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Dennis Burger

Review: Nightmare Alley

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Nightmare Alley (2021)

review | Nightmare Alley

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Guillermo del Toro takes a cynical turn with this noirish thriller that evokes the ’40s without aping the film look of the time

by Dennis Burger
March 15, 2022

Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley is an unusual film in the canon of a director known for unusual films. A new adaptation of the 1946 novel by pulp editor William Lindsay Gresham that was also adapted for the screen in 1947 by Edmund Goulding, it has been promoted heavily as del Toro’s first to fall entirely outside the traditions of sci-fi or fantasy. But to this old fan of his work, that’s hardly as significant as many are making it out to be.

A far more interesting departure is the fact that del Toro has had to doff his anti-cynicism hat for this adaptation, and that—far more so than its rejection of the supernatural—is what makes Nightmare Alley feel so different. The director has certainly flirted with cynicism in the past, perhaps most notably with Pan’s Labyrinth, only to ultimately reject it. But to fully commit to this noir adaptation, he had to embrace it. And if there’s anything that keeps the film from knocking it completely out of the park, it’s that del Toro seems uncomfortable doing so. 

It’s still a very good film, just not a great one—certainly not as great as his previous effort, The Shape of Water. But let’s not allow comparison to be the thief of joy here, because far more works about Nightmare Alley than doesn’t. 

Its impact in large part hinges on star Bradley Cooper’s ability to play a man who seems to be in control—who believes himself to be the master of his own fate—but who ultimately isn’t. And in this respect, Cooper surprised me. He delivers a nuanced and layered performance that is, almost throughout, borderline hypnotic. The film is also bolstered by fantastic performances by Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, and Rooney Mara, all of whom straddle a fine line between paying homage to the era in which the film is set and not feeling overly affected. 

More so than anything else, though, Nightmare Alley is a work of cinema built on mood and tone, much of which is conveyed by its look and sound. One might have expected del Toro to ape or at least hint at the aesthetic of films of the 1940s, but instead he chose to capture the imagery in ArriRaw at 4.5K and 6.5K, relying on a mix of Arri Alexa and Arri Signature Prime lenses, with the film finished in a 4K digital intermediate. 

No attempt has been made to film-look the footage, and as such it is shockingly pristine. Rather than manipulating the medium to add character to the imagery, del Toro and cinematographer Dan Laustsen seem content to let the textures of the sets, locations, and costumes—some slick, some gritty—do the talking. 

The picture is also a study in contrasts, with a heavy reliance on low-key lighting and shadows that feel almost impossibly black. Every frame is beautifully composed, and nearly every scene relies on a careful balance of focus and lighting to draw the eye around the screen. 

Comparing Kaleidescape’s UHD/HDR download to the HD version currently streaming on HBO Max and Hulu, there’s simply no contest. This is a picture that benefits from the enhanced resolution of UHD in its delivery of fine textures and details. But more importantly, it simply doesn’t work without the benefit of HDR. The enhanced dynamic range not only gives more breathing room to the stark contrasts but also gives the picture a deeply dimensional, 3D-without-the-glasses look of a sort I haven’t seen since Netflix’ Our Planet. It also makes the struggle between darkness and light that much more impactful, especially in the offices of Blanchett’s character Lilith, where the unique intensity of (seemingly) natural light filtered through window sheers defines the space as much as does its Art Deco architecture and furnishings. 

And believe me when I say I’m as shocked to write this as you are to read it but the Dolby Atmos mix delivered by Kaleidescape adds something truly meaningful to the experience of the film, primarily in two ways. Firstly, it has be to noted that weather is an uncredited character in Nightmare Alley. In the first act, which largely unfolds at a carnival outside an unnamed small town, it’s always either storming or threatening to storm, and it’s the latter condition in which the Atmos mix really flexes. The thunder rolling on the horizon feels and sounds distant, not like a sound effect being generated from within the room. I think auditory illusions of this sort did as much to draw me into the off-kilter reality of the film as did the imagery.

As the plot moves to Buffalo, wind and snow take over as the dominant meteorological force, and the sonic impact is just as impressive. But there’s also this really neat aural effect—almost subliminal—in which the height channels are employed judiciously to bring, for example, the hum of mercury-vapor lamps overhead, which goes a long way toward selling the illusion of space and the sonic contrast between exteriors and interiors without becoming a distraction. Combine that with some stunningly effective panning across the front channels and punctuated, deliberate use of surrounds to keep the viewer unsettled, and there’s simply no denying that the sound mix is a work of art in itself. 

That may not be enough to keep all viewers engaged, sad to say. Nightmare Alley is an incredibly deliberate long con that demands your constant attention but doesn’t often nudge you or hold your hand. You’ll hear no complaints from me on that front, as I love a slow burn, but this one burns so slowly you can barely see the flame moving. 

I also love the fact that in addition to finding the beauty in ugliness—something that del Toro has long excelled at—in this film he cranks up the knob on spotlighting the ugliness lying just below the surface of superficial beauty. I just wish he had committed to his themes a bit more fully and consistently. Some are oversold and some are glossed over, and that does rob the work of some of its emotional momentum. Still, it’s a film that deserves to be appreciated, and it absolutely must be viewed in UHD/HDR. And with Dolby Atmos, if your surround system supports it.

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 | There’s no comparison between the streamed HD versions and Kaleidescape’s UHD/HDR download of this film. The enhanced dynamic range not only gives more breathing room to the images’ stark contrasts but also gives them a deeply dimensional, 3D-without-the-glasses look.

