directly and with intensity. The exchange between Louis Garrel and Gershon on the boardwalk, Shawn and Anaya stumbling upon her artist husband in bed with one of his models, Anaya later putting Shawn at arm’s length while she grapples with what to do with her marriage and her life all have an inherent and authentic power. And if Allen’s point was that those messy interactions and emotions are what bring meaning to existence and Shawn is completely ill-suited to ever engage, then that’s a filmic experience worth having. It’s too bad he didn’t decide to shift his emphasis and proportions accordingly somewhere along the way.

Gershon, who has never made much of an impression before, is almost obliquely commanding, running much farther than expected with the half-baked material she’s given to work with. Anaya takes some getting used to and is saddled with a character who’s less whole person than convenient plot device, but she somehow makes her seem real over the course of the film.

Garrel is perfectly apt as the smug, pretentious movie director but isn’t as resourceful as the female leads at making something out of the straw man he’s been handed. This was a huge lost opportunity because the comments Allen attempts to make about the current state of Hollywood “art” need to be said—he’s just way too glib, obvious, and scattershot about saying them.

I wish Allen had never crossed paths with Vittorio Storaro, whose too insistent shooting style constantly goes against the grain of what Allen is trying to convey. Even in HD (which is the only way you can watch the film on Google Play), the digital cinematography is too sharp—to the point of being garish and grating. It’s especially out of place in a movie that frequently references classic movies. The various pastiches would have been far more convincing, and beguiling, if they’d been shot on 35mm and presented with a sense of film passing through a gate—but I suspect going that way would have been a budget-buster.

HD is actually an appropriate vehicle for Rifkin’s Festival. A 4K presentation would probably make it look even more video-like and antiseptic.

I flat-out hated the original soundtrack, which tries to ape Django and the Hot Club of France—something many, like The Gypsy Hombres, have tried and at which all have failed. Reinhardt’s isn’t a “sound” to be reproduced but an utterly unique extension of his complex soul, the sum of his experiences, insights, and unmimicable technique. Allen would have been far better off patching the score together out of vintage tracks, even if it wouldn’t have felt as consistent.

The music, like the images, is crisply, pretty much faultlessly, presented—which is unfortunate, because they both cry out for an analog patina.

Thanks to the ongoing New Puritan backlash that continues to plague Allen, it took two years for this film to get released. Only a handful of people will ever see it, and most of those people will wonder why they even bothered. But, even though it never comes together into a complete being, Rifkin’s Festival has more meat on its bones than any of the other walking corpses currently staggering across the blasted entertainment landscape.

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 | Even in HD (the only way you can watch the film on Google Play), the digital cinematography is too sharp—to the point of being garish and grating. 4K would likely make it look even more video-like and antiseptic.

SOUND | The music, like the images, is crisply, pretty much faultlessly, presented, but both cry out for an analog patina

Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets (2020)

Review: Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets

review | Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets

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The Pink Floyd drummer covers their early catalog without turning this concert film into a greatest hits compilation

by Dennis Burger
January 28, 2022

For most people, Pink Floyd’s catalog may as well have kicked off with Dark Side of the Moon. I rarely meet anyone with more than passing familiarity with any of the band’s output before 1973, except for perhaps “One of These Days,” which was a staple of their live shows right up to the end. So Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets: Live at the Roundhouse may be a bit of a hard sell for more casual fans given that it features Floyd’s original drummer along with a band of his own assemblage performing songs exclusively culled from 1967’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn through 1972’s Obscured by Clouds.

But hear me out on this one: I went into Live at the Roundhouse expecting to be entertained by live performances of these formative tunes as a pre-existing fan. It didn’t take long to figure out, though, that this film—and it is indeed a film, not merely a concert video—works more to instill appreciation for pre-Dark Side Pink Floyd than it does to merely delight the already initiated.

Part of that has to do with the performances. Mason and his bandmates—Guy Pratt (who played bass on Pink Floyd’s legendary Delicate Sound of Thunder), Gary Kemp (of Spandau Ballet fame), Dom Beken (perhaps best known for his work alongside Pratt in The Transit Kings), and Lee Harris (who orchestrated this whole get-together)—straddle a fine line between fidelity to the original music and making it their own. The latter, for the most part, comes from never attempting to ape the vocal timbres of Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, or David Gilmour, as well as dropping some of the weird affectations that make so much of Pink Floyd’s early stuff a bit of an acquired taste. In short, they’ve preserved the foundation of what still works about the music and eliminated some of the set dressing that doesn’t stand the test of time. As a result, these performances quickly became almost universally my favorite renditions of the 22 songs collected here.

But as I said, Live at the Roundhouse isn’t merely a concert film—it’s also something of a documentary about the formative years of Pink Floyd and the historical context in which they formed as well as the creative impulse that led to the formation of Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets. There’s a nice mix of archival footage and new behind-the-scenes segments, and although I tend to abhor that sort of thing muddying up my concert footage, it’s all artfully constructed and assembled, and works well to reinforce the intentions behind this project. If you want to skip these parts on subsequent re-watches, Kaleidescape lets you jump straight to the songs and bypass the documentary bits, but you should watch it all in a go at least once, just to get the complete picture.

Even the concert footage breaks from the traditional molds with some truly fascinating camera angles and compositions, and thankfully not a lot of gimmicky video effects. Kaleidescape also presents the film in UHD resolution, whereas the best you’ll come across on disc is a hard-to-find HD Blu-ray release or, more commonly, a two-CD/DVD combo. Not having seen the film in HD, it’s difficult to say how much those extra pixels really matter, but there are quite a few nice textures and details that enhance the experience, and I never saw any of the aliasing or moiré that so often afflict concert films of this sort. Overall, it’s a wonderfully colorful and dynamic presentation, and although I might have liked to see the sort of enhancements HDR grading would have added to the stage lighting, I didn’t miss them in the moment.

