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Review: The Aviator

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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: Season: A Letter to the Future

Season: A Letter to the Future

review | Season: A Letter to the Future

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No fighting, no explosions—you can’t even jump—but this quest game provides a unique experience for everyone who plays it

by Dennis Burger
March 31, 2023

Perhaps the easiest way to explain the concept of the brilliant new PS4/PS5/PC game Season: A Letter to the Future is to deconstruct its title. The “season” to which it refers isn’t a meteorological subdivision of the year but something more akin to the ages of J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium—larger swaths of time into which history is grouped in retrospect. There was, in the past of this game’s world, a season of industrialization, a season of cultural exchange, a season of war, and the season into which your character was born, whose defining characteristics are a bit nebulous.

The “letter to the future” is your mission in the game. The end of your season has been prophesied. You’ve been chosen to leave your insular little hometown to document the world as it exists for the benefit of future generations. Your tools for the journey consist of merely a camera, an audio recorder, a bicycle, and the blank scrapbook you’ll fill along the way—with photos and drawings and quotations from the people you meet in your travels—not for your own benefit, but for the benefit of those who’ll read it long after you’re gone.

Let me underline that point in case it doesn’t resonate. Season: A Letter to the Future is a quest game, to be sure; it is an open-world exploration game. But you have no weapons. You can’t even jump, you can’t punch, you can neither build nor destroy things. Your job is to explore and learn and document—to see the world as it exists and to listen to the stories of the who populate it—and the scrapbook you end up filling by the end of your journey will be uniquely yours. It’s legitimately inconceivable that any other player will construct a letter to the future exactly like yours.

None of it would work if the world weren’t so compelling, but the tiny little indie dev-team Scavengers Studio has created a virtual reality that’s nearly infinitely compelling, not merely in its composition but also its aesthetics. The world of the game certainly seems to be ours in the far future, as its artifacts will look all too familiar to modern eyes—machines of commerce and construction; crumbled superhighways that exist in the landscape but are not part of it. Let’s just call it what it is: A post-apocalyptic earth by all indications. But not since Adventure Time have we seen a post-apocalypse this quirky and beautiful.

The game’s distinctive rendering style certainly doesn’t hurt in that respect. Regular gamers will recognize the graphics as belonging to a tradition known as cel-shading, perhaps employed most popularly in a handful of modern Zelda games but also used in films ranging from A Scanner Darkly to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

As lovely as the graphics are, though, it’s the surround soundtrack that sells the constructed reality of the game. More often than not, it’ll be your ears that point you in the direction of the most interesting discoveries, be it an old windmill creaking in the midst of a storm, creating energy for no one, or a manmade instrument that converts the sounds of the wind into music.

Perhaps the neatest thing about Season: A Letter to the Future is that I think it will be non-gamers who somehow stumble upon it who appreciate it the most. The game begins with the gentlest of invitations: “We invite you to explore and enjoy this experience at your own pace.” Many of us who are accustomed to exploring virtual open worlds will, I fear, rush from one discovery to the next, chasing the trophies and achievements we’ve been trained to view as the point of it all, secure in the knowledge that as soon as we’ve hit the ending credits we can start a new game and discover all the things we missed the first time around.

Season is not that sort of game. Having made it to the end and meditated on its themes—ecological, environmental, societal, historical, and personal alike—I doubt I’ll ever play it again. To do so would be to miss the point. As with life, it’s the ephemerality of this letter to the future that makes it so precious. To attempt a do-over would be to sully the memory of this one-of-a-kind experience.

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 | Not since Adventure Time has there been a post-apocalypse this quirky and beautiful, done in a cel-shading style reminiscent of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

SOUND | The surround soundtrack sells the constructed reality of the game, guiding you in the direction of the most interesting discoveries

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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.”
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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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Review: All That Breathes

All That Breathes (2022)

review | All That Breathes

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Eschewing conventional narrative and exposition, this Oscar-nominated Indian documentary encourages you to develop your own thoughts and feelings about the subject matter

by Dennis Burger
February 22, 2023

If you want to experience the concept of “show, don’t tell” embodied flawlessly in cinematic form, you owe it to yourself to check out Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes at your earliest convenience. Less a documentary—or indeed, a narrative—than a portrait that unfolds in four dimensions, the film opens with a slow panning sequence that establishes the rules straight away. It’s a shot of urban wildlife in the city of New Delhi—rats, specifically, scurrying around in a concrete jungle—devoid of narration or setup. It is, in a sense, pure cinematic experience—a combination of moving imagery and sound orchestrated to transport you elsewhere and make you feel whatever you’re going to feel without imposing its feelings on you.

