DVD

Mother of all cover designs

Cover art for the UK release of Dario Argento's Mother of Tears, due out on April 28th from Optimum, has appeared online at various retailers, including Amazon.co.uk. It's quite a classy design, for once, similar to the artwork used for the cover of Variety's Cannes Film Festival 2007 issue, albeit tinted red.

According to John White over at DVD Maniacs, who has seen a check disc, it's bare-bones barring a trailer, and has a 2.39:1 anamorphic transfer with English Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. Given that it looks like the upcoming Italian release is dubbed into Italian (a good 90% of the dialogue you hear in the film is what was spoken on set by the actors in English), and the currently available Russian release is cropped to 1.78:1, this release would appear to be the one to get.

Eye of the ripper

A few quick words on the Another World Entertainment release of The New York Ripper, which arrived today:

First and foremost, the source for the transfer appears to be the same one that was used for the Australian release from Stomp Visual. Based on the screenshots posted with HorrorDVDs.com's review, I had assumed that the source was different, primarily due to how much more saturated they appear, but I suspect that the person who captured them had his/her DVD playback software's saturation set too high.

Having compared the Stomp Visual and Another World Entertainment transfers fairly thoroughly, I'd go so far as to say that there's really nothing to call either way - both look identical, and I did 600% magnifications of several screen captures. AWE's release does, however, gain several points in its favour for including the scene in which Dr. Davis plays a trick on his secretary, which was omitted from the Stomp release. On the AWE DVD, this scene is sourced from the Anchor Bay DVD and is NTSC-to-PAL standards converted, but it's better than nothing (it could still have been handled better, though - a proper adjustment of the frame rate should have been carried out rather than a video standards conversion).

Another major boon for the AWE release is the fact that it ports over several of the bonus features from the 2-disc French Collector's Edition, along with optional English subtitles. Not everything has made it over, but there is a decent amount of material here - enough to keep you occupied for a while.

Ultimately, the AWE release gets my thumbs-up. As far as I can tell, it's the best release of the film to date. Perfect? No, certainly not. There's certainly room for improvement as far as image quality is concerned (although detail-wise is very nice), and it's a shame the extras package is incomplete. But AWE's efforts to port over some of the material, and to assemble a complete cut of the film (even if the added footage could have been handled better) is appreciated.

Eye slicing never looked more lovely

I was browsing through some of the reviews at HorrorDVDs.com the other night, and I suddenly noticed something: Another World Entertainment's release of Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper has a really nice transfer. Personally, I always appreciate it when a review includes full size screen captures, because it means that, whatever the words might say, I can trust my own eyes and have a fairly good idea of what the transfer will actually look at without having to put a whole lot of faith in reviewers whose credentials are unknown to me.

Today, while doing a bit of shopping at Xploited Cinema, in the form of the Italian genre cinema book Esotika Erotika Psicotika, primarily for my PhD work, I decided to bite the bullet and order this, my third copy of Fulci's notorious Video Nasty. It's not my favourite of Fulci's films by a long shot (I still maintain that A Lizard in a Woman's Skin is his best work), but it's unjustly maligned and is, if not in the "very good" category of gialli, at least in the upper echelons of "good".

Thank you for the screenshots, HorrorDVDs. You've just earned Another World Entertainment another sale!

Blue obscurities

So far, the line-up for Blu-ray titles this year has been fairly underwhelming. Things do seem to be changing, though, with the format being bolstered by the support of independent studios specialising in niche fare. Today, Tartan announced their plans for Spring 2008 with a total of six releases in both the US and UK, beginning with Ji-woon Kim's A Tale of Two Sisters and Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park on April 14th, followed by Park Chan-Wook's I'm a Cyborg and [Sympathy for] Lady Vengeance on May 26th, and finally Nick Cave's The Proposition and Moon-saeng Kim's Sky Blue (known in its native South Korea as Wonderful Days) on June 23rd.

You can certainly sign me up for A Tale of Two Sisters, which I already own on DVD, and Lady Vengeance, which I'm now glad I held off picking up. I might also be tempted by a copy of Sky Blue, particularly if it's a review sample: the film itself is, to be honest, about as limp as a dead kipper, but the prospect of seeing the admittedly impressive live action miniature photography is rather promising.