Kaleidescape’s 4K download carries over the 5.1 soundtrack from the Blu-ray release but encodes it as DTS-HD Master Audio instead of Linear PCM. It isn’t an easy mix to sum up in a few pithy sentences without sounding like I’m tripping over caveats but the bottom line is that the sound is as weirdly effective as it is fascinating. The key thing defining the mix is that there seems to have been an effort to capture the sound of the Roundhouse itself, especially its tonal colorations. My immediate instinct as soon as the show started was to characterize the sound as somewhat thin, part of which is a consequence of the fact that the mix starts very straightforward and centered. But even once it begins to expand laterally and then into the surround channels (which it does quite dramatically and quickly), there’s still a lot of room sound that you don’t often hear in concert videos.

But you get used to that pretty fast. Once immersed in the presentation, the only complaint you could have about the audio is that it’s ever-so-slightly bass-light. Your subwoofers won’t feel completely left out but neither will they run up your power bill. On the other hand, the whole soundtrack up-mixes gorgeously into Dolby Atmos, and if your system has such capabilities, I’d recommend engaging them.

Honestly, though, all of the observations about presentation take a backseat to the experience of Live at the Roundhouse. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, and that extends to everything from the cinematography and sound mix to the performances to the interwoven history lesson to the energy of the audience, which is far from the geriatric crowd you’d see at, for example, a Phil Lesh and Friends show. The fans obviously didn’t buy their tickets in anticipation of a lazy Greatest Hits compilation. There’s this beautiful and magical moment early on when the crowd just spontaneously decides, seemingly telepathically, that they’re going to handle the backup oohs and ahhs for “Fearless.” And I’m honestly not sure if it’s the fact of the proficiency of the performance that turned this deep cut into one of the highlights of the whole affair.

It’s at this point where, in any other review of this sort, I’d tell you Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets: Live at the Roundhouse is a must-purchase for fans of early Pink Floyd music but this is not that sort of release. I think you’ll actually get more out of the film if you’re only sort of casually aware of the existence of the band’s first seven albums. If nothing else, there’s a good chance you’ll walk away from the experience with a new favorite Pink Floyd tune you’ve never even heard before now.

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 | UHD resolution allows for quite a few nice textures and details that enhance the experience without any of the aliasing or moiré that often afflicts concert films.

SOUND | The 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio mix, which seems to be trying to capture the sound of the concert venue, is a little bass-light but up-mixes gorgeously into Dolby Atmos.

Review: Ghostbusters: Afterlife

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This Ghostbusters sequel checks off all the right boxes, from casting to story to demo-worthy picture and sound

by Ryan Rutherford
January 26, 2022

No disrespect to Paul Feig, who directed the 2016 Ghostbusters movie that was less than well received, but this is what I wanted at the time—a true continuation of the original story that includes the original characters as the original characters. Ghostbusters: Afterlife, directed by Jason Reitman (son of the original Ghostbusters director, Ivan Reitman), met nearly all of my expectations in a climate where movies seem to under deliver more than ever and rarely even make theatrical exhibition.

With a winning cast led by McKenna Grace, Finn Wolfhard, and Paul Rudd, this movie has all the charm you’d expect and some great callbacks to the original films. When Egon dies suddenly after spending years alone on an Oklahoma dirt farm, his estranged daughter Callie (Carrie Coon) takes her two kids (Grace and Wolfhard) to pick up the pieces of her father’s exiled life. With some funny side characters and a score that lifts heavily from the original Ghostbusters, you can’t help but get in the mood and want to see where this story goes.

Viewed on Kaleidescape, the 2.39:1 HDR10 presentation, sourced from a 4K digital intermediate, is first-rate and sure to be a demo playing on loop at a showroom near you. If you need something to show your friends, fire this movie up. It has everything a modern blockbuster should have and then some, with some truly dynamic imagery. Small specular details constantly leap off the screen. Black levels are rich, colors pop, and the detail levels are sharp.

Sony continues to impress in both its remasters (like A Few Good Men, Lawerence of Arabia, and The Karate Kid) and its current prints like Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Detail levels are both natural and absurd. Each time the movie shows Egon’s old property, the field details are fantastic and the coloring is incredible with no visible gradients in any big-sky imagery and the propensity to nearly blind with bright, sunny skies. The VFX work on the proton packs jumps off the screen with rare vibrance and color. Viewed on my Sony Z8H LED TV, Afterlife ranks as one of the best HDR presentations I’ve yet to see.

One of the Top 5 Dolby Atmos presentations I’ve ever come across, this mix is one for the ages. It belongs in the same company as Blade Runner 2049, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Gravity, mostly due to the incredible bass dynamics at play. The power and ferocity with which the bass strikes in awesome to behold.

You just need to watch the opening credits to hear a lot of what this track has to offer, like the shocking bass and detailed Atmos movements in the overhead channels. As Phoebe (Grace) fires up the proton pack for the first time in Chapter 7, the detailed bottom end that accompanies it is both heard and felt. This bass isn’t one-note but sumptuous and powerful throughout the bottom octaves.