Shortly thereafter, we’re introduced to Mohammad, Nadeem, and Salik, operators of a wildlife rescue focused on treating and rehabilitating black kites that fall from New Delhi’s toxic skies. What makes All That Breathes hit a bit differently is that it doesn’t explain who these men are or what they do. We discover the particulars of their lives organically, as they come up in conversation or in the course of their day-to-day lives. We witness phone conversations, only half of which can be heard. We’re privy to private discussions about the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the resulting government overreach without any mention of the Citizenship Amendment Act by name.

The filmmakers, in other words, don’t dot every “i” and cross every “t” because they don’t need to. You pick up from context what’s important—at least what’s important to the subjects of the film.

Scenes of family life and the work of the aptly named Wildlife Rescue are interspersed with a good number of the purely cinematic experiential sequences of the sort that open the film, all of which seem designed to make the viewer reflect on the way wildlife affects cities and cities affect wildlife and both affect humans. The beauty of it is, though, we’re not told how to interpret any of this. We don’t need to be. The images coming straight out of the camera are enough of a prompt.

Those images, by the way, were obviously captured at a higher resolution and with more dynamic range than we find in the HD presentation on HBO Max. The film was shot on a combination of Canon and Panasonic prosumer cameras, both of which record at 4K resolution with 10-bit dynamic range. And you can see the constraints of dynamic range at times, when highlights get blown out or shadows get a little muddied. All in all, though, the impeccably composed cinematography benefits from a bit of processing that seems to have muted contrasts a bit, and the footage is so mesmerizing that it transcends reproduction.

No such caveats are needed for the Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 soundtrack, which is an absolute master class in subtle but effective audio mixing. In fact, it upmixes perfectly into Atmos, if your surround processor is capable of such. Pans across the front soundstage are common, though inconspicuous enough that you might miss them. The surround channels are nearly constantly active but never distracting. Dialogue is beautifully rendered—although, it’s in Hindi, so intelligibility might not matter for those of us in the west who don’t speak the language. The baked-in subtitles are nicely done as well and seem better suited to viewing at cinematic proportions than the standard 55-inch TV on the other side of the room. That’s a nice but unexpected touch.

Overall, the only real complaint I have about All That Breathes is that it ends far too quickly. Granted, the 97-minute runtime already seems brisk on paper, but actually watching it, it doesn’t feel anywhere near that long. Some of that is due to the lack of a conventional narrative but a lot of it boils down to fantastic editing, compelling subjects, and mesmerizing cinematography. One simply hopes HBO eventually releases the thing in UHD/HDR so it can be experienced in its full splendor.

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

PICTURE | The images were captured at a higher resolution and with more dynamic range than are found in the HD presentation on HBO Max. You can see the dynamic-range constraints when highlights are blown out or shadows get a little muddied

SOUND | The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 soundtrack is a master class in subtle but effective audio mixing that upmixes perfectly into Atmos

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Review: Fire of Love

Fire of Love (2022)

review | Fire of Love

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A quirky but fascinating Oscar-nominated documentary about two quirky but fascinating scientists

by Dennis Burger
February 13, 2023

If you were looking for the perfect person to review Fire of Love, I’d likely be the last person you’d pick. I say that because I watch nature and science documentaries the way some people watch partisan cable news. I visit the National Geographic tab on Disney+ more often than the Disney tab. I already knew the story of Maurice and Katia Krafft, the married volcanologists whose work is the subject of this film. And more than anything else, that’s what puts me at something of a disadvantage here, as getting to know these two is at least half the thrill of Fire of Love.

It does give me something of an advantage, though, too, as it lends me a bit of authority when I say things like this: Director Sara Dosa seems to understand these weird human beings. She gets what made them tick. In digging through hours and hours of archival footage shot by the Kraffts themselves in attempting to tell the story of who they were, she seems to have let them be the guides. And what’s fascinating about that is that it results in a portrait of two nuanced humans who in some ways contradict the stereotypical caricature of what a scientist is and in some ways embody it almost to the point of parody.