SOUND | The Atmos mix is a work of art in itself, adding something truly meaningful to the experience via stunningly effective panning across the front channels and punctuated, deliberate use of surrounds to keep the viewer unsettled

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Review: Licorice Pizza

Licorice Pizza (2021)

review | Licorice Pizza

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This Best Picture nominee deserved better than this compromised non-HDR 1080p home release

by Dennis Burger
March 4, 2022

Seriously, what the hell is going on with Hollywood these days, especially on the home video side? Of all the films I’ve seen in the past year, if any of them begs to have been released in UHD HDR, it is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza. Shot on a variety of Kodak Vision3 stocks, it was finished photochemically instead of in a digital intermediate, and even exists in the form of a 70mm blowup that saw some limited theatrical exhibition. 

It’s one of Anderson’s most visually captivating movies, and that’s saying a lot. It boasts an image that can only be described as a celebration of the classic cinema aesthetic, but for whatever reason, MGM has seen fit to dump the film to market on Blu-ray or in Blu-ray-equivalent resolution for its home video release.

I can understand not wanting to fork over the dough for UHD Blu-ray disc replication. There have been so many supply-chain issues with 4K discs in the past few years that it’s almost not worth the trouble anymore, for studios or consumers. But to limit digital retailers—including Kaleidescape—to a compromised 1080p SDR transfer is borderline criminal. And look, I don’t want to give the impression Licorice Pizza is a sacrosanct cinema masterpiece. It’s roughly on par with 2017’s Phantom Thread—a bit of a step down from 2007’s There Will Be Blood but a big step up from 2014’s Inherent Vice—if you’re looking to rank it within PTA’s most recent output. 

But so much of the film’s delightful look hinges on its delicious organic chaos, its unapologetic analog nature. So to limit it by squashing it to fit video standards from 16 years ago just doesn’t make a lick of sense. Even on Kaleidescape—which delivers a better-than-Blu-ray-quality download—you can at times see the image struggling against its constraints.

Not consistently, and not egregiously, but there are numerous instances throughout in which flesh tones lack that nuance, highlights are blown out, and detail is lost in the shadows. Put this transfer in front of me back in 2015 and I would have found it wholly acceptable. But I’ve been so spoiled by HDR and the way it unlocks the full color spectrum and tonal range of photochemical film negatives that I now find these limitations glaring and distracting. There are also one or two scenes in which I felt UHD’s enhanced resolution might have rendered the film grain a little more finely and a few long shots with more meaningful detail.

Should you use any of this as an excuse to skip Licorice Pizza? Of course you shouldn’t, especially if you’re a fan of Anderson’s work. It is in many ways indicative of his continued evolution as a filmmaker, especially in terms of the emphasis on artful composition over whiz-bang camera wizardry. 

As always, though, the heart of the story is character interaction, and it very much follows the PTA template of throwing two humans together, having them bounce off one another, and seeing what comes from that. It is, in other words, a further distillation of his “Just get two people talking” approach to story writing. 

Interestingly, though, while so many of the characters in his previous films could best be characterized by their almost pathological need to define themselves for others, that’s less the case here. One of the two main characters—Alana, played brilliantly by pop-rocker Alana Haim—at times grapples with others’ perceptions of her, but seems less inclined to paint a rose-colored picture of herself and force those around her to accept it than you might expect an Anderson character to do. In fact, she spends far more time looking for other people to define her or at least to affirm her own self-image. That’s part of why Licorice Pizza feels more consistently honest than many of the filmmaker’s previous efforts, but there’s also the fact that he doesn’t employ nearly as much visual/verbal misdirection here. 

Overall, it’s as meandering and unfocused an experience as you might expect but it’s worth the journey if only for Haim’s performance. She is an utterly effortless and hypnotic screen presence—the sort of actor who makes you forget she’s acting at all. I found myself shocked at times that co-stars the likes of Sean Penn and Tom Waits could come close to matching her natural energy. 

And you could say the same about her co-lead, Cooper Hoffman. Had he failed to rise to Haim’s level, nothing about the film would have worked. But he did, and it does. My only real beef with the substance of the film—aside from its somewhat messy structure—is that it seems like Anderson just had no clue how he wanted the story to end, and as such it ends . . . weirdly. It will, I imagine, be a divisive conclusion even among those who enjoy the rest of the film.

But as for the home video presentation? You’ll hear no such ambivalence from me. I’m pissed. The sound is good, mind you—a rather front-focused DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix that would have worked just as well in 3.1 or stereo. But the important thing is that it does justice to the dialogue, the fantastic soundtrack music, and the fascinating score by Jonny Greenwood, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite modern film composers. 

The picture, though, is inexcusable. And I don’t blame Kaleidescape here—they delivered an unimpeachable encode based on the materials given to them. I lay the blame squarely at the feet of MGM. Will we see a bait-and-switch of the sort Universal pulled with Phantom Thread, which dropped in HD resolution only at first and was followed by a UHD release a month later? I can’t know, of course, but I hope so. At the very least, if the studio manages to get its act together with this one, the upgrade path will be easy for Kaleidescape owners.

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

PICTURE |  Kaleidescape does an excellent job with its better-than-Blu-ray-quality download, but you can see the image struggling at times against the constraints of the studio-supplied 1080p SDR transfer they had to work with

SOUND | The front-focused DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix would work just as well in 3.1 or stereo but does justice to the dialogue, the soundtrack music, and the Jonny Greenwood score

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Review: CODA

CODA (2021)

review | CODA

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With many of its characters deaf, you’d expect this film to veer into inspiration porn, but it turns out to be both feel-good & socially aware at the same time

by Dennis Burger
February 23, 2022

Sian Heder’s CODA is a tricky film to write about insofar as anything I could say to define it for you will, I fear, give you exactly the wrong impression, and the more I prattle, the more wrong your impression will be. So I’m inclined to keep this brief in the interest of doing as little harm as possible, but there’s just so much I want to dig into. 

