DVD

Why Britain will never complete with Boll and Fagrasso

Note: this film was sent to me by Baron Scarpia as part of our ongoing trade in dreadful movies. You can read his thoughts on the film in question here.

My good friend the Baron once opined that the UK traditionally doesn't have much of a track record for producing truly awful filmmakers. While Italy has given us Claudio Fragasso and Germany has bestowed Uwe Boll upon us, and America is responsible for Tom Green, I don't really think the British Isles has an equivalent. Broadly speaking, Britain tends to make films in the "drippy toffs played by Hugh Grant who find love" or "grimy northern squalor picture in which everyone has perpetually just been laid off from their job down the coal mines" models, and most of them are far from dreadful, just mind-numbingly tedious and depressing. Occasionally, an exception to the rule comes along, such as Pawel Pawlikowski's romantic drama My Summer of Love or Neil Marshall's excellent monster horror flick The Descent, which serve to suggest that perhaps the British film industry shouldn't be dismantled after all, but by and large this country wastes its lottery grants on brain-destroying crap like Sex Lives of the Potato Men (of which I managed to stomach approximately twelve minutes before turning off my TV and disconnecting it from the wall lest it somehow turn itself back on and subject me to yet more pain).

There's a third broad category of British film about which I've yet to say anything, and that's the gangster movie à la Guy Ritchie. I don't like gangster movies, particularly British ones. There are few things I find more irritating than watching a bunch of gristle-chinned wannabe thugs swaggering about, talking in incomprehensible Cockney accents and calling each other unpleasant names. About the only thing I find passably interesting about them is the moral grey area in which they operate, broadly speaking encouraging the audience to align its sympathies with a bunch of moral degenerates for whom theft, assault and murder is a way of life. It's possible to pull off if you're good: I'm sure I'm not alone in finding Hannibal Lecter to be a highly compelling character in spite of (or perhaps because of) his nastiness. Lecter isn't a gangster, but he serves to illustrate a point: if done right, it's possible to root for the bad guy.

The All Saints eagerly examine the papers for reviews of their film.

Honest doesn't get a lot of things right. For a start, it stars three-quarters of a British girl group known as All Saints. (If you've never heard of them, don't worry. They were never really relevant to begin with and are extremely unlikely to become so in the near or distant future.) If you've had the misfortune of seeing Mariah Carey or Britney Spears' forays into the world of acting, you'll know that such endeavours rarely meet with success, and that's before you even begin to take acting ability into consideration. The All Saints (I'm not going to bother referring to them by their actual names, because neither they nor their characters do anything in particular distinguish themselves from each other), I must assure you, cannot act. Given that at least one of them appears in virtually every single scene in the film, you'd be forgiven for assuming this to be a massive problem. Oddly enough, it's not, and the reason for that is that their incompetence is matched on every level, if not dwarfed, by a dreadful script, moronic direction and an outlook so morally derelict that it makes Dr. Lecter simply seem like a cheeky chappy who went a wee bit too far.

The All Saints, you see, are gangsters. Hard-talking ladies who walk the streets of 1960s East End London and routinely do things like steal diamonds and threaten innocent bystanders with crowbars and shotguns. One such jaunt goes wrong, and one of the Saints ends up being apprehended by and falling in love with a wretched excuse for a journalist, whose seemingly radical prose is matched in its incompetence only by every single other act of incompetence committed by the filmmakers. Along the way, we get to see the All Saints doing their damnedest to act menacing, getting stoned out of their minds and having a slow motion argument inside a moving vehicle. No, that last part is not a typo.

Cos this is, like, what the 60s was all about.

