Michael Gaughn Archives - Page 12 of 12

Kaleidescape | The Purple Rose of Cairo

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.

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 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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by Machines of Loving Grace

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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.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011)

Review: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

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Another of Adam Curtis’s full-frontal assaults on contemporary culture, this BBC documentary is intensely cinematic throughout

by Michael Gaughn
February 13, 2021

Before diving in, I need to provide some context for why I’m reviewing a 2011 BBC series made up mainly of some pretty low-fi found footage. To the first point, when I stumbled upon this, Amazon Prime had labeled it as a 2020 release (which is when, I’m guessing, somebody spliced together the three episodes of the series). As for Point Two: This is, despite its lowly origins, the single most cinematic experience I’ve had in years.

Of course, I don’t need to be sold on watching anything with Adam Curtis’s name on it. He and Errol Morris (The Fog of War) are the two most innovative documentarians of recent times, and Curtis’s Century of the Self (about the rise of modern marketing—and social control—springing from the ideas of Freud’s nephew Edward Bernais), The Power of Nightmares (about September 11th and how Bin-Laden and the Americans essentially collaborated to create the myth of Al Qaeda), and HyperNormalization (about the consequences of embracing societal and virtual simplifications) are stunning, troubling, unequaled works. It’s impossible for anyone with an open mind to approach his series and not have their worldview turned on its head.

To define my terms: Most of what passes for documentary filmmaking in the mainstream (and by mainstream, I mean TV networks, cable channels, and, primarily, streaming services—and primarily, within streaming services, Netflix) is really the bastard child of any legitimate documentary impulse, being more exercises in propaganda, marketing, and entertainment than any valid attempt to truly document anything. The filmmakers tend to know what they think and feel about a subject before they begin the project then spend the duration of the film continually reinforcing what they already believe, using their certainty and insistence to get you to buy into it too.

That’s not Curtis. He poses things. While he has definitely done his due diligence, he also knows a video and audio presentation is a pretty flawed way of dealing with anything of substance, that, even if we won’t acknowledge it, we tend to go to media for a continual stream of diversions. But he also knows the importance of having an audience. So his series tend to be exercises in connecting up big things in unexpected ways, with some of those connections tentative, balancing his material between “this is” and “what if?” and, out of both a sense of responsibility and a desire to engage viewers in a way they’re not used to from TV, allowing for enough play that you ultimately have to think a lot of this through for yourself.

Obviously, that’s a deeply frustrating experience for anyone who’s used to being told what to think or doesn’t want to think at all, which is why Curtis is frequently labeled a “cult” personality by both his admirers and detractors. (How anyone can have a recurring presence on the BBC and still be considered cult is a mystery to me.) For others, like me, his work is consistently liberating, partly because it runs so determinedly against the mainstream and so adamantly refuses to go to pat places. For all his well-seasoned British manner, Curtis is beneath it all a punk.

One more digression before I jump in, but it’s essential: Curtis is very much the child (or spawn, depending on your viewpoint) of documentarian Bruce Conner, specifically of his breakthrough 1967 short film Report, which used found footage from the mass media to offer an alternative take on the Kennedy assassination. The whole found-footage thing has become commonplace of course—stiflingly so—but nobody was doing it when Conner came up with Report, which treats its subject both seriously and with a deeply subversive wit.

Curtis creates knowing full well that we’ve literally seen it all before—and that’s his whole point. Yes, we’ve seen it but did we get it? Did we just buy into the bright, shiny surface and the pre-packaged context or did we maintain a skeptical distance and at least try to treat it on our terms instead of theirs? The frightening answer, for almost everyone watching his series—and this is Curtis at his most disturbing—is undeniably No.

So Curtis isn’t for everyone (in fact, he’s for a pretty small subset of everyone). But everything he does is, again, intensely cinematic and, despite its sometimes harrowing subject matter, often entertaining—which helps explain his relative popularity. Someone could watch his series and not grasp a single fundamental point and still have a pretty good time.

The first thing I need to say about All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (a title I promise you’ll never remember) is that it’s hard to find anything to say about it at all—partly because it’s so damned hard to get your arms around (deliberately so) and because, if you allow it to do its voodoo on you, it will leave you literally speechless.

