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Review: The Mitchells vs. the Machines

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The Mitchells vs. the Machines

review | The Mitchells vs. the Machines

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Never having gotten the attention it deserves, this Sony effort is a cut above the usual animation fare on Netflix

by Dennis Burger
May 31, 2021

It’s not hard to imagine an alternate reality in which The Mitchells vs. the Machines is the hottest new title on Sonyflix or Sony+ or whatever Sony might have named its own studio-specific streaming platform, if only it had made it out of the gate before Disney, Warner, Paramount, and NBCUniversal flooded the market and exhausted the public’s patience for such solipsistic subscription services. In our reality, what would have been one of the most highly publicized animated blockbusters of 2020 was instead dumped unceremoniously onto Netflix and forfeit to the whims of its inscrutable algorithms. 

That’s a shame because The Mitchells vs. the Machines deserves more of your attention than does the typical Netflix animated feature. The involvement of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller is your first clue to that. In addition to writing and directing the surprisingly good Lego Movie and producing Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse—one of the best animated pictures of the past few years—the duo’s brand has become something of a seal of approval. So the fact that this comes from their production umbrella is significant. There’s also the fact that The Mitchells was written and directed by Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe, both known for their work on the excellent Disney Channel/Disney XD series Gravity Falls. 

Mush those two aesthetics together and you’ll get a good idea of the overall vibe of this energetic and delightfully weird animated adventure. On the one hand, The Mitchells vs. the Machines owes a lot to the look of Into the Spider-Verse, especially in the way it blends 3D animation with 2D tinkering, the results of which are a sort of best-of-both-worlds mashup. It’s not as if the two films look like they take place in the same reality—this one definitely exists within its own creative landscape—but you can see many of the techniques developed for Spider-Verse employed here in new and creative ways. On the other hand, Rianda and Rowe bring such a genuinely awkward and eccentric energy to The Mitchells vs. the Machines that it would be difficult to confuse it with your typical Lord and Miller production. 

The story revolves around a family of misfits who find themselves pressganged into saving the world after a Silicon Valley entrepreneur unwittingly unleashes the robot apocalypse in the process of attempting to give physical form to his AI digital assistant, cheekily named PAL. We’re told from the get-go that the Mitchells are dysfunctional weirdos but the thing that makes the movie work is that they aren’t.  They’re just a normal family, with a normal family dynamic and normal family problems. What makes them seem like oddballs, especially in their own eyes, is the contrast between their real personalities and the illusion of homogenized perfection constantly shoved down their throats by social media.

But if you’re expecting subtle social commentary here, you’re barking up the wrong animated tree. The Mitchells vs. the Machines is an overt parable about the current state of society and the damage we’re doing to ourselves by submitting to the tyranny of corporate-sponsored groupthink. Sometimes the dialogue gets a little too on-the-nose in broadcasting this message but that’s honestly one of the film’s few significant flaws. 

And you may be thinking to yourself that there’s a gross irony in the fact that this technological wonder of a film, produced by one corporate giant and now distributed by another, has the cajones to touch on the pitfalls of technology and the dangers of corporate greed. But grappling with this is one of the few subtle points made by The Mitchells vs. the Machines. The message isn’t that technology is bad in and of itself, that corporations are an inherent threat. Instead, what the story is trying to show is that our relationship with technology is unhealthy, and that our submission to corporatocracy is, by and large, the product of laziness and FOMO. 

Lest you think this is more a sermon than an entertaining way to spend an hour and a half, The Mitchells vs. the Machines wraps this message up in a thrill-a-minute action spectacle that’s also quite hilarious. The jokes don’t always land with equal effectiveness,—the film is far more effective when it’s blazing its own trail= and falters a bit when it leans on established tropes—but you’re guaranteed to guffaw at least once. 

I have a few other nits to pick. While the characters are, by and large, well-rounded, the story does lean into the clueless-dad cliché a little too hard. There’s a narrative reason for that but it still could have been handled better. The decision to make the youngest Mitchell child a dinosaur-obsessed boy also seems lazy, and the choice to have the child voiced by Rianda was puzzling. In a movie packed with such believable characters (believable in the context of this weird narrative, at least), little Aaron’s blatantly adult voice unnecessarily drew me out of the experience. The rest of the casting is spot on, though, especially Maya Rudolph as the Mitchell matriarch and Fred Armisen as one of the damaged robots that becomes part of the family. 

