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Review: Rosemary’s Baby

review | Rosemary’s Baby

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The film that created the modern horror/thriller genre looks fine in Blu-ray-quality HD but cries out for 4K HDR

by Michael Gaughn
October 22, 2020

1968 saw the lowest movie attendance in history. It was also the year of 2001, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Night of the Living Dead, If . . ., The Producers, Bullitt, The Party, Petulia, Planet of the Apes—and Rosemary’s Baby. In other words, the movies that would reinvent Hollywood and define it for the next 50 years.

Coincidence? Of course not—and it’s exactly that creative ferment born from cultural strife that gives me hope this eerily similar era might lead to another radical reinvention of the movies. Because boy do they (and we) need it.

But that’s a topic for another day. The focus of attention here is Roman Polanski’s genre-defining, damn near perfectly calibrated horror/thriller Rosemary’s Baby. And let’s get one thing clear right off the bat: This is not a serious film, let alone an art film. Polanski knew full well he was making a trashy potboiler and didn’t care. He wanted to know what it felt like to create a big hit within the studio system, and he did. He hit the jackpot.

That’s not to say that Polanski colored within the studio lines. He toys with both the studio conventions and a very wary but looking to be jazzed audience the way a cat torments a half-dead mouse. The movie gets its big perverse kick from seeing how far it can push the boundaries without breaking them. There’s the continual sense that this stuff shouldn’t be happening in a mainstream crowd-pleaser and yet it is, which makes the film, beyond its subject matter, feel very much like a nightmare. But that approach has since become so commonplace that it’s lost its impact—which means you have to approach Rosemary’s Baby on its own terms and with fresh eyes if you’re going to get anything out of the experience at all.

There’s barely a frame that doesn’t bear evidence of Polanski’s lightning-quick paw, but probably the most striking example, especially since it essentially sets the whole grisly machine in motion, is Teresa Gionoffrio’s suicide juxtaposed with the entrance of the Castevets. We go from shots of a woman’s head framed in an improbable amount of blood (Weegee never photographed a crime scene that gory) to a seemingly incongruous low angle of two archetypal geriatric Manhattan flânuers strolling toward the camera dressed like they just came from Mardi Gras. The whole sequence is as disconcerting as it is hilarious. It’s like, “OK—I just got my first big, gruesome shock, so why am I laughing?” It’s Polanski’s way of saying you’d better trust him on this ride or you should just go watch another film.

There’s no point in recounting the plot or the set pieces. If you’ve seen the movie, you know all of that well; if you haven’t, why spoil it for you? What’s worth underlining is that—like Kubrick’s The Shining, which owes Rosemary a huge, and amply acknowledged, debt—Rosemary’s Baby still works. I know it’s arguable, but I don’t think anyone’s ever pulled off anything as odd yet apt—perverse yet airy—as the elaborate ritual leading to Rosemary’s insemination, where she’s granted an audience with a Samsonite-lugging Pope while being straddled by Satan.

The film has flaws but Polanski, out of sheer creative exuberance and guile, manages to trump them all. He’d wanted Robert Redford for the lead, which would have been amazing. He got John Cassavetes instead—which would have sunk the whole enterprise under the hand of a lesser director. Cassavetes acts like an asshole from the very start, so of course he’d sell his soul to the Devil. And yet the film somehow manages to glide right over that major lost opportunity.

I was also struck watching the movie this time by what an outright flake Mia Farrow’s Rosemary is. I realize Polanski wanted to keep the audience wondering if all of this was happening in the character’s head, but this Antichrist-toting Midwesterner is such a dim bulb that you almost don’t care if she’s delusional to boot.

And I have to ask: If Farrow is a housewife and Cassavetes is a struggling actor, where did they get the money to rent an Upper West Side apartment that would easily sell for many millions today?

I’ve never had a chance to see Rosemary’s Baby in a theater, so watching it in HD on Kaleidescape was a better than expected experience—that only made me long to see it in 4K. William Fraker’s cinematography was more compelling than I’d remembered from other home video incarnations—although I would hope that going to the next level of resolution will help minimize that damn flashing they used throughout when printing the film. It seriously dates what would have otherwise been an exquisitely photographed movie (and will forever haunt a large number of otherwise excellent films from the late ‘60s through the ’70s).

Christopher Komeda’s weird gothic-jazz soundtrack, bringing the evil of the East European woods into ‘60s Manhattan, still holds up, partly because it’s applied sparingly instead of being blared wall to wall. And this, like Rear Window and The Birds, is yet another older film that would seem ripe for an Atmos makeover, but it has such an ingeniously done original audio mix that expanding the surround field wouldn’t necessarily make it more atmospheric. That said, as with those other two films, I’d be intrigued to see somebody give it a shot.

To repeat myself: Nobody needs to convince you to watch Rosemary’s Baby. Its reputation as a horror classic is unassailable and secure. But I would urge you to first scrape away as many of the accreted conventions Polanski’s shocker has spawned and try to see it as if all those other films had never happened, as this is the place where it all began.

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

PICTURE | Watching this in HD on Kaleidescape is a better than expected experience, with William Fraker’s cinematography more compelling than it’s been on other home video incarnations

SOUND | Christopher Komeda’s weird gothic-jazz soundtrack, bringing the evil of the East European woods into ‘60s Manhattan, still holds up, partly because it’s applied sparingly instead of being blared wall to wall

Review: Full Metal Jacket

review | Full Metal Jacket

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You can sense Kubrick’s filmmaking powers beginning to wane, but this remains the single most intriguing riff on Vietnam to date

by Michael Gaughn
September 28, 2020

It’s obvious in retrospect that, sometime around 1962, Stanley Kubrick sold his soul to the devil. In Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, and The Shining, he was able to tap into a level of filmmaking no mortal had been able to access before, and none have come even close to since. His work during that period made every other movie, no matter how seemingly well done, feel cliché, compromised, and inept.