As such, the film is a little messy and a lot contradictory, exactly as a biographical snapshot of two people over the course of more than two decades should be. It captures the scientific curiosity of Maurice and Katia so well that at times I couldn’t exorcise from my head Richard Feynman’s humorous comparison between physics and sex: “Sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.” But it also does justice to the passionate mission that evolved out of their curiosity—a desire to understand volcanos so fewer people would be killed by them.

That duality is always bubbling just under the surface of the film, and it’s reflected in a sort of dichotomous tone that defines its style. On the one hand, there’s a reverence here, not merely for the Kraffts but also the work that they did. On the other, there’s an unabashed playfulness that’s reflected in things like the Gilliamesque animation that bridges the gaps in the archival footage and the Wes Anderson-like style that propels the narrative.

Frankly, a lot of the latter comes from narrator Miranda July, whose work on the film is one of the few things I’m not gaga about. I adore July’s writing, and I’ve enjoyed seeing her in other films, but in this one she seems to have been instructed to read the script with a detached hipster aloofness that is out of sorts with the imagery and the words. She reads lines like “Understanding is love’s other name” with the affectation of a stoned-but-bored Aubrey Plaza doing an intentionally half-assed Sarah Vowell impersonation.

Still, even that isn’t enough to rob the film of its power. I think a lesser filmmaker would have let this one fall apart in oh so many ways, especially in trying to deal with Maurice as a sympathetic figure. He is, mind you. The guy was a hoot. But he was also foolhardy and a bit of a showboat. He was the sort of fellow who could sound completely sane and rational while describing a plot to ride an insulated raft inspired by the Gemini spacecraft down a lava flow and into the ocean, no matter how crazy an idea it actually is. He’s the sort of fellow it’s hard not to have a conflicted opinion about. And yet, aside from the obvious editorial choices of what footage to include and what to leave in the archives, Dosa doesn’t seem to impose her opinion at all.

She also shows restraint in another key way I found particularly impressive. Toward the end of the film—and as such, toward the end of their lives—we start to get a sense of Maurice and Katia’s frustration, resulting from a disaster in Colombia that would have been wholly preventable had the local authorities simply listened to the scientists and evacuated the villages surrounding Nevado del Ruiz before it erupted. But the bureaucrats feared the evacuation would be too expensive, and as a result at least 20,000 of the area’s 29,000 residents were killed.

It’s difficult bordering on impossible to watch this without drawing parallels between the work of the Kraffts and that of latter-day climatologists frustratedly attempting to warn us of the impacts of the ongoing climate crisis, and I think most documentarians—especially in this Netflix era of “documentary” filmmaking—wouldn’t have been able to resist the urge to underline those parallels, italicize them, bold them, and rub the viewer’s nose in them. But the script doesn’t even allude to them, leaving the viewer to connect such obvious dots.

It’s that sort of approach that makes this my preferred film about the Kraffts released in the last year—the other being Werner Herzog’s  The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft. Herzog seems to have cleaned up and processed the imagery a bit more than did Dosa, as the bulk of Fire of Love is comprised of unrestored 16mm footage, mostly shot in the 1970s and ’80s in a 4:3 aspect ratio. While a few shots appear duped (perhaps taken from the Kraffts’ numerous films), a lot of it looks to come straight from the camera negative, and as such is fairly clean. But this is still relatively TV-quality imagery that was (mostly) shot more for scientific than entertainment purposes, so it isn’t exactly home theater demo material. All the same, you’ll likely find yourself awed by the subjects of the cinematography and quickly forget issues of detail, color purity, etc.

The 5.1-channel soundtrack, on the other hand, does get a little big for its britches on occasion, trying to add some dynamic zhuzh to footage that doesn’t need zhuzhing. But the all-important dialogue is clear and the hyperactive sound mix doesn’t detract from the story being told.

Of the two documentary films cobbled together last year from footage shot by Maurice and Katia Krafft over the course of their adult lives, Fire of Love is ultimately the better one for a number of reasons. Dosa doesn’t cram her own personality into the film the way Herzog does, but she also takes a more childlike and irreverent approach to the material that I think suits its subjects and its subject matter better. I’d love it if you watched both because there are some ways in which Herzog’s film is superior. But if you have to pick one, make it this one, whether it wins the Oscar or not.