This film was directed by David A. Stewart, who the Internet Movie Database handily tells me was part of the Eurythmics. Barring some music videos that he shot for his own band, Honest was the first thing he ever directed, and I'm pleased to report that he has never stepped behind a camera since. He also provided the film's music and co-wrote the script (along with Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, who between them have written everything from Porridge to Across the Universe). A man of many talents, clearly. Or not. You see, consider that one person had his hand in so many pies and it begins to look pretty obvious why every single one of them tastes foul. No matter what's wrong with this movie (and there's a lot wrong with it), Stewart is the common factor. This is a man who thinks that the most exciting part of a car chase is a conversation taking place between the vehicles passengers, and that the best way to accentuate the tension is not to show exterior shots of the car travelling in slow motion, but to show close-ups of the characters talking in slow motion. He also believes that slowing down and speeding up his footage to a handy "Whoomfff!" sound effect is the height of stylishness, that shots of naked people writhing around during an acid trip is, like, the coolest, most provocative thing ever, and that the All Saints can act. To be fair, you could argue that he is simply being let down by useless leads, but then he also manages to draw useless performances from competent actors like James Cosmo and Corin Redgrave, which puts paid to that theory. (Oh, and Matt Bardock, who currently plays Cockney wideboy paramedic Jeff in Casualty, appears in this film as a Cockney wideboy gangster. I wonder if the loss of hair that he experienced between his appearances in these two productions is to do with the stress resulting in the knowledge that he had appeared in such a train wreck.)

Did I mention the script? Clement and La Frenais have done good work elsewhere, so I can only assume that, once again, the problems stem from our friend Mr. Stewart. Gangster movies generally have the unenviable task of aligning the audience's sympathies with people who are utterly nasty individuals who, by rights, should be locked away for the rest of their lives somewhere where the sun doesn't shine. Most gangster movies are reasonable honest about this and either don't attempt to excuse their anti-heroes' behaviour, or at the very least pit them against people who are equally or more repugnant than they are. Honest, despite its title, is anything but. At every possible occasion, the script attempts to exonerate the All Saints for their contemptible behaviour by offering pitiful excuses like suggesting that they don't like doing it (don't do it, then), that they're only doing it to get their dad a new telly (get a job, then), or that it's because their mother is dead (get over it, then). Oh, and we have a tasteless little subplot involving one of them teaching a lesson to a next-door neighbour who routinely assaults his girlfriend, which again is only there to show us that the girls are good after all, innit? (The Saint in question, incidentally, pours engine oil down the offending ladybasher's throat, which, in addition to being incredibly messy, strikes me as about as distasteful as you can get once you realise that the writers actually want you applaud this act of torture.)

One of the All Saints recreates how she got the part.

Oh, and the film is also content to wallow in its own hypocrisy, opening with the girls chastising a security guard for looking at pornography, despite the fact that the film is loaded to the gills with gratuitous nudity, the most leering of which is provided by two-thirds of the three-quarters of the All Saints, neither of whom are even attractive enough to warrant such exposure. I have, however, provided a picture of one of them, in order to rub their faces in their own double standards.

All this is well and good, but the film's greatest crime, by far, is how boring it is, and this is where my opinion and the Baron's part ways. The Baron, you see, feels that a film can do worse than be boring. I, on the other hand, think that there is no greater crime. Note to filmmakers: you can be as incompetent and as morally bankrupt as you like, but provide you do so in a semi-interesting way, you may at least retain my attention. Unfortunately, for the most part watching Honest is like watching paint dry. There are a few moments that make me shake my head in disbelief and cry out "What the fuck were they thinking?", but, for the most part, it's simply as dull and worthless as virtually every other British movie, and it's because of that that it doesn't make it into "so bad it's good territory". It's just a feckless, incompetently made waste of celluloid.

Incidentally, the back cover of the DVD proclaims that this film is a "cult classic". Presumably, in the same way that Manos: The Hands of Fate and ET: The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 are cult classics.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of July

• All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• Dark City (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Gangs of New York (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• Persepolis (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Teeth (R1 USA, DVD)
   

DVD review: 101 Dalmatians: Platinum Edition

One Hundred and One Dalmatians marks one of the few occasions on which I read the book (a childhood favourite that I still revisit every few years) before seeing the Disney film. Consequentially, perhaps, when I finally did see Disney's interpretation, it was something of a letdown, maintaining the plot of its source material but transposing a number of its most cherished moments. It's still a cracking film, though, endlessly rewatchable and constituting a welcome change of pace from Disney’s previous string of folktales and fairy stories.

