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Review: This is Spinal Tap

This is Spinal Tap (1983)

review | This is Spinal Tap

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The first real mockumentary still comes on strong on streaming, despite being tripped up by some overzealous image manipulation

by Michael Gaughn
December 8, 2023

I need to get some bitching out of the way before I dive in—a little bitch and a big one. The little one: I wanted to rent This is Spinal Tap but none of the streaming services offer it for rental so I was forced to buy it instead. Nothing against Tap—it’s one of the great movie comedies (leagues beyond the shrill and humorless Some Like It Hot)—I just have no use for a streaming copy. Amazon only charged a couple bucks more than they would have for a rental, but still. It’s the principle of the thing.

The bigger bitch: It looks like hell. I’m sure many, if not most, people would praise it as looking clean with punchy enough color, but that’s kind of beside the point. Spinal Tap was shot in the early ‘80s on 16mm film and it’s just not convincing as a documentary if it doesn’t look like it was shot in the early ‘80s on 16mm film. But somebody went nuts with the enhancement, creating the kind of too crisp, pointillistic look I get whenever I screw around too much with the sharpening tool in Premiere.

I know that kind of thing is now so common it’s become expected. What was done to The Godfather should have raised howls—I didn’t even hear whimpers. But it’s especially egregious when applied to 16mm, where it can’t look anything other than forced and artificial. And it’s not something that’s easy to get used to. I found its sand-art aesthetic pulling me out of the film over and over for the duration.

I know my issue with this can’t fall on anything but deaf ears at a time when both audiences and studios are determined to make sure everything looks like it’s a product of the present moment, even though the present moment irredeemably sucks. But when it undermines the whole spirit of a film—especially at a time when so many contemporary movies are trying to ape the look of 16mm—there’s just no possible excuse.

All that aside, Spinal Tap holds up mightily—far better than I would have expected going into it. It wasn’t the first mockumentary, but it was the first one to get all the basics right. And it’s got more depth to it than any of the mocus that have come in its wake, partly because Rob Reiner and company achieve the almost impossible task of honoring the conventions of satire while fleshing out the characters in ways the form doesn’t usually allow.

The Office (the U.S. Office) never would have happened without Tap—not just because of the form, but because Peter Smokler, the Office DP who defined the look of the mockumentary genre, cut his teeth on Spinal Tap. In fact, there’s a strong and true through-line from Tap to The Larry Sanders Show to Freaks and Geeks to The Office.

Tap is the pinnacle of Reiner’s career, before he descended into churning out that series of beloved “Rob Reiner” films that were hugely successful but all felt too slick and corporate—soulless. It’s not to take anything away from Reiner’s work on Tap to wonder how much Harry Shearer, Michael McKean, and Christopher Guest contributed to the film’s genius—because it is a work of genius. Yes, McKean, Guest, and Shearer created a beyond convincing fake band to build the movie around, but they also seem to have been co-equal to Reiner to making the film work as film.

It would be lazy to give too much of that credit to Guest, who would essentially pick up the mantle from Reiner and create his own reputation as a mockumentarian. But even the strongest of his efforts—Best of Show—is just pleasing and diverting. It doesn’t come within lightyears of what Tap was able to achieve.

There’s zero point in rehashing the particulars of Tap at this late date since practically every frame of the film is now baked deeply into the culture, but I have to point out how much Harry Shearer was able to do in the otherwise thankless role of second banana. He gets, and then brilliantly milks, the two best sight gags in the film: the (admittedly an acquired taste) ”stuck in the giant plastic chrysalis” bit and the now legendary “zucchini in the trousers” bit, indisputably one of the great sight gags in cinema.

Lastly, the film’s frequent references to racism and sexism reminded me how long we’ve been stuck in that conversation, have been trying to play by those rules, while making practically no discernible headway, but have instead managed to turn legitimate concerns about decency and fairness into wedges to drive huge swaths of the populace, and single individuals with them, apart. It might be time to give up on playing out that particular lose-lose scenario—it’s clearly become nothing but a way to maintain the status quo—and consider that any kind of sustainable decency might need to be rooted in commonality, not difference, instead.

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

PICTURE | Way over-enhanced, in a way that completely undermines the film’s shot-in the-early-’80s-on-16mm documentary aesthetic 

SOUND | The on-set sound is about what you could expect from a pseudo documentary. The music tracks are cleaner and more dynamic, though, with the occasional too-extreme separation of the time.

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A Little Romance

Romantic Comedies

A Little Romance

A Littte Holiday Cheer

A diverse assortment of Valentine’s treats that offers something for everyone. from traditional romantic comedies to more adventurous fare

by the Cineluxe staff
updated January 20, 2024

While not everything in our quirky roundup falls within the more formulaic definition of a romantic comedy, all of the picks display a common lineage and fit comfortably under the something-to-watch-for-Valentine’s-Day umbrella. But it’s a beyond sad sign of the times  that of the hundreds of reviews we’ve done, we weren’t able to find any recent films that even remotely fit the required bill, so we had to rely solely on classics instead. Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Play It Again, Sam are rightly included here, but we flirted with also including The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, and even Mighty Aphrodite and A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy since almost all of Allen’s best films are romantic comedies at heart. As for the fringier choices: Carnal Knowledge is far more pungent than sweet but offers a biting take on romantic conventions—as does Godard’s surprisingly accessible A Woman Is a Woman. And Casablanca, of course, isn’t a comedy. But it’s undeniably a romance, and pairs nicely—if a little obviously—with Allen’s Sam as a satisfying movie night. 

