Kaleidescape

Review: Let Him Go

Posted on January 26, 2021

For a film featuring the star power of Kevin Costner and Diane Lane—who last shared the screen in 2013’s mega-budget superhero film Man of Steel as the “adoptive” parents of Krypton’s most-famous son—Let Him Go was a bit of a sleeper. Though, to be fair, nearly every film—save Tenet—that has had any kind of cinematic release during the pandemic could be forgiven for sliding in under the radar. Released on November 6, 2020, Let Him Go enjoyed several weeks in theaters before being made available as a PVOD offering during the long Thanksgiving weekend. It is now available for purchase in 4K HDR quality from digital retailers like Kaleidescape.

Based on the 2013 novel of the same name by Larry Watson, Let Him Go is a domestic drama that gradually ignites into a thriller as we eventually meet all the players and the entirety of the situation has unfolded. A bit like watching a fuse of unknown length slowly burn, the film kind of plods along for the first two-thirds, but then ramps up in tension as you sense the fuse is getting closer to triggering an explosion, leaving you unsure what and whom it will ultimately destroy. Based on

Kaleidescape’s brief synopsis—“Grandparents take matters into their own hands to protect their grandson and daughter-in-law from a family of psychopaths”—I was expecting an actioner something akin to Taken with a western vibe, but that wouldn’t be a fair description at all. I’d say the pacing and vibe here is a bit more No Country for Old Men.

In the film’s opening minutes, the only son (Ryan Bruce) of George and Margaret Blackledge (Costner and Lane) dies, leaving behind his widow Lorna (Kayli Carter) and their infant son Jimmy (played by twins Otto and Bram Hornung). We jump ahead three years to see Lorna is now married to Donnie Weboy (Will Britain), who has no interest in getting to know the Blackledges. One day while out shopping, Margaret witnesses Donnie physically abusing Lorna and Jimmy, and when she goes to confront him about it, discovers the family has abruptly left Montana without so much as a goodbye and headed to live with the Weboy family. Convinced of the worst, headstrong Margaret

LET HIM GO AT A GLANCE

Kevin Costner and Diane Lane star is this slow-burn domestic drama, set in Montana, that eventually explodes into a thriller.

PICTURE

Image quality is uneven, with some closeups bristling with detail while wider shots tend to be a tad soft.

SOUND

The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack presents dialogue clearly and uses little atmospherics to help establish different scenes and environments.

informs ex-policeman George that they need to track the family down and save young Jimmy, and she is going with or without him. When they finally discover the Weboy clan, well, things turn . . . creepy. (I wasn’t sure that was the right word here, but on checking the exact definition—“producing a nervous shivery apprehension”—that definitely feels like the right adjective.)

At 113 minutes, Let Him Go never feels in a hurry but steadily ambles, without too many surprises along the way, toward its violent conclusion. What makes it so entertaining and engaging are the performances by Costner and Lane, who are intense and real, and make you feel as if they’ve lived a simple but happy life together on a ranch in 1960s Montana. This is especially true of Lane, who takes the reins in many scenes and is the driving force in the story. Additionally, the off-kilter performances of Donnie’s uncle, Bill (Jeffrey Donovan), and Weboy matriarch Blanche (Lesley Manville) add to the believability that things could spiral out of control with a family that holds control over a small North Dakota town. Conversations between them seem perfectly normal but brew with a deep undercurrent of creepy unease, tension, and read-between-the-lines threats. Manville isn’t in many scenes but she steals the room whenever she is there. As a parent, I was especially taken by the performance of the Hornung twins as young Jimmy. Their mannerisms, expressions, and demeanor make you ache and care for this little boy.

There is no mention of the resolution used for filming or for the digital intermediate, but I found image quality to be a bit uneven at times. While some closeups bristled with detail and held the actors’ faces in crisp focus, others—specifically wider shots—were a tad soft. It looks as if the cinematographer chose to keep the main subject in focus at the expense of

objects around it, which were often slightly defocused, something apparent on my 115-inch screen and 4K projector. This was especially noticeable in some of the big vista shots, where sweeping backgrounds didn’t have the sharpness and detail they could, with fields of grasses or trees clearly softer looking. The 2.39:1 aspect ratio does a beautiful job presenting the wide vistas of what is supposed to be Montana and North Dakota, but, on the whole, I’d say images had a more film-like “softness” rather than sharp digital detail.

It appeared many scenes were filmed using available natural light, giving lots of shadow detail, such as the opening early-morning scene filmed in a stable. A couple of scenes shot by firelight look especially good, with warm lighting and shadows dancing across the actors’ faces, and the dusky, nighttime skies are always clear and noise-free.

The film has a mostly muted, beige/tan, earth-tone color palette, with pops of colors from green grass or cars and trucks. A conflagration clearly popped with blazing reds and oranges, as did bright sunlight streaming in through windows.

Released cinematically with a Dolby Digital sound mix, the Kaleidescape download has a 5.1-channel DTS-HD Master audio soundtrack that presents

dialogue clearly first and foremost. I was pleasantly surprised by how much the audio uses little atmospherics to help establish different scenes and environments. Whether it is the sounds of traffic outside, the low rumble and bell of a distant train, whistling winds, the hum of an AC compressor in an apartment, or bird and insect noises, there was a surprising amount of ambient audio sounds spread around the room to help place you in environment. A scene near the finale has creaks and groans of an old home that upmix nicely into the overhead, height speakers. While there isn’t a lot of gunfire, the few gunshots are loud and dynamic and have an authentic quality to them, making you jump a bit at their power. The audio also does a nice job presenting Michael Giacchino’s mournful soundtrack, with simple guitars, cello, and strings that have a soulful, melancholy feel evocative of older westerns.

Let Him Go is not a fun movie. In fact, near the end, my wife got up and said, “This is just too sad. I can’t finish it.” But with an 82% Rotten Tomatoes rating, it is a thoughtful, well-made, well-acted film that will leave you appreciating the family you do have and perhaps contemplating just how far you’d go to save a loved one. Also, if you learn no other lesson from viewing, perhaps it should be, “Don’t pull a gun unless you are good and ready to use it.”

—John Sciacca

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

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Review: Blue Velvet

Posted on January 24, 2021

in Kaleidescape, Movies, Reviews

by admin

I used to be a huge David Lynch fan. His films were a welcome relief from the increasingly juvenile and shrill mainstream fare of the ‘80s and ‘90s without the pretentiousness and unearned seriousness of typical Oscar fodder. And they were, for the most part, fun to watch, even exhilarating.

But I also had my doubts. Something about his work never quite aligned the way it should. Each movie was ultimately less than the sum of its parts, seeming to deliver as you watched it but quickly dissipating after the lights came up, scattering as quickly as the dreams he has always tried to ape.

And there were always efforts along the way that were just plain indigestible—the mercilessly vicious Wild at Heart, the pointlessly incoherent Lost Highway, and the just plain pointless Inland Empire.

On the other hand, I’ve always liked the much derided Fire Walk with Me, for some reason, and have a soft spot for The Straight Story. Mulholland Dr. might be the one film of his people will still look at 50 years from now, thanks mainly to Naomi Watts’ performance—although they might jump ship once they realize it means having to put up with Justin Theroux for two hours.

What sealed all of my doubts about Lynch and morphed those doubts into a kind of disgust was the misguided and inept Twin Peaks reboot. As with most reboots, it gave hardcore fans, who are by definition uncritical, exactly what they wanted. But for anyone who appreciates unique experiences and the passé notion of quality, it was all half-baked, nasty, and relentlessly ugly.

The point of this potted history was to bring us to the film that really set the whole “Lynch” thing in motion, Blue Velvet. Until then, he only had a glorified student film that

VELVET AT A GLANCE

The film that opened the floodgates of “dark” cinema and made Lynch’s career remains a compelling experience—but of what?

