Michael Gaughn Archives - Page 11 of 12

Review: A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy

review | A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy

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Kaleidescape | Blue Jasmine

Kaleidescape | The Purple Rose of Cairo

Kaleidescape | Stardust Memories

Kaleidescape | Manhattan

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This would rank as one of Woody Allen’s best films—if he’d just spent some more time figuring out the ending

by Michael Gaughn
February 3, 2021

It’s got maybe the worst title ever and probably the worst ending of any Woody Allen film, but wedged between the opening-title card and that Third Act that got away is one of Allen’s best films, an almost perfectly balanced ensemble piece that’s probably the best evocation ever of midsummer, which is especially amazing when you consider how much Allen hates the country.

A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy was his first film with Mia Farrow and kicked off the diverse and more subdued but still fecund era that followed the tremendous creative explosion of Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Stardust Memories. Allen shot Sex Comedy simultaneously with Zelig, which he now admits wasn’t such a great idea but led to two amazing miniatures. He and Farrow would then do such standouts as Broadway Danny Rose (one of his best), The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and the superb but troubling Husbands and Wives. After their all too public breakup, Allen would spend the following decades wandering in the woods, producing far more misses than hits, but occasionally conjuring up gems like Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, and Blue Jasmine that, at the end of the day, still give him a higher overall batting average than any other first-rank filmmaker.

What makes Sex Comedy different from almost every other one of his films (and there are a lot of them) is that he apparently decided to start by capturing a certain time of year—the feel of the peak of summer—and then build a movie around it. He and Gordon Willis had already done something similar with Manhattan, where no other film has done a better job of evoking the sense of the Upper East Side at night. You’re not just watching the people stroll the streets—you’re right there with them, which creates an irreplaceable bond with the characters.

Here, you’re placed in the midst of the country that sits just on the cusp of the city—more specifically, Westchester County, just north of Manhattan—which is conveyed in such a way that it feels like both the city’s complement and dialectical other. This is some of Willis’s best cinematography, which is saying a lot, managing to capture that elusive sense of warm days, abundant nature, and lingering light. There is a reliance on day for night, which creates some unevenness toward the end, but is only really egregious in a shot of Tony Roberts leaving the front of the summer home to go off into the woods.

I was pleasantly surprised by how well Willis’s images came across in Kaleidescape’s Blu-ray-quality HD presentation. The subtle gradations are for the most part there and it’s possible to get lost in the frame while being only occasionally jarred by blown-out bright spots like the full moon. Of course, this film would likely look superb in 4K HDR, which would pull out the abundant detail in the fields, the interiors, and especially the period clothing, but I have no significant nits with the look of the film in its current incarnation. (And, given where this film stands in Allen’s body of work, and his current status in general, it’s not like Sex Comedy and 4K are likely to cross paths any time soon.)

Sex Comedy marks a big step forward in Allen’s evolution as a director, displaying a new maturity with his handling of the cast. Mary Steenburgen, Jose Ferrer, and Farrow all give nuanced, engaging performances that help reinforce the heady atmosphere of the film. Allen is even able to make Julie Haggerty shine within her very limited range. The one false note is Roberts, who was always tolerable when relegated to playing Allen’s sidekick but just isn’t that good of a film actor and whose beats always feel a little forced here. But nothing he does is enough to ever disrupt the ensemble’s seemingly effortless momentum.

Allen shows an increased mastery of film technique as well, with that new-found confidence carrying over into an increasing reliance on lengthy master shots, which reinforce the film’s ensemble nature while also lending it an appropriately pastoral rhythm. The Allen of his earlier movies would have been unable to pull off the extended exchange where Steenburgen confronts his character about lying about Farrow, which is masterfully blocked and performed.

This is just about the last film where Allen allowed his character to be well-rounded and witty, for some reason opting to just spew jokes via a borderline caricature from that point on. I’m not sure why he wandered off down such a self-defeating path—it’s obvious from the documentary Wild Man Blues that he was still capable of ringing resonant changes on the persona he’d so carefully wrought—but Sex Comedy pretty much represents the swan song of the Woody who defined an era.