“Forget that this is supposed to be a romantic comedy. Forget about its Oscars. Forget about the well-heeled mob of Hollywood conformists bleating for Woody Allen’s blood. Approach Annie Hall as an adventurous and innovative and unusually honest piece of filmmaking and you’ll get the chance to experience—or re-experience—one of the best American films of the final quarter of the last century, the movie that helped start the wave that brought New York back from the dead, for better or worse.”    read more

“I can’t say I love this film, but I do admire it, and I found the experience of filtering the past and present of the culture through it if not enjoyable exactly, then intriguing and unsettling and ultimately gratifying. You should watch The Apartment, if you haven’t seen it or haven’t seen it in a while. It’s got some real meat on its bones; and it’s an invaluable snapshot of a both tangible and illusory but undeniably decisive, invigorating—and I would argue, squandered—moment in time.”    read more

“It’s a little too obvious to begin a review of Tiffany’s with Audrey Hepburn, but how can you not? What she does with her character is still breathtaking, somehow managing to stay true to the depth and nuance of Truman Capote’s original conception of Holly while shepherding her through all the standard-issue Hollywood attempts to blandify her, emerging with a conception that’s somehow able to synthesize and transcend both.”   read more

“Since Knowledge isn’t considered a ‘big’ movie, who knows if it will ever receive the restoration or 4K bump-up it more than deserves. But there are classics of the marketing-driven, ‘I loved that when I was a kid’ kind, and then there are true classics, as in legitimate works of cinematic art. Carnal Knowledge falls solidly in the latter camp and ought to be on the short list of films worth seeking out for anyone who hasn’t yet encountered it.”     read more

“I don’t have much to say about the movie itself since countless volumes, most of them paperweights, have already been written about it and trying to counter the consensual view would be like trying to push water. But I would like to emphasize how sophisticated—mature—Casablanca is, like many of the films of the ’40s—far more so than their counterparts today, which show little interest in rising above the adolescent wallowing that’s the basic price of admission to contemporary cinema.”     read more

“If you’ve never seen Love Actually and you need a little silly and adorkable escapism this holiday season, this is well worth the price of a download. Will it change your life? No. But if you don’t find yourself guffawing through tears by the time the end credits roll, you’ve got the heart of a Grinch.”   read more

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

“This is a decidedly minor movie made in the somewhat frivolous style director Herbert Ross (The Goodbye GirlFootloose) was known for, and all involved had to have known they were devoting their energies to what was basically a throwaway. But Play It Again, Sam is still well worth watching 50 years on, partly because the lines still deliver but mainly because it was the incubator or springboard (pick your metaphor) for everything that would be great about Woody Allen’s later work.”     read more

“This is the closest Jonathan Demme ever got to doing a really good movie, and it succeeds mainly because of a rock-solid script and still astonishing performances by Jeff Daniels and newcomer Ray Liotta and, to a lesser degree, Melanie Giffith. If it were possible to scrape away all the hip-political gingerbread Demme spread indiscriminately over the proceedings, Something Wild might just possibly qualify as great. But all that utterly extraneous gunk is now so congealed and ossified that you constantly have to peer around it to discern the movie’s strengths.”     read more

This isn’t technically a review but instead Men in Black director Barry Sonnenfeld’s thoughts on shooting this seminal romantic comedy for Rob Reiner and his reflections on how his work as cinematographer fared in the recent 4K release of the film.    read more

“There is really only a handful of movies that qualify as true classics, a number small enough to rest comfortably in the palm of your hand; films that transcend the zeitgeist, fleeting emotional attachments, and the aura created by relentless marketing and that tap into far deeper and more sustaining currents than the vast majority of fare. This is one of them. But given the aversion, which still persists, to foreign films—or at least to the ones that don’t try to ape American films—it’s necessary to make the case a little more forcefully here than you have to for the Hollywood standards. So let’s try this: You can’t say you know and love movies if you haven’t at least tried Godard. And possibly the best place to begin that journey is the current release of A Woman Is a Woman.”     read more

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Review: Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special

Pee Wees Playhouse Christmas Special

review | Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special

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The ultimate alt holiday special holds up surprisingly well and not just as a nostalgia trip

by Michael Gaughn
updated December 3, 2023

One night about eight years ago, right around this same time of year, I had just introduced a five-year-old girl, a seven-year-old boy, and a prematurely jaded 20-year-old film student to some classic Max Fleischer cartoons and they were clamoring for more. I couldn’t find any other good ones on YouTube, so I decided to follow a train of thought—and take a big gamble—and introduce them to Pee-Wee’s Playhouse via the Christmas special.

All three sat rapt throughout. I was surprised that almost every big laugh landed and nobody in that rag-tag group was thrown by the show’s fever-dream take on the holiday. The only real comment came from the five year old, who reacted to Pee-Wee running around the playhouse screaming “It’s snowing! It’s snowing! It’s snowing!” with a vaguely admiring “He’s crazy.” I couldn’t disagree.

The Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special is by far the best thing Paul (Pee-Wee Herman) Rubens ever did. The early seasons of the Playhouse had their flashes of brilliance, but seemed more daring than they were mainly because they were being shown on Saturday morning on CBS. By the time of the Christmas special, the series had run its course, having become a little too educational for its own good. There was really no good reason to expect anything great out of this primetime offering, let alone an act of genius.

It’s no longer possible to appreciate just how bold the Playhouse Christmas was, unapologetically deploying just about every aspect of gay subculture to challenge the dominance of the safely patriarchal Bing Crosby/Perry Como portrayal of the holiday. But the show doesn’t spring from the rage, resentment, and overweening pride that mars practically every contemporary effort along the same lines, instead showing a world of others where everyone gets along out of mutual tolerance and respect.

Just as importantly, Rubens managed to simultaneously honor longstanding comedy traditions—this is practically a textbook of classic schtick—and the comfortable conventions of the network holiday special while doing the best job since Charlie Brown of actually capturing the feel of the season, which is why it’s as strong today as when it debuted in 1988.

There’s a simple test you can take to determine whether the Pee-Wee special is for you: If the show’s opening doesn’t have you convulsed with laughter, you’d be better off watching the Hallmark Channel or Die Hard instead. The beautifully modulated series of gags in this off-the-charts production number rivals the pacing of the comic revelations in the best Chaplin shorts.

There’s little point in recounting the standout bits—although Little Richard on Ice, The Billy Baloney Christmas Special, Grace Jones in a crate, and Hanukkah with Mrs. Rennie are all classics. And it’s hard to get enough of Larry Fishburne as a very urban Cowboy Curtis. That’s not to say that the show doesn’t occasionally sag, but the cameos by Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, and Joan Rivers are all mercifully held to about 15 seconds each. The only truly painful moment is K.D. Lang’s incredibly misguided take on “Jingle Bell Rock,” which she clearly meant as a goof but was unable to goose above the level of a high-school talent show.