Better late than never, I've reviewed Disney's Region 1 Platinum Edition release of 101 Dalmatians, a feature-packed 2-disc presentation of one of the studio's most enduring films.

Don't take advantage of the poor lady, you rats!

I've come to the conclusion that Andrzej Zulawksi's L'Amour Braque, coming later this year from Mondo Vision, has the single greatest opening sequence ever shot for any movie at any point in the history of cinema. Can you name another movie that features a band of thieves in Disney face masks robbing a bank, filling the air with coloured smoke, evading the authorities by pretending to be statues, then finally dancing in the streets of gay Paris to celebrate their success, all set to the battiest synthesizer music ever heard?

DVD review: The Frightened Woman

Not quite trash and not quite art, The Frightened Woman represents Italian popular cinema at its most trippy. It's just about as batty as they come, and I defy you to find another film that looks and feels anything like it. Beneath all that surface glitz, however, is a surprisingly deep construct, one that is likely to beguile and bemuse in equal measure.

We've got yet more toothed vaginas in my review of the deliciously weird The Frightened Woman, a unique offering of 60s sexploitation from Shameless Screen Entertainment.

DVD review: Teeth

Teeth is ultimately a highly promising debut feature that’s unique enough for me to recommend it on that basis alone. It has considerably more going for it than merely being different, however, most notably an excellent lead performance from an extremely promising actress and a quirky, infectious sense of humour. It’s not entirely satisfying, and it’s not quite as brave as its provocative premise might suggest, but it’s entertaining, engaging, and even strangely endearing. Be prepared to cross your legs, though.

Cross your legs and lock up your sons - Dawn is on the prowl! I kick off a delightful "vagina dentata" double bill with a review of Dimension Extreme's Region 1 release of Teeth, which proves the old adage that sex is indeed a weapon...

No innuendos about electric toothbrushes, please

Yesterday heralded the arrival of a much-awaited review copy, the delightful Teeth, a film about a young lady who has a set of razor-sharp fangs inside her vagina, and the hilarity that ensues as she has various, ahem, prickly encounters with the opposite sex.

If you've heard this story before, then you've probably encountered a form of the vagina dentata myth, which we might describe as a product of the male of the species' enduring suspicion and/or fear of women. You might also have heard of a no-budget British shocker called Penetration Angst, reviewed here by the indomitable Baron Scarpia. Penetration Angst is, I'm reliably informed, absolutely dreadful, which is why, when I first read Teeth's synopsis, I was surprised, to say the least, to discover that both films shared almost exactly the same premise. The notion of a toothed vagina is, of course, nothing new, but the precise details of the two films' plots makes it hard for me to believe that mere coincidence is at play here.

I've been saying for ages that, instead of remaking good films, studios would be better off remaking bad ones, and it sounds as if Penetration Angst is as bad as they come. Teeth, I'm sure, is considerably better, but I still haven't decided quite how I feel about it. Like Penetration Angst, it falls into the trap of making all the men that our intrepid heroine comes into contact with end up being filthy slimy perverts (to quote Tenebrae). It's frustrating because of its predictability, and also because it allows the writer/director, Mitchell Lichtenstein, to dodge any potentially difficult questions - like why are we rooting for a serial killer/mutilator? The way the film is set up, everyone who loses their wang (or, in one case, fingers) basically "deserves" it (yep, even the gynaecologist to whom she rather astutely pays a visit when she realises something isn't quite right downstairs), and the majority of the sexual encounters are forced on her (the only one that isn't is someone she actively seeks to entrap).

The acting in Penetration Angst is described as being uniformly awful (which is probably appropriate enough given the apparent quality of the rest of the film). This isn't a problem with Teeth, whose lead, Jess Weixler, is actually very very good. She has the rather unenviable task of playing a character whose head is firmly up in the clouds (she is a blissfully ignorant Christianity enthusiast who gives talks to impressionable teenagers about "waiting" - c.f. the Silver Ring Thing), and the film, not unreasonably, treats her attitudes without a great deal of respect. Somehow, though, she doesn't lose our sympathy, at least until the final third of the film, in which a rather predictable tonal shift occurs and it becomes considerably harder to root for her. Actually, it's a rather well-made film all round, more so when you realise that it's the director's first feature. I think this raises the bar in terms of quality and prevents it from simply being moronic dross. That, and the fact that a very interesting balance of horror and sly comedy is maintained throughout.