PICTURE

Velvet looks surprisingly good in HD—even the legendary murkiness of Dorothy Vallens’ hell-in-a-handbasket apartment—which bodes well for a UHD release.

SOUND

Alan Splet’s brilliant sound design seems to have a life of its own and, even though originally mixed for stereo, feels perfectly at home in surround.

became a glorified cult film, a dull portrait of a historical freak, and a completely disjointed and uninteresting sci-fi epic under his belt. Velvet not only finally established his career but also launched all of those mannered, fetishistic tropes that defined the Lynch brand—the arch little faux Dali jokes, the ambiguous images and actions and gestures and phrases and stylistic splashes that were meant to be dreamlike but ultimately meant even less than dreams, the politically motivated retrograde embrace of the 1950s, the dipping into his record collection to parasitically create unearned emotional effects, and the raw sadism we were supposed to accept because it was the unfiltered upwelling of the unconscious or something. Beyond, and because of, all that, it ultimately helped launch the most corrosive trends in the history of the movies, resulting in our current atrocity-based cinema. But I’ll get to that.

It’s probably been a decade since I last watched Blue Velvet so I was able to approach it with somewhat fresh eyes, and it still works. It’s still a compelling piece of filmmaking that leaves you feeling like you’ve experienced something—although my sense of what that something is has changed considerably over the years.

It still works partly because is it has a rudimentary plot with something resembling emotional hooks. Of course, it’s a pretty lousy excuse for a story and daring somebody to retell it accurately is an all but guaranteed way to win a party bet, but it at least acts as a kind of dog fence for reining in Lynch’s various indulgences, lending something resembling form, unlike the inchoate and dull randomness of most of his other work.

But what really struck me this time is just how much Dennis Hopper makes this film. He is Blue Velvet. Kyle McLachlan is a far from riveting screen presence and Laura Dern’s gangly awkwardness can make their scenes together uncomfortable to sit through. But once Hopper appears, everything clicks neatly into place and the film leaps from being a stylistic exercise to something worth watching.

Hopper always struck me as a one-note actor—when he wasn’t raging, he wasn’t anything. But he perfectly channels all of that here, convincingly making pure rage equal pure evil and making you wonder if all the treacly stuff at the beginning and end isn’t just insincere pretext. Most people would assume Lynch meant McLachlan to be his onscreen surrogate, especially after all the Agent Cooper crap in the original Twin Peaks. But I seriously have to wonder, especially in light of the rest of his career, if Lynch didn’t really feel most at-one with Hopper’s Frank Booth. McLachlan is kind of a nullifying presence but Hopper is the wellhead of all energy.

Fredrick Elmes’ hugely influential and at times sublime cinematography is still effective—but the film’s low budget was a little more obvious this time around and runs the risk of being even more blatant when Blue Velvet eventually makes the leap from HD to UHD. There’s what looks like dirt on the lens during the famous opening pan down from the improbably blue sky and an obvious screen-door effect from, I’m guessing, a lens filter during the early shot where Jeffrey approaches the field where he discovers the severed ear. Also, the heavy reliance on wide-angle lenses causes curvature at the edges of the frame that becomes distracting and then annoying, and ultimately dates the film.

Alan Splet’s equally influential sound design is still intriguing, but since it’s not always clear what it’s in the service of, it’s almost like listening to an abstract exercise in musique concrète. Blue Velvet deserves credit, though, for being one of the

first films to make a convincing case for using surround sound for something other than the usual bludgeoning mayhem (even though it was originally released in stereo).

Angelo Badalamenti’s score is, let’s say, interesting, mainly a Schoenberg pastiche (you get the sense Lynch was using Verklärte Nacht for a temp track) interspersed with some not very convincing cop-drama cues. It has the saving grace of having been done with an actual orchestra, unlike the more watery synth-driven stuff Badalementi tended to lean on in Lynch’s later films.

There is no denying that Blue Velvet contains some brilliant filmmaking, that parts of it have a purity of execution that’s invigorating and rare. And if that was all that was relevant to judging a film, Lynch could be considered one of the great directors. But there’s something at the heart of this movie that’s just depraved, something that Lynch’s frequent flashing of his TM Get Out of Jail Free card just can’t absolve. Blue Velvet remains disturbing because it’s disturbed—there’s just no other way to slice it.

And that presents the biggest rub. Lynch helped make amoral depravity fashionable. It’s not like he didn’t have a lot of help, but he, with this film, pretty

much single-handedly created its art-house wing. And he threw open the doors for every other callow entitled type who could hide their fundamental immaturity behind dazzling exercises in style. Without Lynch, there is no Fincher—or PTA or Spike Jonze or Aronofsky or any of the other aesthetically or morally half-born types we now bank our notions of serious filmmaking on.

Of course, that raises the question of whether these directors—or rather the machines that have their names attached to them—actually influence the culture or just reflect it. This isn’t the place to go into that. And what I feel is the correct answer is far from trendy. All I can say in closing is that the perception of Blue Velvet, and of Lynch, would be far different if this film had remained an exception, if hadn’t been a harbinger, if it hadn’t become the rule.

—Michael Gaughn

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

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Review: Chinatown

Posted on January 17, 2021

in Kaleidescape, Movies, Reviews

by admin

Let me get the obligatory reviewer equivocation out of the way right up front: Yes, you should watch Chinatown in 4K HDR. No, this isn’t the transfer this film deserves.

Chinatown is, of course, one of the great films of the ’70s and, given that it was made by a bunch of smug movie-industry types, represents something much greater than the sum of the various talents involved. Call it The Casablanca Effect—a film that rises well above the norm more due to the spirit of the age and the chance gathering of forces than any concerted effort of creative will. Hollywood is designed to ensure that truly great movies can’t get made, and it’s only been the very rare—and

now extinct—iconoclasts who’ve ever figured out how to game the system and create anything resembling art. Nobody involved in Chinatown fits the iconoclast MO.

The film has its rough spots. Jack Nicholson never seems entirely comfortable in the lead role and sometimes comes across like a kid playing dress-up. The opening with him and Burt Young is stilted and forced. And some of the secondary casting is questionable, draining the air from some of the scenes.

But this is probably Roman Polanski’s best work (although a convincing case could be made for Rosemary’s Baby) and Robert Towne never came near topping his justly famous screenplay, which successfully updates Raymond Chandler without veering into parody or fawning pastiche.

But pointing out individual contributors detracts from the

CHINATOWN AT A GLANCE

One of the great films of the ’70s, and well worth watching in 4K HDR despite some glaring problems with the transfer.

PICTURE

The film’s evocation of pre-World War II LA is still compelling despite crushed blacks, inconsistent skin tones, and an overall flatness.

SOUND

What you would expect from mid-’70s audio—in other words, serviceable. But Jerry Goldsmith’s near miraculous score is still a wonder to behold.

more important point that Chinatown, as a kind of spontaneously generated entity with a life of its own, perfectly sums up the mid ‘70s by leaning so heavily on the 1930s. Robert Altman took a similar tack at around the same time with his far more auteuristic riff on Chandler, The Long Goodbye. Those films, considered together, reflect a culture toying with the notion that a retreat into the past might be the best response to the turmoil of the ‘60s. They—and to some degree the first two Godfather films—anticipate the emergence of retro and the Reagan era.

But for those without a sociological/political bent, Chinatown still makes for a ripping good yarn. Yes, it cakewalks a lot of the detective-story clichés but takes them dead serious in the service of a tale that’s seemingly about unbridled greed but proves to be about mass complicity in the exercise in cultural corruption that is LA.