Now, about that ending: Allen does an unimpeachable job of establishing the atmosphere, then setting the tone, then introducing the characters, and then setting the various interactions in motion, fleshing out the characters along the way. And all of that is so delicious and, yes, charming that it makes it that much more dispiriting when you have to deal with the train wreck of the final act. My surmise—and I’m really winging it here—is that working simultaneously on Zelig prevented him from seeing the flaws in the Sex Comedy script and likely kept him from doing the kind of reshooting that allowed him to elevate many of his other films from pedestrian or confused to extraordinary.

Had he been able to solve the puzzle he created for himself, Sex Comedy would have easily ranked up with Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah in the mass mind. But anyone who hesitates because of what they’ve heard, or who has heard nothing at all about this film, is missing out in a big way. This is what a great movie feels like when it feels like it doesn’t need to strut its stuff. A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy is so light and energetic and infectious, it’s like a bracing tonic—the cinematic equivalent of a good saison. It moves and feels like no other film. It’s Allen’s most underrated work—and it’s a much needed infusion of summer light during what is, in many ways, the darkest time of the year.

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 | The Blu-ray-quality HD presentation is really, really good, making it hard to find any serious flaws—not that you couldn’t find problems if you really wanted to hunt for them but nothing ever happens to pull you out of the film, which is all that matters at the end of the day.

SOUND | It’s not like Woody Allen makes silent movies and audio doesn’t matter—the all-important dialogue can be clearly heard, the mix helps create atmosphere in the scenes, and the music cues carry an appropriate weight. But it’s all in modest service of the material, as it should be.

Review: Blue Jasmine

review | Blue Jasmine

Kaleidescape |
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy

Kaleidescape | Stardust Memories

Kaleidescape | Manhattan

see more in Reviews

Woody Allen’s best late-period work is an almost perfectly balanced drama that still resonates almost ten years on

by Michael Gaughn
February 8, 2021

Fast forward 30 years from the last Woody Allen effort I reviewed, 1982’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, and you arrive at Blue Jasmine, his best late-period work and the film that nabbed Cate Blanchett a Best Actress Oscar. That at first glance it can be difficult to see the common DNA between these two movies shows how much Allen evolved as filmmaker over the decades and helps dispel the jaundiced myth that he is little more than an assemblage of mannerisms treading in a rut.

What isn’t a myth is that Allen has struggled ever since his break with Mia Farrow after 1992’s Husbands and Wives. He earned much praise for Match Point (2005), but that film is ultimately undone by its implausibility, and its success can mainly be attributed to the public’s fascination with the bright, shiny Scarlett Johansson. Midnight in Paris (2011) was celebrated as a return to form, and made Allen a crapload of money, but it’s basically a lazy recitation of his greatest hits that’s ultimately thinner than fast-food coffee. Wonder Wheel (2017) earned Kate Winslett some kudos (but the real standout is Jim Belushi, who’s so good it’s shocking) and the film almost works, if you’re willing to roll with its early acts, but is ultimately a noble failure.

Of the later films, Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, Vicky Christina Barcelona, the dramatic sections of Melinda and Melinda, and, much more modestly, Cafe Society, join Blue Jasmine as the ones worth a good look. (I’ve been trying to see the Sean Penn vehicle Sweet and Lowdown for years but it flits in and out of circulation so arbitrarily that I’ve never been able to seize the opportunity on the rare occasions when it’s bobbed to the surface.)

Jasmine exists at a higher level than any of his other late-period work, on par with the much earlier Annie Hall, Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Broadway Danny Rose, and The Purple Rose of Cairo. But it’s not easy to pin down why everything suddenly clicked here. Unlike his other masterworks, it’s not a comedy, although it does have some humorous touches. The Allen persona is nowhere to be seen, even in surrogate form. And even though he has an incredibly uneven track record with dramas, Allen shows an effortless command here.

I suspect many would attribute its success to Blanchett, but that shows a fundamental ignorance of how movies work. She didn’t write the script, plan or execute the shots, or labor in the editing room. Without that elaborate support—which is essentially the entire edifice of a film—a performance, no matter how good, isn’t worth bupkis. I think the success of Jasmine, and the reason Allen rose to the occasion, can be actually attributed to class. But I’ll get to that.

