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Review: The Maltese Falcon

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The Maltese Falcon (1941)

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John Huston’s famed directorial debut is sharper, steadier, and grain-free in 4K HDR, but in no meaningful way improved

by Michael Gaughn
April 29, 2023

The Maltese Falcon just got the Casablanca treatment. If you’ve seen Casablanca in 4K HDR or read my review of that release, you know what that means. And you know that’s not good.

The treatment basically consists of removing anything that would suggest the movie was ever shot on film, instead making it look like a video game somebody opted to do in black & white. If this kind of radical do-over becomes the standard for upgrading older films, we’re in for a long, bleak future.

The grain is gone and there’s no sense of movement of film through a gate, which makes everything look too firmly etched. That might not sound like a big deal, and might even sound like a good thing, but the look of projected film was always taken into account when these movies were shot and is now being ignored, which is one of the reasons backdrops often look laughably fake in HDR transfers. The view out Sam Spade’s office window now looks like a diorama from It’s a Small World, with any illusion of depth shattered. And the HDR enhancement of the neon signs on the cardboard cutout buildings is so bright they look like Christmas ornaments hanging just on the other side of the panes.

Everything feels cold and plastic, especially the people. The Victor Laszlo action-figure look is most obvious on Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, who looks like he has Naugahyde skin and forehead furrows brushed in with model-airplane paint. Peter Lorre passed out on Spade’s couch looks like a ventriloquial figure. No one is spared—it’s all a matter of degree.

And, yes, some of the shots feel three-dimensional but since they were never meant to look that way, it’s kind of the equivalent of teaching your dog to tap out “Chopsticks” on the piano—kind of cool the first time you experience it but ultimately little more than a Stupid Pet Trick.

All of which raises the question of, who or what is this kind of brazen makeover meant to serve? It can’t really be argued it’s in the best interests of the film, because it runs roughshod over the whole aesthetic of the original creation. It could be argued it’s intended to make films like this one more accessible to people accustomed to the precise, antiseptic look of the digital world—but that sounds like the same kind of crap you hear in defense of colorization, and I have serious doubts whether either form of egregious meddling attracts enough people to justify the desecration.

I think it comes down to they do it because they can, and damn the consequences.

The Maltese Falcon isn’t John Huston’s best film—that would be The Asphalt Jungle—but it’s the one that put him on the map, and its cheeky tone and often arch performances still work remarkably well. Bogart’s Spade is more than a bit of a bully and creep, indulging in more than a little smiling sadism, but he does make it all feel true to the character. His take on Hammett’s detective also helps to underline the huge distance between Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe. People often confuse the two—partly because Bogart played both—but Marlowe followed a core code of honor (“Down these means streets a man must go . . .”) and never would have done anything like fool around with his partner’s wife (or even have a partner).

The Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook Jr. ensemble of bumbling rogues has of course become iconic and it’s enjoyable to watch their outsized, genre-defining performances and appreciate where it all began.

I assume partly for budgetary reasons (this was a Warner Bros. production, after all), a little too much of the movie plays out in Spade’s apartment, which can make it feel stagey and claustrophobic, but Huston makes the limitations work to his advantage, creating a decent amount of action through cutting, tone, and stage business. The film remains surprisingly brisk and engaging, managing to avoid most of the stuffier conventions of the time.

One quibble before I wrap this up, because it’s become pervasive. Kaleidescape labels The Maltese Falcon a film noir. It’s not. Almost all the “dark” little movies, usually with a crime element, that people like to call noir don’t qualify for the tag at all. (Going there is just trendy laziness, like constantly leaning on “iteration” to say “version” or “variation,” or mangling “deconstruction.”) Every film noir is drenched in paranoia and in some way revolves around a cocky, deluded schnook. That doesn’t pertain here at all. Falcon can be called a crime drama or a mystery or even a thriller, but it has none of the trappings of noir. (The genre wouldn’t even be born until three years later with Chandler and Wilder’s take on Double Indemnity.)

By all means watch The Maltese Falcon in 4K HDR, but just about any of the earlier home releases, despite—or because of—their flaws, is far more likely to convey what Huston and his collaborators intended and what drew audiences to the film in the first place. I’m not saying higher-res transfers can’t be done well—“4K HDR Essentials” features more than a dozen classic films that have benefited significantly from the upgrade. And it’s not that old black & white movies can’t benefit as well—just look at Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. This is an issue of taste, not technology, of shameless pandering prevailing over any respect for the material.

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 | Nobody can say the images aren’t immaculately clean, but nobody would claim they for a moment look like they were ever analog

SOUND | You have to go to the Blu-ray-quality or DVD versions to get the original mono mix 

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Review: The Graduate

The Graduate (1967)

review | The Graduate

Is it possible to strip away all the nostalgia and see Mike Nichols’ generation-defining film for what it is?

by Michael Gaughn
April 27, 2023

It’s pure luck that I stumbled upon Mike Nichols’ The Graduate on Prime after having reviewed his Carnal Knowledge last week. One is a masterpiece, one of the greatest films of its era; the other is a hopeless jumble, triaged in post—and all the stitches still show. And what applies to which is probably the exact opposite of what you’d expect, given the consensus of the mass-mind.

What follows is going to be a little more abstract and analytical than usual. But when you’re dealing with a movie whose reputation stems mainly from people’s identification with a character and an era, you have to cut through all the sentimental attachments to have any hope of judging the film itself. Much like Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Graduate has been embraced by successive generations out of nostalgia and because it can be so easily reinterpreted to fit the preoccupations and prejudices of the present. But being a convenient and malleable receptacle for blind emotion is usually antithetical to what ought to define a good movie.