Expect a full review in the near future, once I've had a chance to mull it over.

Mondo Vision's La Femme Publique on Amazon.com

I hereby order ye to get thee to ye olde pre-ordering shoppe immediately!

Special Edition
Premium Edition (limited to 2,000 numbered copies)

The expected release date is September 30th, 2008.

Note: A few people seem to be under the impression that this is a UK release. Just to clarify, it's not: it's a US release.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of June

• King Kong (R0 UK, HD DVD)
• The Kingdom (R0 UK, HD DVD)
• Phenomena (R1 USA, DVD)
• Stardust (R0 UK, HD DVD)
• Strictly Ballroom (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• Tenebre (R1 USA, DVD)
   

"She's terrible!"

...well, not very good, at any rate.

In the UK, last week, ITV released its first batch of Blu-ray titles, among them classics like Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Black Narcissus and David Lean's Great Expectations - something of a departure, as I'm sure you'll agree, from the usual slew of third-rate action spectacles that invariably end up being released in high definition. Eager to see what ITV was capable of, I picked up a copy of their release of Baz Luhrmann's first film Strictly Ballroom.

It arrived this morning, and I'm disappointed to have to tell you that the results are considerably less than stellar. It appears that an old master has been used - a rather grimy one, and one that has been subjected to an alarming amount of grain reduction, sucking most of the fine detail out in the process. While it constitutes a noticeable improvement on the frankly pretty shocking American DVD from Miramax, that's hardly the greatest advertisement for the Blu-ray format, and ultimately I can only really recommend this release to absolute die-hard fans, or at least those with less than discerning tastes.

Strictly Ballroom
(ITV, UK, VC-1, 18.2 GB)

HD Image Quality Rankings updated

I've performed some updates on the HD Image Quality Rankings page, moving several 8/10-rated titles down into the 7/10 bracket. Among these are several of the more noticeably filtered Warner titles, along with such disappointments as The Simpsons Movie and Sony's somewhat unjustly lauded re-release of The Fifth Element. Two titles have also been pulled out of the prestigious 10/10 category and moved into the still highly impressive 9.5/10: Silent Hill, for having slightly elevated blacks (which can be corrected using the brightness control on your display, which you shouldn't really have to do), and King Kong, for some minor compression artefacts.

It's something of an indication of how good the best high definition transfers look that I am actually currently in a position of having to demote less impressive transfers. I consider this to be very good progress, given that, for the most part, even the best-looking standard definition DVDs were still heavily flawed.

Omenisms

One of the more annoying aspects of any new home entertainment format is that the studios have an unfortunate habit of releasing their less than stellar titles before their classics. Such was the case with 20th Century Fox, who rather bafflingly chose the 2006 remake of The Omen, a execrable little film about which I have already written in some detail, as one of their Blu-ray launch titles. At the time, I was a little peeved, to say the least, that this woeful excuse for filmmaking had been given the 1080p treatment while the original, in my opinion a horror classic, continued to languish in the standard definition pit.

Luckily, Fox have seen the error of their ways and have just announced an Omenistic extravaganza for this September. In addition to a standalone Blu-ray release of the original (and best) The Omen, they will also be putting out a box set containing the horrid remake and the less than stunning sequels, Damien: Omen II and The Final Conflict (the hilariously dreadful third sequel, the TV-originated Omen IV: The Awakening, is, perhaps mercifully, nowhere to be found).

Provided Fox doesn't cancel or postpone this release, as they have a habit of doing, this should be one of my key purchases this year. I make no bones about the fact that I think The Omen is a magnificent film, easily my favourite of the "Big Three" US horror films of the late 60s and 70s (although I concede that The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby are technically "better" films). I doubt I shall be bothering with the box set - an RRP of $129.98 is a bit steep for one classic, one turd and two hack jobs of limited value - but the stand-alone release should go down a treat this Halloween.