This special is from the late ’80s, before TV started aping film-production techniques, but Rubens turns all the various shortcomings of that deeply and permanently flawed medium into virtues. The playhouse is unapologetically set-bound, which reinforces the idea of a man-child living completely divorced from the outside world. (That Pee-Wee only really worked within the artifice of a children’s show helps explain why he never translated well into movies, and why his TV incarnation is way less retrograde and offensive than all the other man-children who overran the ‘80s—and plague us still.) The primitive computer graphics still work because they don’t try to be anything more than what they are—the projections of a child’s imagination. The now legendary puppetry and stop-motion animation remain brilliant.

I was surprised by how good the show looks on Netflix. But you first need to get beyond the opening animation, where a welter of artifacts makes the snowfields look like they’re covered in soot. You can’t expect a TV production from 30-plus years ago to have contemporary sharpness or subtle gradations of color—which would be way out of place here anyway. Everything is appropriately vivid and cartoony, and while there’s the occasional soft frame, there’s never anything egregious enough to pull you out of the show. [NOTE: The special isn’t currently available on Netflix, but the Pee Wee Herman YouTube channel has a restored version available here.]

Watching the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special is like listening to ‘20s small-group jazz—it’s impossible not to feel happy. A lot of shows cynically try to nail the feeling of holiday cheer out of a mandate to spur a nation of knee-jerk consumers to buy yet another round of crap they don’t really need and on the outside chance their not-so-special effort will become up a perennial and rack up some ill-gotten residuals. But the Pee-Wee special has something sincere about it that reminds me a lot (and don’t let this creep you out too much) of Phil Spector’s A Christmas Gift for You—another genius effort from an outsider looking for redemption in the pop-culture heart of Christmas.

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

PICTURE | About as good as you could ever expect a late-’80 TV special to look—although the restored version available on the Pee-Wee Herman YouTube channel looks strangely desaturated

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Review: The Muppet Christmas Carol

A Muppet Christmas Carol

review | The Muppet Christmas Carol

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While not the Muppets’ strongest effort, this oddly faithful retelling of the Dickens tale is a satisfying experience in 4K on Disney+

by Dennis Burger
updated December 3, 2023

The Muppet Christmas Carol isn’t exactly the creative apex of the Muppets franchise. As the first film in the series to be made after the death of Jim Henson, it lacks a lot of the creator’s bohemian funkiness and marks the beginning of a transition for the Muppets in which they became a little more kid-friendly and a little less clever. (Although, to be fair, you could just as easily level some of the same criticism at The Great Muppet Caper.)

But—and this is a pretty huge “but”—it’s still my all-time favorite interpretation of Charles Dickens’ literary classic, just nudging out Richard Donner’s Scrooged and the excellent made-for-TV version from 1984 starring George C. Scott. A lot of that can be attributed to Michael Caine’s performance as Scrooge, in which he seems completely oblivious to the fact that his co-stars almost all have hands up their butts. Instead, he plays the role straight, leaving the winking and nodding mostly to Gonzo the Great, who plays the role of Dickens himself.

There’s also the lovely soundtrack, with songs written by Paul Williams, who didn’t quite turn in as many memorable ditties as he did for The Muppet Movie or Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, but still gives the movie an extra heaping helping of charm.

Oddly enough, despite the songs and despite the puppetry, The Muppet Christmas Carol is a shockingly faithful adaptation of Dickens’ book, abridged though it may be. And as such, it’s a must-see for me every Christmas season.

But as with It’s a Wonderful Life, one must ask if this movie is actually worth owning. And for now—and only for now—I say probably not. That’s primarily because it’s available for free on Disney+—in Dolby Vision no less. The service was, as best I can tell, the first to offer The Muppet Christmas Carol in 4K, and although other digital providers have caught up, I can’t imagine it looking any better on any of those services than it does on Disney+.

The 4K resolution does very little to add detail or definition to the cinematography, and unless my eyes deceive me, the current 4K master wasn’t sourced from the original camera negative. It frankly looks like an upscale from an HD master taken from a print (or at best an interpositive), with the only noteworthy resolution differences coming in the form of enhanced (but very inconsistent) film grain.

The HDR does add a lot to the presentation, mostly by toning down the over-saturation seen in the HD version, leaving the most vibrant hues for those spots with pure primary colors, like the inside of Kermit’s mouth. The HDR also brings more consistency and subtlety to contrasts, making blacks a good bit more consistent and eliminating some crush.

So this is definitely the best The Muppet Christmas Carol has ever looked. But hang on. In recent weeks, it was actually revealed that the original camera negative for the deleted musical number “When Love Is Gone” have been discovered and would be included in a new ground-up 4K restoration of the film sourced from the original elements.

If you’re not familiar with “When Love Is Gone,” that’s probably because the song was cut from the theatrical version of the film at the insistence of Jeffrey Katzenberg and Disney, for fear that it was too emotionally sophisticated for a children’s film (something I can’t imagine Jim Henson ever allowing, but it was his son Brian’s cinematic directorial debut). The song was integrated into LaserDisc and VHS releases of the film, as well some DVD versions, but has disappeared from higher-quality releases due, one would assume, to quality concerns.

Whether you’re particularly interested in that song or not (for my money, it’s one of the film’s best, and thankfully it’s included as a deleted scene on Disney+ and elsewhere), the news that The Muppet Christmas Carol is getting a proper restoration is enough to warrant holding off on a purchase for now.

But if you’ve got Disney+, you should still add the movie to your holiday viewing rotation this year. For all its flaws, it’s still an incredibly charming children’s classic with tons of genuinely funny moments and some wonderful performances throughout, from humans and Muppets alike. And for what it’s worth, it’s the only cinematic adaptation of A Christmas Carol that has genuinely made me shed a tear over the death of Tiny Tim.

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 | HDR adds a lot to the presentation, mostly by toning down the over-saturation seen in the HD version, while also bringing more consistency and subtlety to contrasts

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Review: Wormwood

Wormwood (2017)

review | Wormwood

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Half the content in Errol Morris’s Netflix documentary series on a CIA coverup is must-see viewing—the other half is just an ill-conceived waste of time

by Michael Gaughn
November 6, 2023

If you’re as annoyed as I am by all those overproduced, content-thin pseudo documentaries full of cutesy animation and labored dramatic reenactments that have come to flood Netflix, blame Errol Morris. His 1988 The Thin Blue Line shook up the moribund documentary genre and took it in a radical new direction by introducing images and conventions—including a sometimes cheeky, sometimes brooding tone—straight out of narrative cinema. He can’t really be held responsible for what far less talented, for more ingratiating filmmakers have done with the form he created. But he can be held responsible for offering up an unintentional self-parody in his effort to try to fit into the Netflix mold.