The Graduate is known as being one of the more radical mainstream films of the late ’60s, one of the first to portray the extreme alienation of youth within the Establishment, to show what was once called the Generation Gap as anything other than a punchline, to assimilate disruptive techniques from foreign films, and to use rock-inflected songs in a non-jukebox way. One of the main reasons it’s still embraced is that, like almost every film made today, it’s filled with superficial gestures of rebellion—or at least acting out—but is at heart conformist. Which points to the bigger reason for its continued popularity—

In college, during the Post-Structuralist era, interested in seeing if mainstream movies actually can be radical, I did a Proppian analysis of The Graduate. (For those unfamiliar with Vladimir Propp, his Morphology of the Folktale is an incisive, elegant, and beautifully written analysis of the structure of fables.) I expected The Graduate, given its reputation, to present a challenge, and was surprised—shocked, actually—to find that not only didn’t its bones lead it in any new directions but that it’s a textbook example of a classic fairy tale—not only in the obvious way of Ben as knight, Elaine as princess, and Mrs. Robinson as wicked queen, with Benjamin going off on an archetypal quest/rescue, but down to the micro level of how these tales traditionally play out.

In other words, we continue to watch The Graduate mainly because it provides the emotional satisfaction of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty—both the originary tales and their Disneyfied reinterpretations. Nobody at the time of its release realized that all this lay at its core, and I’ve seen little evidence that many have realized it since. But once you connect the dots, it all makes sense.

And, given what a disjointed patchwork the film is, it turns out that underlying structure is the only thing holding it together in any meaningful way. There are at least four distinctly different shooting styles—not as any deliberate strategy but from an inability to figure out how to convey the material. It doesn’t know when it’s hitting the comedy too hard (Mrs. Robinson’s famous pursuit of Benjamin feels painfully long now, and Hoffman’s reactions to her advances feel forced and sitcomy), and it transitions into drama with a heavy lurch—which once seemed innovative but, in retrospect, could have been handled much more deftly.

I could continue to cite examples, but you get the idea. The only other thing I’ll point to is the ending, which is poorly motivated, ineptly executed, and ultimately the kind of kitchen-sink pile-on you’d expect to see at the end of a Beach Blanket movie. The only reason we buy into it is because the knight is rescuing the princess from her captors. And the only reason we buy into that is because the entire film has been (probably without being aware of it) preparing us for that moment. And the point I ultimately want to make from all that is that, with very few exceptions, radical art—whether we’re talking pop culture or more serious art—feeds from deeply conservative roots that determine it far more completely than most people would be willing to admit.

The other point worth making, because it’s the other reason for the film’s longevity, is that the worst thing you can do is forge any kind of emotional identification with the characters in a movie. At that point, you’re no longer experiencing the film on its own terms but selfishly using it to bolster your own ego (even if you’re not aware that’s what you’re doing). So there’s no way your impressions of it can be even remotely objective—which has been the case with the vast majority of people who’ve seen The Graduate in the 56 years since its release.

If you decide to give The Graduate a gander, nothing about its presentation on Prime should dissuade you. I have to emphasize yet again how good movies can look on the service and how that’s happening more and more often, making the fingerprints of streaming harder and harder to detect.

The iconic image early on of Ben with his head resting against an aquarium is both solid and beautiful. The “Ben at the pool” montage, accompanied by “The Sounds of Silence” and “April Come She Will,” is similarly solid despite reflections, hot spots, and frequent sparkles. There is a decent number of soft frames but they can all be attributed to the film itself, as can all the mismatched and overexposed shots, the inconsistent tonal range, and some scenes exhibiting far more contrast than others. The earlier eras of home video helped smooth over many of these flaws, but streaming is reaching the point of consistently offering up transfers exactly as they are, warts and all.

“Warts and all” pretty much describes the soundtrack as well. It’s not terrible and a little bit of basic cleanup would make a huge difference, but it’s sad to hear so much distortion on the Simon & Garfunkel tracks. That said, the solution isn’t to splice in pristine, digitized mixes that feel alien to the era and violate the spirit of the film.

That people find it acceptable—and are encouraged—to impose their subjective biases on movies might be the biggest argument against granting most films any real stature. If the audience is responsible for creating at least half the experience of a “great” film, what exactly is making it great? Once fads die down and the audience moves on and no longer feels the need to pump a movie up, it’s as if it never existed—which is when marketing steps in to push the nostalgia angle hard to try to inflate it all over again. All this is undeniably part of the life cycle of any film, and something studios and filmmakers have gotten increasingly adept at cultivating and exploiting. It seems all but inevitable we’ll soon reach the point where it will become impossible to judge any film on its own merits because, very much intentionally, there’s no there there.

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 | Nothing about The Graduate‘s presentation on Prime should dissuade you from giving it a gander. The reproduction is solid throughout with any warts solely attributable to the original film.

SOUND | The sound’s not terrible and a little bit of basic cleanup would make a huge difference, but it’s sad to hear so much distortion on the Simon & Garfunkel tracks

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Review: The Pink Panther (1963)

The Pink Panther (1963)

review | The Pink Panther (1963)

The only Panther film worth watching, with Clouseau as a fully realized character instead of a one-joke cartoon

by Michael Gaughn
April 24, 2023

There is only one Pink Panther movie. Blake Edwards managed to create an almost perfect modern-day farce with the original, 1963 film. All the various sequels were just cynical attempts to exploit a brilliantly conceived comic character, reducing Clouseau to an increasingly repugnant cartoon and trotting out Peter Sellers like he was some kind of circus freak. The greatest sin of all is none of the sequels are even remotely funny. The only upside is that the massive revenue they generated allowed Edwards to make films like Victor/Victoria and 10.

Edwards had a weakness for sight gags, an itch he was able to scratch with varying degrees of success throughout his career. He used them to liven up early, fluffy efforts like Operation Petticoat and The Perfect Furlough but failed to show the necessary restraint in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where they often feel like they were spliced in from another movie. The relentlessness of the gags chokes The Great Race, inducing fatigue by the end of the first reel when there’s still more than two hours of movie to go. On the other hand, he turned that relentlessness to his advantage with The Party, a successful modern attempt, with a nod to Tati, at a silent film.