Curtis’s work could be summed up as meditations on society, self, and selfishness—which I say knowing full well I’m being overly reductive. But you’ve got to start somewhere. All Watched Over could be said to ponder the overemphasis on rationality and how it tends to be trumpeted most loudly by the most deeply flawed and insecure. It begins with a meditation on Ayn Rand and by its dizzying and wrenching conclusion shows the devastating (il)logic that leads from Rand, through various too-explanatory models like the various, inherently unnatural attempts to define ecosystem and the vast computer-fed breeding grounds of narcissism, to the emergence of the selfish gene and the sad and somewhat insane ends of two of its proponents, Bill Hamilton and George Price.

But is that really what this series is about? We’re also treated to a disturbing (and exhilarating) tour of the Asian financial crisis and the subsequent backlash that then spurred the American financial crisis; the heyday of commune culture; the rise of the cure-all of self-organizing networks—and, in the series climax, a searing, haunting, ultimately overwhelming recounting of the genocidal consequences of the West’s brutal meddling in every imaginable aspect of the Congo.

All Watched Over is far more coherent than I’m making it sound; it’s just not conveniently linear. It’s also pretty fearless. Curtis tilts boldly at sacred cows ranging from Rand, Alan Greenspan, and the Clintons to The New York Times, Stewart Brand, Dian Fossey, Richard Dawkins, PS2, and, striking awfully close to his home base, David Attenborough and the BBC.

Try not to be put off by my description. This is nowhere near as abstract and clinical an exercise as I might make it seem. It’s not just engaging but compelling. Even if you don’t get everything Curtis is putting in front of you, you want to.

And I have to again emphasize how kinetic this all is. Nearly everything we watch now apes the conventions of cinema while dancing comfortably along the surface, oblivious to or dismissive or scared crapless of the depths. Curtis instead grabs your hand and pulls you down to the levels that matter, encouraging you to consider both the surface and the roots, inducing a sense of both terror and joy as you realize the tremendous distance and intricate relationships between them—and how much we’ve lost by coming to invest all our faith in the superficial.

He has never so deftly played with images, with the conscious juxtaposition and manipulation of their styles, their resolution, with their ironic and sometimes incongruous wedding, using edits to create deliberate gaps in which we’re encouraged to insert our own thoughts and emotions. His deployment of audio is similarly masterful, with sound often creating a sense of dread that can seem out of place until you realize, with a shudder, where he’s heading. And then there’s his use of existing music, which transcends the usual, lazy “forget your troubles come on get happy” efforts to get the audience to tune out of anything potentially challenging and instead radically recontextualizes it in a way that reminds me of Kubrick at his best.

As brilliant as Curtis’s other work is—and everything I’ve seen of his has been brilliant—All Watched Over is the best thing he has done to date. Surprisingly, given how much of his reputation (like Morris’s) rests on his wry detachment, it functions on a more direct emotional level than his other efforts—but that’s just one of its many, many layers. If it were primarily emotional, it would run the risk of becoming sentimental or self-righteous in a hipster sort of way. But Curtis somehow maintains a delicate balance between all the elements of his inherently unstable and inchoate material, jazzed to be dancing on the edge of the void, which gives everything he does the thrill of a crime drama, like he’s constantly just one step ahead of the law.

I hope this hasn’t been hopelessly confusing, because that would be a disservice to Curtis and his creations. But it would also be a disservice to pretend they’re simpler or less troubling than they are. At a time when we’ve actually come to prefer things we can forget about the second we see them, Curtis’s films burn their way into you, like a brand. They’re a reminder that awareness isn’t just an awkward vestige to be purged but an essential part of any inherently and meaningfully human experience. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is cinema by other means—possibly, at a time when the world is purging its birthright en masse, by the only means that matter.

PICTURE | Even though it’s a documentary made of often low-fi found footage, watch it in HD, if possible.