Thankfully, those voices don’t get buried in the hyper-aggressive Dolby Atmos soundtrack. This mix was a bit much for me, so much so that I had to pause the film and downgrade to a basic 5.1 option. But if you like your Atmos mixes intense and all over the place, you’ll dig this one quite a bit. Just one word of warning: it’s delivered at reference levels, so be sure to turn the volume of your receiver or preamp up a bit higher than you normally would for Netflix content, especially if you want to appreciate the richness and dynamics of the mix.

You’ll also want to watch The Mitchells vs. the Machines on the biggest and best screen available. The Dolby Vision presentation makes excellent use of the high dynamic range format, not only at the upper end of the value scale but also in the shadows. There’s plenty of breathing room in the image, from the darkest blacks to the brightest highlights, and although its palette is often relatively muted, the color gradations still exhibit the sort of smoothness you wouldn’t have seen in the streaming domain just a few short years ago. 

You might spot a few video artifacts, especially in the closing credits. But best I can tell, these glitches were intentionally baked into the image during production in an attempt to evoke the DIY filmmaking talents of Katie, the eldest Mitchell child, and they don’t seem to be a consequence of Netflix’ high-efficiency encoding.

Perhaps the best thing about the movie, though, is that it’s legitimate family fare. I know that’s generally used as a euphemism for children’s entertainment but in this case, the label deserves to be taken at face value. There’s a lot of dessert here to keep the young ones in your family engaged, but there’s also enough meat to appeal to audiences of all ages. It may not be the height of profundity and it’s a little uneven in its execution, but the good far outweighs the bad. And that alone elevates The Mitchells vs. the Machines way above the baseline for kid-appropriate movies distributed by Netflix. 

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 | The Dolby Vision presentation makes excellent use of the high dynamic range format, not only at the upper end of the value scale but also in the shadows  

SOUND | If you like your Atmos mixes intense and all over the place, you’ll dig this one a lot

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Review: Don’t Look Up

Don't Look Up (2021)

review | Don’t Look Up

This Adam McKay end-of-the-world black comedy comes up short but features standout performances from Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence

by Dennis Burger
December 28, 2021

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about Adam McKay’s new apocalyptic black comedy/satire is that it legitimately cuts straight to the heart of why our political systems, news media, and culture are so dysfunctional. Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising, given that McKay did the same for our financial systems with The Big Short, but it still stupefies me when anyone in Hollywood turns in a legitimate critique of our power structures and institutions without devolving into “our team good/their team bad” rhetoric. 

As such, Don’t Look Up will probably either infuriate or disgust anyone with super strong partisan leanings because in creating a hypothetical disaster scenario—newly discovered comet is plummeting toward earth and will result in an extinction-level event in six months—and imagining how our leaders and news media and indeed we ourselves would react, McKay doesn’t lay the blame of the hilariously awful response at the feet of one political party or media outlet. Indeed, one of the film’s neatest tricks is that it frames our political maladies as a wholly bipartisan issue without resorting to both-sides whataboutism. 

Much of that has to do with the fact that the story was co-developed with David Sirota, one of the most prescient and poignant—not to mention reviled—political commentators and journalists working today. You can see Sirota’s fingerprints on a lot of the story beats, from the way President Orlean (Meryl Streep) reacts to the news of impending doom by speculating about how it will affect the midterms to the rank superficiality of the media’s response (embodied brilliantly by Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry). 

The film is also bolstered by pitch-perfect performances from Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, the astronomers who discover the comet and attempt to warn the world. Both are so believable as real human beings that it’s sometimes easy to forget all of their previous roles. 

For everything it has going for it, though—and all of the above just scratches the surface of the genius of the script and many of the performances—Don’t Look Up is unfortunately hobbled by some major structural problems that keep it from being anywhere near as impactful as it could have been. 

Its biggest sin is egregiously overstaying its welcome at 2 hours and 18 minutes. There’s a really tight and biting 90-minute black comedy to be found somewhere within the raw materials scripted and shot for the film, and McKay simply couldn’t find it. You can feel him trying his hardest, but the editing is a mess. If you have anything resembling an editor’s bent, there’ll be times when you find yourself yelling at the screen, “Why was this scene necessary?” and other times when you can feel the absence of essential connective tissue, resulting in blatant plot holes and non sequiturs. 

For all the brilliant performances, there are also roles that feel woefully miscast. Hard as it is for me to type these words, Meryl Streep just has no clue what movie she’s in. And the ever-brilliant Mark Rylance—who plays this film’s eccentric Silicon Valley billionaire—is uncharacteristically bad, which I’m choosing to blame on McKay’s direction, not Rylance’s instincts. 

