Cinema

Turn that frown upside down

A couple of days ago, if you’d told me I’d enjoy Enchanted so much, I’d probably have laughed. I must admit that the idea of an intentionally saccharine Disney fairytale spilling over into the “real” (i.e. live action) world didn’t really sound like a bundle of laughs, but, all the same, reports of stellar image quality and some very nice hand-drawn animation piqued my curiosity, and I picked up the Blu-ray release.

I watched it on Friday night, and I honestly don’t think I’ve got so much pure enjoyment out of a film in a long time. If Disney fairytales aren’t your cup of tea, you’ll probably hate this, but in that case you, sir, are Scrooge McDuck and have a heart of stone. This film has its head lodged firmly in the clouds, and frankly I’m not complaining. A little bit of escapism now and then is a very good thing, especially when it’s executed with this degree of panache. I still haven’t decided whether Amy Adams is intensely charming or intensely irritating, but she and the rest of the cast have a level of enthusiasm that is incredibly infectious and lets me overlook the script’s shortcomings.

I found the live action material more appealing to look at than either the traditional animation or CGI elements, which is quite a feat indeed. Then again, given the bland (albeit slick) look of the hand-drawn elements and the overall shoddiness of the CGI (including the worst talking dragon this side of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Graduation Day episode), perhaps that’s not entirely surprising. Anyway, I thought I’d do a bunch of screen captures to show just how far Disney managed to hit their Blu-ray release out of the park. Feast your eyes on these:

Enchanted
(Buena Vista, USA, AVC)

Animation:

Live action:

Plumbing the depths?

Source: Fangoria

It is being reported at Fangoria that the sequel to Neil Marshall’s excellent subterranean horror flick The Descent, due out next year, has been fully cast and is ready to go. Shauna Macdonald and Natalie Mendoza will be getting covered in karo syrup again, in what appears to be a continuation of the modified US cut of the film (its ending was shortened for American audiences in order to be more “upbeat”).

Unfortunately, while Neil Marshall is on board as a producer, both the writer - James Watkins (of My Little Eye, er, infamy) - and director - Jon Harris (editor of the original The Descent) - are new. Given the way in which the original UK cut of the first film, in both my and its director’s eyes the definitive version, ended, it’ll be very hard for me to view this as a direct continuation. I’ll be happy to be proved wrong, but this screams “cash-in” to me. Some films, frankly, don’t require sequels, and as far as I’m concerned this is one of them, particularly when said sequel looks set to be a continuation of an errant version of the film rather than the original cut.

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.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of April

• 101 Dalmatians: Platinum Edition (R1 USA, DVD)
• The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• The Aristocats: Special Edition (R1 USA, DVD)
• The Black Dahlia (R2 UK, DVD)
• Bonnie and Clyde (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• The Frightened Woman (R0 UK, DVD)
• Holby Blue: Series 1 (R2 UK, DVD)
• Juno (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• The Lady from Shanghai (R2 UK, DVD)
• The Maltese Falcon (R2 UK, DVD)
• Mother of Tears (R2 UK, DVD)
• The Postman Always Rings Twice (R2 UK, DVD)
• An Unsuitable Job for a Woman: Series 1 & 2 (R1 USA, DVD)
   

Clash of the tits

Source: Dread Central

Dr. Uwe Boll is at it again! Not content with making some of the worst movies known to humankind, the man behind House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark has issued a personal challenge to Michael Bay, calling on him to meet him in the ring to battle it out, mano a mano, and determine once and for all who is the better director.

You may remember a previous escapade involving Uwe Boll and a boxing ring. Two years ago, he famously challenged his harshest critics to a punch-up in the ring. In something of a perverse twist of fate, Boll resoundingly thrashed all five opponents, proving that it doesn’t matter how bad a filmmaker you are, provided you can pack a mean punch. Frankly, I don’t fancy Bay’s chances if he chooses to accept the challenge.

You can view the Herr Doktor’s video message to Bay at MovieSet.