Again, if you don’t like to dive that deep, preferring to swim near the surface instead, Chinatown is a mannered but convincing exercise in atmospherics, combining a soundstage-bound Studio Era vibe with a stylized-vérité evocation of pre-World War II

Southern California.

Given the slow film stock of the time, it’s astonishing how well Polanski and cinematographer John Alonzo capture the lingering LA sunsets and how effectively they weave them into the fabric of the film. They consistently nail the LA light at various times of day, not by striving for accuracy but by capturing the romantic tinge that was key to the various booster efforts of the time, especially the citrus industry’s legendary orange-crate art.

And that brings me to the reason why I said Chinatown deserves a better transfer. For such a beautiful film, it looks inexplicably dull in 4K HDR. It’s hard to say where the fault lies but this movie should not look this flat.

The biggest problem is with the black levels. You’d rightly expect more nuance in an HDR transfer but the film here looks like it’s trying to ape Gordon Willis’s shadow-driven aesthetic in The Godfather—something Paramount wanted at the time of production but that Polanski fought hard to avoid. Looking at this release with its crushed blacks, and with scenes like the ones in Mulwray’s office so dim they become murky, you’d get the sense the studio prevailed.

Skin tones are wildly inconsistent, with many of the scenes in the first half looking almost monochrome or, at best, like hand-tinted postcards. In an early scene where Nicholson and Faye Dunaway sit outside talking, Dunaway looks like she was dipped in bronze. Given that there are occasional scenes where skin tones look more natural—and certain closeups, like

the one of Dunaway in mourning apparel as she lunches with Nicholson, that look stunning—you have to suspect the problem isn’t with the original film. I don’t remember this having been an issue before, and although it could be inherent in the original materials, it’s hard to believe Polanski, Alonzo, or the studio would have signed off on something this all over the map for the theatrical release.

All of that said, I again have to emphasize that Chinatown is so engrossing that it’s possible to look beyond all the flatness, blackness, and visual inconsistencies and get caught up in the experience. While I was thrown the first time I watched this new transfer, I found myself a lot less distracted during subsequent viewings.

On the audio side, Jerry Goldsmith’s score is something of a miracle—not least because he conjured it up in less than two weeks after Paramount rejected Phillip Lambro’s stab at the music. Rather than go wall to wall, which is tempting in any film that leans so heavily on the Studio Era aesthetic, Goldsmith alternates between Mancini-like splashes of the lush main-title theme and very angular, astringent, mainly percussive cues that lend a distinctly ‘70s edginess and anxiety to the proceedings.

Chinatown is a film set almost a hundred years in the past that’s really about an

era now almost 50 years in the past but is rooted so firmly in the constants of human behavior that it feels surprisingly relevant and fresh. Polanski provides a mix of seriousness and perverse humor no other director could have brought to the material, with the blindly creative forces of the larger culture then raising his contributions to a level where few Hollywood efforts are ever allowed to go.

Allow me a moment’s more equivocation on my way out the door: Chinatown is a movie that needs to be seen, and re-seen, and while this isn’t the transfer the film deserves, this is the best it has ever looked at home.

—Michael Gaughn

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Review: Get Shorty (1995)

Posted on January 10, 2021

in Kaleidescape, Movies, Reviews

by admin

UHD has put anybody who reviews home releases in a really odd position. Most catalog titles are still in HD, with many having Blu-ray-quality transfers. But it’s become impossible to watch any of these films without speculating on how they’d look in 4K HDR—which is something of a gamble because some older titles haven’t survived the process well, looking decidedly uneven. But then there are unquestionably stunning gems, like Vertigo, The Shining, and the other titles gathered in “4K HDR Essentials,” that have you salivating for more.

Barry Sonnenfeld’s note-perfect Hollywood satire Get Shorty is one of those films that has me shamelessly drooling. You can definitely appreciate its deft, droll visual style in its current HD incarnation, but you can also sense how much more delicious it would be with a 4K HDR buff and shine.

As I’ve said before, Sonnenfeld is the master of the puckish fairy tale, and here he gets to graft his bone-dry style of humor onto Elmore Leonard’s Damon Runyon-meets-Goodfellas mobster yarn, resulting in a film that plays as well 25 years on as it did on the day of its release.

Shorty is worth watching for its flawless casting alone. I’m not a Travolta fan, but he doesn’t miss a beat here, giving his small-time hood a boyish innocence and enthusiasm

SHORTY AT A GLANCE

Flawless casting and some very deft & droll direction help ensure this ultimate Hollywood satire still lands 25 years on.

PICTURE

The spot-on evocation of LA & the movie business is well presented in Blu-ray-quality HD—but cries out for 4K.

SOUND

People say witty things and the occasional gun goes off, all to the beat of Booker T. & the M.G.’s., in a clear and suitably restrained 5.1 mix.

that never feels forced. Hackman is miles from Lex Luthor, turning in a nuanced comic performance that gets big laughs by way of a fully realized character instead of a cartoon. This has to be DeVito’s best work. And a both menacing and charming Delroy Lindo and a flat-out funny Dennis Farina play the mobsters who just can’t get a break.

The performances stand out all the way down the cast line. Nobody is here just to be the butt of a joke. Even the bit parts are fleshed out and compelling. Special kudos go to David Paymer for his story-within-the-story turn as the dry cleaner who fakes his death in a plane crash and flees to L.A. with 300 grand in mob money, sweating all the way.

Sonnenfeld doesn’t get enough credit as an actor’s director, but the scene where Travolta shows DeVito how to play a shylock is so well done it deserves to be ranked with the best. It’s almost impossible to convincingly portray an actor acting,

let alone actor/director interaction, but all involved are so perfectly in sync that you’re laughing not just at the jokes and the situation but at the sheer virtuosity of the execution.

What Shorty gets right, above everything else, though, is LA and the many ways the movie business overlaps with LA life. It unerringly and evocatively captures the

feel of Beverly Hills, the Sunset Strip, the Hollywood Hills, and all the trendy little West Hollywood restaurants that sit practically in the middle of traffic. Maybe the film’s second-best scene—although this might just come from having suffered through this too many times myself—is DeVito going way off-menu to order an elaborate omelet for the table then taking off before it arrives, leaving the other guests to figure out what to do with it.

Shorty works as a satire because it doesn’t spring from the often hypocritical vitriol that drives almost every other similar effort, instead using the quiet accumulation of spot-on touches to make its point, making it far more akin to Raymond Chandler’sThe Little Sister than to more overwrought works like The Day of the Locust and SOB. (And don’t even mention Tarantino, who’s way too much of a raging Neanderthal to even begin to grasp anything as subtle as irony.)

This approach is seamlessly translated into the movie’s visual plan, where the camera moves are restrained (for a Sonnenfeld film) and the lighting is for the most part true to the locales—which I suspect was in part a deliberate strategy to heighten the impact of the film’s stylized, proscenium-warping finale. And it’s exactly because Shorty dances right up to the edge of caricature and gross exaggeration without crossing over that I think it would benefit immensely from a tasteful application of 4K HDR. Some judicious enhancement would make it that much more engaging without turning it into gratuitous eye candy. (The operative word here, of course, is “judicious.”)

No problems with the sound. This is a dialogue-driven film only occasionally

punctuated by bursts of action, and the lines (“E.g., i.e., f— you,” “You think we go to see your movies, Harry? I’ve seen better film on teeth.” “My favorite color—putty”) are all crisp and clear, as are the gunshots. It’s usually a little too obvious when temp tracks make their way into the final film but Sonnenfeld does such a great job of deploying Booker T. & the M.G.’s that it’s hard to make much of a stink. The cues are nicely placed in the foreground without ever being in your face.