The only time he achieved an ideal balance between story and gags was The Pink Panther, which works because he was able to use the conventions of classic stage farce without making the film look stagey—and because he came up with Clouseau. And because Peter Sellers played the character when he was at the absolute height of his powers. Sellers did The Pink Panther and Dr. Strangelove pretty much back to back—two of the supreme examples of comic acting on film and, considered together, an unsurpassed feat.

Peter Ustinov was originally supposed to play Clouseau, which would have guaranteed that the film would be nothing more than a pleasant temporary diversion fated to sink beneath the waves of time. The rest of the ensemble is solid enough but in no way exceptional, which allows Sellers to exist within it as an independent force of nature, but without the obligation to have him in every scene—one of the reasons the original film wears so well and the sequels seem so  ponderous and one-note now.

But for everything Edwards does well here, even he can’t sustain his well-modulated conception for the duration, and the whole thing starts to sag badly after the transition from Cortina d’Ampezzo to Rome, where the need to stage a “wild” party and a jewel heist simultaneously, followed by a “wild” chase scene—all of them forced exercises that feel more obligatory than inspired—threatens to sink the whole enterprise. (Richard Lester’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, made two years later, suffers from the same flaw, only worse.) The ending almost works and almost reestablishes some kind of equilibrium, but you’re basically left with a warm memory of what transpired during the earlier parts of the film, once you repress the egregious missteps.

The transfer on Prime bears all the earmarks of being the same Blu-ray-quality transfer available on Kaleidescape—which means it’s pleasant enough to watch with no significant distractions, but a movie of this popularity and stature deserves better. The famous opening titles look dirty and even a little murky, and some wear and tear with the elements is apparent throughout the film. That said, the colors are for the most part vivid, and streaming is able to handle things like the blinding white slopes of Cortina without a hiccup—something that would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago.

The audio could use some work. The mix from the time probably wasn’t great but I find it hard to believe it sounded this bad. This is probably Henry Mancini’s best score, which, aside from a few too-obvious “joke” cues is mainly wall-to-wall mood music—which is more than fine because it’s exactly what the material called for and a merciful break from the pretentious Post Romantic drivel that drips off most movies like syrup. But it’s painful to hear Mancini’s tasteful arrangements sounding like AM radio. On the other hand, it would be a disaster to give them a latter-day goosing—the Living Stereo treatment that make his cues on the most recent release of Breakfast at Tiffany’s sound like they existed in a parallel universe from the dialogue tracks.

It’s a shame Blake Edwards got lazy. Clouseau, married but as a perpetual cuckold, as lost running the gauntlet of domestic life as he is the one of crime and the police, and unburdened by the comic relief of a manservant, the Little Tramp removed from the Victorian era and saddled with the pathetic delusions and neuroses of the present, would have been a much richer character than the merely convenient and monotonous figure of the sequels. But at least we have the original Panther film to appreciate on its own terms and as a glimpse of what could have been.

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 transfer on Prime bears all the earmarks of being the same Blu-ray-quality transfer available on Kaleidescape—which means it’s pleasant enough to watch, with no significant distractions, but with enough evidence of worn elements to cry out for a restoration

SOUND | The audio could use some beefing up so Henry Mancini’s tasteful arrangements don’t end up sounding like AM radio

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Review: Carnal Knowledge

Carnal Knowledge (1971)

review | Carnal Knowledge

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Its deceptively small scale and stripped-down style have led to this still vibrant Mike Nichols’ satire on fractured mores never getting the recognition it deserves

by Michael Gaughn
April 20, 2023

Not having seen Carnal Knowledge in a while, and not exactly sure what my impression was of it the last time around, this recent viewing was something of a revelation. Mike Nichols’ deeply quirky, deeply sardonic big-name, big-budget miniature is one of those one-off, completely sui generis films that pop up from time to time that really shouldn’t work yet somehow manage to coalesce and succeed. For something so deeply rooted in its extremely unstable era, it holds together amazingly well and seems even more expressive and potent now, probably both because it taps into timeless constants of behavior and is such a spot-on portrait of that time.

Nichols was once considered a genius filmmaker, but that was mainly hype. He’s now known, when he’s known at all, as the guy who did The Graduate—a film, like Breakfast at Tiffany’s, that recent generations have willfully misconstrued to help bolster and justify their preoccupations and prejudices. His movie career began with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, an overly long adaptation of Albee’s play made watchable by unexpectedly powerful performances from Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Then came The Graduate, a bit of a mess of a movie that awkwardly tossed together attempts at late ’60s social consciousness with European art-film pretentiousness and a lot of TV comedy schtick, thanks mainly to Buck Henry. Again, it was the performances that made it work. Next was Catch-22, which was—from conception to production to final release—a mess on a monumentally larger scale. (Sensing an opportunity, Robert Altman created M*A*S*H as a pared-down, knowing, and kind of nasty retort to Nichols’ disaster. Altman was then able to use the huge box-office generated by his low-budget farce as the springboard for his career.)

While this is a somewhat simplistic tack, it’s hard not to see Carnal Knowledge as a reaction—possibly traumatic—to the overweening nightmare of Catch-22. Instead of a cast of thousands, the ensemble of players is so small it fits on two title cards with plenty of room to spare. Instead of staging a vast, coffer-draining military operation, the action plays out, in highly stylized form, on a series of modest, even spare, sets. Instead of epic spectacle, there’s people, just a few, and most often shown in medium shot or closeup, sometimes speaking directly to the camera.

And, as with Woolf and The Graduate, Knowledge is very much an actors’ showcase. It’s not that Nichols is shy about deploying his filmic technique or afraid to experiment stylistically, but for the only time in his career, that technique is a completely organic extension of the material, expressive and reinforcing and consistent.

