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Michael Gaughn

People First, Then the Gear

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People First, Then the Gear

People First,
Then the Gear

By finding out all about their clients’ lives and needs well before they get around to talking about the tech, Britain’s Equippd sets an example other high-end integrators should follow 

by Michael Gaughn

left | Equippd co-founder & director Matthew McCourt (at right) consults with a client at a job site

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January 31, 2023

Custom integrators—the folks who come up with the gear for watching movies, running your lights and shades, cobbling together your security system, and so on—justifiably worry about just being seen as the tech guys, a stigma that leads to not being taken as seriously as architects and designers, which in turn often means they’re the last ones called in on a job. Some integrators have started to make an effort to show they understand lifestyle and design but the exercise often comes across as forced and insincere because most really are just tech guys at heart.

Consider the websites of the leading luxury integrators in the NYC market. They all look different but the messaging is all pretty much the same—not “we understand you” but “look at how great we are.” And the focus tends to be on brand names and on awards won, sometimes accompanied by a single image of a contemporary but sterile and depopulated room. Even the newer firms, which ought to be more attuned to design, usually display more attitude than empathy.

They could all afford to learn a thing or two from Britain’s Equippd. Everything about this  Surrey-based high-end integration firm—from their website to their portfolio to how they engage their clients—shows they don’t just pay lip-service to but genuinely get design. Every page of their site speaks to lifestyle well before it broaches technology, and does so in a natural and disarming way that just can’t be faked.

I initially became aware of Equippd while wading though scores of photos of media rooms and private cinemas from a broad cross-section of luxury integration firms. Only one space stood out—the whimsical little theater tucked away behind a bookcase profiled in “Secret Cinema.” Everything about that room felt right. It not only looked comfortable and conducive to movie watching but evinced a deft ingenuity without ever being showy. Most striking of all was its apt sense of design, leagues away from the “we don’t really get how this works but we had to do something” aesthetic that mars most dedicated entertainment spaces.

Interviewing Equippd’s Matthew McCourt for “Secret Cinema” confirmed that the virtues on display in that theater, and in the company’s other projects, are just an organic extension of the well-considered, engaging, reassuring manner of the company’s principals. The brainchild of Matthew and his brother Charlie, Equippd adopts a familial approach that can’t help but put clients and collaborators alike at ease. Wanting to go deeper into why they get it right when so many other integrators don’t get it at all, I recently buttonholed Matthew for another transatlantic chat.

145B Walton Road
East Molesey
Surrey KT8 0DU

+44 (0)20 8191 7887
hello@equippd.uk

“If you hit people with all the brands and specifications very, very quickly, it’s just overwhelming because they don’t have enough time to digest any part of it, so they just shut down”

Your website does a nice job of showing clients how Equippd determines their needs, but could you walk me through the process a little?

It’s all about finding out how people live in their homes. Once you understand that, you can then put forward different types of technology that are going to enhance those areas or make certain things easier for them rather than going in and saying, “Yeah, this is Lutron! and Crestron! and this and that,” which will cause the client to go, “Well, what is that? Do we need that sort of stuff?”

Equippd co-founders Charlie and Matthew McCourt describe their process for determining a client’s needs

Equippd co-founders Charlie and Matthew McCourt describe their process for determining a client’s needs

The Artechouse NYC show The Life of a Neuron incorporates the work of a number of artists to tell the story of neurons

“The desire to find the optimum solution for every project is what helps to get me up in the morning, along with knowing we’re going to be trying to understand a new customer and how they want to develop their house”

Before we dig down into different types of brands and things like that, there’s a bit of a journey we have to take people along because there are a lot of different things we do when we’re integrating into a home. We’re involved in the lighting, the heating, the shading, the entertainment spaces, the multiroom audio, their garden, their shed, their attic, the security. If you hit people with all the brands and specifications very, very quickly, it’s just overwhelming because they don’t have enough time to digest any part of it, so they just shut down. But If you instead try to understand how they live and show how you can improve that while making sure the space looks good—i.e., not see the tech at all or just see the bare minimum—we find that works well.

While there has been some effort to improve the look of the things people interact with, there’s still a long way to go.

Touchscreens are ugly. All of these things don’t look good, really. And alarm panels—terrible, terrible. Everything looks like it was from the ‘80s.

So what do you do to make all of that a little more palatable?

Whether it’s interior design, system design, schematics, elevations of how walls are going to look, how keypads and touchpanels are going to sit, what else is on that wall, we’re always thinking in terms of what can we remove, how can we clean up that space. Our sole drive is, how can we simplify this? Because we’ve seen panels everywhere before in properties and light switches just everywhere. And it’s like, why? We’ve walked into houses before where even we can’t operate the light switch.

When it comes to new construction versus retrofit, how do your projects tend to skew?

New build and renovation form 90% of our work, with the last 10% being retrofit, which we tend not to do too much because we’re not geared that way.

What distinguishes renovation from retrofit?

You’ve got a lot of London residences where pretty much the whole home apart from the facade is getting knocked back, stripped out, and then completely remodeled from the ground up. We classify those as a full renovation because we’re still keeping the existing fabric or four walls of the structure.

That kind of new construction and renovation can often mean open-floorplan spaces with a mandate to include as many types of entertainment as possible but without compromising the picture or sound.

We love those challenges because design plays so much into that, looking at the space, understanding, “OK, how can we do this to be able to give them this multifaceted kind of functionality for the room but make it look good?” In an open space like that, you can’t just have what looks like a media room tucked away in one corner. It’s just not going to fit in.

Renderings of a multi-use entertainment space. The section of the paneled wall above the TV conceals a dropdown projection screen. For movie viewing, the wall section comes forward and the screen descends in front of the TV.

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Have you had much call yet for video walls?

Not really. We did have one guy who wanted one as the splash-back in the kitchen. Where the hob and other stuff is would have basically been a massive TV. We quoted him but the project didn’t go anywhere.

Would it be fair to say that the living spaces themselves hold more interest for you than the technology you put in them?

Absolutely. The desire to find the optimum solution for every project is what helps to get me up in the morning, along with knowing that we’re going to be looking at something new, that we’re going to be trying to understand a new customer and how they want to develop their house, how that house is going to flow, how they’re going to use it.

Given all the things you can offer in a home, it seems almost inevitable you’d form as deep a bond with the client as the architect or interior designer does.

All the other trades do their work and then most often move on, but we’re there right at the start and then we’re also there right at the end. While the family are moving in, we’re meeting them, we’re meeting their kids, we meet their dog. And there’s a relationship that goes on after that, with any sort of tweaks and changes they want, or looking after systems and servicing them as well. I’ve always found that quite enjoyable, getting to know the people behind the home. That’s the part of the business I think is so important.

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

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Oscar Nominees 2023

reviews | Oscar Nominees 2023

our comprehensive roundup of this year’s most notable Academy Award picks

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by the Cineluxe staff
updated March 9, 2023

This year’s Oscar nods were so predictable that we were able to lay this page out more than a week ago and only had to make one change after the nominations were actually announced. It’s kind of sad the industry is so committed to sticking with the safe and known—and, as you’ll see from many of our reviewers’ comments, long. But while there don’t seem to be any masterpieces in the 2023 round of picks, there is a decent number of films that are, if nothing else, engaging, diverting, and demo-worthy.