SOUND | And even though it relies on existing sources, the audio is respectable throughout.

click on the images to enlarge

Review: Vertigo

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The Robert Harris restoration of one of Hitchcock’s best translates beautifully into 4K HDR

by Michael Gaughn
October 29, 2020

Lazy commentators on Hitchcock will tell you Vertigo is his best film like that’s the beginning and end of the discussion. I’ll allow that it’s one of his best—it’s definitely his most psychologically probing and, in its strange way, intimate—but I would also argue that both Strangers on a Train and Shadow of a Doubt deserve to be placed on that same top tier.

What is inarguable is that this is by far the best of the first round of Hitchcock films to receive the 4K HDR treatment. Whereas the releases of Rear Window and The Birds are merciless in exposing the flaws in both the original productions and the current state of the film elements, Vertigo is practically seamless in its presentation, gliding from image to image without any jarring technical distractions (with one exception, which I’ll discuss below). If you’re a Hitchcock fan, this is the 4K title to start with.

But it’s not necessarily the best place to start if you’re new to Hitchcock. Vertigo lacks most of the puckish little gimmicks he used to lure in the masses and, if you take it on its own terms, it’s a pretty disturbing tale of a damaged and fundamentally weak man completely gutted by his belief in the cultural tropes of the saint and the whore. And it can get especially unnerving when you realize that that man isn’t really Jimmy Stewart—who delivers an amazingly fearless portrayal of a pathologically vulnerable ex-detective—but Hitchcock himself.

Also, Hitchcock takes his time with the pacing, which won’t sit well with the jolt-a-minute immediate-gratification crowd. It’s a cliché to say Vertigo feels like a dream, but that doesn’t make it any less true. And there’s something about the tactile crispness of the images and the sumptuousness of the colors in this release that just enhances that impression. (But, ironically, given how nightmarish Hitchcock’s imagery can be, Vertigo notoriously contains one of the worst dream sequences ever.)

Seriously aiding that sense of being seduced into and then trapped within a dreamworld is Bernard Herrmann’s masterful score, probably his best. It’s something to be savored, and is especially well presented here, sounding both epic and intimate in its Wagnerian longing, with the orchestra not just some indiscriminate wash of sound but an assembly of individuals where you can feel the bows being drawn across the strings, the metallic resonance of the French horns, and the reedy, wooden resonance of the clarinets. For just one example among too many to name, watch the scenes of Stewart’s car drifting up and down the hills of San Francisco where the muted strings, like a siren’s call, subtly limn his character’s loosening grip on the objective world.

This is undoubtedly Robert Burks’ most accomplished work for Hitchcock, with one subtly, and sometimes strikingly, stunning image after another. Given that this is Hitchcock, there is some occasional overreaching, but you can’t really fault Burks for not being able to rise to an impossible challenge.

There’s one borderline moment where 4K HDR really comes through. The pivotal scene where Madeleine reborn emerges from the green mist in Judy’s shabby hotel room had always looked corny on previous home video releases, like she was stepping out of a time transporter in a ‘50s sci-fi film. But here, by hitting just the right note with the green tone—not just in this shot, but in the ones leading up to it—and by now being able to just see through the haze, you can experience for the first time outside of a movie theater exactly what Hitchcock was aiming for—and it works. It’s not just a clever effects shot but a deeply subjective portrayal of a man using another person to purge his demons and sensing himself on the verge of redemption.

Of course, a lot of the credit for the beauty of this 4K release goes to the 1996 restoration by Robert Harris and James Katz, who refurbished the film on 70mm to mimic its original VistaVision presentation. (I’m usually wary of extras, but it would have been useful if the Kaleidescape download had included something that put this somewhat controversial restoration in context since it’s so crucial to the film’s impact here.)

There is one glaring flaw, which I feel obliged to point out because I can see it’s going to be an issue with 4K releases of older films until someone finds a fix. The photo-backdrop cityscapes out Barbara Bel Geddes’, and to a lesser degree, Stewart’s apartment windows are unconvincing, and look so flat and static that they run the risk of pulling you out of the film. But that’s just not how they looked when Vertigo was shown in theaters.