Then, in the early ‘80s, his deal with the Dark Prince began to go sour. By the early ‘90s, they had clearly parted ways, and with Eyes Wide Shut, Satan exacted his revenge.

With Full Metal Jacket (1986), you can clearly sense the Master failing—but keep in mind that’s compared to the best of his own work. He was still way ahead of what any other mainstream director was doing.

During the Strangelove-to-Shining period, you might not have always been able to fathom some of his creative choices but, even when they were inexplicable, they felt like they were somehow a part of the whole. With Full Metal Jacket, you have entire passages that, both upon viewing and reflection, feel inert, like they’re keeping the movie from hitting its stride.

Just to be clear: Jacket is a great film—it’s just not quite one of the greatest Kubrick films. The boot-camp sequence, from the second R. Lee Ermey appears on the screen though Vincent D’Onofrio’s self-inflicted head wound, is, if not flawless, undeniably compelling and even exhilarating. But the movie then sputters throughout the second act, trying out various stuff just to see what will stick, before recovering its stride for the conclusion in Hué.

It’s easy to re-edit Jacket in your head, removing the dead spots, and seeing it as a much tighter 90-minute affair that wouldn’t have been any less sardonic or bleak or exhausting but wouldn’t have so many things that would make you cringe. (“Paint it Black”? Really?!)

I’m not at all saying you shouldn’t watch it—in fact, there are some pretty compelling reasons to put it above anything you currently have on your Watch list. First off, it’s worth it just to savor Ermey’s Sgt. Hartman and D’Onofrio’s Pvt. Pyle, two of the most iconic film performances ever. Kubrick is often shortchanged as an actor’s director, but you just need to consider that D’Onofrio had never acted in a film before and Ermey had never had a major role to appreciate just how masterful he was.

It’s also worth watching for its (and I’m about to say a dirty word here) ambiguity. At a time when you’d be hard pressed to name a film that doesn’t ultimately reinforce accepted beliefs, no matter how convoluted it might be in getting there, it can be bracing to watch something that pushes back so hard against the status quo.

Consider Pvt. Pyle’s blanket party. Kubrick has been using Matthew Modine, with his Wonder Bread blandness, as the traditional point of audience identification, but he’s been increasingly making Pyle’s plight the focus of the action. And, for all his abuse, Ermey has been serving as comic relief and the volcanic source of the film’s energy. By the time of the assault on Pyle, Kubrick has put the audience in an untenable position where Pyle’s suffering, the recruits’ contempt for him, and the Corps’ impersonal need for steely discipline all have equal weight. If you can watch that scene and not feel that incredible tension, and not be thrown by it, you should probably just stick with Wes Anderson.

The other main reason Jacket is worth revisiting is for its intimacy—a term that’s hardly ever used in connection with war films, but it defines Jacket and sets it apart from almost every other entry in the genre. There are no epic battle scenes, is never the sense of massed forces colliding and none of the fetishistic portrayal of war machinery that’s defined the genre (and practically every other genre) since militarization, weaponization, and armoring became de facto cultural norms. You are in close quarters with every character here for the duration, and since this isn’t a particularly warm and fuzzy, or even articulate, bunch, it can be an incredibly uncomfortable feeling.

Finally, Jacket is worth watching just to appreciate that something like this could never be made today. It features an unvarnished, unromanticized, and unblinking portrayal of racial and sexual attitudes no contemporary filmmaker, too busy anticipating the outraged squeals of various pressure groups, would ever have the balls to attempt. If Jacket was in heavier rotation on cable, it would probably get slapped with the kind of silly, titillating, reality-denying warning labels that now precede any film that doesn’t toe any number of faddish political lines.

And, O yeah, one more thing—Kubrick had the stupefying ability to make his films look like they were created from somewhere beyond their era. Jacket was made in the mid ‘80s, but it has none of the excessive grain, contrast, saturation, or softness of most films from that time. The 4K HDR transfer faithfully reproduces what he wrought—which isn’t always easy, especially in the final third, most of which was shot during the Magic Hour and is filled with smoke and flames.

I do have two nits, though. The HDR tends to overemphasize the gold rims of Joker’s glasses and the silver dog-tag chains, especially during the boot-camp sequence, which can briefly pull you out of those shots. And I have to wonder if, given what Kubrick was going for here, the film doesn’t look just a little too pretty. Watching the Blu-ray version to check out the audio commentary, I couldn’t help wonder if that flatter, more documentary look wasn’t closer to what he was after. But that’s not really a criticism—more a matter of taste. And I don’t think I would ever opt for the Blu-ray over the 4K HDR, especially for the finale in Hué.

The sound mix is so subtle—especially for a war film—that it’s hard to appreciate just how good it is. There are no elaborate surround effects, mainly because Kubrick tends to keep the action squarely in front of you. Where it really pays off is with the steady, almost subliminal, succession of explosions heard at a distance once you’re in Hué. Often little more than muffled thumps, they’re meant, like the breathing in 2001 and the heartbeat in The Shining, to represent the pulse of the film.

All of that is presented cleanly and effectively. My only criticism is with the distortion in some of the dialogue tracks. I suspect this stems from the original tracks recorded on location, but it’s hard to believe Kubrick ever signed off on the results.

The extras can be summed up in two words: Don’t bother. The promotional film, “Full Metal Jacket: Between Good and Evil,” has some interesting comments from Kubrick’s collaborators, but you have to fight your way through a lot of annoying, and often silly, manipulation of footage from the film and strictly amateur motion graphics.

