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Michael Gaughn

What’s So Great About Color?

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What's So Great About Color?

What’s So Great About Color?

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The unthinking, market-driven prejudice against black & white is destroying some of the greatest works of pop culture

by Michael Gaughn
July 9, 2020

A few days ago, we ran Dennis Burger’s interview with Ray Harryhausen, where the justly revered special-effects genius talked about how happy he was with the colorized version of his 20 Million Miles to Earth. I know this is a touchy subject I can’t possibly begin to do justice to in the space allotted here, but colorization is bad—it has always been bad and always will be. The fact that we’ve gotten better at it—like getting better at covering your tracks after a murder—only compounds the crime.

There are so many ways to approach this, but let’s start with this: Why do we need everything to be in color? Why did the idea take root that black & white is somehow inferior? Are Dürer’s or Doré’s engravings or Ernst’s collages in any way inferior to their work in color—or any other artist’s work in color? How about Steiglitz’ or Walker Evans’ or Weegee’s photos? Does the fact that Chaplin’s and Keaton’s films—and Murnau’s and Eisenstein’s and Griffith’s—were shot in black & white make them inherently inferior to later, color films? 

Then there’s the notion that color films are more realistic. Really? When was the last time you saw a movie where the color palette even came within striking distance of reality? Movies are so heavily manipulated in post now that they look like the colorist let his six-year-old daughter loose on the file with a set of neon Sharpies. Yes, 4K HDR is capable of more accurately reproducing reality but the sad truth is that our addiction to retreating into superficial fantasy means practically no one takes advantage of what the tools can actually do. 

Another argument is that colorization is a way to get jaded people raised on color media (in other words, Millennials) to check out older material. Not only is that cynical pandering, it assumes that it’s the black & white that makes these older movies and shows somehow irrelevant.

The only self-consistent explanation is that the need to colorize is part of the current mania to obliterate the past and to desensitize ourselves into an oblivious stupor. Eradicating black & white via color is akin to filling every movie with more and more gunplay, grosser and grosser gags, bigger, louder, deeper explosions, and greater and greater levels of intolerance. Given that, of course we would want to annihilate anything more elegant and subtle because it would represent an annoying reminder that the present is rarely a significant improvement on the past.

Black & white has become associated with things like sophistication (say Lubitsch comedies or Astaire/Rogers musicals) and noir (take your pick) because grayscale evokes both subtlety and ambiguity in ways color tends to obscure. 

A colorization booster would say, “Why do you care what they do to some ‘50s monster flick—or some Shirley Temple movie, or some ‘50s sitcom?” But where do you draw the line—especially given how voracious and indiscriminate the people with their hands on the cultural levers have become?

The “Why do you care?” argument is inherently elitist—especially at a time when we like to pretend that all creative expression has been flattened to the level of pop culture (kind of like the apparatchiks using bureaucracy to enforce mediocrity during the Soviet era). I Love Lucy and the first season of Bewitched have been colorized, and that’s somehow OK because they’re “just” sitcoms (ignoring for the moment that Lucy was shot by Metropolis cinematographer Karl Freund). 

What about something like The Dick Van Dyke Show? That’s just some old black & white sitcom, right? Except that it was beautifully captured by veteran Studio Era DP Robert De Grasse, and that its black & white ethos is redolent of the best still photography of the time, of the most sophisticated films, of magazine layouts for Christian Dior and Yves St. Laurent. In other words, it’s the very essence and epitome of that too brief era of American Enlightenment. Dick Van Dyke in color is no longer Dick Van Dyke—which is one reason why Carl Reiner decided not to switch over to color halfway through the series’ run.

Colorizing it now would go directly against the creators’ intent—an always dubious notion that has become inherently hypocritical and virtually meaningless now—and couldn’t result in anything but a curiosity, at best, and a travesty at worst.*

The notion that the addiction to color could creep from the world of monster films and I Love Lucy to, say, classic noir or early Godard should scare the crap out of anyone. It’s a path we should have never begun to venture down and needs to be nipped in the bud. Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.

What would be the colorization equivalent of nuclear deterrence?

* While doing my due diligence before publication, I discovered that some war criminal has actually committed that atrocity. Hopefully there’s a circle in Hell—preferably right below Satan’s crotch—reserved just for colorists.

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

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Review: Blue Velvet

Blue Velvet (1986)

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.

