Kaleidescape Archives - Page 16 of 19

Review: Big Fish

review | Big Fish

recent reviews

Netflix | Don’t Look Up

HBO Max | Dune (2021)

Kaleidescape | Last Night in Soho

Kaleidescape | The Alpinist

see more in Reviews

4K HDR restores the impact of 35mm film to what might turn out to have been Tim Burton’s last great movie

by Dennis Burger
January 6, 2022

More than almost any other film, it’s nearly impossible for me to be objective about Tim Burton’s Big Fish. For one thing, I almost had a bit part in it but that fell through. For another, it was filmed—almost literally—in my back yard. My niece attends the private college that stood in for Auburn University in the picture. My wife and I often take long walks through the dilapidated sets of the Town of Spectre, which is on an island just north of town and serves these days as a goat sanctuary.

But all that takes a backseat to my feelings about Tim Burton’s body of work and Big Fish‘s place in it. As a huge fan of his earlier films, I found this one to be a welcome return to form after the disappointing Sleepy Hollow and Planet of the Apes. It really felt like a potential turning point for Burton. I saw Big Fish as a new beginning, the first step on a journey that had a more genuine human element, without so much of the affected weirdness Burton became known for after he stopped being a legitimately weird outcast and transformed into a popular Hollywood darling. Instead, it ended up being his second-to-last legitimately good film and his final worthwhile live-action work. So it’s hard for me to watch Big Fish and not get distracted by thoughts of what could have been.

But you don’t care about any of that, do you? Nor should you. Chances are good that if you’re reading a review of a nearly two-decade-old film, you already know exactly what you think about it. You just want to know what it looks like in 4K and how well the new Dolby Atmos mix works with or against the material.

Long story short: Both are astonishing. Big Fish has never been a film that worked well on home video, as the tired old Blu-ray master was overly soft with a weirdly unbalanced and idiosyncratic color palette that did the cinematography no favors.

By contrast, the new UHD/HDR presentation is revelatory. Don’t get me wrong—this is still a somewhat soft and gauzy image. There isn’t a razor-sharp edge to be found within its 125-minute runtime, even in closeups. But the increased resolution of UHD and—one assumes—the new scan of the negative unlock textures in the faces, fabrics, and environment that the old Blu-ray never even hinted at. There’s also a delicious bed of organic film grain Sony thankfully saw fit to leave alone, so you’ll see none of the digital noise reduction and subsequent edge enhancement that so often plagues films with similar aesthetics.

What you end up with is what was on the photochemical film—nothing more, nothing less. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. In addition to the rich textures and the palpability they lend to the film, the new HDR grade also unlocks subtlety in the color palette I had long since forgotten existed. Skin tones are consistent throughout, and the larger gamut gives the image room to be muted when it needs to be and intensely saturated when appropriate. Kaleidescape’s HDR10 presentation is also abundant with lovely shadow detail, and although you won’t spot many if any eye-reactive extremes of brightness (although the nighttime sequences in Spectre make for a dazzling display of shadow and light), there’s enough bandwidth in the value scale to give the image a wonderful sense of depth and dimension. It deserves to be seen on the best screen you have access to.

In terms of the audio, I didn’t notice at first that Kaleidescape’s download comes with a new Dolby TrueHD Atmos mix. Don’t take that to mean there’s nothing going on in the overhead channels. There is. But the mix is so well-balanced and thoughtful that the overhead effects don’t draw your attention away from the screen. For the most part, they serve as connective fabric between the all-important front soundstage and the surrounds, making the entire mix more cohesive and far more immersive. Dialogue intelligibility is fantastic, and there’s a wonderful richness and warmth that works to the benefit of Danny Elfman’s score.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess this was somewhere in the neighborhood of my 30th viewing of Big Fish at home. But this was the first time I was able to set aside all of the intrusive thoughts I mentioned above and just soak in the film on its own terms. That’s how good this UHD HDR presentation is. It is, at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, like looking at projected 35mm.

And as the credits rolled, I did get hit with that unshakable bittersweetness that arises from this being one of my favorite Burton films but also his last good one. But for just over two hours, I was able to put all that down and get lost in this magical but all-too-human movie, with its spectacular environments, ridiculous scenarios, and tender sincerity. The long and short of it is, this new UHD release captures Big Fish‘s essential cinematic nature in a way no previous home video format could come close to replicating.

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 presentation is revelatory, with the increased resolution unlocking textures in the faces, fabrics, and environment that the old Blu-ray never even hinted at.

SOUND | The Atmos mix is so well-balanced and thoughtful that the overhead effects don’t draw your attention away from the screen but instead serve as connective fabric between the front soundstage and the surrounds.

Review: C’mon C’mon

review | C’mon C’mon

recent reviews

Netflix | Don’t Look Up

HBO Max | Dune (2021)

Kaleidescape | Last Night in Soho

Kaleidescape | The Alpinist

see more in Reviews

This Joaquin Phoenix road picture transcends the genre thanks to a standout performance from Phoenix’ nine-year-old costar

by Dennis Burger
January 4, 2022

Any film that attempts to bite off as much as Mike Mills has done with C’mon C’mon invariably ends up choking on its own aspirations. By that I mean most films that attempt to be this thematically rich and that try to juggle so much meaning eventually drop a ball or two. The thing is, I suspect Mills would tell you C’mon C’mon is incredibly simple and straightforward, and perhaps he’s right. Perhaps its density is an emergent property of its characters and the positions in which he’s placed them. But for whatever reason I can’t stop thinking about this film and marveling that it never falls apart.

Narratively, I suppose you’d have to describe it as a road picture. The plot involves Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix), a public-radio audio journalist who has to take a break from an assignment to babysit his nephew, Jesse, whom he barely knows. Jesse’s mom Viv (Gaby Hoffmann) has been called out of state to tend to her estranged husband as he struggles with a mental breakdown. When there’s a holdup on that front and Johnny has no choice but to hit the road again, he brings this odd little nine year old with him, first from L.A. to New York, then to New Orleans.

Like most good road pictures, the cities themselves serve as characters, but it’s really the relationship between Johnny and Jesse that propels the story, and the bulk of the scenes are set in bathtubs and beds, as well as through cross-country phone calls and text messages. I know none of that sounds very exciting but it’s an incredibly gripping film from start to finish, largely due to pitch-perfect performances by Phoenix and wunderkind Woody Norman, who plays Jesse so effortlessly you almost have to suspect Mills patted him on the back and said, “Go be a kid.”

But little clues throughout suggest that, aside from a bunch of performances from non-actors that serve as Johnny’s interviewees, this may well be Mills’ most tightly scripted film. Despite that, the sort of impossibly clever dialogue that has dominated his work is nowhere to be found here. Instead, he seems to work through his penchant for having his characters speak in literary prose by having them read books—to one another and to themselves. With that out of his system, the rest of the dialogue sounds like it flows straight out of the brains of his characters in the moment.

And that’s a consequence of honesty. This isn’t merely Mills’ most genuine film, it’s also one of the most unapologetically frank films I’ve seen in ages and undoubtedly one of the most cinematic (by which I mean I can’t conceive of way this story could have been told in any other medium).

The script cuts straight to the heart of the weirdness that arises from children and adults interacting, especially when those adults are holding onto baggage from their own childhoods. It’s about adults struggling to understand the emotions of children who don’t yet have the vocabulary to express their feelings, juxtaposed with those children’s lack of inhibitions and their ability to articulate things adults can’t—or won’t. You could say the entire film is about juxtapositions. But if I start rattling off further examples, we’ll be here all day.