Blu-ray brattiness

Unfortunately, high definition doesn’t make Juno MacGuff any less moody and obnoxious than her standard definition counterpart, but she, her posse and their surroundings certainly look considerably more detailed and lifelike, courtesy of one of 20th Century Fox’s best transfers to date. “Grain!” I hear you say. “Good!” I say. Juno has a look not unlike that of Atonement (HD DVD screen captures here), but is considerably less eroded, resulting in a far more satisfying experience overall. The clots at DVD Town, IGN (“Only marginally better than the standard [definition DVD]” - pffffft!) and the like may have been pretty lukewarm in their reactions to this transfer, but rest assured that Captain Whiggles will be giving it a glowing appraisal come review-time.

Juno
(20th Century Fox, USA, AVC, 26.9 GB)

DVD review: Mother of Tears

All things considered, Mother of Tears could so easily have been a much worse film than it is. As a conclusion to the Three Mothers trilogy, it’s not even remotely satisfying, paying lip service to various plot elements from the previous entries but failing to continue their thematic concerns in anything but the most superficial manner. Taken on its own terms, however, you have a pacey and at times very entertaining romp through various pieces of 70s and 80s horror iconography, bolstered by some stand-out set-pieces and gung-ho violence. It’s something of a reflection of how much times have changed that I can honestly say I enjoyed a Dario Argento film more as a fast, silly rollercoaster ride than as a work of art, but I prefer to look upon this as a “glass half full” endeavour. No, it’s not Suspiria or Inferno, but nor is it the disaster it could have been.

Three decades after starting his Three Mothers trilogy, Dario Argento comes full circle with Mother of Tears. I review Optimum’s R2 UK release.

Naturellement la version panoramique

Yesterday, I received a copy of the new R1 USA Special Edition DVD of Disney’s The Aristocats via DVD Pacific. Unfortunately, I’m sorry to have to report that this is yet another “cropped to 1.75:1” atrocity:

I’m sorry, but would someone like to explain to me why this is being done? I don’t care that this was how they would have been projected theatrically (the chances of finding a cinema equipped to display 1.33:1 material in 1970, when this film was released, would be small in the extreme) - anyone can take one look at the image above and instantly tell that something is not right about the framing. It was nice to see this trend reversed for 101 Dalmatians, but that doesn’t change the issue of several other titles having been bungled and continuing to be bungled.

This release, incidentally, seems to have been done on the cheap. For a so-called Special Edition, you really don’t get much that’s all that special, barring a pointless Virtual Kitten game, a brief piece on the Sherman brothers, some image galleries and a deleted song. Additionally, a sure sign of a rush job, the film’s original mono mix is no included, instead porting over the 5.1 remix from the older European release (the previous US disc featured a 2.0 surround remix). On the plus side, the image hasn’t been subjected to the same level of excessive grain reduction that has resulted in most Disney re-releases since Alice in Wonderland looking as if they were shot digitally, but at the same time the compression is pretty damning.

I know The Aristocats is far from a shining example of what Walt Disney Feature Animation was capable of (it and Robin Hood are, in my opinion, the studio’s weakest animated features this side of Pocahontas), but that’s no excuse for a second-rate DVD release.

R.I.P. Ollie Johnston

Cartoon Brew reports that Ollie Johnston, the last survivor of Disney’s Nine Old Men, died today at the ripe old age of 95. This definitely marks the end of an era in the history of filmmaking, and he leaves behind a truly impressive legacy in terms of character animation.

So many discs, so little time

The last few days have heralded a shed-load of DVD and Blu-ray releases pouring through my letterbox, most of which I’ve scarcely had time to give more than a cursory glance. Most of them were free review copies, and a good thing too as I recently had to pay off my Graduate Endowment, so my coffers are looking a little empty at the moment.

First up, and one that I did pay for, was Sony Pictures’ UK Blu-ray release of Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. It looks to feature a decent transfer for a catalogue title: detail is, on the whole, very good, but the tell-tale signs of grain reduction are consistently evident. At the moment, I’d peg it as being slightly better than the re-release of The Fifth Element, also from Sony, but more investigation will be needed.

