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Review: Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special

Pee Wees Playhouse Christmas Special

review | Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special

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The ultimate alt holiday special holds up surprisingly well and not just as a nostalgia trip

by Michael Gaughn
updated December 3, 2023

One night about eight years ago, right around this same time of year, I had just introduced a five-year-old girl, a seven-year-old boy, and a prematurely jaded 20-year-old film student to some classic Max Fleischer cartoons and they were clamoring for more. I couldn’t find any other good ones on YouTube, so I decided to follow a train of thought—and take a big gamble—and introduce them to Pee-Wee’s Playhouse via the Christmas special.

All three sat rapt throughout. I was surprised that almost every big laugh landed and nobody in that rag-tag group was thrown by the show’s fever-dream take on the holiday. The only real comment came from the five year old, who reacted to Pee-Wee running around the playhouse screaming “It’s snowing! It’s snowing! It’s snowing!” with a vaguely admiring “He’s crazy.” I couldn’t disagree.

The Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special is by far the best thing Paul (Pee-Wee Herman) Rubens ever did. The early seasons of the Playhouse had their flashes of brilliance, but seemed more daring than they were mainly because they were being shown on Saturday morning on CBS. By the time of the Christmas special, the series had run its course, having become a little too educational for its own good. There was really no good reason to expect anything great out of this primetime offering, let alone an act of genius.

It’s no longer possible to appreciate just how bold the Playhouse Christmas was, unapologetically deploying just about every aspect of gay subculture to challenge the dominance of the safely patriarchal Bing Crosby/Perry Como portrayal of the holiday. But the show doesn’t spring from the rage, resentment, and overweening pride that mars practically every contemporary effort along the same lines, instead showing a world of others where everyone gets along out of mutual tolerance and respect.

Just as importantly, Rubens managed to simultaneously honor longstanding comedy traditions—this is practically a textbook of classic schtick—and the comfortable conventions of the network holiday special while doing the best job since Charlie Brown of actually capturing the feel of the season, which is why it’s as strong today as when it debuted in 1988.

There’s a simple test you can take to determine whether the Pee-Wee special is for you: If the show’s opening doesn’t have you convulsed with laughter, you’d be better off watching the Hallmark Channel or Die Hard instead. The beautifully modulated series of gags in this off-the-charts production number rivals the pacing of the comic revelations in the best Chaplin shorts.

There’s little point in recounting the standout bits—although Little Richard on Ice, The Billy Baloney Christmas Special, Grace Jones in a crate, and Hanukkah with Mrs. Rennie are all classics. And it’s hard to get enough of Larry Fishburne as a very urban Cowboy Curtis. That’s not to say that the show doesn’t occasionally sag, but the cameos by Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, and Joan Rivers are all mercifully held to about 15 seconds each. The only truly painful moment is K.D. Lang’s incredibly misguided take on “Jingle Bell Rock,” which she clearly meant as a goof but was unable to goose above the level of a high-school talent show.

This special is from the late ’80s, before TV started aping film-production techniques, but Rubens turns all the various shortcomings of that deeply and permanently flawed medium into virtues. The playhouse is unapologetically set-bound, which reinforces the idea of a man-child living completely divorced from the outside world. (That Pee-Wee only really worked within the artifice of a children’s show helps explain why he never translated well into movies, and why his TV incarnation is way less retrograde and offensive than all the other man-children who overran the ‘80s—and plague us still.) The primitive computer graphics still work because they don’t try to be anything more than what they are—the projections of a child’s imagination. The now legendary puppetry and stop-motion animation remain brilliant.

I was surprised by how good the show looks on Netflix. But you first need to get beyond the opening animation, where a welter of artifacts makes the snowfields look like they’re covered in soot. You can’t expect a TV production from 30-plus years ago to have contemporary sharpness or subtle gradations of color—which would be way out of place here anyway. Everything is appropriately vivid and cartoony, and while there’s the occasional soft frame, there’s never anything egregious enough to pull you out of the show. [NOTE: The special isn’t currently available on Netflix, but the Pee Wee Herman YouTube channel has a restored version available here.]

Watching the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special is like listening to ‘20s small-group jazz—it’s impossible not to feel happy. A lot of shows cynically try to nail the feeling of holiday cheer out of a mandate to spur a nation of knee-jerk consumers to buy yet another round of crap they don’t really need and on the outside chance their not-so-special effort will become up a perennial and rack up some ill-gotten residuals. But the Pee-Wee special has something sincere about it that reminds me a lot (and don’t let this creep you out too much) of Phil Spector’s A Christmas Gift for You—another genius effort from an outsider looking for redemption in the pop-culture heart of Christmas.

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 | About as good as you could ever expect a late-’80 TV special to look—although the restored version available on the Pee-Wee Herman YouTube channel looks strangely desaturated

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Review: Wormwood

Wormwood (2017)

review | Wormwood

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Half the content in Errol Morris’s Netflix documentary series on a CIA coverup is must-see viewing—the other half is just an ill-conceived waste of time

by Michael Gaughn
November 6, 2023

If you’re as annoyed as I am by all those overproduced, content-thin pseudo documentaries full of cutesy animation and labored dramatic reenactments that have come to flood Netflix, blame Errol Morris. His 1988 The Thin Blue Line shook up the moribund documentary genre and took it in a radical new direction by introducing images and conventions—including a sometimes cheeky, sometimes brooding tone—straight out of narrative cinema. He can’t really be held responsible for what far less talented, for more ingratiating filmmakers have done with the form he created. But he can be held responsible for offering up an unintentional self-parody in his effort to try to fit into the Netflix mold.