It’s one thing to call Get Shorty the best film in the thinly populated mobsters-come-to-Hollywood genre, it’s another to say nobody’s ever done a better job of skewering the movie business—a windmill many have tried to tilt only to wind up on their asses. Shorty never gets ahead of itself, never tries to be bigger than it needs to be, relying on craft and wit instead of angst and sour grapes to score its points—which is why it continues to be a compact and unassuming but undeniable and undiminished gem of a film.

—Michael Gaughn

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Review: Blade

Posted on January 7, 2021

in Kaleidescape, Movies, Reviews

by admin

In my somewhat controversial review of Wonder Woman 1984 (controversial in that I actually enjoyed that silly and overly fantastical romp, a fact that seems to infuriate some people), I mused about whether you could really enjoy the movie if you weren’t raised on and invested in not only the tropes of the 1980s but also the storytelling style of comic books and superhero movies of that era. With the subject of today’s review—1998’s Blade—there’s nothing to speculate about. If you don’t outright love everything about the late ’90s, this standalone, pre-MCU Marvel comic adaptation probably isn’t for you.

In fact, if we were to retroactively create a time capsule for the late ’90s in hopes of explaining that era to future generations, I think I would pass over The Big Lebowski, Being John Malkovich, Pi, Gods and Monsters, Go, and any number of other vastly superior contemporary films in favor of Blade. To varying degrees, those films have all stood the test of time. Blade, on the other hand, is little more than an artfully arranged pile of action-movie clichés of its day: Every gun is a pistol-grip machine

gun, every line of dialogue is an oh-so-gritty catchphrase, every character wears black leather or rave-culture clubwear, every artist on the soundtrack either has or is a DJ, and for inexplicable reasons every no-name goon is proficient in some form of Asian martial art.

But what can I say? It all just works. Yes, if it’s been a while since you saw the movie, it comes off more like a satirical Key & Peele sketch sans punchline than it does the sort of serious-action-movie-meets-Fatboy-Slim-music-video director Stephen Norrington thought he was making. But in a weird way, that’s part of the Blade‘s lasting appeal. It’s pure B-movie schlock on an A- budget.

I’m relieved that I’m not the sort of reviewer who regularly summarizes plots, as it would be difficult to do so in this case without sounding like a stroke victim. The long and short of it is this, though: The titular hero is a sword-toting half-vampire vigilante who hates him some bloodsuckers

BLADE AT A GLANCE

The digital enhancement in this pre-MCU slice & dice vampire romp is a little too heavy-handed but it’s still a big step up from HD.

PICTURE

Edge enhancement and grain scrubbing unnecessarily obscure the movie’s film-stock origins, but HDR brings a richer and more nuanced palette to the effort.

SOUND

The Dolby TrueHD Atmos mix is appropriately relentless, delivering a full-throated surround sound assault.

because they killed his momma right before he was born. Along with his mentor/quartermaster “Whistler” (played to hammy perfection by Kris Kristofferson, who chews up the scenery like a Hungry Hungry Hippo), Blade uncovers a plot to awaken the blood god “La Magra” and trigger the Vampire Apocalypse, which of course can only be stopped by an over-the-top mix of capoeira, jujutsu, kung fu, and ninjutsu. And then he goes to Russia—because of reasons.

If that’s not your bag, the new UHD/HDR release isn’t going to do anything to change your mind. If you are a fan of the movie, though, you’ll be happy to hear that this new transfer is a pretty significant step up from previous releases in several respects. It isn’t perfect, however.

Unexpectedly for a movie shot on 35mm relatively recently, the 4K resolution brings out a lot of the sharpness and detail missing from the numerous DVD and Blu-ray releases. Unfortunately, whoever mastered the movie this time around didn’t trust the viewer to appreciate the fact that film equals grain, and as such, a lot of the movie’s texture has been scrubbed clean by digital noise reduction that sometimes goes too far. To compensate, the transfer has been artificially sharpened by a process known as edge enhancement, which leads to ringing edges on high-contrast areas of the image. You can really see this any time there are baked-in subtitles (like in the meeting of the council of vampire elders). And I’m not sure if it’s the edge enhancement or simply the increased resolution, but for whatever reason the film’s mid-budget, low-pixel-count CGI effects also look goofier than ever before.

On the other hand, HDR is used to especially good effect, although if you’re looking for a demo-movie to push your video system to extremes of brightness, this one doesn’t fit the bill. Instead, it’s the wider color gamut of HDR10 that really adds something to this presentation as compared with previous releases. There’s simply a richer and more nuanced palette to work with, and there’s a purity of tone that’s missing from past transfers. In A/Bing between this new release and the most recent

1080 transfer (again, there have been a few), I also noticed that while there are some enhancements at the lower end of the value scale, the biggest benefit for the new HDR grade is a whole lot less clipping in highlights and brighter scenes. In other words, there are simply more shades of “almost white” to work with, which makes previously washed-out shots look a lot more dimensional and resolved, even if they’re not particularly intense.

So, long story short: If you’re looking for a substantial upgrade over previous home video releases of Blade, this one is unquestionably it. But if you’re looking for a perfect remaster of the movie, the egregious artificial smoothing and sharpening keeps this transfer from being everything it could be.

As for the Dolby TrueHD Atmos mix included with the Kaleidescape download of Blade? I really only have one word to describe it: Relentless. Of course, that’s always been true of the movie’s soundtrack. In fact, the original DVD release of Blade, way back in 1998, was one of my favorite demo discs at a time when I was still assembling my first halfway decent home theater system. I learned quite quickly, though, that the little Sony satellite speakers that had served me well as surround channels in the LaserDisc era were no match for this movie’s full-throated surround-sound assault. They died an uglier death than any of Blade’s

onscreen adversaries. And I brought that DVD along with me when auditioning replacement speakers at my local Circuit City, just to make sure they would survive the onslaught.

The Atmos remix doesn’t substantially tinker with that experience, other than to extend it upward. This is still a hard-hitting, techno-heavy, effects-driven sound mix that only shows its age by virtue of its ostentatiousness.

So, yeah, in the end, the UHD/HDR release of Blade has its virtues as well as its flaws. Hopefully by the time Warner Bros. gets around to releasing the superior sequel in 4K, they’ll have learned from the mistakes of this one and give us a straight scan of the 35mm negative, free of the unnecessary digital manipulation. But, again, if you’re a Blade fan, don’t let the occasional visual distraction turn you off of this release. It’s still an appreciable step up from the HD transfer.

—Dennis Burger

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.

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Review: Annie Hall

Posted on January 5, 2021

in Kaleidescape, Movies, Reviews

by admin

It’s impossible to talk about a Woody Allen movie without having to first weigh in on the ongoing efforts to vilify Allen and obliterate all traces of his career. He’s been spattered with so much bile by Hollywood types like Greta Gerwig and Ellen Page who’ve blindly bought into the Me Too herd mentality that there are fewer and fewer people even willing to approach his films let alone consider them objectively.

I’m hoping to do an appreciation of his career where I can go into all this a little more. What I would ask for the moment is that you try to ignore that grating cacophony of squeaky wheels and appreciate the works of one of the most accomplished

filmmakers of the ‘70s and ‘80s for what they are.

Annie Hall is known as a romantic comedy—a perception that had a lot to do with it snagging a Best Picture Oscar. The problem is, it’s not really a romantic comedy—at least not for me.

That I’ve never found Diane Keaton to be very attractive, or a very good actress, has helped me develop a different—and I think more accurate—take on the film. Annie Hall is actually a very ambitious, incisive, and candid attempt to capture the essence of a particular culture at a particular moment in time via its embodiment in a particular personality—and that personality is not Keaton.

There had to be a reason why Allen suddenly shifted away from all of those gag-driven early movies that served as his film school and allowed him to build the fan base he was able to ride for the next four decades. And there has to be

ANNIE AT A GLANCE

Pigeonholed as a romantic comedy, Annie Hall is actually an ambitious attempt to find hope in the darkness of mid-’70s New York.