Blue Jasmine exhibits a bounty of great acting, and it’s not really possible to appreciate the film without first considering Allen and actors. From the late ’70s on, and even in his subpar efforts, Allen has offered a place where actors can show their abilities without fear of being humiliated, relegated to reciting genre cliches, treated like the director’s marionette, or subjugated to green screen. Because he provided an oasis, a place where an actor’s abilities were treasured and given room to flourish, a tremendous diversity of talent flocked to his projects—that is, until Me Too happened (but we’re not going to go there again).

(It’s ironic, by the way, that someone with no traditional training turned out to be the best actor’s director of the last half century.)

What’s always intriguing about Allen is that he can get me to appreciate performers I can’t stomach elsewhere. I wouldn’t want to spend a nanosecond with Andrew Dice Clay outside the boundaries of this film, and yet he’s perfectly cast here. Pretty much the same can be said for Louis C.K., who’s insufferable as a comedian and elsewhere only borderline acceptable as an actor. (He does do a strong turn in American Hustle, though.) Here he shines. Ditto for Alec Baldwin, who’s become a caricature of himself over time but rises above his limitations in Jasmine.

Other standouts: Bobby Cannavale (Boardwalk Empire) brings depth and some surprising twists to what could have been a thuggish performance as Sally Hawkins’ boyfriend. And Michael Stuhlbarg, who out and out stole Men in Black 3 as the pixieish multi-dimensional alien Griffin, is far more understated but still strong here.

As for Blanchett: As one of those performers, like Penn and Streep, far better at “acting” than acting, I’ve always found her work rough going—her attempt to play Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator was so cringeworthy I wanted to avert my eyes from the screen—but she is perfectly in sync with Allen’s material and makes a potentially unsympathetic character compelling. And while Blanchett got most of the attention, Hawkins—another actor I could usually take or leave—I think actually bests her here.

The two weak spots in the chain are Peter Sarsgaard, who just doesn’t bring enough heft to his role as the aspiring diplomat, and Alden Ehrenreich as Blanchett’s son, who barely registers as a presence.

About the whole class thing: Allen has taken a lot of heat over the years, some of it justified, for being overly enamored with Upper East Side society. And a lot of his portrayals are so fawning they take on a peepshow quality for almost every human being on the planet who wasn’t to the manor born. But the 2008 recession caused him to put all that in perspective, and Blue Jasmine is a perceptive, even biting, look at the great class divide that doesn’t have an ax to grind for either side—and thankfully doesn’t fall into the oppressive cliche of saying the members of the lower classes are forever doomed to do themselves in. It’s his ability to pull from his vast experience with both sides of the class equation without peddling an agenda that allows him to go deeper than most mainstream attempts to fathom the issue.

(Let me pause to note that Allen is one of the last filmmakers left from the era before you had to be a member of the top one percent to gain admittance to Hollywood, when lower-bred outsiders were at least tolerated as long as their movies made money, when they could still have a voice.)

Blue Jasmine looks really, really good in Blu-ray-quality HD—which I suspect can attributed to the existence of a DI. I was hard pressed to find any serious flaws—not that you can’t find problems if you really want to hunt for them, but nothing that was happening with the images ever pulled me out of the film, which is all that should matter at the end of the day. My one criticism is the introduction of too many golden tones in post. Yes, I get where they were going with that, but I still suspect that future generations are going to look at the early efforts of digital filmmaking and want to slap us silly for not being able to resist fiddling with the knobs.

And now I once again come to the pointlessness of talking about the audio in a Woody Allen film. It’s not like he’s making silent movies and audio doesn’t matter—few directors rely as heavily on dialogue—and it’s not like the mix doesn’t help create atmosphere in the scenes; and it’s not like music cues don’t have a huge impact in his work. The point is that the audio is in modest service of the material, as it should be—there are no bravura flourishes that would make you exclaim “Nice audio!” So let’s just say that it works, and works well.