Half of 2017’s Wormwood—the stuff that directly revolves around Eric Olson and his efforts to find out the real story of why his father fell to his death out of a hotel window while in the care of the CIA—is unsettling and riveting. It offers another badly needed glimpse into that organization’s notorious MK Ultra program, shows the failure of the investigative press to pierce the subsequent decades-long coverup, and tells the wrenching story of Olson, who threw away a potentially brilliant career in psychology to get to the bottom of his father’s death. All of that is well worth watching.

The other half—speculative reenactments of the events leading up to and a way from the supposed suicide, with Peter Sarsgaard anemically portraying Olson’s father—is well intended, thinks it’s being groundbreaking, but is nothing but inept, tepid filler. And although Morris has been threatening to do something like this for years, I suspect these segments are only there to the oppressive degree they are because they’re the kind of thing Netflix feels makes documentaries palatable for its audience. But they’re really just a cringe-inducing waste of time that puffs the series up to six episodes when it would have been far more engaging and powerful at three.

So I’ve got a very odd recommendation to make: Definitely watch this series—it’s well worth it. But know that you’ll want to re-edit it in your head as you go along, blotting out all the threadbare theatrics, instead homing in on just the Eric Olson material—unless of course you actually like dramatic reenactments. In which case I have to ask, what the hell’s the matter with you?

I don’t think I can stress this enough: Wormwood is almost schizophrenic, but in a somewhat trivial way. The Eric Olson stuff is brilliantly done, the material is consistently absorbing, and it plays out with all the teases and reveals of a good mystery story. The other half is like having a son in film school and having to sit through the end-of-term screening of everyone’s final projects—except done here with a redundancy and tonal monotony that can make you feel like you’re trying to catch your breath in a vacuum.

That carries over into both the visuals and sound as well. Translating Olson’s therapeutic photo-collage technique into the supporting graphics works well for the most part. (Although it gets a little flip when it commingles images of actual people with shots of the actors portraying them, and Morris goes back to his “spiking the Cointreau” animation about five times too often.) The Olson’s home movies are well deployed to both convey the family in its time and to underscore key emotional points. The score for these segments—yet another dollop of poor man’s Glass—doesn’t really enhance anything but doesn’t do much to distract you, either. And while the video is dim and almost monochromatic, and the framing too clever by half, it doesn’t really impede Olson, Seymour Hersh, the Olson family’s attorneys, and others from presenting their material.

The reenactments, though, feature that relentlessly murky “did somebody forget to pay the electric bill?” look that’s served as a substitute for truly expressive cinematography for more than a decade now. What does this predilection for wallowing in a world where the sun never shines say about our collective psyche? This so-called aesthetic in no way makes the action more interesting—just harder to see. (And here, it even manages to stump Netflix’ usually stellar encoding, with obvious banding in a shot outside a hotel room door in Episode 3 and in the police interrogation scene and the interview with former Assistant DA Stephen Saracco in Episode 4, among other places.)

The score, which behaves itself for the most part during the Eric Olson-related segments, becomes just silly and grating during the reenactments—that monotonous noodling over dark, ominous tones, big on atmosphere but thin on emotion, that we now accept as the contemporary equivalent of the wall-to-wall scoring that helped sink hundreds of mediocre Studio Era productions. If you’re looking for nice, deep, gut-churning bass, the score serves up heaping helpings whenever it’s trying to cover up for the inept staging and convince you something exciting (or at least interesting) is about to happen.

I realize I’m circling back, but it’s a point worth emphasizing: The arc of Eric Olson’s story is documentary manna so well presented that it allows you to tolerate all the dramatic contrivance elsewhere—and how many filmmakers could manage to rise above their own misjudgment like that? But the reenactments seem to be nothing but an exercise in perversity. You can’t really say they summon up enough energy to qualify as sound and fury but they do manage to signify next to nothing. And Morris just can’t stop chewing on the hotel-room scene, showing it play out over and over again with minor variations when it carried whatever impact it was going to have (which wasn’t much) the first time around.

Anyone attuned knows that Errol Morris has had an odd career, and that he’s deliberately cultivated that oddness as a way to keep himself in the limelight. But something that went well beyond his usual quirkiness happened in the wake of his Oscar-winning The Fog of War, which is undeniably a sui generis masterwork. Like with Truman Capote and In Cold Blood, Morris seemed to have lost something essential by digging so deeply into a character as complex and bedeviling as Robert McNamara. He continued to do films on provocative figures—Donald Rumsfeld, Abu Graib, Steve Bannon—but lost the ability to rise to the challenge of his subjects, producing work that didn’t so much leave you hungry for more as hungry for somethinganything. The parts of Wormwood that work work because Morris was almost perfectly attuned to the material and because he obviously identified with and bonded with Olson, providing an emotional undercurrent that’s been missing since he bonded with the uniquely corrupt father figure McNamara. As for the reenactments, the only pertinent question is: What was he thinking?

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 consistently murky cinematography manages to trip up Netflix’ codec in a few places, with some obvious banding in evidence

SOUND | Intelligible dialogue during the interview segments—a lot of mumbling during the reenactments. The bass goes deep with impact during the dramatic scenes. 

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Review: A Life of Speed: The Juan Manuel Fangio Story

A Life of Speed

review | A Life of Speed: The Juan Manuel Fangio Story

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This Netflix documentary about the Formula One legend makes for compelling viewing, even if you’ve never heard his name

by Dennis Burger
March 30, 2020

Could Superman beat the Incredible Hulk? Is Batman a match for Iron-Man? These sorts of questions have filled the dreams of kids and comic-book geeks alike for decades, but they’re rarely seen as any more than conversation starters or flights of fancy. And yet, for some reason, asking who’s the greatest baseball player or quarterback or goalie of all time is viewed as legitimate discourse amongst grown-ass men and scholars alike.