How to make a DVD on the cheap

My copies of the new Anchor Bay US releases of Tenebre and Phenomena arrived this morning. Unfortunately, as you will know if you've been following discussions of these new editions, you'll already know that both are less than stellar.

If you were expecting gorgeous new high definition-sourced transfers, you can think again: to my eyes, both appear to be "fake" 16x9 upconverts of the old non-anamorphic masters. The new Phenomena appears to suffer from some overzealous noise reduction, which causes smearing. This is particularly noticeable during the second shot in Chapter 2, where, if you look at the grass at the bottom left hand side of the frame, you can clearly see it smudging and smearing as the camera sways slightly. And, given that they are derived from the same masters that were used for the previous releases, both are still missing material - a few seconds in the case of Tenebre, around six minutes in the case of Phenomena.

Audio (and lack of subtitle) options are identical to the previous releases. In other words, this means that the original mono (for Tenebre) and stereo (for Phenomena) mixes are nowhere to be found. Both discs include 2.0 Dolby Surround tracks, but these are both down-conversions from the 5.1 remixes created by Chase Digital.

The bottom line is that, from an AV standpoint, I really don't see there being much point in picking up these new DVDs provided you already own either the old AB disc or another version. These are by no means awful discs, but the sad fact, for AB, is that, since they released their original DVDs of these films, other companies have come along and done considerably better, so to recycle these old masters in 2008 really is a bit much. The new featurettes that have been provided for both films are very good, and I really enjoyed hearing from the various participants (including finally putting a face to a name with the first on-screen appearance I've seen of Franco Ferrini on the Phenomena featurette), but it's really a question of whether these two short documentaries justify the price of the new discs.

Regarding the issue of the ongoing debate about which version is the best, there is no doubt in my mind that the best all-round version of Tenebre is the Dutch release from A-Film, entitled Shadows. While this release is bare-bones, and it's true that it does suffer from some colour timing issues in its second half, they are considerably less severe than on the Japanese DVD (which is admittedly the sharpest-looking of the bunch). It is also completely uncut (as is the Japanese release) and features by far the cleanest English audio track I've ever heard for the film, especially in comparison to the one used by AB, which sounds pretty noisy and scratchy.

Things get a bit trickier for Phenomena. The best-looking release, by far, is the Japanese one, and it is also the full-length integral version, but unfortunately, presumably as a result of using a longer cut of the film which sometimes includes shots which differ in length from the English version by a frame here and a frame there, several dialogue scenes are rendered in Italian only on the English audio track. If you're prepared to do a bit of piecing together in a video editing program, you can put together a satisfying version, but if you intend to play it straight from the disc and watch it in English, you'll have to be prepared for some key narrative scenes being in Italian, despite English audio existing for them.

I've posted some screen captures comparing these new releases to various other versions that are available at Dark Discussion.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of May

• 30 Days of Night (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Enchanted (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• The Golden Compass (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Mrs. Doubtfire (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• The Orphanage (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• Waking the Dead: Series 6 (R2 UK, DVD)

Definitely a very Blu month for me, which I have no complaints about whatsoever. I was going to post a bit about the various titles listed above, but for some reason I only managed to get an hour and a half of sleep last night, and as a result I'm absolutely knackered. Therefore, I'm off to get some serious shut-eye now, if I can. Laters.

Dead rising

My copy of the DVD release of the sixth series of Waking the Dead arrived on Tuesday, coincidentally on the same day that the twelfth and final episode of seventh series aired on BBC1. Series 6 stands out to me as by far the weakest of the bunch, for a number of reasons, but it's been over a year since I last saw it and I'm genuinely curious to see if it plays better on a second viewing. The thing about Waking the Dead is that the plots are often so convoluted that they require two or three viewings to work out what's actually going on and simply enjoy the drama on its own merits.