Next up, on Saturday, Shameless Screen Entertainment’s UK DVD release of Piero Schivazappa’s trippy 60s shocker The Frightened Woman (a.k.a. Femina Ridens). As a nice surprise, they sent me a fully boxed copy rather than the “DVD in a paper wallet” affair that most of the UK studios favour, so I can savour the tacky artwork in all its, erm, glory.

Unfortunately, I can’t say anything particularly positive about the transfer. Yes, it looks considerably better than my old VHS dupe, but that’s not a fair or particularly realistic comparison. A more valid counterpoint would be Severin Films’ release of The Psychic, which had similarly poor image quality, with a lack of detail and what looked like a dodgy scaling job, manifesting itself in the form of jagged diagonal lines. I wonder what caused this. Perhaps both films were acquired from the same licensor, or perhaps both companies used the same (incorrectly set up) encoder? Either way, if I’d paid for a company to encode my film and it came back looking like this, I would have rejected it outright. In case anyone gets the wrong idea, this is nothing to do with the quality of the source materials, which, barring some tape-based inserts for scenes which wouldn’t be sourced from a print, appears to be in great shape. This issue here has nothing to do with that and everything to do with the way it has been treated at the authoring stage. Not impressed.

Also in the package was the 2-disc release of the first series of Holby Blue, from 2 Entertain (the BBC’s front for commercial exploitation via optical disc). This is interesting, because I recorded the entire series directly to my computer via my USB TV stick back when it first aired, so I had a point of comparison to refer to when examining the image quality. The results, which you can see by clicking the smaller images below, are quite surprising:

Example 1
(Left: Commercial DVD; Right: My recording from DTV)

Example 2
(Left: Commercial DVD; Right: My recording from DTV)

Example 3
(Left: Commercial DVD; Right: My recording from DTV)

That’s right: the DVD release is considerably more filtered than what was broadcast on BBC1. Obviously, there are considerably more compression artefacts in the captures taken from my off-air recordings - that’s not surprising, given the notoriously shoddy standard of BBC’s encoding (BBC1 has a fixed 6 Mbps bit rate to play around with, so there’s really no excuse). I am, however, surprised, by how much more detailed my recordings are. A further black mark against the DVD release is that 2 Entertain have unceremoniously lopped off the “Previously” and “Next week” segments at the start and end of each episode, sometimes incredibly badly: the music has noticeable jump cuts and generally reeks of shoddiness. Is it so unreasonable to expect a complete package when you shell out your hard-earned cash for a TV series that you already helped pay for with your robber baron tax? (Ignoring the fact that I got the DVD for free, and, not being a home-owner, don’t pay the robber baron tax.)

The final disc in this package of joy was Optimum’s UK release of Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears. Audio options are Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 English, with no subtitles, while the only extra is the trailer. Image quality (and I’m aware of sounding increasingly like a broken record here) is not too bad, but not too great either. There’s plenty of evidence of ringing as a result of brick wall filtering, and also a massive amount of noise reduction which robs the image of its natural grain. A couple of people who got advance copies of this disc mentioned that the film looked as if it had been shot on digital video, and I see what they mean. I wonder if Medusa’s Italian release (which doesn’t have any English audio options) looks any better?

This morning, I received an order from DVD Pacific containing the US release of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. This was an ITV adaptation of P.D. James’ novel of the same name (which I’m reading at the moment), starring Helen Baxendale and Annette Crosbie, and the DVD contains all four three-part episodes. My interest was piqued when I discovered that one of the three-parters was written by Barbara Machin, creator of Waking the Dead (the seventh series of which incidentally started tonight), so I decided to pick up this DVD set, fully aware that all four episodes feature standards converted transfers. This is, unfortunately, as far as I’m aware the only release of this programme on DVD, and beggars can’t be choosers. I won’t start watching till I’ve finished reading the book, though.

Finally - and this is where my luck with image quality finally changes - I also received a review copy of the US Blu-ray release of Juno. My good friend Peter M. Bracke opines that this is “a fairly good-looking presentation”, but as usual I beg to differ. This is definitely the best high definition transfer I’ve seen from 20th Century Fox so far, bearing in mind that I own fewer of their films than any of the other major studios. The source material is such that it won’t make you leap out of your seat, marvelling at all the detail on display, but even so it’s an excellent presentation of a fairly low-key, muted-looking film.