Those of us who follow motorsports (serious ones, at least) know what a ridiculous question this is when applied to our own passion. Auto racing is as much about the team as it is the pilot. It’s as much about the car as the team. It’s as much about the chaos of meteorological conditions as it is the car. And, yes, we all have our favorite drivers (shout-out to Jan Magnussen), but that often has as much to do with personality or manufacturer affiliation as it does talent.

But such subjectivity didn’t satisfy Dr. Andrew Bell of the Sheffield Methods Institute, who set out in 2016 to use quantitative statistical analysis to remove (or at least account for) the differences made by cars, teams, weather, and even year-to-year variance in order to determine who was the best Formula One pilot of all time. I mention this research only because the resulting paper forms the backbone of the new Netflix documentary A Life of Speed: The Juan Manuel Fangio Story. And this fact alone—the use of scientific parsing to answer the question of who could beat whom if they never competed head-to-head—makes for one of the most fascinating sports documentaries I’ve seen in ages—perhaps ever.

As with any documentary focusing on the accomplishments of a single individual, A Life of Speed leans heavily on biography and provides a solid understanding of who Fangio was and what made him tick, even if you’ve never heard his name before. It also provides a pretty satisfying history of Formula One, a sport that emerged just as Fangio was making a name for himself in long-distance dirt-road racing. On top of that, it sprinkles in a bit of the history of automotive engineering.

Truth be told, if the film weren’t so well made, it would probably crumble under its own weight. It attempts to be three or four documentaries at once—which is at least two too many—and if not for the talents of director Francisco Macri and editor Luciano Origlio, it would be a mess. Somehow, though, it isn’t a mess. Quite the opposite—by juggling so many balls so effectively, A Life of Speed manages to be interesting in several ways simultaneously.

Of course, given its historical nature, the bulk of the film is comprised of archival photographs, old film stock, kinescope recordings, and even a few well-played VHS tapes. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing for Netflix’ 4K HDR presentation to latch onto, though. The present-day interviews and newly filmed historical reenactments are beautifully framed, wonderfully composed, and have a distinctive low-contrast look that still makes great use of the enhanced dynamic range and color gamut of modern home video standards.

If there’s one glaring criticism I can level from a creative perspective, it’s that the score is just awful. If you’ve ever used one of those power-nap apps that are all the rage these days, you’ll recognize the New Age-y ambience in a heartbeat.

Also, the film is presented in a 2.39:1 aspect ratio, which wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that Netflix positions its subtitles halfway into the black bar at the bottom of the screen, with no way of moving them. So if you’re using a constant-height projection setup, you’ll likely miss half the film’s dialogue and narration (unless you speak Spanish, Italian, German, and English).

Don’t let those quibbles turn you off, though. Even if you’re not a fan of Formula One—indeed, even if you’ve never heard the name Fangio—A Life of Speed is one of those rare documentaries whose quality isn’t contingent upon your interest in the subject matter.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | Although most of the film is made up of archival material, Netflix’ 4K HDR presentation does a great job with the present-day interviews and newly filmed historical reenactments

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Review: The Edge of Democracy

The Edge of Democracy

review | The Edge of Democracy

This Oscar-nominated Netflix film is less a documentary than a personal journal about Brazil’s tentative hold on democracy

by Dennis Burger
January 28, 2020

The Edge of Democracy is one of the most infuriating, frustrating, and foreboding films I’ve seen in ages but also one of the most compelling, and without a doubt the most haunting. Had it been your typical faux-objective political documentary, I’m not sure that would have been the case. But in telling the story of Brazil’s relatively recent political struggles, filmmaker Petra Costa makes no pretenses about objectivity. What she’s really telling here is her own story—a story about watching her civilization collapse around her.

Right from the giddy-up, Costa lays all of her cards on the table. Her parents were revolutionaries who fought against the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985. She was only five when the country officially returned to democracy in 1988. Her first vote in a national election was cast for Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The ideology of Partido dos Trabalhadores, the Worker’s Party, runs through her veins.

As such, when she began documenting the crumbling of Brazil’s fragile democracy, starting with the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2015, she didn’t do so dispassionately, with the eye of a historian. More than anything, The Edge of Democracy centers on her own frustrations, sense of foreboding, fury as she watches her country being torn apart by partisanship, fueled by the corruption of oligarchs and the malfeasance of the media.

You wouldn’t think this would be fodder for twists and turns, but it is. Rather than plot twists, though, the film dwells in personal, emotional twists. There’s the revelation, for example, that Costa has just as many familial ties to the oligarchs at the center of the corruption scandal that rocked the country as she does to revolutionaries.

That adds another shade of gray to a very personal story that’s all shades of gray, really. It’s a story told with nuance, but also with passion. More than anything, though, what impresses me is Costa’s ability to deftly and clearly straddle the line between the specific and the general. She never fails to articulate the unique failures of the Brazilian political and judicial system that make all of this a distinctly Brazilian problem. On the other hand, she clearly illuminates some universal truths about the ways in which any representative government can devolve into plutocracy and then autocracy through demagoguery and manufactured consent.

The rhythm with which she oscillates between these two perspectives is frighteningly effective. Just as I started to settle into a “Phew, that couldn’t happen here” sense of security, Costa blindsided me with a stark reminder that, yeah, it totally could. The tempo and pacing of the film are also aided by deft editing and a non-linear unfolding of the story that emphasizes both the personal, emotional trauma this film represents, as well as its effectiveness as a warning to the rest of the world.