Oh, and New Line is releasing the Guillermo Del Toro-produced The Orphanage (El Orfanato in its native Spanish) on April 22nd, day and date with the standard definition DVD release. This is another title that has caught my eye and is clawing its way towards my wallet.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of February

• Almost Famous (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• American Gangster (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• Astérix et les Vikings (R0 France, HD DVD)
• The Brave One (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• Gone Baby Gone (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• The Lady Vanishes: The Criterion Collection [2007 re-release] (R1 USA, DVD)
• La Môme (R0 France, Blu-ray)
• The Night of the Werewolf/Vengeance of the Zombies (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Run Lola Run (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• Volver (RA USA, Blu-ray)
   

Blu Underground

Source: Film Talk

Well, this has got to be just about the most unexpected piece of news to round off the month, but perhaps also the most pleasant. Blue Underground, who hold the US DVD rights to most of Dario Argento's catalogue, not to mention a vast sea of other European cult titles, have added a placeholder page to their web site announcing their intentions to get into the high definition market in the near future:

We are proud to announce that a number of high definition Blu-ray™ releases are in the works. We will have more information soon.

There we go - there's no actual information besides their statement of an intention to release on the format, but I must say I'm absolutely thrilled. I pretty much gave up any hope of seeing the likes of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red, Suspiria and Inferno in HD any time soon after the rights to these films ended up at Blue Underground and various statements came from the company indicating that they didn't perceive the market to be large enough to make HD releases viable. I can't wait to see what their first titles are, and it goes without saying that they should constitute a sizeable improvement on the filtered, edge enhanced standard definition transfers that Blue Underground routinely put out.

My most wanted titles:

• Baba Yaga
• The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
• Deep Red
• Don't Torture a Duckling
• The Fifth Cord
• Inferno
• Night Train Murders
• Opera
• Short Night of the Glass Dolls
• Suspiria
• The Stendhal Syndrome
• Who Saw Her Die?

Now, obviously, I'm not naïve enough to assume that anything approaching all of these titles will show up, but if even a handful of them get the HD treatment, I will be a very happy gentleman.

Anchor Bay sails again

Fangoria has got the scoop on the long-delayed special edition re-releases of Dario Argento's Tenebre and Phenomena from Anchor Bay, due out at some point this summer, accompanied by some fairly dodgy cover art. Originally announced in an unofficial capacity a good 2-3 years ago, I forget precisely where they were first mentioned, but it seems to have been common knowledge for some time that these were in the pipeline. Anyway, the specs provided are as one would expect: these two titles, both originally non-anamorphically, will both be receiving new 16x9 enhanced transfers in their original aspect ratios of 1.85:1 and 1.66:1 respectively. Additionally, they will carry over all the extras from their previous releases, in addition to a new retrospective featurette - Voices of the Unsane for Tenebre, and A Dark Fairy Tale for Phenomena.

Unfortunately, the real questions aren't answered. Namely, will these releases be properly uncut? The previous release of Tenebre was missing a few seconds of footage at various points, while Phenomena lacked over six minutes' worth of (mostly minor) material in comparison with the longer integral cut. (Both films were released on DVD in their full length variants in various other territories.) Additionally, while the Fangoria article states that each film will feature a Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track, what I really want to know is whether or not the original mono (or should that be stereo for Phenomena?) mixes will also be provided. Ideally, I'd like to see the original audio mixes provided for both English and Italian, with subtitles... although this is Anchor "you don't need subtitles if the film is in English" Bay we're talking about, so I won't get my hopes up.

Finally, where are the Blu-ray releases?

Anyway, I'll continue to keep an eye on the buzz surrounding these releases, but with some trepidation. I already own a copy of Tenebre (the Dutch Shadows release from A-Film) which I'm pretty happy with, barring some colour timing issues, and the Integral Japanese version of Phenomena that I own is nice, but for the fact that certain stretches of dialogue are in Italian on the English language track. Ah, we'll see. I might be tempted by review copies...