Half of 2017’s Wormwood—the stuff that directly revolves around Eric Olson and his efforts to find out the real story of why his father fell to his death out of a hotel window while in the care of the CIA—is unsettling and riveting. It offers another badly needed glimpse into that organization’s notorious MK Ultra program, shows the failure of the investigative press to pierce the subsequent decades-long coverup, and tells the wrenching story of Olson, who threw away a potentially brilliant career in psychology to get to the bottom of his father’s death. All of that is well worth watching.

The other half—speculative reenactments of the events leading up to and a way from the supposed suicide, with Peter Sarsgaard anemically portraying Olson’s father—is well intended, thinks it’s being groundbreaking, but is nothing but inept, tepid filler. And although Morris has been threatening to do something like this for years, I suspect these segments are only there to the oppressive degree they are because they’re the kind of thing Netflix feels makes documentaries palatable for its audience. But they’re really just a cringe-inducing waste of time that puffs the series up to six episodes when it would have been far more engaging and powerful at three.

So I’ve got a very odd recommendation to make: Definitely watch this series—it’s well worth it. But know that you’ll want to re-edit it in your head as you go along, blotting out all the threadbare theatrics, instead homing in on just the Eric Olson material—unless of course you actually like dramatic reenactments. In which case I have to ask, what the hell’s the matter with you?

I don’t think I can stress this enough: Wormwood is almost schizophrenic, but in a somewhat trivial way. The Eric Olson stuff is brilliantly done, the material is consistently absorbing, and it plays out with all the teases and reveals of a good mystery story. The other half is like having a son in film school and having to sit through the end-of-term screening of everyone’s final projects—except done here with a redundancy and tonal monotony that can make you feel like you’re trying to catch your breath in a vacuum.

That carries over into both the visuals and sound as well. Translating Olson’s therapeutic photo-collage technique into the supporting graphics works well for the most part. (Although it gets a little flip when it commingles images of actual people with shots of the actors portraying them, and Morris goes back to his “spiking the Cointreau” animation about five times too often.) The Olson’s home movies are well deployed to both convey the family in its time and to underscore key emotional points. The score for these segments—yet another dollop of poor man’s Glass—doesn’t really enhance anything but doesn’t do much to distract you, either. And while the video is dim and almost monochromatic, and the framing too clever by half, it doesn’t really impede Olson, Seymour Hersh, the Olson family’s attorneys, and others from presenting their material.

The reenactments, though, feature that relentlessly murky “did somebody forget to pay the electric bill?” look that’s served as a substitute for truly expressive cinematography for more than a decade now. What does this predilection for wallowing in a world where the sun never shines say about our collective psyche? This so-called aesthetic in no way makes the action more interesting—just harder to see. (And here, it even manages to stump Netflix’ usually stellar encoding, with obvious banding in a shot outside a hotel room door in Episode 3 and in the police interrogation scene and the interview with former Assistant DA Stephen Saracco in Episode 4, among other places.)

The score, which behaves itself for the most part during the Eric Olson-related segments, becomes just silly and grating during the reenactments—that monotonous noodling over dark, ominous tones, big on atmosphere but thin on emotion, that we now accept as the contemporary equivalent of the wall-to-wall scoring that helped sink hundreds of mediocre Studio Era productions. If you’re looking for nice, deep, gut-churning bass, the score serves up heaping helpings whenever it’s trying to cover up for the inept staging and convince you something exciting (or at least interesting) is about to happen.

I realize I’m circling back, but it’s a point worth emphasizing: The arc of Eric Olson’s story is documentary manna so well presented that it allows you to tolerate all the dramatic contrivance elsewhere—and how many filmmakers could manage to rise above their own misjudgment like that? But the reenactments seem to be nothing but an exercise in perversity. You can’t really say they summon up enough energy to qualify as sound and fury but they do manage to signify next to nothing. And Morris just can’t stop chewing on the hotel-room scene, showing it play out over and over again with minor variations when it carried whatever impact it was going to have (which wasn’t much) the first time around.

Anyone attuned knows that Errol Morris has had an odd career, and that he’s deliberately cultivated that oddness as a way to keep himself in the limelight. But something that went well beyond his usual quirkiness happened in the wake of his Oscar-winning The Fog of War, which is undeniably a sui generis masterwork. Like with Truman Capote and In Cold Blood, Morris seemed to have lost something essential by digging so deeply into a character as complex and bedeviling as Robert McNamara. He continued to do films on provocative figures—Donald Rumsfeld, Abu Graib, Steve Bannon—but lost the ability to rise to the challenge of his subjects, producing work that didn’t so much leave you hungry for more as hungry for somethinganything. The parts of Wormwood that work work because Morris was almost perfectly attuned to the material and because he obviously identified with and bonded with Olson, providing an emotional undercurrent that’s been missing since he bonded with the uniquely corrupt father figure McNamara. As for the reenactments, the only pertinent question is: What was he thinking?

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

PICTURE | The consistently murky cinematography manages to trip up Netflix’ codec in a few places, with some obvious banding in evidence

SOUND | Intelligible dialogue during the interview segments—a lot of mumbling during the reenactments. The bass goes deep with impact during the dramatic scenes. 

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Halloween Treats

The Shining (1980)

Halloween Treats

We pick more than two dozen films that steer clear of the gratuitous and try stay true to the spirit of the holiday instead

by the Cineluxe staff
updated October 13, 2023

Despite the best efforts of the Hallmark Channel to turn Christmas into a year-round holiday, Halloween has—not so strangely—earned that honor instead. As the culture took a decidedly heavy metal turn, it became inevitable that all things dark and nasty—including, of course, horror movies—should find themselves in permanent ascendance. It would be all too easy to churn out a list of callous and desensitizing hardcore horror flicks, but that kind of cultural effluvia has become so pervasive that there would be little point—and they don’t have much to do with Halloween anyway. The films gathered here are instead meant to invoke the feel of the holiday as a fixed point in time, as a tradition, not a consumerist feeding frenzy. And they’re an effort to move beyond the usual suspects. For every Scream, there’s an Ed Wood; for every It, a Carnival of Souls. The films that follow are meant to offer an opportunity to savor, not wallow.