Much of the imagery that comprises the film is taken from archival film footage and TV broadcasts, some of it from source tapes and some of it from cell phones pointed at TV screens, mixed with handheld video that looks to be prosumer level and drone shots interspersed throughout for flavor. It definitely makes for a visually interesting film, though not one you’ll watch as demo material. Netflix HD transfer does the imagery justice, and is almost never the weak link in the delivery chain, except in those cases where a few seconds here and there of original footage might have benefited from high dynamic range and an expanded color gamut.

The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 soundtrack unsurprisingly leans heavily on the center channel, with the mix focusing primarily on Costa’s narration (provided in your choice of English or Portuguese, although even if you opt for the former, the bulk of the audio is still in Portuguese with subtitles).

The sound design does occasionally get a little big for its britches, especially in its overuse of the surround channels to convey the chaos of celebratory crowds or demonstrations. I can’t help but suspect that what we’re getting here is a theatrical sound mix not a nearfield mix made for home theaters, but the good news is that such overemphasis on surround sound is generally limited to scenes without narration or even dialogue so it’s hard to grump about it. It never interferes with the telling of the story, although it does intrude on moments that could have served as a prompt for quiet reflection.

No matter. I haven’t stopped thinking about The Edge of Democracy since I saw it so I’ve had plenty of opportunities to reflect on my own time. It’s a rare political documentary I think I’ll revisit on occasion, not due to the revelation or illumination contained within its 121-minute runtime—although there is plenty of that—but more due to the fact that it’s simply one of the most engrossing and intimate human dramas I’ve seen in ages, genre be damned.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | Netflix’ HD transfer does the imagery justice and is almost never the weak link in the delivery chain, except when a few seconds of original footage might have benefited from high dynamic range and an expanded color gamut

SOUND | The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 soundtrack unsurprisingly leans heavily on the center channel but does occasionally overuse the surround channels to convey the chaos of celebratory crowds or demonstrations

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Review: Life in Color

Life in Color

review | Life in Color

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Netflix makes major strides toward picture-perfect reproduction with this David Attenborough nature series

by Dennis Burger
June 24, 2021

If you have someone in your life who insists that streaming simply isn’t capable of delivering an AV experience worthy of a true home cinema, here’s a fun little experiment you can perform, assuming you’re willing to spend a few bucks. If you don’t have one already, go out and buy a Roku Ultra for $75 or whatever they’re selling for at the moment. Hook it up to the biggest and best display in your home. Fire up either of the first two episodes of the new Netflix/BBC co-production Life in Color and skip past the opening credits. Then invite the bitrate dogmatist in your life to sit and watch a few minutes of the series. If they’re anything like most videophiles, they’ll soon be begging to borrow the disc or at least know what it’s called so they can order their own copy.

And that’s when you spring the trap. Hit the back button on your remote and return to the Netflix homepage. If your guest balks, hit Play again and implore them to point out any flaws in the imagery. Challenge them to show you any noteworthy compression artifacts. Ask them to point out any instances of less-than-razor-sharp detail, any loss of color purity. Or, you know, maybe take a kinder and gentler approach. It occurs to me as I’m writing this that perhaps there’s a good reason I don’t have more friends.

This series, played via good streaming hardware, needs to be put in front of the eyeballs of more home cinema enthusiasts, if only as a prime example of just how much streaming has improved in just the past few years. But even if you’re not here to inspect the imagery with a magnifying glass and marvel at the masterful application of high-efficiency compression, there’s a lot to love about Life in Color. The series is, in many ways, a bit of a throwback for host David Attenborough, a return to a time when he wasn’t merely narrating documentary footage but actively participating in the filming. I thought we’d seen the end of that era, given Attenborough’s age (95, for those keeping count). And this may be the last time we see him traipsing through the jungle to point out something cool and eye-catching.

It’s also something of a return to the more specialized sort of documentaries he more commonly made in the ’80s and ’90s. For the past few years, Attenborough has been focused on making grand statements, as if every new documentary released under his name was made as if it would be his last. But, as its name in implies, Life in Color is content to go deep rather than wide, focusing on one topic with laser precision: The variety of colors in nature.

The first episode, “Seeing in Color,” focuses on all the ways life uses chromaticity to attract mates, signal friends, and repel foes, as well as the different ways animals see in color, both within and outside of the spectrum visible to humans. The second episode, “Hiding in Color,” focuses mostly on camouflage.

The third episode, “Chasing Color,” is a weird one, and I mean that in the best possible way. It sets itself up as a sort of making-of for the first two episodes, exploring the new camera and lens technology developed specifically for this series. But then it veers off to answer to the question: “How do you know that?” In other words, it’s a pretty satisfying explanation of the science behind the surprising little bits of trivia dropped by Attenborough throughout the earlier episodes.

As much as I loved the series—although, truth be told, I would happily consume nine hours of Attenborough narrating golf, or paint drying, or my last colonoscopy, so maybe I’m not the best judge of its quality—I almost found myself distracted by how impossibly perfect it all looks. Just over two years ago, I absolutely raved about the gorgeousness of Our Planet. But Life in Color looks even better, mostly because the few remaining encoding flaws that made brief onscreen appearances in the older series are nowhere to be seen here.

There are underwater shots reminiscent of those in Our Planet, and yet none of the minor color banding that briefly reared its head there. There are scenes here that push the bounds of image complexity in ways Our Planet never did, and yet they appear without blemish. (There’s one shot, in which a peacock bristles its plume in slow motion, that’s such a kaleidoscope of fine detail that I would expect it to be riddled with some digital ookiness even at 100 mbps. And yet, with my nose on my screen, I couldn’t see any of the telltale signs of HEVC reaching its breaking point. I can only assume Netflix recently adopted a new encoder, because otherwise I just cannot make sense of why this imagery looks this pristine.)

Dolby Vision is also employed to stunning effect. There are colors on the screen that older home video technology simply wasn’t capable of reproducing—vibrant reds and yellows and greens that fall outside the boundaries of the color space used in the HD era.