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

PICTURE | 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 

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Review: Ed Wood

Ed Wood (1994)

review | Ed Wood

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Unfairly slighted and neglected, Tim Burton’s best film (you read that right) still shines almost 30 years on

by Michael Gaughn
October 15, 2020

I told myself I was going to make this one a quickie and not belabor my points. So, Point No. 1—this is the only good Tim Burton movie. Point 2—it features Johnny Depp’s best performance, by far. Point 3—it’s astonishing Martin Landau did such a great job of playing Lugosi without getting much help from behind the camera. Point 4—Ed Wood died at the box office, not because it’s not a great film—it is—but because it doesn’t fit within the all too predictable definition of what a Burton film is supposed to be. And because it committed the unforgivable sin of being in black & white.

I guess this is going to take some explaining after all.

I continue to be amazed by the number of people who haven’t seen Ed Wood, and by the number who have seen it but didn’t realize Burton directed it. In an age where practically everything, no matter how inept, has its rabid fan base, there’s something fundamentally wrong about the neglect this film has suffered. It seems like its financial failure caused Burton to decide to only do “Tim Burton” films from that point on—akin to what happened after De Niro played a very Ed Wood-like Rupert Pupkin in King of Comedy. Audiences weren’t willing to accept him as anything other than “Robert De Niro,” so he was forced to be that somewhat limited character for the rest of his career.

If the points I rattled off at the top weren’t enough to get you to check this movie out, here are a few more. It’s got one of the great opening-credits sequences, which manages to capture both the feel of Wood’s movies and set the tone for what’s to come without feeling arbitrarily grafted onto the rest of the film. Beyond Landau and Depp, there are some hugely entertaining turns by Sarah Jessica Parker, Jeffrey Jones, Bill Murray, and especially Mike Starr as the head of the C-grade exploitation house Screen Classics. (The one big casting misstep is a so-meek-she’s-barely-there Patricia Arquette as Wood’s wife.)

Then there’s the writing. Ed Wood stands above Burton’s other films mainly because it’s one of the few times he’s had an exceptional script to work from—by far the best effort from Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (the team responsible for the strictly pedestrian The People vs. Larry Flynt and Man on the Moon, and the inexcusable The People vs. OJ Simpson). Their portrait of Wood might not be very accurate, but it’s exactly who we need Wood to be, serving up one big fat softball after another for Depp to knock out of the park. 

The movie is laugh-out-loud funny in a way Burton films rarely are. You can thank the script for most of that, but it’s more than ably realized by Depp, who displays some genius comedic chops he’s just been too cool to bother to use since; by Murray, who adds some nicely timed flourishes; and especially by Starr, who aces every scene he’s in.

The script can also claim most of the credit for the nicely modulated shifts of tone. While Ed Wood is mainly a comedy—and frequently a really broad one—it occasionally transitions deftly to drama, especially when dealing with Lugosi’s drug addiction. And it pulls off the really neat trick of not having Wood come across as just a cartoon or complete loser or clown. The actual Ed Wood doesn’t get enough credit for having tapped into the often trashy archetypes that define American culture in ways more sophisticated directors have never been able to. Wood wasn’t the worst director of all time, just the most naive.

Then there’s Stefan Czapsky’s black & white cinematography, which convincingly evokes the feel of ‘50s LA despite some lapses in direction and production design. The film looks both gritty and elegant, even in plain old HD on Amazon Prime. Besides, a color film about Ed Wood would just be absurd.

In the same way this is the best work from Burton, Landau, Depp, and Alexander & Karaszewski, it’s the only Howard Shore score I’ve ever been able to stomach. Pared down and witty, it’s an effective complement to the action and helps paper over some of the deeper sags in the mis en scène.

And, finally, Ed Wood is well worth watching because it’s one of those rare films that just feels like Halloween. While we tend to associate that holiday with shock-machine gore fests, they rarely capture the feel of the evening itself—which is one of the reasons why the studios tend to dump them on the market at the end of summer. But Ed Wood—along with Pixar’s sublime Coco—is redolent with the feel of All Hallow’s Eve.

To say Ed Wood was one of the best films of the ‘90s would border on being a slight, since that was a pretty abysmal decade for filmmaking. Better to say that it stands outside that decade, and the rest of Burton’s oeuvre, as an example of what happens when the right forces come together at the right time and somewhat magically manage to conjure up something that’s better than the sum of its parts.