CODA is an acronym for Children of Deaf Adults, and in this case that label applies to Ruby—played to perfection by Emilia Jones—who is the only hearing member of her immediate family. She’s also a gifted singer, to the surprise of everyone including herself, and although the trailer would lead you to believe that the movie’s major source of conflict is her family’s failure to understand her desire to join the school choir and even audition for a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music, that’s far from the whole story. 

A far bigger problem—and one largely glossed over by the film’s marketing—is that Ruby and her family are working poor, and their attempts to scrape together a meager living are hampered by everything from climate change to bureaucracy to neoliberal regulatory forces. CODA is, in short, one of the most subtle and compelling anti-capitalist films in ages but I wouldn’t be surprised if many viewers miss that fact, as well as the irony of its being distributed entirely by Apple. 

That it manages to explore this territory without being overtly political is a neat trick. But by far CODA‘s niftiest sleight-of-hand is that it deals with issues of disability without devolving into inspiration porn of the sort the trailer sells it as. Deafness is certainly a characteristic of three of its four main characters but it’s not a defining one. 

The film is irreverent without going for cheap shocks, adorable without being cloying, sentimental without being schmaltzy, awkward without being affected, and fits firmly into the tradition of feel-good cinema without being overly manipulative emotionally. My only criticism is that it plays it safe in terms of broader story structure. Let’s call it what it is—the Hero’s Journey. And as a result, by the end of the first act you’ll probably have an accurate sense of how it ends. 

But given how specific its scenario is—lower-class fishing family, three-quarters of whom are deaf, fight a constant battle to find balance between the desires of the individual and the needs of the collective—the tried-and-true narrative template serves mostly to add a much-needed dose of universal relatability. And in that sense, it very much succeeds. I’d be shocked if you can’t find some common ground with these characters, no matter your station. 

CODA is a remake of a French film called La Famille Bélier, which I’ll admit I wasn’t aware existed until I saw it listed in the closing credits. That does make some sense of a few things—notably the fact that American filmmakers rarely know what to do with class struggles, if they even bother to grapple with them. Whether La Famille Bélier is a better film, I can’t say. But CODA stands on its own as a very good one. 

The Apple TV+ presentation is a lovely thing to behold. Shot on location in Gloucester, Massachusetts, it certainly looks like no soundstages were employed. The Rossi family cottage has the sort of grit and clutter that reads as authentic whether it is or not, and it gives the entire picture a ton of texture and a warm cast overall. 

Even before we get our first peek at the home, though, the image is packed with the sort of chaos that makes me somewhat nervous when viewing at streaming bitrates. That never ends up being a problem, though—a least not when watched on Roku Ultra. The opening shot is of a rickety trawler bouncing around on choppy seas, with a flat sky above that’s broken up only by a few clouds on the horizon. 

This is stress-test material for any video codec, even one as good as HEVC. But amidst the chaos of the waves and the nearly imperceptible gradations of the sky, I never saw any of the misplaced textures or banding you’d have to keep an eye out for even on UHD Blu-ray. The only perceptible flaws in the image are a couple instances of unnecessary edge-enhancement you might not even spot depending on when you blink. 

While the picture doesn’t live or die based on razor sharpness, you can definitely see the benefits of the 6K shooting resolution and the 4K DI. Apple presents the film in Dolby Vision, and while you won’t notice many scenes with high overall brightness, the pinpoint bursts of specular intensity—especially on the seas—give the image a nice amount of pop. There’s also a lot of breathing room at the lower end of the value scale, which really helps with dimly lit interiors.

Apple delivers the film with a Dolby Atmos mix (AC-4, if your hardware supports that codec; Dolby Digital+, if not) that serves the material well. There’s one scene early on where the overhead effects were slightly gimmicky for about two or three seconds, but other than that it’s a nicely immersive mix that seems more concerned with accurately portraying interior and exterior spaces than with stressing your amps or subs. The school music room in which so much of Ruby’s story unfolds, for example, has its own sonic fingerprint, with exactly the sort of modes and other resonances you would expect of such a space, along with the consequent vocal colorations. The mix avoids the mistake of switching over to dry studio vocals during music numbers, and as such it all just sounds that much more authentic. 

In the end, it’s little authenticities of that sort that make CODA such an enjoyable film, despite the predictability of its larger structure. Yes, from a bird’s-eye view you’ll know how this one ends as soon as you settle into it, but there are oodles of little moment-to-moment surprises that make it a journey very much worth taking anyway. 

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 Dolby Vision presentation is lovely to behold, with pinpoint bursts of specular intensity giving the image a nice amount of pop. A lot of breathing room at the lower end of the value scale really helps with dimly lit interiors.

SOUND | A nicely immersive Atmos mix that’s more concerned with accurately portraying interior & exterior spaces than it is with stressing your amps or subs

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Second Thoughts: The Book of Boba Fett

Second Thoughts: The Book of Boba Fett

Second Thoughts | The Book of Boba Fett

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Not only did this Disney+ series not live up to expectations but it devolved into grownups playing with action figures

by Dennis Burger
February 21, 2022

Rarely have I seen a series launch with so much potential and squander it so spectacularly as did The Book of Boba Fett. Reflecting on the show now that it has run its course, I still stand by my review of the first episode. It was a great slow-burn setup for what promised to be a fascinating character study and a rumination on how cultural forces shape the individual. 

But by the third episode, that promise was broken as the show devolved into a silly and chaotic biker-gang/cowboy/sci-fi mash-up action romp devoid of any real meaning or cohesion. And by the fifth of its seven episodes, it took a hard right turn and became the very thing I said it wasn’t in my review: The Mandalorian Season 2.5. 

Oddly, that episode was one of the best of the series, but only taken in isolation. Why it wasn’t simply the first episode of The Mandalorian Season Three is beyond me, as plopping it into the middle of this spinoff rendered the entire affair narratively and thematically incoherent. And things only get worse from there. By the seventh episode, The Book of Boba Fett came across as a bunch of middle-aged men playing with Star Wars action figures more so than any attempt at creating something compelling or comprehensible. And it became so bogged down by fan service that it’s nearly impossible to take it seriously. 