So I’ll just say this: One of the ways Mills explores the importance of honesty is by juxtaposing that truthfulness with artifice—indeed, deceit. And that extends all the way to the look and sound of the film. C’mon C’mon was shot monochromatically—I would call it black & white but there’s a hint of warmth to the imagery that isn’t quite prominent enough to qualify as “sepia toned”—and at first there seems to be no good reason for that. Whether it was a conscious or subconscious decision, though, I think Mills is using the monochromatic palette to reminds us that screens aren’t reality, that even something that seems as genuine as this film is a meticulously crafted construct.

There’s also some auditory evidence I’m on the right track here. For much of the first act, I wondered why the audio was mixed in Dolby Atmos, given that it was largely a monophonic-verging-on-stereo experience to that point, aside from a few musical cues. There’s a scene early on, though, in which Johnny—desperately trying to make any meaningful connection with Jesse that he can—gives the boy his microphone and recording equipment and takes him to Santa Monica for a fun day out. And it’s during this scene—in which we experience the world as Jesse hears it, through his microphone and headphones, then filtered through the magic of sound mixing and out our home cinema speakers—where the mix explodes in every dimension. It’s simply a marvelous sensory experience but it’s done in a way to remind you that, Hey, what Jesse is experiencing—intoxicating though it may be—is one level removed from reality. And what you, dear viewer, are experiencing is at least a few levels further removed.

And so it goes for the rest of the film, which is served beautifully by Kaleidescape’s PVOD download. The HDR10 transfer gives the imagery room to breathe, especially at the lower end of the value scale, and it delivers this captivating study in light and shadow flawlessly, with no banding, moiré, or misplaced or softened textures. It isn’t a razor-sharp film but it doesn’t need to be to have effect. Kaleidescape also delivers the Dolby TrueHD Atmos soundtrack unimpeachably, and while it may not be the most dynamic or consistently hard-hitting of mixes, it’s still one you want to experience through a good center channel. On rare occasions, the mix gets so dense I expected dialogue intelligibility to be a problem, though it never is.

I could say more. Hell, I could write a book about this film and feel like I’d only scratched the surface. But C’mon C’mon is so packed with universal truths—and subtle, seemingly intentional deceptions—that I worry any more said on my part would color your own interpretations of the material. All I can do is implore you to watch it at your earliest convenience and on the best home cinema system you have access to.

PICTURE | The HDR10 transfer gives the imagery room to breathe, presenting this captivating study in light and shadow flawlessly, with no banding, moiré, or misplaced or softened textures.

SOUND | Kaleidescape delivers the Dolby Atmos soundtrack unimpeachably. It might not be the most dynamic or consistently hard-hitting of mixes but it’s still one you want to experience through a good center channel.

Review: The Long Goodbye

review | The Long Goodbye

related reviews

Kaleidescape | Nashville

Amazon Prime | California Split

Kaleidescape | A Clockwork Orange

Kaleidescape | Chinatown

see more in Reviews

Robert Altman’s sui generis noir looks suitably grubby in this Blu-ray-quality download

by Michael Gaughn
April 14, 2021

Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye is one of the best films of the 1970s—maybe the best—and one of the most influential. That last part is ironic, in a way Altman would have appreciated, because there’s no way it can be in any legitimate sense true. Altman and Kubrick created films that came from such an intricate and hermetic personal aesthetic that it’s impossible for them to be built upon without the result being anything other than travesty. That doesn’t mean legions haven’t tried, but all have failed.

I asked Altman once what he thought of the fact that The Long Goodbye closed almost as soon as it opened but has become possibly his best-known work. He deflected, with a purpose, saying his Phillip Marlowe fell asleep in the early ‘50s—the era of Chandler’s source novel—only to wake up in the early ‘70s, finding his sense of chivalry was no longer in fashion and could only lead to disaster. Even Altman’s Marlowe would be completely lost in the sociopathic present.

The Long Goodbye both is and isn’t a detective movie; is an unforgiving evisceration of Chandler’s work and a very heartfelt tribute. It’s so cynical it verges on nihilism while openly trying to figure out which values, if any, still have meaning. And because it lives both in and outside genre, it gets to feed from both worlds, very much like early Godard. There are very few films that feel this much like a movie.

Altman, of course, makes none of it easy, constantly toying with the audience like a sly, somewhat sadistic, cat. He and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond did everything they could to make the film gritty, flashing the footage, flattening the palette, pumping up the grain. The result eschews superficial prettiness, which tends to be fleeting, to tap into something far more sublime.

This is John Williams’ best score (no, I’m not being facetious) exactly because it’s so awful. Williams isn’t known for having a sense of humor so I have to wonder if he didn’t just write a bunch of straight cues, not fully aware of how Altman was planning to deploy them.

And then there’s Elliot Gould’s almost non-existent range as an actor, which Altman turns to the film’s advantage by making his Marlowe continually spout lame, often improvised, wisecracks. Altman has everything around Gould do the acting for him, which results in Marlowe coming across as smug but ultimately lost.

To add irony to all the other irony, The Long Goodbye probably holds up as well as it does both because it’s Altman’s most genre-driven movie and because enough of what’s best of Chandler’s work manages to survive the merciless beating it receives here to permeate the film and give it a resonance unique to Altman’s canon.

And if all of that is just a little too high-brow for you, watch this movie just to revel in the secondary casting. Sterling Hayden is still astonishing as the washed-up writer on a fatal binge. Just as nobody seeing him as Dix Handley in The Asphalt Jungle could have anticipated his performance as General Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, nobody seeing those two earlier films could have ever seen his Roger Wade coming. And yet there’s something at Hayden’s core that creates a through-line that joins those characters in a way that goes well beyond their having been played by the same performer.

And nobody seeing Henry Gibson on The Dick Van Dyke Show or Laugh-In could have anticipated his Dr. Veringer in a million years. Gibson and Altman conspired to pull off a tremendous practical joke that’s simultaneously, when seen from just the right angle, chilling. It’s that he’s the least likely villain ever that makes him so apt.

As for the presentation: How do you judge the image quality of a film that went out of its way to not look very good? To reference my earlier thought, there’s that beauty that comes from aping the styles of the present, which rarely ages well, and then there’s the beauty that comes from staying true to the demands of the material, even if it takes you to deeply unpleasant places. The Long Goodbye is gorgeous exactly because it’s lurid, and because it’s as lurid in the heart of the Malibu Colony as it is in a decrepit city jail. While there’s plenty of Southern California sunshine in evidence, it’s always accurately shown as monotonous or piercing, never pleasant.

This Blu-ray-quality download does a pretty good job of honoring what Altman and Zsigmond wrought, and you can’t help but recoil in horror at the thought of some culturally myopic tech team scrubbing it free of grain and trying to expand its dynamic range. Still, matching its original resolution would likely yield huge improvements, and a deft touch with an appreciation for grunge could conjure up something amazing.

In a similar vein, should an upgrade some day come, someone should post a sign reading “Hands Off the Soundtrack” on the mixing-room door. This film would not benefit from a surround mix—stereo suits it just fine.

