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Too long and overpopulated with unfamiliar characters, the lowest-rated MCU entry to date is a slog even for die-hard Marvel fans

by John Sciacca
January 14, 2022

Back when I was a club golf professional, we had a TV in the pro shop where we would watch whatever tournament was on. This was during the time Tiger Woods turned professional and started his dominating run on the PGA Tour. Every week, we’d have these tournaments on start to finish and every member passing through the shop would ask, “How’s Tiger doing?” or “Is Tiger winning?” It was just an almost foregone conclusion that he would finish on top of the leader board.

That’s kind of the reputation Marvel Studios has built since 2008 when it released Iron Man, the first entry in Phase One of its grand Marvel Cinematic Universe. With an amazing string of critical, fan, and box office hits, you just expect each new Marvel film to be terrific.

So when Eternals came out—the third film in Phase Four of the MCU following Black Widow and Shang-Chi—you just kind of expected it would be another home run. To give the film even more cred, Marvel brought in Chloe Zhao following her Best Picture and Director Academy Awards win for Nomadland to helm the film, who gets a screenplay credit as well. They also stacked the cast with a ton of stars and diversity. In fact, this is by far the most ethnically inclusive cast of any Marvel film, to the point that it almost feels like the filmmakers were going down a list and checking off to make sure everyone was represented.

So, when Eternals debuted as the lowest-rated Marvel film—and the first to be certified Rotten with a critics’ score of only 47%—you couldn’t help but wonder, “What went wrong?”

When it comes to movies, I like to make up my own mind. So while I mentally filed the bad reviews away, it wasn’t going to change my plans to see it when it debuted on Disney+ on January 12. There was a rather humorous and meta comment from one character who says, “DVD? It’s all about streaming now!”

Probably like many of you, I’m not a Marvel super-fan, so I knew absolutely nothing about the comic-book roots of the Eternals characters featured in the film. For the film to be successful, though, it had to work for the uninitiated and serve to bring them into the fold, as well as provide the deeper layers of fan-service to the faithful.

For me, Eternals’ biggest problem is there is just too much. You’re trying to keep up with and learn about ten characters that are likely brand new to you. To add to the learning curve, they all have names that don’t exactly immediately imprint on your mind like Iron Man or Spider-Man. We’ve got Ajak, Sersi, Ikaris, Kingo, Sprite, Phastos, Makkari, Druig, Gilgamesh, and Thena. And when I’m spending mental energy thinking, “Who is that again? And what is their power?” you’ve probably missed a page in the “How to make a superhero movie” primer.

At one point, my wife said, “XXX just died. I feel like I should care more.” And that’s the other problem—with so many new faces and stories, you never really get the time to care about any of these characters. When Tony Stark died in Endgame it was wrenching because we’d cared about him over the course of numerous films and 13 years. With Eternals, it was almost a relief of, “Well, that’s one less person I have to keep up with.”

At 2 hours and 36 minutes, Eternals is long. Now, I don’t mind a long film, but when it feels long, that’s a problem. There are many parts through the middle that just kind of drag along. At one point, I got up to get a snack and hit pause and my family literally groaned when they saw it still had 41 minutes left. When you’re sitting there wondering, “When is this thing gonna end?” that’s another giant red flag.

One of the things Marvel has done so well is to feel like this is all part of a larger universe, and that everything fits in. While I realize this is the beginning-ish of a new Phase of the MCU, Eternals feels totally disconnected from the rest of the world. There are a couple of forced comments about who will lead the Avengers now and a reference to Thanos erasing half the population, but they’re almost “blink and you’ll miss it” throwaway remarks.

Of course, Eternals has the requisite big, over-the-top, VFX-laden battles, some wide cinematic vistas, and some light-hearted moments, mostly provided by Kuail Nanjiani (Kingo), who I’m a big fan of since his movie The Big Sick, and his valet Karun (Harish Patel).

The film opens with a very Star Wars-like text preamble trying to give the film some context but even this is a bit convoluted. Since this is literally the opening of the film, there’s no spoilers in sharing:

In the beginning . . .
. . . before the six Singularities and the dawn of creation, came the CELESTIALS. Arishem, the Prime Celestial, created the first sun and brought light into the universe. Life began, and thrived.

All was in balance. Until an unnatural species of predator emerged from deep space to feed on intelligent life—they were known as DEVIANTS. The universe was plunged into chaos.

To restore the natural order, Arishem sent ETERNALS—the immortal heroes from the planet Olympia—to eliminate the Deviants. Eternals had unyielding faith in Arishem until one mission, led by the Prime Eternal, Ajak, changed everything . . .

Disney+ offers the film in either its cinematic 2.39:1 aspect ratio (which will be preferred for projector owners with widescreens) or in IMAX Enhanced, where some scenes are presented in 1.78:1, which fills a traditional 16:9 screen. The Disney+ stream is encoded in Dolby Vision, along with HDR-10. Eternals was shot in 4.5K resolution, and this is sourced from a 4K digital intermediate.

Images are certainly clean, sharp, and noise-free but I never felt like I was getting that tack-sharp ultra-detail of the finest 4K transfers. There is plenty of detail to be sure, especially in closeups, but I was really convinced this was upconverted from a 2K source. There was an uptick in image quality when it cut to the enhanced IMAX images, whether due to the better cameras or IMAX’s DNR process I can’t say, but I felt the expanded height enhanced the scenes where it was used.

Night cityscapes always look stunning in HDR, with the bright, multi-colored lights dotted against a dark background, and shots of London look beautiful. At one point, the characters walk under a dark overpass and there are glowing white lights that have loads of intensity. There are also plenty of brightly lit outdoor scenes, with the golden sun radiating enough to make you squint. A walk through a rocky valley showed lots of texture and shadow detail in the crevices and hollows.

The characters’ powers are often manifested by glowing yellow-gold effects (eye lasers, bolt blasts, weapons) and these have a lot of vibrancy, especially when employed at night. There are also several scenes with really saturated red, such as lava, fires burning, or the glowing red lava-like pools of Arishem, which not only have a lot of intensity but also depth and a variety of shading.

Sonically, the Dolby Atmos track is really engaging and entertaining, with lots of immersive moments both big and small. To be fair, this is one of the first films I’ve watched with a Trinnov Altitude processor I’m reviewing, so I’m sure having that in the system only added to the enjoyment.

There are many moments where characters are running or flying across and all around the room, Deviants creeping and jumping around the back of the room and into corners, or things flying overhead and along the sides. During one scene, Ikaris unleashes some eye-blasts that you can hear traveling through the room and then searing into the side walls.

I found dialogue to be mostly easy to understand, and there are a few scenes where the audio mix gets creative by having voices swirl around and overhead to taunt you, or to give a ton of added weight to Arishem’s voice by having it boom and echo through the room.

Even smaller moments have a lot of air and presence. There is a scene where a lot of fighting is happening way off in the distance, and you can hear these far-off sounds of yelling and gunfire. There are also moments where thunder rolls through the room, or there’s the gentle sound of rain falling, or the whistling of wind.