All the Beauty and Bloodshed (2022)

All the Beauty and Bloodshed

Documentary Feature

Review Coming Soon 

Picture, International Film, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Original Score, Visual Effects, Sound, Makeup & Hairstyling, Production Design

“From the opening pastoral scenes of nature in the French countryside that transition to the bleakness and horror of the trenches and No Man’s Land of the Great War, All Quiet on the Western Front captivates with an unflinching visual style, providing one of the most satisfying cinematic experiences offered by a movie from a streaming service this year.”
read more

Documentary Feature

“The only real complaint I have about All That Breathes is that it ends far too quickly. Granted, the 97-minute runtime already seems brisk on paper, but actually watching it, it doesn’t feel anywhere near that long. Some of that is due to the lack of a conventional narrative but a lot of it boils down to fantastic editing, compelling subjects, and mesmerizing cinematography. One simply hopes HBO eventually releases the thing in UHD/HDR so it can be experienced in its full splendor.”  read more

Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor,  Supporting Actress,  Original Screenplay, Editing, Original Score

The Banshees of Inisherin will no doubt go down as one of the most divisive films of this awards season but likely not for the reasons you might suspect, mainly because I can’t imagine anyone outright hating it. It’s one of the most captivating films of the year. No scene—indeed, no frame—is wasted and its closing credits seem to nip at the heels of its opening imagery. Then again, if you said you found it ploddingly paced, I’d have a hard time arguing with you.”    read more

Visual Effects, Sound, Makeup & Hairstyling

“At nearly three hours, the pacing is slow, and there are often long periods between the next ‘event,’ making it feel long at times. Even when it feels the film is wrapping up, there is another 30 minutes! But, while I don’t think this is the best Batman movie ever, it’s still engaging and entertaining, and director Matt Reeves gives us an interesting new take on the Dark Knight that certainly looks and sounds better when screened at home.”    read more

Actress

“Writer and director Dominik’s liberal use of artistic license and unorthodox filmmaking techniques in telling the story of the legendary Marilyn Monroe is risky. As often as it works, there are equally as many times that it comes across as lurid and cringey. Blonde is sometimes beautiful to look at, with a heroic performance by de Armas, but its content is bleak and disturbing.”    read more

Supporting Actor

Causeway may be a small film that hasn’t received much attention but it is an exquisitely crafted character study with two very fine performances by Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry that elevate it to something special.”    read more

Picture, Actor, Cinematography, Editing, Costume Design, Makeup & Hairstyling, Production Design

“I can’t comment on how closely the film hews to actual events, or if Colonel Tom Parker was truly as controlling and influential on Elvis Presley as the film portrays, but I did find Elvis entertaining, though a bit long at 2 hours 39 minutes. If you’re a fan of Presley or Baz Luhrmann, it’s definitely worth a watch.”    read more

Picture, Director, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay, Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Costume Design

“Despite being a work of legitimate cultural significance, with a message that will still be sending shockwaves through my brain years from now, Everything Everywhere All at Once is also incredibly accessible and wildly entertaining, not to mention slap-happily zany.”    read more

Picture, Director, Actress, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Original Score, Production Design

“The two-hour 31-minute run-time can be a bit plodding. Don’t expect a lot of—or really any—action other than of the emotional kind. While I found the film interesting, scenes can drag a bit. But if you’re a Spielberg fan, this is definitely a movie you’ll want to see, as it accurately depicts his early life and influences.”    read more

Documentary Feature

“Of the two documentary films cobbled together last year from footage shot by Maurice and Katia Krafft, Fire of Love is ultimately the better one. Sara Dosa doesn’t cram her own personality into the film the way Wenrer Herzog does, but she also takes a more childlike and irreverent approach that suits its subjects and subject matter better. I’d love it if you watched both because there are some ways in which Herzog’s film is superior. But if you have to pick one, make it this one, whether it wins the Oscar or not.”    read more

Adapted Screenplay

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is lighter and breezier than the original film but with a similarly clever and intricate plot. It also features first-rate sound and picture quality, making it one of the premier streaming releases of the year.”    read more

Animated Film

“Del Toro’s Pinocchio—a re-imagining of the 1883 novel that has nothing to do with Disney’s take on the property—is a weird and wonderful, utterly soulful fantasy adventure and allegory that almost seems to have been made with no other audience in mind than del Toro himself.    read more

Animated Film

“This is such a compelling little film that anyone with a hint of tolerance for weirdness will get altogether lost in the experience. It’s refreshing to watch a movie that leans so hard into its adorableness without ignoring the difficulties we all face in life. It’s also a delightfully strange feeling to watch a film made with so much sincerity and so little cynicism. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but if the original shorts resonated with you in the slightest, I think you’ll love the feature-length Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.” read more

RRR

Original Song

RRR may not have been India’s entry in the Academy Award International Feature category this year, but it is a hugely successful and highly accessible film that you don’t have to be a film connoisseur to enjoy. So check out this not so hidden gem of a film on Netflix if you haven’t already.”   read more

Animated Film

“Chris Williams’ The Sea Beast is not perfect but it brings all the charm and well-crafted storytelling of his previous efforts for Disney to his new partnership with Netflix Animation.”
read more

Picture, Director, Actress,  Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing

Tár can be a maddening film to watch—which makes it an even more maddening film to review. It ticks off all the trendy boxes, not just weighing in on gender politics and the blind destructive power of the howling virtual mob but also adopts a chill, distant, elliptical style that constantly holds the characters at arm’s length. Most troubling of all, it dips into the au courant fantasy realm by having certain key actions hinge on the implausible. It’s hard to take the film’s take on the contemporary world seriously or care a fig about any of its characters when it’s so willing to conveniently veer away from any kind of convincing reality.”    read more

Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Editing, Original Song, Visual Effects, Sound

Maverick is like a master class in how to make a blockbuster sequel. The casting and acting are great, the cinematography is fantastic, the plot is simple but compelling, and the action is fast-paced and (mostly) believable. And it plays terrifically in a luxury home theater. It looks and sounds great, is a near-guaranteed crowd pleaser for your next get-together, and has great replay value. In fact, I already can’t wait to watch it again, and it will likely have heavy rotation in your theater’s demo showoff reel!”    read more 

Picture, Director, Original Screenplay

“It’s nearly impossible to tell if writer/director Ruben Östlund desires to watch the ultra-wealthy suffer himself or if he simply assumes his audience is cruel and morally bankrupt. Either way, this muddled and overly long exercise in unfocused schadenfreude manages to be both shallow and thematically incoherent, callous and distant, shockingly disgusting and punishingly boring, and even its contradictions aren’t enough to make it interesting. It’s one of the most soulless and repugnant works of cinema I’ve seen in ages, and the fact that it’s getting any attention this awards season is as scathing an indictment of entertainment industry as I can imagine.”
read more

Animated Film

Turning Red seems to have critics and audiences split, with critics giving it a 95% Rotten Tomatoes rating, matching both Soul and Wall-E, and audiences scoring it a more mediocre 66%, closer to The Good Dinosaur’s 64%. While I didn’t find Turning Red to be among Pixar’s strongest outings, it’s entertaining and looks fantastic, and certainly worth checking out for Disney+ subscribers.”    read more

© 2023 Cineluxe LLC

Review: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)

review | Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

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Probably the most influential porn film ever, Russ Meyer’s evisceration of both the entertainment industry and the counterculture still packs a hell of a punch

by Michael Gaughn
January 13, 2023

This once-X-rated opening salvo in the effort to get soft porn out of sleazy “adult film” houses and into mainstream theaters is surprisingly well made, something of a masterpiece, and, by taking on a self-parodic tone no one had ever quite experienced before, yielded one of the most influential movies ever. It’s also spooked, channeling both the Manson murders and “The Teen Tycoon of Rock” Phil Spector, uncannily predicting Spector’s death-dealing future by 33 years, which can make watching it more than a little unnerving. Constantly poking and jabbing at the “no there there” of LA culture, coming at it from both above and below, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is the kind of film it never should have been possible to get made within the traditional studio system.