The Long Goodbye is the kind of art that appears when you just don’t care at all but can’t help but care a lot. It feeds from a wellspring of paradox and, while it wraps things up, it never really resolves a thing. There are no reliable guideposts. Nothing triumphs; nothing is vanquished. That constant troubling creates an energy that keeps Altman’s film vital and relevant, and impossible to dismiss as simply smart-ass. The result is nothing but a mess, but a strangely elegant one that somehow rings very true.

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 | This Blu-ray-quality download does a pretty good job of honoring what Robert Altman and Vilmos Zsigmond wrought. Still, matching its original resolution would likely yield huge improvements, and a deft touch with an appreciation for grunge could conjure up something amazing.

SOUND | Should an upgrade some day come, someone should post a sign reading “Hands Off the Soundtrack” on the mixing-room door. This film would not benefit from a surround mix—stereo suits it just fine.

Review: Ran

review | Ran

recent reviews

HBO Max | Dune (2021)

Kaleidescape | Last Night in Soho

Kaleidescape | 2001: A Space Odyssey

Kaleidescape | The Alpinist

see more in Reviews

4K brings subtle improvements to the presentation of Kurosawa’s late-period riff on King Lear

by Dennis Burger
July 29, 2021

Discussing Akira Kurosawa’s Ran publicly is a strange feeling for me, so my apologies if I seem a bit more awkward than usual here. This film has always been a private indulgence for me, a secret pleasure. When new people come into my life, I might sit them down and make them watch Amélie, or Almost Famous, or Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, or The Conformist. But never, ever Ran.

Part of that boils down to being protective of it. You tell me you don’t like 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Searchers or Tokyo Story? It’s all good. Different strokes and all that. Sit next to me in the dark and watch Ran, though, and if you come out of the experience feeling anything less than reverence, I’m probably never inviting you over for movie night ever again.

At least, I assume that would be the case. I’ve never even shared the experience with my wife, simply out of fear that she would take custody of Bruno in the divorce.

Part of that forced isolation while viewing Ran, though, comes down to the recognition that this isn’t an easy film to watch. It’s exhausting, though not in the ways we would normally hang that adjective on a work of cinema. It’s methodically, deliberately exhausting. That fatigue is an essential element of the film.

It’s also, at times, a brutal film, both emotionally and physically. And although the violence is mostly cartoonish, with its cheap blood-squirting effects and its overwrought death scenes, it hits me harder in this film than almost any other. The carnage may look fake, but it feels real.

That makes it a questionable choice for a feel-good get-together with friends. All that said, this is a film I think needs to be in the collection of any serious cinephile, for more than one reason. Firstly, it’s Akira Kurosawa’s last truly great film. (Madadayo is very good, but falls just shy of greatness). Seen from a more charitable perspective, though, it’s incredible that the auteur managed to make such a vibrant work at the age of 75.

Kurosawa’s age definitely shows in the film, but not in its production. Ran—which, by the way, translates roughly into something like chaos, discord, turmoil, turbulence—is in many ways the filmmaker’s grandest statement on human nature. It has been described as a beautifully nihilistic work but I think that’s far too reductive. With this film, as with many of his best works, Kurosawa shines an unflinching light on human nature and the most ignoble tendencies of man. But describing the film as nihilistic assumes Kurosawa saw in us no capacity to rebel against our basest instincts, to rise above. Ran is a warning, a parable, a lesson from which to learn. He shows us humanity at its worst to inspire us to be better.

It’s also reductive to simply write Ran off as an adaptation of King Lear, as so many have done. Kurosawa didn’t recognize the parallels between the story he wanted to tell and the Bard’s famous play until late in the scripting process. Lear certainly influenced Ran in ways, some subconscious, but to pretend the latter is a direct adaption of the former—the way Throne of Blood (1957) very deliberately transposed the plot of The Scottish Play in space and time—would hang some additional baggage on the movie that it was never designed to carry.

Chances are good, though, that if you have any interest in purchasing this new 4K HDR release, you couldn’t care less about what I think of the film. You may even think the above opinions are daft. That’s fine.

What I think we’ll agree on, though, is that this is the best-looking home video release of Ran to date. Just don’t go in expecting monumental improvements over the excellent StudioCanal Blu-ray from 2016, which was taken from the 4K restoration used for here.

In my “4K HDR Wish List” from February, I said that I thought Ran, of all Kurosawa’s films, would “benefit most from the enhanced resolution and especially the expanded color gamut of 4K HDR. Watching the Blu-ray release, you can tell there’s ten pounds of color here crammed into an eight-pound bag.”

Well, I was wrong on both counts. There are, at best, a handful of scenes where the benefits of UHD resolution can be seen, and the colors are just as muted, just as reserved, just as measured as was seen on the Blu-ray. This new restoration was overseen and approved by cinematographer Shôji Ueda, so it’s safe to assume it’s true to the original vision for the film. But, as it turns out, 8-bit 1080p video was more than sufficient to unlock most of the detail and almost all of the colors found on the original camera negative.

There are some improvements in contrasts, which contribute to an image with more depth and nuance. Am I saying you shouldn’t upgrade to the 4K HDR version? Of course not. Why wouldn’t you want to own the best presentation of the film seen to date? Just go in knowing the improvements are incremental at best. There are also a few noticeable instances of edge-enhancement and grain that look more digital than organic but that was true of the 2016 Blu-ray as well and can’t be pinned on Kaleidescape’s otherwise unimpeachable presentation of this somewhat flawed but still much appreciated remaster.

The only options for audio on Kaleidescape are the original Japanese in stereo or remixed DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1. I don’t care how much of a purist you are—opt for the latter. It’s a textbook example of how films of this vintage and importance should be remixed. It’s largely a three-channel affair, with surrounds mostly used to add ambience and space to the mix. But dialogue sounds fantastic and is always utterly intelligible, locked firmly as it is in the center channel.

I do have a slight beef with the English subtitles, which can’t be turned off or modified in any form. The problem is that they’re mostly white, with but one pixel of black surrounding each letter to give it some contrast. For the bulk of the film, that’s perfectly fine. But in shots that are brightly lit, in which the lower portion of the image is mostly gray or white or very light tan, the subtitles get a bit lost in the image.

Other than that, the only major flaw with the Kaleidescape release is that Lionsgate, which is distributing this new 4K HDR release in the U.S., seems to have once again given Apple the exclusive on bonus features. That means iTunes is your only option if you want to enjoy the incredible feature-length documentary AK, short of buying the disc. That said, the Kaleidescape 4K HDR release is surprisingly cheap—just $14.99. So if you have that option, grab it.

But if you have the 2016 Blu-ray already and you’re not obsessed with very minor, momentary, sporadic improvements in picture quality that you’d probably only notice in a direct A/B comparison, you can probably safely stick with the disc you already own.

PICTURE | This is the best-looking home video release of Ran to date, but don’t go in expecting monumental improvements over the excellent StudioCanal Blu-ray from 2016.

SOUND | The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is a textbook example of how films of this vintage and importance should be remixed.

Review: Onward

review | Onward

recent reviews

Kaleidescape | Ratatouille

Kaleidescape | Coco

Disney+ | Soul

Kaleidescape | Vertigo

see more in Reviews

This offering follows the Pixar formula, transcending its RPG roots to appeal to a wide and diverse audience

by John Sciacca
March 22, 2020

Onward is set in the fantasy world of New Mushroomton, a world that was once filled with adventure and wonder and magic. But magic wasn’t easy to master and over time it faded away, and now itls a forgotten skill replaced by technology. I mean, why struggle learning to cast a light spell or rely on a wizard when now everyone can just walk over and flip a switch?