Disney has often been slagged for producing anemic, bass-less soundtracks but I definitely didn’t find that to be the case. There are lots of moments where your subs will pressurize the room, and impacts and collisions have authoritative weight. An earthquake early on has tons of rumble and rattle with the sounds of objects shaking and falling all around the room. The Deviants also have a really throaty low-bassy growl to their sounds. Plus, any film that has Pink Floyd’s “Time” in Atmos during the opening—with the sounds of drums occurring at all points around the room—is definitely headed in the right direction.

Of course, the film has the now requisite Marvel mid- and end-credits scenes to “tease” upcoming events in the MCU. I’d like to say these scenes were enough to rally me and get me excited for the next chapters in the Eternals story, but sadly, they weren’t.

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

PICTURE | Images are clean, sharp, and noise-free but never feel like they have the tack-sharp ultra-detail of the finest 4K transfers, instead looking like they were upconverted from a 2K source.

SOUND | The Dolby Atmos track is engaging and entertaining, with lots of immersive moments both big and small, and even the smaller moments have a lot of air and presence.

Review: Midway (2019)

review | Midway (2019)

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The most recent stab at this pivotal WWII battle gets most of the history right & has lots of action but has a few too many stars

by John Sciacca
February 11, 2020

Maybe one of the most important things about a film based on historical events is that it portray those events truthfully and accurately. Sure, we’ll forgive some minor inconsistencies at the expense of storytelling, dramatic license, and time constriction but you need to get most things right. And in that respect, this latest retelling of Midway from director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, Day After Tomorrow, White House Down) gets them right. (You can see a factcheck here at History vs Hollywood.)

Of course, the next thing a film needs to be successful is be both engaging and entertaining, and I’d say Midway succeeds on those merits as well, an opinion echoed by its Rotten Tomatoes Audience score of 92%. This is not to say Midway isn’t without its flaws, attested by the critics’ less-than-enamored RT score of 42%.

The film opens four years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, with Japanese Admiral Yamamoto (Etsushi Toyokawa) ominously telling US intelligence officer Edwin Layton (Patrick Wilson) that Japan will attack if its oil supplies are threatened. Cut to December 7, 1941 and the Japanese surprise attack , which delivers the US Navy its biggest defeat in history. Midway concerns itself with the events following that attack, and how the US regroups and looks to not only save itself but deliver a counterpunch to the Japanese navy, leading up to the attack known as the Battle of Midway.

With the modern-day might of the US Navy, we don’t often think about just how close to utter defeat its forces were following Pearl Harbor. On that day, more than 2,300 sailors were killed along with another 1,000-plus wounded, 18 ships were sunk or damaged, and 180 planes were destroyed. To restore naval operations, Admiral Nimitz (Woody Harrelson) is brought in to take control of the Pacific Fleet, described as “the most difficult job in the world.”

Following Pearl, the US had just three functional carriers, compared to Japan’s ten, and no functional battleships compared to Japan’s nine, with the Japanese also having more cruisers, bombers, and fighters; and much of their equipment was more modern. If the gamble at Midway didn’t pay off, the United States would have likely been sidelined for much of the war.

The movie does a good job of presenting these stakes, as well as compressing the timeline into an easy-to-follow narrative. If it’s guilty of anything, it’s of trying to cram so many stars into so many roles that none of the characters are really fleshed out. It’s hard for viewers to really care for anyone when they have just a bit of screen time before another new and famous face is trotted out. And there’s more than enough drama in the true events of the war that we don’t need to be distracted by cutaway stories about USO parties or brief shots of home life.

A perfect example is Mandy Moore cast as Ann Best, wife of hotshot pilot Dick Best (Ed Skrein), who feels like she’s just there to put her name in the credits and serves no real role in the film. Dennis Quaid is also underused as Admiral Halsey. Aaron Eckhart is given a small role as Jimmy Doolittle, a pilot awarded the Medal of Honor for leading a near-suicidal bombing mission on Tokyo who must bail out in China and evade capture from the Japanese army, which killed 250,000 Chinese civilians for aiding in Doolittle’s escape (events covered in the 2017 film In Harm’s Way). Musician Nick Jonas is brought in to portray real-life hero Aviation Machinist Bruno Gaido, receiving enough dialogue and backstory to give his character a bit of depth.

It’s tough to build much suspense when retelling a story where most viewers already know the outcome but Midway manages to give the action scenes enough tension that you can’t help but groan as bombs and torpedoes slide just past their targets, missing by scant feet. The film also blatantly telegraphs its heroes. We know early on that cocky pilot Dick Best is going to be play a big role in the air campaign, and when we see him perform a ridiculous landing maneuver onto an aircraft carrier very early on, we know we are going to see this move again later in the film. When Nimitz instructs Layton to make sure the intelligence mistakes of Pearl aren’t repeated, you know the time will come when Layton will have to convince Nimitz to trust him. Or that the friction between Dick Best and Wade McClusky (Luke Evans) will turn into a grudging respect.

Shot on Panavision DXL cameras at 8K resolution, Midway is taken from a 2K digital intermediate, not unusual for a film so heavily laden with CGI effects. Closeups feature lots of detail but don’t seem to have that Nth degree of resolution of films with a true 4K DI. There’s still plenty of detail to appreciate in clothing, from a crocheted top worn by Moore in one scene, to the wooly texture of Japanese officers’ uniforms, to the collar stitching on Americans’ shirts, to the leathery texture of the pilots’ seats.

Since none of the ships portrayed in the film still exist (at least not in their WWII-era state), they all had to be created, and the resolution does lay bare several instances of pretty blatant CGI, where things just look a bit video-gamey. The opening shot of an aircraft carrier with sailors doing PT on the deck just doesn’t ring true, especially if you focus on individual characters long enough. Nor does a scene at a graveyard in Pearl, which just looks . . . off. Any time there are so many computer-generated ships and planes on screen—which is often—there are bound to be a few instances where some shots aren’t perfect but it’s often the long shots that seem to suffer most.

HDR is used to good effect, not just to enhance the brilliant red-orange fireballs that erupt from exploding ships and planes, burning with a vibrant fury and intensity, but also to bring an extra layer of depth and punch to interior shots aboard ships where sunlight in pouring in through port holes or walkways. The ocean gleams in shades of blue, with bright highlights as the sun glints off its surface, and exterior scenes are bright enough to make you squint into the sunny skies. Blacks remain deep and dark, with no banding, which is a challenge with the varying shades of blue and grey in the skies as planes fly in and out of different lighting and cloud cover.

Beyond the visuals, Midway offers a fun ride that sounds fantastic in a home theater. In fact, you might call it a 2-hour 18-minute Dolby Atmos spectacle masquerading as a war movie. The sound mix plays a dynamic role in nearly every scene, and if anyone has every wondered if their height speakers are working or if Atmos can add to the immersion of a movie, just show them any of the aerial attack scenes where the audio lends a wonderful third dimension to plane flyovers.

Planes rip along the side walls and into the back of the room or roar past overhead, diving down on unsuspecting pilots, bullets shredding things around you. Flak shells explode left, right, above, and behind you, with bullets ricocheting all around the room.