All movies are, in a sense, a product of their moment but few ever get to feed on that present as ravenously as Beyond, which devours it raw and with relish. It couldn’t have been made a year earlier, and would have just seemed tacky and sad done a year later. It had to spring from the cultural nadir of 1970, when all bets were off in a rudderless Hollywood desperate to seize on anything that worked. And realizing the once unthinkable idea of giving a pornographer the keys to the kingdom—not unlike Orson Welles given free rein of RKO to make Citizen Kane—lends this movie an infectious exuberance that somehow makes everything in it not just palatable but sublime.

Beyond is both very much of its time and an experience that hasn’t aged a day—partly because it’s so rampantly heedless and maniacally inspired and partly because it still serves as a wellhead for other movies, with no one yet able to top it. In a sense, like all great films, it just knows too much for anyone to completely exhaust it. If somebody had forced Douglas Sirk’s hand, it would have looked something like this; and it’s easy to trace a beeline straight from here to Alex Cox’s Repo Man. It’s like a boot camp for iconoclasts—and one of their last stands.

Simultaneously the lurid Victorian melodrama it says it is and its own parody, Beyond brought Nouvelle Vague-type self-reflexivity to American film, deploying it with a seemingly effortless dexterity. Its montage sequences—which are both integral to the story and standalone set-pieces of unparalleled goofiness but without ever succumbing to the temptation to pat themselves on the back—have never been bettered. (“In the Long Run” ranks with Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps as one of the genius moments of cinema.) It’s one of the first instances—you can also see it happening in Leone around the same time—of movies starting to feed on themselves, munching on their own tails. And, like the most satisfying art, it’s as deeply conservative as it is provocatively radical, deriving its energy from the collision, and symbiosis, of those fundamentally opposed moral and aesthetic spheres, transmuting that volatile act into something that miraculously hangs together—and that you feel compelled to watch exactly because of the sense it could all fly apart at any moment.

Beyond opens with the cheekiest credit sequence since Kiss Me Deadly, and, like Deadly, starts by knocking viewers off balance then does everything possible to keep them dizzy and disoriented for the duration. After a title card that basically tells the audience they’ve been lured into the movie under false pretenses, it then gives away the climactic scene, bringing a whole new meaning to “teaser.” But that big reveal, meaning little out of context, basically reveals nothing, and while it plays like something from a horror film, you ultimately find out it’s not more than a step or two removed from the Marx Brothers.

No one has ever equalled what Russ Meyer pulled off here, getting consistently strong portrayals out of a bunch of second- and third-stringers who ultimately wouldn’t fare any better than the characters they portray. John Lazar’s Z-Man is one of the iconic movie performances, a tightrope walk of virtuoso ham acting that somehow works but could never breathe for a second outside the confines of this film, which supplies all its oxygen. Yet Lazar, as great as he is in Beyond, would spend the rest of his career bouncing from one C-grade exploitation film to another. The top-billed Dolly Read made out even worse, scoring just a bare handful of minor one-off roles in series like Charlie’s Angels, Vegas, and Fantasy Island before disappearing forever beneath the waves. Meyer’s cast could hold its own against its counterpart in any A-list film, but its members all went exactly nowhere. 

The 1080p streaming presentation on Apple TV is surprisingly true to the original film, with no obvious flaws when viewed on a big screen. There’s probably more that could be pulled out of the elements in a 4K release, but what’s here honors both the spirit of the film and of the time, and only the only fussiest could find serious fault with this incarnation.

The same can’t be said for the sound, unfortunately. While I suspect the problems are mostly or completely with the source tracks, some judicious cleanup could make some of the muddier moments more presentable and some basic balancing between scenes could help even things out. Be prepared to have to occasionally goose your levels once they’re set since some sections are so muffled and low they can sound like you’re hearing somebody having a conversation in the next room.

If you haven’t come across this film before and use criteria more meaningful than Oscars won or Rotten Tomato scores tallied to judge the worth of a movie, you’ll likely find an evening spent with Beyond the Valley of the Dolls a bit of revelation. While it’s no longer considered forbidden fruit and, having lost a lot of its original shock value, can seem even quaint to the jaded, there’s still more than enough here to offend contemporary sensibilities. Beyond is very much its own animal, both exhilarating and disturbing, with DNA so unique it’s been spared the indignity of being franchised. Very, very few movies approach the level of pure film. Beyond is one of them, and one of the best. 

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

PICTURE | The 1080p streaming presentation on Apple TV is surprisingly true to the original film, with no obvious flaws when viewed on a big screen

SOUND | There are issues with clarity and with balance from scene to scene, so be prepared to adjust your levels as the film goes along

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Review: Tár

Tár (2022)

review | Tár

What could have been an intriguing look at the ability of anonymous accusers to wrongfully topple the powerful collapses under its own pretentiousness

by Michael Gaughn
January 6, 2023

Tár can be a maddening film to watch—which makes it an even more maddening film to review. It ticks off all the trendy boxes, not just weighing in on gender politics and the blind destructive power of the howling virtual mob but also adopts a chill, distant, elliptical style that constantly holds the characters at arm’s length. Most troubling of all, it dips into the au courant fantasy realm by having certain key actions hinge on the implausible. It’s hard to take the film’s take on the contemporary world seriously or care a fig about any of its characters when it’s so willing to conveniently veer away from any kind of convincing reality.

This was unabashedly created as a vehicle for Cate Blanchett and will likely pave her way to another Oscar nomination. But I’d be interested to know what the Academy would base that decision on. Since her performance is more a series of stylized poses and largely the product of the editing suite, it would seem just as appropriate to nominate all the people who propped her up.

Which triggers a brief digression. The movie opens with the closing credits, exhaustively listing in tiny type every minion who worked on this effort. It should not take that many people to make a movie, especially an independent-y art film. Those teeming hordes seem to be more about safety in numbers than about the hands necessary to craft something of merit, and what I guess was meant to be a magnanimous gesture only helps to explain why most movies now feel more manufactured than created.

But to get to the nub of the thing: It’s not possible to understand what’s going on with Tár until a second viewing. And since I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, I hope you’ll take what I have to say here on faith. The film all but completely unravels on that second pass because you’re now aware of all the little tricks that diverted your attention the first time around. Once the stylistic frosting melts away, you begin to see that the cake is just a straight-from-the-box “powerful woman undone” melodrama from the 1940s cribbed from the Bette Davis/Joan Crawford playbook (think Mildred Pierce)—all of which had antecedents in the “women’s wrongs” literature of the 1850s. 

It’s amazing how political positions and attitudes can change but we always express them through the same handful of narrative conventions. Which brings up another dilemma: There are only so many plots, so many genres, and they all have a history—often a long one—that lends them their resonance. Adopting them without acknowledging where their power is derived from can’t help but make hash out of contemporary “let’s just make up our beliefs as we go along” soap boxing because the medium ends up completely contradicting and undermining the message—which is as it should be, and a small glimmer of hope in a self-infatuated world.