Rob Simonsen’s score is essentially a Cliffs Notes version of Elmer Bernstein’s original Ghostbusters score but this comforts more than annoys me. (I’m probably alone here.) The music is as dynamic as the rest of the soundtrack and explodes in the sequences it’s called upon for. The atmospheric effects are both nuanced and overwhelming. From Phoebe tinkering in Egon’s lost lab where lights move gently overhead to the massive Third Act sequence that lights up all channels at levels sure to threaten lesser systems—the bass energy alone nearly cracked my home’s foundation—a lot of love and creativity went into this mix. It’s my current go-to demo and one that will likely be hard to top.

Ryan Rutherford is a 20-year home theater sales & installation veteran who owns Northstar Audio Video in Altoona, Pa. In between designing & installing systems, he loves his time with his two children and beautiful wife while obsessing about how much better the next TV/receiver/speaker will perform in his home.

PICTURE | A demo-worthy HDR10 presentation. Small specular details constantly leap off the screen, black levels are rich, colors pop, and detail levels are sharp

SOUND | Equally demo-worthy, mostly thanks to the incredible bass dynamics, which aren’t one-note but sumptuous and powerful throughout the bottom octaves

Review: The Birds

review | The Birds

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The 4K HDR transfer tends to emphasize the film’s many flaws, technical and otherwise

by Michael Gaughn
October 16, 2020

Without The Birds, there would be no Jaws—and, arguably, no Spielberg, since he lifted so many of his filmic mannerisms from this brutal and detached end-of-the-world tale. The really ironic thing is, while this is far from Hitchcock’s best film, it’s still better than Jaws. I realize that conclusion is heresy to the popularity = quality crowd but it underlines the vast difference between what an adult with adolescent tendencies and a perpetual adolescent with no interest in growing up can do.

As I mentioned in my Psycho review, Hitchcock, in that film, managed to intuit the entire course of the movies from that point on. But for whatever reason he wasn’t able to assimilate and exploit what he had achieved there and spent the rest of his career sputtering, trying to remain relevant while leaning on his past glories from the Studio Era. But, increasingly consumed by bitterness, he just couldn’t make any of those old conventions hold.

The Birds was his next film after Psycho, and seems meant to function as a kind of companion piece, but because he had lost so much confidence in himself and in the very nature of the movies, his attempt to make a shocker with studio polish resulted in a very uneven affair. This is especially obvious on the technical level, where the heavy reliance on process shots and matte paintings means things rarely sync up visually for large [swathes] of the film. That’s not to fault Robert Burks’ cinematography, which is beautiful and effective when it just gets to record things without having to allow for any trickery. And it’s not really to fault the heavy reliance on Albert Whitlock’s matte work, which almost succeeds in giving the film a warped pastoral quality, like the action is playing out on a vast theater stage. But it’s kind of sad to see Hitchcock’s reach constantly exceed his grasp and sense his slipping ability to maintain a proper sense of proportion.

The things in the film that go well go very well and more than justify the time spent watching it. Since it really doesn’t have any stars, just the semi-talented Robert Taylor and Tippi Hedren as the leads, Jessica Tandy gets to steal the show with her rock-solid performance as a deeply needy yet domineering mother. The scene where she discovers Dan Fawcett’s body still plays—and is one of the things Spielberg lifted pretty much straight for Jaws. And he didn’t just pilfer The Birds for that reveal of a mangled corpse. The subsequent low-angle shot where Tandy stagers out of the house to stand gape-mouthed next to the farm hand would also become a Spielberg staple.

As would the low-angle track-back late in the film where Tandy, then Hedren, then Taylor are revealed, with the ceiling looming low above them, as they listen for signs that the bird attack has subsided. Not only would Spielberg get an absurd amount of mileage out of this, ’80s filmmakers leaned on it so heavily that they eventually broke it.

What really doesn’t work at all is the famous attack on the school children—which I would have to shift into the “infamous” category, and not just for its technical blunders. The animation at the beginning of the crows welling up from behind the school house is crudely done and all out of proportion. And the pacing of the rear-projection shots creates the weird sense of everyone running in place. A cineaste would argue Hitchcock was trying to evoke a nightmare sense of frantic effort with no progress. He wasn’t—he just couldn’t pull it off.

The equally famous attack on the town almost works, creating a borderline apocalyptic feel larger than what’s being shown on the screen. But it’s marred by that hokey series of shots of Hedren reacting to the stream of flaming gasoline and especially by all of the heavily processed rear-projection stuff while she’s trapped in the phone booth.

But it wasn’t ultimately the technical miscalculations and gaffes that undermined Hitchcock—they were just the symptoms, not the disease. There’s something really disturbing, but not in any entertaining way, about how he obviously relishes showing children being attacked and witnessing atrocities. Even more foul is how he sets up the doll-like Hedren just to have her brutally taken down—especially during the elaborate bird-rape in the attic at the end. It’s as if his faith n cinema to protect him from the outside world had been shattered and he felt he had to lash out at the audience in his fear and rage.

All of that said, Hitchcock deserves tremendous credit for doing a horror/thriller film without a score. Yes, the absence of music tends to lay bare a lot the movie’s flaws, but it also makes many of the scenes—like the discovery of Fawcett’s body, the later discovery of Annie Hayworth’s body, and the final attack on the Brenner home—tremendously more effective. There’s no John Williams here to Mickey Mouse everything by dragging you through the film by the nose, clobbering you with cues, telling you what to think and feel. You’re thrown into each of the scenes without any ersatz late-Romantic bluster to act as a buffer, which is not just bracing but kind of liberating.