Mater Lacrimarum revisited

Today, I had the opportunity to watch the English version of Dario Argento's Mother of Tears. This was my second viewing of the concluding part in the Three Mothers trilogy, after watching it in Italian on Christmas Day. The viewing conditions weren't ideal (the version I saw was cropped from its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio to 1.78:1), but overall the quality was better than my Italian copy. (A Russian DVD appears to be available now, but it seems to have been the source of the cropped version I saw, so I would recommend holding out for a different release. Medusa will be releasing it in Italy on April 9th, while Optimum are supposedly putting it out in the UK on April 28th.)

In most respects, the English version improves things somewhat, although Asia Argento's performance is still uneven, closer to Trauma than to The Stendhal Syndrome. With the benefit of the English audio, Valeria Cavalli (Marta) definitely emerges as the best actor of the group, giving a strong and believable performance (the monkey is still great, though). Adam James (who has previously appeared in Casualty and Waking the Dead) is, like Asia, uneven. In some scenes he is quite effective (his final scene is quite chilling), but in others, such as when he is going nuts after his son has disappeared, he comes across as quite weak. Oh, and I don't really see the big deal about Udo Kier's performance. A lot of people described it as hammy, but it didn't strike me as problematic in any way.

On the downside, Moran Atias (Mater Lacrimarum) is awful, and I mean awful. She looks ridiculous and can't act her way out of a paper bag. She really made me yearn for Ania Pieroni. Her bald, male lackey is also hamstrung by some really atrocious dubbing, and the gothic witches continue to make me cringe. Actually, if anything, they came across as worse rather than better on a second viewing. I knew they were coming this time, but it didn't make the experience any less painful. Really, Dario, what were you thinking?

On a related note, watching the film again revealed all sorts of squandered opportunities to throw in some of the bravura colours and lighting from the first two instalments. I can only imagine how much more magical moments like Sarah lighting the fire in Michael's apartment and Marta summoning the spirits would have been had Argento used them as an excuse to unleash some Technicolor brilliance. And what happened to the idea of Mater Lacrimarum's jewel-studded robe casting primary colours on the faces of her grovelling followers? All we get now is a red T-shirt with glitter writing on it.

My original rating of 7/10 still stands. It's not a bad little film, but, as a conclusion to what was started in Suspiria and Inferno, it's a let-down. I never expected it to be on the same level as them, so I can't claim to be disappointed, but it remains a middle of the road entry in Argento's filmography - better than Trauma and The Phantom of the Opera but weaker than all his other theatrical ventures (it's better than his three recent TV projects, though, especially those embarrassing Masters of Horror episodes).

Lola redux

This is a follow-up to my previous post on the Blu-ray release of Run Lola Run, Dear Universal, this is what a catalogue release SHOULD look like.

In the comments section to that post, I was contacted by a regular reader who called into question the Blu-ray transfer and its authenticity as regards Tom Tykwer's intentions, due to comments made by his friend, a hardcore fan of the film, who reacted in horror, upon seeing my screen captures:

At first glance, I always thought the colours looked messed up on those pics (based on my memory of the film). Lola looked green/yellow-ish on lola4.jpg, and Manni looked purple on lola7.jpg. I compared them to the DVD. And I can now say the colours are totally messed up on the BD. There is also framing issues. As the BD looks cropped on the left/right sides. I've seen this movie probably well over a hundred times, and based on these pics, the BD presentations is WAY to much on the green side. I've attached pics that showcase all these problems.

Link
Link
Link

My regular reader also sent me a few more of his friend's thoughts on the transfer (among other issues) via email, and, with his permission, I thought it would be worthwhile to post some of the material that pertains specifically to the matter at hand.

Regarding his familiarity with the film (lest he be accused of basing his opinion on how it should look solely on the previous DVD release):

Well, I've seen the film theatrically, but it wasn't the best presentation. As it was one of those tiny garbage arthouse theatres, with a screen smaller than todays Plasmas and no better than stereo sound.

But I never remember the film looking that green. And, 10 years ago, I had near photographic memory.