This setting is one of the first unique things for Pixar, in that the film takes place in an entirely fantastical world. Every other Pixar film has been set to some degree in the “real world.” Whether it is the distant future of Wall-E, the underground insect world of A Bug’s Life, inside Riley’s head in Inside Out, or the alternate reality of The Good Dinosaur, the studio’s world building had so far been based on our world. (Even Monstropolis from Monster’s, Inc. and Monster’s University is tied to our world, as the monsters cross over into our side of the closet door.)

Onward also features some deep ties to fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, with tons of references overt and subtle that fans of these games will pick up and love, specifically one gelatinous monster that even passing D&D fans will be familiar with. The movie’s substitute for these is Quests of Yore, “A historically based role-playing scenario.”

In a way, it reminded me of a “Weird” Al Yankovic song like “All About the Pentiums.” You can enjoy the song on the surface for what it is but the deeper you are into geek culture, the more you’ll appreciate its brilliance on different layers. Pixar is known for littering Easter eggs throughout its films, and Onward features more references and hidden jokes than perhaps any other, and the home release allows you to pause and analyze scenes to loot-hunt these treasures at your leisure.

Whether it is The Lion King, Bambi, Frozen, Finding Nemo, or numerous other films, a common theme among Disney heroes is having lost a parent, often in some tragic manner. But no film tackles this subject head-on quite like Onward, where the movie’s entire plot revolves around the opportunity to bring back a lost parent, to spend one last day with him. Also, for the first time we hear Disney characters not only talking about the pain and loss of losing a parent but of the emotions of having to deal with a parent that is sick and dying. Heavy stuff for a “kid’s” movie.

The film focuses on elven brothers Ian (Tom Holland) and Barley Lightfoot (Chris Pratt) some 16 years after their father has died. On Ian’s 16th birthday, their mom, Laurel (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), unveils a present their father left behind for when both boys were older than 16. Inside the present are a wizard’s staff, a rare Phoenix Gem, and instructions for casting a “visitation spell” that will allow the father to return for one single day to see how the boys have grown. Of course, things go awry when casting the spell, and dad only returns from the waist down before the Phoenix Gem—an assist element required for casting powerful magic—is destroyed.

This sets up the campaign quest, as the brothers—and the lower-half of dad—head off in Barley’s sweet van, Guinevere, fueled by an appropriately epic mixtape, of course, to follow clues left behind from the magic of old to discover another Phoenix Gem and finish casting the spell before the sun sets and dad is lost forever.

Pixar inhabits this fantasy world with all manner of creatures including gnomes, pixies, mermaids, unicorns, centaurs, cyclops, and goblins, which keeps scenes visually entertaining. And in keeping with the RPG rules, different character classes have different abilities; and it is the shy and awkward Ian (whose name might be a subtle nod to Sir Ian McKellen, who played a certain wizard named Gandalf the Grey in a few Tolkien films) who develops the ability to use the wizard’s staff to cast spells rather than his RPG-obsessed, living the “longest gap year ever,” non-starter brother, Barley, perpetually wearing a jean vest emblazoned with patches and buttons of Metal-like band names and a 20-sided die, like so many of the kids I went to high-school with in the ‘80s.

And like any epic quest, the story begins in an all-too common starting point: The Tavern. From Chaucer’s Tale to Hobbiton’s Green Dragon Inn to numerous D&D campaigns, the Tavern is often the place where parties gather to palaver prior to beginning a campaign. In this case, the Tavern is run by a Manticore (Octavia Spencer), a mythical creature with “a vaguely humanoid head, the body of a lion, and the wings of a dragon, whose long tail ends in a cluster of deadly spikes,” according to D&D rules. With magic gone, our Manticore has lost its bite, and the tavern is now more a family-friendly TGI Friday’s affair. But it serves as the launching point for the brothers’ adventure—as well as a way for the Manticore to do some self-discovery—and provides the first clue to tracking down the Gem.

This review is of the HD version, which looks fantastic in its own right but definitely left me eager to see this visual glory once again in higher resolution and with the added color and punch of HDR when the 4K HDR release becomes available.

As literally every pixel shown on screen is rendered in computer, we get an amazing level of detail, especially in closeups. Literally every strand of hair or fur is visible in perfect detail, as are things like the grain in desks or the stones in walls. Other things have a photo-realistic quality, such as slices of bread, vehicles, or wet roads. Pixar continues upping the ante in computer visuals and Onward picks up where the gorgeous Toy Story 4 left off. Lighting effects are dazzling, whether it is fire, sparkling magic, or light streaming in through windows. Dark spaces like caves or night scenes make for especially vibrant eye candy.

As is the case with every Disney release I’m aware of, the digital HD version—and Blu-ray disc on release—doesn’t contain the object-based Dolby Atmos soundtrack, which is reserved for the premium 4K content. Instead, Onward’s HD version has a 7.1-channel DTS-HD Master audio soundtrack.

While I can’t wait to audition the Atmos track when the 4K version drops, this mix offers plenty to enjoy. There are strong panning and surround effects tracking the onscreen action, especially during the driving scenes on the expressway and the final challenge quest in the tunnels, where multiple objects whiz past your head. Even with the 7.1-channel mix, my processor’s upmixer smartly put sounds up into the ceiling, such as a dragon’s tail swiping overhead or fire breathing across the room. Outdoor scenes feature tons of ambient sounds to place you in the action, and bass is deep and authoritative. I find dialogue to be slightly forward with DTS mixes but had no difficulty understanding all the lines.

Of course, the brilliance of Pixar is in making movies that appeal to a broad range of viewers, and not just for that small subset of hardcore fans of a specific genre or RPG subculture. Unlike any other studio, the studio has a knack for writing stories and jokes that play across multiple levels. Kids appreciate the top-level humor, with other jokes and references for adults, and deeper meanings and storytelling themes that parents recognize.

Ultimately, Onward is Pixar doing what it does best, which is creating movies about deep relationships and going right for the feels at the end. Whether you’re a beginning Level 1 Crafty Rogue or a veteran Level 20 Wizard, there’s plenty in Onward to engage and entertain families of all ages.

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

PICTURE | As literally every pixel shown on screen is rendered in computer, you get an amazing level of detail, especially in closeups, and even in the HD version reviewed here.

SOUND | The 7.1-channel mix here offers plenty to enjoy, with strong panning and surround effects tracking the onscreen action and outdoor scenes featuring tons of ambient sounds to place you in the story.

Review: Psycho

review | Psycho

recent reviews

Kaleidescape | Vertigo

Kaleidescape | A Clockwork Orange

Kaleidescape | The Shining

Kaleidescape | Last Night in Soho

see more in Reviews

Seeing this film in 4K not only underlines how much Hitchcock reinvented himself here but how much he changed filmmaking forever

by Michael Gaughn
September 11, 2020

This was supposed to be a review of Rear Window. But I had such a strong reaction to watching Psycho in 4K that Hitchcock’s lurid horror classic quickly pushed its way to the front of the reviewing queue.

More has probably been written about Hitchcock than any other filmmaker, most of it boxing him in so tightly that he’s ended up as badly embalmed as Norman Bates’ mother. So I’m going to try to avoid retreading any of that ground here. My comments will be mainly about why you should care about Psycho in 2020—and why you should care about it in 4K.