The commentary is a slice-and-dice affair involving D’Onofrio, Ermey, Adam Baldwin (Animal Mother), and critic Jay Cocks, with everyone in isolation and no one getting a chance to speak at length. And it just gets painful once Ermey drifts away and D’Onofrio goes off to the sidelines and you’re stuck with the obsequious Cocks for most of the duration. If you really want to know more about the film, read Modine’s Full Metal Jacket diary or check out the extremely uneven documentary Filmworker.

It was once a big deal to figure out who had created “the” Vietnam film. And given how big a trauma that war was, I can kind of see why that used to be important. Ironically, no one has ever really risen to that challenge. Full Metal Jacket isn’t really about Vietnam but about America’s obsession with war, and its whole second half feels much more relevant to Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other recent exercises in empire than it ever did to the jungles of Southeast Asia. It’s worth a good, long look for anyone who can handle a little truth.

PICTURE | The 4K HDR transfer faithfully reproduces what Kubrick wrought—which isn’t always easy, especially in the final third, most of which was shot during the Magic Hour and is filled with smoke and flames

SOUND | The sound mix is so subtle—especially for a war film—that it’s hard to appreciate just how good it is. There are no elaborate surround effects, mainly because Kubrick tends to keep the action squarely in front of you.

Review: Nashville

review | Nashville

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Robert Altman’s American microcosm still rings true as an unflinching look at the time—and at the time to come

by Michael Gaughn
May 8, 2021

Shot in a city meant to be a not-too-flattering microcosm of the whole of American society on the cusp of the country’s Bicentennial and released during what should have been a celebratory but turned out to be a very flat and bitter, still hung over from the ‘60s, year, everything about Robert Altman’s Nashville screams that this is supposed to be an important film—which is deeply ironic since Altman was rightly known as an iconoclast who openly mocked the idea of important films. And yet he succeeded mightily in creating a movie that was, and remains, important without succumbing to any of the lazy pretentious of Oscar fodder.

Given all that, Nashville needs to be approached on its own terms; and within the context of the country at the time; and, maybe more importantly, from the vantage of the state of the country today. And that all needs to be done without turning this review into a scholarly essay.

The widescreen (2.35:1) aspect ratio says this is supposed to be an epic, but any action that approaches the epic is treated ironically, and the framing is mainly deployed—similarly to The Long Goodbye but on a much more ambitious level—to capture intimacy; the chaotic intimacy of people alone in groups, but also of people just alone.

Altman saw the country rapidly devolving into individuals encouraged to fetishize their own importance, leading to what the French philosopher Paul Virilio called, awkwardly, totalitarian individualism—an overinflated, ultimately fascist, sense of self that at the end of the day only reinforces how unimportant each individual is. This is probably the strongest through-line in Adam Curtis’s documentaries, that Americans keep confusing narcissistic indulgence with freedom—something corporations are happy to exploit because vanity makes people easy to sell to, and that political groups ride just as hard because it creates the illusion of free expression while stifling meaningful dissent in resentment and rage.

All of this was just beginning to coalesce at the time Altman made Nashville, with corporations groping toward figuring out how to channel the earnest childishness of the ’60s, guiding it through things like EST, Scientology, Ayn Rand, and Tony Robbins so that when people looked around, all they saw were themselves. Altman got a lot of this right but missed one crucial thing—like a lot of people, he assumed that the Carterian malaise would lead to the emergence of a viable third party. What it got us instead was Reagan.

Every character in the film reinforces this theme of crippling isolation—and it’s a massive cast—but there’s no redundancy. Instead, each portrait contributes to a mosaic that, when you step back and consider it as a whole, is devastating. On an emotional level—in a film about the death of emotion—the two key characters are Gwen Welles’ endlessly pathetic Sueleen Gaye and Keith Carradine’s promiscuous troubadour, Tom. Sueleen, hopelessly naive—and dumb—is imperviously optimistic, while the sociopathic Tom exploits the Romantic notion of the wandering minstrel to bed down every woman he encounters. They represented the two poles of American existence at the time, positions that have only become more entrenched and grotesque, and infinitely more dangerous, since.

Stepping to one side of all the sociopolitical stuff for a second, you have to marvel at the consistency of the performances Altman was able to draw from such a sprawling group of players. It’s almost impossible to single anybody out because everyone gets their standout moments, but it’s worth focusing in particular on Ronee Blakely, Keenan Wynn, and the always underrated but strangely compelling Henry Gibson. The weakest link is David Hayward—and it’s not really his fault because he did the best he could with what he had to work with, but Altman’s conception of the lone gunmen was stuck in ‘50s psycho-dramas so he failed to grasp how non-human these emptied-out souls tend to be—ironic since he accurately sensed the same thing in Carradine’s Tom.

Nothing in this film is supposed to be beautiful—not in the gauzy Geoffrey Unsworth style admired at the time or the kind of relentlessly smart-ass and ultimately vacant compositions we’ve come to idolize since. Like in The Long Goodbye, Altman is going for a deceptive flatness, a grittiness, relying on telephoto lenses so he’s more spying on the characters, having them reveal themselves, than framing them. The “pretty” shots are deliberately vicious, and always tied to Geraldine Chaplin’s clueless documentary for the BBC—the masses of parked school buses turned into a kind of refugee camp and the truly gorgeous in its grunge shot of the crushed and mangled junked cars.