The reason I'm taking the time to post all this is to provide an alternate viewpoint on the issue of the film's transfer. I don't feel qualified to make a case for the transfer being right or wrong - clearly, my reader's friend has a familiarity with the film which I do not possess (I consider it a favourite of mine, but at the same time I must point out that I have only seen two versions of it: the Region 2 UK DVD and the Blu-ray release), and on that basis alone (not to mention his obvious technical knowledge, when discussing such issues as VC-1 compression and digital intermediates in his email), I am inclined to trust his viewpoint.

But it's not my place to say whether the Run Lola Run Blu-ray release looks "correct" or not. I suspect that, as is always going to be the case with a medium like film, especially when we are in the realm of lab printing, which does not provide the accuracy of digital colour timing (where you can create a single master with a locked down colour palette), every source is going to look somewhat different from the others, meaning that it is virtually impossible to identify a single correct look. Looking at the comparison shots linked to above, it should be clear to all that there are obvious differences between the DVD and Blu-ray releases in terms of colour palette, but that's the one thing I can say for sure.

What I can't say with any degree of certainty is whether one is more accurate than the other. Yes, you could argue that the Blu-ray release looks a bit too yellow in terms of flesh tones, but someone else might just as easily turn round and say that the DVD looked a bit too magenta. In any event, I'm always somewhat wary of using flesh tones as an indicator of the accuracy of a transfer's colour palette. Lighting conditions, film stock and all manner of other variables can all affect the look, and that's before you get into the issue of artistic intent. Who's to say Tykwer was going for natural flesh tones anyway? One can hardly consider this to be a film with a naturalistic style.

As is always the case with issues like this, the one person who can truly clear up the issue is Tom Tykwer. Did he supervise the original DVD or the Blu-ray release? Did he supervise both or neither? How does he feel about the new look? I don't know, and, therefore, the only advice I can really give on this matter is to use your own judgement based on the evidence at your disposal. The bottom line is that I'm very happy with the look of the Blu-ray release, although I readily admit that it could be the wrong look. Caveat emptor, and all that.

The rat that got the cream

Ratatouille may have been denied a Best Picture nomination by the Academy, but there can be no doubt it absolutely owned the animation industry's own equivalent of the Oscars, the Annie Awards, on February 8th. Nominated for virtually every category in which it was eligible, and winning most of them, this is a success that seems to have been matched only by Brad Bird and Pixar's previous collaboration, The Incredibles.

Ratatouille's wins were in the following categories: Best Animated Feature, Character Animation in a Feature Production (Michal Makarewicz), Character Design in an Animated Feature Production (Carter Goodrich), Directing in an Animated Feature Production (Brad Bird), Music in an Animated Feature Production (Michael Giacchino), Production Design in an Animated Feature Production (Harley Jessup), Storyboarding in an Animated Feature Production (Ted Mathot), Voice Acting in an Animated Feature Production (Ian Holm), and Writing in an Animated Feature Production (Brad Bird).

The short piece, Your Friend the Rat, included on the Ratatouille Blu-ray and DVD releases, also won Best Short Subject.

In addition, animation historian John Canemaker, Ren & Stimpy creator/director John Kricfalusi and veteran Disney animator Glen Keane were honoured with the Winsor McCay Award (for career contributions to the art of animation), while historian Jerry Beck picked up the June Foray Award (for significant and benevolent or charitable impact on the art and industry of animation). Flash creators Jonathan Gay, Gary Grossman and Robert Tatsumi, meanwhile, received the Ub Iwerks Award for technical achievement, while a Special Achievement Annie Award went to Edwin R. Leonard for "promoting the Linux open system for animation in animation studios and gaming software development".

For a full list of the nominees and winners, see here.

Early warnings from Warner

Source: High-Def Digest

Warner has announced some of the high profile titles forthcoming coming to Blu-ray (and DVD) over the course of the next year (covering the rest of 2008 and early 2009). These include, in Q2 2008, a Dirty Harry Ultimate Collection, a Batman Anthology in Q3, and, looking further ahead, Gone with the Wind, North by Northwest and The Wizard of Oz in 2009. You can certainly pencil me in for a copy of North by Northwest, which has been one of my most anticipated titles for high definition treatment since the possibility was initially raised at Warner's Home Theater Forum chat in February 2007.