To bolster my case: Even at two hours and almost 40 minutes, Blanchett’s character becomes unhinged far too easily and quickly to be believable—that is, if you use reality as a yardstick for her deterioration. But in a ‘40s melodrama, that timing (proportionally speaking) and over-the-top level of craziness would be just about right. And outright silly bits like her charging the podium during a performance and slugging the conductor or vomiting because the number “5” manifests itself in a massage parlor is the stuff of potboilers, not sensitive character studies. (About that run time: This film could have easily shed an hour and lost nothing, which would have brought it much closer to the 90-minute ballpark of the sturm und drang weepies it springs from—but that would have revealed its hand.)

I’m not saying it’s not possible to enjoy Tár, at least on that first viewing. Just know that it’s not at all what it seems to be, not because of any cunning on the filmmakers’ part but because they either didn’t know or didn’t want to acknowledge what they were dealing with. 

Because the film’s tableaux-like approach doesn’t allow for coherent performances, it’s hard to single out actors, but Nina Hoss is, at a minimum, intriguing as Blanchett’s concertmaster/lover/conscience/enabler. And while the camera is clearly enraptured with Sophie Kauer as a rising young cellist, it’s frustrating she wasn’t given enough to do so we could know if she has any extraordinary chops as an actor. 

I also have to point out that while Blanchett is sometimes convincing as somebody presenting herself as a conductor, she couldn’t be more unconvincing when she actually tries to conduct. She just lacks the ability, which few possess, to surrender her entire body and being to the music. It was a huge strategic mistake to show a brief clip near the end of Leonard Bernstein at the podium since his movements, from the very first seconds, make clear what a conductor is and what Blanchett isn’t.

Not that there aren’t enough rubs here to go around but maybe the biggest is that Tár comes damn close to being a reference-quality HDR presentation. But I would feel guilty recommending it as such knowing anyone would have to sit through the film itself. Much of the imagery is quietly beautiful, even if it’s almost always too full of itself and pretty much all veneer. And the transfer handles it deftly, accurately rendering the nuances of the muted palette and conveying it all with an at times startling sharpness without veering into the clinical digital look of a lot of recent films. This is the best case I’ve come across of HDR displaying its supple versatility without succumbing to the temptation to show off.

A lot of the same could be said for the sound, which is well recorded and mixed without, for the most part, drawing attention to itself. You don’t get any complete musical performances, just snippets, but what’s here is rendered with a realistic sense of presence—but without any of what can only be described as the analog warmth many people associate with the best classical music recordings. For a film that fetishizes vinyl, adding just a touch of coloration might not have been sonically accurate but would have heightened the music’s emotional impact considerably.

This is a talky movie, with lots of voices in a variety of accents, mostly speaking in subdued tones, and all of that is conveyed cleanly enough. The use of ambient sound and of effects is well presented and treated with restraint, with a few exceptions. One instance of an offscreen knock at the door is so realistic it becomes one of those “made you look” moments where you have to admire the sound designer’s acumen at the same time you can’t help but get annoyed at being yanked out of the film.

It would be remiss of me to not mention that it’s not all that farfetched to see parallels between the Blanchett character’s woes here and the protracted hounding of Woody Allen, whose Blue Jasmine got Blanchett a Best Actress Oscar a decade ago. There are undeniable parallels between Tár and Jasmine, pointed by a scene near the end of the former where Blanchett retreats to her humble beginnings in the New York boroughs and her working-class brother dismissively greets her with, “Hi, Linda—sorry, Lydia,” eerily similar to Andrew Dice Clay’s line in Jasmine—“Janine or Jasmine, or whatever you’re calling yourself these days”—which then triggers the collapse of that character’s world. If I could credit the filmmakers with sufficient subtlety, I would say they were turning the tables on gender posturing to deliberately trouble the cocksure MeToo take on the world. If nothing else, they seem to be putting forward a “character is your digital destiny” argument that is, sadly, true enough, with the consequences all too often tragic. 

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

PICTURE | Tár comes close to being reference-quality, with the transfer accurately rendering the nuances of the film’s muted palette and conveying it all with an at times startling sharpness without veering into the clinical digital look of a lot of recent films 

SOUND | The audio is well recorded and mixed without, for the most part, drawing attention to itself. The orchestral snippets are rendered with a realistic sense of presence, while ambience and effects are well presented and treated with restraint.

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O Rob! Part 2

Part 2—The Return of the Repressed

That the upstanding sitcom family man re-emerged as an insensitive, petulant loser seems like a fitting enough sign of the times 

by Michael Gaughn

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“Rob Petrie was a model of decency and tact because he felt firmly grounded in his world; Michael Scott lashes out blindly because he feels lonely and lost.”

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As a possible way of life, the Liberal movement of the early 1960s barely survived the Great Society and was in any meaningful sense kaput by the early ‘70s. The eruption of political radicalism and the resulting right-wing backlash—which made it clear the Liberal dream was not just untenable but vanquished—swept the myths that fed both the Kennedy mystique and The Dick Van Dyke Show into the dustbin of history. But for many, that mythology represented America’s best possible face, and even people who found it repugnant acknowledged its allure.

You can’t aggressively repress a potent cultural force fraught with unresolved emotion without expecting it to return—usually in monstrous form. Faced with a society that felt beat up, disoriented, and cheated after a decade and a half of constant upheaval, the late ‘70s conjured up retro as consolation. An unconscious admission that the present wasn’t good enough and all that turmoil hadn’t added up to squat, retro gave us an excuse to get lost in a vague haze of nostalgia. But by reinventing history to suit the needs of the present instead of accepting it on its own terms, creating a false sense of security based on a lie, it kept yesterday alive in ways that could only trouble today.

Initially created to smooth over a massive cultural void, retro was too tempting a fiction to not be turned to political ends, with TV the primary vehicle for its dissemination. From the ‘70s through the early part of this century, we defined our political identity by way of the tube. Whether via sitcoms, dramas, news shows, pervasive political ads—even children’s shows and wrestling—it provided a way to feel politically at home. 

That all got supercharged with the emergence—more accurately, eruption—of social media, which thrives on fostering the illusion of free expression, interaction, immediacy, and intimate contact when it’s really just another form of entertainment. The pivot was reality TV, programs that made us comfortable with figures who were every bit as fictional as the ones on sitcoms and dramas but who we agreed to accept, out of a gaping emotional need, as actual. Once social media was able to add the illusion of access to TV’s illusion of reality, the door was wide open for creating a world ruled by influencers—people we flock to to define us because we don’t just admit to but feed on their superiority. Once all that became commingled with politics, the genie unleashed became an even more malevolent force.

All of this was set in motion, incredibly, by the Petries. Just because the whole influence thing has become hopelessly fragmented (deliberately so) didn’t mean it couldn’t coalesce in ways as powerful as a groundbreaking situation comedy able to command the rapt attention of more than a third of the nation. With the nuclear family dead and interred and a manic individualism—the very definition of atomization—on the rise, the idea of rallying behind a married couple that represents a national ideal is no longer tenable, but we can—and dodefine ourselves against thousands of influencers who, considered as a whole (and once you allow for the huge redundancy factor), hold the same kind of sway over society. All of that fragmentation just ensures that the ground never feels quite solid under our feet.

As for the political dimension—there’s no need to spell it out, but I’ve left enough breadcrumbs along the way for anyone with a keen enough interest to follow the trail. Kennedy’s obvious successor, ruling-by-charisma-wise, was Regan—but, a product of the movies, he was ultimately just a trial balloon. It would take a figure clearly born of TV to make this whole thing virulent.