First off, there’s Anthony Perkins. Sure, people have praised his performance before but I didn’t realize until this most recent viewing exactly how groundbreaking it was and how much it still reverberates today. Hitchcock was notorious for putting blinders on his performers, so while there are some exceptional breakout performances in his films (I’m thinking of Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train in particular), they’re rare, and tend to happen not because the actor was given extraordinary latitude but because he figured out how to roll within Hitchcock’s often stifling restrictions.

Perkins turns that straitjacket into a virtue, offering the most direct, nuanced, and startling performance in any Hitchcock film. (His bursting in on Vera Miles at the end always seems so comical because he has kept Norman on a such a believably tight leash until then.) There are many things in Psycho that are unique for a Hitchcock film (I’ll get to that in a minute) but this is the most unusual. As soon as Perkins says his first lines to Janet Leigh, Psycho pivots from a traditional studio-era production into the cinematic unknown.

And then there’s the enduring influence of his performance, which has become the standard for any actor attempting to explore the extreme edges of dissociation. It’s hard to watch his Norman Bates and not see De Niro’s Travis Bickle—or even Rupert Pupkin. To watch Perkins in this film is to watch him actively and radically reinvent film acting—all while under his director’s unblinking gaze.

But Hitchcock ventured into all kinds of new territory in Psycho, and it’s fascinating to watch him try to reinvent himself as he grapples with the collapse of the studio system and the realization of how tightly he was bound to it. The tragic thing about Psycho was that he found it impossible to build on his many innovations here, instead retreating to what he already knew, which is why all of his later films feel half-baked and carry the fetid reek of nostalgia.

A lot has been made about Hitchcock using a TV crew to shoot the film but that kind of misses the point. Psycho, on the moviemaking level, is mainly about Hitchcock grappling with his increasing bitterness, cynicism, disorientation, and misogyny in a world where he could feel his influence as a filmmaker and a personality waning, and figuring out what the hell to make of his unmistakable attraction to La Nouvelle Vague, a movement that worshipped his work but couldn’t have been further removed from his Hollywood-machine style of filmmaking.

Any talk of Hitchcock’s misogyny in the age of the New Puritanism is guaranteed to fall on deaf ears—but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be said. His take on women was far more deft and complex than he’s usually given credit for (consider, for instance, that the two most assertive and courageous characters in Rear Window are Thelma Ritter and Grace Kelly, and how Eva Marie Saint makes Cary Grant look like a dope in North by Northwest). Yes, the sense of personal aggression in his handling of the Marion Crane character is troubling, but the film hinges on being able to see her through Norman’s eyes from the second he first encounters her in the rain at the Bates motel.

That’s one of the more New Wave elements in this very New Wave-y film, that not only is Marion not very likable—nobody in this film is, which is what forces you to gravitate toward Norman and feel some uncomfortably complex emotions about him as it all plays out.

As for the shock factor—it’s there, but not in the broad strokes that enticed and repelled audiences at the time. Probably the two most disturbing images now are Janet Leigh staring out at the audience with her face flattened against the bathroom floor and Perkins mounting Martin Balsam, butcher knife aloft, while Balsam lies on his back squealing like a stuck pig.

What’s more disturbing are the droller, more perverse touches, like forcing the audience to suffer John Gavin through the whole second half of the film, and the justly infamous penultimate scene where the smug psychiatrist explains all. But it’s worth enduring that to get to the brilliant Godardian shot of Norman in confinement, leading to him giving the camera what would become the patented Kubrick crazy stare, with that almost subliminal superimposition of Mother’s rotting face.

What 4K brings to all this is distressing—as in, you can see all the little nicks and scuff marks and tears and stains that evoke the shabby decay of the Bates Motel. It’s hard to emphasize how much this heightens the experience of the film. Given Hitchcock’s horror of any kind of filth, the idea of a place—and a mind—than rundown was probably truly terrifying for him, and it takes all the clarity of UHD resolution to faithfully convey that.

Strangely, capturing the full impact of 35mm film makes the subtle verbal duel between Perkins and Balsam that begins in the motel office and continues out on the walkway far more intense than it felt in earlier home video incarnations. This is another scene where Hitchcock went well outside his comfort zone, not only in the way he allowed the actors to fence, but in the way he turned it into a duel of acting styles that had until then had been foreign to his work. This scene had always felt kind of flat seen anywhere other than in a movie theater, until now.

But 4K both giveth and taketh away. This transfer does its best with some occasionally bad elements, the worst instance probably being a POV shot through Marion’s windshield at the 24:11 mark where the resolution and image enhancement create a giant swarm of digital gnats that make it feel like you’re watching the opening to Men in Black.

Also, without getting pulled into any sweeping generalizations, it needs to be pointed out that while the HDR version bests the UHD version, the differences are so subtle they’ll probably only register with hyper-critical viewers. Spot-checking scenes with a lot of gradation, like Marion and Norman in the lobby parlor (Chapter 8) or Norman burying evidence in the swamp (Chapter 12), showed only the slightest difference between versions.

But it’s hard to emphasize how much 4K does to revive Psycho and make it feel vital, instead of like some vaguely appreciated but permanently filed-away relic. And experiencing it in either UHD or HDR brings a new respect for its mostly restrained black & white cinematography. Color would have been too distracting, visually drowning out the impact of the film’s brutally pared-down main elements. And we can only shudder at the thought of 4K colorization.

As for the sound, you’re probably best off experiencing Psycho with the DTS HD Master Audio stereo track. The Master Audio 5.1 mix doesn’t make the film more engaging, just different. That’s not to say someone someday couldn’t do a compelling Dolby Atmos remix but they would have to be an absolute virtuoso to make their efforts dovetail with Hitchcock’s aesthetic.

And let’s pause for a moment to acknowledge Bernard Herrmann’s groundbreaking score, which is well served by both mixes. I had never really appreciated until I heard it here just how much Herrmann relied on the primal physicality of the bows scraping across the strings and the rough resonance of the string instruments’ body cavities—the cellos and basses in particular. Sure, that impression had always been there, on the verge of recognition, but this time that naked musical aggression seemed far more crucial to the impact of the music than the notes themselves.

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

PICTURE | What 4K brings to this film is distressing—as in, you can see all the little nicks and scuff marks and tears and stains that evoke the shabby decay of the Bates Motel.

SOUND | You’re probably best off experiencing Psycho with the DTS HD Master Audio stereo track. The 5.1 mix doesn’t make the film more engaging, just different.

Review: Stardust Memories

review | Stardust Memories

recent reviews

Kaleidescape | Manhattan

Kaleidescape | The Purple Rose of Cairo

Kaleidescape | Annie Hall

Kaleidescape | Blue Jasmine

see more in Reviews

The film that drove the masses away from Woody Allen’s work offers the deepest, most nuanced, portrayal of his persona

by Michael Gaughn
March 7, 2021

Having considered a handful of Woody Allen’s most significant films, we now approach his most problematic work (that is, the most problematic for anyone who’s not a prisoner of the irredeemable present). Allen had been on a roll with audiences after Annie Hall and Manhattan but ran into a massive wall with Stardust Memories, which effectively alienated the broader following he’d created with those two earlier films and left him with the small but blindly devoted fan base that would allow him to keep making movies for the next four decades. As perverse as it sounds, it seems possible—even likely—he deliberately created Memories to offend, in a maybe too successful effort to cull the herd.