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

PICTURE | Ed Wood looks both gritty and elegant, even in plain old HD on Amazon Prime

SOUND | Howard Shore’s pared down and witty score is an effective complement to the action and helps paper over some of the deeper sags in the mis en scène 

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Review: Chinatown

Chinatown (1974)

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. 

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

PICTURE | 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 

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Review: Get Shorty (1995)

Get Shorty (1995)

review | Get Shorty

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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. 

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

PICTURE | 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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Review: Mank

Mank (2020)

review | Mank

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Yet another misguided—and poorly made—attempt to steal the credit for Citizen Kane from Orson Welles

by Michael Gaughn
March 27, 2021

For proof that it was a really bad idea to have the Oscars in the middle of a pandemic, you don’t need to look any further than David Fincher’s Mank. It’s had a ton of nominations heaped upon it and it’s the kind of film that stands a decent chance of walking away with some major awards. But it’s also an astonishingly bad movie, and in a legitimate year—like say 2019—it wouldn’t have been allowed to even stick its head in the Academy’s door.

I’m going to offer up my rationale for the above conclusions not because I want to let this thing reside in my brain for a single second longer than necessary but since it’s being puffed up as a really big deal, an important film, it would be irresponsible to shirk making the case against it.

First off, the story it tries to tell is incredibly old news. The myth that Herman Mankiewicz, not Orson Welles, is responsible for the greatness of Citizen Kane has been Hollywood folklore from the time of Kane’s creation. The tiresome Pauline Kael later latched onto it and made it the subject of her notorious Raising Kane. HBO’s unforgivable RKO 281 (1999) tread the same ground. It’s an argument that’s so easily picked apart I won’t even bother going there but comes down to being yet one more instance of the American terror of the outsider. Mank breaks no new ground here.

The film’s deepest flaw is one common to all of Fincher’s work—he’s just an overgrown kid who approaches everything he does like a giggly teenager who’s adopted a completely unearned cynicism to mask his fundamental immaturity. That leads him to take an incredibly complex and potentially rich tale and reduce it to the overstylized and remedial presentation of a comic book. The film is full of superficial busyness. All of the actors speak in exposition. All plausibility is optional and only grudgingly deployed. There is no nuance.

A fundamental example: Fincher is so obsessed with pulling off clever shots and editing patterns, and is so fundamentally limited as an actor’s director, that he lacks the interest, ability, or trust to just let people sit in the same space and organically interact. To resonate at all, this needed to be a tale of very real, very vulnerable people striving in some very heightened worlds. It instead feels like a bunch of indifferently-drawn stick figures meant to serve some storyboard hopelessly stuck in Fincher’s head.

Also, for the movie to have any power, it needed to stay true to who these people were and what these institutions were within the world of 1930s California and Hollywood. But Fincher, for all his faux cynicism, is really just a big lapdog of a director so he can’t resist the temptation to draw contemporary parallels throughout and give his characters contemporary attitudes. Remolding Welles as a hipster is faintly amusing but also a little too pat, like everything else here. 

I was more impressed by Gary Oldman than I expected to be. I’ve always felt he was an “actor,” not an actor, and have been suspicious of his work ever since he was overpraised for his Sid Vicious impression in Sid and Nancy (1986). He’s almost engaging here, I suspect, because everything else in the film is so barely and poorly formed that even a yeoman-like turn seems intriguing.

It’s so easy to pick apart the movie’s ill-conceived and silly visual plan that I’ll leave that to others. The one thing I will point out is that the black & white cinematography is so contrasty, with the whites pumped up wretchedly high, that most of the images are painful to look at. Add to that a lot of fundamentally ill-conceived CGI work and you’ve got the visual equivalent of sandpaper.

There’s really nothing to be said about the Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross score except that it’s so predictable it’s like it’s not even there. But I was surprised by how badly this film is mixed. Since the dialogue was frequently unintelligible, I watched Mank a second time listening on headphones just to make out most of the lines. 

If you like movies that are full of a sense of their own cleverness and that tell you exactly what to think and feel—and I realize there’s a substantial audience for that—then by all means wallow in Mank. But it’s hard not to watch something like this and continually sense how much more the movies can do, how much more they have done, and see it as a deeply troubling sign that this kind of simplistic twaddle is somehow seen as important. Citizen Kane brought an unprecedented depth to the movies; Mank is a celebration of the kind of bright, shiny surfaces Welles’ film was meant to pierce. 