Expect full reviews of The Frightened Woman, Holby Blue, Mother of Tears and Juno at DVD Times before very much longer.

Brody goes yellow

Source: ComingSoon.net

Its production has been pushed back and it appears to have lost almost its entire original cast (which included Ray Liotta, Vincent Gallo and Asia Argento), but Dario Argento’s latest film, Giallo, looks set to go begin shooting in Turin on May 12th, this time boasting Adrien Brody and Emmanuelle Seigner in the cast. Brody, who will executive produce the film along with Oscar Generale, Claudio Argento, Luis De Val, David Milner, Billy Dietrich, Patricia Eberle, Donald Barton and John Hicks (co-production, anyone?), must be a particularly impressive casting coup for Argento, giving the impression that the maestro may, after several false starts, be about to crack the mainstream, and to tell you the truth I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that.

I must confess that, as happy as I am to hear that Argento is working on another film so soon after Mother of Tears, what I’ve heard about Giallo doesn’t exactly fill me with hope. He’s once again working from someone else’s pre-written script, again the product of an American duo, Jim Agnew and Sean Keller, and it sounds like this will be very much a nudge-nudge wink-wink “homage” to gialli, albeit hopefully not in the same way that Scream was to the Halloween-inspired slasher movie gravy train. I hope I’m pleasantly surprised, but this sounds a bit ho-hum and fairly pointless for Argento at this stage in his career. I’m yet to be convinced that this will do anything Sleepless didn’t already do.

Happenings in Whedonsville

A couple of recent goings-on in tellyland for your attention, both concerning Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon. The first, and probably least interesting from my perspective, is that Firefly, his short-lived sci-fi western series, looks set to get a Blu-ray release at some point down the line. The release is still a considerable way off, given that it is described as only being in the “early development stages”, but it has been confirmed by a 20th Century Fox spokesperson, so this news will surely please its many devoted followers. Myself, I could never get into Firefly, which is odd, given how much I enjoyed its big screen follow-up, Serenity. In its defence, I didn’t try particularly hard to watch it, and had a lot of other things on the go when I rented the first disc of the DVD set, so perhaps I didn’t give it enough of a chance. I’d certainly be up for revisiting it in high definition to see if my view on it has changed.

Secondly, and in my eyes far more excitingly, is the news that Whedon has a new television series in the pipeline, which will be titled Dollhouse and will reteam him with Eliza Dushku (Faith in Buffy) and, erm, 20th Century Fox. Yes, the same 20th Century Fox whom he vowed never to work with again after they, in his eyes, screwed him over so royally with Firefly. Also, I must admit that, in light of the debacle that was Buffy’s sixth and seventh season, and its shark-jumping comic book continuation, my faith in the man to put together a half-decent show has waned somewhat, but there’s a little part of me that is nonetheless excited to hear that he’s returning to television, paired with the always-watchable Dushku no less. And come on, you’ve got to admit that the premise has promise:

Echo (Eliza Dushku) [is] a young woman who is literally everybody’s fantasy. She is one of a group of men and women who can be imprinted with personality packages, including memories, skills, language - even muscle memory - for different assignments. The assignments can be romantic, adventurous, outlandish, uplifting, sexual and/or very illegal. When not imprinted with a personality package, Echo and the others are basically mind-wiped, living like children in a futuristic dorm/lab dubbed the Dollhouse, with no memory of their assignments - or of much else. The show revolves around the childlike Echo’s burgeoning self-awareness, and her desire to know who she was before, a desire that begins to seep into her various imprinted personalities and puts her in danger both in the field and in the closely monitored confines of the Dollhouse.

The word is that former Angel (and Firefly, and Wonderfalls) executive producer Tim Minear will also be involved, so here’s hoping he’ll help steer this new show in the right direction.