Midway will also test your subwoofer’s mettle, with deep bass present throughout. Beyond the bombs and explosions, ships crash through waves with appropriate weight and AAA guns thump you in your seat with repeated blasts. There’s also the constant low, steady, bassy rumble as a steady background reminder that you’re aboard a warship, along with other ambient mechanical sounds to place you on board, or the deep, throaty roar of the planes’ engines. There’s also the carnage of the USS Arizona breaking up after explosions and then ripping itself apart with groans, creaks, and the rumble of crumpling steel.

Available for download now at the Kaleidescape Store ahead of its 4K disc release on February 18, Midway hits enough high points to overlook its flaws and makes for a rollicking night in your home theater, with one of the most dynamic and immersive Dolby Atmos audio tracks I’ve heard in a while.

PICTURE | HDR is used to good effect, not just to enhance the brilliant fireballs that erupt from exploding ships and planes but also to bring an extra layer of depth and punch to interior shots aboard ships where sunlight in pouring in through port holes or walkways

SOUND | You might call Midway a 2-hour 18-minute Dolby Atmos spectacle masquerading as a war movie, with the mix playing a dynamic role in nearly every scene

Review: Kong: Skull Island

review | Kong: Skull Island

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An especially dynamic Atmos soundtrack seriously ups the ante on the kind of roaring, stomping mayhem Kong does best

by John Sciacca
March 9, 2021

With Godzilla vs. Kong getting ready to debut theatrically and streaming on HBO Max on March 31, it seemed like a good time to revisit an earlier film in the franchise, Kong: Skull Island. In the opening of my “4K HDR Wish List,” I wrote, “These are probably films you already own—or have definitely watched—and a new 4K transfer would be a great reason to revisit them,” and that definitely holds true for Skull Island. Released in 2017, I hadn’t watched it in a few years even though I’d upgraded the HD version to the new 4K HDR version with Dolby Atmos some time ago when it became available at Kaleidescape.

While it doesn’t totally apply here, the quote “comedy is tragedy plus time” comes to mind. Skull Island didn’t really stand out in my memory as anything special but on watching it this time, the movie was far more entertaining. Maybe it was the improvements in the audio/video quality, maybe it was having a better projector, maybe it was my daughter seeing it with us for the first time. Whatever the case, Skull Island just worked, having solid pacing, story, acting, and the right amount of quirky just-shy-of-crazy humor courtesy of John C. Reilly.

I’d also forgotten how much star power was brought to bear. Along with John Goodman as head of the government agency Monarch, it unites four actors from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (which might be a record in a non-Marvel film, something I’d need resident MCU-expert Dennis Burger to confirm), including Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury), Brie Larson (Captain Marvel), and Corey Hawkins (small part in Iron Man 3 listed as “Navy Op”).

What Skull Island does right is to focus on what it is: Kong on Skull Island. There isn’t a long preamble or slow build-up but rather a small bit of pre-credits setup that establishes a later payoff, a short explanation of the science of how this island has remained off the charts for so long and why it’s so important to investigate it now, a bit of introduction to the team, and then boom! You’re thrust straight into the action. Within the first 25 minutes, we’re transported to the island and in the thick of it. Kind of like with the recent Monster Hunter, you aren’t tuning to a film called Kong: Skull Island for a deeply philosophical examination; rather, you want an engaging and entertaining story wrapped around Kong battling and smashing stuff. This film plays by believable rules and allows you to maintain a suspension of disbelief with none of those head-shaking moments where the visual effects team does something solely for the case of impressing with their skills.

And speaking of the VFX, they’re surprisingly terrific. If Kong looked fake the film would fail, or if they shied away from showing him in all his glory you’d know it was a cheat, but there are plenty of closeups of the giant ape, and his size, scale, and speed are all realistic and impressive. In fact, the film was nominated for an Academy Award for its effects work (losing to Blade Runner: 2049).

Set in 1973 with the Vietnam war winding down, warmonger Lieutenant Colonel Packard (Jackson) is thrilled to have one final op with his Air Cav unit to investigate an uncharted island before returning home stateside. The soldiers head off to the island aboard a convoy of helicopters along with a small team of scientists, including Goodman, an ex-British Special Forces tracker Conrad (Hiddleston), and a photographer Weaver (Larson). The idea is to test Brooks’ (Hawkins) “Hollow Earth” theory by flying around and dropping seismic charges on the island, but this gets the attention—and ire—of one mammoth 100-foot ape, who quickly dispatches the helicopters, leaving the team separated on the ground and trying to survive amidst other threats that are larger than life-sized.

Packard reminds me a bit of the saying, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to look at everything as a nail.” He’s an unabashed warrior and he’s looking for a fight, and Kong is the obvious threat. If Kong has a social message underpinning the story, it would be looking for fights where there aren’t enemies and learning to co-exist with those around us. But the film doesn’t beat us over the head with this, rather making a way to care about and root for Kong.

Eager to avenge his fallen soldiers, Packard goes off on his own agenda, ordering his men to hunt and destroy the ape, and he becomes the obvious antagonist to Kong’s role as island protector. Meanwhile, the separated team of Conrad and Weaver discover Hank Marlow (Reilly), a WWII-pilot who has been stranded on the island for 28 years and learned to co-exist with the natives. Together, they try to regroup with the remaining soldiers and travel across the island to the planned rendezvous point to get off the island.

Shot on Arri at 3.4K resolution, Skull Island is taken from a 2K digital intermediate. While it doesn’t have that hyper-sharp detail and resolution of some modern films, it still looks fantastic, with very clean image quality and sharp, well-defined edges. Still, some scenes are so clean and detailed they could have been filmed yesterday. Closeups can have terrific detail, showing individual stitching in the soldiers’ uniforms and exhibiting pore-level detail on all the actors’ faces save for Brie Larson, whose face always looks angelically smooth.

Early, pre-island scenes in the film have a warm, earth-toned image with picture quality that was a bit reminiscent of The Brady Bunch, and the opening blue skies from the aerial dogfight have a bit of digital noise. On the island, colors are green and lush, with a variety of shades for grass, trees, and foliage.

HDR gives plenty of depth and realism to the many scenes at night or in deep shadow. An early scene in a downtown area in Vietnam lit by bright neon lights pops off the screen. Elsewhere, there are brilliant flashes of lighting and vibrant, rich red-orange flames in the dark night of the island. The Kaleidescape transfer’s high bitrate also does a nice job keeping the island’s fog and smoke from becoming a digital mess.

Sonically, you get a glimpse of what you’re in for in the opening seconds, with planes flying and fighting overhead and buzzing around the room. The overhead flyover—or tracking objects as they pass around and across the room—is a favorite of Atmos theater owners, and this delivers, with plenty of other similar sonic moments such as helicopters swirling around, announcements from PA systems, or the blare of master caution alarms. This dynamic Atmos soundtrack almost constantly has something going on, including big dynamic effects and tons of ambient jungle sounds like bugs and wind rustling leaves in trees.

The soundtrack is heavily influenced by psychedelic, Vietnam-era rock from the late ’60s, which is given a lot of room to play across the front channels and into the height speakers. The mix also does a great job of tracking audio objects, such as when things move left/right of center and then pass into the surrounds off camera. We also get a near-videogame use of localizing threats, as you’ll hear things coming up on our characters from the surround channels. We also get to enjoy a healthy amount of low-frequency effects courtesy of Kong’s stomping footsteps and roars, and from explosions.