That last shot is a good way of judging the quality of the 4K HDR transfer, which for the most part seems sincerely committed to Altman’s visual plan but occasionally wanders off the reservation—especially early in the film, where some of the shots look a little oversaturated, so traditionally pretty that they border on cartoonish. Not that Altman ever made this easy for anybody, constantly looking for ways to approach the idea of Hollywood movies from the obliquest possible angles, so anyone not completely on his wavelength is inevitably going to make mistakes transferring his work. But the material is compelling enough that you don’t notice the visual stumbles unless you seek them out.

Altman was notorious for his overlapping dialogue, which could occasionally lapse into mannerism but works for the most part here. That approach has been so widely adopted since that it really shouldn’t throw anybody coming to the film at this late date. But the 5.1 mix here didn’t seem to do much to improve the separation between the voices. The music is well, but not spectacularly, presented—but that was part of Altman’s point, that feeble, desperate tunes like these are just crap meant to be borne off by the wind.

I’m probably making Nashville sound preachy and heavy. It’s not. But it’s not exactly light and fluffy either. Altman does a great job of keeping things moving and of creating a pleasant enough surface for people who want their movies to be nothing but bright and shiny distractions. But everything just beneath that surface is troubling, and earned, and disturbingly prescient. This isn’t the whiny kiddie darkness of contemporary film. Altman saw how truly dark things were about to become and recorded it all as faithfully as he could. Nashville is a document of a past lost and a future more than earned.

I can’t let Nashville lie without talking about the ending—not that anything I, or anyone, could say could do it justice. All I can do is point toward it and say that no one has ever done something this coolly unsparing before or since. Altman managed to perfectly sum up the entire film there—not really narratively, but aesthetically, emotionally. It’s all very wry and detached, but it had to be because, without that distance, it would be impossible to watch.

PICTURE | The 4K HDR transfer seems sincerely committed to Altman’s visual plan but occasionally wanders off the reservation, especially with some slightly oversaturated shots that border on cartoonish

SOUND | The 5.1 mix doesn’t do much to improve the separation between the voices in Altman’s infamous overlapping dialogue. Meanwhile, the deliberately crappy music is well, but not spectacularly, presented.

Review: The Killing

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Kubrick’s first real feature is rough around the edges but is still one of the seminal works of American filmmaking

by Michael Gaughn
August 2, 2021

The staging is often stilted, the acting often laughably bad when it’s not just mismanaged, it’s a concatenation of crime-drama clichés that leans almost to the breaking point on John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, the whole punctuated by pretentious, even silly, compositions and tracking shots that convey nothing, and yet Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing is one of the seminal works of American filmmaking, poised right on the pivot into what would become, for better or worse, the modern era of the movies. This is Kubrick’s first real feature, and he freely admitted that, in that age before film schools, he still had his training wheels on—and it shows. But, determined not to be a studio hack, aiming to be the first true independent within the studio system, he pushed the boundaries throughout. The results might be ludicrously mixed, but they’re a damn sight more interesting than what almost any other director was doing at that time, and their ramifications were, in retrospect, huge.

Critics did dismiss The Killing as a low-budget Asphalt Jungle knockoff—an accusation that was true as far as it went. And Kubrick might have seen himself as more of a Hustonian director at that point (although his affinity lay more with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), but as he hit his stride as a filmmaker, it became obvious that if you created a Venn diagram of the two directors, any common ground between them would be minimal, and suspect. The more plausible explanation is that, in a bid to be palatable to the system, Kubrick donned a Huston disguise and used it as a Trojan horse to insinuate himself with the studio elders.

I can’t begin to do the film justice in this short review, just point out some things that might make the experience more interesting if you decide to revisit it—beginning with the fact that, while Jungle was a character-study-driven crime drama that was also about process, Kubrick decisively shifted that emphasis, not unsympathetically showing that his characters were pawns of much larger forces—not metaphysical but post-war societal ones defined by increasing dehumanization. (This viewpoint is captured in the many meanings of the title—all but one of which is lost on contemporary viewers, with their blinkered obsession with bloodshed.)

While Kubrick wanted to attract the largest possible audience, he had no interest in feeding them A-list pablum. He instead drew from the fertile muck of the B- (and often C-) movie world—a vital perspective on his work that’s rarely (actually, as far as I know, never been) explored. In many ways, his movies owe far more to Ed Wood and Burt I. Gordon than to William Wyler or Cecil B. DeMille. Just consider the recurring presence of actors like Ted Corsia and Joe Turkel or those godawful Gerald Fried scores (with Fried joined at the hip to the equally obstreperous Albert Glasser). And while it wasn’t deliberately placed there for the production, it’s not just pure chance that a poster for “Lenny Bruce and His All Girl Review” can be glimpsed on a seedy downtown LA wall when Sterling Hayden goes to buy a pawn-shop suitcase for hiding the loot. In a sense, Kubrick always showed an affinity with Bataille, constantly reminding us of the fetid underbelly that was essential to creating the Hollywood sheen—and driving the American engine.

And then there’s Jim Thompson, the roman noir King of the American Underbelly, whose work went through a very much lauded revival thanks to a seemingly endless string of film adaptations from the 1990s into the new millennium. Accepted wisdom has it that moviemaking wasn’t equal to Thompson’s material at the time he was an active writer. The truth is that none of those recent adaptations are worth anything more than the spit it took to make them. None of them understood Thompson but just pushed the more lurid elements for all they were worth. If you want to know his work, read his books—or watch The Killing or Paths of Glory. Or The Shining.

True, Kubrick didn’t know what to do with what Thompson was handing him—the scenes between Marie Windsor and Elisha Cook Jr. were great on paper but beyond what Kubrick was then capable of as a director. But they’re still meaningful, and amusing in ways that go beyond their status as kitsch, because they make it clear that Cook’s put-upon George Peatty is very much the heart and fulcrum of the film (which you would never know by looking at Kaleidescape’s cast list, where his name is oddly omitted.)