There’s no place like home

My Windows Vista experience has been temporarily halted, after slightly under 72 hours. I’ve come to the conclusion that the video playback situation, at least in its current state, is too inconvenient for me to stick with. This morning, when I popped in The Maltese Falcon, I discovered that PAL overlay playback is severely borked: material such as subtitles and menu selection gets drawn for NTSC resolution, which means that everything is displaced and wonky. It’s something that can be worked around, but it makes it a pain the neck attempting to select anything on a menu, and means that, when watching a film with subtitles, the text ends up half-way up the screen. Oh, and for some reason, screen capturing in PowerDVD doesn’t work for PAL discs in Vista when hardware acceleration is enabled, which means that, when taking screenshots for reviews, I first have to switch the player into software mode. Not the end of the world, of course, but a giant pain in the neck and something I don’t see the point of continuing to struggle with.

Beyond the video support, I have no major issues with Vista whatsoever. Then again, I don’t exactly have any significant complaints about XP either (other than that it doesn’t look quite as pretty), and its video playback works the way it’s supposed to. For the time being, though, I’m going to continue to use XP and hope that a solution to my video woes eventually materialises, either in the form of better drivers from ATI, better DVD software from Cyberlink (or anyone else, come to that), or an end to this “no overlay” nonsense from Microsoft.

Thoughts on The Maltese Falcon, and various giallo/film noir observations

I had my first proper film noir experience today in the form of John Huston’s celebrated 1941 offering, The Maltese Falcon. I don’t mean by that that it was the first film noir I’d ever seen, but rather that it was the first time I sat down to watch a film thinking “Right, this is a film noir. What does that mean and how does it manifest itself?”

The Maltese Falcon is currently ranked as the 69th greatest film of all time on IMDB, and, regardless of how much or how little faith you put in such lists (personally, I think they’re generally of little value), it’s tough to deny that it’s difficult to approach any film with that sort of reputation, particularly one that’s over 60 years old. How do you even begin to comprehend how it would have been viewed at the time of its release, and how do you begin to appreciate its various innovations in that context, knowing full well that they have now been assimilated into the everyday language of film? The answer is that you don’t, unless you possess both a time machine and a means of erasing all of your existing knowledge and preconceptions regarding the type of film in question. The Maltese Falcon is very much a quintessential film noir, but it wouldn’t have been seen as such in 1941, given that the movement didn’t enjoy its glory period until some years later, and it would take even longer for people to begin actively referring to these as film noirs.

So anyway, did I enjoy The Maltese Falcon? Yes, I did - considerably so, in fact, although, as I find to be the case with many films that are considered the greatest of their respective genres or movements, my enjoyment didn’t develop into out and out awe or adulation. I found it consistently witty dialogue-wise and at many points engaging, but there were also several moments for me where things began to sag a bit and my interest started to wane. Each time that happened, a plot development would generally show up in a few minutes to regain my attention, but my overriding reaction was “Yeah, this is a really good film” rather than “Wow, this is one of the greatest films of all time!” (Oh, and a minor criticism: I must admit that the continual continuity flubs, mainly actors changing position between shots, kept taking me out of the drama.) That said, I’m pretty sure my reaction to Deep Red was somewhat similar the first time I saw it, and we all know how highly I regard it now.

Anyway, as I’ve continued reading up on film noir, the similarities between it and the giallo movement have become all the more pronounced. I’m not sure that much, if any, of this comes from my viewing of The Maltese Falcon, but I thought I’d note a few of my observations regarding the ties between the two movements:

- The giallo began in the late 60s as an offshoot of 30s pulp literature, whereas film noir kicked off more than two decades earlier, in the early 40s, drawing on the influence of 10s/20s German Expressionism (for the visuals) and hard-boiled detective pulp fiction (for the narratives and themes).

- For both movements, there is a broad agreement on what constitutes the key iconography, but no single universally accepted definition. In addition, broadly speaking, it is agreed that neither the giallo nor the film noir constitutes a genre. To describe film noir, Alain Silver uses the word “cycle”, which has obvious connotations of time, indicating that the movement is part of a specific period, an is echoed in writing on gialli which uses the Italian word ‘filone’, used to refer to trends and cycles.