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

PICTURE | The black & white cinematography is so contrasty, with the whites pumped up wretchedly high, that most of the images are painful to look at

SOUND | This film is so badly mixed that the dialogue is frequently unintelligible. The Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross score is so predictable it’s like it’s not even there. 

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Theo Kalomirakis: A Personal History of Home Theater

Theo Kalomirakis: A Personal History of Home Theater

Theo Kalomirakis: A Personal History of Home Theater

The man who started it all offers an exclusive look at his career as the unrivaled master of home theater design

by Michael Gaughn
March 6, 2022

In the three-part interview gathered on this page, Theo provides a snapshot of each phase of his career, dipping into the past not so much to reminisce as to show the continuing relevance of the core ideas that have driven his designs. At a time when home theaters are going through a tremendous resurgence—especially at the highest end of the market—fueled largely by the pandemic-driven desire to have domestic retreats from the world, Theo’s efforts provide fertile ground for conceiving new ways to create unique and captivating movie-watching spaces within the home.  

“Because he’s the guy who invented home theater and remains beyond doubt its preeminent designer, people tend to assume Theo Kalomirakis’ interest lies primarily or solely in the design side of things. And if you only know his reputation or his work but not his history, that’s a natural enough assumption to make.

“But digging a little deeper goes a long way toward explaining why, despite all the changes in technology, entertainment, and taste over the years, Theo’s theaters continue to be the most evocative and compelling expression of the idea of watching films at home. The explanation—which really isn’t a secret, just obscured by the dash and brilliance of his designs—is that everything he does springs from his unusually deep passion for everything movies.”    read more

“The 1990s saw Theo Kalomirakis create and hone not just the style but all the various techniques that would forever define home theater design. And it all happened within his first few commissions—which is especially impressive when you realize that he leapt into the field with no formal training as an interior designer. 

“It was the decade not just of his earliest work—which quickly established his reputation and caused him to be sought out by millionaires, billionaires, movie stars, sports figures, and business and political leaders—but of his first international commissions and his first coffeetable book, Private Theaters, which features, among other work, the Ziegfeld, Uptown, and Gold Coast theaters discussed here.”    read more

“Theo and I have agreed to disagree over how to approach the third part of this interview. I had wanted to focus on the theaters he’s created since the turn of the millennium, which include some of the most striking and innovative of his career, most of which have never been published and none of which have been collected in a book. But he was adamant that we should focus instead on his various efforts to create a broader-market brand for himself. I relented for two reasons: Because I knew he would make the subject compelling and because, as he rightly said, ‘Talking about projects is misleading regarding how my career developed, and I know my career better than anybody.'”    read more

a sampling of Theo’s work

photos by Phillip Ennis and Randall Michleson

Theo’s second coffeetable book includes more about many of the theaters he discusses in the interviews, which set the standard for private cinema design

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Theo Kalomirakis: A Personal History of Home Theater, Pt. 3

Theo Kalomirakis: A Personal History of Home Theater, Pt. 3

Theo Kalomirakis:
A Personal History of Home Theater, Pt. 3

related features

Theo’s Blue (above) and Broadway (below) home theater designs for Owens Corning

the Exquisite Theaters logo

Theo Kalomirakis: A Personal History of Home Theater, Pt. 3

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The 2000s are mainly a story of Theo’s efforts to have his reputation resonate in the larger market beyond the home theater world

by Michael Gaughn
February 7, 2022

Theo and I have agreed to disagree over how to approach the third part of this interview. I had wanted to focus on the theaters he’s created since the turn of the millennium, which include some of the most striking and innovative of his career, most of which have never been published and none of which have been collected in a book. But he was adamant that we should focus instead on his various efforts to create a broader-market brand for himself. I relented for two reasons: Because I knew he would make the subject compelling and because, as he rightly said, “Talking about projects is misleading regarding how my career developed, and I know my career better than anybody.”

—M.G.

When did you first feel the urge, or need, to brand yourself in the larger market?

I began shifting my attention away from creating custom designs around 2000 because other designers were beginning to do home theaters, so that stopped being the exclusive territory of my company. But I had actually first come up with the idea of creating home theater products as a way to stay ahead of the game back at the start of the ‘90s with my first company, Theater Design Associates. Even though that effort turned out to be premature, I never abandoned the idea.