I guess if you want to pick nits about the presentation, you could take issue with the fact that the audio is merely 5.1, not Dolby Atmos. But it’s still a lovely mix. And it up-mixes into Atmos beautifully, especially in the scenes set within jungles or forests.

So, yeah, maybe don’t take my advice when it comes to confronting your streaming-skeptical friends. Perhaps take a nicer approach. But make them sit down and watch Life in Color anyway. It’s honestly some of the most compelling home cinema demo material I’ve seen in years.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | Dolby Vision is also employed to stunning effect, producing vibrant reds and yellows and greens that fall outside the boundaries of the color space used in the HD era

SOUND | The 5.1 soundtrack is lovely, and up-mixes into Atmos beautifully, especially in the scenes set within jungles or forests

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Review: My Octopus Teacher

My Octopus Teacher

review | My Octopus Teacher

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This Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary is relentlessly self-obsessed but still worth watching for its nature footage

by Dennis Burger
April 6, 2021

Netflix’ My Octopus Teacher tells the story of Craig Foster, a South African director/cinematographer who, in the midst of a midlife crisis of sorts, commits to free-diving in the kelp forests near Cape Town every day to get his head together or whatever. During his dives, he quickly befriends a common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) and becomes obsessed with her life and daily habits.

Your enjoyment of the film will likely largely come down to whether or not you like Foster as a human being, because he not only narrates the film from beginning to end in the form of one continuous monologue but the footage often cuts to him sitting at a table, staring about three inches to the left of the camera, telling his tale Spalding Gray style.

He may be a perfectly fine man. I don’t know him. But he exhibits so many infuriating quirks that I found myself struggling to connect with him. He has an annoying habit shared by all emotionally distant people, in that he often refers to himself in the second person, present tense. So, “I realized” becomes “You realize,” and “I rushed to the surface as fast as I could” becomes “You rush to the surface as fast as you can.”

Far too often, when there’s the perfect opportunity to focus on the amazing underwater imagery of the octopus, we instead cut to Foster for absolutely no reason. He also almost never shuts up—except for a few shots where he stares into the camera and gulps pensively to let us know that it’s time to have an emotion. Shots that absolutely speak for themselves are narrated like a bad audio commentary from the early days of Laserdisc and DVD, when directors hadn’t figured out yet that they can occasionally stop talking if they don’t have anything interesting to say.

But those are pet peeves and don’t speak to the quality of My Octopus Teacher as a film. Here, too, I have some concerns, though. Most of the footage for this ostensibly nonfiction film was shot over the course of many months, and much of it was captured via handheld underwater cameras. In the process of stitching together a reasonably linear narrative, it’s obvious a lot of editorializing was done, which is totally fine. The problem comes from the fact that sometimes this editorializing feels far too forced.

At one point, for example, Foster’s octopus friend loses an arm in a shark attack. That in itself provides an opportunity to watch the fascinating process of her regrowing the arm over time. But since the narrative thread the filmmakers settled on centers on all the lessons Foster learned from the octopus, he of course has to concoct some hackneyed fable about how if this cephalopod could heal such a catastrophic wound, he could find a way to crawl out of his funk and hang out with his son. To call this a stretch would be to test the limits of elasticity.

About a quarter of the way into My Octopus Teacher, I really started to become distracted with the artifice of it all. And I say that as someone who is infatuated with David Attenborough’s world-spanning documentaries, many of which rely on footage that’s practically staged.

The difference is that Attenborough’s series don’t present themselves as personal journeys. My Octopus Teacher does. Foster tells the tale of his treks into the kelp forest as if no one else in the world existed, not even his family. The fact that he’s alone, that this is a solitary endeavor, is half the point of the narrative. And indeed, a lot of the best footage comes directly from his hand.

But then we’ll cut to a shot of him, underwater, holding his camera, which rightly raises the question: Wait, who’s filming that footage? There are also long top-down drone shots of Foster entering the ocean, which further undermines the integrity of the yarn he’s spinning about being oh-so-alone during this stretch of time.

So you’re probably wondering why I still recommend watching My Octopus Teacher despite all its problems. That simply comes down to the fact that Foster managed to capture some of the most compelling and fascinating footage I’ve ever seen of the daily life of an octopus. We get to see her hunting, hiding, and healing. We get to watch her study Foster as curiously as he studies her. But my favorite shot by far is a sequence in which Foster catches her playing, entertaining herself, staving off boredom. I wish he hadn’t intruded on this footage with his obvious observations about what she’s doing, because it’s clear to anyone with eyes. But there’s nearly literally nothing Foster could have done to diminish the value of this imagery.

And there are so many other shots throughout the film that have the same impact. Far too many documentaries  about cephalopods focus on animals in captivity. Here we have the opportunity to see this magnificent alien creature in her natural habitat, and I only wish I could think of a word more poignant than “revelatory” to describe my reaction to it all. 

Granted, not all of that footage is what you would describe as home-cinema reference quality. The most compelling of it is more than a bit raw, kinda dingy, questionably lit, and obscured by silt. This is interspersed with much more professionally shot footage and the aforementioned indoor interview shots of Foster. But given that so much of the video is so unpolished, it’s not surprising that Netflix’ presentation wasn’t mastered in Dolby Vision. We just get a UHD transfer with no HDR.

Still, even just a few short years ago, such a presentation would have been riddled with banding, so it’s heartening to see that Netflix has stepped up its game in terms of delivering non-HDR video. There’s one shot near the end of a setting sun that’s a bit clipped, but other than that, I didn’t spot any noteworthy video artifacts.