The 4K HDR transfer is for the most part faithful—which means it gets the good moments absolutely right, but also tends to emphasize all that frequent mismatching between shots. Probably the worst shot of the film is the very first one, done on location in San Francisco, which looks like it was grabbed surreptitiously on a 16mm camera. (It wasn’t—it just looks that way.) Get beyond that, and you’ll be able to experience some patches of Burks’ best work.

The one shot I can fault the transfer for—although its problems lie in the original image—is the very last one in the film, an elaborate high-contrast matte shot that borders on monochrome. The HDR crushes the blacks and punches up the whites so much that it becomes not just too blatantly artificial but visually chaotic.

If ever a film cried out for a surround mix, this one would seem to be it. So much of it hinges on things happening from just out of frame and on characters being engulfed that it’s a natural for the 5.1 or Atmos treatment. And yet the original soundtrack is so well designed that the DTS-HD Master Audio stereo mix here is surprisingly effective. The staccato bird cries followed by the sudden, muted crescendo of fluttering wings that signals the beginning of the final attack is so chilling that it’s hard to say whether a surround reworking would be an improvement. But I’d be curious to know.

I’m not going to resort to one of those “You can tell I had problems with this film but it still makes for a great night at the movies” conclusions. But I will say this: With very few exceptions, time spent with a Hitchcock film is time well spent. Even if you just watch The Birds to pick up on all the Jaws/Spielberg parallels, you’ll have, in a way, improved your life. The Birds is a suitably disturbing thriller; it’s just not quite the film Hitchcock intended to make.

PICTURE | The 4K HDR transfer is for the most part faithful to the original film—which means it gets the good moments absolutely right but also tends to emphasize all the frequent mismatching between shots.

SOUND | The Birds is a natural for a 5.1 or Atmos treatment. And yet the original soundtrack is so well designed that the DTS-HD Master Audio stereo mix here is surprisingly effective.

Review: A Journal for Jordan

review | A Journal for Jordan

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This Denzel Washington-directed true-life tale of a too-good-to-be-true solider and father has slipped unnoticed into the home market

by John Sciacca
January 22, 2022

I try to keep up with movies—both those being released theatrically and those available for home viewing—but somehow A Journal for Jordan totally slipped under my radar. Even though it’s directed and co-produced by Denzel Washington, whom my wife loves, and stars Michael B. Jordan, whom I’m a big fan of, it managed to sneak quietly into theaters on December 25 and then became available as a PVOD offering from retailers like Kaleidescape on January 11. It wasn’t until I started scrolling through the “New Release Movies” section on Kaleidescape’s mobile app that I realized it was even a thing.

Washington flips around through time to establish the relationship and love story between First Sergeant Charles Monroe King (Jordan) and Dana Canedy (Chante Adams), going forward and back to different points pre and post the birth of their child Jordan (Jalon Christian). And the 2-hour 11-minute runtime gives us plenty of time to learn about these characters and develop some attachment to them, even though we learn right from the beginning that King won’t be around to see the end.

The film begins with flashes of images and bursts of sound from the fateful day when King is killed in action in Baghdad and then cuts to Canedy struggling to raise their son as a single mother working at the New York Times. Prior to deploying, Canedy gives King a journal designed for fathers to fill out so their children can get to know them. A late-night epiphany then inspires her to start writing a journal for her son to learn about the man his father was, which ultimately became the memoir A Journal for Jordan: A Story of Love and Honor, which is the basis for the film. As Jordan grows older—and starts being bullied at school over his light complexion—Canedy gives him the journal King left behind and starts sharing more about him.

Films based on true stories can certainly have an elastic presentation of the truth, and Jordan definitely presents an idealized version of King as the near-perfect gentleman and soldier—which isn’t to say King wasn’t near perfect. It’s just that Washington shows him as nearly too good to be true, with his only “flaw” being that he frequently cares more—at least as much—for the men in his command as he does for his wife. While Jordan does an admirable job in the role—and at times feels like he’s channeling Washington’s acting style with expressions, mannerisms, or minimalistic line delivery—King doesn’t provide a lot of depth for Jordan to explore.

Available now from Kaleidescape as a Premium Rental in 4K HDR, Jordan is presented in a 2.4:1 aspect ratio. There’s no mention of the format it was shot in or the source of the transfer but images are certainly clean, detailed, and sharp, and my guess is this was taken from a true 4K digital intermediate.

At first it felt like the images in the initial flashbacks were a bit sharper and clearer, making me wonder if it was perhaps a storytelling device Washington was employing to play with how memories often stand out clearer in our mind. But I think I was getting a bit too deep here, and it’s just that the opening scenes are mostly in interiors and don’t have the clarity provided by natural, exterior lighting. There are a lot of exterior day shots in New York City and these look gorgeous, with the camera just swallowing up all that daylight and delivering bright, sharp, beautifully detailed images. Closeups reveal the textural differences in facial detail between Adams and Jordan—her skin smooth and soft, his with some pocks, whiskers, and lines. You can also count each bead in the military dog chain around his neck.

Focus is consistently sharp and tight, letting you see details like the fine lines, edges, and stitching of King’s camouflaged uniform top, the long, tight rows of a tile roof-line, the tight ribs on a shirt Adams wears, or the crisp edges and architectural lines inside a museum. There’s also a lovely outdoor driving scene where the camera pulls back to show a lot of trees alongside the road, where you can clearly see each leafless branch and twig.