- Key traits include moral ambiguity and sexual motivation, often involving a contemporary urban setting.

- Although there are a number of high profile exceptions (The Maltese Falcon being a case in point), the majority of gialli and film noirs tended to be B-movies, with modest budgets and a lack of major stars.

- Both movements seem to have emerged in times of social and/or political unrest:

— Literary gialli arrived in the 1930s during the rise of fascism.

— Filmic gialli emerged during a period of intense violence and terrorism in the early 1970s, and following considerable progress in the women’s emancipation movement.

— The hard-boiled detective novels which influenced film noir emerged in the US during the Depression of the 1930s.

— Film noir as a movement took off during the aftermath of the Second World War, and its portrayal of powerful, independent women as dangerous (i.e. the femme fatale) can be seen as representative of the fears of a generation of men who returned from war to find that women had entered the public sector in their absence. The vilification and ultimate destruction of the femme fatale can be argued to constitute an attempt to restore ‘order’ and return women to what was perceived as their rightful place.

- Shared (partial) roots in German Expressionism: Dario Argento, whose The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) is considered to have sparked the main thrust of the giallo boom, has professed to having been influenced by German Expressionism, particularly the films of F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang.

- In both cases, the ‘colour’ terminology appears to have been applied retrospectively. ‘Film noir’, or so says Wikipedia (remind me not to quote that in my bibliography!), was first coined by French critic Nino Frank in 1946, and likewise the term ‘giallo’ does not appear to have been actively used when the films in question were initially released (trailers which do attempt to classify them tend to use the word ‘thrilling’, e.g. Deep Red). It may be that the giallo movement’s literary origins were only noticed and acknowledged later. (Does anyone know? An investigation of contemporary Italian press publications would probably be needed here.)

- Oh, and Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943), referred to by some (e.g. Gary Needham) as the first cinematic giallo, was adapted from James M. Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, itself adapted in the US in 1946 and considered a major film noir.

DVD debacle

Tomorrow, my film noir crash course will begin in earnest, starting with a morning viewing of The Maltese Falcon, which I picked up today during my lunch break. I also snagged The Lady from Shanghai and The Postman Always Rings Twice, so a sincere word of thanks to everyone who suggested titles for me to look into.

I also decided to nab The Black Dahlia to give me a flavour for a more recent take on the noir framework. I’ve heard mixed reports about it, but I figure I might as well give it a whirl.

I got home to find a package from DVD Pacific waiting for me, containing the Blu-ray release of Bonnie and Clyde and the recent Platinum Edition DVD release of Disney’s 101 Dalmatians. I’ve always had a strange relationship with the latter, since it’s one of the few Disney features where I actually read the source material before reading the film, and, perhaps for that reason, the adaptation never really stood up for me. It’s a very enjoyable film, don’t get me wrong, and Cruella De Vil is one of the greatest screen villains ever created, but the book, for me, just paints a much richer and more appealing image in my head.

An interesting point about this release is that, whereas the recent re-releases of The Jungle Book, The Aristocats and Robin Hood (and the upcoming The Sword in the Stone) were all matted to an aspect ratio of 1.75:1, 101 Dalmatians retains the open matte 1.33:1 format favoured by every prior home video release, something which pleases me greatly considering how borked The Jungle Book looked when matted. The behind the scenes documentary for 101 Dalmatians, contained on the second disc, mattes the image to a widescreen ratio, with disastrous results, and watching it made me thankful that Disney have opted for a full-frame presentation for this release. I mean, take a look at the image below and try to imagine how you might matte it without completely destroying the composition:

Hopefully there will be a full review at DVD Times in the near future.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of March

• Across the Universe (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• Atonement (R0 UK, HD DVD)
• Danny the Dog (R0 Japan, Blu-ray)
• Hidden (R2 UK, DVD)
• Lewis: Series One (R2 UK, DVD)
• The New York Ripper: Special Restored Edition (R2 Denmark, DVD)
• Sugar Rush: Series One & Two (R2 UK, DVD)
• Tragic Ceremony (R1 USA, DVD)
   

How Blu are you?