PICTURE

Some of master cinematographer Gordon Willis’s most subtle work, it looks flat—but not unwatchable—in HD.

SOUND

This is a Woody Allen movie. There’s not a lot of music, there aren’t any surround effects. People just talk, with intelligence and wit. And you can hear them just fine.

a reason why he suddenly went from being a good-enough comedy director to a fully fledged and inspired filmmaker.

And I think the answer lies in this exchange from the film:

“The failure of the country to get behind New York City is anti-Semitism.”

“But, Max, the city is terribly run.”

“But we’re not discussing politics or economics. This is foreskin. . . . Don’t you see? The rest of the country looks at New York like we’re Left-Wing Communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers. I think of us that way sometimes, and I live here.”

New York City had pretty much imploded in the wake of the social upheaval of the ‘60s and was in a wretched state by the mid ‘70s. Very much like the way it’s portrayed in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, it had become a kind of repository for all of the country’s sins. This was probably the city’s darkest period, years before the unfettered avarice of the ‘80s turned Manhattan into a playground for billionaires and Brooklyn into a day-care center for their kids.

Allen’s identification with the city was so strong that this all had to have sent him reeling. Knowing that it was the prime source of his inspiration—and of his creativity in general—he needed to work out what it meant to be a popular entertainer trying to create within a metropolis that the rest of the country was treating like it had the plague.

That’s what Annie Hall is really about—Diane Keaton was just his Trojan Horse, a way to open some doors and to make sure the studio got its money back.

The movie comes very close to being a drama. Just slightly shift the emphasis of almost every one of the scenes and it becomes a sobering look at people desperately trying to define themselves at a time when there were very few reliable guideposts to lean on. Had Allen approached the film that way—although he wasn’t yet that good of a filmmaker—Annie Hall would have been wrenching instead of hilarious.

Consider how Allen treats his own character—which is the same as saying, how he treats himself. This is not a very flattering portrayal—miles away from the narcissism he’s too often accused of. Alvy Singer displays a lot of bluster, and uses his jokes as his armor, but you can tell the guy is hopelessly lost—which Allen expresses through the movie’s loose, improvisational structure, trying on different styles and techniques and attitudes to see what will stick.

But that shouldn’t be mistaken as Allen himself flailing from behind the camera. Just consider the famous scene of him and Keaton on line at The New Yorker, where Allen humiliates the pontificator by dragging a seemingly embalmed Marshall McLuhan into the shot. It’s a nuanced and logistically complex near-3-minute single-take piece of bravura comedy filmmaking that only a self-assured and truly inspired director could have pulled off. And that’s just one example among many.

True, this isn’t the film Allen set out to make, and a lot of Annie Hall did come together in the editing room. But the list of genius directors who’ve confided that the real filmmaking happens in the editing is long. And they’re not wrong.

Allen started out with a film that was true to his intentions but was all cake and no icing, and he sweetened it just enough to make it palatable for his audience, which was expecting another Sleeper. In the end, he found himself named King of the Romantic Comedy with a couple of Oscars left at his door—an experience he likely wasn’t expecting and that probably scared the bejeezus out of him.

Annie Hall was Allen’s Rhapsody in Blue—a loosely structured, jazz-inflected work that announced that he had ambitions that went beyond being a successful pop performer. And, as with Gershwin, he was never able to do anything quite that fluid and

intuitive again, instead trying on different genres defined by others with decidedly mixed results.

But Hall holds up. A surprising number of the jokes and gags still land, his approach to the material and the scenes remains fertile unexplored territory for other filmmakers, and the way he took the careening wreck of New York City and turned it into the most vital and romantic place on Earth still clicks. The City owes him a statue—but then some group of Yahoos would come along and demand that it be taken down.

Talking about seeing the film in HD is difficult. Gordon Willis’s cinematography is known for being dark and bold, but it’s very subtle, almost documentary-like here. In HD, it feels flatter than it should—not unwatchable, just flat. And then there’s the weird dilemma of having to separate the shots where he deliberately and beautifully exploited grain—like the famous shot of Annie and Alvy standing on a pier at twilight with the East River bridges arrayed behind them—from the ones that are overrun with grain because the elements for the transfer probably weren’t the best.

As for the sound—come on, this is a Woody Allen movie. One of Allen’s greatest

strengths as a filmmaker is the ability to make his material compelling without relying on CGI, aggressive editing, explosions, or other gratuitous effects. This is moviemaking stripped down to its essence, and it can be cleansing to get caught up in a piece of cinema that doesn’t depend on its ability to mercilessly abuse you.

Forget that this is supposed to be a romantic comedy. Forget about the Oscars. Forget about the well-heeled mob of Hollywood conformists bleating for 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.

—Michael Gaughn

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Review: Love and Monsters

Posted on January 4, 2021

in Kaleidescape, Movies, Reviews

by admin

With the horror show that was 2020 finally behind us, a lighthearted post-apocalypse film with a different take on the genre might just be the perfect thing for your next movie night. Originally slated for a theatrical release, Love and Monsters instead debuted on VOD via digital retailers on October 16, as well as seeing a small (just 387 theaters) theatrical release for the October 16-18 weekend. Like many VOD titles, this one didn’t get a lot of press, so unless you’ve been cruising the digital-release updates on your favorite provider—iTunes, Fandango, Vudu, Kaleidescape—you probably missed it.

Post-apocalypse films typically follow one of two themes: Hordes of zombies relentlessly attacking the survivors or survivors forced to fight against each other for the few remaining resources. Love takes a different approach to this, giving us a new but entirely relatable “enemy,” making for a far more light-hearted journey, as well as a fresher take on this “love” story.

In the opening moments we’re told the governments on Earth decided to launch a massive rocket barrage in order to ward off a planet-killing asteroid. While they destroyed the asteroid, no one counted on all of the chemical fallout causing massive mutations among earth’s insect and reptile populations, with these creatures growing hundreds of times their normal size, with increased appetites to boot.

In the seven years following the fallout, 95% of Earth’s population has been wiped out, with the remainder joining up in colonies and living underground in shelters to survive.

MONSTERS AT A GLANCE

Populated with mutant insects instead of zombies, this lighthearted post-apocalyptic tale is 109 minutes of popcorn-chewing fun.

PICTURE

While not the last word in sharpness or detail, the images are clean and clear with some shots looking almost 3D and with HDR giving them punch and realism.

SOUND

The videogame-like 5.1-channel DTS-HD Master soundtrack is immersive and exciting, with the surrounds used throughout to help establish environments.

It’s in one of these colonies where we meet our unlikely hero, Joel (Dylan O’Brien, best known from his starring role as Thomas from The Maze Runner trilogy). While well liked in his colony for his skill at repairing the radio and making a mean minestrone, he is worthless when it comes to fighting against the creepy-crawlies, completely freezing up on any encounter.

After discovering that his old high-school girlfriend, Aimee (Jessica Henwick), is living in a colony just 85 miles—or 7 days walk—away, he decides he’s tired of hiding underground and that he’s going to risk the journey for love.

Along the way, Joel befriends a dog, meets up with two seasoned survivors, Clyde (the excellent Michael Rooker) and Minnow (Ariana Greenblatt), who give him some much-needed training, gets attacked by a variety of mutated critters, and learns what it takes to survive and actually live again.