It’s borderline impossible to make any sense out of what this series is about, what we’re supposed to take from it, or how it in any way advances the post-Return of the Jedi storyline that continues to unfold on Disney+. Because, in the end, Boba Fett himself sort of meanders, and The Mandalorian’s storyline lazily reverts to the status quo ante, undoing all of the gripping character progression that happened in the second season of his own series. I honestly haven’t seen this concerted an effort to undo what came before since J.J. Abrams’ ham-fisted attempt at erasing The Last Jedi from existence with the hatchet-job whose name I will not utter here. 

If you’re a hardcore Star Wars fan, it’s a safe bet you’ve already slogged through this mess and my warning is too late. If, though, you’re a more casual fan who enjoyed The Mandalorian and want to stay abreast of what’s going on in that narrative thread, my recommendation would be to peruse the episode recaps on Wookieepedia and save yourself some time. None of it will make a lick of sense, but none of it made any sense in real-time, either.

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.

Why “Second Thoughts”?

Reviewing series is always a challenge. If you weigh in after everything’s wrapped up, you run the risk of being late to the party and offering up your insights when the world has already moved on to pastures new. Ideally, you want to go on the record early enough to give the reader a sense of whether they should commit to something for its duration—but then the show might blindside you in a big way, for the good or the bad. So we’re launching this department to give our writers a chance to offer some sometimes badly needed additional perspective when a series doesn’t turn out quite how they expected. 

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Review: Flee

Flee (2021)

review | Flee

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This unique documentary uses animation creatively to both tell the story and protect the identity of its subject

by Dennis Burger
February 17, 2022

You can’t help but get the sense filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen began work on Flee with no firm idea of where it was going or even what it was about at anything other than the 30,000-foot level. That may seem an odd statement to make about an animated film, given how meticulously most of those are pre-engineered. But Flee, as it happens, wasn’t animated for aesthetic reasons—it was animated to protect the identity of its subject, Amin, for reasons that become clearer and clearer as the story unfolds.

Amin is an Afghani refugee who fled to Denmark during the Afghan Civil War that followed the Soviet–Afghan War of 1979-1989. The exact circumstances of his circuitous journey were a closely guarded secret for many years—even from his closest friends—and when he finally started to open up about his past, Rasmussen recorded the conversations, sometimes on his phone, sometimes with professional equipment, but always in fits and starts. 

I hesitate to say much more than that since Flee is largely about self-discovery and the nature of suppressed memories and unspoken truths. And the twists and turns Amin takes in not only unpacking but accepting his past add up to an incredibly compelling human drama that needs to be experienced in real-time, as unspoiled as possible.

Make no mistake, though—it can be a frustrating journey, worthwhile as it is in the end. The animation occasionally acts as a barrier between the viewer and the subject, and although the insertion of unanimated and unaltered newsreel footage serves as a consistent reminder that these were real events that happened to real human beings, there are times when the umbilical between the cartoonish imagery and the reality lying beneath it is stretched almost to the point of snapping. 

It’s easy to make criticisms of that sort. It’s not so easy to think of another way this project could have come to fruition. So don’t take any of the above as a reason to skip Flee. Just know that you’ll occasionally need to do some work here. This isn’t a passive viewing experience; nor is it entertainment. It’s a shocking look at geopolitical and societal forces of the sort most of us have never been subjected to, filtered through the lens of one man’s memories and experiences, then filtered through yet another lens of two-dimensional artwork. 

Thankfully, given the attention the film is getting due to its various Oscar nods for Animated Feature, Documentary Feature, and International Feature Film, Flee isn’t hard to find. It’s available to Hulu subscribers with both its original soundtrack (a mix of several languages but primarily Danish and Dari, with a good bit of Russian and English sprinkled in) or in an English dub. I instead rented it from iTunes and viewed it via the Apple TV+ app on Roku, as I find that’s often a safer bet in terms of image quality. 

Doing a quick spot-check between various scenes in the Hulu and Apple presentations, though, I honestly found only one meaningful difference, in a live-action establishing shot of New York City. Apple-by-way-of-Roku renders this brief shot with a little less aliasing and a bit more detail. Aside from that, they’re practically identical. 

By that I mean that both look quite good, given the material they’re working with. Flee does benefit from artful character design and very nice background animation but it’s not super-detailed nor is its color palette nuanced. As such, the HD/SDR presentation available on most streaming retailers is more than up to the task. I know we’re not quite to the point where high-def looks consistently great at streaming bitrates—certainly nowhere near as great as UHD/HDR—but Flee is aided by the fact that there isn’t quite as much to compress here as would normally be the case with animated features. 

The picture is often animated on the fours or sixes, and at times as low as one or two frames per second. It’s also largely devoid of texture for long stretches. So aside from that aforementioned shot of NYC, there isn’t much that would trip up any reasonably modern video codec. But if you’re overly concerned with any of the above, you’re missing the point. The animation is employed as a tool, not a treat. The question is: Does it get the job done? And the answer  is: Yes, undeniably.

The film’s 5.1 sound mix is utterly fascinating. Again, keep in mind that some of the audio was sourced from smartphone footage shot from the back of a moving car and some of it was from spur-of-the-moment recordings done in hotel rooms and bedrooms. In a weird way, this results in the audio being the strongest anchor to reality throughout the film. There’s also a lot of creative mixing, and the shape of the soundfield is frequently used to mark the transition between the present and the past, between the reality of the conversation between Jonas and Amin to the memories of the latter—sometimes crystal clear, sometimes hazy and nebulous. 