Kong: Skull Island give a glimpse of the kinds of battles we can expect in Godzilla vs. Kong as Kong fights the Skull Crawlers, and be sure to stick around all the way through the end credits for a scene that leads us into the sequel. As Marlow said, Kong is young and still growing, and we need him to keep growing to defend us from other threats. If GvK takes place in the current day, this will have given Kong almost 50 years of growing to prepare for the fight, and we’ll want him ready! Skull Island is a surprisingly fun time that makes for a great-looking and -sounding event in your home theater.

PICTURE | Shot in 3.4K and taken from a 2K digital intermediate, Skull Island doesn’t have the hyper-sharp detail and resolution of some modern films but still looks fantastic, with very clean image quality and sharp, well-defined edges.

SOUND | The dynamic Atmos soundtrack almost constantly has something going on, including big dynamic effects, lots of flyovers, and tons of ambient jungle sounds like bugs and wind rustling leaves in trees.

Review: Old

review | Old

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Not one of M. Night Shyamalan’s best, this not-quite-a-horror movie is worth at least a one-time look

by John Sciacca
October 12, 2021

Oh, M. Night Shyamalan . . . Where do I start? Over the past 22 years, Shyamalan has become a pretty polarizing filmmaker and at this point in his career, it feels like many have settled into a “love him” or “hate him” category. And even a percentage of those in the “hate him” group like to keep tabs on his latest projects just so they can hate-watch and then tell the world a big, fat, “See! I told you so!”

It’s important to remember that before the duds, Shyamalan’s career started off like a rocket with tense and well-crafted films between 1999 and 2002 like The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs. The guy was on a roll, writing, producing, and directing one hit after another. But then, like a ballplayer headed into a real slump, he started getting singles instead of home runs, and then, well, he started just striking out.

But then something truly unexpected happened in 2016. He delivered Split, an out-of-nowhere sequel of sorts to Unbreakable, which he then followed up with a true sequel/conclusion with Glass. These felt like a real return to form and both had the critical and box-office success of the Shyamalan of old.

Did this mean he was back? For me, those two films at least bought him enough cred to put him back on my radar, and when I saw the ad for Old during Super Bowl LV, it certainly piqued my interest. Old was released theatrically in the States on July 23 and made available to digital retailers like Kaleidescape on October 5, with a physical media release scheduled for October 19.

The film is based on the 2010 French-language graphic novel Sandcastle, which I had never heard of. Of course, Shyamalan added his own tweaks to the source material, and with Sandcastle being only 112 pages—and those all filled with illustrated panels—he had some fleshing out to do to get a complete story.

Old reminded me a bit of Season Four of The Twilight Zone, where Rod Serling and team broke away from their tried-and-true formula of taut 30-minutes episodes and went to stories that ran an hour long. The result was some things felt padded and stretched a bit thin, and they learned—when they returned to the 30-minute form for Season Five—that an idea that worked for 30 minutes didn’t necessarily work better when prolonged to 60. (The reverse is true for long material that filmmakers try to excise down to a theatrical run time, as evidenced by so many of Stephen King’s failed adaptations . . .)

While the film certainly has an interesting premise, which is how Shyamalan manages to hook you, at 108 minutes, it feels a bit long and like it is treading water in the middle, with some of the beats repeating themselves, and like something that would have worked better in a shorter form.

A family goes on a vacation at a luxury tropical resort and we discover pretty quickly that Guy (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps) are headed towards a divorce. The holiday is kind of a last family hurrah before they break the news to the kids, Trent (Nolan River) and Maddox (Alexa Swinton). While at the resort, the manager (Gustaf Hammarsten) approaches them and says he likes the family and that he wants to send them to a beautiful and secluded part of the resort he doesn’t just share with everyone. The family piles into a van along with married couple Dr. Charles (Rufus Sewell) and Chrystal (Abbey Lee), their young daughter, Kara (Mikaya Fisher), and Charles’ mother, Agnes (Kathleen Chalfant), where they are driven to a secluded area by a resort employee played by Shyamalan in one of his many not-so-cameo roles. When they arrive, Shyamalan loads them up with baskets of food and drinks, and the group walks down a path and through a cave to emerge onto a beautiful beach.

There they see another person sitting alone whom Maddox recognizes as famous rapper Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre), who seems to be nursing an almost constant nosebleed. While swimming, the naked body of a dead woman washes into Trent, and when it is revealed this woman came to the beach with Mid-Sized Sedan, it sets the group into a bit of paranoia. With no cell signal, they try and go back through the cave and find they can’t (anyone trying is hit with a massive headache that knocks them unconscious), and then everyone starts aging at a rapidly accelerated rate to the tune of about one year every 30 minutes.

With the rapid aging, any negative traits like vanity, paranoia, and racial tension quickly come out, and infirmities like blindness, deafness, schizophrenia, and tumors can develop in literally moments. The kids grow in what feels like the blink of an eye, with new actors taking on the roles in nearly every scene. (For example, four different actors play Trent.)

Why is this happening? Is there any way to stop it? What is the deal with the name Mid-Sized Sedan? (Not germane to the movie, but, I mean, come on?! Is that a commentary on something?) And why does it appear that someone is observing them from far away?

Like most of Shyamalan’s films, Old is pretty slow to get going but part of the allure of his movies is seeing where the winding path leads you and what interesting things will happen along the way to see how things play out.

One issue I had is that a lot of the characters really just aren’t that likable. It’s hard to be vested in what happens to people you don’t care about. Plus, they often act in ways that seem completely obtuse to what is happening, almost acting in an odd, robotic manner that makes them unrelatable. (And, no, they aren’t all robots—that isn’t the twist.) And while they are aging rapidly, there seems to be no lingering emotion, thought, or feeling to things that have happened. “Well, so-and-so is dead. Guess we just move on . . .” Further, some of the dialogue is just bad. There were a couple of parts where I literally groaned. Guy is an insurance actuary and he wastes no opportunity to remind us of that and cite some actuary table percentage of the likelihood of something happening.

Also, calling this a “horror” movie seems a stretch. And if you’re a fan of that genre, I think you’ll be in for a real disappointment. It’s as much a horror movie as an episode of The Twilight Zone or a Shyamalan film like, say, The Village. Yes, there are a couple of violent moments, multiple people die, and there are some intense images, but horror? I don’t think so. More like supernatural, but not in an occult-ish way.

Filmed in 35mm and taken from a 4K digital intermediate, Old has a lot of cinematography that is great to look at, especially up on a big screen, with plenty of wonderful vistas of the beach and ocean against the rock and lush jungle backdrop. I never noticed any grain issues, certainly nothing that was distracting, and found images to be clean and sharp throughout, though not having that tack-sharp look of a movie shot digitally.

Closeups have tons of sharp, vivid detail, where you can literally make out single grains of sand or see the fibers in characters’ garments. The detail also makes it easier to appreciate the aging the characters go through as they develop wrinkles and the like. Longer shots—specifically when they are looking back up at the mysterious person watching on the hill—are noticeably softer and devoid of detail, with the trees just lacking the sharpness, almost like they are slightly out of focus.