While zombie films essentially have waves of the same kinds of undead hordes, Joel is confronted with a constant variety of insects, with different looks and attack patterns that keep it visually interesting and exciting, with Joel never knowing where the next attack is coming from. (Though, spoiler, it’s almost always from below . . .) Also, the violence and gore here is decidedly “family-friendly;” Instead of humanoid creatures getting brains blown out in a shower of gore or chewing on human flesh, we get insects dying in mostly bloodless manners. Other than several uses of sh–, the film is pretty unobjectionable, and definitely something you could enjoy with a teenaged crowd.

The filmmakers also did a nice job of worldbuilding, littering the landscape with old, wrecked military weaponry and remnants of giant insect corpses as well as abandoned vehicles and shelters, and the insects have enough detail to make them both gross and creepy.

Information on the technical specifications of Love and Monsters’ transfer wasn’t available, but images are clean, clear, and sharp throughout. Though it didn’t have the constant tack-sharpness and hyper-detail of some modern transfers—making me think it is maybe a 2K digital intermediate—there is still tons of detail in closeups, revealing the micro-stubble and texture in Joel’s face. What I really noticed was the image focus and depth of field, with some shots having a near three-dimensional quality. Even with groups of people together—such as inside Joel’s bunker—all of the characters are distinct, captured in sharp, clear focus.

With images alternating between the stark, fluorescent- and flashlight-lit darkness of bunkers and the bright, sun-filled outdoors, HDR really helps to give images punch and realism. Lighting and shadows in the dark interiors also look

appropriately dark, with clean dark blacks, punctuated by the bright fluorescent lighting. Outdoor scenes are filled with vibrant and realistic looking earth tones, with beaming sunlight that will make you squint against the light coming off your screen.

While “just” a 5.1-channel DTS-HD Master soundtrack, I was impressed with how immersive and exciting the mix was played with Dolby Surround upmixing through my Marantz processor. In fact, far more of my viewing notes were about the audio than the picture quality, with sound used throughout to establish environments like inside Joel’s bunker with lots of metallic groans and echoes or sounds of dripping water, or deep metallic thunks and clanks as heavy doors are opening/closing, or the wind rustling through grasses and trees in outdoor areas.

The surrounds are used extensively to help locate an imminent insect attack, with the creatures slithering and skittering in from the side or back of the room, or the sounds of weapons whisking past, reminding me a bit of the way a good videogame mix helps you to localize the threat. While not an immersive mix with true discreet height effects, the height speakers are fed sounds of flares popping and jets streaking overhead, sounds of rain and thunder during a storm, as well as creature sounds during some of the insect battles.

Your subwoofer adds weight to the explosions, metallic collisions, and insect burrowing, and dialogue remains clear and intelligible.

While Love and Monsters doesn’t break any new ground—handsome boy risks death to go and get pretty girl—it’s just fun to watch, due in large part to O’Brien’s charming turn as Joel and the variety of critters he runs across, as well as some dry humor injected from Clyde, whose survival lessons reminded me a bit of Zombieland‘s “Rules.” If you’re looking for a slightly edgy film you can watch with the family—my 14-year-old daughter, Lauryn, really enjoyed it, with just enough tension and sudden scares to keep her engaged and entertained—that isn’t animated or doesn’t involve superheroes, Love and Monsters is 109 minutes of popcorn-chewing fun.

—John Sciacca

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Review: Total Recall (1990)

Posted on December 26, 2020

in Kaleidescape, Movies, Reviews

by admin

With the dearth of new content available to release to the home market, studios have been mining their catalogs of older titles, giving them fresh, new 4K HDR video remasters and (frequently) Dolby Atmos immersive audio tracks to entice viewers to purchase—or repurchase—a classic. The latest film to get a (gasp!—has it actually been that long?!) 30th-Anniversary remaster release is Total Recall.

I actually saw Recall in the theater in 1990. That was right in the middle of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s reign as king of the big-screen blockbuster, following his roles in two Conan films, The Terminator, Commando, Predator, The Running Man, and the comedy Twins (followed shortly thereafter by Terminator 2, Last Action Hero, True Lies, and Eraser). Arnie in a film all but

guaranteed audiences that they were in for a big-budget, wild action ride.

Besides his imposing physicality and quasi-believability of being able to wipe out hordes of bad guys, Arnold also managed to bring some humor to the big action role, proving to have surprising comic timing and dryly delivering one-liners that brought another facet to the action genre.

Based on the story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick (who also penned “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” the basis for Blade Runner), Recall is directed by Paul Verhoeven, and it definitely has his stylistic thumbprint all over it, especially in the over-the-top gun violence and massive bullet wounds and in-film adverts, which are heavily reminiscent of his other films RoboCop and Starship Troopers.

The sci-fi plot actually has a bit of depth and complexity to

RECALL AT A GLANCE

This sci-fi actioner from the height of Schwarzenegger’s fame receives the 30th-anniversary 4K HDR treatment.

PICTURE

The 4K transfer is true to the movie’s 35mm origins, retaining a respectable amount of grain, while HDR makes the saturated, neon Martian reds pop.

SOUND

The Atmos mix is mainly restrained and front-forward, with the surround channels used extensively to expand the music score.

it, thanks to Dick’s source material. Taking place in 2084, Douglas Quaid (Schwarzenegger) is continually plagued by dreams of being on Mars with a mysterious woman. Thinking that a virtual trip to Mars might satisfy him, Quaid heads over to Rekall, where they implant memories in your brain. These implanted memories are indistinguishable from actual memories, and Rekall promises to make you feel like you’ve had a luxury vacation experience without ever leaving Earth and for a fraction of the price.

Complications arise during the implant process, and Quaid is quickly sedated and dumped in a cab. His life turns upside down when people—including his wife, Lori (Sharon Stone)—start attacking him. Lori tells him that his life and memories are all fake and just implants from The Agency, and she has been assigned to watch over him. This leads to Arnold delivering one of the film’s iconic lines, “If I’m not me, who the Hell am I?” Narrowly avoiding a raid, Quaid is given a briefcase with money, papers, gadgets, and a video message from himself, but as someone named Carl Hauser who tells him that he, as Hauser, underwent a memory wipe to escape The Agency after discovering an alien artifact on Mars. After Hauser walks Quaid through the process of removing a tracking device, Quaid heads to Mars.

Is Quaid still on the table at Rekall, stuck in his dreams, living implanted memories? Is he actually Hauser? What memories are real and can be trusted? And if you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust?

With a huge (for the day) budget of $65 million, the movie features elaborate sets, makeup, costume design, and world building. Mars feels like a fleshed-out, alien world that has been colonized by humans, including various mutations from intense radiation, and the interiors—especially the location of the alien artifact—seem appropriately huge. Further, practical special effects abound throughout—as well as some relatively new for the time CGI. Recall actually won an Academy Award for Visual Effects. (It was also nominated for Sound and for Sound Effects Editing.)

Originally shot on 35mm film, this new transfer is taken from a new 4K digital intermediate. Some film grain remains visible throughout, but it is never distracting. The film certainly didn’t receive the massive grain reduction smoothening Terminator 2 did. In general, most scenes—especially those filmed in the bright outdoors—are clear and sharp. Don’t expect the ultra clarity, sharpness, and detail of modern digital images, but you’ll definitely appreciate all the detail the source material has to offer.

I remember being especially impressed with the scene of Quaid pulling the tracker roughly the size of a golf ball out of his nose, wondering how they pulled that off. While this would have certainly been a CGI effect today, it was accomplished with the use of an elaborate, incredibly realistic-looking puppet, and the effect still holds up, even under 4K’s enhanced resolution, where you can really appreciate the detail that went into it. The same goes for the mutant Kuato.

Some scenes—such as on board the subway—look a bit soft. Even within scenes, there can be a bit of inconsistency. When Quaid is in the Rekall offices, the fine check print in McClane’s (Ray Baker) jacket can alternate between being crisp and defined to looking soft and unstable. The added resolution also reveals the limitations of the video screens used at the time.