Alien

Alien has never lived up to its potential on the home screen. DVD and LaserDisc versions were overly grainy and noisy, and the previous remastered Blu-ray version couldn’t do the shadow and black-level detail justice. All of that is made right with this 4K HDR version, which looks fantastic. Fortunately, the restoration isn’t heavy-handed, getting rid of the bad bits of noise and deterioration while keeping Scott’s look and stylistic feel solidly intact.    read more

Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice is one of the worthiest UHD HDR remasters I’ve seen to date (almost on par with The Wizard of Oz), and the film itself is such a joyous (and ironic) celebration of life that it stands on its own.    read more

THE BIRDS

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

If the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a B movie, then Carnival of Souls is a solid C—a wild fling at moviemaking by a bunch of naive and repressed Midwesterners meant for second, or third, billing at Kansas drive-ins, a kind of Bergman-goes-to-Topeka thing that must have confused the hell out of the 2 a.m. hangers-on expecting to get off on something like Chain-Gang Girls. And yet somehow out of that impossible equation came art.   read more

The series is slow in parts but definitely picks up near the end. There are some nice King-esque jump scares along the way, along with tons of general creepiness as we slowly move towards solving the mystery of who is The Kid and how did he get here, along with the overall question of, “Why is Castle Rock so rotten?”    read more

I’m not sure what fans of the film will make of this presentation. Maybe, having looked past its visual flaws in the earlier incarnations they’ll be willing to forgive them being heavily underscored here. My take is that drawing too much attention to the technical lapses makes you that much more aware of everything else that’s wrong. But you can’t expect a well-intended but inept ‘50s creature-on-the-loose throwaway to look like Citizen Kane.   read more

The myth of Dracula isnt one I think needs retelling. It, and vampires in general, have been done to death over the past couple decades. But whenever Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss write a project together, Im intrigued.    read more

I told myself I was going to make this one a quickie and not belabor my points. So, Point No. 1—this is the only good Tim Burton movie. Point 2—it features Johnny Depp’s best performance, by far. Point 3—it’s astonishing Martin Landau did such a great job of playing Lugosi without getting much help from behind the camera. Point 4—Ed Wood died at the box office, not because it’s not a great film—it is—but because it doesn’t fit within the all too predictable definition of what a Burton film is supposed to be. And because it committed the unforgivable sin of being in black & white.    read more

This is a better movie than the original—better acted, more artfully shot, with a more coherent script and more competent direction, but such praise is relative. This is still a glorified after-school special with a false edge, filled with out-of-touch musical numbers and lazy references to modern culture that will lose what chuckle-worthiness they have before the inevitable Hocus Pocus 3 comes out in a few years.    read more

If there’s an inherent value in a piece of pop cinema being able to both capture the angst of an era and use it as a springboard to perfectly project the trajectory of the culture, then Body Snatchers has that, and in spades. The film was too easily dismissed at the time and subsequently as an expression of Red Scare paranoia. It’s not. It’s a low-budget B-movie depiction of the loss of self, or soul—depending on how you want to parse that—uncannily prescient, and done with a power that lends it a continuing relevance it never would have achieved as an A-list project.   read more

It is a surprisingly good horror movie that thankfully relies more on scares than gross-outs to keep you glued to the screen and huddled under your blanket. Don’t go into it expecting a faithful adaptation of Stephen King’s book (although, given how poorly that one has aged, that’s probably a good thing) but do go in expecting a very satisfying reinterpretation of parts of the novel—one that absolutely works on its own terms, whether you have any intention of watching the sequel or not.    read more  

Last Night in Soho won’t be to everyone’s taste, and even if you love it as much as I do, I think you’ll find some flaws with it. Wright attempts to load the film with a bit more meaning than its narrative framework will support. And in paying homage to the whole of the 1960s—from its fashions to its music to the diversity of its cinema, ranging from Polanski to EON Productions—he’s bitten off a bit more than he can chew. All of which makes Last Night in Soho flawed by any objective measure. But it’s one of the most fascinatingly flawed films I’ve seen in ages, which makes it a shoo-in for Day One purchase the instant it’s available on home video proper.    read more  

Loosely based on the short story by Edgar Allen Poe, The Masque of the Red Death is a heightened and slightly campy tale of a pandemic plague that sweeps medieval Italy. The Raven, on the other hand, has no intention to be authentically scary in any way. Peter Lorre plays the Raven in bird and human form in a highly comedic performance. And it has a fabulous supporting cast: Boris Karloff, a very sexy Hazel Court, and a very young Jack Nicholson—in tights, no less.     read more

The Masque of the Red Death

The Raven

One relatively recent trend that warms my dark heart is the reemergence of horror as a legitimate genre of cinema. This isn’t to say that I don’t get a kick out of schlocky B-movie suspense but for most of my adult life, horror movies have been little more than that, leaving legitimate attempts at making serious films in the genre—like Rosemary’s Baby and Kubrick’s The Shining—in the distant past. So to see Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, and Ari Aster’s Midsommar embraced in recent years as art is, if nothing else, a step in the right direction.    read more

Muppets Haunted Mansion ends up being a pretty good time, mostly due to the antics of Pepe combined with the gorgeousness of the imagery. If you have kids, I’m also pretty sure they’ll love the whole thing. And that is the thing I like best about this special. Fun Halloween specials that can be enjoyed by the whole family are few and far between and it’s nice to see another one added to the mix, even if it’s not quite as good as it could have been.
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It ought to be a mess, and yet Nightmare remains one of the most charming and heartfelt holiday films I’ve ever seen. And, yes, it would be more accurate to call Nightmare a “holiday” film than a Christmas film because although it appropriates all the trappings of our modern commercialized, paganized melting-pot celebration of the nativity, the story makes it abundantly clear the trappings of Christmas are hardly the point.    read more

Old

While Old isn’t the best of M. Night Shyamalan’s catalog, it’s not 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 “I see dead people!”  Also, I felt like he tried to over explain and over resolve the ending, and it would have been better had he stopped about five minutes before he did and let it be more open-ended.  read more

Anybody who cares about movies beyond junk-food event flicks needs to make the pilgrimage to Hitchcock at some point in their lives, and there are far worse places to start than Psycho (like, say, Family Plot). Whether it gets under your skin on your first viewing is a matter of blind luck, but it will stick with you. If you haven’t seen it in a while, your best chance beyond the local revival house will be these UHD and HDR releases. And if you’re a rabid fan of the film, you should have already hit the download button by now.    read more