My dream was to create a category of pre-designed and pre-packaged theaters. Companies like Cinematech, Acoustic Innovations, and AcousticSmart have done that successfully within the AV industry but I wanted to reach out to the world beyond the industry. I found a way to do that with the help of large organizations such as Owens Corning, Disney, and IMAX, which had the means, name recognition, and brand awareness. They gave me the opportunity to access that larger market where my name was relatively obscure. 

How do some of your other efforts like ESPN fit into all this?

Companies like ESPN, Hammacher Schlemmer, Henredon, and Roche Bobois approached me over the years to help them develop home theater-related products but there was always some obstacle. With ESPN, the product didn’t even make it out of the lab because it was too high-end. The electronics they were considering for the

entertainment console  would have retailed for over $80,000, which would have extremely limited sales.

Has part of the problem been that the market wasn’t ready for what you were offering—that you were thinking well ahead of where the market was?

On the one hand, I think that was the problem. On the other, I think I was unrealistically optimistic, and I made mistakes. But I believe I now know what didn’t work with each of the partnerships.

With Owens Corning, they thought a home with a theater would be more attractive than one without, so they spent millions to develop a line of inexpensive, all-inclusive theaters. The builders they targeted weren’t the big, custom ones that do one or two large homes a year but the ones that build hundreds of homes a year. The biggest mistake we made—and I share the blame—was that we aimed at the lowest possible price for a theater—$40,000 for homes that sold for around $250,000. But we found out at the Atlanta Builders Show in 2000 that most of those homes only had two bedrooms. What self-respecting parent would kick their kids out of the second bedroom to put a theater in it? Owens Corning also offered the option of having the theater in the basement but that didn’t increase the market size enough. 

Your next big collaboration was with Disney, but that wasn’t until a few years later, right?

That began in 2008 and went until 2011. A group of Disney executives came to a lecture I was giving to designers at the Pacific Design Center. They were looking for licensees to help them launch co-branded products for the luxury market under a new brand called the Disney Signature Collection. They told me they wanted to appeal to a more affluent segment of consumers who liked the idea of being associated with the Disney brand but “without the Mickey Mouse ears.” The other Signature licensees developed products such as fabrics and pottery, while I was offered the opportunity to develop a line of plug & play entertainment furniture that had the necessary electronics already built in.

We conducted numerous design meetings where the Disney team and I would sketch out and exchange ideas. We also spent months in China looking for factories to produce the furniture. Everybody opened their doors to Disney, which was fun to watch. That was a very creative period of my life. I was impressed by how organized and methodical they were about defining and developing a product.

As with Owens Corning, Disney wanted a bigger market than just the AV industry, and I related to that. We rented a showroom at the heart of the furniture market, in High Point, North Carolina, where we presented the collection  to retailers. And we hired marketing directors from the industry who introduced the collection to all the major furniture stores.

At the time, it seemed like the collection was going to be a home run for you. Why do you think it didn’t catch on?

What we found out was something the furniture industry already knew—very few store owners want to deal with electronics. So most of them waited to see if other retailers would buy into it. They didn’t want to be first to stick their toe in a pool they weren’t very familiar with. As a result, Disney started losing interest and slowed down its marketing support. I think I was the last licensee to pull out. I realized then that even a strong brand isn’t enough to capture a new market.

Your next couple of projects seemed to keep you in China almost constantly for a couple of years.

I had met a lot of people while I was traveling there for Disney, including Stevie Ng, who is still a good friend. He was involved in the Chinese AV industry and knew about my efforts to develop pre-designed theaters. As the Disney business was winding down, he asked if I would be interested in designing theaters for his company, Alpha Technologies of Shanghai. We partnered with a strong AV dealer/distributor, Beijing AV Design, and created a company called Exquisite Theaters. We installed theaters in dealer showrooms in major cities throughout China.

Here I was again speaking to the press, inaugurating showrooms, and enjoying the experience while getting to know a new market. The theaters were meant to help sell design accessories and electronics but the problem was that the interiors required a lot of customization. Not living in China, it was hard for me to commit to working on too many of them. But the dealers didn’t seem to mind that much because the showrooms gave them a chance to give great home theater demonstrations and sell electronics. 

When did you start designing IMAX theaters for the home market?

That was around that same time. Robb Report came to me and said, “We want the ultimate gift for this year to be an IMAX theater.” And IMAX said, “We’ll give you the equipment for the theater and see how the story does.” It actually created quite a stir, so IMAX decided to come up with a line of theaters, which they called IMAX Private Theatres. I worked with them to design the line, which we made available in the US but mainly in China. The theaters were spectacular but they were too expensive to sell very many. Still, it was thrilling to sit in one of them and be treated to the full-blown IMAX experience. 