With most of the film taking place on the beach during the day, the HDR grading certainly helps with the look, giving brilliant highlights and nice shadow detail. You can really appreciate the texture of the rocks and cave walls, and when the sun goes down, there are some nice highlights and added contrast from a fire the characters sit by.

The Dolby Atmos mix was actually a highlight for me, as Shyamalan really leans into the possibilities of immersing the listener in sound and using all the speakers. Jungle sounds frequently fill the room, with birds and wind creating a nice canopy of sound overhead and all around. You also get nice moments like the sounds of the hotel’s lobby Muzak pumping out of the ceiling speakers like you’re walking through the hotel, or the sounds of water dripping down from overhead in the cave complex, or the noise of crashing waves and surf all around.

One thing the mix really plays with is the location of voices. Most films anchor about 90% (or more) in the center speaker, but here we have dialogue that literally swirls 360 degrees around the room as a character is turning and listening to people talking. This is almost a video-game like effect but it really puts you in the moment. It will also lay bare if your speakers have any timbre-matching issues, as you’ll really notice a change in the tone and quality of the dialogue. Bass is mostly restrained—dialogue is a big driver of the movie—but it can be deep when called for, such as when characters enter the cave or when there are powerful waves crashing.

My wife and I did have a bit of problem understanding some of the dialogue. Some of it is a bit forward-sounding, some of the characters have a bit of an accent, and occasionally it can be masked by some of the other sounds going on.

While Old isn’t the best of Shyamalan’s catalog, it certainly isn’t the worst, and it kept me involved enough to see how it was going to wrap. And, I didn’t see the particular “twist” coming but it wasn’t on par with the big “I see dead people!” moment of The Sixth Sense. It was more like, “Yeah, OK, I guess that makes sense.” Also, I felt like he tried to over explain and over resolve the ending, and it would have been better had he, ummm (keeping this spoiler-free . . .) stopped about five minutes before he did and let it be more open-ended.

PICTURE | Even though Old was shot on 35mm, there are never any grain issues and images are clean and sharp throughout, though without the tack-sharp look of a movie shot digitally

SOUND | The Atmos mix is a highlight, with the director really leaning into the possibilities of immersing the listener in sound and using all the speakers

Review: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

review | Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

recent reviews

Scott Pilgrim fans will rejoice at both the new remaster and new Atmos mix

by Dennis Burger
July 22, 2021

This review was supposed to be done weeks ago. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was technically released to UHD Blu-ray on July 6, 2021. The day it was supposed to arrive, though, Amazon informed me they didn’t have an estimated ship date. So I went to Best Buy—no Scott Pilgrim. I hit Walmart—no Scott Pilgrim. I scoured every online source for shiny silver discs and no one could get me a copy in physical form in anything approaching a predictable timeframe. Thankfully, the disc finally arrived from Amazon this past weekend.

If I hadn’t already decided this would be my last disc purchase, this whole experience would have pushed me hard in that direction. The reality is, discs are a niche product at this point. There’s only one replication facility left in North America that can produce UHD Blu-rays, as far as I know, and when they get backed up, or when there’s more demand than expected for a title like Scott Pilgrim, getting your hands on a copy becomes a frustrating affair.

But you’re not here to read a treatise about the current state of a dying format. You’re here to read about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and whether the new Dolby Vision remaster was worth the wait. And indeed it was—but not quite in the ways I expected.

I’ve always just assumed that this, one of my favorite movies, was shot digitally. But about ten seconds into watching the new remaster, I jotted a quick note on my notepad: “This looks like 35mm!” Indeed, the movie was shot on photochemical film and as good as the old Blu-ray was, it just wasn’t revealing enough to deliver the nuance of fine film grain.

There’s just no denying it in 4K. And mind you, this is a remaster, not a full-on restoration. The original 35mm camera negatives weren’t rescanned. This is an upsample of the old 2K digital intermediate. But it still represents enough of a boost in resolution and fine detail that the film’s analog origins are there to be seen, clearly and unambiguously.

And as subtle a difference as that is, it’s enough to change the entire vibe of Scott Pilgrim for me. It’s a weird movie, if you’ve never seen it—it’s another one of those films that is simultaneously a thing and a critique of that thing. It’s a pop-culture-reference-packed comic book movie that playfully mocks all of the shortcomings of pop-culture-reference-packed comic book movies. It’s a sendup of everything ridiculous about video games, made by and about people who completely adore video games. It’s a takedown of hipsters despite being hipsterish as heck. It sort of takes the piss out of vegans and feminists and the LGBT community but with complete and utter love and respect for anyone who falls under any of those umbrellas. It walks the fine line of laughing with rather than laughing at.

But perhaps the biggest seeming contradiction at the heart of the film is that it’s a grungy garage-band rock-and-roll picture (with, by the way, the single best original motion-picture soundtrack since Almost Famous, thanks to the songwriting talents of Beck and the vocal and musical talents of the actors, all of whom performed the music seen in the film themselves), but it’s also a super-slick special-effects extravaganza.

And again, that element has always worked on Blu-ray, but it works so much better in Dolby Vision, since you can see the grit and organic chaos of film stock under the computer graphics and other special effects. It’s not simply that Dolby Vision makes Scott Pilgrim look better—it legitimately allows it to work better as a piece of art, as a story about the weirdness of nostalgia, as a big old bag of very intentional contradictions.

There are still one or two brief moments where you can see the consequences of the 2K digital intermediate—a bit of lost resolution here and there in the backgrounds or in quickly panning shots. But they’re so fleeting I’m not sure it would be worth the effort to do a ground-up restoration.

One thing I want to be very clear about is that the Dolby Vision color grade and dynamic-range expansion are very rarely in your face. By and large, the chromatic character of the imagery remains the same. There are a few splashes of color that ring through with more vibrancy and purity. There are also some nice specular highlights on display from time to time. But the new color grade really keeps those splashes of color and brightness in its back pocket and only pulls them out for punctuation. The biggest difference in terms of dynamic range is that blacks are blacker, shadows are better resolved, and the overall image has a more natural dimensionality and depth.

The new Dolby Atmos remix, on the other hand, rarely shows similar restraint. It’s big, bold, loud, and an outright violation of your subwoofers’ rights. Normally, I would hate this kind of mix, but for such a ridiculous spectacle as this movie is, it just works. I wouldn’t change a single thing about it.

Of course, none of this will make a lick of difference if you’re not a fan of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. And if you’ve never seen it, all I can say is that a quick watch of the trailer will tell you whether you’ll love it or loathe it. (I’ve never met anyone who thought it was “just OK.”)

But if you’re already a card-carrying member of the Scott Pilgrim fan club, this new Dolby Vision release is an essential upgrade. Just maybe skip the hassle of trying to get it on UHD Blu-ray. I spot-checked the disc against the Vudu and iTunes streams and there’s virtually no meaningful difference between them in terms of picture quality. Level-match the soundtracks and there’s no real difference in audio fidelity, either.

So, yes, grab this new Dolby Vision remaster at your earliest convenience. But if you don’t have a Kaleidescape, just go ahead and buy it via MoviesAnywhere. I’m glad I have the disc on my shelf, since I know it’ll be there when my internet service is out and I need my Scott Pilgrim fix right this very now. But if I had to do it over again, I would have just bought the digital copy and saved myself a massive headache.