(Anyone remember the Proton and Curtis Mathis brand names?)

What really pops from this new HDR color grading are the vibrant, deeply saturated reds of Mars. From the opening credits, you get these searing, neon reds, giving a glimpse into what is to come. HDR also gives pop to the bright lights on the subway, and the neon lights and signs in Venusville, Mars’ red-light district. Blacks are also deep and clean, providing a solid background for the rest of the images to pop.

Sonically, the new Dolby Atmos mix is fairly reserved, certainly by modern standards, with most of the mix taking place in the front of the room. Even with a mainly LCR mix, you get a lot of width across the front, with action spread far left and right. The mix also does a great job with the dialogue, which is clear and understandable throughout.

The height and surround channels are used pretty extensively to expand the musical score, using the additional speakers for a far more room-filling experience, especially inside the Last Resort Club on Mars where loud music booms from all around.

The sound mixers did take some opportunities to extend sound effects into the

room to heighten certain moments. Aboard the robot-driven “Johnny Cab,” we get some nice creaks and groans happening overhead, during gunfights there are some ricochets into the surround speakers, subway announcements emanate from the height speakers, reverb sounds in the mine shafts, and wind swirls and blows overhead when there is a atmosphere breach.

While Total Recall shows its age in parts—some of the scenes between Schwarzenegger and Stone are a bit groany—it remains a fun action ride, driven forward with near constant action and a good bit of depth to the story. If your only experience with Total Recall is the disappointing 2012 Colin Farrell remake or from watching the original film on DVD, this new 4K HDR remaster is a must-see.

—John Sciacca

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Review: Elf

Posted on December 20, 2020

in Kaleidescape, Movies, Reviews

by admin

You’re going to need to bear with me here because I will get around to recommending that you watch Elf. But I first need to point out that it’s just not a very good movie.

The story is contrived and soulless, the casting—with one very obvious exception—is tone deaf, it’s badly shot, and the practical effects are so unconvincing that they would have been better off going with early-‘00s CGI instead.

Every character except Will Ferrell’s is one-dimensional and pretty much interchangeable. Any irascible middle-aged actor could have played the James Caan role, Mary Steenburgen is just there to be stereotypically empathetic, the kid that plays their son is just unpleasant, and a very anemic and kind of homely (before she went full Kabuki and became an “It” girl)

Zooey Deschanel is just there to admire Ferrell—Nicoletta Braschi’s thankless job vis-à-vis Roberto Benigni in Life is Beautiful, although not quite that bad.

Everything about this film feels half-baked, like a Tim Burton movie. The ending is a completely botched deus ex machina, with every kind of contrivance thrown at the audience, all but forgetting about Buddy, ladling on a ton of fake drama because the filmmakers hadn’t been able to generate any real drama before then—the kind of thing that happens when the so-called creatives only have other movies to draw on for tactical support because they don’t have any bearings in real life.

It might seem misguided to beat up on a 17-year-old film, but I’m trying to make a point about why we watch Elf, and should watch Elf.

ELF AT A GLANCE

Elf isn’t so much a fully fledged movie as it is a 90-minute one-man show—but Will Ferrell’s performance is so brilliant that it’s worth making some time for over the holidays.

PICTURE

Aside from some creepy crawlers whenever there’s a blown-out white patch, the movie looks surprisingly good in HD on Kaleidescape.

SOUND

An unexceptional mix—but at least it never gets in the way of Ferrell’s schtick.

This movie has become a tradition because it’s great holiday wallpaper, meant to be played in the background during Yuletide celebrations, but liberally sprinkled with “O wait!” moments that momentarily draw your attention back to the screen—like “O wait! This is the scene where he eats the Pop Tarts with the spaghetti,” and “O wait! Here’s that thing where he gets attacked by the midget.” In other words, A Christmas Story, except made with some intelligence and a modicum of taste.

In retrospect, it’s obvious that Elf anticipated and helped create the current age of maximum repetition and redundancy where the last thing we want from a movie or a series is to be shown anything challenging or new. It’s meant to be big, warm, and fuzzy like a well-worn security blanket, something utterly predictable and familiar you can wrap yourself in so you don’t have to feel anything, except coddled.

What would seem to be the movie’s greatest vice is actually its saving virtue. Elf is ultimately nothing but a Will Ferrell vehicle—he doesn’t just carry the film, he is the film. And that’s not a bad thing but a great thing—a cause for celebration—because

he’s able to pull it off, and in spades, turning an otherwise by-the-book studio hack job into a virtuoso one-man show.

Ferrell has Peter Sellers’ ability to make cartoonish, completely impossible, characters feel more real than than the more realistic characters around him. And his investment in Buddy is so complete that he’s able to rise above the incredibly tepid and inept script (which apparently everybody but the gaffers worked on) and energize enough scenes to make it worth tolerating all the many areas where the movie sags.

I know that’s a really back-handed recommendation, but it’s a very sincere one. It’s definitely worth anyone’s time to watch Elf and just hone in on and savor and sit in amazement of what Ferrell is able to bring forth. He makes Buddy so completely embody Christmas that Santa, the elves, the North Pole, and all the other traditional trappings seem not just threadbare but unnecessary.

Elf looks surprisingly good viewed in HD on Kaleidescape. I can’t see any point in rushing this movie into a 4K HDR upgrade—it would likely just make it look even more poorly executed than it already does. The only real flaw in HD is the crawling corpuscles that appear whenever there’s a bright white patch, like the

blownout sunlight seen through the doors at Gimbels or the lighting under the kitchen cabinets in Caan’s apartment.

The soundtrack is nothing special, just serviceable, but you can hear all the lines so I’ve got to give it credit for that. The extras? (of which there are many). Let’s not go there.

Nothing I’ve said here is going to make even the slightest dent in Elf’s reputation as a latter-day Christmas classic. But hopefully I can jog the perception of it just enough that it seems less like an obligation, like fruitcake, sweaters, and socks, and more like a genuine source of holiday cheer.

—Michael Gaughn

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Review: Tenet

Posted on December 18, 2020

in Kaleidescape, Movies, Reviews

by admin

I don’t believe I’ve written more about any single subject this year at Cineluxe than I have about Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Tenet. Nolan has been quite vocal about his preference that his films be seen on the largest screen (i.e., IMAX) possible, and was insistent Tenet receive a theatrical release rather than bow on a PVOD streaming service. In accordance with his wishes, it was one of the first films to show theatrically in the States after closing restrictions were lifted, but it had a pretty dismal performance at the box office, grossing under $58 million in the US and Canada—not great for a film that had a production budget of $200 million.

As a fan of Nolan’s work, I went and saw Tenet at a theater, renting out the entire auditorium for a private watch party, and I had been looking forward to its home video release ever sense. I left that first viewing . . . confused. The story is incredibly complex, with physics concepts like entropy (“a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system”) and inverting (or reversing) entropy being key plot points.

Further complicating Tenet is Ludwig Goransson’s often aggressive, kinetic soundmix and blasting sound effects that pummel you almost constantly, especially during key sequences when you’re struggling to keep up with who is where (and when). Add to that the fact that characters are

TENET AT A GLANCE

Christopher Nolan’s big & loud cerebral spy thriller arrives on home screens—which means you don’t have to risk your life anymore to go see it.

PICTURE

Shot on 65mm film and in IMAX, Tenet looks gorgeous, with reference-quality video throughout.

SOUND

The DTS-HD Master Audio mix is both fantastic and—thanks to some overly emphatic bass and hard-to-hear dialogue—damnably frustrating.

frequently speaking behind masks, which makes some of the dialogue all but impossible to understand. And it just adds to the frustration when you’re constantly asking yourself, “What did (s)he say?”