Weirdly enough, the 5.1 sound also upmixes beautifully into Atmos, a fact I stumbled upon purely because I forgot to turn off my system’s Atmos processing before pressing Play. There’s one scene—a recreation of Amin’s memories of being smuggled out of Russia in the belly of a rickety boat—that’s so sonically immersive it’s hard to believe it wasn’t mixed in Atmos proper. 

Again, though, to focus on such issues is to put the cart before the horse. Amin’s is a story that needed to be told, and it’s one you need to hear. It’s a story about acceptance, dealing with trauma, and self-sabotage and the nature of memory. In short, despite all the artifice, it’s a film rooted in the messiness of life and the juxtaposition between the forces of history and the individual human spirit. And all of that makes it very much worth your time.

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 | Aside from one brief live-action shot, there’s no meaningful difference between the film’s HD presentation on Hulu and AppleTV+

SOUND | The 5.1 mix is deployed creatively, providing the strongest anchor to reality throughout the film, and upmixes to Atmos surprisingly well

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Review: Summer of Soul

Summer of Soul (2021)

review | Summer of Soul

This documentary of a 1969 Harlem music festival is less about the performances and more about the culture & politics of the time

by Dennis Burger
February 11, 2022

To describe Summer of Soul ( . . . or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) as the best documentary I’ve seen in recent years would be a disservice to it and to you. It is, without question, one of the best films I’ve seen in ages, regardless of genre. It’s a masterclass in film editing, although it’s never ostentatious in its cutting. Its pacing is hypnotic, resembling the timing and tempo of an album more so than a film (and not for the reasons you might suspect given its subject matter). It manages to be shockingly comprehensive and broad without losing focus. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, going straight onto my exceedingly short list of truly perfect films. 

If you’ve seen the trailer, you know already that it’s a film about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, held at Mt. Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park). It has been described as the Black Woodstock, and although clips from the festival have surfaced from time to time—perhaps most notably in What Happened, Miss Simone?, one of the few legitimately good documentaries on Netflix not starring David Attenborough—no one could muster the will or the financial backing to do an entire film about it until Roots drummer and frontman Questlove took it on. 

While all of the above is a perfectly satisfactory summation of the heart of the film, it’s so much more than that. Summer of Soul is the most intersectional film I’ve seen in I don’t know how long. I hesitate to use that adjective and would have instead substituted literally any other descriptor that might have worked. But none does. Make no mistake about it, though: Despite being defiantly and unapologetically political, the film isn’t tainted by modern political biases. 

What do I mean by “intersectional”? In short, the main thing Questlove seems to be saying is, “You can’t understand X if you don’t understand Y,” and the variables he plugs into that equation range from the political and societal to the spiritual and secular, from fashion to art to civil rights to the heroin epidemic that ravaged Harlem at the time. As a Tolkien nerd, perhaps my favorite intersection Questlove plants a street sign into—before driving right on by, confidently and casually—is that you can’t understand shifts in culture without understanding shifts in language. And vice versa. 

It’s interesting that the film doesn’t dwell on this—or any point, for that matter. And I can’t know for sure if there simply wasn’t time to linger or if Questlove simply respects the intelligence of the audience too much to belabor anything (an all-too-rare treat these days), but it hardly matters. The thing is, while you’d think the breadth of topics would be too much for one film to chew on, Summer of Soul manages to be cohesive and focused largely due to its use of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival as its center of gravity. Literally everything ties back to it. 

In his audio commentary—available on Kaleidescape—Questlove discusses a much longer first cut that ran close to three and a half hours, and how it differed from the final edit. It seems clear that most of what got excised—aside from additional performances by Sly and the Family Stone and so many other acts on the verge of exploding into the public consciousness shortly thereafter—involved side journeys that got too far away from the festival itself in an attempt to provide an even larger, though less concise, historical context. 

Part of me wants to see that extended cut and part of me doesn’t because as both a historical document and a work of art, the 118-minute cut is not only a complete statement but also an incredibly tight and rhythmically fascinating jam, and it’s borderline impossible to imagine it being improved upon by additional material. 

Bottom line: I’m kicking myself for not watching Summer of Soul sooner. It was made as a Hulu exclusive and originally released last summer. And although I do subscribe to that service for reasons I don’t quite understand, I’ve never been able to bring myself to watch a proper film on it, as  its video quality is unacceptable in most cases. As it turns out, this isn’t a film where image quality makes much difference. The festival was shot on video and not well preserved, so it’s riddled with aliasing, moiré, clipping, chromatic aberrations, and mosquito noise, and no attempt has been made to clean it up à la Get Back. 

Because of that, Kaleidescape’s UHD presentation is practically indistinguishable from Hulu’s for large swaths of its runtime. Only the modern interview segments with attendees and performers reveal any meaningful differences in image quality, largely due to the fact that some lost high frequencies in the Hulu presentation result in a slight dulling of textures and some minor loss of the finest details, all of which Kaleidescape allows to shine. 

Kaleidescape also presents the film with a Dolby TrueHD Atmos soundtrack, which is a little baffling given that the 5.1 mix on Hulu was overkill to begin with. The audio is sourced from mics on the stage, of which there weren’t many, and although fidelity and tonal balance are surprisingly good, there just isn’t much going on in either the surrounds or—in the case of the Atmos track—the overhead channels. Thankfully, the Atmos mix does no harm to the experience, which was my biggest fear. It’s largely unnecessary, but at least it’s never gimmicky. 

But none of the above really matters in the moment. The material is so engaging that you quickly forget about the rawness of the footage or the limitations of the audio recordings. But it does raise a question: Why buy it on Kaleidescape instead of watching it for free on Hulu? 

It comes down to the aforementioned commentary track. This is a commentary for people who hate commentaries. It is, in effect, an alternate version of Summer of Soul, packed with historical perspective beyond the scope of what could be shown in the film, and crammed full of anecdotes that run the gamut from hilarious to elucidating. It feels like a two-hour hangout session with the smartest person you know, just without the laborious pedantry. 