Jack Nicholson’s performance is from start-to-finish astonishing, running the gamut from charming to insecure to cooly detached to terrifying—probably his best work. Anyone who hasn’t seen him in Knowledge has only been exposed to a fraction of what he’s capable of. Still a relative newcomer who’d only recently gotten his first serious attention in Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, you can sense Nicholson relishing the chance to finally work with a sophisticated script and a first-rank director.

What I’m going to write next might be even more astonishing, because the rest of the ensemble—Art Garfunkel, Candice Bergen, and Ann-Margret—none of them blessed with acting chops within spitting distance of Nicholson’s—all rise to the occasion, turning in nuanced, daring, exceptional performances. None of them had done work this good before; none would ever do anything better.

It’s too easy to lean on the saw that what’s best about the best films often has more to do with the cinematographer than the director, even though that’s often true. The meaning of “best” is so multivalent and slippery, and so many factors can contribute to what does and doesn’t work in a movie, that it’s rarely useful to ride that thought too hard. (And, to utter the ultimate heresy, producers probably have more to do with a film’s creative success than either the director or the cinematographer—especially since the turn of the millennium.)

That said, Giuseppe Rotunno’s considered but spellbinding photography undeniably gives Carnal Knowledge a consistency, solidity, mordancy, wit, and grace it would have lacked otherwise. It and the acting are equally stunning, but Rotunno’s work is what holds the production together, what makes it sing.

The late ’60s and early ’70s were not kind to cinematography. Film stocks tended to be too slow to keep up with what filmmakers were trying to achieve, and post production was a shambles in the wake of the collapse of the studio system, so nobody seemed to know how to properly put a film together anymore. And yet Rotunno’s work here—a European working in the wreckage of the old Hollywood—is brilliant and unassailable. Any contemporary director could glean volumes by going back to Knowledge for a refresher course in the rudiments of post-Studio Era film grammar. Rotunno shows how to be experimental without being pretentious, theatrical without looking stagebound, virtuosic without being smart-ass.

But some of the credit also goes to production designer Dick Sylbert, his sister-in-law Anthea as costume designer, and editor Sam O’Steen—the same team that had worked on Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby three years earlier and would work on Chinatown three years on, able to achieve the craftsmanship of Paramount in its heyday at a time when that kind of resourcefulness and finesse had fallen out of favor.

The elements for the transfer streaming on Prime are a little beat up but not unacceptably so, nothing that will take you out of the experience once you get beyond the random scratches and dirt during the red-on-black opening credits. All in all, this is a damn fine presentation that’s remarkably true to the film. The color levels seem accurate, blacks—which are crucial to the look—are solid and deep, and whites are similarly solid, only exhibiting noise in some tiles on a bathroom wall during a tracking shot.

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.

The soundtrack, like the visuals, is deceptively simple—clean and dynamic and surprisingly satisfying for mono. Yes, mono.

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 | A damn fine presentation that’s remarkably true to the film. The color levels seem accurate, blacks—which are crucial to the look—are solid and deep, and whites are similarly solid, only exhibiting noise in some tiles on a bathroom wall during a tracking shot.

SOUND | The soundtrack is deceptively simple—clean and dynamic and surprisingly satisfying for mono

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Review: The Aviator

The Aviator (2004)

review | The Aviator

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Scorsese’s best effort since Casino still holds up—if you peel away all the spectacle and just focus on the human drama

by Michael Gaughn
April 18, 2023

Let’s be honest—Martin Scorsese has been squeezing every last drop out of his reputation for a painfully long time. He hasn’t made a great film since 1995’s Casino, nor a good one since the 2004 effort under consideration here. Most of his late-period output has been at the level of Gangs of New York, Shutter Island, and The Wolf of Wall Street, movies that would be deplorable coming from any director, let alone Scorsese.

It’s not like his whole career hasn’t been littered with misfires—nobody can possibly justify the existence of 1985’s After Hours—but the problem became chronic with the rise of digital cinema, which Scorsese chose to commingle with an overly romantic fantasy of working within the old studio system, resulting in a long, long string of tepid, grating, overwrought works.

It’s not a hard and fast rule of thumb, but his films became rapidly less interesting the further he roamed from his Neo-Realist roots. Without that looseness of execution and core interest in human interaction, they quickly became mannered, almost mechanistic, to the point where you can almost hear them giving off a kind of clockwork whirr.

The Aviator is a bit of an exception, although it’s not entirely clear why. It can be engrossing when it’s not trying to be epic. Channel out all the pasteboard spectacle and it’s actually pretty compelling—but looking past the vast welter of misconceived, poorly executed, and often silly effects work can be daunting for even the most determined.

And the film manages to work despite some astonishingly bad casting. Gwen Stefani’s cameo as Jean Harlow is brief but she still manages to be a significant negative presence, and makes you wonder who owed who a favor. A far bigger problem is Cate Blanchett’s Katherine Hepburn. The vast gap between Blanchett and Hepburn’s physical presences serves as a constant reminder of how little the former resembles the latter, and makes Blanchett seem more caricature than character. Her only strong scene, as she tries to communicate with Hughes through the locked door to his screening room, works mainly because the lighting mercifully obscures her. Kate Beckinsale does an interesting turn as an Ava Gardner that has practically nothing to do with the real Gardner but she displays enough skill that you have to wonder what her career would have been like if she hadn’t so easily succumbed to portraying one-dimensional cartoon figures.

DiCaprio isn’t up to playing Hughes, but watching him struggle so hard to rise to the challenge is a large part of the film’s allure. The Aviator works, to the degree it does, because the core material and Scorsese’s fascination with the dichotomy between Hughes’s public persona and his dysfunction (which would eventually become his persona)—wedded with DiCaprio’s valiant effort to craft a character—bring a depth to the proceedings that would have been wholly absent if the film’s original director, Michael Mann, had been at the helm.

Once you start actively blocking out all the egregious digital set-pieces, you realize this is a pretty intimate, fairly nuanced, and surprisingly quiet film. It’s a shame no one will ever recut this thing into that movie because the result would be a work for the ages. What we have instead is a lumbering, overly long, effects-addled curiosity piece. And in that sense, it could be argued that The Aviator was well ahead of its time.