Make no mistake about it: There’s more about Don’t Look Up that works than doesn’t. Stack up a list of pluses and minuses and the former would dwarf the latter. But given that its flubs are rooted in the fundamentals of filmmaking, it can be a frustrating to watch, no matter how worthy of your time it may be.

Maybe you can take solace in the fact that it’s a beautiful film to behold, but perhaps not in the ways you might expect. Don’t Look Up was originally intended as a Paramount theatrical release but eventually ended up as a Netflix exclusive. It was shot on 35mm—with a mix of flat and anamorphic lenses—and finished in a 4K digital intermediate before, as best I can figure, being printed back out to a 35mm negative. 

As such, it has a wonderfully organic look, with plenty of light grain and that gorgeous analog halation that’s still nearly impossible to recreate in the digital domain without significant processing. The color palette is also delicious, and Netflix’ Dolby Vision presentation captures all of the above beautifully, with only a few brief instances of moiré indicating that the encode might have benefited from a handful of momentary bursts of higher bitrate of the sort you normally see on Disney+ and Apple TV+. 

The Dolby Atmos soundtrack, meanwhile, is nice and dynamic but rarely too aggressive. The most important thing is that dialogue is rendered with tip-top intelligibility, but when there’s the rare need for some more adventurous mixing, the soundtrack rises to the occasion.

I’m glad we don’t do star ratings or thumbs-up/thumbs-down assessments at Cineluxe because I would be crippled with analysis paralysis in attempting to encapsulate the merits and demerits of Don’t Look Up. It’s simultaneously one of the year’s best films and one of its worst. It’s as fascinating as it is frustrating. It tries to be Network, Dr. Strangelove, and Veep all at the same time but more often than not, those allusions simply serve to remind you it’s not quite as good as the works that inspired it.

Seriously, though, watch it for DiCaprio’s and Lawrence’s performances, if nothing else.

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 | The film has a wonderfully organic look, with plenty of light grain and that gorgeous analog halation that’s still nearly impossible to recreate in the digital domain without significant processing.

SOUND | The Atmos soundtrack is nice and dynamic but rarely too aggressive, with the dialogue rendered with tip-top intelligibility.

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Review: Shaun the Sheep: The Flight Before Christmas

review | Shaun the Sheep: The Flight Before Christmas

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Aardman presents a half hour of holiday-themed family-friendly sheep-fueled stop-motion slapstick

by Dennis Burger
December 21, 2021

We here at Cineluxe have a bit of a Christmas tradition, in that we do our best to curate high-quality holiday films worth watching with your family in your home cinema. But when you get right down to it, how many of us have the time to sit and watch a whole movie this time of year, what with the hustle-bustle and family gatherings? If that resonates with you, I’ve got some good news: Shaun the Sheep: The Flight Before Christmas—Aardman’s new animated holiday special on Netflix—is a perfectly delightful little seasonal romp, and it’s in-and-out in half an hour.

If you’re a Shaun the Sheep fan, you know pretty much exactly what to expect here: 10 minutes of setup followed by 20 minutes of chaotic slapstick hilarity and Buster Keaton-esque pratfalls, mixed with a heartwarming but non-shmaltzy message that’s not terribly deep but neither overbearing. If you’re not already a Shaun the Sheep fan and don’t recognize the name Aardman, it’s worth pointing out that this is a spinoff of the beloved Wallace & Gromit series, although that duo doesn’t make an appearance here.

I won’t dig into the plot as I don’t think it’s possible to do so without sounding like a raving lunatic. But I will say that it’s cute and inoffensive but altogether cheeky, and it’s perfectly appropriate for all ages. I could legitimately envision myself sitting down to watch it with my 78-year-old dad or my 7-year-old niece, and I’m honestly not sure who would enjoy it more. 

Stuck as I am reasonably close to the midpoint between those ages (plus or minus a decade), I think the thing I enjoyed most was the artistry of it all. Aardman has been doing stop-motion for decades upon decades now so you’d think there wouldn’t be much room for improvement. But compositionally speaking, the filmmakers have made some interesting choices here. Camera angles are dynamic. The character animation is, at times, elevated to the level of old Looney Tunes cartoons. 