Which brings us to probably the most salient recent example of mutation via repression. Like a classic doppelgänger from the uncanny, Michael Scott couldn’t be further removed from Rob Petrie. But, as the bumbling male lead of an influential TV series about work, he and Rob obviously spring from the same sitcom roots, which lends them an unsettling resemblance. A charismatic figure warped to fit the present, Michael is little more than the sum of his flaws, a social cripple we find endearing mainly because we share his plight. 

His defining character trait—and the point where he veers most radically from Rob—is the whole “no filters” thing, which allows him to get away with saying and doing things that are undeniably hurtful and offensive just because he’s seen as a well-meaning, hopelessly insecure dope. Rob was a model of decency and tact because he felt firmly grounded in his world; Michael lashes out blindly because he feels lonely and lost.

“No filters” has of course become a kind of rallying cry, a pernicious phenomenon no one would have trouble finding multiplying examples of in the wider culture—and something that couldn’t be farther from the world of the Van Dyke show. Brutality as grace is the price we pay for stumbling forward clueless, believing something potent will go away just because we succeeded in temporarily sweeping it under the rug. By refusing to understand and assimilate the past, we leave it free to constantly judge the present and, not surprisingly, find it lacking.

It should be obvious none of the above is meant to be an exercise in nostalgia—if anything, it was a meditation on the price we pay for nostalgia. Adopting the comforting shells of the past without pondering their meaning, or relevance, to fill a sense of emptiness in the present has only lead to massive discontent. Huddling inside outmoded forms as if they’ll somehow protect us from a storm of our own making has left us vulnerable, isolated, frustrated, and angry. 

The answer isn’t to return to Rob and Laura’s world any more than it is to continue to obsessively, mechanically repeat our present mistakes. It could even be argued that our refusal to become unstuck from the past is the whole problem. But the past we continue to cling to bears practically no relation to the past as it actually happened but is more a kind of willy-nilly appropriation, a history’s greatest hits, a child’s form of succor. And no sane person could ever expect anything good to arise from a lie like that.

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

“Honey, I’m Home!”

To provide a little potted Freud for context: The Return of the Repressed comes from Sigmund, and the core concept is that things once comfortable and familiar that we repress for whatever reasons will inevitably return to haunt us because we’ve never resolved how we feel about them. This led to his concept of The Uncanny, which Freud called “unheimlich”—or “unhomelike”—because what once protected and nurtured us re-emerges transfigured into forms that now threaten us instead. Overly reduced, the womb becomes the tomb. The whole notion of homelike become unhomelike obviously has a particularly pungent and ironic meaning when applied to a domestic situation comedy—the domestic situation comedy—of the early ‘60s.

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O Rob! Part 1

O Rob!--Part 1
Part 1

How the best sitcom ever helped pave the way for many of our current cultural ills

by Michael Gaughn

AT ITS HEIGHT, The Dick Van Dyke Show was seen by more than 17 million viewers a week. The most popular sitcom of this past year, Young Sheldon, averaged just over 9 million viewers. There were 52,600,000 TV households in 1963; there are more than twice that now. Roughly translated, about 33% of the people watching TV in 1963 tuned in to the Van Dyke show, while around 13% of viewers today watch Young Sheldon. (I admit I’ve thrown enough apples and oranges together here to make a fruit salad but

the basic proportions are accurate enough.) And the programming on the only three networks available then added up to a tiny fraction of what virtually any TV viewer can access now.

In an age of rampant tribalism and the acute atomization of media, it’s easy to forget how dominant and influential a single TV series could be—especially when that series didn’t resemble anything else that had been on television and seemed like a harbinger of the medium’s future. There had been plenty of domestic comedies before Van Dyke but those husbands and wives were neither young or old but tended to exist in an ageless realm of staid maturity. And everyone tended to live in a non-specific middle-American everywhere. You knew the husbands had jobs but you rarely, if ever, saw them at work. The level of sophistication was decidedly low—everybody seemed to eat meat and potatoes, and if they went out at all, it was to the movies. Knowing references to current culture were taboo, considered likely to alienate the lowest common denominator.

Rob and Laura Petrie were young and hip-enough suburbanites living in the very real New Rochelle, NY with Rob taking the train or driving to his job in midtown Manhattan where he was the head writer of a comedy/variety show viewers readily identified with similar shows hosted by Sid Caesar, Red Skelton, and Milton Berle. The series was peppered with spot-on nods to Leonard Bernstein, bebop, Roger Corman films, Lenny Bruce-type comedians, Tennessee Williams, late-night talk shows, Ingmar Bergman, Albert Schweitzer, comedy albums, Off Off Broadway, underground film, and even the early days of audiophilia.

And at a time when nothing on TV was overtly political and definitely not specific, the Van Dyke show exhibited an obvious fascination with the Kennedy administration. In “Bank Book 6565696,” Rob yearns for a XKG-JFK-400 roadster. In “The Sam Pomerantz Scandals,” comedian Danny Brewster does a lengthy JFK impersonation. And Laura looks like a Jackie Kennedy clone when she goes to beg mercy from Alan Brady in “Coast-to-Coast Big Mouth.”

O Rob!--Part 1

But it went deeper than that. The money for the pilot for the show that would become The Dick Van Dyke Show was put up by Peter Lawford—a has-been actor whose only fame at the time came from having married into the Kennedy fold. But Lawford was just the beard—the funds actually came from the Kennedys, and series creator Carl Reiner had to send his script to family head Joseph Kennedy for approval before the money could be released.

The series and the administration seemed fated to be intertwined. The first episode was shot on the day of Kennedy’s inauguration; and even though everyone on the show was in shock from the President’s assassination, Reiner decided to go ahead with filming “Happy Birthday and Too Many More,” just without the usual live audience. It’s likely coincidental, but the quality of the series, which crested during the 1963 season, fell off after the end of the Kennedy administration, as if it had lost its lifeline.

I don’t think it’s too bold to say that Reiner deliberately crafted the Van Dyke show to be a definitive expression of the late ‘50s/early ’60s Liberal agenda. Episodes like “That’s My Boy???,” “A Show of Hands,” and “A Vigilante Ripped My Sport Coat” are direct expressions of the movement—again, something new for series TV, where any kind of advocacy was strictly forbidden. Reiner only became overt with his leanings once the show’s popularity was established but that worldview, and those politics, were baked into Van Dyke from the beginning and permeated it so completely that there’s barely an aspect, overt or covert, they didn’t inflect.

Let me pause, lest anyone get their hackles up, and say this piece isn’t really about politics, let alone any particular political position. The form of liberalism Reiner was espousing pretty much died with the Great Society and continues to exist, if it exists at all, as little more than a historical artifact, not unlike the Know-Nothings and Abolitionists of the Antebellum period. Any resemblance between it and any current politicians and movements is almost purely coincidental.

By having the identity of the Van Dyke show spring so obviously from the New Frontier, Reiner unavoidably brought all its baggage in tow. It’s not to for one second diminish the genius of the series to say that it exhibits the smugness and elitism many, detractors and supporters alike, saw as that movement’s greatest flaw. Rob Petrie is college educated, lives in an affluent Northeastern suburb, and works in a glamorous industry in NYC—pretty much the perfect embodiment of the Liberal ideal, and a life practically no one actually lived but many aspired to. 

The problem was that this somewhat utopian worldview could only work on TV—and only if you played by its rules. Its centerpiece was tolerance—but a kind of tolerance that was only feasible under a form of benign monarchy, laced with a heavy dollop of noblesse oblige, where Rob and Laura (as stand-ins for Jack and Jackie) were undeniably king and queen.