Robert Richardson’s cinematography is consistently strong, often inspired, and is still frequently surprising, although it’s hard to appreciate exactly what he accomplished here because it often finds itself butted up against all that inept digital showboating and suffers by the association. The sound is clean enough; the mix is sometimes fascinatingly complex, other times just pointlessly chaotic. And then there’s the typically meaningless score from Howard Shore.

One last dig at the effects, but it’s a point worth making. The showstopper moment is supposed to be Hughes’ crash landing in the middle of a Beverly Hills neighborhood. But the shots leading up to the crash are so smooth and stylized and quiet (since when have prop planes been quiet?) and so obviously matted that nothing about the crash feels real. The tiles peeling off the roofs of the homes look (and, oddly, sound) like a kid tossing around Legos. The flames could have come from a hand-tinted silent movie. The upshot is that there’s no sense of physical peril. So what was the point?

That kind of miscalculation is far from limited to The Aviator and has come to infect virtually every film made. Movies have become merely diverting because they lack the courage to engage. And our lazy embrace of digital effects, on both the production and audience sides, is largely responsible for that. Since supposedly cutting-edge effects start to look creaky pretty much the second they’re first deployed, we’re running the very real risk of the past three decades of mainstream filmmaking looking not just hokey but, with no other qualities to redeem them, being written off as a total loss.

In the ongoing crapshoot that is streaming on Prime, The Aviator is one of the winners. It doesn’t represent the ideal, and it’s far from the last word in resolution. You can sense what’s missing. But you don’t really miss it. Taking all the tradeoffs into account, it creates a satisfying experience. There’s some noise in blown-out areas, like you’d see in a Blu-ray-quality transfer on Kaleidescape. And it’s able to handle most of Scorsese’s signature fast pans and tracking shots without judder, breakup, or other obvious stumbles. (But the pan down from the ceiling in Juan Trippe’s office in the top of the Chrysler Building does fall apart badly. And the 360-degree track and pan of the frantic editing-suite activity during post production on Hell’s Angels proves to be a bridge too far.) There’s a nice amount of grain in evidence—which is worth savoring because odds are it would get damped down or scrubbed away completely in a 4K HDR release.

It’s all too easy to become blasé, but consider that for a moment. We are now in an age where you can readily stream Blu-ray-quality transfers—even 4K ones—without appreciable compromises. That’s not to say there aren’t bad apples out there—there are, a lot of them. But day by day, both the quality and quantity of higher-resolution streaming titles increases. We’re not far from the point when reference-quality streaming will be the expected norm.

And The Aviator on Prime is free.

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 Aviator on Prime doesn’t represent the ideal and is far from the last word in resolution, but once you take the tradeoffs into account, it offers a satisfying experience

SOUND | The sound is clean enough, with a mix that’s sometimes fascinatingly complex, other times just pointlessly chaotic

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Review: The Magician’s Elephant

The Magician's Elephant (2023)

review | The Magician’s Elephant

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Aimed more at kids than adults, Netflix’ latest animated effort, while beautiful to look at, is a little too restrained

by Roger Kanno
March 26, 2023

The newest full-length animated feature available to stream on Netflix since March 17 is The Magician’s Elephant. It was produced by Animal Logic, now a Netflix subsidiary and a studio that provides visual effects services to the film industry and has produced the distinctive animation for the Lego and Peter Rabbit films. Based on the novel of the same name by Kate DiCamillo and a screenplay by Martin Hynes, who was one of the contributors to the Academy Award-winning Toy Story 4, The Magician’s Elephant tells the tale of an orphaned boy named Peter (Noah Jupe) and his search for his long-lost sister.

The talented voice cast also includes Mandy Patinkin, Bryan Tyree Henry, Benedict Wong, Sian Clifford, Miranda Richardson, and the always amusing Natasia Demetriou as the Fortune Teller who provides Peter with mysterious advice to help in his search. She also acts as the narrator and breaks the fourth wall to address the audience during her occasional monologues, which are smartly conceived and charmingly executed. Ultimately, though, the storytelling is somewhat clunky, with lessons delivered heavy-handedly and with little backstory as to why the townspeople and the entire city of Baltese where Peter lives have fallen into a state of indifference.

The three-dimensional look and overall visual style of the film along with a color palette full of soft blue, pink, and purple hues is extremely appealing even though Baltese, where Peter and his adoptive father Vilna live, is stuck under perpetual cloudiness. While the brightness of the picture is slightly muted due to the constant presence of the clouds, I was struck by the beauty of the detail in the cityscapes of the Old World buildings. As Peter walks across their rooftops, hundreds of individual tiles of different colors fill the screen, and closeup views show subtly varying shades on their uneven surfaces. The paint is realistically worn on the edges of roof flashings, and Peter’s well-worn leather shoes are wrinkled and grainy with scuffing evident on both the uppers and thick soles, with individual threads visible in the laces. The subdued but still lavishly colorful and detailed animation presented in Dolby Vision is a visual feast.

Character renderings are also exquisite, whether it is the realism of Vilnas’ long scraggly beard, with the hairs nearest his mouth moving more so than those further away as he speaks, or his bushy eyebrows moving independently, as do the many creases and wrinkles as he contorts his face in deep expression. The elephant’s deeply textured skin also moves smoothly and naturally and appears to be realistically stretched over the musculature of the animal as it expands and contracts in unison with its movements. In addition to the finely detailed main players, background characters are also rendered with great detail and clarity as each looks unique and distinct from one another with very different clothing, skin tones, and facial features. Regrettably, though, the painstakingly produced animation is limited to a resolution of 1080p. And while the picture didn’t appear particularly soft or lacking in quality, I couldn’t help but wonder if the fantastic visuals could have been further enhanced had the video been presented in 4K.