This is the subject of an ongoing conversation between Gerard Alessandrini and me, and something he broached in his “When Restorations Go Wrong, Pt. 1.” These backdrops don’t stick out now not because people were more gullible back in the day. (In some ways, Studio Era audiences were far more sophisticated than today’s adrenalin junkies.) The cinematographers and production designers knew what they were doing and factored in the impact of images projected on a movie theater screen when they created these sets. But they couldn’t have anticipated what modern technology would do to their efforts. It’s kind of like seeing La Gioconda for the first time and only noticing the cracks in the paint.

Vertigo ranks up with The Shining as the best 4K HDR release of a catalog title I’ve seen to date. You not only get the benefit of experiencing Hitchcock at his best—you get to experience what greater resolution and a wider color gamut can do to restore the impact of an older film.

PICTURE | Ranks up with The Shining as one of the best 4K HDR releases of a catalog title to date.

SOUND | Bernard Herrmann’s masterful score is something to be savored, and is especially well presented here.

Review: The Shining (1980)

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Kaleidescape | A Clockwork Orange

The horror classic finally receives a transfer that matches—even beats—the experiencing of seeing it in a movie theater

by Michael Gaughn
October 7, 2020

The critics hated The Shining. Some of the more prominent, and dubious, ones put it on their “Worst of the Year” lists. Some pointed to the first Friday the 13th installment, released around the same time, as the future of horror and dismissed Kubrick’s effort as quaint and out of touch. Stephen King famously damned the film—then went on with his own adaptation to prove that he knows nothing about filmmaking.

The Shining has, of course, since become a classic. But films are usually deemed “classic” more for their ability to pander to mass taste than for any inherent worth. The more important question is: Is it Kubrick’s best film?

I’m not completely sure about that, but I would tend to argue yes. In The Shining, his technique is in perfect sync with his ambitions, his execution fully, inventively, and surprisingly realizes his themes, and he dives deep enough into the much-abused but still fecund roots of the culture and returns with enough gold to craft something that might still survive when almost every other movie has been forgotten. The Shining is so well done it makes even the best of Kubrick’s previous efforts seem a little callow.

There’s no point in hashing out its merits as a traditional horror movie. While he does deploy some conventional elements, Kubrick primarily pursues horror through other, more effective, means—by using the very nature of film technique to keep the audience uneasy and to pull them into the action against their will.

The most obvious instances are well known by now, the two most famous being seeing the hyper-realistic manifestation of the old woman rising out of the bathtub at the same time her cackling horror-movie double is already chasing Jack Nicholson from the room, and Nicholson asking Shelly Duvall “Which room was it?” only to have the film cut to a cold open of a Miami newscast. (Kubrick intentionally placed that cut at a reel change so the audience would think the projectionist had screwed up.)

Things like that and the infamous title cards makes you wonder “Is this supposed to be a joke?” while baffling you why it should be, which eventually induces a skittish sense of “I can’t trust anybody here.” Taking a puppet-master’s delight in messing with the audience, Kubrick’s cunning runs the gamut from puckish to perverse, dancing right up to the edge of sadistic.

More relevant for our purposes is his astonishingly successful effort to transport the viewer into the film. It’s a cliché to say that The Overlook is a character in The Shining, but going there kind of misses the point. Kubrick took the strategies Roman Polanski used in Rosemary’s Baby to give The Black Bramford a palpable presence and seriously upped the ante by grafting them onto the medieval Art of Memory to achieve not just the sense of being lost in the film but trapped inside a labyrinthine hotel with a madman.

But anyone who’s only seen The Shining at less than 4K resolution—even on a cinematic home theater screen—has never had this experience—which means they’ve never really seen this film. All of which is a longwinded way of saying that Kaleidescape’s 4K HDR release is the first time anyone has had the chance to experience The Shining at home with the full impact Kubrick intended.

That impact hinges on a number of things, but primarily on accurately reproducing the naturalness of the artificially created outdoor light, matching the resolution of the original film print so all of the detail—especially in the landscape shots—is faithfully reproduced, and having enough resolution so the movie can be experienced from the proper viewing distance, without distractions.

That last point is the most key: Sit at the right distance, and you begin to experience The Overlook the way the characters do. You accurately feel the scale of both the large and smaller spaces and can mentally navigate the corridors the same way they do—even when they’re not around. After a while, you begin to have this sensation independently of the action on the screen. You feel haunted, in real-time—which is what makes the film uncanny and horrific in a way no other movie has been able to achieve.