I wondered in an earlier review why Allen soon abandoned his nimble, well-rounded, creatively fertile persona to portray a thin caricature of himself in later films. The answer might lie here. Being too honest about himself and his perceptions created a backlash that might have been both personally traumatizing and a threat to his career. With his Zelig-like need to be accepted, Allen might have decided that, rather than continue to mine that tremendously and uniquely fruitful vein, he should play it safe—or at least safer—from now on.

Some have called Stardust Memories his best film. It’s undeniably a great film—it takes tremendous talent to go this picaresque and be this unvarnished and ambitious and still pull it off—but it just doesn’t hang together as well as the equally audacious Manhattan. And I think the fault might lie in the relationships he chose to portray and his too facile casting of his partners.

Allen tends to go for the Flavor of the Month with his actors, and while Charlotte Rampling might have photographed well, she just doesn’t have the chops to be believable as his deeply disturbed love interest. Marie-Christine Barrault fares slightly better as his more grounded alternative but, again, there’s just not enough depth there. Jessica Harper almost makes her part work, but she’s not a significant enough screen presence to care about. While Allen was likely just staying true to his actual situation, and famous directors undoubtedly do tend to flit from one stimulating but superficial relationship to another, the film needed a deeper emotional resonance there to balance its incisive but ultimately wearying examination of celebrity.

I don’t want to give the impression I don’t like this film—I do. I just wanted to pinpoint where it sags. Stardust Memories shows a fierce courage—and Allen paid a huge price for going there. Many felt he was too brutal on his fans, but that misses the point. He’s mainly exploring why we manifest the worlds we do and his intense dissatisfaction with his current state, which he was largely responsible for. The suffocating fans were just an inevitable extension of that.

It’s got the loosest structure of any his non-gag-driven films, with a “meet the director” weekend at a seaside resort supplying the armature for him to hang his diverse impressions on, and he makes it work well. The problem (to the degree it is a problem) is that people assumed it would be fun to be inside Allen’s head for 90 minutes and were thrown to find the experience jarring, even disturbing. It’s as if he took another stab at the deeply subjective, free-associational original premise for Annie Hall (called “Anhedonia”) and this time succeeded in landing all the blows.

And let’s not forget that Stardust Memories is a comedy, and a funny one—his conversation with a bunch of street-wise aliens (“I have an IQ of 1,600 and I still don’t know what you expected from that relationship with Dorrie”) might be the best bit in any of his films—but there’s not a single comic moment than isn’t deliberately troubled by darker currents—which is what makes the film so brilliant but also threw audiences so hard.

Allen does somewhat balance, or at least temper, his unflinching take on his reality with a deeply bittersweet romanticism, which he sees as a necessary buffer while realizing that retreats into fantasy always come at a price (something he would explore with far more nuance in The Purple Rose of Cairo). That romanticism permeates the film, in how the Allen character treats his relationships, in the Django Reinhardt-inflected jazz soundtrack, and especially in Gordon Willis’s cinematography, which takes the more epic style of Manhattan and gives it a deeper bite.

My comments about how Willis’s images fare in this Blu-ray-quality HD download will sound eerily similar to my comments about his work in Manhattan. Everything looks good, but not first-rate, and Memories really does need the subtlety of all the captured steps of grayscale to help soften the impact of the deliberately harsh material. The movie is perfectly watchable in this form—although intense pools of bright light are so harsh they’re distracting—but it would be not just better but a different experience in 4K HDR.

Stardust Memories remains a challenging film—partly because none of Allen’s other movies have pushed the audience as hard to consider the difficult, but valid, positions he’s putting forth. It’s hard to appreciate the risks he took here—especially when you consider that even he didn’t accurately anticipate the backlash he’d trigger. If you see this film and know exactly how you feel about it at the end, you weren’t really watching.

In hindsight, this was the pivotal moment in Allen’s career. One of the running gags in Memories is his fans’ preference for his “early, funny” films, a sentiment he acknowledges and, through this film, says he’s OK with because he knows that’s all behind him now. Time has since affirmed his judgment, exposing the many weaknesses of those early movies while revealing the many strengths of his mid-period work.

But this was also his first film in years without Diane Keaton as his leading lady, and although her presence can be felt in the Rampling character, his inability to make the romantic relationships interesting enough does weigh the film down. This is pure speculation, but it seems likely Allen would have continued making far more adventurous movies if the public hadn’t turned on him so viciously after Memories. Looking to regroup, he assumed he needed a leading lady to make his work more palatable—which is when a very eager Mia Farrow appeared.

PICTURE | The movie is perfectly watchable in Blu-ray-quality HD—although intense pools of bright light are so harsh they’re distracting—but it would be not just better but a different experience in 4K HDR.

SOUND | You can hear all the dialogue and various vintage jazz cues just fine.

Review: The Purple Rose of Cairo

review | The Purple Rose of Cairo

recent reviews

Kaleidescape | Manhattan

Kaleidescape | Stardust Memories

Kaleidescape | The Shining

Kaleidescape | Vertigo

see more in Reviews

This deeply bittersweet look at the consequences of escapist culture resonates more strongly today than when it was first released

by Michael Gaughn
March 13, 2021

Of all of Woody Allen’s many films, The Purple Rose of Cairo deserves to be in, or near, the Top 5. I doubt anyone has ever treated the subject of mass-produced fantasies and their consequences as incisively. And Allen does it without turning it into the type of cold-blooded, too-clever-by-half intellectual exercise that tends to rule the roost today.

In an initial viewing, Purple Rose can seem lightweight, in a charming and quirky kind of way. It’s Allen’s most successful attempt to translate the style of his S.J. Perelman-type short pieces for The New Yorker to the screen. But while those pieces, hilarious as they often are, tend to be little more than a kind of absurdist riffing, here he manages to interweave a decent amount of earned emotion with the absurdity; and when he veers into sentimentality, it reinforces his critique of pop fantasies and comes with a bite.

While Mia Farrow gives what might be her best performance, it’s Jeff Daniels who walks away with the film. It’s hard to imagine the one-note Michael Keaton pulling off playing two similar yet very distinctly different roles, let alone looking like a Hollywood actor from the ‘30s. And yet Daniels aces it, also bringing a bland Midwestern quality to his portrayal that makes Gil Shepherd’s eventual betrayal of Farrow that much more affecting.

Without that last-mentioned turn, the film would have been little more than a very funny confection. But Allen’s movies, as he emerged from his mid period, began to display a maturity, a grounded and often troubling depth, he’s never gotten enough credit for. If he had opted for anything resembling a traditional happy ending, Purple Rose would have been little different from the fluff it both embraces and skewers. Shepherd’s all-too-human duplicity is a bracing jolt that throws the dangers—and irresponsibility—of the easy retreat into fantasy into context. Nobody can stop you from escaping into fantasy worlds—something the culture industry has shifted into hyper drive to encourage since the grim turn of the century—but it always comes at a hefty price.

And you have to wonder if the contemporary masses aren’t so thoroughly indoctrinated, so caught up in the endless, indulgent, self-congratulatory, self-referential, and insanely lucrative exercises in overgrown child’s play, for anything like this to even begin to resonate anymore, if Allen’s point isn’t utterly lost on a world that just wants to be left alone with its toys.