You don’t need to know anything about Allen’s other films to appreciate Jasmine, but saying that at this moment in time sounds defensive and weak. Allen has created a tremendous and unparalleled body of work, one that deserves to continue to be appreciated. Few directors are capable of making movies that are as human, and Blue Jasmine, as a study of pride and vulnerability, might be his most human film of all.

Theo Kalomirakis: A Personal History of Home Theater, Pt. 2

Theo Kalomirakis:
A Personal History of Home Theater, Pt. 2

click on the images to enlarge

theater photos by Phillip Ennis

The box office (above) and foyer (below) for The Gold Coast

some of illustrator Phil Parks’ reinterpretations of posters for classic films, for Koontz’ Moonlight theater

Theo discusses the ’90s—the decade when he learned his craft, created his signature work, and gave birth to an entire industry

by Michael Gaughn
January 21, 2022

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 below.

While much of Part 1 of our interview focused on the emerging technology that allowed Theo to indulge his passion for collecting and watching movies, the emphasis here is more on the blooming of his aesthetic, and on the succession of eager, generous clients who gave him the opportunity to introduce his exuberant showman’s flair into their homes.

—M.G.

When did you get your first commission to do a theater?

1989.

So, by the end of the ‘80s, people were starting to show a lot of interest but since you didn’t really have any training as a designer, you had to sort of learn on the job.

Exactly. I just was pushed to do it but I didn’t find my stride until the ‘90s. The first home theater was in the Hamptons. It was called The Sweet Potato. I did that one with help from industry people that used to do commercial theaters, because there was no such thing as custom integration then. At the end of the year, I left my art direction job at American Heritage and incorporated. The first day of Theater Design Associates was January 1, 1990.

So home theater really began at the beginning of 1990.

Before then, there was no such thing. I called the company Theater Design Associates because I wanted it to sound like there were a lot of people.

Besides the Sweet Potato, this other guy, Skip Bronson, who turned out to be a very good friend, said, “I want to have a theater in my house in West Hartford, Connecticut.” He drove down and saw my Roxy and became enamored with it. He said, “I want a lobby, I want a box office—I want everything.” So I did The Ritz for Skip, and immediately I got the Barry Knispel job—immediately—about 1992.

That’s the Ziegfeld, right?

Yes. That was an amazing learning experience because I was given an unlimited budget to do things no one does today—expensive millwork, expensive hand painting. I was able to work with a lunatic in furniture design, Frank Pollaro, whose work can be seen now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He does the most spectacular reproductions of antique Art Deco furniture. You cannot tell from the original. He was doing just millwork for the rest of the house and somehow we connected. I wanted to do something different, Barry wanted to do something different, Frank wanted to do something different.

You’ve said before that the best clients are the ones who have a sense of adventure or creativity or play, because they’re willing to experiment.

Absolutely. You feed off that. You can’t fall in love with someone that doesn’t love you back. It’s as simple as that. I was lucky enough in the beginning to bump into people that were my duplicates in thinking—who had the same kind of enthusiasm.

But also there was still an inherent thrill at that point in the idea of having a theater at home, so the clients were riding that wave as well.

We were explorers. We charted new territories.

Barry wanted an Art Deco theater for the Ziegfeld, so I got every Deco book I could get my hands on. And I realized I didn’t need to reinvent the wheel because there are actual visual references for everything that signifies that era. So I singled out elements from Art Deco landmarks and built a library of design elements that I synthesized in the theater. This is the theater that made me start saying that you don’t invent—you steal, but you steal creatively.

Was the Ziegfeld when you felt like you’d arrived at something?

Yes. That was absolutely the pinnacle of what I was trying to do. And it was a very abrupt rise to the top, to where you have control of your medium and you are given the opportunity to just do what’s in your mind.