There’s also Lucien Ballard, who’s a bit of a curious case. Known for shooting Three Stooges shorts, he lensed for Kubrick here with mixed but sometimes inspired results, then went on to do both Blake Edwards’ The Party and Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch—which officially qualifies him as a kind of subversive chameleon. The Blu-ray-quality transfer of The Killing—like the hit-and-miss 4K one for Dr. Strangelove—helps highlight the huge impact Kubrick’s photojournalistic work had on his films—something that was a lot harder to discern in earlier, lower-res releases. That documentary aesthetic lends an authentic grit to the action that more polished studio noir could never capture.

Brace yourself for a lot of grain, along with a lot of digital noise, but The Killing is definitely viewable on a big screen, and it’s worth making the effort for the shots where those forces aren’t as much in play, such as the many tight shots, a lot of them—like most of the closeups of Sterling Hayden and those key exchanges between Cook and Windsor—quite striking. (As with most older films, the opening titles are overly enhanced. When is somebody going to figure out how to make those stop looking like bad student video and more like film?)

Not much to be said about the audio, except that nothing could ever be done to ameliorate the impact of Fried’s clangorous blaring except to scrub it from the film completely. I noticed on this viewing, though, that there were big disparities in the levels of the actors’ voices, which I’m sure is a baked-in problem but one someone should address if this ever makes it to 4K.

I don’t mean to dump too heavily on The Killing, but it’s in no sense a great film—but it is an infinitely intriguing one, with moments of undeniably bold camerawork, editing, design, sound, and acting that still hold up. And of course there are all those early indications of the filmmaker Kubrick would eventually be. Maybe what most redeems the film is that you can sense him trying to claw his way above all the then-current melodramatic and romantic clichés in an effort to find higher, more authentic ground. (The contemporary equivalent would be trying to make a film that’s not hopelessly fouled by adolescent fantasy and its attendant fascist notions of power.) He would continue furiously pursuing that quest all the way through Paths of Glory and Lolita, with decidedly mixed results, before emerging a master artist with Dr. Strangelove. (Even Kubrick freely admitted that Spartacus doesn’t count.)

You don’t have to be a Kubrick—or Jim Thompson or Sterling Hayden—fan to enjoy The Killing. But you do have to leave most of the current cultural biases at the door (and there are so many of them) to even begin to appreciate it. It’s not mindless entertainment, a diversion—it’s a movie.

PICTURE | Brace yourself for a lot of grain, along with a lot of digital noise, but The Killing is definitely viewable on a big screen, and it’s worth making the effort for the moments where those forces aren’t as much in play, such as the many striking tight shots.

SOUND | Not much to be said about the audio except that nothing can ever be done to ameliorate the clangorous blaring of Gerald Fried’s score except to scrub it from the film entirely. The big disparities in the levels of the actors’ voices is likely a baked-in problem that someone should address if the film ever makes it to 4K.

Review: The Party

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This rowdy Blake Edwards comedy has gone from bomb to classic but has never gotten the presentation it deserves

by Michael Gaughn
March 21, 2021

Blake Edwards’ The Party actually opened on the same day as 2001: A Space Odyssey in that very strange year of 1968. It took a while for 2001 to gain some traction but it eventually became a big deal (thanks largely to a faithful following of stoners) and went on to become a classic. The Party closed almost immediately and the twin blows of that and the godawful Darling Lili almost obliterated Edwards’ career. But the film has shown surprising tenacity, and while it doesn’t have anything like 2001’s reputation, it is, in its broad, neurotic, and fundamentally conservative way, a deeply radical film.

Oddly, The Party and 2001 have things in common beyond springing from a radical impulse, primarily that, while they both have audio, they’re basically widescreen silent films—an itch Jacques Tati scratched at around the same time with Playtime. (It wouldn’t be inapt to see that retreat into silence as a kind of traumatic reaction to the times.)

But The Party’s biggest—and highly dubious—honor is that it single-handedly created the frat-boy/gross-out comedy genre that eventually proved stupidly lucrative for the studios and still plagues us today. And that, of course, has since morphed, as the culture has grown more callous, into the even more smug and sadistic genre of horror comedy. But Edwards can’t really be held responsible for that last crime against humanity.

And then there’s the fact that The Party would fall somewhere near the top of that daily longer list of films that could never be made today. The announcement that anyone like Peter Sellers was going to play an Indian in a comedy would cause vast hordes of rabid Millennials to well up trailing endless miles of hangman’s rope, Edwards’ and Sellers’ intentions and the actual execution of the film be damned. The sad truth is that any form of expression outside of some very rigid and oppressive guardrails has become verboten. There was far more latitude in the mid ‘60s, obviously, but nobody was quite sure what to do with the freedom that had suddenly tumbled into their laps.

That anyone who could enjoy this film might be dissuaded from watching it just because some zealots have labeled it “racist” is tragic.

While Edwards tried to make important films—including some basically unwatchable dramas—and dabbled in social commentary, he was mainly an extremely gifted metteur en scène with a deeply intuitive sense of the physics of comedy who probably would have been happiest doing slapstick shorts in the 1920s but was born too late. The first Pink Panther film is a work of genius, an almost flawless classical farce in the style of Molière, Feydeau, and Beaumarchais. Its followup, A Shot in the Dark, is OK but begins to feel forced. All of the subsequent Panther films aren’t worth the time it takes to watch them.