As I wrote after my first viewing:

Nolan has been crafting Tenet for years, saying he deliberated on the film’s central ideas for over a decade and then took more than five years to write the screenplay. With all of that time to weave the story, plot, and world of Tenet, expecting to unpack and process it all in one viewing is an overly ambitious goal, especially with sensory overload happening in many scenes and overlooking small details you aren’t aware are important. It will take multiple viewings to fully take in and comprehend this film.

Prior to watching for the second time, I did a bit of homework. Googling “Understanding Tenet” produces quite a few results of blogs, theories, threads, and videos from people who have really dug into the film and tried to dissect it to make it a bit more

JOHN SCIACCA |
I RENTED AN ENTIRE THEATER TO SEE TENET

MICHAEL GAUGHN | LET THEM WATCH BOOTLEGS

MICHAEL GAUGHN | IS CHRISTOPHER NOLAN TOO MUCH OF A PURIST FOR HIS (& OUR) OWN GOOD?

JOHN SCIACCA | IS TENET TO DIE FOR?

REVIEW | INCEPTION

viewer friendly.

Concepts like the Sator Square were new to me, and discovering how Nolan weaved this into the story added to my appreciation. You’ll notice that the words below read forwards and backwards, as well as up and down, forming a palindrome in both directions, playing into Nolan’s forwards-backwards time concept with Tenet.

SATOR

AREPO

TENET

OPERA

ROTAS

While there is still a good bit of the film I don’t fully understand—maybe on a third or fourth viewing!—I will say I got far more out of a second viewing, thanks to the foreknowledge of why people were doing things and some other visual clues Nolan throws in if you know what to look for. And, with apologies to Mr. Nolan, I think Tenet actually works better at home.

Of course, if this is your first viewing, I’d suggest going in “blind.” Part of the fun is being thrown into this world and trying to figure out how to make your way in it. As Barbara (Clemence Poesy) says to our hero, the Protagonist (John David Washington), “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.”

Nolan has said that while Inception was his heist film, Tenet is his version of a spy thriller. When boiled down to its essence, it’s about The Protagonist trying to stop Russian Oligarch/arms dealer Sator (Kenneth Branagh) from destroying the world. How the Protagonist goes about uncovering Sator’s plans and draws close to him, how Sator intends on destroying the world, and how the Protagonist goes about stopping him are what make the story so twisty-turny and visually compelling. The film also benefits from the strong performances of Elizabeth Debicki as Sator’s suffering wife, Kat, and Robert Pattinson as The Protagonist’s partner, Neil. And Pattinson’s handling of Neil also makes me think that he is up to the task of playing Bruce Wayne whenever the next Batman film is released.

There are a couple of ways to watch Tenet, and depending how you do so will also affect your viewing experience. With the 4K HDR version from digital retailers like Kaleidescape or Vudu, you will see a constant 2.2:1 aspect ratio film. However, those watching the physical disc (4K or standard

Blu-ray) or watching the HD version of the film from Kaleidescape will see the film alternating between 1.78:1 and 2.2:1 ratios, switching to 1.78:1 for the scenes shot on IMAX. If you’re watching on a traditional direct-view TV, or have a 16:9 aspect-ratio projection screen, you will likely enjoy the alternating ratios, as the big action scenes will get bigger, filling your entire screen. But if you own a widescreen projection system—as I do—the constant 2.2:1 ratio is likely preferable and less disruptive to the viewing experience.

Shot on 65mm film and in IMAX and taken from a true 4K digital intermediate, Tenet looks gorgeous. It doesn’t have that tack-sharpness of movies shot digitally, but looks like a movie shot on film in all the right ways. Grain is absolutely minimal, and the images on screen just look natural and terrific. In looking through my viewing notes, I wrote down the words “clean,” “clear,” and “crisp” repeatedly.

Edges are sharp and defined, and closeups bristle with detail. Much of Tenet takes place in the world of billionaires, and the trappings of luxury are beautifully displayed. You can really see and appreciate the character styling in the fine detail, texture, patterns, and prints in the clothing worn by the main characters. One scene where the characters are dining aboard Sator’s mega-yacht had so much fine detail to appreciate in the tablecloth and linens and other bits on the yacht that it was almost distracting. Daylight shots of the Amalfi Coast are also just stunning to look at, with the beautiful array of colors and sharply defined buildings contrasted against the craggy cliffs and water.

Blacks are clean, clear, and dark, and we get plenty of bright highlights in the form of explosions or bright lighting. Colors are bright and punchy when called for, like bright yellows of safety vests, or the red-orange of fireballs, or the warm, golden hues of a candlelit dinner. Throughout, Tenet delivers reference-quality video, with images that look incredibly natural, sharp, and detailed. While it might have been impressive on an IMAX screen, it absolutely looks fantastic viewed on a high-quality home theater.

As much as I wrote down about Tenet’s video quality, I have more notes about the audio. Presented in 5.1-channel DTS-HD Master Audio (Nolan famously eschews immersive mixes like Dolby Atmos), the mix is both fantastic and damnably frustrating.

It’s fantastic in the way it is just filled with atmospheric sounds both subtle and overt in virtually every scene. Interiors are densely layered with little sounds—echoes, ocean sounds, machinery noises, background chatter, etc.—that fully place you in that space. While not an immersive mix, my Marantz’s processor did a wonderful job of upmixing the 5.1-channel track to provide a fully hemispherical presentation. A scene where gas is filling a room literally fills your room with the hissing jets of gas coming from all around. Another scene has the Protagonist in the middle of a train yard, and when the trains pass by left and right of him, the cacophony of the squealing and groaning and clacking of the wheels makes you experience what the characters is experiencng.

Dynamic sounds are dynamic and loud. Gunshots sound fantastic, having appropriate weight that engages the subwoofer and delivers the zip and snap of close misses, with bullets slamming into things with appropriate force. Wood splinters, metal thunks, glass shatters. Both the opening opera scene and later gun battle on the highway are perfect audio demos to show off your system.

You’ll also never need to wonder if your subs are working, which is a part of why the audio mix can be so frustrating. Bass is frequently on the verge of being overwhelming—I wrote down “bombastic”—or crossing over into just walloping you with low-end for no apparent reason, often from the musical score, which frequently is filled with a steady, deep, low-frequency hum, pulse, and throb. But when things blow up, your sub needs to be there to deliver, and it will produce couch-rattling, chest-stomping bass.

Dialogue intelligibility is still a very mixed bag. At its best, you can understand what characters are saying; at its worst, dialogue is so drowned out by background effects and music that it’s impossible to understand, or even hear at all in some cases. I’d say most of the film’s dialogue—spoken behind oxygen masks or just in very noisy environments—is challenging. On this second viewing, I decided to not to struggle and opted to just turn the subtitles on from the get-go, and that made for a much more entertaining experience. If you want to argue that you shouldn’t have to turn subtitles on to fully understand a film, you’ll get no argument from me.

But this is the audio mix Nolan wanted, and it’s the audio mix we’re stuck with, warts and all. Nolan says he likes viewers to experience the confusion and disorientation his characters would be feeling, and that he uses “dialogue as a sound effect, so sometimes it’s mixed slightly underneath the other sound effects or in the other sound effects to emphasize how loud the surrounding noise is.” Fortunately, at home you have the option of enabling subtitles—and rewinding—in case you missed something.

Whether you love it, hate it, are confounded by it, or just curious over the hype, Tenet is an experience that plays wonderfully in a luxury home theater. And seeing giant practical effects play out on a big screen—yes, they literally blew up that 747—in pristine quality is worth the price of admission alone. Plus, unlocking the “I understand Tenet” achievement demands multiple viewings, which provide more appreciation and understanding over subtle details, giving it huge points for replayability.

—John Sciacca