With the next theater, which was The Uptown for Larry and Nora Kay in Toluca Lake, he wanted to do a lot of Deco elements from The Pantages [theater in Los Angeles]. They were available, because I had found the sources, but if I had cast them the way they are they would have been out of scale. So, in my pursuit to create details that were as good as the originals but in a scale that would fit in a theater, I found my way to what used to be called staff shops, which are the movie-studio workshops where they make set ornaments out of clay. I started going to the shop at Warner Brothers and then at 20th Century Fox, where I discovered molds. And I asked them to reproduce them in different scale because all these facilities have sculptors, and they were doing things that would fit the scale of a particular movie set.

The next theater was The Gold Coast, which I did for another incredible patron—Lloyd Wright, the nephew of Frank Lloyd Wright. It was just client after client after client that pushed me to reach out to do things that hadn’t been done before. That was the blessing of my career.

When was Dean Koontz?

That was towards the end of the nineties, but it started right away. Dean was one of my first clients but the project was huge.

Was that the biggest theater you had done to date?

Absolutely. And he was very intent on having me do a recreation of the Opera of Paris, and I loved it. He financed a trip to France, and I came back with 2,000 pictures and did drawings. There were not computers back then to do digital drawings, so it took forever. But then in the course of the first two years we shed the classical thing and

click on the image to enlarge

switched to Art Deco because his house developed slowly into a Deco house. And that’s when we veered towards Frank Lloyd Wright because he loved Wright.

Again, another client with unlimited money to put in millwork and detail and original art. He was so obsessed with this thing that he didn’t even want original posters in the theater, so he had an artist create wonderful interpretations. You would think instinctively, “What the hell are you doing recreating a poster for The Maltese Falcon or The African Queen?” First of all, we couldn’t have found all of them in three-sheet configuration, big posters. They’re perfect recreations of the era of the poster, not the original poster. They were another indication of a confluence of people who just adored movies.

How many seats were in the Koontz theater?

There were four rows—at least 16—about 20, 24. And there were balconies all around for additional seats but it was mostly for effect.

Is Seth MacFarlane’s theater bigger?

Of course. His has 40 seats.

Is that the biggest one you’ve done?

Ah, definitely.

The key differentiator between you and other designers seems to be that you create from your passion for watching and escaping into movies, which you share with your clients, while a lot of the other designers are just creating a room to watch movies in.

It could absolutely be the differentiator. I was working in conjunction with the clients, while a lot of other designers are separated from the client so while they create a room for watching movies, it’s a room the clients don’t really want. They do it because everybody has a theater. The disconnect is double—not only do many designers not do a real theater because they don’t have a passion to design it, the clients don’t have a passion for the room. The funny thing is that the demand for home theaters has exploded through the roof, but it’s lost its soul.

As you mentioned earlier, there needs to be that intense emotional bond between designer and client in order to spur something exceptional.

I would have never done anything if the clients hadn’t encouraged me. I would tell them stories about what it would be, and I had their rapt attention. “Yeah! Let’s do that.” I was like a pied piper, leading them on to something that was magical that they didn’t know how to express. They had it in them. They knew what they wanted. But I was able to articulate it for them via architecture.

They were all the same people—all the clients. They were all like children, in that they wanted to build movie palaces, they wanted to build paradise in their home. They wanted the ultimate escape, which is what I enjoy every night when I go to my own theater. When I’m there, I become Skip Bronson, Lloyd Wright, Dean Koontz, Larry Kay, Barry Knispel.

Coming Soon: Part 3—From 2000 to the Present

Theo’s hand drawing of his original conception for Dean Koontz’ home theater, inspired by the Opera of Paris. (Scroll down to see the complete original rendering.)

related features

Theo Kalomirakis | A Personal History
of Home Theater, Pt. 1

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

Theo Kalomirakis | A Personal History
of Home Theater—Complete

an ebony cocktail-table top designed by Frank Pollaro

the original Opera of Paris concept for Dean Koontz’ theater evolved into this Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired Deco design

Theo’s second coffeetable book includes more about the Moonlight and the other theaters that set the standard for private cinema design

Theo Kalomirakis: A Personal History of Home Theater, Pt. 1

Theo Kalomirakis:
A Personal History of Home Theater, Pt. 1

click on the images to enlarge

above & below: click on the slides to enlarge

The media coverage generated by Theo’s Roxy spurred much of the early interest in home theater

The man who started it all on how his desire to see favorite films at home transformed movie-watching forever

by Michael Gaughn
January 7, 2022

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.