In any event, Series 7, on the whole, constituted a definite step up from Series 6. It shared the same core cast of characters, the same producer, Colin Wratten, and the same head writer, Declan Croghan, but this time round, all but one of the six two-part storylines was at least worth a watch, even if the overall standard varied wildly from episode to episode. The stand-out, this time round, was Skin, a storyline involving a group of neo-Nazis connected with the murder of a gay Jewish man. The twist, which I'll spoil here given that the episode in question has now aired, was that their victim had in fact infiltrated their group by posing as a skinhead himself, and has succeeded in infecting all of them with the AIDS virus by mixing his own blood into the pigment he then used to give them tattoos. It was a unique concept, and exceedingly well-told too, and I'm quite pleased with myself for managing to work out what was going on a good five minutes before it was revealed in the programme itself, which I think speaks well for its refusal to cheat the audience by throwing in a massive twist out of left field.

Unfortunately, Skin, and the first part of the final storyline, Pietà, were the only ones that I felt were up to the standards of the earlier series. It doesn't speak well of the second two-parter that I actually had to look up LocateTV to remind myself what it had been about. On the other hand, the fifth storyline, Wounds, sticks in my mind for all the wrong reasons. Gimmicky in the extreme and confusing for its own sake, it was more along the lines of the previous series with its pseudo-mysticism, muddy structure and overuse of flashbacks. I also continue to be less than impressed by forensic pathologist Eve (Tara Fitzgerald), who joined the team last year and has so far been a less than riveting replacement for Holly Aird and Esther Hall. Part of the problem stems from the fact that she never seems to alter her facial expression or manner of delivery, to the extent that, when she actually gives a slight half-smile in the final episode, it's something of a shock to discover that her mouth can actually make that shape.

In my review of Series 5, I criticised the increasingly exaggerated and unrealistic behaviour of the central character, Detective Superintendent Boyd (Trevor Eve), who would repeatedly bully his colleagues and extract confessions from suspects under duress. This behaviour escalated throughout the previous series to the extent that it became a running joke, so it was something of a relief that Series 7 went in the opposite direction, giving us an older, quieter, wearier Boyd than the one we're used to seeing. The writers certainly reined in the character's temper tantrums in this series, and likewise, Trevor Eve toned down his scenery-chewing in favour of brooding and scowling. He also, to the best of my knowledge, didn't assault anyone this year, preferring instead to leave the strong-arming to his sergeant, Stella (Félicité Du Jeu).

This uncharacteristic calmness seems particularly strange when you consider that this was the very series in which Boyd might have been considered justified in flying off the handle, in that a storyline that has been lurking on the sidelines since the very beginning of the show, the disappearance of his son, was finally resolved. At the beginning of this series, his son, Luke (who I'm fairly sure was actually named Joe in Series 1), re-appeared, a homeless drug addict who Boyd spent the rest of the series intermittently running away from and trying to help. In some respects, I thought this storyline was quite effective, providing a reason for Boyd's bizarre behaviour and also helping to tie what would have been six disparate storylines together, but at the same time I feel that it breaks the programme's crucual tenet of never allowing us to see anything of the main characters' personal lives.

The Luke storyline also created a far bigger problem for the rest of the series, because the writers seemed to insist on drawing parallels between Boyd's relationship with his son and most of the cases the team were investigating. This led to a sense of repetition, not least with the continual emphasis on missing children and fathers' dysfunctional relationships with their sons. It also meant that four of the six storylines involved a suspect, victim or witness who either was or was suggested to be gay: it is implied, at the end of the second storyline, that Luke is gay, or possibly working as a rent-boy to feed his drugs habit (the specifics of what we see are infuriatingly unclear), and, reading between the lines, I wonder to what extent we are meant to suspect that this in some way led to his estrangement from his father. The thing is, though, that Boyd may have been shown to be many things, but homophobic has never been one of them; actually, his views towards most aspects of humanity have always been characterised as fairly liberal. In the end, I don't know what to think.

On the whole, though, what we got was an improvement on the previous year's clumsy, wishy-washy series. I wouldn't characterise any of it as essential viewing, except perhaps the Skin two-parter, but it proved to be an engaging enough distraction on Monday and Tuesday evenings for six weeks, and only two of the twelve hours I devoted to it (the Wounds two-parter) are ones that I consider to have been wasted.