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 | Comprised of unrestored 16mm footage, the documentary is made up of relatively TV-quality imagery shot more for scientific than entertainment purposes, so it isn’t exactly home theater demo material

SOUND | The 5.1-channel soundtrack gets a little big for its britches on occasion, but the all-important dialogue is clear and the hyperactive sound mix doesn’t detract from the story being told

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Review: You People

You People (2023)

review | You People

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This star-filled romantic comedy on Netflix is amusing enough but never lives up to its potential

by Roger Kanno
February 12, 2023

Ezra Cohen (Jonah Hill) is a financial professional and podcaster who falls in love with costume designer Amira Mohammed (Lauren London). However, Amira’s father Akbar (Eddie Murphy) doesn’t like or trust Ezra, and Ezra’s mother Shelley (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), is prone to saying wildly inappropriate things on a fairly regular basis. After Amira accepts Ezra’s marriage proposal, the two families come together with the predictable resulting tension as the interracial couple navigates the cultural differences between their families.

You People, which began streaming on Netflix on January 27, has a screenplay co-written by Hill and Kenya Barris, creator of the award-winning television series Black-ish, and a star-studded cast that also includes Nia Long and David Duchovny along with many celebrity cameos. Additionally, Barris directs and with such a stacked cast and established team behind the production, all of the ingredients are present for some outrageous comedy and biting social commentary. And while the dialogue is often clever and amusing, it is seldomly laugh out loud funny, and cultural themes are mostly superficially addressed.

As Ezra and his podcast partner Mo (Sam Jay) riff on his inability to maintain a healthy romantic relationship with multiple references to Drake, the resulting rapid-fire dialogue is mildly comical and charming but isn’t as funny or daring as I would have expected it to be. When Eddie Murphy first appears on screen as the serious and non-nonsense Akbar, his severe demeanor and swagger are palpable. But what seems so promising at first soon blends into the rest of the film and its predictable jokes and slightly cringey scenes that don’t quite seem to go far enough to make them uproariously funny or make any astute societal observations.

Nonetheless, Murphy is charismatic, and his intense energy is fascinating to watch even if his character doesn’t have all that much to do in the film. And yet he still manages to make Akbar both relatable and sympathetic. London and Hill are likable as the leads but they too aren’t given much to work with to develop their characters. The onscreen chemistry between them never really goes anywhere even as we watch their relationship develop and deepen. Much the same can be said of the other characters, but with such an excellent cast, the film is buoyed by their performances even if it plays it relatively safe and results in a pretty standard romantic comedy with relatively few truly funny moments.

The cast may be loaded, but so too is the highly engaging music soundtrack presented in Dolby Atmos with fantastic songs from the late Nipsey Hussle, James Brown, Ice-T, DJ Khaled, and Barry White, just to name a few. The music is marvelously integrated into the overall sound design with many scenes introduced by a fabulous flourish of hip hop jams. The songs feature a truly immersive object-based mix to provide a wonderfully wide and spacious sound with plenty of deep bass. From the opening scenes featuring “Chitty Bang” by Leikeli47, the music surrounded and enveloped me in scene after scene with an infectious beat. And when things slowed down during Amira and Ezra’s first date, Brittany Howard’s silky smooth “Stay High” was smoothly and coherently mixed into all channels to deliver a truly enveloping and dreamy effect.

Picture quality was nearly as impressive as the audio. The clothing and furnishings in the backgrounds of the many upscale shops Ezra and Amira visit look totally realistic, with each carefully crafted scene filled with a plethora of pleasing colors. Fashion lovers will appreciate the extensive use of contemporary clothing and sneakers utilized by costume designer Michelle R. Cole. The exquisitely detailed stitching and the beautiful pink, blue, and yellow pastel shades of corduroy looked absolutely perfect with a Dolby Vision color grade that brought out the subtle differences in the soft pale hues. Colors did pop when required as with a Southwest airlines plane, whose deep-blue fuselage looked absolutely gorgeous in a sharply detailed establishing shot.

The slick-looking visuals and excellent sound design of You People were a pleasant surprise from this rom-com but considering the film’s promising pedigree, I was disappointed in its formulaic plot and lack of cutting-edge comedy.

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 | Clothing and furnishings looked realistic, with each scene filled with a plethora of pleasing colors. The pink, blue, and yellow pastel shades of corduroy looked perfect with a Dolby Vision color grade that brought out the subtle differences in the soft hues. 

SOUND | The truly immersive object-based Atmos mix provides the film’s many songs with a wonderfully wide and spacious sound with plenty of deep bass.

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