WATCHING DVD

Some might look askance at the idea of site called Cineluxe devoting an article—let alone a two-parter—to an old TV series. Two immediate rejoinders: TV always has been and always will be nothing but sitcoms and melodramas, so old really has nothing to do with it. And the Van Dyke show is one of the few pre-‘90s sitcoms that holds up well when viewed on a big screen.

The series was shot on 35mm by veteran cinematographer Robert De Grasse, who cut his teeth on RKO classics like Stage Door, the Rogers & Astaire Carefree, and the Robert Wise noir Born to Kill—which goes a long way toward explaining how a relatively low-budget 30-plus-episodes-a-year black & white sitcom looks so damn elegant. It’s not the last word in the filmic art, but it doesn’t look like it was shot in somebody’s closet either.

That it was all originally framed for 19-inch TVs—which means lots and lots of medium shots and closeups—isn’t as jarring as it could be, mainly because the material is so strong that you quickly shake off any twinges of claustrophobia. The big screen also tends to expose any dings, scratches, stains, or painted-over hinges in the sets—which are more beat up than they should have been—as well as continuity errors and shots saved in post by way of the optical printer. 

The quality of the sound is all over the place, from season to season and sometimes from episode to episode within a season—and even with an episode. The last third of Season 3’s “Scratch My Car and Die,” for instance, sounds like they swapped out the boom mics for tin cans and string. Not that the audio for this series had to do much heavy lifting, but the too bland sound of the first two seasons tends to make the material feel flatter than it is and the actors more plastic than they are.

The release of the series currently streaming for free on practically any service you can think of is a pleasure to watch but looks like somebody went a little heavy with the edge enhancement. A new release done with a more delicate touch would be very much appreciated—and since it seems like the original 35mm sources are in decent enough shape, why not just do it in 4K next time?—although I’m not seeing where HDR would bring much to the party.

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The series reinforces this constantly, almost obsessively. The most blatant example is “My Husband is the Best One,” where it’s driven home that Rob is by far the smartest, most talented, and attractive person in the show’s universe (when Laura tells him, “You’re the best one and you know it, and so do I,” Rob responds, “Right!”) and that everyone else, other than Laura and including TV star Alan Brady, are mere peons (“Petrie is truly the genius behind the genius. The swift satirical sword belongs to him. Brady merely wields it.”). This is revisited in a more explicitly political context in the two-part Season 5 episode where Rob runs for councilman, where he’s seen as superior to a far more qualified candidate just because he’s taller and more personable. 

The ultimate message of the Van Dyke show would seem to be that height and a kind of modest charm are the keys to ruling a benevolent society. There are constant references throughout the series to Rob and Laura’s attractiveness and a large number of episodes focus on how they’re pursued by almost everyone they come in contact with. Meanwhile, there are just as many reminders of the inferiority of everyone else in the cast—how Buddy is short and dumpy, Sally unattractive and old (Rose Marie was just two years older than Van Dyke), Mel a cringing marshmallow, Millie a snoop, a nag, and a lousy cook, Jerry an uncouth braggart, and Alan Brady a tyrannical, egotistical boor. 

I could continue to cite examples—they’re legion—but you get the idea. 

All of this fed from and helped reinforce the Camelot mystique, the myth, created largely via America’s popular-entertainment apparatus, of a young and vibrant couple that would lead the country into a prolonged and enlightened Golden Age. That all of course collapsed utterly after the assassination, with no one, inside or outside the Kennedy clan, able to assume the mantle—mainly because no one had a Jackie to go with their Jack. But the core of the idea—of the enthralling power of a mass-media-created political mythology—didn’t die; in fact, it was just getting on its feet and would ultimately lead to the rise of the cult of celebrity.

Part 2 suggests that while the values promoted by the Kennedy Administration and promulgated by the Van Dyke show were plowed under by the tumult of the ‘60s, they refused to rest in peace, and, mutated, rose again to permeate the current cultural landscape

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

O Rob!--Part 1

Buddy, Sally & Mel—the bungled & the botched

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Review: Anatomy of a Murder

Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

review | Anatomy of a Murder

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Held together by Jimmy Stewart’s career-defining performance, this epic-length courtroom drama looks exceptionally good in the 4K HDR

by Michael Gaughn
December 23, 2022

The second American Renaissance (c. 1955 to 1962) spawned a whole slew of mainstream iconoclasts. Coltrane, Mingus, and Monk in jazz, Weegee in photography, Warhol in art, Glenn Gould in classical music, Lenny Bruce in comedy, Ginsberg in poetry, and Aldrich, Kubrick, and Sirk in the movies all stand at the beginning of the long and fecund list that sums up the tenor of that time, an era that coughed up more cultural radicals than any other. 

Director Otto Preminger was a provocateur, a bad boy, but he was never an iconoclast. He very much wanted to be seen as being a member of that club but his interest in transgression didn’t run deep. He was mainly interested in breaking taboos as a way to grab headlines and fill theater seats. At the end of the day, he was a guy who made the occasional intriguing film but was essentially a workmanlike director with a penchant for publicity. 

All of which makes it curious that his Anatomy of a Murder has just received a 4K HDR release. I could name a couple hundred movies that deserved that attention long before Anatomy. The way titles are chosen for 4K is so random it almost feels like it’s being done by lottery. 

To be clear, I actually like Anatomy of a Murder. I’ve liked it ever since I was a kid and sneaked downstairs late at night to watch it once everyone else in the family was asleep. And it always held my attention, even at its almost three-hour run time and arbitrarily broken up by a seemingly endless number of commercials. It’s a talky film, a courtroom drama that takes almost a whole hour to get to the courtroom, and yet somehow works, despite problems—partly because it was made at the right moment in time so that the whole of the culture helps prop it up, but mainly because of Jimmy Stewart.

To start with that propping up, Anatomy springs from the trend toward gritty documentary-style dramas that began with The Naked City in 1948 (which were themselves inspired by the Neo Realist films out of post-World War II Italy). That style really didn’t take root until the mid ‘50s, only to be erased by the emerging tumult of the early ‘60s, to then re-emerge, more heavily stylized, in the early ‘70s in movies like The French Connection, Taxi Driver, and urban exploitation films—only to be once again obliterated, likely forever, by the emergence of fantasy and blockbuster movies in the late ‘70s.

Anatomy has a down-at-the-heels look appropriate to a small industrial city in Michigan in the late ‘50s. Shot on location, nothing was done to spruce up the decay that had begun to envelop the country as the post-war boom began to fade. That tack can make many films of the era feel just tawdry and depressing but it works here because the actors bring a heightened enough presence to the action to offer sufficient relief from the gloom—though it has to be pointed out that they overdid it with Stewart’s house, which is so relentlessly filthy it’s hard to believe somebody like Stewart would ever live in a dump like that. 

Casting was never Preminger’s strong suit, so what you get here is incredibly hit and miss. Arthur O’Connell and Eve Arden do what they can with the hoary clichés of the alcoholic, washed-up attorney eager for redemption and the wisecracking underpaid and unappreciated secretary. Joseph Welch does an outstanding turn as the crotchety but droll and benign judge. And Murray “Mayor Vaughn” Hamilton is estimable as ever in his patented role of arrogant and put-upon schlemiel. You can only feel sorry for Brooks West as the easily duped district attorney—the weakest link in the script and casting, who’s present just to be Stewart’s straw man. And while Lee Remick constantly grabs the camera’s attention, even in the crowded courtroom scenes, it all comes a cropper whenever she has to open her mouth and attempt to act. 