Theo is an accomplished director, a graduate of NYU’s legendary filmmaking program whose work has been screened at such high-profile venues as the New York Film Festival. He’s also accumulated one of the largest private movie collections in the world—maybe the largest. The theater he recently built at his home in Athens, Greece has become a mecca from everyone from students to critics to directors and other film-industry professionals.

All of this, and his constantly restless spirit, which keeps him from ever doing the same theater design twice, helps make clear why he’s been able to create a body of work that will likely never be equalled, let alone surpassed.

In the series of interviews that follows, 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.

—M.G.

Because you had such an intense interest in movies, you started cobbling together systems before you even thought about designing theaters.

Absolutely.

What was the state of the technology when you started doing that?

My first glimpse of something coming was in 1981 while I was working as a graphic artist at the Abraham & Straus department store in Brooklyn. I went down one day to the electronics department and saw an exhibit of LaserDiscs. It piqued my curiosity because I already had started buying videotapes of movies. Before that, I would spend nights recording them off TV, waking up during the commercials so I could pause the recording and start it again when the movie came back on. The very first Betamax tape I bought was Glen or Glenda. It’s a bizarre choice, but it was good to see a movie that you could hold and have. The second one was A Star Is Born, with Judy Garland, which actually had stereo sound, which was a revelation. But it was cropped. The first version of every movie that came out on videotape was cropped.

What were you watching your tapes on?

I had a 19-inch Sony Trinitron monitor with two Klipsch speakers. Then one day I went to New York Video, where I saw this big TV—a Mitsubishi two-piece, where you opened the front and the three beams projected into a mirror from under the screen. I fell in love with it and bought it on the spot. It was a floor model, so I could afford it. I set it in the middle of my living-room window, which was the death for me of watching movies in my apartment because it blocked half the view and the sunlight would come in and wash out the movie, but there was no other place to put it.

I connected my Betamax to the Mitsubishi and played A Star Is Born, but the picture was fuzzy. So I went back to the store the same evening and said, “What you sold me is not what I saw. It has a defect and I need to give it back.” And the owner said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. What are you playing?” I said, “A Star Is Born.” He said, “What you watched here was a LaserDisc. You saw a sharper picture because of the source.” So I said, “Give me a LaserDisc player and add a Raiders of the Lost Ark.” I didn’t hesitate because I was enthralled by the sharp pictures. So I took it home, and that was the beginning of my obsession with LaserDiscs

I took the Klipsch speakers—I don’t remember where I got them, but they were big—and I put them left and right of the TV and took advantage of the stereo sound. It was sensational. That’s why people would applaud. They were watching for the first time with a big picture and big sound. They would come and gather around and we would watch movies very religiously without distractions—except for the distraction of the environment, which was a major letdown for me.

What led up to you creating your first home theater?

In 1983, I found a brownstone on St. Marks Avenue in Brooklyn that had a basement so I could have a better place to watch movies. But I was very disappointed. The TV had looked big enough in my living room but looked too small in the basement. So I wanted something bigger. Someone had told me Barco was selling a bunch of projectors that had been in TWA planes. So I got one—I remember I paid, like, $600. I bought a screen from a photo-supply store. It was no more than a hundred inches but it was big enough. The room was small. It fit the space.

It fulfilled my goal to have a a dedicated room with a big screen and no windows. I painted everything a consistent color and upholstered the seats. But suddenly the fact that I had sewer pipes running over my head, and drop-ceiling tiles, was like anticlimactic. I thought, “This is not really cutting it.” I started looking at pictures of theaters but I hadn’t really spent too much time studying their architecture. But the buzz about home theater was already beginning because I still have the story that appeared in USA Today with me holding a bowl of popcorn at the 100 St. Marks theater.

I knew my theater needed something else, though, so in 1985 I bought a townhouse on Union Street in Brooklyn where I knew I could do something something better, something that was more grandiose. I had discovered pictures of the original Roxy Theatre, and there was a big model of it at the Kaufman Astoria studios in Queens.