The Atmos soundtrack was also not as immersive or involving as I would have expected, especially considering the quality of the carefully crafted animation and the fanciful nature of the story. However, in certain instances, holographic spatial cues such as during a battle scene, the sound of explosions echo realistically in all directions and a baby’s cries are clearly audible off in the distance. And when Peter frolics with the elephant during a dream sequence, the wind swirls and envelops them as the majestic sweeping score exhibits excellent bass. Unfortunately, during much of the rest of the film, there is a relative lack of both discrete, directional surround effects and an enveloping surround ambience.

Animal Logic’s animation for The Magician’s Elephant is visually arresting and a real treat even though it might have benefitted from an upgrade to 4K from the 1080p standard HD video stream provided by Netflix. And the wholesome story with relatively little violence and a whimsical quality will likely appeal to children, although adults may not be as entertained by the rather simplistic plot.

Roger Kanno began his life-long interest in home cinema almost three decades ago with a collection of LaserDiscs and a Dolby Surround Pro Logic system. Since then, he has seen a lot of movies in his home theater but has an equal fascination with high-end stereo music systems. Roger writes for both Sound & Vision and the SoundStage! Network.

PICTURE | The subdued but still lavishly colorful and detailed animation presented in Dolby Vision is a visual feast

SOUND | The Atmos soundtrack isn’t as immersive or involving as you would expect given the quality of the carefully crafted animation and the fanciful nature of the story

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Review: Something Wild

Something Wild (1986)

review | Something Wild

This comedy-drama road film from the ’80s rises above its mediocre direction thanks mainly to defining performances by Jeff Daniels and Ray Liotta

by Michael Gaughn
March 24, 2023

Can we all now agree that Jonathan Demme just wasn’t a very good filmmaker? From the too-tall-tale-ish Melvin and Howard to the preppy pretentiousness of Stop Making Sense to the cringe-inducing Married to the Mob to the inexcusable cartoonishness of Silence of the Lambs to the TV-movie angst of Philadelphia to the sheer pointlessness of his Manchurian Candidate and the half-baked flailing of Rachel Getting Married, Demme could just never transcend his limitations long enough to rise to the first rank. Ultimately he was simultaneously too conservative and too progressive, unable to subsume his leanings into his work, and ultimately that work was just too thin to stand the test of time.

The closest he ever got to doing a really good movie was Something Wild, and that 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, it 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.

Something Wild is strikingly similar to Blake Edwards’ Blind Date, released around the same time, with both being ill-considered attempts to drag Bringing Up Baby kicking and screaming into the ‘80s—conservative young man gets pulled into the orbit of wild young woman and chaos ensues. It also overlaps substantially with Lynch’s Blue Velvet—also from the same time—with the naive young man having to vanquish the irredeemable baddie. There must have been something in the air—and that something was the crumbling of the insubstantial illusion of the Reagan era. After six years, its essential hollowness, hypocrisy, and nastiness were becoming apparent even to its boosters.

But what played out next was unprecedented. Rather than accept what we were being shown and do some badly needed soul-searching, we decided to double down on the illusion and say we’d rather get lost in obviously curdled fantasy than accept an unpleasant but too obvious truth. And that’s what ultimately kicks the props out from under Something Wild. By trying to have it both ways, saying there’s something rotten at the core and that it’s all ultimately going to somehow be OK, it lands exactly nowhere—which makes it a kind of harbinger for the all-things-to-everyone-and-nothing-to-anyone cinema of today.

What all these filmmakers missed was the insidious rise of the technocratic gods and how easily we’d be pacified by their seemingly empowering but ultimately self-serving and oppressive fictions. Thinking the human dimension still mattered, they failed to see not only that it was being reduced to a convenient shell of dichotomous stereotypes but that they were actively aiding in that dismantling. It’s a little scary how accurately Demme anticipates the delusional bleak, blinkered, and ruthlessly judgmental pre-adolescent utopianism that’s overrun contemporary pop culture.

He’d like you to think he’s being radical but here, as in all his work, Demme is just doing penance for his Liberal guilt. Any film that opens with blatant cultural appropriation, with David Byrne croaking out lily-white salsa behind the titles, obviously has its priorities all knotted up. By the time the credit comes up for the predictably forgettable John Cale/Laurie Anderson score, you know you’re solidly in the ‘80s Downtown art scene that smoothed down the waves of the ’70s and laid the foundation for the robber barons who seized and devoured Manhattan whole in the ‘90s. (For a more honest and infinitely more creative take on all this, see Scorsese’s “Life Lessons,” the first section of New York Stories.)

Critics went ape over Tak Fujimoto’s cinematography at the time. It has its moments but it’s not that good, and a lot of it now feels not just affected but dreary. But it is well enough served by the 1080p presentation on Amazon. As with so much on that service, it’s not exceptional but isn’t compromised enough that you’ll be lunging for the remote to click off. The stereo mix is similarly serviceable—certainly not distracting. It’s hard to see where Atmos would bring much to the experience—better to leave the mix alone and treat the film as a product of its time.

Something Wild is fascinating as a cultural artifact—showing how political convictions can warp creation and blind you to the present. Demme is almost irrelevant to what’s best about the film, but somebody had to be there to say “Action!” If you’ve never seen it, it’s worth watching for the leads. And if it’s been a while, revisit it—once.

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 | Something Wild is well enough served by the 1080p presentation on Amazon—not exceptional but not compromised enough to be distracting

SOUND | The audio is similarly serviceable, with a stereo mix that wouldn’t be much enhanced by an Atmos do-over.

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Review: Luther: The Fallen Sun

Luther: The Fallen Sun (2023)

review | Luther: The Fallen Sun

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This feature-length continuation of the BBC series is engrossing enough but doesn’t break any new ground

by Roger Kanno
March 19, 2023

Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) John Luther (Idris Elba) is a brilliant but disgraced ex-police officer who has been imprisoned for transgressions committed as a result of the all-consuming nature of his investigations. Often consumed by the darkness of the crimes he investigates, DCI Luther walks the line between good and evil and right and wrong that often becomes blurred and sometimes crosses that line in his quest to bring criminals to justice.