One of my favorite bits involves Questlove describing his creative process, specifically all the little things he did to make Summer of Soul his own without inserting himself or his biases into the work. For one thing, he chose to start the film with a Stevie Wonder drum solo. For another, while he discusses his struggles with resisting the urge to cheat in the editing process, he does reveal some of his few sleights of hand, including the fact that he occasionally re-synced the sound with the footage because he couldn’t bear to see some of his black brothers and sisters clapping on the 1 and 3 instead of the 2 and 4—although he did leave in many instances of such because to remove them entirely would have been dishonest. 

In short, this is a version of the film you absolutely need to experience, and the Kaleidescape download is one of the few ways of doing so, outside of buying the Blu-ray. What’s more, the only extras included on the disc that aren’t available on Kaleidescape have long since been released to YouTube. 

Even if I can’t convince you to check out the commentary, you owe it to yourself to watch the film at your earliest convenience. Again, I’ve barely nicked the paint on this incredible experience, which centers on a wonderful but forgotten music festival but also touches on everything from the moon landing to the repercussions of the assassinations of MLK and JFK to the power of music and the purpose and nature of art. The fact that it does all of this elegantly and with a cohesive narrative thread is itself something of a minor miracle.

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 recent interview segments look fine but the music festival was shot on video in 1969, so it’s riddled with aliasing, moiré, clipping, chromatic aberrations, and mosquito noise. 

SOUND | The audio for the Atmos mix was sourced from mics on the festival stage, and although fidelity & tonal balance are surprisingly good, there isn’t much going on in either the surrounds or the overhead channels.

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Review: House of Gucci

House of Gucci (2021)

review | House of Gucci

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Ridley Scott serves up a stinkburger so bad it gives the impression it was directed by committee

by Dennis Burger
February 9, 2022

Let it be stated for the record that Ridley Scott has directed the worst movie I’ve suffered through since 1993’s Super Mario Bros. It’s simply undeniable—his name is right there in the credits. But had you removed that credit and tried to convince me House of Gucci was the product of 10 or 15 directors haphazardly chopping up the mess of a script and filming their scenes in isolation with no knowledge of what comes before or after, I might have been inclined to believe you. If you then told me they had slapped Scott’s name onto this lazily assembled dumpster fire out of spite, I’d have been convinced your theory was the only one that made any sense at all. Because even after he’s turned in so many atrocious films in recent years, it’s hard to believe a director with Scott’s experience could deliver a final product this unwatchable. 

The problems with this movie are many and I won’t even begin to try parsing them all, because who has time for that? But one of the biggest things working against it is the screenplay, which purports to be about the marriage of Patrizia Reggiani and Maurizio Gucci and the eventual assassination of the latter by the former. I barely know anything about the real-world events that inspired the film but I know enough to know screenwriters Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna couldn’t be bothered to get any of it right.

Mind you, that’s not always a bad thing. Spencer is evidence you can concoct a wholly fictional story about real-world personas and still create a gripping film. Johnston and Bentivegna did not. They apparently had no idea what they intended to convey in terms of meaning or narrative momentum, nor the passage of time. 

You could forgive some of that if the acting were better, but if you manage to pull a bad performance out of Adam Driver, you’ve done something horribly wrong. My first inclination was to say that Driver comes across as if he’s slogging through a bad SNL sketch, but I’ve seen him slog through some bad SNL sketches before. He was pretty good at it. 

Lady Gaga, meanwhile, seems to have been given the impression she landed the starring role in a trashy telenovela that would ultimately be dubbed in Russian; somebody forgot to tell Jeremy Irons that Rodolfo Gucci wasn’t an Englishman; Al Pacino, who plays Aldo Gucci, apparently intended to wander onto the set of the latest Scorsese gangster pic but took a left turn at Albuquerque; and a wholly unrecognizable Jared Leto . . . hell, I don’t even know where to begin with that one. I think maybe he was trying to audition for a sequel to the aforementioned Super Mario Bros. Had he looked straight into the camera and exclaimed, “Mamma mia! That’s a spicy-uh meat-uh-ball-uh,” I wouldn’t have batted an eye. If there hadn’t been a director present on set—if someone merely turned on a camera and walked out of the room, then prompted the actors to stroll by and deliver their lines based on their own instincts—I think every one of them would have turned in infinitely better performances than what we’ve ended up with.

The one person who seems to have understood the assignment is cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, who shot the movie on an Arri Alexa Mini LF cameras, with Panavision 65 Vintage Series lenses for the most part. It’s a lovely image, captured at 4.5K and finished in a 4K DI, packed with pitch-perfect contrasts and oodles of detail. The color timing does seem a bit odd at times, occasionally exhibiting a sumptuously warm vintage-like patina while at other times seeming like you’re looking out a window, and there’s no real consistency to these shifts. Still, Kaleidescape’s UHD/HDR10 presentation is flawless, so much so that you might be inclined to load the movie up and let it play with the sound off while you’re doing anything more interesting. 

You won’t be missing much with the sound off. Despite having a Dolby TrueHD Atmos mix, the soundtrack is a cluttered and messy affair that almost seems like someone tried to cram as much into the front three channels as possible on a dare. As a result, dialogue intelligibility suffers at times. Not that it matters. Even the soundtrack music is a pile of anachronisms assembled so inartfully that it infuriated me, and I love a good anachronistic needle drop when done competently with a hint of intentionality. 

I guess what I’m saying is, you can safely avoid House of Gucci unless you simply loathe Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, or Jared Leto and want to see them humiliate themselves. If any other filmmaker turned in a movie this irredeemable, they would spend the rest of their career shooting commercials for local flea-market malls. 