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

PICTURE | The new color grade really keeps splashes of color & brightness in its back pocket and only pulls them out for punctuation. As for the increased dynamic range, blacks are blacker, shadows are better resolved, and the overall image has a more natural dimensionality and depth.

SOUND | The new Dolby Atmos remix rarely shows restraint. It’s big, bold, loud, and an outright violation of your subwoofers’ rights.

Review: Big Fish

review | Big Fish

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4K HDR restores the impact of 35mm film to what might turn out to have been Tim Burton’s last great movie

by Dennis Burger
January 6, 2022

More than almost any other film, it’s nearly impossible for me to be objective about Tim Burton’s Big Fish. For one thing, I almost had a bit part in it but that fell through. For another, it was filmed—almost literally—in my back yard. My niece attends the private college that stood in for Auburn University in the picture. My wife and I often take long walks through the dilapidated sets of the Town of Spectre, which is on an island just north of town and serves these days as a goat sanctuary.

But all that takes a backseat to my feelings about Tim Burton’s body of work and Big Fish‘s place in it. As a huge fan of his earlier films, I found this one to be a welcome return to form after the disappointing Sleepy Hollow and Planet of the Apes. It really felt like a potential turning point for Burton. I saw Big Fish as a new beginning, the first step on a journey that had a more genuine human element, without so much of the affected weirdness Burton became known for after he stopped being a legitimately weird outcast and transformed into a popular Hollywood darling. Instead, it ended up being his second-to-last legitimately good film and his final worthwhile live-action work. So it’s hard for me to watch Big Fish and not get distracted by thoughts of what could have been.

But you don’t care about any of that, do you? Nor should you. Chances are good that if you’re reading a review of a nearly two-decade-old film, you already know exactly what you think about it. You just want to know what it looks like in 4K and how well the new Dolby Atmos mix works with or against the material.

Long story short: Both are astonishing. Big Fish has never been a film that worked well on home video, as the tired old Blu-ray master was overly soft with a weirdly unbalanced and idiosyncratic color palette that did the cinematography no favors.

By contrast, the new UHD/HDR presentation is revelatory. Don’t get me wrong—this is still a somewhat soft and gauzy image. There isn’t a razor-sharp edge to be found within its 125-minute runtime, even in closeups. But the increased resolution of UHD and—one assumes—the new scan of the negative unlock textures in the faces, fabrics, and environment that the old Blu-ray never even hinted at. There’s also a delicious bed of organic film grain Sony thankfully saw fit to leave alone, so you’ll see none of the digital noise reduction and subsequent edge enhancement that so often plagues films with similar aesthetics.

What you end up with is what was on the photochemical film—nothing more, nothing less. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. In addition to the rich textures and the palpability they lend to the film, the new HDR grade also unlocks subtlety in the color palette I had long since forgotten existed. Skin tones are consistent throughout, and the larger gamut gives the image room to be muted when it needs to be and intensely saturated when appropriate. Kaleidescape’s HDR10 presentation is also abundant with lovely shadow detail, and although you won’t spot many if any eye-reactive extremes of brightness (although the nighttime sequences in Spectre make for a dazzling display of shadow and light), there’s enough bandwidth in the value scale to give the image a wonderful sense of depth and dimension. It deserves to be seen on the best screen you have access to.

In terms of the audio, I didn’t notice at first that Kaleidescape’s download comes with a new Dolby TrueHD Atmos mix. Don’t take that to mean there’s nothing going on in the overhead channels. There is. But the mix is so well-balanced and thoughtful that the overhead effects don’t draw your attention away from the screen. For the most part, they serve as connective fabric between the all-important front soundstage and the surrounds, making the entire mix more cohesive and far more immersive. Dialogue intelligibility is fantastic, and there’s a wonderful richness and warmth that works to the benefit of Danny Elfman’s score.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess this was somewhere in the neighborhood of my 30th viewing of Big Fish at home. But this was the first time I was able to set aside all of the intrusive thoughts I mentioned above and just soak in the film on its own terms. That’s how good this UHD HDR presentation is. It is, at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, like looking at projected 35mm.

And as the credits rolled, I did get hit with that unshakable bittersweetness that arises from this being one of my favorite Burton films but also his last good one. But for just over two hours, I was able to put all that down and get lost in this magical but all-too-human movie, with its spectacular environments, ridiculous scenarios, and tender sincerity. The long and short of it is, this new UHD release captures Big Fish‘s essential cinematic nature in a way no previous home video format could come close to replicating.

PICTURE | This UHD/HDR presentation is revelatory, with the increased resolution unlocking textures in the faces, fabrics, and environment that the old Blu-ray never even hinted at.

SOUND | The Atmos mix is so well-balanced and thoughtful that the overhead effects don’t draw your attention away from the screen but instead serve as connective fabric between the front soundstage and the surrounds.

Review: C’mon C’mon

review | C’mon C’mon

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Kaleidescape | Nashville

This Joaquin Phoenix road picture transcends the genre thanks to a standout performance from Phoenix’ nine-year-old costar

by Dennis Burger
January 4, 2022

Any film that attempts to bite off as much as Mike Mills has done with C’mon C’mon invariably ends up choking on its own aspirations. By that I mean most films that attempt to be this thematically rich and that try to juggle so much meaning eventually drop a ball or two. The thing is, I suspect Mills would tell you C’mon C’mon is incredibly simple and straightforward, and perhaps he’s right. Perhaps its density is an emergent property of its characters and the positions in which he’s placed them. But for whatever reason I can’t stop thinking about this film and marveling that it never falls apart.

Narratively, I suppose you’d have to describe it as a road picture. The plot involves Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix), a public-radio audio journalist who has to take a break from an assignment to babysit his nephew, Jesse, whom he barely knows. Jesse’s mom Viv (Gaby Hoffmann) has been called out of state to tend to her estranged husband as he struggles with a mental breakdown. When there’s a holdup on that front and Johnny has no choice but to hit the road again, he brings this odd little nine year old with him, first from L.A. to New York, then to New Orleans.

Like most good road pictures, the cities themselves serve as characters, but it’s really the relationship between Johnny and Jesse that propels the story, and the bulk of the scenes are set in bathtubs and beds, as well as through cross-country phone calls and text messages. I know none of that sounds very exciting but it’s an incredibly gripping film from start to finish, largely due to pitch-perfect performances by Phoenix and wunderkind Woody Norman, who plays Jesse so effortlessly you almost have to suspect Mills patted him on the back and said, “Go be a kid.”

But little clues throughout suggest that, aside from a bunch of performances from non-actors that serve as Johnny’s interviewees, this may well be Mills’ most tightly scripted film. Despite that, the sort of impossibly clever dialogue that has dominated his work is nowhere to be found here. Instead, he seems to work through his penchant for having his characters speak in literary prose by having them read books—to one another and to themselves. With that out of his system, the rest of the dialogue sounds like it flows straight out of the brains of his characters in the moment.

And that’s a consequence of honesty. This isn’t merely Mills’ most genuine film, it’s also one of the most unapologetically frank films I’ve seen in ages and undoubtedly one of the most cinematic (by which I mean I can’t conceive of way this story could have been told in any other medium).