Creator Barbara Machin's newest project, another crime series under the title of Kiss of Death, airs next Monday, by the way. It's being billed as a one-off 90-minute drama, although Waking the Dead started out very much in the same way, airing its two-part pilot episode in 2000 before returning for a full series in 2001. The advance buzz suggests that Machin is continuing her interest in non-linear storytelling, using an approach similar to that of the Casualty episodes she wrote for Christmas 2006.

Popcorn strictly optional

Whimsy Cinemas™ is finally ready to open its doors! Yesterday evening, Lyris assembled his projection screen and attached it to the wall, ready for its first gala presentation. What will it be? Inside Man on HD DVD was the first title to be screened on our previous movie-watching solution, the crazy bed sheet of multiple creases, so it only makes sense that we follow it up with something that boasts equally stellar image quality. So far, we've taken a brief look at the Blu-ray releases of Ratatouille, Resident Evil: Extinction and Across the Universe, all of which looked suitably incredible, not to mention the most recent pass of La Femme Publique, which looked better than a standard definition DVD has any right to.

Finally, we have something that vaguely resembles being at the movies, only without the spotty-faced youths heckling (if any heckling's to be done, we'll do it, thank you very much) the movie and playing with their mobile phones. Sometimes, we even get the films before they're released theatrically in this country, and in any event, in many cases, the Blu-ray discs we're watching look somewhat better than the prints being trotted round the local cinemas.

Paramount, Criterion go Blu

I'm sure everyone else has already reported on this by now, but Paramount have, not particularly unexpectedly, relaunched their support for Blu-ray with the announcement that Face/Off, Next and Bee Movie will be coming to the format on May 20th, followed by Cloverfield and There Will Be Blood on June 3rd. No word yet on Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which was initially announced for HD DVD at around the same time as There Will Be Blood, but disappeared along with that and several other titles when Toshiba turned off the ailing format's life support machine. Presumably it will materialise before too long - I hope so, because, out of all of these, it's the one I'm most interested in seeing.

Paramount also plans to re-issue its entire back catalogue of Blu-ray titles, starting with eight titles on May 20th.

The real news, however, is that, after spending a considerable amount of time umming and erring from the sidelines, the mighty Criterion has finally announced its intention to get with the winning team and begin releasing in high definition. Announced via their most recent email newsletter, Criterion states that it will begin rolling titles out in October, with each released priced the same as its standard definition counterpart and porting over all the bonus content from the legacy release. Currently announced titles include:

- The Third Man
- Bottle Rocket
- Chungking Express
- The Man Who Fell to Earth
- The Last Emperor
- El Norte
- The 400 Blows
- Gimme Shelter
- The Complete Monterey Pop
- Contempt
- Walkabout
- For All Mankind
- The Wages of Fear

Now, here's hoping they have the sense to do away with their nonsensical pictureboxing practice for their Blu-ray titles.

The day approaches...

It's time for me to go into shameless promotional mode, but for good reason. After months of secrecy, I'm finally able to tell you something about the DVD project Lyris is working on. This is the first public announcement of this release anywhere, so consider yourselves lucky indeed.

Later this year, new DVD label Mondo Vision will be releasing its debut title, the first ever English-friendly release of Andrzej Zulawski's La Femme Publique ("The Public Woman"), initially released in 1984 and starring Valérie Kaprisky, Francis Huster and Lambert Wilson. The name of Zulawski may be familiar to some of the Dario Argento fans visiting the site, since Argento has identified his 1981 film Possession as one of his favourites and a key influence on Tenebre.

This upcoming US DVD release is special for a couple of reasons. First of all, the film has never been released on any format in an English-speaking territory. As such, Mondo Vision's DVD will feature the first ever English subtitle translation of the film. Secondly, I've had the opportunity to see the transfer for this film at various stages of its encoding, and I can honestly state that the final encode, completed a few days ago, is one of the best I have ever seen in standard definition. To say that this blows away what most of the other independent and also major studios are routinely putting out would be a gross understatement. Don't take my word for it, though: feast your eyes on the images below (click the smaller thumbnails to view them at their full size).