None of that would be possible at home without this transfer, which is the most beautifully done, and faithful, 4K HDR translation I’ve seen of any movie. Nothing is overemphasized; all of it is in the service of the film.

And you can feel the full impact from the very first shot, where the faint ripples on the surface of the lake create the sense the small island is rushing toward you, and where the detail deep in the landscape makes the shot seem almost 3D—an effect maintained throughout the opening sequence, where the images have so much detail in the distance that they border on vertiginous. With HDR, the landscapes seem not just grand but crisp and cold and almost nasty.

This carries over to the interiors, where the ability to perceive even the smallest details reinforces the reality of The Overlook, adding to that sense of being trapped within it. I was especially awed by the wide shots of the gold ballroom, where you can clearly see the variations in the metallic surfaces and on the parquet walls way in the back of the room, and where all the lighting sources and reflections are properly balanced without being blown out. The movie hasn’t looked this good since the pristine prints from its initial release.

The quality of the transfer is just as important in the many striking closeups, with their natural skin tones and often uncomfortable intimacy. Letting yourself get lost in those shots helps reinforce the sense of being a complicit member of the film’s highly dysfunctional family.

I really can’t fault the transfer for anything—except two somewhat inadvertent things. The HDR is so revealing that it gives away how Kubrick was able to achieve the seemingly impossible overhead shot of Wendy and Danny walking through the middle of an improbably elaborate version of the hedge maze. And Kubrick relied on the random variations of film grain and the motion of the film through the projector gate to sell the shot of Jack sitting frozen in the snow. Seen as it is here, with no film or grain movement, it’s all too obviously a photo still.

I don’t mean to shortchange the film’s soundtrack, but the images are so beguiling that you have to force yourself to really focus on what’s going on there. First off, the music score is to be savored. Without question the most effective use of existing cues in any film ever, Kubrick so carefully wedded and molded its elements that most viewers probably assume it’s an original score.

As for chest-thumping explosions, window-rattling gunfire, and the other aesthetically dubious bombast we’ve come to expect from a contemporary surround mix, there’s none of that here. Kubrick was too much a master of his craft to resort to gratuitous jolts. Intent on keeping you inside the action, he wouldn’t have wanted viewers thinking about the potential seismic damage to their homes.

The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix is as deft as the visual transfer, enhancing the atmospheric sense of inevitability without drawing attention to itself or doing anything that would make you wince. The best stuff is the most subtle—the contrasting sonic signatures of the hotel’s rooms, lobby, ballroom, and other spaces, and the first hints, and then rising presence, of the winter storm. It’s like a perverse twist on New Age pablum, using the sounds of nature to lull you into a nightmare.

I feel obligated to mention the extras while kind of dreading it. To save the best for first, there’s “The Making of The Shining,” a documentary by Kubrick’s daughter Vivian that Kubrick suppressed during his lifetime but couldn’t keep from popping up from time to time on YouTube and elsewhere. Because of his daughter’s unrivaled access and her skill, even at 17, as a filmmaker, it’s really the only portrait we have of Kubrick as a filmmaker. It’s also surprisingly revealing about Nicholson, Duvall, and Danny Lloyd, and the whole dynamic on the set. If you’re even casually interested in Kubrick or The Shining, it’s a must-see.

“Wendy Carlos, Composer,” available only on the DVD version, is mildly interesting for both the casually curious and for students of Carlos’ work. The audio commentary, also only available on the DVD download, is a very mixed bag. Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown has a decent number of insightful remarks about his work on The Shining, but Kubrick biographer John Baxter is nothing but a train wreck. You’d think a biographer would be strong on details, but he gets so much wrong you get the sense he’s just making it all up as he goes along. And his Felix the Cat recounting of the action while we’re watching it play out on the screen is so dumb and pointless it becomes funny after a while. It’s like he’s narrating the film for a group of incredibly gullible blind people.