The Dolby Digital+ 5.1 soundtrack, meanwhile, is dominated by Foster’s narration and the sort of new-agey score we’ve come to expect from nature documentaries in this vein. There’s nothing really special about it, but it serves its purpose.

When you get right down to it, though, the soundtrack could have consisted of Gilbert Gottfried reading 50 Shades of Grey and I still would have suffered through My Octopus Teacher enthusiastically and with roughly the same level of frustration. You stick the word “octopus” in the title of a documentary and I’m going to watch it, just on the off chance of seeing these enigmatic beings behaving in mysterious ways I’ve never witnessed before. This one delivers on that in spades, and I imagine I’ll be watching it again sometime very soon. The next time I do, though, I think I might mute the soundtrack and cue up Pink Floyd’s Meddle on a loop in the background instead.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | Aside from a shot near the end of a setting sun that’s a bit clipped, the UHD presentation, sans HDR, exhibits no noteworthy artifacts 

SOUND | The purely utilitarian Dolby Digital+ 5.1 soundtrack is dominated by narration and the sort of new-agey score we’ve come to expect from nature documentaries in this vein.

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Review: Marriage Story

Marriage Story

review | Marriage Story

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The Oscar-nominated Netflix drama turns out to be a deft character study

by Dennis Burger
January 9, 2020

I’m almost ashamed to admit that this year’s Golden Globes played some part in my awareness of Noah Baumbach’s new Netflix-original film Marriage Storyashamed because I couldn’t care less about awards ceremonies and rarely base any of my viewing habits on self-congratulatory pomp. I do, on the other hand, care quite a bit about Baumbach’s work. And I’m drawn to him, in part, because his films aren’t predictable. While I’ve loved all of his collaborations with Wes Anderson (especially the delightful Fantastic Mr. Fox), his own directorial efforts have been a little more uneven. For every engaging The Squid and the Whale, there’s been an off-putting Margot at the Wedding. For every mercurial Frances Ha, there’s been a muddled While We’re Young.

But even Baumbach’s failures have been noble failures because he has a singular talent for writing dialogue that’s simply unmatched in our generation. And all of that is on full display in what I consider to be one of his best yet.

Marriage Story stars Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver as soulmates at an impasse. It’s ostensibly the story of their divorce, territory Baumbach already explored from one perspective in The Squid and the Whale. But to call it a film about divorce would be to miss the point. Instead, it’s about the individual sense of identity that’s often lost in any marriage, but also the intimacy that’s gained in return. That back and forth, give and take, yin and yang ultimately influences all of the film’s themes.

It really isn’t the thematic or narrative heart of Marriage Story that makes it work, though. It’s the characters that drive the film, as well as Baumbach’s gift for crafting dialogue that sounds completely organic and natural to the ear but upon closer inspection turns out to be a masterfully assembled jigsaw puzzle conglomerated from pieces pilfered from two different boxes.

Characters talk past and over one another, they inject non sequiturs and distractions, they leave thoughts dangling and stumble over interruptions, and if you didn’t know better you might suspect that Baumbach is allowing his performers to improvise. He’s not. Every pause, ever “uh,” every clipped and broken sentence fragment is meticulously scripted to keep the flow of what’s actually being communicated between two characters who aren’t really listening to one another unambiguous for the viewer.

It helps, of course, that the film is perfectly cast. It’s seems clear to me that Baumbach selected Johansson and Driver not merely because of their talent, but as much for the audience’s expectations of what they bring to a film. With Johansson, we expect a certain emotional complexity—an ability to convey two contradictory emotions on her face, in her body language, in her vocal inflections. With Driver, we expect a certain caged-animal ferocity—explosions of intensity and frustrated vulnerability. Baumbach plays around with those expectations in wonderful ways, and I hesitate to say more than that.

The one thing I will say about characterization, though, is that Baumbach seems to be going for more universal relatability with this film than with previous efforts. Much as I love his last Netflix original, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), I’ll admit that as with most of his films, I found its neurotic characters as unrelatable as they were fascinating. It could simply be that I’m from Alabama, where—to paraphrase Julia Sugarbaker—we proudly display our crazy out in the open rather than bottling it up until it boils over, but there’s always been an aloof affectation to Baumbach’s characters that made them seem more than a little alien to me.

That’s far from the case with Marriage Story, save for a few supporting characters whose affectations are more of a contrived West Coast sort that I at least understand. At its heart, though, the two leads are less defined by their neuroses than by their sympathetic human failings.

If all of the above makes Marriage Story seem like the sort of film that could just as easily be viewed on a laptop or mobile screen, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan gives the characters room to breathe, opting for wide shots throughout except when closeups are needed for punctuation. It’s a film that begs to be seen on the largest screen in the home, and one that rewards quality of presentation thanks largely to its distinctive, filmic look.

Shot on Kodak Vision3 200T and 500T film stock in an increasingly uncommon 1.66:1 aspect ratio, Marriage Story is an analog cinephile’s dream. The organic grain structure and photochemical idiosyncrasies of the film stock give the film a unique character that’s missing from so many modern, digitally captured movies.

What surprised me, though, is that Netflix’ UHD/HDR presentation—at least by way of my Roku Ultra—is more than up to the task of delivering this unabashedly analog imagery pretty much perfectly intact. Much as I love this modern era of high-efficiency, relatively low-bitrate streaming, I’m not blind to its limitations. One expects a few seconds here and a few seconds there with a little light banding or digital noise. Indeed, there is a handful of shots in Marriage Story—one in particular featuring characters positioned against an inconsistently lit cream-white wall—where I leaned forward to judge just how prominent the banding would be. And yet I saw none.

Ask me to find a visual flaw in the presentation and I might point to one scene in which the structure of the film grain and the textures of an onscreen object interfere a little and may have been presented a little less noisily in a much higher bandwidth download or on disc. But without being able to do direct A/B comparisons, I’m just guessing.