Obviously, don't expect to see any of these titles on HD DVD, given that Warner is cutting its ties with the format at the end of May... although Batman Begins did see a (decidedly sub-par) HD DVD release back in 2006.

The Criterion mind game

Today, I received my copy of Criterion's recent re-release of Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. This new 2-disc edition, released in November 2007, replaces the old single-disc version from May 1998. As one of the first DVDs Criterion put out (both the original release and the new one are number 3 in the collection), it left rather a lot to be desired in the transfer department, taken from a composite source and filled with dot crawl.

I'm happy to report that the new transfer is a massive improvement, although it does suffer from an extremely irritating practice known as windowboxing, which Criterion have been applying to all their transfers for Academy ratio films for at least a couple of years. Essentially, the entire image is shrunk slightly and surrounded by a black border on all four edges. According to the booklet included inside the DVD case, this is done "to ensure that the maximum image is visible on all monitors". What they should have said is "to ensure that the maximum image is visible on improperly calibrated televisions". Overscan is an issue with most television displays, cropping off as much as 10% of the signal image. However, I don't think it would be unreasonable to suggest that those who are serious about film will do everything they can to minimise, if not eliminate, overscan, or buy a display that does not suffer from it in the first place (such as most projectors, as well as the majority of modern 1080p LCD or plasma displays).

Why, then, is Criterion, a company that caters specifically to cinephiles and prides itself on the highest possible quality standards (more on this later) effectively authoring discs, as one of my fellow netizens put it, "to look best on the worst equipment"? I can think of no other studio who routinely shrinks the image and therefore throws away valuable resolution. This is standard definition NTSC we're talking about, with a resolution of 720x480. Every line of resolution should be valued, not thrown away in order to prevent a small amount of the image being cropped on Joe Sixpack and Mary-Jane Rottencrotch's tube display. The windowboxing on this release is certainly not excessive, but it does mean that the image is approximately 12-13% smaller than it could have been, and as a result has 12-13% less detail than would overwise have been possible.

(Left: old version; Right: new version; click for full size images)

The long and short of it is that I am of the opinion that Criterion's reputation as being the absolute best of the best in the DVD field is largely a mind game propagated by a number of factors, ranging from their pioneering work in the LaserDisc days (it's unlikely that you would have audio commentaries or be able to expect an original aspect ratio presentation of a film as the rule rather than the exception if not for them) to their extremely high standard of publicity and design. Their packaging is always eye-catching and, even if they occasionally confuse plainness with minimalism (The Rock is a cover that only Criterion could get away with!), broadly speaking the sort of artwork they put out is clever, tasteful and light years ahead of anything the mainstream studios (or indeed the indie studios, most of whom seem to delight in making their wares look as schlocky as possible, as if it's some sort of badge of honour) are doing. Essentially, pick a Criterion DVD off the shelf and it looks like you're really getting something special. The old adage is "never judge a book by its cover", but all too many people do.

There's also the niche factor: broadly speaking, I doubt that your average moviegoer will have heard of, let alone seen, the bulk of the films Criterion have released. Intriguingly, this often seems to lead to a sense of reverence: "They've put out a film in a foreign language with a title that's hard to pronounce about nuns in S&M gear painting each other pink - they must be really dedicated!" I am of no doubt that the people at Criterion are absolutely devoted to their craft and truly love what they are doing. However, what I am trying to say it that I'm not convinced that their grand reputation is entirely justified. While their choice of films (barring the odd Armageddon), bonus materials and packaging are all very high-brow, their transfers are often not that much better, if indeed better at all, than the competition.

Surf to various review sites, and you'll find that Criterion's transfers are often held up as the benchmark to which all other companies should aspire. In reality, though, the majority of the Criterion transfers that I've seen are fairly average. The Rock and Naked Lunch are at the upper end of the spectrum and are truly great (if imperfect) pieces of work, but at the lower end you have the likes of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which in terms of its lack of detail is one of the worst DVD transfers I've ever seen that wasn't pulled off a VHS tape or LaserDisc master. Oddly enough, many people praised it as a welcome improvement on the earlier Universal DVD.

They are practically the same transfer, folks.