A continuation of Luther, the acclaimed BBC series created and written by Neil Cross that aired from 2010 to 2019, Luther: The Fallen Sun has been available on Netflix since March 10 after a limited theatrical run in select theaters beginning February 24. During its nine-year run, the TV series only produced 20 episodes yet resulted in many nominations for BAFTA, Screen Actors Guild, Golden Globe, and Primetime Emmy Awards, among others, and several wins, including acting awards for Elba from the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild.

Fallen Sun brings back Elba and Dermot Crowley as Detective Superintendent (retired) Martin Schenk, another brilliant, but more ethical, officer and Luther’s uneasy friend and ally from the original series. Taunted by a ruthless killer (Andy Serkis), Luther must solve the grisly murders even though he is behind bars by using whatever goodwill still exists for him and favors he can muster from past acquaintances and colleagues. Serkis is better known for his digital performance-capture roles such as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and for co-founding Imaginarium Studios, which is dedicated to this film-making technology. But he is both menacing and convincing in his portrayal of serial killer David Robey. If you require further evidence of the quality of his conventional acting skills, watch him in Andor, arguably the best Star Wars limited series available on Disney+. Add to this a fine performance by Cynthia Erivo as DCI Odette Raine, the lead investigator assigned to the case, and the cast is simply rock solid.

The difficulty with Fallen Sun is that the story, written by Cross, must live up to the considerable expectations created by the high caliber of the original TV series. While it does this for the most part, it is a relatively conventional, if well-made, thriller that’s not especially innovative nor shocking. There are also a few too many plot details that are simply glossed over or somehow conveniently wrapped up by the end of the film. The door is left open for the possibility of a sequel or even the beginning of a movie franchise.

As with many recent streaming releases, the quality of the visual presentation is very good. It exhibits a cool bluey-green tinge at times, especially early on, but overall the picture looks smooth and natural. It can be difficult to tell that the presentation is in HDR as the Dolby Vision picture is not exceedingly bright, but this contributes to the natural look. For instance, as Luther chases a suspect through a seedy tattoo parlor, the realistically dark lighting and shadows make it hard to make out a lot of detail, but the colored lights in a dimly lit hallway brilliantly cut through the darkness. Scenes inside a police command center show computer monitors glowing realistically in the background with colorful but not overly saturated hues, and DCI Raine’s smooth and even complexion perfectly reflecting the carefully controlled lighting. The ice fields of Norway also appear impressively austere and bleak but not excessively bright as they are shot under mostly cloudy skies, yet the minute details on Luther’s signature dark woolen overcoat and his slightly unkempt beard are sharp and easily visible.

While the picture quality is quite satisfying, the audio quality is a bit underwhelming. All of the components of an engrossing soundtrack are present—ominous music, carefully timed jarring sound effects, and more constant ambient sounds—but they’re not mixed effectively to utilize the immersive capabilities of Dolby Atmos as the sound remains mostly anchored to the front channels. Even scenes that are obvious candidates for an enveloping surround ambience, such as heavy rain during a storm or the echoey interior of a large prison, make only subtle use of the surround and height channels. More suspenseful scenes when Luther is closing in on Robey have aggressive music and sound effects mixed into a wider front stereo soundstage, but even then there is fairly limited use of the additional channels.

Fallen Sun is a capable thriller but fans of DCI Luther may be disappointed by the film’s rather conventional narrative that fails to take his story to the next level. There is always the possibility of a sequel, but so far, the film adaption of Luther is not up to the same creative standards as those set by other Netflix franchises such as Enola Holmes or Knives Out.

Roger Kanno began his life-long interest in home cinema almost three decades ago with a collection of LaserDiscs and a Dolby Surround Pro Logic system. Since then, he has seen a lot of movies in his home theater but has an equal fascination with high-end stereo music systems. Roger writes for both Sound & Vision and the SoundStage! Network.

PICTURE | The picture exhibits a cool blue-green tinge at times but overall looks smooth and natural

SOUND | All the components of an engrossing soundtrack are present but aren’t mixed effectively to utilize the immersive capabilities of Dolby Atmos since the sound remains mostly anchored to the front channels

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Oscar Winners 2023

reviews | Oscar Winners 2023

by the Cineluxe staff
March 13, 2023

This was a good year for “You’re kidding.” Even those who have long been sour on the whole exercise had to have been more than a little thrown by what transpired last night. And because the Academy—apparently eager to just get it over with and move on—went into full pile-on mode, there wasn’t a lot left standing by the time the ceremony was over. A lot could be said about how almost all the films that won this year were in some way retreads, things that not only didn’t move the needle forward but forcibly wrenched it back a few notches, seemingly out of fear of doing anything new. Hopefully this was just the last wave of leftovers from the pandemic, there are more vital forces stirring, and next year’s affair will be a little more gratifying. 