For my money, Pan’s Labyrinth is as near to perfection as any work of cinema made in the past quarter century. And while I can’t say the same for any of its home video releases, this new UHD/HDR release gets closer to the mark than past efforts. Quite frankly, that’s enough to recommend it as a worthy upgrade for those who are already under the film’s spell.   
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A Quiet Place 2 is like a classic horror film where suspense and what you dont see provides much of the scares, which is perfect for people who dont like what the modern horror genre has become. The violence is mostly bloodless, and not the focus of the film. Not only does it make for a great night at the movies, I think it actually plays better in a well-designed home theater outfitted with an array of Atmos height and surround speakers for the full experience.   
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Nobody needs to convince you to watch Rosemary’s Baby. Its reputation as a horror classic is unassailable and secure. But I would urge you to first scrape away as many of the accreted conventions Polanski’s shocker has spawned and try to see it as if all those other films had never happened, as this is the place where it all began.    read more

The teen-slasher genre had been stagnating in the ‘90s when along came Wes Craven of Freddy Krueger and A Nightmare on Elm Street fame to totally upend and breathe new life into the genre with Scream. It’s hard to believe Scream is celebrating its 25th anniversary but the good news is that Paramount has given it a 4K HDR transfer.    read more

This latest Scream is the first film in the series not directed by franchise creator Wes Craven. But it remains true to the spirit of the franchise and brings back key cast, including Randy Jackson returning to voice Ghostface, with some quick cameos and voiceovers from actors that have been in the earlier films. I did find the violence to be a bit more brutal and gorier, and the language to be a bit saltier, so definitely not suitable for younger viewers.    read more

This release of The Shining will quickly become the jewel of any serious film collection. But it’s not there to be revered but watched. This film’s impact hasn’t diminished a jot since the day of its release. And this 4K HDR version takes us all the way back to that first day without compromise.  
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Stranger Things 3 is such a tonal, structural, and narrative departure from what’s come before that it can take hardcore fans of the series a few episodes to get into this year’s batch of eight episodes. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with the first couple episodes. In fact, the show’s creators demonstrate time and again their ability to lovingly mash up, remix, riff on, and reassemble 1980s pop culture in new and inventive ways. It’s simply that this time around, they’re being a little cheeky about it.    read more

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Review: A Life of Speed: The Juan Manuel Fangio Story

A Life of Speed

review | A Life of Speed: The Juan Manuel Fangio Story

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This Netflix documentary about the Formula One legend makes for compelling viewing, even if you’ve never heard his name

by Dennis Burger
March 30, 2020

Could Superman beat the Incredible Hulk? Is Batman a match for Iron-Man? These sorts of questions have filled the dreams of kids and comic-book geeks alike for decades, but they’re rarely seen as any more than conversation starters or flights of fancy. And yet, for some reason, asking who’s the greatest baseball player or quarterback or goalie of all time is viewed as legitimate discourse amongst grown-ass men and scholars alike.

Those of us who follow motorsports (serious ones, at least) know what a ridiculous question this is when applied to our own passion. Auto racing is as much about the team as it is the pilot. It’s as much about the car as the team. It’s as much about the chaos of meteorological conditions as it is the car. And, yes, we all have our favorite drivers (shout-out to Jan Magnussen), but that often has as much to do with personality or manufacturer affiliation as it does talent.

But such subjectivity didn’t satisfy Dr. Andrew Bell of the Sheffield Methods Institute, who set out in 2016 to use quantitative statistical analysis to remove (or at least account for) the differences made by cars, teams, weather, and even year-to-year variance in order to determine who was the best Formula One pilot of all time. I mention this research only because the resulting paper forms the backbone of the new Netflix documentary A Life of Speed: The Juan Manuel Fangio Story. And this fact alone—the use of scientific parsing to answer the question of who could beat whom if they never competed head-to-head—makes for one of the most fascinating sports documentaries I’ve seen in ages—perhaps ever.

As with any documentary focusing on the accomplishments of a single individual, A Life of Speed leans heavily on biography and provides a solid understanding of who Fangio was and what made him tick, even if you’ve never heard his name before. It also provides a pretty satisfying history of Formula One, a sport that emerged just as Fangio was making a name for himself in long-distance dirt-road racing. On top of that, it sprinkles in a bit of the history of automotive engineering.

Truth be told, if the film weren’t so well made, it would probably crumble under its own weight. It attempts to be three or four documentaries at once—which is at least two too many—and if not for the talents of director Francisco Macri and editor Luciano Origlio, it would be a mess. Somehow, though, it isn’t a mess. Quite the opposite—by juggling so many balls so effectively, A Life of Speed manages to be interesting in several ways simultaneously.

Of course, given its historical nature, the bulk of the film is comprised of archival photographs, old film stock, kinescope recordings, and even a few well-played VHS tapes. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing for Netflix’ 4K HDR presentation to latch onto, though. The present-day interviews and newly filmed historical reenactments are beautifully framed, wonderfully composed, and have a distinctive low-contrast look that still makes great use of the enhanced dynamic range and color gamut of modern home video standards.

If there’s one glaring criticism I can level from a creative perspective, it’s that the score is just awful. If you’ve ever used one of those power-nap apps that are all the rage these days, you’ll recognize the New Age-y ambience in a heartbeat.

Also, the film is presented in a 2.39:1 aspect ratio, which wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that Netflix positions its subtitles halfway into the black bar at the bottom of the screen, with no way of moving them. So if you’re using a constant-height projection setup, you’ll likely miss half the film’s dialogue and narration (unless you speak Spanish, Italian, German, and English).

Don’t let those quibbles turn you off, though. Even if you’re not a fan of Formula One—indeed, even if you’ve never heard the name Fangio—A Life of Speed is one of those rare documentaries whose quality isn’t contingent upon your interest in the subject matter.