“View from the Overlook: Crafting The Shining” and “The Visions of Stanley Kubrick,” by the same team that perpetrated Full Metal Jacket’s “Between Good and Evil,” manage to neutralize the impact of any interesting comments by various actors, directors, studio executives, and authors through their appallingly inept editing of footage from the film. Like the Full Metal Jacket travesty, they’re a textbook example of what happens when you give people with no discernible taste or talent free rein to butcher brilliant material.

But don’t let any of that cause you to hesitate to download this film. This release of The Shining will quickly become the jewel of any serious film collection. But it’s not there to be revered but watched. This film’s impact hasn’t diminished a jot since the day of its release. And this 4K HDR version takes us all the way back to that first day without compromise. It’s kind of like the movie just keeps repeating itself in an infinite loop without ever aging. Right?

PICTURE | Kaleidescape’s 4K HDR release is the first time anyone has had the chance to experience The Shining at home with the full impact Kubrick intended. It hasn’t looked this good since the pristine prints from its initial release.

SOUND | The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix is as deft as the visual transfer, enhancing the atmospheric sense of inevitability without drawing attention to itself or doing anything that would make you wince.

Review: 2001: A Space Odyssey

review | 2001: A Space Odyssey

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Kaleidescape | The Shining (1980)

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As close as you’ll get to having the full experience of Kubrick’s space-travel epic without building a Cinerama at home

by Michael Gaughn
November 11, 2020

1968 (as I mentioned in my review of Rosemary’s Baby) was the year Hollywood, no longer able to lure people into theaters, blew everything up and started all over again. 2001: A Space Odyssey was the most radical product of that very radical year—not only because it flouted all the conventions of mainstream storytelling but because it went full-court Brecht to subvert the audience’s addiction to identifying with the protagonist, refused to use dialogue to Mickey Mouse viewers through the action, openly pissed on the convention of the traditional Hollywood music score, and stubbornly refused to be wedged it into any identifiable genre.

2001 is utterly sui generis—no film had looked anything like it before then; no film has looked anything like it since. It exists in its own, somewhat rarefied, universe.

Kubrick would never do anything that overtly adventurous again. Sure, Clockwork Orange was more outrageous but kind of in the same way as Dr. Strangelove; and “outrageous” isn’t the same thing as “adventurous.”

But neither adventurousness nor outrageousness on their own, or even together, are enough to make a film great. (The path from 1968 to the present is littered with the corpses of films that managed to do both, but little else.) 2001 is great because it sets an impossibly high bar and almost achieves it. Adventurousness and outrageousness are symptomatic of that ambition, but neither is essential to realizing it.

Which is why—to again return to an earlier review—I have to give The Shining the edge as Kubrick’s most accomplished work. Almost everything he does big and bold in 2001 he achieves quietly and more deftly in that later film. 2001 is the product of an artist so giddy he can’t help showing off; The Shining is the work of a master so confident in his abilities that he can just quietly drop clues and then wait as the rest of us scurry to catch up.

But why even go into all this? Because both 2001 and The Shining hinge on the experience of pulling you deep inside the film—not in a superficial, escapist way but so you begin to have the sensation of actually occupying the same physical space as the characters.

That the 4K HDR presentations of both films are reference-quality seriously ups the “you are there” ante—but with a crucial difference. And there’s the rub. The Shining is almost one-to-one true to the movie Kubrick created. When you watch it at home on a high-quality system, you’re seeing what he wanted you to see. 2001 in 4K HDR is just as extraordinary—but as a title card in the closing credits reminds you, this was originally a Cinerama presentation. And, unlike most of the other filmmakers who dabbled in Cinerama, Kubrick didn’t deploy it as a gimmick (Grand Prix, anyone?) but made it absolutely central to creating that sensation of taking an epic voyage into space.

So, is 2001, viewed in 4K HDR, in any meaningful way inferior to The Shining? On the technical level of the transfer, no, they’re both excellent—almost flawless. But since you can’t do Cinerama at home (at least not without a hell of a jerry-rigged setup that would have to verge on ludicrous), The Shining is truer to the original film.

All of the above is really just an exercise in praise by faint damning. The Kaleidescape download of 2001 is one of a handful of films so well served by the 4K HDR treatment that it has to be part of the foundation of any serious film collection. If there’s a single significant hiccup in this presentation, I didn’t see it.