Don't believe me? The pictures speak for themselves. The same master has clearly been used, the level of detail is almost exactly the same, and the only significant (and I use the word loosely) difference between the two is minutely looser framing on the Universal disc. Hardly the stunning improvement that most would have you believe, and, given that the Universal disc was rightly criticised by a number of people at its time of release all these "5/5" and "10/10" reviews for the Criterion version look mightily suspect.

All this is not part of some deliberate attempt on my part to pour scorn on Criterion or turn people away from their products. They deserve a great deal of praise for putting out films that no other company would touch (even if most of them aren't to my tastes), their packaging is top notch, and I love the fact that they routinely include chunky booklets filled with reviews, analyses, interviews and artwork - something I've really come to appreciate since many of the majors have given up even including a chapter insert. However, I don't think Criterion's releases should be celebrated as the absolute best that the DVD format can look. Like just about every other company, they've put out a handful of great-looking titles, some absolute turds and a vast number that merely look quite good. "Quite good", it must be said, is an awful lot better than what an awful lot of the independents are putting out, but, when you routinely charge $40 for a single film and lay claim to "gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions that offer the highest technical quality", "quite good" isn't really enough.

DVD review: Halloween (remake)

Essentially a film of two halves, neither of which works on its own and which fail to gel together as a single cohesive whole, Zombie's version of Halloween falls somewhere between a crass, ass-backwards attempt to shoehorn the more superficial elements of his style into an origin story, and a soulless, slavish copy of the original.

I review Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween, presented here in its unrated form in a 2-disc set, and wonder how to get two hours of my life back.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of January

• 28 Weeks Later (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Cat People (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• Eastern Promises (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• Factory Girl (R2 UK, DVD)
• Little Children (R2 UK, DVD)
• Munich (R2 UK, DVD)
• Pan's Labyrinth (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• The Plague Dogs (R2 UK, DVD)
• The Simpsons Movie (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Y Tu Mamá También (R2 UK, DVD)
   

It's called having standards

My respect for the majority of DVD production houses has just plummeted to a record low. Why? Well, my brother is currently involved in the production of an upcoming DVD release. Because it hasn't officially been announced yet, I can't tell you what the title is, but while the DVD is certainly not a cut-price endeavour by any means, it has not had the amount of money thrown at it that the majors (and even the more prominent independents) have access to.

Anyway, my brother's main capacity in this operation (in addition to performing editing work on the exclusive director's commentary, typing up the first ever English subtitle translation, designing the menus and a host of other tasks) is to handle the video transfer. He received the DigiBeta master tape and personally transferred it, and recently did his first pass on the DVD encode.

To say that the end result blows away every single commercially released DVD I have ever seen would be the understatement of the century.

I only wish I could show you direct screen captures at this time, because they really make a mockery of what pass for prestige releases from other studios. The level of detail is sublime (there are moments where, if you'd told me it was an HD DVD or Blu-ray release, I'd have believed you), the grain is accurately reproduced, and compression artefacts are basically a non-issue. It's not even as if my brother had a brand new element to work with: on the contrary, the DigiBeta master he was sent was previously used by an other company who put out a release which, while not exactly awful by regular DVD standards, really left me scratching my head when I saw the quality of the master itself. A perfect example of how a company can take a decent master and then proceed to screw it up by applying a whole load of pointless "enhancement" algorithms.

So, what we will have here is a DVD for a low budget film that is more than 20 years old and was converted from DigiBeta to DVD-friendly MPEG-2 without anything being done to it beyond painting out a handful of cue marks and instances of print damage, and looks ten times better than what the big-shot studios are putting out for films that are only a few months old. For god's sake, the damned trailer, taken from a dupe print that has presumably been lying around someone's garage for the past two decades, shows more detail than any commercial DVD I've seen released in the last year.

Do you think this is fair?

Here come the Razzies

Stop press! Hold everything! The nominations for the 28th Annual Razzie Awards have been revealed. The full list of nominees is at the official web site, but I can tell you already that this year is going to be one to remember. I Know Who Killed Me, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and Norbit are leading the race, with nine, eight and eight nominations respectively. Eddie Murphy, meanwhile, has set a new achievement with an impressive five nominations in a single year (one of the downsides to playing several characters in the same film, it would seem - not to mention taking a screenwriting credit).