And all of this is aided by a 4K Dolby Vision presentation that really lets you appreciate the details of the stop-motion puppets. The combination of higher resolution and expanded dynamic range makes the textures of the plasticine models and the faux hair and wool feel palpable. There’s a wonderful radiant quality to the tinsel and lights and other shiny accoutrements of the holidays. There’s a lovely amount of depth and a genuine sense of space that’s a huge step above last year’s Shaun the Sheep: Adventures from Mossy Bottom, which was shot and released in HD only. Indeed, the image is so detailed and dynamic that it almost takes on the quality of 3D, just without the glasses and the headaches. It may be family fare but the picture is inarguably reference quality. 

The Dolby Digital Plus Atmos track, meanwhile, isn’t quite so technically adventurous. Vocal clarity isn’t a problem since there is no discernible dialogue. The ovine characters bleat and grunt and the human characters speak in a sort of muttering mumble reminiscent of the nonsense vocal tracks from The Sims. By and large this is a front-heavy mix, and you likely won’t notice much going on in the surrounds or overhead channels, but that’s perfectly fine. The soundtrack serves its purpose, and fidelity is top-notch.

By the way, it’s worth mentioning that The Flight Before Christmas isn’t the only half-hour Aardman stop-motion holiday special to drop on Netflix this year. There’s also a little film called Robin Robin. The animation in that one is a bit of a departure from the studio’s normal style, and it’s worth a look for that fact alone. But I didn’t care for the musical numbers nor the voice acting. 

So if you have time for only one new stop-motion-animated half-hour Christmas special this year, opt for Shaun the Sheep. It remains to be seen whether it ends up becoming a holiday favorite, but it’s cute,  laugh-out-loud hilarious, perfectly timed, has oodles of genuine personality, and is one of the most visually engaging things Aardman has done to date. 

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 | The 4K Dolby Vision presentation makes the textures of the stop-motion puppets feel palpable, gives a radiant quality to the tinsel and lights, and creates a genuine sense of space.

SOUND | The front-heavy Atmos mix doesn’t have much going on in the surrounds or overhead channels but the soundtrack serves its purpose, and fidelity is top-notch.

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Review: Red Notice

Red Notice (2021)

review | Red Notice

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Netflix spent $200 million to come up with this action-driven heist film that critics hate but viewers seem to love

by John Sciacca
November 18, 2021

While Netflix has dumped Hollywood-level boatloads of cash into previous productions à la Martin Scorsese’s mega The Irishman ($159 million), and Michael Bay’s Underground ($150 million), Red Notice boasts the streaming giant’s biggest budget to date, along with its highest level of A-list talent, in the form of Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Gadot. With an estimated budget of $200 million, and a limited theatrical release to be eligible for awards consideration, any thoughts Netflix isn’t treating its original tentpole productions with the same focus as traditional Hollywood studios is totally out the window, further eroding any arguments against streaming services as legitimate forms of entertainment.

Of course, we’ve learned time and again that big budgets and casts don’t guarantee a good movie, so the obvious questions are, “Does Red Notice work? And is it worth your time?”

With a current Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score of 35%, you might say, “No,” but when you counter that with the 91% audience score, it’s probably apparent Red Notice is designed to entertain viewers less than cater to critics.

While it doesn’t break any new ground, and relies heavily on elements from heist movies like the Ocean’s films starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt, the Mission: Impossible franchise, and Indiana Jones—at one point, Reynolds even whistles the Indy theme—the chemistry between Reynolds and Johnson and their anti-buddy frenemy relationship makes for an entertaining two hours. Watching Reynolds needle Johnson for almost the entire film was great, and you have to wonder if the genesis of this bond was formed during Reynold’s cameo in Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw. We watched Red Notice right after Shang Chi and everyone in our group preferred Red.

We’re informed during the opening credits that a Red Notice is, “The highest level of arrest warrant issued by The International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), reserved for the world’s most wanted criminals.”

We’re then told that 2,000 years ago, Marcus Antonius gave Cleopatra three bejeweled eggs. While the whereabouts of one egg is known, the second is rumored to be in the possession of a notorious arms dealer and the third remains lost. An Egyptian billionaire wants to give all three of the eggs to his daughter, Cleopatra (Brenna Marie Narayan), as a wedding present, and he has offered a massive reward to whoever can deliver. This attracts the attention of international art thief Nolan Booth (Reynolds), but also puts FBI profiler Special Agent John Hartley (Johnson) and Interpol agent Urvashi Das (Ritu Arya) on high alert when one of the eggs is put on display at a museum in Rome. 