The HDR grade is used mainly to deliver consistently natural images, with nice depth and some extra pop from bright sunlight when required. Cities always look beautiful at night in 4K HDR and we get at least one lovely shot of New York all lit up and it doesn’t disappoint. During one scene, Adams goes to a bar with friends, and there are rich golden hues in the lighting behind the bar and in a stairwell. At another point they’re talking with multiple candles lighting the room and the scene has a very natural glow to it. Another scene shows the wonderful depth, shades, and variety of black levels, with King, wearing a black apron over a black shirt, hugging Adams, who is wearing a black dress with her black hair. All black, all visible, all subtly different.

Jordan has a Dolby TrueHD Atmos soundtrack but don’t expect too much from this primarily dialogue-driven story. Fortunately, the dialogue is clear and easy to understand throughout, though some of the early scenes feel a tad forward and louder in relation to other sounds. And there are several scenes where music comes in quite loud, booming from all the channels, which seems a bit heavy-handed and might have you reaching for the volume control.

Mostly, the surround and height speakers are used to deliver a nice bit of ambience to establish environments—things like wind blowing through the room or rustling leaves, or the sounds of rolling thunder. When we cut to external shots in New York, your listening space evolves into the cavernous sounds of the city, but then they are quickly replaced with the tight confines of an office space, with little clicks, chatters, and conversations happening around. There are some more dynamics when scenes involve King and the military, with the sounds of planes or helicopters passing overhead, or the sharp crack of rifles on the range. Short of one big explosion, there isn’t a lot to get your subwoofer engaged.

Journal for Jordan sits at that intersection of films panned by critics—currently sitting at a “Rotten” 45% on Rotten Tomatoes—but loved by viewers, with a 95% audience score. This generally means it’s pretty approachable and designed to entertain. After 2021, I’m happy to sit back and watch a feel-good, inspirational film based on a true story, and watch Michael B. Jordan portray a different kind of hero.

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 numerous exterior day shots in New York City look gorgeous, with the camera delivering bright, sharp, beautifully detailed images assisted by the HDR grade, which lends some nice depth and some extra pop from bright sunlight when required.

SOUND | Don’t expect too much from the Atmos soundtrack in this primarily dialogue-driven story. While there’s some nice ambience in the surrounds, music cues tend to come in way too loud.

Review: A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy

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A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy

This would rank as one of Woody Allen’s best films—if he’d just spent some more time figuring out the ending

by Michael Gaughn
February 3, 2021

It’s got maybe the worst title ever and probably the worst ending of any Woody Allen film, but wedged between the opening-title card and that Third Act that got away is one of Allen’s best films, an almost perfectly balanced ensemble piece that’s probably the best evocation ever of midsummer, which is especially amazing when you consider how much Allen hates the country.

A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy was his first film with Mia Farrow and kicked off the diverse and more subdued but still fecund era that followed the tremendous creative explosion of Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Stardust Memories. Allen shot Sex Comedy simultaneously with Zelig, which he now admits wasn’t such a great idea but led to two amazing miniatures. He and Farrow would then do such standouts as Broadway Danny Rose (one of his best), The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and the superb but troubling Husbands and Wives. After their all too public breakup, Allen would spend the following decades wandering in the woods, producing far more misses than hits, but occasionally conjuring up gems like Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, and Blue Jasmine that, at the end of the day, still give him a higher overall batting average than any other first-rank filmmaker.

What makes Sex Comedy different from almost every other one of his films (and there are a lot of them) is that he apparently decided to start by capturing a certain time of year—the feel of the peak of summer—and then build a movie around it. He and Gordon Willis had already done something similar with Manhattan, where no other film has done a better job of evoking the sense of the Upper East Side at night. You’re not just watching the people stroll the streets—you’re right there with them, which creates an irreplaceable bond with the characters.

Here, you’re placed in the midst of the country that sits just on the cusp of the city—more specifically, Westchester County, just north of Manhattan—which is conveyed in such a way that it feels like both the city’s complement and dialectical other. This is some of Willis’s best cinematography, which is saying a lot, managing to capture that elusive sense of warm days, abundant nature, and lingering light. There is a reliance on day for night, which creates some unevenness toward the end, but is only really egregious in a shot of Tony Roberts leaving the front of the summer home to go off into the woods.

I was pleasantly surprised by how well Willis’s images came across in Kaleidescape’s Blu-ray-quality HD presentation. The subtle gradations are for the most part there and it’s possible to get lost in the frame while being only occasionally jarred by blown-out bright spots like the full moon. Of course, this film would likely look superb in 4K HDR, which would pull out the abundant detail in the fields, the interiors, and especially the period clothing, but I have no significant nits with the look of the film in its current incarnation. (And, given where this film stands in Allen’s body of work, and his current status in general, it’s not like Sex Comedy and 4K are likely to cross paths any time soon.)

Sex Comedy marks a big step forward in Allen’s evolution as a director, displaying a new maturity with his handling of the cast. Mary Steenburgen, Jose Ferrer, and Farrow all give nuanced, engaging performances that help reinforce the heady atmosphere of the film. Allen is even able to make Julie Haggerty shine within her very limited range. The one false note is Roberts, who was always tolerable when relegated to playing Allen’s sidekick but just isn’t that good of a film actor and whose beats always feel a little forced here. But nothing he does is enough to ever disrupt the ensemble’s seemingly effortless momentum.

Allen shows an increased mastery of film technique as well, with that new-found confidence carrying over into an increasing reliance on lengthy master shots, which reinforce the film’s ensemble nature while also lending it an appropriately pastoral rhythm. The Allen of his earlier movies would have been unable to pull off the extended exchange where Steenburgen confronts his character about lying about Farrow, which is masterfully blocked and performed.