The Party is essentially Edwards’ baffled reaction—common to square-but-desperate-to-seem-hip society in the ’60s—to almost the whole of the social order being tossed into a blender. It takes the sophisticated, ’50s-inflected chaos of the party scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s—a milieu he knew well—and wonders what would happen if that anarchy-within-bounds were allowed to roam free. But Edwards didn’t have a politically rebellious bone in his body, so the best he could arrive at was something that often resembles the finale of a Beach Blanket movie. Only the fact the he was a far more talented director than William “Bewitched” Asher begins to redeem this mess.

But it’s a both beautiful and nasty mess, and something to be savored—beginning, of course, with Sellers. This is his last great comic performance. After reaching his peak with Strangelove, Clouseau, and, here, Bakshi, he had little left to give and spent the next decade and a half stumbling from one mediocre film and half-hearted performance to another. (Being There is such an oddity it’s hard to say where it falls in all that.)

This is also his most fully rounded performance. Bakshi obviously meant something to Sellers (and Edwards) and he took the time to develop him into a complete character with a resonance that goes well beyond his comedic presence. You can laugh at him but at the same time can’t help but feel for him. None of Sellers other creations evoke that kind of emotional response.

While there are some perfectly tuned supporting performances (with the exception of the unfortunate Claudine Longet), they are all, appropriately, meant to create foils and a frame for Sellers. About the only thing that approaches deserving second billing is the studio head’s cringe-worthy home. Edwards and cinematographer Lucien Ballard captured the sheer awfulness of mid-‘60s West Cost architecture and design, and, again echoing Tati, turned this hideous altar to status into a character. It’s so ugly it’s, within the context of the film, beautiful.

Edwards and Ballard set up elaborate widescreen compositions with multiple bits of business playing out at the same time. The dinner scene contains endlessly cascading sight gags that display virtuoso timing and reward repeated viewing. (This was one of the first films to use a Sony video system for playback, which Edwards deftly deployed to develop his set pieces.)

You can’t say The Party looks great in Blu-ray-quality HD, but you can’t say it looks lousy either. The opening titles are better defined, less blotchy, than they’ve been in the past, and the increased detail helps enhance the impact of complex set pieces like that dinner scene, which have just been visually busy before. The film would obviously benefit from a bump up to 4K, but you can also see where certain elements would likely just look like too contrasty exercises in excess grain.

(One quick aside: No other Edwards film looks and moves like this one, which can probably be largely attributed to Ballard, who cut his teeth shooting shorts for The Three Stooges and who would move on from The Party to shoot The Wild Bunch. Like I said, it was a very strange year.)

Poor Henry Mancini. Just four years earlier, on the heels of Peter Gunn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and The Pink Panther, he had been the king of the pop music world, but the British Invasion had since all but wiped him from the face of the planet, and you can sense him struggling mightily here to figure out how he fits into a world of Day-Glo, psychedelica, and fuzz-tone guitars. The answer, unfortunately, is that he doesn’t, and his title song, with its sitar played with a Garden Weasel, ragtime syncopations, and Keith Moon at a high-school dance drumming, is so out of touch it’s unintentionally funny.

The Party should have a surround mix on par with the brilliance of its visual gags but it would be impossible for anyone, at this late date, to get far enough onto Edwards’ wavelength to pull something like that off. So what we get instead is serviceable but not what the film deserves.

There’s something deeply medieval about the present, where the most honest and potent creative works are being forced into hiding, held in some form of safekeeping until the day—that may never come—when they can again be appreciated for what they are. The Party, at its heart, is a tale of the outsider—and it’s exactly the iconoclasts, the outsiders, who are being purged. Enjoy it for what it is, but also for the badly needed context it provides.

PICTURE | You can’t say The Party looks great in Blu-ray-quality HD, but you can’t say it looks lousy either. The film would obviously benefit from a bump up to 4K, but you can also see where certain elements would likely just look like too contrasty exercises in excess grain.

SOUND | The Party should have a surround mix on par with the brilliance of its visual gags but it would be impossible for anyone, at this late date, to get far enough onto Edwards’ wavelength to pull something like that off. What we get instead is serviceable but not what the film deserves.

Review: Pan’s Labyrinth

review | Pan’s Labyrinth

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Both brutal and enchanting, Guillermo del Toro’s low-budget tale of the costs of escaping into fantasy is well served by UHD HDR

by Dennis Burger
October 18, 2019

Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno) for whatever reason—is a fantasy film for people who have no patience for fantasy. It’s a war film for people who don’t like war films. It’s a fairy tale for people who prefer the Brothers Grimm to Disney. It’s allegory that avoids so many of the lazy conventions that made J.R.R. Tolkien such a vehement detractor of allegory. It’s a rich and nuanced, deeply symbolic and personal work that I believe will go down in history as Guillermo del Toro’s best, topping even El espinazo del diablo (aka The Devil’s Backbone), with which it shares a lot of thematic and narrative similarities.

If it weren’t obvious from the above gushing, I’m an unabashed devotee of this haunting little film. But I’ve never really been overly thrilled with any of its home video releases. The original Blu-ray from 2007 was excessively smoothed and de-noised, robbing the imagery of much of its grit and impact. It also suffered from lackluster black levels, which is a sin for a film that lives so unapologetically in the shadows.

The Criterion Collection release from 2016 was a vast improvement, thanks in part to the contributions of del Toro himself, who supervised a new color grade and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 remix. But that release dropped at a time when I was already spoiled by HDR so I couldn’t help but be distracted by the lack thereof and the richer shadow detail a UHD release would bring with it.