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 | Although most of the film is made up of archival material, Netflix’ 4K HDR presentation does a great job with the present-day interviews and newly filmed historical reenactments

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Review: The Edge of Democracy

The Edge of Democracy

review | The Edge of Democracy

This Oscar-nominated Netflix film is less a documentary than a personal journal about Brazil’s tentative hold on democracy

by Dennis Burger
January 28, 2020

The Edge of Democracy is one of the most infuriating, frustrating, and foreboding films I’ve seen in ages but also one of the most compelling, and without a doubt the most haunting. Had it been your typical faux-objective political documentary, I’m not sure that would have been the case. But in telling the story of Brazil’s relatively recent political struggles, filmmaker Petra Costa makes no pretenses about objectivity. What she’s really telling here is her own story—a story about watching her civilization collapse around her.

Right from the giddy-up, Costa lays all of her cards on the table. Her parents were revolutionaries who fought against the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985. She was only five when the country officially returned to democracy in 1988. Her first vote in a national election was cast for Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The ideology of Partido dos Trabalhadores, the Worker’s Party, runs through her veins.

As such, when she began documenting the crumbling of Brazil’s fragile democracy, starting with the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2015, she didn’t do so dispassionately, with the eye of a historian. More than anything, The Edge of Democracy centers on her own frustrations, sense of foreboding, fury as she watches her country being torn apart by partisanship, fueled by the corruption of oligarchs and the malfeasance of the media.

You wouldn’t think this would be fodder for twists and turns, but it is. Rather than plot twists, though, the film dwells in personal, emotional twists. There’s the revelation, for example, that Costa has just as many familial ties to the oligarchs at the center of the corruption scandal that rocked the country as she does to revolutionaries.

That adds another shade of gray to a very personal story that’s all shades of gray, really. It’s a story told with nuance, but also with passion. More than anything, though, what impresses me is Costa’s ability to deftly and clearly straddle the line between the specific and the general. She never fails to articulate the unique failures of the Brazilian political and judicial system that make all of this a distinctly Brazilian problem. On the other hand, she clearly illuminates some universal truths about the ways in which any representative government can devolve into plutocracy and then autocracy through demagoguery and manufactured consent.

The rhythm with which she oscillates between these two perspectives is frighteningly effective. Just as I started to settle into a “Phew, that couldn’t happen here” sense of security, Costa blindsided me with a stark reminder that, yeah, it totally could. The tempo and pacing of the film are also aided by deft editing and a non-linear unfolding of the story that emphasizes both the personal, emotional trauma this film represents, as well as its effectiveness as a warning to the rest of the world.

Much of the imagery that comprises the film is taken from archival film footage and TV broadcasts, some of it from source tapes and some of it from cell phones pointed at TV screens, mixed with handheld video that looks to be prosumer level and drone shots interspersed throughout for flavor. It definitely makes for a visually interesting film, though not one you’ll watch as demo material. Netflix HD transfer does the imagery justice, and is almost never the weak link in the delivery chain, except in those cases where a few seconds here and there of original footage might have benefited from high dynamic range and an expanded color gamut.

The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 soundtrack unsurprisingly leans heavily on the center channel, with the mix focusing primarily on Costa’s narration (provided in your choice of English or Portuguese, although even if you opt for the former, the bulk of the audio is still in Portuguese with subtitles).

The sound design does occasionally get a little big for its britches, especially in its overuse of the surround channels to convey the chaos of celebratory crowds or demonstrations. I can’t help but suspect that what we’re getting here is a theatrical sound mix not a nearfield mix made for home theaters, but the good news is that such overemphasis on surround sound is generally limited to scenes without narration or even dialogue so it’s hard to grump about it. It never interferes with the telling of the story, although it does intrude on moments that could have served as a prompt for quiet reflection.

No matter. I haven’t stopped thinking about The Edge of Democracy since I saw it so I’ve had plenty of opportunities to reflect on my own time. It’s a rare political documentary I think I’ll revisit on occasion, not due to the revelation or illumination contained within its 121-minute runtime—although there is plenty of that—but more due to the fact that it’s simply one of the most engrossing and intimate human dramas I’ve seen in ages, genre be damned.

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 | Netflix’ HD transfer does the imagery justice and is almost never the weak link in the delivery chain, except when a few seconds of original footage might have benefited from high dynamic range and an expanded color gamut

SOUND | The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 soundtrack unsurprisingly leans heavily on the center channel but does occasionally overuse the surround channels to convey the chaos of celebratory crowds or demonstrations

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Review: Life in Color

Life in Color

review | Life in Color

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Netflix makes major strides toward picture-perfect reproduction with this David Attenborough nature series

by Dennis Burger
June 24, 2021

If you have someone in your life who insists that streaming simply isn’t capable of delivering an AV experience worthy of a true home cinema, here’s a fun little experiment you can perform, assuming you’re willing to spend a few bucks. If you don’t have one already, go out and buy a Roku Ultra for $75 or whatever they’re selling for at the moment. Hook it up to the biggest and best display in your home. Fire up either of the first two episodes of the new Netflix/BBC co-production Life in Color and skip past the opening credits. Then invite the bitrate dogmatist in your life to sit and watch a few minutes of the series. If they’re anything like most videophiles, they’ll soon be begging to borrow the disc or at least know what it’s called so they can order their own copy.

And that’s when you spring the trap. Hit the back button on your remote and return to the Netflix homepage. If your guest balks, hit Play again and implore them to point out any flaws in the imagery. Challenge them to show you any noteworthy compression artifacts. Ask them to point out any instances of less-than-razor-sharp detail, any loss of color purity. Or, you know, maybe take a kinder and gentler approach. It occurs to me as I’m writing this that perhaps there’s a good reason I don’t have more friends.

This series, played via good streaming hardware, needs to be put in front of the eyeballs of more home cinema enthusiasts, if only as a prime example of just how much streaming has improved in just the past few years. But even if you’re not here to inspect the imagery with a magnifying glass and marvel at the masterful application of high-efficiency compression, there’s a lot to love about Life in Color. The series is, in many ways, a bit of a throwback for host David Attenborough, a return to a time when he wasn’t merely narrating documentary footage but actively participating in the filming. I thought we’d seen the end of that era, given Attenborough’s age (95, for those keeping count). And this may be the last time we see him traipsing through the jungle to point out something cool and eye-catching.

It’s also something of a return to the more specialized sort of documentaries he more commonly made in the ’80s and ’90s. For the past few years, Attenborough has been focused on making grand statements, as if every new documentary released under his name was made as if it would be his last. But, as its name in implies, Life in Color is content to go deep rather than wide, focusing on one topic with laser precision: The variety of colors in nature.