This is just about the last film where Allen allowed his character to be well-rounded and witty, for some reason opting to just spew jokes via a borderline caricature from that point on. I’m not sure why he wandered off down such a self-defeating path—it’s obvious from the documentary Wild Man Blues that he was still capable of ringing resonant changes on the persona he’d so carefully wrought—but Sex Comedy pretty much represents the swan song of the Woody who defined an era.

Now, about that ending: Allen does an unimpeachable job of establishing the atmosphere, then setting the tone, then introducing the characters, and then setting the various interactions in motion, fleshing out the characters along the way. And all of that is so delicious and, yes, charming that it makes it that much more dispiriting when you have to deal with the train wreck of the final act. My surmise—and I’m really winging it here—is that working simultaneously on Zelig prevented him from seeing the flaws in the Sex Comedy script and likely kept him from doing the kind of reshooting that allowed him to elevate many of his other films from pedestrian or confused to extraordinary.

Had he been able to solve the puzzle he created for himself, Sex Comedy would have easily ranked up with Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah in the mass mind. But anyone who hesitates because of what they’ve heard, or who has heard nothing at all about this film, is missing out in a big way. This is what a great movie feels like when it feels like it doesn’t need to strut its stuff. A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy is so light and energetic and infectious, it’s like a bracing tonic—the cinematic equivalent of a good saison. It moves and feels like no other film. It’s Allen’s most underrated work—and it’s a much needed infusion of summer light during what is, in many ways, the darkest time of the year.

PICTURE | The Blu-ray-quality HD presentation is really, really good, making it hard to find any serious flaws—not that you couldn’t find problems if you really wanted to hunt for them but nothing ever happens to pull you out of the film, which is all that matters at the end of the day.

SOUND | It’s not like Woody Allen makes silent movies and audio doesn’t matter—the all-important dialogue can be clearly heard, the mix helps create atmosphere in the scenes, and the music cues carry an appropriate weight. But it’s all in modest service of the material, as it should be.

Review: Blue Jasmine

review | Blue Jasmine

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Woody Allen’s best late-period work is an almost perfectly balanced drama that still resonates almost ten years on

by Michael Gaughn
February 8, 2021

Fast forward 30 years from the last Woody Allen effort I reviewed, 1982’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, and you arrive at Blue Jasmine, his best late-period work and the film that nabbed Cate Blanchett a Best Actress Oscar. That at first glance it can be difficult to see the common DNA between these two movies shows how much Allen evolved as filmmaker over the decades and helps dispel the jaundiced myth that he is little more than an assemblage of mannerisms treading in a rut.

What isn’t a myth is that Allen has struggled ever since his break with Mia Farrow after 1992’s Husbands and Wives. He earned much praise for Match Point (2005), but that film is ultimately undone by its implausibility, and its success can mainly be attributed to the public’s fascination with the bright, shiny Scarlett Johansson. Midnight in Paris (2011) was celebrated as a return to form, and made Allen a crapload of money, but it’s basically a lazy recitation of his greatest hits that’s ultimately thinner than fast-food coffee. Wonder Wheel (2017) earned Kate Winslett some kudos (but the real standout is Jim Belushi, who’s so good it’s shocking) and the film almost works, if you’re willing to roll with its early acts, but is ultimately a noble failure.

Of the later films, Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, Vicky Christina Barcelona, the dramatic sections of Melinda and Melinda, and, much more modestly, Cafe Society, join Blue Jasmine as the ones worth a good look. (I’ve been trying to see the Sean Penn vehicle Sweet and Lowdown for years but it flits in and out of circulation so arbitrarily that I’ve never been able to seize the opportunity on the rare occasions when it’s bobbed to the surface.)

Jasmine exists at a higher level than any of his other late-period work, on par with the much earlier Annie Hall, Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Broadway Danny Rose, and The Purple Rose of Cairo. But it’s not easy to pin down why everything suddenly clicked here. Unlike his other masterworks, it’s not a comedy, although it does have some humorous touches. The Allen persona is nowhere to be seen, even in surrogate form. And even though he has an incredibly uneven track record with dramas, Allen shows an effortless command here.

I suspect many would attribute its success to Blanchett, but that shows a fundamental ignorance of how movies work. She didn’t write the script, plan or execute the shots, or labor in the editing room. Without that elaborate support—which is essentially the entire edifice of a film—a performance, no matter how good, isn’t worth bupkis. I think the success of Jasmine, and the reason Allen rose to the occasion, can be actually attributed to class. But I’ll get to that.

Blue Jasmine exhibits a bounty of great acting, and it’s not really possible to appreciate the film without first considering Allen and actors. From the late ’70s on, and even in his subpar efforts, Allen has offered a place where actors can show their abilities without fear of being humiliated, relegated to reciting genre cliches, treated like the director’s marionette, or subjugated to green screen. Because he provided an oasis, a place where an actor’s abilities were treasured and given room to flourish, a tremendous diversity of talent flocked to his projects—that is, until Me Too happened (but we’re not going to go there again).

(It’s ironic, by the way, that someone with no traditional training turned out to be the best actor’s director of the last half century.)

What’s always intriguing about Allen is that he can get me to appreciate performers I can’t stomach elsewhere. I wouldn’t want to spend a nanosecond with Andrew Dice Clay outside the boundaries of this film, and yet he’s perfectly cast here. Pretty much the same can be said for Louis C.K., who’s insufferable as a comedian and elsewhere only borderline acceptable as an actor. (He does do a strong turn in American Hustle, though.) Here he shines. Ditto for Alec Baldwin, who’s become a caricature of himself over time but rises above his limitations in Jasmine.