That aside, Netflix presents Marriage Story beautifully, preserving the slight golden cast of the film stock, as well as its overall low-contrast aesthetic. It’s important not to confuse contrast and dynamic range here, as the HDR does leave a lot of room between the not-very-black blacks and the never-very-intense highlights, allowing us to peer deeper into shadows and appreciate the subtle differences between, for example, two black pieces of clothing dyed differently and aged asymmetrically.

The sound mix also hinges on subtleties. Mostly mono, the barely-surround soundtrack makes another strong case for why the center channel is the most important speaker in your sound system. The mix does spread to the front left and right speakers occasionally, mostly to give width to Randy Newman’s sparse-but-poignant score, but also, creatively, to give some space to the often dense and chaotic cacophony of dialogue.

Netflix, it seems, is somewhat under siege as of late, with some criticizing the inconsistent quality of its original offerings and others (yours truly included) musing on how the service can maintain any semblance of identity in the face of new competitors like Disney+ and the upcoming HBO MAX and Peacock.

If the company keeps supporting the creation of films like this, though, it can count on my $15.99 every month. And if Noah Baumbach is going to keep maturing as a filmmaker and delivering consistently amazing character studies like The Meyerowitz Stories and now Marriage Story, he’s going to convert me into an unapologetic and unreserved champion.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | Netflix’ UHD/HDR presentation is more than up to the task of delivering the movie’s unabashedly analog imagery pretty much perfectly intact

SOUND | Hinging on subtleties, the mostly mono soundtrack makes another strong case for why the center channel is the most important speaker in your sound system

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Review: The Social Dilemma

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review | The Social Dilemma

This Netflix docudrama on the dangers of social media is so eager to please it nearly undermines its own arguments

by Dennis Burger
September 14, 2020

Netflix’ The Social Dilemma is one of the most frustrating viewing experiences I’ve had in ages—frustrating because it has a really important message to convey, but sometimes undermines that message with cutesy animation and heavy-handed musical accompaniment. It’s also frustrating because it wants to be equal parts documentary and drama, but fails in the latter respect. And it’s frustrating because I wanted to write it off entirely but ended up being won over despite my better judgment. But most of all, it’s frustrating because it relies on some of the same tactics it decries.

As you could probably ascertain from its title, The Social Dilemma is about the dual-edged sword of social media and the impact it’s having on society. What makes the documentary aspect of the film work as well as it does is the reliance on Silicon Valley experts like Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, who helped create the very tools that they’re now warning us about.

Harris—co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and the “closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,” according to The Atlantic—dominates the film with a series of cogent explanations about how the algorithms that drive everything from Google searches to Facebook interactions work. On the upside, he’s given a lot more room to breathe here than in his famous TED Talk on the subject, allowing him to connect some dots I’ve never seen connected before, at least not in the way they’re connected here.

But for every illuminating observation from Harris, The Social Dilemma feels compelled to spoon-feed the viewer a disjointed dramatic narrative that feels like the mutant child of an ABC Afterschool Special and one of those awful Chick Tracts that used to litter the gutters of New Orleans.

It’s in these dramatizations that The Social Dilemma commits its greatest sin: Assuming the stupidity of the viewer. The story here is about a family whose two youngest children are being harmed by social media—one child whose entire sense of self-worth is based on “Likes” in response to photos she posts, the other who ends up sliding down the slippery slope of fake news and becoming radicalized.

Handled well, I suppose it could have worked. But in attempting to explain how the algorithms that encourage engagement trap users in a dopamine-driven feedback loop, the filmmakers decided to anthropomorphize these algorithms and give them dialogue, à la a twisted techie version of Pixar’s Inside Out.

This takes what is genuinely a malignant phenomenon and turns it into a seemingly malicious one, which undermines a lot of the film’s messaging. It also directly contradicts the views of the experts, who do a much better job of explaining the nuances of these wholly impersonal algorithms and the way they manipulate users to generate revenue, engagement, and growth. But nuance doesn’t suffice these days, I suppose, so we end up with these wholly unnecessary abstract dramatizations that do little more than confuse the uninitiated and drag down the film.

By the time its closing credits rolled, though, The Social Dilemma won be back with a well-developed conclusion that cuts straight to the heart of the divisiveness, anxiety, depression, suicide, social upheaval, and general discord sowed by social media—as well as some of the upsides of this technology. I wish some of this balance had been sprinkled more evenly through the rest of the film, because we can’t have an honest conversation about the impact of social media without covering the good as well as the bad (although, full disclosure: I’m a little biased in this respect since Facebook was responsible for my reunion with my daughter).

If the entire 94-minute running time of The Social Dilemma had lived up to the quality of the last 10 minutes or so, it would be much easier to recommend. But I’m left with a dilemma of my own here, because I think the message of the film is so important that you should view it despite its flaws. Just go in armed with the knowledge that director Jeff Orlowski employs some of the same psychological sleight-of-hand the film warns us about.

As for the presentation of the film itself, Netflix delivers The Social Dilemma in Ultra HD without HDR10 or Dolby Vision high dynamic range. As soon as I noticed this, I deliberately kept an eye out for the sort of visual artifacts inherent in high-efficiency streaming without HDR—banding, crushed blacks, poor shadow detail, etc. Surprisingly, I couldn’t see them, which makes me think Netflix may be employing a higher-than-usual bitrate for the film, but I’m just speculating. Whatever the explanation, it points to the fact that streaming services are constantly evolving in terms of quality of presentation. Even just a couple years ago, Netflix would have had to stick this SDR film in an HDR container to deliver a stream this artifact-free.