The first episode, “Seeing in Color,” focuses on all the ways life uses chromaticity to attract mates, signal friends, and repel foes, as well as the different ways animals see in color, both within and outside of the spectrum visible to humans. The second episode, “Hiding in Color,” focuses mostly on camouflage.

The third episode, “Chasing Color,” is a weird one, and I mean that in the best possible way. It sets itself up as a sort of making-of for the first two episodes, exploring the new camera and lens technology developed specifically for this series. But then it veers off to answer to the question: “How do you know that?” In other words, it’s a pretty satisfying explanation of the science behind the surprising little bits of trivia dropped by Attenborough throughout the earlier episodes.

As much as I loved the series—although, truth be told, I would happily consume nine hours of Attenborough narrating golf, or paint drying, or my last colonoscopy, so maybe I’m not the best judge of its quality—I almost found myself distracted by how impossibly perfect it all looks. Just over two years ago, I absolutely raved about the gorgeousness of Our Planet. But Life in Color looks even better, mostly because the few remaining encoding flaws that made brief onscreen appearances in the older series are nowhere to be seen here.

There are underwater shots reminiscent of those in Our Planet, and yet none of the minor color banding that briefly reared its head there. There are scenes here that push the bounds of image complexity in ways Our Planet never did, and yet they appear without blemish. (There’s one shot, in which a peacock bristles its plume in slow motion, that’s such a kaleidoscope of fine detail that I would expect it to be riddled with some digital ookiness even at 100 mbps. And yet, with my nose on my screen, I couldn’t see any of the telltale signs of HEVC reaching its breaking point. I can only assume Netflix recently adopted a new encoder, because otherwise I just cannot make sense of why this imagery looks this pristine.)

Dolby Vision is also employed to stunning effect. There are colors on the screen that older home video technology simply wasn’t capable of reproducing—vibrant reds and yellows and greens that fall outside the boundaries of the color space used in the HD era.

I guess if you want to pick nits about the presentation, you could take issue with the fact that the audio is merely 5.1, not Dolby Atmos. But it’s still a lovely mix. And it up-mixes into Atmos beautifully, especially in the scenes set within jungles or forests.

So, yeah, maybe don’t take my advice when it comes to confronting your streaming-skeptical friends. Perhaps take a nicer approach. But make them sit down and watch Life in Color anyway. It’s honestly some of the most compelling home cinema demo material I’ve seen in years.

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 | Dolby Vision is also employed to stunning effect, producing vibrant reds and yellows and greens that fall outside the boundaries of the color space used in the HD era

SOUND | The 5.1 soundtrack is lovely, and up-mixes into Atmos beautifully, especially in the scenes set within jungles or forests

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Review: Blue Planet II

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review | Blue Planet II

This David Attenborough series has been available on many platforms but truly shines on Kaleidescape

by Dennis Burger
December 12, 2018

My wife and I watch a lot of documentaries. No, seriously, a lot of documentaries. Air a special about dinosaur dung, the restoration of a 1967 barn-find VW Beetle, or how a famous actress invented frequency-hopping encryption during World War II, and we’re pretty much guaranteed to boost your Nielsen numbers for the night. Here’s the thing, though: We watch a lot of documentaries exactly once. That seems pretty normal to me. After all, do I really need to re-learn how Lego bricks are made?

The one exception to this rule is David Attenborough’s captivating nature docs because there’s nothing normal about the treasures this wonderful man has bestowed upon the world. If you’ve never seen one of his series, I’m envious that you have the opportunity to discover him for the first time. His infectious, childlike sense of wonder about nature, combined with the wisdom you’d expect of a natural historian with 92 years under his belt, makes each of his series seem like a sci-fi/fantasy exploration of a planet in a galaxy far away. There’s a weird and wonderful sense of cognitive dissonance that comes from realizing, somewhere in the middle of one of his shows, that we actually live on this weird and wonderful world.

A scant 11 months after the incredible Blue Planet II first aired here in the Colonies, my wife and I have already devoured the series from start to finish three times. And as we were sitting down for our fourth feast this weekend, we finally decided to retire the 4K broadcast recordings clogging our DVR and move on to a proper home video release.

Netflix seemed the logical place to turn to, since the series just made its way to the service this month. And it took no more than a few seconds of viewing to note that their version was a huge step up from the original 4K satellite broadcast. Kudos to their engineers for compressing such a visually complex image as well as they have. Simply put, Blue Planet II looks brilliant streaming in 4K, as long as you’ve got a good ‘net connection.

But shows come and go on Netflix. I can’t count the number of times that utterly re-watchable favorites have been yanked at pretty much exactly the same time I had a hankering to watch them. So, when I noticed that Blue Planet II is also now available on Kaleidescape—along with a whole host of other programming from BBC America—downloading it was a no-brainer. At a hefty 193 GB, the seven-episode mini-series is not an impulse download, but as I said above, this is a show that’s already in heavy rotation in the Burger casa. I knew it was worth the wait.

I just didn’t realize how wait-worthy it would turn out to be. As lovely as these alien undersea vistas are via Netflix, they’re positively stupefying in Kaleidescape’s full-bandwidth presentation. The tiniest of details simply fly off the screen. And thanks to the HDR presentation—something Blue Planet II lacks via Netflix, for whatever reason—you can’t help but be sucked right into the image, eyelids peeled, jaw agape, breath bated, mind blown. If the Broca area of your brain can crank out much more than the occasional “whoa” while watching a technicolor cuttlefish hypnotizing its cancrine prey in Episode Three, you’re made of sterner stuff than I. Switch over to the Netflix stream, and that scene almost seems monochromatic by comparison.

Even if you’re not a biology nerd or a connoisseur of great documentaries, Blue Planet II is an absolute must-own on Kaleidescape (or on UHD Blu-ray, if you haven’t made the leap into the discless future just yet). It’s perhaps the most torturous AV demo material I’ve lain eyes on in ages. It’s the title you’ll pull up when skeptical guests ask, “Do I really need this HDR business?” because Blue Planet II’s answer to that isn’t a mere “yes.” It’s a yes with an exclamation point, delivered in a charming British accent, with a wink and an unforgettable lesson about the kooky unexplored corners of our own globe.

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 | As lovely as the alien undersea vistas are via Netflix, they’re positively stupefying in Kaleidescape’s full-bandwidth presentation

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