How deep was your interest in movie palaces before you did this?

I would say there was no interest because there was no knowledge. But something strange happened. The lady who had lived on the first floor had been married to the last projectionist of the Roxy. And I found in the basement, in a box, wrapped up, some valences from the curtains for the balconies and a whole bunch of programs. And there was a key to a projection room, which I found out later was from the Loew’s Kings on Flatbush Avenue.

While I was finishing my theater, which I called The Roxy, I started immersing myself in books about theater architecture. I hired an architect to help me do the theater. I kept the arches of the basement as a design element. But the big difference between this room and St. Marks was that it had an outer lobby with a marquee. And immediately I started promoting it, or it promoted itself. I don’t know what happened.

Did you upgrade your system as well?

Yes. I had seen a 70mm film at the Ziegfeld in Manhattan and I was entranced by the sound. So I went to the projection booth and became friends with the projectionist, Mike Percoco. He took a liking to me because I was nosy. He took me backstage and showed me the big horn-loaded JBL speakers. I said, “That’s what I want.” Now, it was chutzpah to want these huge speakers—the same ones that were in the Ziegfeld—in a tiny room. I didn’t care. I thought, “These are the speakers that can do that sound. These are the speakers I should have.” That was a very important connection with Mike because it led to the theater being a guinea pig for new technologies.

Later he said, “You know, there’s something new coming and it’s called ‘surround’.” The first processor that came out was called Sensurround. Bob Warren from Dolby flew from California, saw what I had, and said, “I’ll give you what you need.” So I got free a Dolby surround decoder. I then bought four more JBL speakers for the sides—not in the back. Two and two, flanking the three rows of seats.

It seems like it’s never been just a design thing for you, that you were also trying to make sure you were on the cutting edge with the technology.

Absolutely, absolutely. Technology is important. Without it, you get stuck with just a nice-looking room—if it is nice. To your point, I was always chasing the latest technology that was produced.

That takes us up to 1986.

Nothing much happened from then until 1990, when I got my first commission to design a theater—the Sweet Potato on Long Island.

The first glimpse many people had of home theater was via Theo’s The Roxy on Union Street in Brooklyn, shown here
c. 1986. (Roxy photos by Phillip Ennis)

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Review: The Long Goodbye

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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.

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: Psycho

review | Psycho

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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

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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

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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

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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: Ratatouille

review | Ratatouille

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The best of the Golden Age Pixar films beats the “all animation looks good in digital” cliché, showing off the subtle virtues of HDR

by Michael Gaughn
September 21, 2021

On the heels of Dennis Burger’s review of Coco—probably the best of the recent harvest of Pixar films, likely because it was a holdover from the Lasseter era—comes this review of Ratatouille, probably the best of the films from the studio’s initial, defining Golden Age. Anointing a “best” Pixar film is almost impossible, especially when you’re talking about that early period when they could do no wrong—well, except for Cars.

Why Ratatouille? Mainly because nobody should have been able to create a mass-market cartoon about the world of gourmet cooking, let alone use it as a springboard for portraying that world in depth and at length, with both insight and affection, then draw a big enough audience to reap almost a billion dollars along the way. No live-action film could venture into that territory and expect to earn enough to even cover the crew’s car fare.

Making it even more miraculous is that Brad Bird and associates portray this rarified and exclusive world without succumbing to the Bay Area’s provincial snobbery, Silicon Valley’s endemic hubris, and the insufferable know-nothingness (and -everythingness) of the then emergent hipster movement. This movie should not exist—and yet there it is.

Fourteen years on, Ratatouille still holds up for the most part. The visuals don’t have the depth and photorealistic microdetail of Pixar’s more recent fare, but the production design and animation are so inventive that those technical improvements would be superfluous here. About the only thing that comes up short are the fire effects, which look smudgy.