For fans of bad cinema, the Razzies are surely the most important awards ceremony of the year, far more so than the Oscars (pfff!), since they allow buffs to plan their DVD rentals and viewings for the year ahead. I mean, just looking through the full list, there are several films that have somehow passed me by.

The case for euthanising Tom Green

I will watch and review Norbit, a film I hoped never to see, if you watch and review Freddy Got Fingered, one of the only two films in the world that I actively hate. 'Tedious, mean-spirited, nasty, unfunny, noxious, loathsome, fucking tragic waste of celluloid'? Oh, Michael, you have no idea...

- Baron Scarpia, December 8th, 2007

It took me long enough, but I eventually got there. I have now watched Freddy Got Fingered. Given the 83 minutes of sheer agony that I have just suffered through, fulfilling the second half of the bargain should, in comparison, be a doddle.

As we sat down to watch the film, my brother said to me: "You know, I bet you anything you like that there will be one joke that absolutely kills us buried somewhere in all this." He was right. Just under twelve minutes into the film, we see an animation executive talking on his cellphone. Here is his dialogue:

Listen, you tell Hanna-Barbera to go fuck themselves, okay? I got twelve Korean teenagers in a tiger cage that can draw a fucking dog wearing a cape.

It's one of those little "it's funny because it's true" moments that should put a smile on the face of anyone who knows the mentality of the average animation executive. Unfortunately, this means that there are still more than 72 minutes of pain to follow. Freddy Got Fingered has three things working in its favour:

1. It's only 83 minutes long.
2. Of which 4½ are the closing credits.
3. I watched a PAL release, which is 4% faster than the NTSC versions. Had I found myself landed with an NTSC copy, it would have lasted 87 minutes. On balance, I consider myself to be extremely lucky.

Isn't this funny?

Unfortunately, from here on in, the positives will have to be restricted to the fact that the experience of sitting through this film did not actually prove to be fatal. Freddy Got Fingered stars Tom Green, not as Freddy (more about him later), but as Gord Brody, an aspiring cartoonist. Stop and think about this for a second. Tom Green. As a cartoonist. Broadly speaking, good cartoons require two things: they have to be funny, and they have to be drawn well. Tom Green is not, by any stretch of the imagination, funny. He isn't funny when he's performing someone else's material. When he's performing his own (he not only stars in, but also directed and co-wrote this film), he's fucking tragic. His cartoons, which I suspect Green himself didn't actually draw, are not particularly well drawn, but on balance are probably as good as or slightly better than 95% of the animated fare you'll see when you turn on your television.

And here's the problem: I'm not sure whether or not we're supposed to take Gord's aspirations seriously. Is he supposed to be a great cartoonist, or is the joke that he's a hopeless one? The quality of his output certainly doesn't give us any clues, since it's not god-awful, but it's not any good either. I'm not even sure whether or not we, the audience, are expected to like Gord, let alone his cartoons. On paper, he is as vile and loathsome an excuse for a human being as you could hope to find, but then again, given that he seems to be a stand-in for Green himself, one can only assume that either Green suffers from a serious case of self-hatred, or, more likely, he thinks he's a comic genius and that masturbating a horse, slitting open a dead deer and wearing its skin Ed Gein-style, and spinning a baby round and round by its umbilical cord are the height of entertainment.

You're supposed to laugh because she's disabled.

This film also stars Rip Torn as Gord's vulgar father. When I first saw him, I thought for one awful minute that it was Jack Nicholson, but thankfully, not even he, who has recently starred in such classics as Anger Management, has delved that low yet. Eddie Kaye Thomas, who appeared in the American Pie comedies, plays Gord's younger brother, Freddy. In an absolutely "hilarious" scene, Gord accuses his father of molesting Freddy, hence the film's title. Freddy ends up in a home for abused children. Isn't that funny? Better yet, Green's wife at the time, Drew Barrymore, also shows up to embarrass herself in the minor role of a secretary at the animation studio. The fact that she divorced him less than a year after the film was released does a lot to redeem her in my eyes. Oh, and Marisa Coughlan, the only element of the film that even approaches pleasantness, plays Gord's girlfriend-to-be, a wheelchair-bound lady who enjoys sucking his cock and having her legs whacked with a bamboo stick. That we are spared seeing her actually putting Tom Green's penis in her mouth and performing fellatio on him can, I suspect, give us one reason to be thankful for the rating criteria of the Motion Picture Association of America and the fact that the mainstream studios generally won't put out anything with an NC-17 certificate.