The Dolby Digital+ 5.1 soundtrack has a lot of overbearing sound effects and a generally doom-and-gloom score that could have easily gotten out of hand with the wrong sound mixer. Thankfully, it’s a mostly front-channel affair, and dialogue clarity is topnotch. It should sound fine whether you’re watching on a full-fledged home cinema system or a simple soundbar.

Again, I’m of two minds here: I want you to watch The Social Dilemma, but I also want you to know what you’re getting into. It’s a significantly flawed film, but it’s also an important one. If the hypnotic animation and ham-fisted dramatizations are too much for you to stomach, though, I highly recommend watching Tristan Harris’ TED Talk instead. It doesn’t connect the dots nearly as effectively as does The Social Dilemma, and it isn’t nearly as well-produced, but it also isn’t burdened by all the saccharine fluff that mires this docudrama.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE |  Netflix delivers The Social Dilemma in UHD without HDR10 or Dolby Vision high dynamic range and yet the presentation is artifact-free

SOUND | Mostly a front-channel affair with topnotch dialogue clarity, the Dolby Digital+ 5.1 soundtrack should sound fine whether you’re watching on a full-fledged home cinema system or a simple soundbar

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Review: Space Force

Space Force

review | Space Force

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Netflix’ blatant and desperate attempt to try to salvage some of its Office audience results in a sitcom that manages to fire on no cylinders

by Michael Gaughn
June 6, 2020

It’s not hard to figure out how this all began. Netflix had an unexpected boon when Millennials didn’t discover The Office until after it had migrated over to the subscription service, but then seized on and devoured it as if they’d just summoned up manna. But then, as part of the seemingly endless proliferation of streaming providers, NBC decided to launch Peacock and bring The Office back under its wing, depriving Netflix of what is probably its steadiest flow of viewers.

While they would never publicly admit it, Netflix suddenly found itself desperate for a new series that looked, walked, and smelled enough like The Office to retain a sizable portion of that show’s audience.

Enter Office creator Greg Daniels and star Steve Carell with the idea for a service comedy—an idea as old as the hills (or at least as old as Aristophanes)—and as current as today’s headlines. Or at least that’s how they would have presented it at the pitch meeting—assuming they even had to do a pitch before Netflix handed them a blank check.

To cut right to the chase, Space Force is nothing but a mess, way overinflated in every possible way, the most hackneyed of sitcom premises puffed up with a stupidly large budget and a random mob of a cast. If this had been made for a fraction of the money and with a little less latitude, the constraints might have brought some badly needed discipline to the exercise, yielding something tighter, funnier, and more watchable. Maybe.

What we have instead is the Netflix equivalent of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World—a too-big-to-fail comedy that puts a gun to your head and tells you to laugh because it’s desperate to justify its existence. There are some laughs, occasionally (I have to admit to falling for the space chimp bit), but far too rarely. Space Force is the sitcom equivalent of spending an evening watching a room full of monkeys perched at typewriters and waiting for one of them to randomly tap out a joke.

To go with another animal analogy, it’s a great, big slobbering Labrador of a show, utterly superficial, with no ideas or convictions of its own, desperately trying to please everybody and willing to do anything to get a little attention. If you’ve heard that it’s a spoof or satire, you heard wrong. Space Force doesn’t bite—it licks your face instead. It doesn’t have the creative courage to skewer a damn thing.

But enough generalities; let’s talk specifics. You get the sense Carell loves The Great Santini and decided, for some reason, to drag it into the present. But it would be hard to name another actor more different from Carell, with his extremely limited acting range, than Robert Duvall. That cognitive dissonance might help explain why Carrel can’t get a bead on his character but constantly shifts between playing a pint-sized general, Michael Scott, and an ambiguous third being who might actually be Carell himself.

The cast is big and, almost without exception, unexceptional, the most offensive member being Ben Schwartz as Carell’s media manager. His every moment on screen is the comedy equivalent of waterboarding. Carell’s character fires him in the first episode, which seemed logical and felt definitive, and led to the hope we were rid of him forever. But this is a cliché-laden sitcom after all, so he keeps arbitrarily popping back up throughout the series, like a horror-movie villain or a rodent, even though his shtick is predictable, his actions implausible, and he fails to generate any laughs.

The biggest offense—although you can’t really blame the completely bland, inoffensive actress saddled with playing her—is the pilot who starts out as Carrel’s whirlybird chauffeur and somehow ends up commanding a lunar mission. She’s not a character or the product of a legitimate creative act but a fashionable amalgam, born of checking off a bunch of boxes meant to suck up to contemporary sensibilities. As far as you can get from three-dimensional, she’s a direct descendant of the personified virtues in a medieval morality play.

More specifically, she’s only there to be the token tough-but-caring black girl who rises to a level of great responsibility because she has a massive father complex.

If there’s any glimmer of light in this black hole of a series, it’s John Malkovich as the lead scientist. He’s ultimately nothing but a stereotypically affected straw man, Alice to Carell’s Ralph, Felix to his Oscar. It’s only Malkovich’s ability to make something out of nothing that causes his screen time to add up to anything resembling creative redemption.

Pardon a little inside baseball, but I watched Space Force straight through when it debuted and planned to publish this review then. But my reaction was so strong, I felt the need to buy some distance before going public with my thoughts. Unfortunately, the weeks that have lapsed since have only reinforced my original impressions.

If you’re big on Anointed vs. Underclass fictions that come down firmly for the Anointed, this show is for you. If you find succor in a day-care center view of the world, then you’ll probably actually enjoy the image of a military mission jubilantly jumping around the lunar surface like a bunch of infants. I didn’t. Space Force shows how far we’ve devolved since Metropolis, and suggests the Fredersens of the world have irrevocably won.

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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