After landing that blow, though, Allen does cheat a little with an unfortunate shot of Shepherd looking wistfully out a plane window as he flies back to Hollywood from Farrow’s bleak corner of New Jersey. That moment seems to let Daniels’ character off the hook way too easily. It’s not that Allen shouldn’t have gone there but something more ambivalent would have rung truer.

I need to pause for a moment to acknowledge Danny Aiello’s performance. An actor all too often typecast, Allen plays off from that here, taking an archetypical abusive goon and making him, if not palatable, at last understandable. Consider the distance from Sylvester Stallone in a black leather jacket beating up old ladies on the subway in Bananas and you have an accurate gauge of just how much Allen grew as a filmmaker. And Aiello takes the opportunity and runs with it, without ever breaking a sweat.

Dianne Wiest deserves similar praise. If she hadn’t been able to bring depth to her portrayal of a roaming prostitute, Daniels-as-Tom Baxter’s sojourn in a bordello would have been little more than an extended cheap laugh. But she and Allen give her a basal dignity that keeps her and her fellow co-workers from becoming objects of ridicule.

And now we once again come to Gordon Willis. It would be impossible to decide which film represents his best work for Allen, but I would have to put Purple Rose really near or on par with Manhattan. He doesn’t really do anything bravura here, but it’s all strong. How he and Allen were able to take a closed-for-the-season amusement park in the autumn chill and turn it into a subtle metaphor for the film itself and for the torpor of America in the middle of the Depression remains both stunning and sublime.

As with A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, the cinematography holds up surprisingly well in Blu-ray-quality HD. Most of the subtlety is retained, only occasionally marred by excess noise and grain. Patches of bright light remain a problem, but not much can be done about that until the increasingly distant day when this film gets lifted up to 4K HDR.

The most egregious problem is the shots in the film-within-the-film that were radically enlarged on an optical printer. Allen obviously shot all of these as masters and then decided in editing that the other characters in the frame were too distracting. I don’t remember these images being this grainy and blobby when seen in a theater, but here they look like somebody spliced in some degraded VHS footage.

The weakest thing about Purple Rose is Dick Hyman’s score. It’s unfortunate Allen leaned so heavily on Hyman in his films, because, while he was a technically proficient musician, his work tended to be slick and soulless. Fortunately Allen’s material is strong enough to not be unduly weighed down by the seemingly arbitrary and often incongruous cues, but it’s a shame Allen couldn’t have cobbled together the entire soundtrack out of vintage music instead.

Many of Allen’s films are about characters who easily—and often, too easily—slip into fantasy worlds, and many of his protagonists are haunted by fantasy projections of the past. Key films like Annie Hall and Stardust Memories show Allen himself, thinly disguised behind fictional monikers, having a hard time, by his own admission, separating fiction from reality. His condition, which at one time was seen as an aberration, has since become desirable, is now accepted as the norm. While he frequently played that tenuous hold on reality for laughs, he never fully accepted it, and Purple Rose remains his most trenchant look into what has become the very heart of the culture.

PICTURE | The cinematography holds up surprisingly well in Blu-ray-quality HD with most of the subtlety retained, only occasionally marred by excess noise and grain.

SOUND | Come on, this is a Woody Allen movie, a lot of witty banter interspersed with music cues. It sounds fine.

Review: Manhattan

review | Manhattan

recent reviews

Kaleidescape | The Purple Rose of Cairo

Kaleidescape | Stardust Memories

Kaleidescape | 2001: A Space Odyssey

Amazon Prime | All Watched Over
by Machines of Loving Grace

see more in Reviews

Woody Allen’s most ambitious and fullest film looks just fine in HD but cries out for a 4K reissue

by Michael Gaughn
January 31, 2021

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

Manhattan is Allen’s most ambitious work, the film where he completely rose to, and exceeded the level of, those ambitions. It and Annie Hall are his fullest movies. No matter how good any of his subsequent efforts have been, they’ve never been as generous, don’t have that same sense of flowing over. In no other film has he been as close to or confident with the material.

And yet Allen pleaded with United Artists not to release Manhattan. He’s never really explained why. It could just be that he doesn’t have a good perspective on his own work, which would help explain (and I’m not being facetious here) the shortcomings of many of his films.

While this is his fullest movie, nothing really happens in it—or it at least it seems that way if you’ve become addicted to melodrama and its crippled stepchild, adventure. But if you focus intently on each of the characters and can establish some common ground with them, their decisions and actions become significant and the film becomes a kind of intimate epic, with Manhattan, fittingly, as its landscape.

In any other city, this congruity between a handful of people and the totality of the urban environment would seem forced, but Manhattan being confined to an island allows Allen to put a frame around the action—literally. Doing a comedy in both 2.39:1 widescreen and black & white ran the risk of being gimmicky, but Allen and Gordon Willis pull it off partly because it’s a constant reminder of the city’s island status and mostly because it firmly establishes everything in the film as an extension of the Allen character, sealing the connection between individual and larger environment.

And the variety of the widescreen compositions is dazzling, ranging from macro—an elaborate fireworks display in Central Park South to Park Avenue in the snow to the justly famous image of the 59th Street Bridge at dawn—to micro: a group of creatives chatting at a reception at MOMA to the long take of Allen and Mariel Hemingway strolling through SoHo with Diane Keaton and Michael Murphy to Allen glimpsed at a distance through the slats of Venetian blinds as he sits on his terrace. By each composition being so apt and by creating such a seamless flow between them, Allen creates the sense that these people are New York (or at least best embody a certain, admittedly romantic, notion of the city.)

Maybe the most successful composition is the post-coital one of Hemingway laying on a couch in a pool of light from a lamp, bottom frame left, as Allen comes down spiral stairs almost in silhouette frame right. He and Willis turn a typical upscale apartment into both a stage set and a kind of palace without losing any of the intimacy—no small feat.

Their evocation of the city at night, of walking down deserted streets with most of the businesses closed for the evening as taxi cabs continue to stream down the avenues, is so convincing it’s uncanny. No one has ever done a better job of capturing the energy constantly simmering behind the quiet, that sense of possibility, of New York after dark.

This was Allen’s first comedy with traditionally structured scenes and a sustained narrative structure, and he applies the experience gained in the labored Interiors well. He was still learning the ropes of being an actor’s director, though, so while he and Keaton have no problems holding the frame, Murphy, Hemingway, and Anne Byrne (In a woefully underwritten role) don’t register as strongly as they should.

But those are quibbles. The film is so dynamic and so spot-on that it has a life of its own that makes its flaws seem inconsequential. That’s exceedingly rare in movies, and in a more just world, only those films where the cup runneth consistently over would ever be considered classics.

And now to the awkward part: Being able to savor Willis’s cinematography is a big part of the experience but Manhattan is in HD, and watching it on a 4K display will only make you ache to see it properly presented in UHD. Once you get past the opening montage, the irritating distractions of the upsampled high-def presentation are minimal and you rarely find yourself pulled out of the film (with one glaring exception). But that montage is so essential that it’s hard not to wince every time a large, uniform bright area in the frame becomes a crawling gnat infestation.

That glaring exception: The last three shots of Allen and Keaton walking through an exhibit at the Hayden Planetarium are so contrasty and over-processed they look like community-access chromakey. This isn’t even close to how these shots appear on film. Many of Allen’s movies deserve to be upgraded to 4K HDR but, given his current pariah status, that might take a while. When it finally does happen, though, Manhattan should be at the top of the list.