Not filtered, not edge enhanced, not noise reduced, not tampered with in any way.

Specifications for this release include:

- Digitally restored transfer mastered in high definition progressive video (1.66:1 anamorphic widescreen, dual layer)
- French Dolby Digital 2.0 dual mono audio
- First ever English-language subtitle translation (optional)
- Feature length audio commentary with Andrzej Zulawksi and Daniel Bird (recorded specially for this release)
- Exclusive new interview with Andrzej Zulawski (recorded specially for this release)
- 1984 theatrical trailer
- Image gallery
- DVD-ROM content (original screenplay and high resolution images)

In addition to the standard single-disc release, a limited edition will also be released featuring a bonus CD containing the film's original score, as well as a special commemorative booklet.

Two more Zulawski titles, L'important c'est d'aimer (1975, starring Romy Schneider, Fabio Testi and Klaus Kinski) and L'amour braque (1985, starring Sophie Marceau and Francis Huster), will also be released this year.

http://andrzej-zulawski.com/AZF/index.php

The pain, the pain!

This morning, I was looking through some of the DVDs I haven't blown the dust off in a while, and I came across the Region 1 Deluxe Edition of Luc Besson's Léon, a favourite of mine. This is a film that, to the best of my knowledge, has never been adequately represented on DVD, with every release falling way short of decency standards. Every release I've seen for myself, or have seen screen captures of, has suffered from a crippling lack of detail, not to mention massive amounts of ringing and mosquito noise. The overall look is that of an ancient master that has been trotted out again and again over the years, which makes the Superbit logo and claim that it has been "mastered in high definition" on the back of the Deluxe case completely absurd.

Even so, I wasn't prepared for the utter horror of just how bad this transfer, from a major studio who have done some absolutely stellar work, looks:

Now, bear in mind that this has been blown up to 1920x1080 resolution, but I wanted to do this to give you an example of just how bad the ringing is, and to approximate how this might look on a large display. Even at its default resolution (see here) it looks pretty outrageous, more like what you might expect from a crummy DivX bootleg downloaded from one of the dubious sites that offer such material.

"Deluxe" my left wallnut! This film is crying out for a re-release - a proper one, not just the same old master hauled out and run through the blender again.

Greetings from Vista

I'm back inside Windows Vista again, this time permanently, I hope.

Why? Well, it all started when my brother put together a new computer, a quad core system with 4 GB of RAM to enable more efficiency in his DVD projects (the first of which I hope will be announced before very much longer). Among the components he picked up for it was a new video card, an ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro, which gave him access to the advanced deinterlacing and other hardware video acceleration technologies that weren't available on his previous Radeon X800. As I previously explained, problems in the hardware video acceleration department were responsible for me crawling back to Windows XP with my tail between my legs. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I discovered that he was getting perfectly good deinterlacing, with subtitles, in Vista using Windows Media Player.

A reinstall of Vista later and I discovered the reason for my video problems. It seems that installing the ArcSoft TotalMedia TV recording software that came with my TV stick buggered up Vista's EVR video decoding, to the extent that, even when I uninstalled TotalMedia and removed all references to it in the registry, it still continued to be borked. Completely reinstalling Vista was the only way to solve the problem, and solve it it did. (I don't need TotalMedia anyway because Vista Home Premium comes with the very slick Windows Media Center, which has its own TV viewing and recording capabilities.)

So, here I am, just about as happy as I can possibly be with Vista. There are still some niggles to be worked out - it looks as if EVR video playback, at least on this video card with these drivers, suffers from blocky chroma upsampling (see the image above, from Pocahontas) - but the situation is much better than it was before.

Update, May 2nd, 2008 02:42 PM: Well, slap my face! It turns out XP's handling of chroma upsampling (in PowerDVD, Media Player or Media Player Classic - take your pick) is identical to that of Vista, and I can't say it's bothered me unduly before. It just goes to show the things you spot when you're in nitpick mode. Ah well, at this point I can't claim that XP offers anything that Vista doesn't give me, so I suppose you can officially call the earlier operating system dead and buried as far as my system is concerned.