Fast forward to 2019, and we finally have that UHD/HDR release—not from Criterion, but rather Warner Bros. Unsurprisingly, this isn’t sourced from the same regraded transfer as the 2016 Blu-ray, which one has to assume is owned by Criterion. And that’s a bit of a shame because the superior color timing of that transfer plus the improvements brought by HDR would make for a near-perfect representation of this film.

Make no mistake: The UHD/HDR is a big improvement over the original Blu-ray, despite being sourced from the same 2K digital intermediate. Black levels are vastly deeper, shadow detail is much improved, depth of field and edge definition are a substantial step up, and the frustrating, plasticky smoothness of the original HD release is thankfully a thing of a past. The grain of the original 35mm negative, though not pronounced or distracting, gives this new transfer an earthiness that greatly benefits it. It’s even an improvement over the Criterion release in terms of contrasts and dynamic range. I just wish a few of the key color-grading changes del Toro made for Criterion could have been incorporated here.

I’m picking nits, of course, if only because I adore this beautiful work so deeply. I do need to get a little pedantic about what I mean by “beautiful,” though. While an utter treat for the eyes from a cinephile’s perspective, Pan’s Labyrinth is not videophile demo material. This is, after all, a low-budget Mexican film, shot for less than $20 million. There is some softness to the image, some rough edges and textures here and there, and some compromises that result from the original digital intermediate that could only be rectified by a full-scale restoration sourced from the film negatives. That would mean re-rendering the computer-generated effects, which—to be frank—don’t entirely hold up to scrutiny, especially in this more revealing UHD transfer.

Thankfully, though, most of the effects work is practical, with heavy reliance on makeup, costuming, and animatronics. (Del Toro fans will immediately recognize longtime collaborator Doug Jones beneath tons of latex as both the Faun and the Pale Man—two of the film’s creepiest fantastical creatures—if only due to his inimitable pantomime and distinctive lithe physique.)

This Warner Bros. release oddly does carry over the new DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack from the Criterion release, which I suppose could be considered a downgrade from the 7.1-channel track of the original Blu-ray in terms of channel count but is undeniably a subtle upgrade in every other respect. Honestly, you won’t miss the extra channels. But if you comprehend any Spanish, you’ll appreciate the enhanced dialogue intelligibility, as well as the improved clarity and spatial refinement of the mix. And, hey, if don’t hable español, the English subtitles were actually written by del Toro himself, due in large part to his frustration with the awful translated subtitles for El espinazo del diablo.

All of the above is a roundabout way of saying if you love Pan’s Labyrinth and want to view it at its best, this new UHD/HDR release is that, just by a hair. It’s worth the upgrade even if you own the Criterion Blu-ray release, if only because its remaining flaws are less distracting.

But if you’re averse to dark parables and are simply looking for demo material to stress every pixel of your 4K display, you can probably safely pass. This isn’t a mindless feel-good film. It’s a challenging and at times troubling look at the stark realities of war (actually, technically, the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, as the film is set in Francoist Spain in 1944) and the dual-edged sword of escapism from such horrors. It’s also, though, a wondrous and magical fable that defiantly spits in the face of the notion that fantasy films cannot be serious art.

By the way, for those of you who pick up the new UHD release on Kaleidescape, know that you’ll need to download the Blu-ray version included with your purchase if you want to access the bonus features. And you do. Granted, a few key goodies from the Criterion release are missing (I’ll certainly be hanging onto that physical release for the exclusive interview with del Toro and novelist Cornelia Funke), but what’s presented here still counts as a wealth of supplemental material that genuinely adds value and insight into not only the filmmaking process, but also the deep symbolism of the film. Granted, two of those supplements—the short documentary “The Power of Myth” and the audio commentary by del Toro—do rob you of the opportunity to interpret some of the story’s more ambiguous aspects for yourself, so make sure you’ve seen the movie a few times to solidify your own interpretations.

The truly great thing about El laberinto del fauno, though, is that it rewards multiple re-watches, even after you think you’ve got it all figured out (in terms of meaning, that is— narratively speaking, it’s an incredibly simple tale that requires no parsing). I hesitate to recommend buying the film sight-unseen, if only for the fact that some viewers (my wife included) find the ruthlessness of the film’s human antagonists too much to bear. Try as I might, she can’t bring herself to give it a second chance. And that’s fair. But I would argue that none of the brutality on display is gratuitous. It’s thematically, narratively, and emotionally necessary. It’s also, thankfully, infrequent.

For my money, Pan’s Labyrinth is as near to perfection as any work of cinema made in the past quarter century. And while I can’t say the same for any of its home video releases, this new UHD/HDR release gets closer to the mark than past efforts. Quite frankly, that’s enough to recommend it as a worthy upgrade for those who are already under the film’s spell.

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 | This UHD/HDR release is a big improvement over the original Blu-ray. Black levels are vastly deeper, shadow detail is much improved, depth of field and edge definition are a substantial step up, and the plasticky smoothness of the original HD release is thankfully a thing of a past.

SOUND | The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack is a downgrade from the 7.1-channel track of the original Blu-ray in terms of channel count but is undeniably a subtle upgrade in every other respect

Review: Nightmare Alley

review | Nightmare Alley

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

by Dennis Burger
March 15, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Blue Velvet

review | Blue Velvet

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David Lynch’s breakthrough effort is still a compelling viewing experience but, in retrospect, proved to be a harbinger of what’s worst about contemporary film

by Michael Gaughn
January 23, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan Splet’s equally influential sound design is still intriguing, but since it’s not always clear what it’s in the service of, it’s almost like listening to an abstract exercise in musique concrète. Blue Velvet deserves credit, though, for being one the first films to make a convincing case for using surround sound for something other than the usual bludgeoning mayhem.