Other standouts: Bobby Cannavale (Boardwalk Empire) brings depth and some surprising twists to what could have been a thuggish performance as Sally Hawkins’ boyfriend. And Michael Stuhlbarg, who out and out stole Men in Black 3 as the pixieish multi-dimensional alien Griffin, is far more understated but still strong here.

As for Blanchett: As one of those performers, like Penn and Streep, far better at “acting” than acting, I’ve always found her work rough going—her attempt to play Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator was so cringeworthy I wanted to avert my eyes from the screen—but she is perfectly in sync with Allen’s material and makes a potentially unsympathetic character compelling. And while Blanchett got most of the attention, Hawkins—another actor I could usually take or leave—I think actually bests her here.

The two weak spots in the chain are Peter Sarsgaard, who just doesn’t bring enough heft to his role as the aspiring diplomat, and Alden Ehrenreich as Blanchett’s son, who barely registers as a presence.

About the whole class thing: Allen has taken a lot of heat over the years, some of it justified, for being overly enamored with Upper East Side society. And a lot of his portrayals are so fawning they take on a peepshow quality for almost every human being on the planet who wasn’t to the manor born. But the 2008 recession caused him to put all that in perspective, and Blue Jasmine is a perceptive, even biting, look at the great class divide that doesn’t have an ax to grind for either side—and thankfully doesn’t fall into the oppressive cliche of saying the members of the lower classes are forever doomed to do themselves in. It’s his ability to pull from his vast experience with both sides of the class equation without peddling an agenda that allows him to go deeper than most mainstream attempts to fathom the issue.

(Let me pause to note that Allen is one of the last filmmakers left from the era before you had to be a member of the top one percent to gain admittance to Hollywood, when lower-bred outsiders were at least tolerated as long as their movies made money, when they could still have a voice.)

Blue Jasmine looks really, really good in Blu-ray-quality HD—which I suspect can attributed to the existence of a DI. I was hard pressed to find any serious flaws—not that you can’t find problems if you really want to hunt for them, but nothing that was happening with the images ever pulled me out of the film, which is all that should matter at the end of the day. My one criticism is the introduction of too many golden tones in post. Yes, I get where they were going with that, but I still suspect that future generations are going to look at the early efforts of digital filmmaking and want to slap us silly for not being able to resist fiddling with the knobs.

And now I once again come to the pointlessness of talking about the audio in a Woody Allen film. It’s not like he’s making silent movies and audio doesn’t matter—few directors rely as heavily on dialogue—and it’s not like the mix doesn’t help create atmosphere in the scenes; and it’s not like music cues don’t have a huge impact in his work. The point is that the audio is in modest service of the material, as it should be—there are no bravura flourishes that would make you exclaim “Nice audio!” So let’s just say that it works, and works well.

You don’t need to know anything about Allen’s other films to appreciate Jasmine, but saying that at this moment in time sounds defensive and weak. Allen has created a tremendous and unparalleled body of work, one that deserves to continue to be appreciated. Few directors are capable of making movies that are as human, and Blue Jasmine, as a study of pride and vulnerability, might be his most human film of all.

Review: The Tender Bar

review | The Tender Bar

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George Clooney helmed this diverting little tale that seems to have slipped under almost everyone’s radar

by Dennis Burger
January 20, 2022

The Tender Bar is not an easy film to frame. It is the latest example of one of two trends—the shift in distribution for non-blockbuster films from cinemas to streaming or the dumping of films intended for theatrical distribution onto online platforms as a consequence of the pandemic—but I’m not sure which. Not that it really matters. This most recent directorial effort by George Clooney, based on the 2005 memoir of the same name by J. R. Moehringer, has been so poorly promoted by Amazon Prime (its home either by intent or circumstance) that most viewers will likely never know it exists at all.

In any other era of filmmaking, that would be fine. But given how dry the wells of content are running at the moment, it might be worth your time to go hunting for this one. At the very least, there are plenty of worse ways you could spend 106 minutes of your life, and that’s simultaneously the kindest and most damning thing I can say about the film itself.

The main thing that keeps The Tender Bar from being much more than a pleasant diversion is that it just sort of meanders through a decade or so in the life of its lead character, played by Daniel Ranieri as a child and Tye Sheridan as a young adult. Young JR deals with daddy issues, goes to college, falls in love, gets his heart broken, gets a job, loses said job, and spends a lot of time hanging out with his uncle in a bar, but none of it really means much of anything. And as a result, the film isn’t really about anything.

I haven’t read the book, so I can’t speak to how faithful the adaptation is. But just based on what I’m seeing on the screen, it feels to me like screenwriter William Monahan felt compelled to adapt as many of the novel’s plot beats as possible but didn’t give much thought to how they’re connected, nor that time passes differently in film than it does in print. More importantly, he didn’t stop to consider that film needs to be thematically more concise. And I say that because there are quite a few themes hinted at in the finished film but none of them gets enough screen time to really resonate.

On the upside, The Tender Bar is very competently shot and directed. Its compositions are pleasant, though never very interesting. Its editing is very workmanlike, and as such most of its structural problems seem inherent in the script. And its soundtrack is purely predictable 1970s nostalgia fuel, with none of the idiosyncratic panache you get from a James Gunn or Quinten Tarantino film, but none of the completely dropped balls you get when the music supervisor just has no familiarity with the era in which they’re working.

And much the same could be said about the film’s audiovisual presentation. Right off the bat, it wants you to think it was shot on film, but telltale clues throughout let you know it was shot on digital and put through some pretty heavy film-look processing. IMDb offers next to nothing informative about the technical specifications but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that it was shot on a variety of Arri Alexa cameras, then processed with some reasonably convincing faux grain and color graded to push secondaries and earth tones to the forefront.