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

PICTURE | Kaleidescape’s UHD/HDR10 presentation is flawless—so much so that you might be inclined to load the movie up and let it play with the sound off

SOUND | The Dolby Atmos soundtrack is so cluttered and messy that it almost seems like someone tried to cram as much into the front three channels as possible on a dare

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Review: The Mitchells vs. the Machines

The Mitchells vs. the Machines

review | The Mitchells vs. the Machines

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Never having gotten the attention it deserves, this Sony effort is a cut above the usual animation fare on Netflix

by Dennis Burger
May 31, 2021

It’s not hard to imagine an alternate reality in which The Mitchells vs. the Machines is the hottest new title on Sonyflix or Sony+ or whatever Sony might have named its own studio-specific streaming platform, if only it had made it out of the gate before Disney, Warner, Paramount, and NBCUniversal flooded the market and exhausted the public’s patience for such solipsistic subscription services. In our reality, what would have been one of the most highly publicized animated blockbusters of 2020 was instead dumped unceremoniously onto Netflix and forfeit to the whims of its inscrutable algorithms. 

That’s a shame because The Mitchells vs. the Machines deserves more of your attention than does the typical Netflix animated feature. The involvement of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller is your first clue to that. In addition to writing and directing the surprisingly good Lego Movie and producing Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse—one of the best animated pictures of the past few years—the duo’s brand has become something of a seal of approval. So the fact that this comes from their production umbrella is significant. There’s also the fact that The Mitchells was written and directed by Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe, both known for their work on the excellent Disney Channel/Disney XD series Gravity Falls. 

Mush those two aesthetics together and you’ll get a good idea of the overall vibe of this energetic and delightfully weird animated adventure. On the one hand, The Mitchells vs. the Machines owes a lot to the look of Into the Spider-Verse, especially in the way it blends 3D animation with 2D tinkering, the results of which are a sort of best-of-both-worlds mashup. It’s not as if the two films look like they take place in the same reality—this one definitely exists within its own creative landscape—but you can see many of the techniques developed for Spider-Verse employed here in new and creative ways. On the other hand, Rianda and Rowe bring such a genuinely awkward and eccentric energy to The Mitchells vs. the Machines that it would be difficult to confuse it with your typical Lord and Miller production. 

The story revolves around a family of misfits who find themselves pressganged into saving the world after a Silicon Valley entrepreneur unwittingly unleashes the robot apocalypse in the process of attempting to give physical form to his AI digital assistant, cheekily named PAL. We’re told from the get-go that the Mitchells are dysfunctional weirdos but the thing that makes the movie work is that they aren’t.  They’re just a normal family, with a normal family dynamic and normal family problems. What makes them seem like oddballs, especially in their own eyes, is the contrast between their real personalities and the illusion of homogenized perfection constantly shoved down their throats by social media.

But if you’re expecting subtle social commentary here, you’re barking up the wrong animated tree. The Mitchells vs. the Machines is an overt parable about the current state of society and the damage we’re doing to ourselves by submitting to the tyranny of corporate-sponsored groupthink. Sometimes the dialogue gets a little too on-the-nose in broadcasting this message but that’s honestly one of the film’s few significant flaws. 

And you may be thinking to yourself that there’s a gross irony in the fact that this technological wonder of a film, produced by one corporate giant and now distributed by another, has the cajones to touch on the pitfalls of technology and the dangers of corporate greed. But grappling with this is one of the few subtle points made by The Mitchells vs. the Machines. The message isn’t that technology is bad in and of itself, that corporations are an inherent threat. Instead, what the story is trying to show is that our relationship with technology is unhealthy, and that our submission to corporatocracy is, by and large, the product of laziness and FOMO. 

Lest you think this is more a sermon than an entertaining way to spend an hour and a half, The Mitchells vs. the Machines wraps this message up in a thrill-a-minute action spectacle that’s also quite hilarious. The jokes don’t always land with equal effectiveness,—the film is far more effective when it’s blazing its own trail= and falters a bit when it leans on established tropes—but you’re guaranteed to guffaw at least once. 

I have a few other nits to pick. While the characters are, by and large, well-rounded, the story does lean into the clueless-dad cliché a little too hard. There’s a narrative reason for that but it still could have been handled better. The decision to make the youngest Mitchell child a dinosaur-obsessed boy also seems lazy, and the choice to have the child voiced by Rianda was puzzling. In a movie packed with such believable characters (believable in the context of this weird narrative, at least), little Aaron’s blatantly adult voice unnecessarily drew me out of the experience. The rest of the casting is spot on, though, especially Maya Rudolph as the Mitchell matriarch and Fred Armisen as one of the damaged robots that becomes part of the family. 

Thankfully, those voices don’t get buried in the hyper-aggressive Dolby Atmos soundtrack. This mix was a bit much for me, so much so that I had to pause the film and downgrade to a basic 5.1 option. But if you like your Atmos mixes intense and all over the place, you’ll dig this one quite a bit. Just one word of warning: it’s delivered at reference levels, so be sure to turn the volume of your receiver or preamp up a bit higher than you normally would for Netflix content, especially if you want to appreciate the richness and dynamics of the mix.

You’ll also want to watch The Mitchells vs. the Machines on the biggest and best screen available. The Dolby Vision presentation makes excellent use of the high dynamic range format, not only at the upper end of the value scale but also in the shadows. There’s plenty of breathing room in the image, from the darkest blacks to the brightest highlights, and although its palette is often relatively muted, the color gradations still exhibit the sort of smoothness you wouldn’t have seen in the streaming domain just a few short years ago. 

You might spot a few video artifacts, especially in the closing credits. But best I can tell, these glitches were intentionally baked into the image during production in an attempt to evoke the DIY filmmaking talents of Katie, the eldest Mitchell child, and they don’t seem to be a consequence of Netflix’ high-efficiency encoding.