The script cuts straight to the heart of the weirdness that arises from children and adults interacting, especially when those adults are holding onto baggage from their own childhoods. It’s about adults struggling to understand the emotions of children who don’t yet have the vocabulary to express their feelings, juxtaposed with those children’s lack of inhibitions and their ability to articulate things adults can’t—or won’t. You could say the entire film is about juxtapositions. But if I start rattling off further examples, we’ll be here all day.

So I’ll just say this: One of the ways Mills explores the importance of honesty is by juxtaposing that truthfulness with artifice—indeed, deceit. And that extends all the way to the look and sound of the film. C’mon C’mon was shot monochromatically—I would call it black & white but there’s a hint of warmth to the imagery that isn’t quite prominent enough to qualify as “sepia toned”—and at first there seems to be no good reason for that. Whether it was a conscious or subconscious decision, though, I think Mills is using the monochromatic palette to reminds us that screens aren’t reality, that even something that seems as genuine as this film is a meticulously crafted construct.

There’s also some auditory evidence I’m on the right track here. For much of the first act, I wondered why the audio was mixed in Dolby Atmos, given that it was largely a monophonic-verging-on-stereo experience to that point, aside from a few musical cues. There’s a scene early on, though, in which Johnny—desperately trying to make any meaningful connection with Jesse that he can—gives the boy his microphone and recording equipment and takes him to Santa Monica for a fun day out. And it’s during this scene—in which we experience the world as Jesse hears it, through his microphone and headphones, then filtered through the magic of sound mixing and out our home cinema speakers—where the mix explodes in every dimension. It’s simply a marvelous sensory experience but it’s done in a way to remind you that, Hey, what Jesse is experiencing—intoxicating though it may be—is one level removed from reality. And what you, dear viewer, are experiencing is at least a few levels further removed.

And so it goes for the rest of the film, which is served beautifully by Kaleidescape’s PVOD download. The HDR10 transfer gives the imagery room to breathe, especially at the lower end of the value scale, and it delivers this captivating study in light and shadow flawlessly, with no banding, moiré, or misplaced or softened textures. It isn’t a razor-sharp film but it doesn’t need to be to have effect. Kaleidescape also delivers the Dolby TrueHD Atmos soundtrack unimpeachably, and while it may not be the most dynamic or consistently hard-hitting of mixes, it’s still one you want to experience through a good center channel. On rare occasions, the mix gets so dense I expected dialogue intelligibility to be a problem, though it never is.

I could say more. Hell, I could write a book about this film and feel like I’d only scratched the surface. But C’mon C’mon is so packed with universal truths—and subtle, seemingly intentional deceptions—that I worry any more said on my part would color your own interpretations of the material. All I can do is implore you to watch it at your earliest convenience and on the best home cinema system you have access to.

PICTURE | The HDR10 transfer gives the imagery room to breathe, presenting this captivating study in light and shadow flawlessly, with no banding, moiré, or misplaced or softened textures.

SOUND | Kaleidescape delivers the Dolby Atmos soundtrack unimpeachably. It might not be the most dynamic or consistently hard-hitting of mixes but it’s still one you want to experience through a good center channel.

Review: The Long Goodbye

review | The Long Goodbye

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Amazon Prime | California Split

Kaleidescape | A Clockwork Orange

Kaleidescape | Chinatown

Robert Altman’s sui generis noir looks suitably grubby in this Blu-ray-quality download

by Michael Gaughn
April 14, 2021

Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye is one of the best films of the 1970s—maybe the best—and one of the most influential. That last part is ironic, in a way Altman would have appreciated, because there’s no way it can be in any legitimate sense true. Altman and Kubrick created films that came from such an intricate and hermetic personal aesthetic that it’s impossible for them to be built upon without the result being anything other than travesty. That doesn’t mean legions haven’t tried, but all have failed.

I asked Altman once what he thought of the fact that The Long Goodbye closed almost as soon as it opened but has become possibly his best-known work. He deflected, with a purpose, saying his Phillip Marlowe fell asleep in the early ‘50s—the era of Chandler’s source novel—only to wake up in the early ‘70s, finding his sense of chivalry was no longer in fashion and could only lead to disaster. Even Altman’s Marlowe would be completely lost in the sociopathic present.

The Long Goodbye both is and isn’t a detective movie; is an unforgiving evisceration of Chandler’s work and a very heartfelt tribute. It’s so cynical it verges on nihilism while openly trying to figure out which values, if any, still have meaning. And because it lives both in and outside genre, it gets to feed from both worlds, very much like early Godard. There are very few films that feel this much like a movie.

Altman, of course, makes none of it easy, constantly toying with the audience like a sly, somewhat sadistic, cat. He and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond did everything they could to make the film gritty, flashing the footage, flattening the palette, pumping up the grain. The result eschews superficial prettiness, which tends to be fleeting, to tap into something far more sublime.

This is John Williams’ best score (no, I’m not being facetious) exactly because it’s so awful. Williams isn’t known for having a sense of humor so I have to wonder if he didn’t just write a bunch of straight cues, not fully aware of how Altman was planning to deploy them.

And then there’s Elliot Gould’s almost non-existent range as an actor, which Altman turns to the film’s advantage by making his Marlowe continually spout lame, often improvised, wisecracks. Altman has everything around Gould do the acting for him, which results in Marlowe coming across as smug but ultimately lost.

To add irony to all the other irony, The Long Goodbye probably holds up as well as it does both because it’s Altman’s most genre-driven movie and because enough of what’s best of Chandler’s work manages to survive the merciless beating it receives here to permeate the film and give it a resonance unique to Altman’s canon.

And if all of that is just a little too high-brow for you, watch this movie just to revel in the secondary casting. Sterling Hayden is still astonishing as the washed-up writer on a fatal binge. Just as nobody seeing him as Dix Handley in The Asphalt Jungle could have anticipated his performance as General Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, nobody seeing those two earlier films could have ever seen his Roger Wade coming. And yet there’s something at Hayden’s core that creates a through-line that joins those characters in a way that goes well beyond their having been played by the same performer.

And nobody seeing Henry Gibson on The Dick Van Dyke Show or Laugh-In could have anticipated his Dr. Veringer in a million years. Gibson and Altman conspired to pull off a tremendous practical joke that’s simultaneously, when seen from just the right angle, chilling. It’s that he’s the least likely villain ever that makes him so apt.

As for the presentation: How do you judge the image quality of a film that went out of its way to not look very good? To reference my earlier thought, there’s that beauty that comes from aping the styles of the present, which rarely ages well, and then there’s the beauty that comes from staying true to the demands of the material, even if it takes you to deeply unpleasant places. The Long Goodbye is gorgeous exactly because it’s lurid, and because it’s as lurid in the heart of the Malibu Colony as it is in a decrepit city jail. While there’s plenty of Southern California sunshine in evidence, it’s always accurately shown as monotonous or piercing, never pleasant.

This Blu-ray-quality download does a pretty good job of honoring what Altman and Zsigmond wrought, and you can’t help but recoil in horror at the thought of some culturally myopic tech team scrubbing it free of grain and trying to expand its dynamic range. Still, matching its original resolution would likely yield huge improvements, and a deft touch with an appreciation for grunge could conjure up something amazing.