You did one for Seth MacFarlane, right?

Yes, that was the best IMAX theater I designed.

Is there anything you want to say about TK Living?

The major stops in my career were working with Owens Corning, Disney, and IMAX. TK Living, like Exquisite Theaters, was mainly an effort to sell home theater design accessories. To help customers create a design, I devised theater templates in Art Deco, traditional, and contemporary styles that they could use to apply different colors and finishes. Our most successful product was an extensive collection of acoustic fabrics, which my associate James Theobald still sells.

And that brings us to Rayva, which is your most recent effort to create a franchise.

Rayva is probably my final effort to create pre-designed theaters. From a product perspective, it is the most successful company I have worked with. Rayva has gotten wonderful support from its great chairman and our lead engineer, and from the dedicated team that still works for the company while I have moved to Greece. My only regret has been that we depended too much on the AV industry to sell the theaters. I believe the time has come to sell directly to end users but that requires a lot of money. Making that investment will reap huge rewards from what I and our industry have done so far for home theater. Roger Ebert wrote almost 25 years ago in the introduction to my first book, Private Theaters: “Henry Ford wanted to put a Model T in every garage. Theo Kalomirakis wants to put a theater in every home.” I was far from alone in making that happen, but Roger’s prophecy isn’t just a prophecy anymore.

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

A rendering of one of Theo’s designs for the IMAX Private Theatres line

click on the images to enlarge

(above) a sports-themed home theater design for ESPN, and (left) a media wall unit created for Roche Bobois 

the invitation to the launch of the Disney Signature furniture collection, with examples from the Toccata and Symphony lines

a rendering of Seth MacFarlane’s IMAX home theater

Origami photos by Phillip Ennis

Rayva’s Origami theater design

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Review: Rifkin’s Festival

Rifkin's Festival (2020)

review | Rifkin’s Festival

Buried somewhere deep in the heart of this unholy mess lies a movie actually worth watching

by Michael Gaughn
January 31, 2022

So little of Rifkin’s Festival coheres that you basically have two choices: Turn away or mentally cobble together the bits that add up to the film Woody Allen seemed to be trying to make. Just passively toughing it out as presented really isn’t an option.

Which explains why I almost took a pass on reviewing this. But the more I thought about it, the more I sensed that there was a bit of a rough diamond buried deep in its dungheap that might be worth trying to pluck out, no matter how dirty and unpleasant the task. So here we are.

Allen’s previous film, A Rainy Day in New York, was an even bigger mess that had practically nothing going for it and probably never should have been released. So expectations—mine and of the remaining smidglet of the curious—were really low here. 

The thought of spending 90 minutes with Wally Shawn at the center of a cinematic world induced a sense of dread. And, unfortunately, my expectations there were more than met. The casting of Shawn was misguided, if not disastrous, basically because he never had much of a range to begin with and, now that he’s older, has practically no range at all. His character is so thinly sketched in, and Shawn himself is such a negative screen presence, that he (both the character and the actor) just can’t provide the badly needed glue to bring it all together. A little more effort here, both with the conceptualization and the casting, would have made all the difference.

But Rifkin’s Festival is, once you start groping around in that pile, primarily about someone who exists almost wholly divorced from the real world trying to make whatever tentative connections he can with reality. And, viewed from that angle, Shawn couldn’t be more apt, even iconographic. Allen frequently emphasizes that gulf by framing and editing him so he’s ignored by the other characters. Even though he’s clearly a part of the action, he comes across as a passive spectator and an ineffectually ironic commentator.

And this is where the film begins to get interesting. The stuff with Shawn almost invariably falls flat, while just about everything with female leads Gina Gershon and Elena Anaya is surprisingly strong, even compelling. Rifkin is most engaging when it veers toward drama, when it sheds its irony and allows the characters to interact directly and with intensity. The exchange between Louis Garrel and Gershon on the boardwalk, Shawn and Anaya stumbling upon her artist husband in bed with one of his models, Anaya later putting Shawn at arm’s length while she grapples with what to do with her marriage and her life all have an inherent and authentic power. And if Allen’s point was that those messy interactions and emotions are what bring meaning to existence and Shawn is completely ill-suited to ever engage, then that’s a filmic experience worth having. It’s too bad he didn’t decide to shift his emphasis and proportions accordingly somewhere along the way. 