Perhaps the best thing about the movie, though, is that it’s legitimate family fare. I know that’s generally used as a euphemism for children’s entertainment but in this case, the label deserves to be taken at face value. There’s a lot of dessert here to keep the young ones in your family engaged, but there’s also enough meat to appeal to audiences of all ages. It may not be the height of profundity and it’s a little uneven in its execution, but the good far outweighs the bad. And that alone elevates The Mitchells vs. the Machines way above the baseline for kid-appropriate movies distributed by Netflix. 

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 Dolby Vision presentation makes excellent use of the high dynamic range format, not only at the upper end of the value scale but also in the shadows  

SOUND | If you like your Atmos mixes intense and all over the place, you’ll dig this one a lot

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Review: Spencer

Spencer (2021)

review | Spencer

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Kristen Stewart channels the inner Diana in this extremely quirky take on the fairytale princess’s flight from grace

by Dennis Burger
February 4, 2022

If there’s one thing I wish I’d known before diving into Pablo Larraín’s Spencer, it’s that this fictionalized portrayal of Princess Diana is as far from bio-pic territory as possible while still incorporating real humans as characters. The film tries to clue you into this from the giddy-up with a title screen that reads “A fable from a true tragedy.” But let’s be honest: That’s the sort of language many a dramatist has leaned on to paper over anachronisms, inaccuracies, and outright fabrications. But Spencer actually does what it says on the tin, delivering a story that could only be accurately described as a fable.

The movie plays out over three days—Christmas Eve though Boxing Day 1991—and if you wanted to distill the plot to its essence, it’s an exploration of Diana’s breaking point, in which she decided to leave her husband and the life of a royal behind her. But it takes such a fascinatingly weird path from its beginning to that point that you can’t simply write the film off as just that. It’s a character study that’s more interested in truth than fact, and although I’m far from qualified to assess whether it hits that mark—really, only one person could have—it certainly feels convincing as a rather abstract expression of Diana’s inner life. 

I guess what I’m saying is, don’t bother Googling “Did that really happen?!” when you stumble on details that seem just farfetched enough to be true. It almost certainly didn’t happen. And trust me, you’ll reach a point in the film where the urge to fact-check leaves you entirely. Maybe it’s the scene in which Diana—played by Kristen Stewart—bites into and swallows a gigantic pearl from a necklace she ripped off her neck at the Christmas dinner table. Maybe it’s the scene in which she gains insight from the ghost of Anne Boleyn. But at some point you’ll give up trying to make more than a tenuous connection between this film and reality—except, perhaps, for the reality that existed in Lady Di’s head. 

Draw a line from Rosemary’s Baby to The Crown, however wiggly, and this film would hew closer to the former than the latter. It is, at times, a psychological drama, at times an absurdist fantasy, and at times a beat poem in cinematic form. And in keeping with its idiosyncratic nature, it doesn’t look like any film I’ve ever seen. There’s no denying from the very first frame that it was shot on film. The quality of the halation is apparent, and inimitable, despite the best video processing algorithms. It’s also a very muted film, mostly devoid of strong contrasts and lacking anything resembling true black. 

It wasn’t until I finished watching the movie and went digging for some additional insights that I discovered it was largely shot on 16mm, which I wouldn’t have guessed based on Vudu’s 4K HDR10 presentation. There doesn’t seem to be enough film grain here for it to have been shot on 16mm, at least not at first glance. And the image is devoid of the sort of muckery normally involved in noise reduction. Fine textures and organic chaos abound, but subtly. As it turns out, the filmmakers used Kodak Vision3 50D, 250D, and 500T stock, which is known for minimal grain even in low-light conditions, of which there are quite a bit in Spencer‘s 117-minute runtime. 

To cut straight to the chase, Spencer is a cinephile’s dream and a videophile’s nightmare. It has a soft, dreamlike, spooky quality but—as a result of the super-low contrasts—no sharp edges and absolutely no pop. It looks like an incredibly well-preserved photograph from decades past. And Vudu’s stream presents this enigmatic image almost flawlessly. There’s one scene early on that takes place in a bathroom in which contrasts are even lower than the norm for the rest of the film, and with the flatness of the background and the bleaching of Stewart’s skin tones, there’s a miniscule amount of posterization that might have been avoided with a bit more bandwidth than Vudu is capable of. But that’s it. 

And if you’ve been keeping up, you won’t be shocked to learn that the film’s Dolby Digital+ 5.1 soundtrack veers quite a way off the beaten path as well. A lot of that has to do with the score by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead fame, which runs the gamut from traditional cinematic composition to avant-garde jazz in spots, but never fails to both support and enhance the film’s erratic moods. 

Overall, it’s an incredibly dynamic mix, but perhaps not in the sense in which we normally use that word to describe surround mixes. It shifts on a whim from a whisper-quite monophonic experience to a shockingly immersive multichannel onslaught and back with something that might be described as regularity if there were anything regular about it. 

Overall, the music and sound mixing were by far my favorite things about Spencer, which is saying a lot given that I was captivated from beginning to end. It isn’t exactly a great film. Not quite. But it is a very good one, marred only by the occasional slip into melodrama, a few editing flubs, and an ending that’s too much of a tonal shift to swallow. For a movie that’s built on tension, tone, and shockingly tasteful body horror (seriously, who even knew that was possible?) to end with a singalong of Mike + The Mechanics’ “All I Need is a Miracle” over a bite of KFC was just a stretch too far for me. But don’t let that turn you off. Spencer is absolutely worth your time. Maybe rent it instead of buying it sight unseen, though. 

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 | Spencer has a soft, dreamlike, spooky quality with no sharp edges and absolutely no pop, which Vudu presents almost flawlessly 

SOUND | An incredibly dynamic Dolby Digital+ 5.1 mix that shifts from whisper-quite monophonic experience to shockingly immersive multichannel onslaught on a whim

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Review: Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets

Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets (2020)

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.

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