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

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

And that presents the biggest rub. Lynch helped make amoral depravity fashionable. It’s not like he didn’t have a lot of help, but he, with this film, pretty much single-handedly created its art-house wing. And he opened the floodgates for every other callow entitled type who could hide their fundamental immaturity behind dazzling exercises in style to trash anything that could be considered serious filmmaking. Without Lynch, there is no Fincher—or PTA or Spike Jonze or Aronofsky or any of the other aesthetically or morally half-born types we now bank our notions of “serious” filmmaking on.

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

PICTURE | Frederick Elmes’ hugely influential cinematography is still effective—but the film’s low budget runs the risk of being even more blatant when Velvet eventually makes the leap from HD to UHD.

SOUND | Alan Splet’s equally influential sound design is still intriguing, but since it’s not always clear what it’s in the service of, it’s almost like listening to an abstract exercise in musique concrète

Review: Chinatown

review | Chinatown

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This 4K HDR transfer doesn’t begin to do justice to Roman Polanski’s neo-noir classic

by Michael Gaughn
January 17, 2021

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

Chinatown is, of course, one of the great films of the ’70s and, given that it was made by a bunch of smug movie-industry types, represents something much greater than the sum of the various talents involved. Call it The Casablanca Effect—a film that rises well above the norm more due to the spirit of the age and the chance gathering of forces than any concerted effort of creative will. Hollywood is designed to ensure that truly great movies can’t get made, and it’s only been the very rare—and now extinct—iconoclasts who’ve ever figured out how to game the system and create anything resembling art. Nobody involved in Chinatown fits the iconoclast MO.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skin tones are wildly inconsistent, with many of the scenes in the first half looking almost monochrome or, at best, like hand-tinted postcards. In an early scene where Nicholson and Faye Dunaway sit outside talking, Dunaway looks like she was dipped in bronze. Given that there are occasional scenes where skin tones look more natural—and certain closeups, like the one of Dunaway in mourning apparel as she lunches with Nicholson, that look stunning—you have to suspect the problem isn’t with the original film. I don’t remember this having been an issue before, and although it could be inherent in the original materials, it’s hard to believe Polanski, Alonzo, or the studio would have signed off on something this all over the map.

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

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

Chinatown is a film set almost a hundred years in the past that’s really about an era now almost 50 years in the past but is rooted so firmly in the constants of human behavior that it feels surprisingly fresh and relevant. Polanski lends the material a level of seriousness and perverse humor no other director could have brought to it, while the blindly creative forces of the larger culture then raise all that to a level where few Hollywood efforts are ever allowed to go.

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

PICTURE | Chinatown deserves a better transfer. For such a beautiful film, it looks inexplicably dull in 4K HDR—this movie should not look this flat.

SOUND | Jerry Goldsmith’s score is something of a miracle, alternating between Mancini-like splashes of the lush main-title theme and very angular, astringent, mainly percussive cues that lend a distinctly ‘70s edginess and anxiety to the proceedings

Review: Get Shorty (1995)

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Barry Sonnenfeld’s deft little gem might be the best Hollywood satire ever

by Michael Gaughn
January 10, 2021

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

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

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

Shorty is worth watching for its flawless casting alone. I’m not a Travolta fan but he doesn’t miss a beat here, giving his small-time hood a boyish innocence and enthusiasm that never feels forced. Hackman is miles from Lex Luthor, turning in a nuanced comic performance that gets big laughs while presenting a fully realized character. This has to be DeVito’s best star turn. And Delroy Lindo is both menacing and charming and Dennis Farina is flat-out funny as the mobsters who just can’t get a break.

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

Sonnenfeld doesn’t get enough credit as an actor’s director, but the scene where Travolta shows DeVito how to play a shylock is so perfectly modulated it deserves to be ranked with the best. It’s almost impossible to convincingly portray an actor acting, let alone actor/director interaction, but all involved are so perfectly in sync here that you’re laughing not just at the jokes and the situation but the sheer virtuosity of the execution.

What Shorty gets right, above everything else, though, is LA and the many ways the movie business overlaps with LA life. It unerringly and evocatively captures the feel of Beverly Hills, the Sunset Strip, the Hollywood Hills, and all the trendy little West Hollywood restaurants that sit practically in the middle of traffic. Maybe the film’s second-best scene—although this might just come from having suffered through this too many times myself—is DeVito going way off-menu to order an elaborate omelet for the table then leaving before it arrives, forcing the other guests to figure out what to do with it.

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

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

No problems with the sound. This is a dialogue-driven film only occasionally punctuated by bursts of action, and the lines (“E.g., i.e., f— you,” “You think we go to see your movies, Harry? I’ve seen better film on teeth.” “My favorite color—putty”) are all crisp and clear, as are the gunshots. It’s usually a little too obvious when temp tracks make their way into the final film but Sonnenfeld does such a great job of deploying Booker T. & the M.Gs that it’s hard to make much of a stink. The cues are nicely placed in the foreground without ever being in your face.

It’s one thing to call Get Shorty the best film in the very circumscribed mobsters-come-to-Hollywood genre, it’s another to say nobody’s ever done a better job of skewering Hollywood—a windmill many have tried to tilt only to wind up on their asses. Shorty never tries to be bigger than it needs to be, which is why it continues to shine as a compact, quietly dazzling gem.

PICTURE | While you can appreciate the movie’s deft, droll visual style in its current Blu-ray-quality incarnation, you can also sense how much more delicious it would be with a 4K HDR buff and shine

SOUND | This is a dialogue-driven film only occasionally punctuated by bursts of action, and the lines are all crisp and clear, as are the gunshots

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