Gershon, who has never made much of an impression before, is almost obliquely commanding, running much farther than expected with the half-baked material she’s given to work with. Anaya takes some getting used to and is saddled with a character who’s less whole person than convenient plot device, but she somehow makes her seem real over the course of the film.

Garrel is perfectly apt as the smug, pretentious movie director but isn’t as resourceful as the female leads at making something out of the straw man he’s been handed. This was a huge lost opportunity because the comments Allen attempts to make about the current state of Hollywood “art” need to be said—he’s just way too glib, obvious, and scattershot about saying them.

I wish Allen had never crossed paths with Vittorio Storaro, whose too insistent shooting style constantly goes against the grain of what Allen is trying to convey. Even in HD (which is the only way you can watch the film on Google Play), the digital cinematography is too sharp—to the point of being garish and grating. It’s especially out of place in a movie that frequently references classic movies. The various pastiches would have been far more convincing, and beguiling, if they’d been shot on 35mm and presented with a sense of film passing through a gate—but I suspect going that way would have been a budget-buster. 

HD is actually an appropriate vehicle for Rifkin’s Festival. A 4K presentation would probably make it look even more video-like and antiseptic. 

I flat-out hated the original soundtrack, which tries to ape Django and the Hot Club of France—something many, like The Gypsy Hombres, have tried and at which all have failed. Reinhardt’s isn’t a “sound” to be reproduced but an utterly unique extension of his complex soul, the sum of his experiences, insights, and unmimicable technique. Allen would have been far better off patching the score together out of vintage tracks, even if it wouldn’t have felt as consistent.

The music, like the images, is crisply, pretty much faultlessly, presented—which is unfortunate, because they both cry out for an analog patina. 

Thanks to the ongoing New Puritan backlash that continues to plague Allen, it took two years for this film to get released. Only a handful of people will ever see it, and most of those people will wonder why they even bothered. But, even though it never comes together into a complete being, Rifkin’s Festival has more meat on its bones than any of the other walking corpses currently staggering across the blasted entertainment landscape.

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

PICTURE | Even in HD (the only way you can watch the film on Google Play), the digital cinematography is too sharp—to the point of being garish and grating. 4K would likely make it look even more video-like and antiseptic. 

SOUND | The music, like the images, is crisply, pretty much faultlessly, presented, but both cry out for an analog patina

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Review: The Birds

The Birds (1963)

review | The Birds

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The 4K HDR transfer tends to emphasize the film’s many flaws, technical and otherwise

by Michael Gaughn
October 16, 2020

Without The Birds, there would be no Jaws—and, arguably, no Spielberg, since he lifted so many of his filmic mannerisms from this brutal and detached end-of-the-world tale. The really ironic thing is, while this is far from Hitchcock’s best film, it’s still better than Jaws. I realize that conclusion is heresy to the popularity = quality crowd but it underlines the vast difference between what an adult with adolescent tendencies and a perpetual adolescent with no interest in growing up can do.

As I mentioned in my Psycho review, Hitchcock, in that film, managed to intuit the entire course of the movies from that point on. But for whatever reason he wasn’t able to assimilate and exploit what he had achieved there and spent the rest of his career sputtering, trying to remain relevant while leaning on his past glories from the Studio Era. But, increasingly consumed by bitterness, he just couldn’t make any of those old conventions hold.

The Birds was his next film after Psycho, and seems meant to function as a kind of companion piece, but because he had lost so much confidence in himself and in the very nature of the movies, his attempt to make a shocker with studio polish resulted in a very uneven affair. This is especially obvious on the technical level, where the heavy reliance on process shots and matte paintings means things rarely sync up visually for large [swathes] of the film. That’s not to fault Robert Burks’ cinematography, which is beautiful and effective when it just gets to record things without having to allow for any trickery. And it’s not really to fault the heavy reliance on Albert Whitlock’s matte work, which almost succeeds in giving the film a warped pastoral quality, like the action is playing out on a vast theater stage. But it’s kind of sad to see Hitchcock’s reach constantly exceed his grasp and sense his slipping ability to maintain a proper sense of proportion.