After thinking he has made off with the first egg, Booth is apprehended by Hartley and Das at his home in Bali, but the egg is then stolen by Booth’s main competitor for title of “World’s Best Thief,” The Bishop (Gadot). The Bishop also plants disinformation that makes it appear Hartley was in on the heist, which leads to he and Booth winding up in the same Russian prison cell, forcing them to work together.

Throw in a bad guy named Sotto Voce (Chris Diamantopoulos), who looks eerily like a cross between Paul Rudd and Dos Equis’ “World’s Most Interesting Man,” a bull fight, elaborate escapes and thefts, chases, and Nazis, and you’ll have a pretty good idea what Red Notice is about. 

What the film lacks in originality, it more than makes up for in fun, packing in almost non-stop action with plenty of big scenes and a ton of locations—Rome, Bali, Russia, London, Valencia, Argentina, Cairo, Sardinia, Paris—that keep the visuals fresh and interesting. There are also plenty of plot twists along the way to keep you entertained. 

And humor. Reynolds brings his signature snark to almost every scene, similar to the PG-13 patter he brought to Free Guy. In fact, I daresay the only reason I can think of to not see this is if you aren’t a fan of Reynolds’ humor. Also, since all three of the leads have experience playing superheroes—Black Adam for Johnson, Wonder Woman for Gadot, and both Green Lantern and Deadpool for Reynolds—they know their way around action and choreographing exciting fight scenes.

Netflix has been a real advocate for 4K HDR in its productions, so it’s no surprise that Red Notice was shot in a combination of 6K and 8K resolution, and that the transfer is taken from a true 4K digital intermediate with Dolby Vision HDR grading, resulting in images that are sharp, clean, and highly detailed throughout.

A scene in the opening shows a line drawing of Cleopatra, and its lines are crisp, sharp, and defined. Closeups reveal tons of detail in the actors’ faces, making it easy to see the creases, crags, and lines in Johnson’s head and face versus Reynolds’ whiskers and stubble and the smooth near-perfection of Gadot’s skin. You can also really appreciate the texture in surfaces like the stone and brick walls outside the museum in Rome or the pebbled surface of the doors and sides of an armored car, or the detail and sharpness of individual leaves in a jungle forest. Even lengthy shots like one of London in golden early morning light have lots of sharpness. 

There is also a ton of pop courtesy of the DolbyVision HDR grading. Right from the very beginning, I noticed how saturated the color red is in the titles. There are also beautiful, bright highlights off golden objects such as one of the eggs, or from bright sunlight streaming in through windows, or interiors lit by warm lighting that almost give the images a glow. Other scenes, like one showing video screens inside a security station, really pop with bright highlights. Black levels were deep and solid and clean throughout as well. The only bit of streaming nastiness I noticed was a moment when characters were dunked underwater, and there was a bit of posterization in the murky lighting.

Sonically, the Dolby Atmos track definitely enhanced the fun with a pretty dynamic mix. We get nice atmospheric effects like voices echoing off the hard museum walls, the flat sound inside an old bunker, the swirls of winds and snow, the background yells, commotion, and buzzers in a prison, or the huge crowd roars and cheers during the bullfight. 

The mix also really expands when called on via active height channels used effectively to add another sonic layer when appropriate. We get the almost requisite Atmos helicopter flyover that clearly races overhead, or the sounds of water bubbling up all around, and moments like The Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” blaring from all channels prior to the start of a big chase. 

There is plenty of action here, and I was surprised by the depth of the bass performance. Besides the report of gunfire, you can really feel the weight of heavy doors as they slam shut or the concussion of grenades as they go off.

Thanks to its generous budget, the visual effects and production values are first-rate, and the leads play their roles exactly as you would expect. Honestly, this feels like a big-budget Hollywood production that would have been successful at the box office. For Netflix subscribers, I can’t think of any reason why you wouldn’t add it to your list.

Probably the most experienced writer on custom installation in the industry, John Sciacca is co-owner of Custom Theater & Audio in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, & is known for his writing for such publications as Residential Systems and Sound & Vision. Follow him on Twitter at @SciaccaTweets and at johnsciacca.com.

PICTURE | The transfer is taken from a true 4K digital intermediate with Dolby Vision HDR grading, resulting in images that are sharp, clean, and highly detailed throughout.

SOUND | The Dolby Atmos track definitely enhances the fun with a pretty dynamic mix with surprisingly deep bass performance.

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