Adding to the challenge is the use of locals as extras, who are fascinating to look at because they’re unvarnished reflections of the time. But the distance between them and that teeming gaggle of Hollywood actors is so extreme it almost topples the artifice by making clear the near infinite distance between those two worlds.

But, again, Anatomy is really all about Stewart, who was that rarity of being as much actor as star and throughout the ‘50s brought a maturity to his roles that audiences weren’t used to seeing from A-listers. His ability had always been evident—his performance in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington takes Capra’s precious, flawed bromides to a level he was never able to achieve via other actors—but Stewart, by sublimating his experiences in World War II, heightened movie acting in a way that’s never fully been appreciated. 

What he accomplished here is truly a feat—holding together an epic-length film that’s almost all dialogue by his performance alone. It’s especially fascinating to watch him take his evolved version of classic movie acting and use it to go toe to toe with Actors Studio types like George C. Scott and Ben Gazzara, who both, in their “we’re too good to be here” way, attempt to devour most of the scenery. There’s something about Stewart not only being able to single-handedly hold the picture together but dispatch these upstarts without breaking a sweat that’s both exhilarating and triumphant. 

Anatomy of a Murder looks damn good in 4K HDR—especially for a production that deliberately didn’t have a lot of polish. While there’s the constant bugaboo of elements on either side of dissolves looking compromised—especially problematic here since Preminger tended to rely on longer takes—they’re never quite as awful as the similar elements in Creature from the Black Lagoon. Anatomy, for the most part, looks like film, making it easy to stay immersed in the movie. While it’s neither as faithful or compelling as the transfer for Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, nothing happens along the way to jolt you out of the experience. The quality of the transfer is especially evident in many of the medium and tighter shots, where you really couldn’t ask for anything more. The one significant nit is that the HDR grade does occasionally make shots look a little plasticy or video-like—a fleeting annoyance; nothing persistent.

The audio is for the most part clean and well balanced—although there’s a scene in Stewart’s house near the end that’s oddly several dB lower than everything around it. The only times the dynamic range really comes to the fore are when Duke Ellington’s band is strangely grafted into the movie, which sound fine but really don’t add anything to the overall impact. I do once again have to point out that this is yet another older film where the original mono mix is nowhere to be found. I don’t understand the point of getting the look of a movie within striking distance of how it was originally presented and then playing fast and loose with the audio.

This might be the simplest and most definitive conclusion I’ve ever written: Watch Anatomy of a Murder just to savor Jimmy Stewart at the peak of his powers. This a sly act of virtuosity done with modest, almost humble, bravura by a performer too often enjoyed but not appreciated, too often passed over as just a comfortable old shoe. There is everything to be learned about movies and movie acting by watching Stewart rise so far above both the material and its execution and do the impossible without ever once succumbing to the temptation to pat himself on the back. 

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

PICTURE | Anatomy of a Murder looks damn good in 4K HDR, with the quality of the transfer especially evident in many of the medium and tighter shots

SOUND | The audio is for the most part clean and well balanced, although this is yet another release of an older film without the original mono mix

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Destinations: The Village Theater

Destinations | Village Theater

Destinations | The Village Theater, Coronado Island

No visit to San Diego is complete without a jaunt to this immaculately restored & reimagined first-run mini palace

by Michael Gaughn
updated December 23, 2022

Many towns have smaller vintage cinemas that they attempt to make attractive and relevant, with varying degrees of success. But you rarely, if ever, find an intimate older theater showing first-run films on three screens, the whole reimagined by a world-famous designer and nestled in a storied and storybook community as theatrical as the theater itself. That would be The Village Theater on Coronado Island.

Originally opened in 1947, the Village was shuttered in 2000, only to be boldly brought back by Vintage Cinema‘s Lance Alspaugh, who specializes in reviving Southern California theaters and last graced these pages when we described his efforts to help Quentin Tarantino reboot LA’s fabled Vista Theatre. Alspaugh was put on the trail of the Village by his contacts at Warner Brothers, who told him there was a small theater on the San Diego island that had fallen into disrepair but was well worth preserving.

Rather than just slap on a new coat of paint and call it a day, Alspaugh went big (thanks to generous support from the City of Coronado Redevelopment Agency), luring theater designer Joseph Musil, probably best known for his work on Disney’s flagship El Capitan in LA, out of retirement to buff and polish this, in its modest way, spectacular gem. The result was part restoration, part grand riff, a kind of Deco meets Xanadu take on movie-

above | the main auditorium of the Village Theater, the work of famed designer Joseph Musil

820 Orange Avenue
Coronado, California

—191-seat main auditorium
—two screening rooms with 42 seats each
—Sony 4K digital projection
—7.1-channel Dolby sound
—first-run movies
—classic films the last Wednesday of
   every month

not just another movie theater, the Village is a celebration of Coronado Island, San Diego, and Southern California in general

The Artechouse NYC show The Life of a Neuron incorporates the work of a number of artists to tell the story of neurons

going that pulled the Village out of the musty past and into the present, turning it into a celebration of Coronado and San Diego, and of Southern California in general.

Part of the attraction of visiting the Village is exactly that’s it not a tourist mecca but, with its 191-seat main auditorium and two 42-seat screening rooms, a kind of mini palace still very much in the service of the community. It’s not to stand in awe of but to be charmed by and settle into, its flair not meant to be awe-inspiring so much as soothing, conducive to easing into a relaxing night at the movies.

For all its retro trappings, the Village is very much a modern cinema, replete with Sony 4K digital projection and 7.1 Dolby surround—but so far no Atmos because, like with the Vista, nobody’s yet found a way to deploy the height speakers without making hash out of the décor. And while the seats are contemporary and comfortable, there’s been no strong inclination to replace them with loungers because of the dissonance that kind of too cushy outsized seating would create with the surroundings.

Both intimate and ebullient, the Village is a perfect fit for Coronado, a place designed for desultory strolls, lined with the requisite small shops and bistros, all wrapped up in a seaside atmosphere free of big, look-at-me gestures—with the possible exception of the 

click on the image to enlarge

the proscenium of Disney’s El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles, probably Musil’s most famous restoration

Destinations | Village Theater

the iconic Hotel del Coronado, probably best known from Some Like It Hot, is just down Orange Avenue from the Village Theater

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famed Hotel del Coronado, instantly recognizable as the resort where Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Marilyn Monroe mixed things up in Some Like it Hot, and just a short, diverting walk down Orange Avenue from the Village.

Just over the bridge from San Diego, the Village Theater is inviting for dinner and a movie, a day within Coronado’s Brigadoon-like world within the larger world, or, coupled with an extended stay at the Hotel Del, the entertainment complement to a romantic retreat in this most romantic of border towns.

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

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Where’s the Danger, Will Robinson?

Where's the Danger, Will Robinson?

Where’s the Danger, Will Robinson?

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Here’s a modest proposal: Let’s scrap movie warnings and just let people think for themselves

by Michael Gaughn
December 13, 2022

I suspect you’ll be as surprised as I was to find out there’s violence in the romantic comedy Breakfast at Tiffany’s. There’s also apparently foul language in the classic Dick Van Dyke Show episode “Coast-to-Coast Big Mouth.” And sexual content in the beyond fluffy Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers vehicle Swing Time. The list of supposed transgressions in legendarily anodyne entertainments like these is long and adds up to a mystery as deep and baffling as the murder of the Black Dahlia. My efforts to date to ferret out moments of vile corruption in any of the above slapped have so far proven futile, but I’m still in there digging.