The things in the film that go well go very well and more than justify the time spent watching it. Since it really doesn’t have any stars, just the semi-talented Robert Taylor and Tippi Hedren as the leads, Jessica Tandy gets to steal the show with her rock-solid performance as a deeply needy yet domineering mother. The scene where she discovers Dan Fawcett’s body still plays—and is one of the things Spielberg lifted pretty much straight for Jaws. And he didn’t just pilfer The Birds for that reveal of a mangled corpse. The subsequent low-angle shot where Tandy stagers out of the house to stand gape-mouthed next to the farm hand would also become a Spielberg staple. 

As would the low-angle track-back late in the film where Tandy, then Hedren, then Taylor are revealed, with the ceiling looming low above them, as they listen for signs that the bird attack has subsided. Not only would Spielberg get an absurd amount of mileage out of this, ’80s filmmakers leaned on it so heavily that they eventually broke it.

What really doesn’t work at all is the famous attack on the school children—which I would have to shift into the “infamous” category, and not just for its technical blunders. The animation at the beginning of the crows welling up from behind the school house is crudely done and all out of proportion. And the pacing of the rear-projection shots creates the weird sense of everyone running in place. A cineaste would argue Hitchcock was trying to evoke a nightmare sense of frantic effort with no progress. He wasn’t—he just couldn’t pull it off.

The equally famous attack on the town almost works, creating a borderline apocalyptic feel larger than what’s being shown on the screen. But it’s marred by that hokey series of shots of Hedren reacting to the stream of flaming gasoline and especially by all of the heavily processed rear-projection stuff while she’s trapped in the phone booth.  

But it wasn’t ultimately the technical miscalculations and gaffes that undermined Hitchcock—they were just the symptoms, not the disease. There’s something really disturbing, but not in any entertaining way, about how he obviously relishes showing children being attacked and witnessing atrocities. Even more foul is how he sets up the doll-like Hedren just to have her brutally taken down—especially during the elaborate bird-rape in the attic at the end. It’s as if his faith n cinema to protect him from the outside world had been shattered and he felt he had to lash out at the audience in his fear and rage.

All of that said, Hitchcock deserves tremendous credit for doing a horror/thriller film without a score. Yes, the absence of music tends to lay bare a lot the movie’s flaws, but it also makes many of the scenes—like the discovery of Fawcett’s body, the later discovery of Annie Hayworth’s body, and the final attack on the Brenner home—tremendously more effective. There’s no John Williams here to Mickey Mouse everything by dragging you through the film by the nose, clobbering you with cues, telling you what to think and feel. You’re thrown into each of the scenes without any ersatz late-Romantic bluster to act as a buffer, which is not just bracing but kind of liberating.

The 4K HDR transfer is for the most part faithful—which means it gets the good moments absolutely right, but also tends to emphasize all that frequent mismatching between shots. Probably the worst shot of the film is the very first one, done on location in San Francisco, which looks like it was grabbed surreptitiously on a 16mm camera. (It wasn’t—it just looks that way.) Get beyond that, and you’ll be able to experience some patches of Burks’ best work. 

The one shot I can fault the transfer for—although its problems lie in the original image—is the very last one in the film, an elaborate high-contrast matte shot that borders on monochrome. The HDR crushes the blacks and punches up the whites so much that it becomes not just too blatantly artificial but visually chaotic. 

If ever a film cried out for a surround mix, this one would seem to be it. So much of it hinges on things happening from just out of frame and on characters being engulfed that it’s a natural for the 5.1 or Atmos treatment. And yet the original soundtrack is so well designed that the DTS-HD Master Audio stereo mix here is surprisingly effective. The staccato bird cries followed by the sudden, muted crescendo of fluttering wings that signals the beginning of the final attack is so chilling that it’s hard to say whether a surround reworking would be an improvement. But I’d be curious to know.

I’m not going to resort to one of those “You can tell I had problems with this film but it still makes for a great night at the movies” conclusions. But I will say this: With very few exceptions, time spent with a Hitchcock film is time well spent. Even if you just watch The Birds to pick up on all the Jaws/Spielberg parallels, you’ll have, in a way, improved your life. The Birds is a suitably disturbing thriller; it’s just not quite the film Hitchcock intended to make.

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

PICTURE | The 4K HDR transfer is for the most part faithful to the original film—which means it gets the good moments absolutely right but also tends to emphasize all the frequent mismatching between shots.

SOUND | The Birds is a natural for a 5.1 or Atmos treatment. And yet the original soundtrack is so well designed that the DTS-HD Master Audio stereo mix here is surprisingly effective.

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