To get lost in 2001 today, you have to get beyond ticking off what has and hasn’t come to pass and look past all that Swinging ‘60s clothing and furniture and get on the wavelength of the film Kubrick actually created, which exists in an elaborate and self-consistent world that merely uses the trappings of reality to achieve escape velocity.

The 4K resolution can’t reveal every detail of the original 70mm print, but it shows so much more than any previous home video incarnation that it’s shocking to realize to what extent Kubrick created outside his era, how unencumbered he was by the stylistic ticks of that time (or even of the future). On the level of film technique and film grammar, 2001 still holds.

What really takes the experience to a new, truer level is the HDR. Yes, many of the special effects now even more obviously look like still photos traveling across painted backgrounds. But shots of actual physical objects in motion, like the space station, the Discovery, and most of the extravehicular footage of the pod, are stunning. The brightness of objects in space is one of the things 2001 got basically right, and the HDR makes them look so crisp and cold they’re almost tactile.

Scenes to check out include the scientists walking down the ramp into the lunar excavation, where Kubrick shoots directly into a large worklight, with the light so intense you almost have to look away. The beginning of the final act, where the floating monolith guides Bowman into the Stargate, is especially compelling because of the convincing luminosity of Jupiter and its moons. And the virtual hotel room where Bowman goes through his transformation, which Kubrick created to mimic the look of early video, is more convincing with the white and other light tones pumped just enough to glow without becoming bloated or diffused.

As for the audio: Talking about the soundtrack of 2001 has always been kind of a ticklish business because this is essentially a silent movie. Kubrick rediscovered and then reinvented the core grammar of silent film, much of which had been glossed over and obliterated by the tyranny of the microphone during the Studio Era, and used it to not just drive this film but all of his subsequent efforts. It’s not that the audio is superfluous; it’s just not redundant with the visuals the way it had been since the introduction of sound—and continues to be.

(Curiously, another product of 1968—Blake Edwards’ The Party, which was much maligned at the time and is now revered—is also basically a silent film. Edwards, on a parallel track with Kubrick, dipped back into silent comedy to bring a sense of grace and redemption that had been missing from movie comedies since the Chaplin era.)

So, things like The Blue Danube, the heavy breathing, and the various warning sounds all sound perfectly fine. But this is a film of stripped-down and barren environments, without warfare or roaring engines, so there’s, thankfully, little audio-demo fodder to be found.

As for the extras—all I can say is “beware.” I’ve already sufficiently dumped on the team that created (although that seems far too kind a word) the promotional videos disguised as mini-docs included with Full Metal Jacket and The Shining. Their efforts here are equally awful. The other videos here are just as irritating and, for the most part, pointless. It would be great if somebody could unearth the Primer to “2001” Keir Dullea hosted on CBS in the late ‘60s. It would make all these other efforts seem superfluous.

The trailer included here isn’t the one from its initial release or even its legendary initial re-release but a contemporary stab that feels like a cliché film-school exercise (people are going to look back 20 years from now at our addiction to dips to black and laugh their asses off) and indulges in exactly the kind of manipulative melodrama Kubrick despised.

The only extra worth going out of your way for is the extended audio-only interview Jeremy Bernstein did with Kubrick in 1966. You get to hear the director walk through his whole career to that point, beginning as a failed high school student who became the youngest photographer ever at Look magazine and then went on to learn filmmaking, in a world without film schools, by making his own features. Not only is it better than anything any writer has ever done on Kubrick, it confirms, beyond a doubt, that Peter Sellers’ Quilty in Lolita is basically an extended Kubrick impression—which puts that deeply flawed film in a whole new light.

PICTURE | The Kaleidescape download of 2001 is one of a handful of films so well served by the 4K HDR treatment that it has to be part of the foundation of any serious film collection.

SOUND | Things like The Blue Danube, the heavy breathing & the various warning sounds all sound perfectly fine, but this is a film of stripped-down and barren environments, without warfare or roaring engines, so there’s little audio-demo fodder to be found.

Review: A Clockwork Orange

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