Remy, Skinner, Ego, Emil, and Django are all still solid, Colette still feels perfunctory and obligatory, and Linguini is still consistently annoying, a sop to the youngest part of the audience that never felt right and hasn’t aged well—which brings up the biggest differences between this and earlier viewings of the film. It’s becoming apparent there’s a flaw in the Pixar formula that is going to become more obvious as time passes, a tendency to periodically amp up the action way beyond what the story calls for out of fear of losing the audience. This especially sticks out in Rataouille because it’s so unnecessary, the themes, characters, and plotting being so compelling (with a glaring exception) that all the little action set pieces jump out as arbitrary and disruptive.

That glaring exception is the third act, which, for all their genius at plotting, the Pixar team badly bungled here. Not having properly balanced the various narrative threads, the result was something just short of chaos when they tried to pull them all together. Or, to shift metaphors, by the time Ego arrives at the restaurant for his dinner, they have so many balls in the air that you can sense their arms getting tired.

The time that elapses between Ego’s arrival and when he’s finally served is so drawn out that it stretches plausibility to the breaking point, even for a cartoon. Instead of maintaining the tension created by his presence and taking advantage of the momentum it creates, the movie jerks along in fits and starts as it tries to check off the boxes of all the various subplots, wreaking havoc on any realistic (or dramatic) sense of time.

For instance, we’re supposed to believe that Linguini has his freak out, then defends Remy, the entire kitchen staff quits, Remy becomes reconciled with his father, Colette reconsiders, the rats come to the rescue, the perpetually bumbling Linguini becomes a supremely coordinated skater, and they all conjure up a ratatouille while the most important food critic in France, with the power to ruin the restaurant, just waits—and waits, and waits. It doesn’t help that they too conveniently place the deposed and banished (and distinctly diminutive) Skinner in the middle of the dining room where he would have been instantly spotted by the wait staff. Poetic license can be a beautiful thing but this is all too much to swallow. You naturally give a cartoon a lot of leeway—but not when it squanders a natural point of dramatic energy because of shoddy plotting.

None of this fatally flaws the film—far from it. It’s just another aspect of Pixar being so hyper conscious of serving the audience that they didn’t fully invest themselves in the material—which would have led to a better, and likely just as successful, film.

So let’s jump to the “modern animation always looks great on digital media, whether HD, Blu-ray, or 4K” cliché. I can see the merits of that argument but would then have to point toward what HDR brings to the presentation here. It’s a consistently restrained application but a consistently compelling one that takes full advantage of Paris’s reputation as the City of Light. Probably the best example is the shot toward the end of Ego standing looking out his tall study window at the skyline as he’s heard reading his review on the soundtrack. The deft enhancement of his desk lamp, the dimly lit chandelier, and the city’s glow is both subtle and dazzling. This is why animation is worth seeing in HDR.

I’m sometimes intrigued by Michael Giacchino’s work but wouldn’t call myself a fan. His scores are too often both ingratiating and derivative, and too big for the project at hand. But Ratatouille is one of his less turgid efforts—aside from those gratuitous action set pieces—with the scaled-back narrative causing him to rein in his usual excesses, leading to some evocative, and even graceful and restrained, flourishes from time to time.

The TrueHD Atmos mix is appropriately atmospheric, convincingly placing you out in a field, in a farmhouse, in the sewer, in a gourmet kitchen, etc. But it does get a little too cartoony doing those moments when all involved felt obliged to goose the action.

The reputation of Pixar’s films is so strong it’s damn near invincible, so pointing out that some cracks might be starting to emerge is unlikely to trigger any kind of reconsideration. And it doesn’t make those early years any less of a miracle—the animation in the original Toy Story is really starting to show its age but that hasn’t yet had any real impact on enjoying the film. The same thing applies here, sort of—the animation in Ratatouille is still strong, and the Pixar team gets the expressive aspects so right that that third act fumble, which would have sunk a lesser film, triggers little more than a passing twinge. It’s hard, even at this late date, not to be in awe of what Pixar wrought here.

PICTURE | A consistently restrained but compelling application of HDR that takes full advantage of Paris’s reputation as the City of Light.

SOUND | The TrueHD Atmos mix is appropriately atmospheric but gets a little too cartoony doing those moments when the folks at Pixar felt obliged to goose the action.

Michael Gaughn

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