I know I’m a broken record about this but what can you really say about the sound in a movie where people basically just talk to each other for 90 minutes, offering a blissful retreat from the aural assaults we’ve unfortunately come to prize from surround sound? The all-Gershwin score sounds fine—although I wish Allen had been able to get just about anyone but Zubin Mehta to do Rhapsody in Blue.

The big question about Manhattan is why, having developed his character, his persona, and the city so fully, in a way that suggested so many more creative opportunities, did Allen essentially retreat? After Annie Hall and this film, he never really went down that path again. His character is in the forefront of Stardust Memories, but that’s not really a New York film. And while he explores similar territory in Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Husbands and Wives, he reduces his character to secondary status, to a kind of comic relief that almost makes him superfluous. I’m not saying he should have just kept churning out Manhattan retreads, but there’s an unshakeable sense that we all lost something vital when he decided to close that door.

(* I’m going here reluctantly, which is why I’m relegating these comments to a footnote, but the whole “You shouldn’t watch Manhattan because Allen’s character has a relationship with a 17 year old” thing has become such a flashpoint that you can’t mention—let alone praise—the film without addressing it. Let’s just leave it at this: There’s been a lot of smug commentary along the lines of “Audiences at the time of the film’s release didn’t have a problem with that relationship but we, from our morally superior viewpoint in the present, do.” First off, contemporary audiences did have problems with that relationship, which Allen deliberately introduced into the film to make them squirm and to get them to rethink what defines a relationship—something we no longer seem capable of doing unless it’s framed in terms of a bland and stultifying androgyny. Second, when a certain entitled subset of society hopelessly confuses fiction with reality and then feels it can put fetters on expression and decide what can and can’t be portrayed, we are indisputably at the end of empire.)

PICTURE | Once you get past the opening montage, the irritating distractions of the upsampled high-def presentation are minimal and you rarely find yourself pulled out of the film.

SOUND | What can you really say about the sound in a movie where people basically just talk to each other for 90 minutes?

Review: Coco

review | Coco

recent reviews

Kaleidescape | Ratatouille

Kaleidescape | The Alpinist

Kaleidescape | 2001: A Space Odyssey

Kaleidescape | Beetlejuice

see more in Reviews

This often subtle visual presentation of Pixar’s Day of the Dead tale makes a strong argument for HDR in digital animation

by Dennis Burger
September 10, 2021

It may seem strange to begin a review of Coco with a discussion of a man who had nothing to do with the film but hopefully this will all make sense in a few paragraphs. I am, to put it mildly, a magic enthusiast. I have a drawer in my dresser dedicated to all manner of illusions, from prop thumbs to Svengali decks to Scotch & Soda coins, and the list goes on. So it stands to reason I have an all-time favorite illusionist—a mischievous little imp known as James Randi, who performed for years as The Amazing Randi before transitioning into a career as a professional skeptic and debunker.

What makes Randi my favorite magician is that he was honest about being a liar, famously stating, “I’m a trickster, I’m a cheat, I’m a charlatan. That’s what I do for a living.” The one time I got to see him perform illusions in person, he explained his craft in detail. He walked the audience through his tricks, exposing not only the mechanics but also why the audience fell for them.

And all of the above is simply context for what I’m about to say: One of my all-time favorite magic tricks is Pixar’s Coco. And yes, it is a magic trick. It’s illusory, after all, packed with deception and misdirection and sleights of hand both subtle and coarse. But what makes it such a great magic act is exactly what made Randi such a great magician—even after you recognize and understand the deceptions, they still work, they still have power, they’re still artful and masterful.

And that is just one of the many reasons why Coco sits high on my all-time favorites list of Pixar films, and why it’s worthy of discussion today, some four years after its release. Another reason is the film’s thematic complexity—which I’m forced to contend with as I attempt to convey what the film means, what it has to say. The simplest I can come up with is that it’s ultimately about the struggle—the tug-of-war—between one’s intrinsic search for identity and obligation to family and society. But that’s too simple. It would be more accurate to say it’s about the complex way in which our identity is formed both from within and from without. More obviously, it also beautifully deals with death, legacy, and the afterlife in a way that feels mutually compatible with spiritual thinking and a more secular outlook on life. And somehow it manages all of this while feeling organic and spontaneous.

Of course, a more obvious reason to discuss the film at this juncture is that Kaleidescape is currently running a Pixar Fest through September 14, with special pricing on select films from the studio’s catalog. Coco currently comes in at $14.99 in UHD/HDR. I mean, come on. At that price, it’s irresistible, even if you’re a Disney+ subscriber—and I know that may be a hard sell, but let me explain why. Firstly, Kaleidescape’s download comes with so many of the bonus features that are missing on Disney’s streaming service, including a wonderful (but far too brief) documentary called “The Real Guitar,” which is otherwise only available on disc or Apple TV.

Kaleidescape’s UHD presentation is rich with subtle textures and the HDR10 color grade is a significant step up from the Blu-ray release. Coco is a gorgeous film at any resolution, mostly owing to its fantastic art design and animation but the HDR adds some meaningful enhancements that make the illusion all the more convincing. The expanded color gamut allows for a slightly more pronounced contrast between Miguel’s Día de las Muertas makeup and the actual bony flesh of the dead, for example, accentuating why the deception almost works, but not quite. The fluorescent glow that permeates the Land of the Dead also radiates with more intensity, making it all feel that much more magical.

Kaleidescape’s Dolby TrueHD Atmos soundtrack is a textbook example of object-based surround done right. Panning and object placement are perfect within the base soundfield and the overhead channels are used to expand and enhance the ambiance and reverberance of the world without thwapping you over the head with distractions.

It’s interesting to note that there are more significant differences between Kaleidescape’s presentation of the film and the stream available on Disney+ than would usually be the case. And that’s mostly because Kaleidescape relies on HDR10, while Disney+ has the film in Dolby Vision. It’s not a matter of which is better—in this case, it largely comes down to personal choice, as both have their merits. The Dolby Vision grade is more vibrant, with a more intense color palette and higher-intensity brightness in spots, making it obvious bait for videophiles. The HDR10 grade is more muted—at least in the land of the living—which makes the visual contrast between the two worlds stand out a bit more. Both look gorgeous, but again—and this is the main kicker for me—Disney+ only adds a few deleted scenes and one short featurette, whereas the Kaleidescape download comes with almost all the bonus goodies available on disc. Those supplements, as well as the more reliable access afforded by downloading the film once instead of streaming it on demand, make Kaleidescape’s release incredibly easy to recommend as a permanent part of your movie library.

PICTURE | Kaleidescape’s UHD presentation is rich with subtle textures and the HDR10 color grade is a significant step up from the Blu-ray release.

SOUND | The Dolby TrueHD Atmos soundtrack is a textbook example of object-based surround done right.

Kaleidescape

Review: Big Fish

recent reviews

Review: C’mon C’mon

recent reviews

Review: The Long Goodbye

related reviews

Review: Ran

recent reviews

Review: Onward

recent reviews

Review: Psycho

recent reviews

Review: Stardust Memories

recent reviews

Review: The Purple Rose of Cairo

recent reviews

Review: Manhattan

recent reviews

Review: Coco

recent reviews

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Type:

Genre:

Duration:

Average Rating:

Kaleidescape

recent reviews

recent reviews

related reviews

recent reviews

recent reviews

recent reviews

recent reviews

recent reviews

recent reviews

recent reviews

Recent Posts

Recent Comments