Amazon delivers the film in UHD with HDR10, the former of which helps bring out some of the grungy details and textures of the bar the film returns to time and again, and the latter of which mostly serves to eliminate banding, although there are a few scenes in which some punctuations of brightness add depth to what would have otherwise been rather flat scenes.

The Dolby Digital+ 5.1 soundtrack, meanwhile, seems content to deliver dialogue with excellent intelligibility while mostly using the surround channels to bring the music out into the room. It’s the sort of mix that would work just as well on a really good high-end soundbar.

If it sounds like I’m being over hard on The Tender Bar, that’s not my intention. It’s fine, and given how little new content there is to talk about otherwise, I don’t regret watching it. Shockingly, my favorite thing about the film is Ben Affleck’s performance as Uncle Charlie, the most uncle-y uncle who ever uncled his way through a story about uncles. Affleck positively shines here, turning in the performance of his life, for whatever reason. And yeah, it’s a shame the rest of the film doesn’t rise to meet his energy—despite having an oddly compelling cast—but let’s not dwell on that. Treat The Tender Bar like a not-very-special episode of The Wonder Years (the original one, not the reboot) and you’ll probably have a perfectly agreeable time with it.

PICTURE | The UHD resolution helps bring out some of the grungy details and textures of the bar the film returns to time and again, while HDR10 mostly serves to eliminate banding.

SOUND | The Dolby Digital+ 5.1 soundtrack is content to deliver dialogue with excellent intelligibility while mostly using the surround channels to bring the music out into the room.

Review: The Tragedy of Macbeth

review | The Tragedy of Macbeth

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A provocatively modern take on Shakespeare’s classic, despite being shot on a soundstage in black & white with a square aspect ratio

by Roger Kanno
January 19, 2022

The Tragedy of Macbeth is Joel Coen’s first directorial effort done without the partnership of his younger brother, Ethan, with whom he has collaborated on nearly 20 films over almost four decades including such critically acclaimed titles as Fargo, No Country for Old Men, and True Grit. The elder Coen’s Macbeth premiered at the New York Film Festival on September 24, 2021, followed by a limited theatrical release on December 25, 2021 and streaming on Apple TV+ as of January 14, 2022.

A streamlined retelling of the Shakespearean tragedy, this film clocks in at only 105 minutes and is presented in black & white with a 1.37 aspect ratio, giving it a unique style. Shot entirely on a soundstage, the sets are sparse and often highly stylized, providing a stark and dreamlike look that becomes as much a part of the narrative as Shakespeare’s verse. The angularity of long hallways juxtaposed with the many arches in Macbeth’s castle and the movement of the players from light to darkness within the castle mirrors the duality in the characters and their actions. All of this is wonderfully captured in Bruno Delbonnel’s exacting cinematography and the direction of Coen with the tight framing required by the standard aspect ratio forcing the viewer to focus on the actors and their dialog.

The casting of Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth might distract purists but their performances, if not conventional, convey the horribly fearful and tortured nature of their characters brilliantly, especially that of Lady Macbeth. The bird-like imagery created by the intensely contorted movements and piercing vocalizations of Kathryn Hunter as the three witches is genius and the recurring motif of birds is revisited repeatedly during the film. This makes for great spectacle, but not without substance as is of course provided by the source material, but also by the committed performances and the film’s artistic vision.

The film was shot in Arriraw (4.5K) color and converted to black & white in post-production, allowing greater control over grayscale, and it looks fantastic in the 4K Dolby Vision presentation on Apple TV+. There is no evidence of black crush, and extremely challenging material such as fades from foggy or cloudy, irregular backgrounds, and the dim flickering light from candles exhibits almost no aliasing. The searing imagery as Banquo moves out of the shadows into a bright light underscores the importance of his musings on the foresight of the prophecies of the three witches. The contrast between the totally black background and the stark foreground lighting place him in sharp relief and highlights the minutiae in the detail of his facial features and the textures of his clothing with exquisite intricacy.

Stephen Root, whom you may know from the delightfully twisted black comedy Barry, has a brief but comedic scene importantly introducing the literary device of knocking sounds to portend evil. Those knocking sounds and the dripping of water echoed ominously throughout the castle and robustly in my listening room in Dolby Atmos as Lady Macbeth commands, “Out, damned spot; out, I say.” And later, as Macduff’s army approaches, the tolling of bells and the sounds of Macbeth’s panic-stricken subjects fill all of the channels with a satisfying ambience. While surround envelopment and the use of Carter Burwell’s beautifully fitting music score increase as the plot progresses and the drama heightens, I just wish that there had been a bit more generous use of the entire audio palette throughout the film.

I often find film adaptations of plays and musicals to be rather tedious, especially if they are literal adaptions of the source material as I feel that film requires unique visual elements to engage the viewer. However, The Tragedy of Macbeth succeeds in bringing the play to life with a wonderfully surreal vision of medieval Scotland and the treacherous tale of its protagonist.

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 4K Dolby Vision presentation on Apple TV+ looks fantastic, with no evidence of black crush. Extremely challenging material such as fades from foggy or cloudy, irregular backgrounds and the dim flickering light from candles exhibits almost no aliasing

SOUND | The Atmos mix allows knocking sounds and the dripping of water to echo ominously throughout the castle, while the tolling of bells and the sounds of Macbeth’s panic-stricken subjects as Macduff’s army approaches fill all the channels with a satisfying ambience

Review: A Quiet Place 2

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