I'm not even going to attempt to critique the film's plot (or lack thereof), cinematic technique (or lack thereof), performances (or lack thereof), or any of the other elements that one might expect to find in a movie. (I do, however, want to point out that, when I first head about this film, I assumed it was something that had been shot on a consumer grade camcorder or, at most, DV. Never in my life did I expect it to be shot on 35mm, which isn't cheap and actually requires some degree of technical know-how to shoot on.) I simply want to conclude by saying that, until now, I have never given anything a rating of "0/10". Previously, no matter how awful a film appeared to be, I always held off slapping it with a score that low because I was sure that there must be something in the world that was worse than it, and that I couldn't make use of this score until I could be sure I had seen something approximating the worst film ever made. That long search is now over. While I can conceive of there being other films that are as bad as Freddy Got Fingered, the notion of there being anything more awful is beyond my reasoning. I have gazed into the abyss, and it gazed back at me. And it wanked an elephant off.

HD banditry

Although they have been floating cover art, vague specs and a "coming soon" release window for some time now, Universal have, until today, not unveiled many specifics about their upcoming HD DVD release of Ridley Scott's latest film, American Gangster.

Today, however, they issued an official announcement, confirming its release date as February 19th, along with its full specs. This will be an HD DVD/DVD combo release, and, oddly enough, while the HD DVD side contains only the theatrical cut, the DVD side, via seamless branching, also throws in what is being described as an "Unrated Extended Cut", clocking in at 19 minutes longer than its theatrical counterpart.

My first reaction upon reading this announcement was "No!!! You morons! What are you thinking releasing it like this?" The more that I think about it, though, the less this annoys me. Does anyone remember the last Ridley Scott film to be released as an "Unrated Extended Cut" (as opposed to a "Director's Cut")? It was Gladiator, and it opened with a visibly pissed off Scott, scarcely able to hide his contempt, telling us that the version we were about to release was categorically not his director's cut. The fact that he and writer Steven Zaillian have provided an audio commentary for the theatrical version rather rather than the extended cut suggests to me that this is their preferred version. I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover that the extended version was just another Gladiator, with a few scenes that were rightly left on the cutting room floor spliced back in.

Bottom line, it would have been nice to have had both versions in HD, but I'm not losing sleep over this. Unlike some people, I'm not about to cancel my pre-order.

I am, however, disappointed to note that many of the extras from the DVD have been left off this release... although it may turn out that much of the missing material may be replicated in the picture-in-picture feature on the HD DVD.

Now this is more like it

Last night, Lyris and I watched his recently-acquired HD DVD of the Director's Cut of Zodiac. Like Crank (see here), it was shot entirely in the digital realm, but unlike Crank, it didn't have a bunch of chimpanzees fiddling with the image control knobs. Zodiac continues Paramount's winning streak for new releases, with a virtually flawless transfer that makes the standard definition release appear even more embarrassing than it did already. If you look very closely, you can see a teeny tiny bit of sharpening, which I suspect was added during post production (the on-screen text, such as credits and location type, are unaffected), but otherwise this is one of the absolute best presentations of a movie I've ever seen (at least in a technical sense - I'm personally not a fan at all of the completely grain-free look).

Zodiac: Director's Cut
(Paramount, USA, AVC, 24 GB)

DVD review: The Plague Dogs

The Plague Dogs is a film that I can honestly say I don't ever want to watch again, and I mean that in the best possible way.

I've reviewed Optimum Home Entertainment's recent release of The Plague Dogs, Martin Rosen's second and final animated feature and a spiritual successor to the earlier Watership Down. Optimum's DVD includes both the shorter theatrical cut and the much longer director's edition.