It would be easy to keep mustering examples but they would quickly become redundant. Take any of the above no-nos and factor it out by a few thousand and you’ll have a good idea of what’s afoot here. There’s no lack of evidence. The larger question is, who is this institutionalized squeamishness meant to serve? And is there any point in being warned off from entertainment that was never meant to offend, where any reasonable person should be able to allow for the shifting of the cultural winds, knowing even our most deeply held current strictures will inevitably fade with time, will someday be seen as being as wrongheaded as the things we so zealously damn today?

The pivot here is that whole idea of intent to offend. Most mainstream entertainment since the early ’70s has come with a strong titillation factor, which has created a masochistic mass addiction to being shocked and jolted and all-around assaulted, with all the various forms of amusement having become a symbiotic exercise in adolescent acting-out. Most movies exist to dance up to the line of too much, teasing with the notion they’ll somehow step over. This isn’t the place to discuss how antithetical all that is to anything resembling art, how each wave of transgression can only make us more callous, creating a demand for amping things up to the next level the next time around, so each successive wave becomes even more brutal and offensive, and deadening. 

Given that, I suppose there is some utility in having a warning system to let you know how much of your soul you can expect to lose in exchange for being exposed to a recent film. But rather than having vague and hopelessly subjective admonishments, we should take the mania for quantification that’s made Rotten Tomatoes so popular and seemingly definitive and apply it to something actually useful—maybe some kind of graphing system that shows how often and to what intensity a film indulges in things that are mainly meant to appeal to our primate brain. (More useful still would be some kind of social-oppression index, but that’ll never happen.)

But what does all this have to do with the eras before we traded overt for covert censorship? I would contend, nothing. Which is why a warning system meant to deal with an industry that thrives on inducing and sustaining a permanent state of arrested development just seems silly and insulting when applied to any epoch pre heedless indulgence.

I get that some people get a womblike sense of security from having everything they come into contact with wrapped in warnings. But there’s something about needing to be taken by the hand before we’ll approach even the most inoffensive fare, about essentially being told what to think about it before we even experience it, that can’t help but cast a pall over legitimate creativity and helps explain the clonelike sameness of content in a world drowning in diversion. 

Beyond that, constantly coddling the least intelligent, tolerant, and mature among us seems like a cynical, demeaning, and ultimately corrosive way to run a society. Admittedly, at a time when everything is a race to the bottom, warnings, in a perverse way, make some sense. But better, I would think, to start the long process of weaning ourselves from impossible guarantees and the pernicious influence of invisible judges and reclaim responsibility for what we watch and how we watch it. 

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

“A warning system meant to deal with an industry that thrives on inducing and sustaining a permanent state of arrested development just seems silly and insulting when applied to any epoch pre heedless indulgence”

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Review: Capote

Capote (2005)

review | Capote

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Strong performances, haunting cinematography, and powerful real-life source material make this 2005 rumination on the deeply flawed author worth a look

by Michael Gaughn
December 9, 2022

There’s not much point in beating up on older films since they’re already relegated to the past. Why take the time to pluck something out and hold it up for examination if it’s not worth recommending? That said, I think it’s fair game to talk about a flawed movie if it’s worth seeing at least once, especially if watching it offers some perspective on movies of the time or since. And that would be Capote.

This is a good film that could have been a great one—which is why I revisit it occasionally, only to experience the same frustration every time. It became apparent on this most recent viewing that it’s not great exactly because it was made at the moment when the movies stopped aiming that high, when they decided to invest only in the safely known and merely ape “great” gestures, putting all their money on style to convince audiences they were seeing something substantial; when they chose to divert instead of absorb.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Chris Cooper, Catherine Keener, and Clifton Collins Jr. are all exceptionally strong. Even Bruce Greenwood wrings every last drop out of the thankless straw man he’s asked to play. The cinematography is accomplished and sometimes stunning, making the subdued palette as expressive as its limited tonal range will allow. Some of the scenes are powerful, with about half the credit going to the acting and half to the writing. And the subject matter—the intersection of the depraved slaying of a wealthy Kansas farm family by a pair of disaffected drifters and Capote’s efforts to capture that act and its aftermath in a book—is compelling enough to bear the film along even at the moments when it sags.

To see how badly somebody can botch the exact same material, watch Infamous, released the same year—although I wouldn’t recommend approaching that radioactive stink bomb without a hazmat suit. Highlights include Sigourney Weaver as, as best I can figure, a female impersonator, a woefully miscast Daniel Craig as Perry, and the novel concept of gay sex in prison. 

Capote aces Infamous in every way. The problem is that it’s also, in every way, shallow; lacking the courage the material demands, it offers instead an initially convincing but ultimately hollow simulation of strength. Hoffman comes tantalizingly close to translating Capote into a fully realized fictional being but needed a better director than Bennett Miller, someone who could tell him when too much of his own, more regular-guy personality was showing through and when he was slipping into caricature. And the cinematography is so proud of its own stylishness that it loses sight of when it’s no longer serving the material. Seizing on the muted colors offered by the Arts & Crafts revival raging at the time the movie was made, the filmmakers make it look like the events happened sometime between the the 1930s and mid ‘50s instead of the early 1960s. But those events were very much a product of their era, and not staying true to the transitional, sometimes disruptive look of that time robs the movie of much of its potential power. Then there’s the pouty adolescent “the never shines in this world” aesthetic, which, with its myopic brattiness, underscores the film’s larger myopia.

Miller and company would like you to think they’re being trenchantly spare, allusive, enigmatic, speaking in a kind of haiku, but they’re merely striking a series of poses—mainly because they don’t know how to do anything more substantial. That was really driven home when I watched the bonus features and realized all involved could be mistaken for J Crew models. People from those kinds of backgrounds, so sure of themselves and so eager to please, couldn’t begin to fathom let alone effectively portray deeply tortured figures like Perry and Capote. 

Representative is the scene where Capote gives Perry a copy of Walden, telling him Thoreau was put in jail because he was an outsider. Capote might have actually said that, but I doubt it. It feels more like a screenwriter trying to telegraph a point and missing the mark by a country mile. (For those playing along at home, Thoreau was in jail because he wanted to be there not because anyone was eager to lock him up.)

There are instances everywhere of the filmmakers getting things wrong just because they weren’t interested enough in getting them right (like Hoffman’s height as Capote varying by more than a half foot during the course of the film so that in one long shot he almost looms over Chris Cooper). But maybe the biggest flaw is that Hoffman’s character is the only one that shows any nuance, who goes through any significant changes. Everyone else is just there to provide context and foils and help fill the frame.

Miller’s constant need to seem cool and detached also kept him from doing anything interesting with Foxcatcher, another project with tremendous potential but realizing practically none of it, and another one where a based-on-true-life lead—in this case Steve Carrell—comes across as borderline cartoonish.  

Because it tackles a deep subject shallowly, Capote is good for two or three viewings at most. By then, you’ve learned all its mannerisms. It’s not one of those films that matures, offering something new and deeper each time—and my point is that it should be. My other, perhaps larger, point is that this has become the way of the world. That it’s fashionable to treat blockbusters as disposable—as popcorn movies—masks the larger problem that no current films are substantial enough to have any worth beyond their first release, let alone establish a legacy based on anything other than marketing. We’ve all become so cool and detached we’re no longer capable of—or interested in—producing anything that challenges and endures.

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

PICTURE | While the cinematography is well served by the HD transfer, you can constantly sense how much more a straight 4K transfer would bring the experience

SOUND | The spare mix helps to highlight the impressive dynamic range, bringing an effective sense of presence to many of the scenes

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