International Film, Cinematography, Original Score, Production Design

“From the opening pastoral scenes of nature in the French countryside that transition to the bleakness and horror of the trenches and No Man’s Land of the Great War, All Quiet on the Western Front captivates with an unflinching visual style, providing one of the most satisfying cinematic experiences offered by a movie from a streaming service this year.”
read more

Picture, Director, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay, Editing

“Despite being a work of legitimate cultural significance, with a message that will still be sending shockwaves through my brain years from now, Everything Everywhere All at Once is also incredibly accessible and wildly entertaining, not to mention slap-happily zany.”    read more

Animated Film

“Del Toro’s Pinocchio—a re-imagining of the 1883 novel that has nothing to do with Disney’s take on the property—is a weird and wonderful, utterly soulful fantasy adventure and allegory that almost seems to have been made with no other audience in mind than del Toro himself.    read more

RRR

Original Song

RRR may not have been India’s entry in the Academy Award International Feature category this year, but it is a hugely successful and highly accessible film that you don’t have to be a film connoisseur to enjoy. So check out this not so hidden gem of a film on Netflix if you haven’t already.”   read more

Sound

Maverick is like a master class in how to make a blockbuster sequel. The casting and acting are great, the cinematography is fantastic, the plot is simple but compelling, and the action is fast-paced and (mostly) believable. And it plays terrifically in a luxury home theater. It looks and sounds great, is a near-guaranteed crowd pleaser for your next get-together, and has great replay value. In fact, I already can’t wait to watch it again, and it will likely have heavy rotation in your theater’s demo showoff reel!”    read more 

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Review: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2022)

review | Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

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Previously the subject of three very short animated films, Marcel translates surprisingly well into a perceptive and unusually optimistic feature-length effort

by Dennis Burger
March 10, 2023

Viewers of a certain vintage will remember Edith Ann, the character created by Lily Tomlin. The bit involved her sitting in an oversized rocking chair and dispensing nuggets of wisdom from the perspective of a five-and-a-half-year-old, first on Laugh-In in the 1960s and later on Sesame Street in the ’70s. If you remember what I’m talking about, imagine taking those segments—which ran from maybe 30 seconds to a couple minutes at most—and expanding them into a feature-length film, and you’ll get a sense of exactly how preposterous an idea it was to turn Marcel the Shell with Shoes On into a movie.

Marcel, in case you’re not familiar, was the subject of three stop-motion animated shorts made between 2010 and 2014, each with a runtime of under four minutes. Marcel is cuter than Edith Ann, to be sure, and a little more mature at that, but the concept is remarkably similar—take a look at the world through the eyes of a naïve-but-wise child (in this case, an anthropomorphic seashell voiced by Jenny Slate) if only to appreciate how weird some of our social conventions are, or perhaps to shine a light on things we take for granted. Truth be told, though, much as I loved those little films, four minutes seemed to be stretching the concept to its limits.

Thankfully, Slate and former husband Dean Fleischer Camp—who cowrote and directed the original shorts and the feature film together—knew better than to simply fill up more time with Marcel’s trademark “guess what . . .” gags. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On—the movie, that is—has a for-real narrative arc, one that organically emerges from the original concept while also expanding it. Marcel and his grandmother (voiced here by Isabella Rossellini) are all that remain of their family, who disappeared when the former owners of their house broke up and moved out. Documentarian Dean (played by Fleischer Camp) rents the house from AirBnB after his own breakup, and decides to make a film about Marcel’s daily life and his distinctive view of the world. 

While coloring way outside the lines of the original premise, the film version of Marcel is true to its roots, and it actually incorporates the shorts into the cinematic narrative quite inventively, as Marcel becomes an internet sensation in this reality sort of the same way he did in ours over a decade ago.

In a larger sense, though, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is a quest film, with the quest in this case being Marcel’s dogged determination to find his lost family. Along the way, the film manages to weave in some truly profound commentary on parasocial relationships and the illusion of connectedness that comes from social media. And far from overstaying its welcome, by the time the credits started rolling at around the 80-minute mark, I found myself wanting it to go on, wanting at least another half hour with this adorable character and his defiantly optimistic outlook despite the profound sadness of his circumstances.

The film also understandably looks a little more professional than the low-budget DIY originals, but I dig the fact that live-action director of photography Bianca Cline and stop-motion director of photography Eric Adkins managed to evoke the look of the shorts without aping them. There’s also a lot more inventive camerawork on display here, but rather than being showy, it all sort of aids buying into the reality of this wholly unbelievable scenario.

The film was shot on a combination of older Alexa digital cameras with rehoused Nikon still-photography lenses and Canon EOS R mirrorless bodies, and it looks like a bit of film-look processing has been applied to add a touch of faux grain and mute some of the contrasts. It was finished in a 4K digital intermediate at an odd aspect ratio of 1.55:1.

Light plays a big role in the film—both narratively and cinematically—and while none of it is eye-reactive, the HDR10 grade of Kaleidescape’s download presents it beautifully. Little motes of dust suspended in sunbeams throughout the film pop a bit more than they would in standard dynamic range, and although the imagery has an intentionally soft look, the combination of the expanded value scale and the enhanced resolution of UHD gives the whole thing a wonderfully textured look. The only flaws are two very brief instances of banding that may or may not have been baked into the original footage.

The Kaleidescape version also comes with a surprisingly aggressive Dolby Atmos mix that somehow manages to work. The surround channels are nearly constantly active, especially early in the film, and the utterly brilliant score by Richard Vreeland (aka Disasterpeace) expands upward into the height channels at every appropriate opportunity. I would normally hate any Atmos mix that throws as much sound around the room as this one does, but it’s always perfectly in proportion with the images onscreen and never distracts from the viewing experience. It’s simply further proof that sound mixers are finally figuring out how to fill this expanded sonic landscape without making a spectacle of it all.

Frankly, though, unless you’re specifically concentrating on the shape of the sound—say, for the purposes of a review—I doubt you’ll notice the technical particulars. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is such a compelling little film that anyone with a hint of tolerance for weirdness will get altogether lost in the experience. It’s refreshing to watch a movie that leans so hard into its adorableness without ignoring the difficulties we all face in life. It’s also a delightfully strange feeling to watch a film made with so much sincerity and so little cynicism. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but give the original shorts a watch if you haven’t seen them a dozen times already (you can find them on YouTube here, here, and here). If they resonate with you in the slightest, I think you’ll love the feature-length Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.

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 | Light plays a big role in the film and while none of it is eye-reactive, the HDR10 grade of Kaleidescape’s download presents it beautifully

SOUND | The Kaleidescape version comes with a surprisingly aggressive Dolby Atmos mix that somehow manages to work, being always perfectly in proportion with the images onscreen and never distracting from the viewing experience

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