In a similar vein, should an upgrade some day come, someone should post a sign reading “Hands Off the Soundtrack” on the mixing-room door. This film would not benefit from a surround mix—stereo suits it just fine.

The Long Goodbye is the kind of art that appears when you just don’t care at all but can’t help but care a lot. It feeds from a wellspring of paradox and, while it wraps things up, it never really resolves a thing. There are no reliable guideposts. Nothing triumphs; nothing is vanquished. That constant troubling creates an energy that keeps Altman’s film vital and relevant, and impossible to dismiss as simply smart-ass. The result is nothing but a mess, but a strangely elegant one that somehow rings very true.

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 | This Blu-ray-quality download does a pretty good job of honoring what Robert Altman and Vilmos Zsigmond wrought. Still, matching its original resolution would likely yield huge improvements, and a deft touch with an appreciation for grunge could conjure up something amazing.

SOUND | Should an upgrade some day come, someone should post a sign reading “Hands Off the Soundtrack” on the mixing-room door. This film would not benefit from a surround mix—stereo suits it just fine.

Review: Ran

review | Ran

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Kaleidescape | 2001: A Space Odyssey

4K brings subtle improvements to the presentation of Kurosawa’s late-period riff on King Lear

by Dennis Burger
July 29, 2021

Discussing Akira Kurosawa’s Ran publicly is a strange feeling for me, so my apologies if I seem a bit more awkward than usual here. This film has always been a private indulgence for me, a secret pleasure. When new people come into my life, I might sit them down and make them watch Amélie, or Almost Famous, or Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, or The Conformist. But never, ever Ran.

Part of that boils down to being protective of it. You tell me you don’t like 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Searchers or Tokyo Story? It’s all good. Different strokes and all that. Sit next to me in the dark and watch Ran, though, and if you come out of the experience feeling anything less than reverence, I’m probably never inviting you over for movie night ever again.

At least, I assume that would be the case. I’ve never even shared the experience with my wife, simply out of fear that she would take custody of Bruno in the divorce.

Part of that forced isolation while viewing Ran, though, comes down to the recognition that this isn’t an easy film to watch. It’s exhausting, though not in the ways we would normally hang that adjective on a work of cinema. It’s methodically, deliberately exhausting. That fatigue is an essential element of the film.

It’s also, at times, a brutal film, both emotionally and physically. And although the violence is mostly cartoonish, with its cheap blood-squirting effects and its overwrought death scenes, it hits me harder in this film than almost any other. The carnage may look fake, but it feels real.

That makes it a questionable choice for a feel-good get-together with friends. All that said, this is a film I think needs to be in the collection of any serious cinephile, for more than one reason. Firstly, it’s Akira Kurosawa’s last truly great film. (Madadayo is very good, but falls just shy of greatness). Seen from a more charitable perspective, though, it’s incredible that the auteur managed to make such a vibrant work at the age of 75.

Kurosawa’s age definitely shows in the film, but not in its production. Ran—which, by the way, translates roughly into something like chaos, discord, turmoil, turbulence—is in many ways the filmmaker’s grandest statement on human nature. It has been described as a beautifully nihilistic work but I think that’s far too reductive. With this film, as with many of his best works, Kurosawa shines an unflinching light on human nature and the most ignoble tendencies of man. But describing the film as nihilistic assumes Kurosawa saw in us no capacity to rebel against our basest instincts, to rise above. Ran is a warning, a parable, a lesson from which to learn. He shows us humanity at its worst to inspire us to be better.

It’s also reductive to simply write Ran off as an adaptation of King Lear, as so many have done. Kurosawa didn’t recognize the parallels between the story he wanted to tell and the Bard’s famous play until late in the scripting process. Lear certainly influenced Ran in ways, some subconscious, but to pretend the latter is a direct adaption of the former—the way Throne of Blood (1957) very deliberately transposed the plot of The Scottish Play in space and time—would hang some additional baggage on the movie that it was never designed to carry.

Chances are good, though, that if you have any interest in purchasing this new 4K HDR release, you couldn’t care less about what I think of the film. You may even think the above opinions are daft. That’s fine.

What I think we’ll agree on, though, is that this is the best-looking home video release of Ran to date. Just don’t go in expecting monumental improvements over the excellent StudioCanal Blu-ray from 2016, which was taken from the 4K restoration used for here.

In my “4K HDR Wish List” from February, I said that I thought Ran, of all Kurosawa’s films, would “benefit most from the enhanced resolution and especially the expanded color gamut of 4K HDR. Watching the Blu-ray release, you can tell there’s ten pounds of color here crammed into an eight-pound bag.”

Well, I was wrong on both counts. There are, at best, a handful of scenes where the benefits of UHD resolution can be seen, and the colors are just as muted, just as reserved, just as measured as was seen on the Blu-ray. This new restoration was overseen and approved by cinematographer Shôji Ueda, so it’s safe to assume it’s true to the original vision for the film. But, as it turns out, 8-bit 1080p video was more than sufficient to unlock most of the detail and almost all of the colors found on the original camera negative.

There are some improvements in contrasts, which contribute to an image with more depth and nuance. Am I saying you shouldn’t upgrade to the 4K HDR version? Of course not. Why wouldn’t you want to own the best presentation of the film seen to date? Just go in knowing the improvements are incremental at best. There are also a few noticeable instances of edge-enhancement and grain that look more digital than organic but that was true of the 2016 Blu-ray as well and can’t be pinned on Kaleidescape’s otherwise unimpeachable presentation of this somewhat flawed but still much appreciated remaster.

The only options for audio on Kaleidescape are the original Japanese in stereo or remixed DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1. I don’t care how much of a purist you are—opt for the latter. It’s a textbook example of how films of this vintage and importance should be remixed. It’s largely a three-channel affair, with surrounds mostly used to add ambience and space to the mix. But dialogue sounds fantastic and is always utterly intelligible, locked firmly as it is in the center channel.

I do have a slight beef with the English subtitles, which can’t be turned off or modified in any form. The problem is that they’re mostly white, with but one pixel of black surrounding each letter to give it some contrast. For the bulk of the film, that’s perfectly fine. But in shots that are brightly lit, in which the lower portion of the image is mostly gray or white or very light tan, the subtitles get a bit lost in the image.

Other than that, the only major flaw with the Kaleidescape release is that Lionsgate, which is distributing this new 4K HDR release in the U.S., seems to have once again given Apple the exclusive on bonus features. That means iTunes is your only option if you want to enjoy the incredible feature-length documentary AK, short of buying the disc. That said, the Kaleidescape 4K HDR release is surprisingly cheap—just $14.99. So if you have that option, grab it.

But if you have the 2016 Blu-ray already and you’re not obsessed with very minor, momentary, sporadic improvements in picture quality that you’d probably only notice in a direct A/B comparison, you can probably safely stick with the disc you already own.

PICTURE | This is the best-looking home video release of Ran to date, but don’t go in expecting monumental improvements over the excellent StudioCanal Blu-ray from 2016.

SOUND | The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is a textbook example of how films of this vintage and importance should be remixed.

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