Concluding my Blu-ray Trilogy of Terror™ for today, I thought I’d take a look at upcoming releases that have been announced for the format and put together a list of titles I intend to pick up:

Out now:
- Enchanted (Buena Vista)

March 25th, 2008
- Bonnie and Clyde (Warner) (ORDERED)

April 8th, 2008
- The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Sony Pictures)

April 14th, 2008
- A Tale of Two Sisters (Tartan)

April 15th, 2008
- Juno (Fox) (REVIEW COPY REQUESTED)

April 22nd, 2008
- The Orphanage (New Line)

April 29th, 2008
- The Golden Compass (New Line)

May 26th, 2008
- Lady Vengeance (Tartan)

July 1st, 2008
- Gangs of New York (Buena Vista)

October 7th, 2008
- Sleeping Beauty (Buena Vista)

Gangs of Blu York

Source: High-Def Digest

For some reason, I seem to have been waiting for a high definition release of Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York for longer than virtually every other title. Back in 2006, it was erroneously listed for a release in the UK on HD DVD at Play.com… until, that is, it was discovered that UK distribution Entertainment In Video weren’t actually going to be supporting HD DVD at all. A Blu-ray release eventually showed up after several delays, and looked like crap. In any event, it was coded for Region B only, which made it a no sale for me. Congratulations, EIV! A double strike!

However, Buena Vista have now announced their plan to bring it out on Blu-ray in the US on July 1st. No disc specifications have been revealed yet, but I do have slightly more faith in Buena Vista than in EIV, so here’s hoping this film will actually get its first passable-looking home video release.

And thus the cycle of grief continues

Baron Scarpia has reviewed Norbit. As you may remember, this was part of a wager into which we entered: he would watch and review Norbit, but only on the condition that I watch and review Freddy Got Fingered.

As the good Baron himself acknowledges, I probably got the worse end of the deal, but only just. Read his review to see what he thinks of this fascinating indictment of the fact that Eddie Murphy is for some inexplicable reason still allowed to make films.

Are we completely without morals?

Source: Mobius Home Video Forum

The British Board of Film Censors has just recanted on yet another of their blasphemies, this time giving an 18 rating to the uncut version of Piero Schivazappa’s The Frightened Woman (reviewed here as part of my Giallo Project, even though it’s technically not a giallo). This film was previously classified in 1998, when it was subjected to 16 seconds of unspecified vandalism. The new release runs for 86 minutes and 3 seconds (PAL), and, according to the information issued by distributor Shameless Screen Entertainment, is approved by Schivazappa himself:

Rebuilding The Frightened Woman has been a labour of love but thanks to the work of genre expert Marc Morris the Shameless version of The Frightened Woman runs at 86m 03secs compared to the 83m 25 secs run time supplied by the licensor.

What became clear as Shameless compared all the known versions of The Frightened Woman was that various moments had been lost at different points in all of them. Some were merely shaved seconds; others changed the nuance of a scene or missed out important footage. These have been more than enough to prompt fans on the web to start cataloguing the differences with a prime example being this thread on the respected DVD Maniacs forum:

http://www.dvdmaniacs.net/forums/showthrea…rightened+woman

In order to create this new Shameless version they have used a wide variety of source materials that widely vary in quality but they believe that the end result shows off the film in the complete form it has long deserved to be celebrated in including the correct colour palette.

Shameless have kept director Piero Schivazappa informed throughout the process and asked him to watch through it for them and see if he could give it his seal of approval. He kindly sat through it, with script in hand and felt that, “it is as faithful as it can be to the original script”, and was very happy to see the film brought back to life in this Shameless version declaring, “This IS the version of my film to watch.”

Shameless Screen Entertainment will release The Frightened Woman on DVD at £12.99 on 14th April, 2008. The Shameless director approved cut will run at 86m 03secs and is being released uncut by the BBFC for the first time in the UK. Presentation of the film is in restored 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen with a restored 2.0 mono soundtrack. The DVD includes an original theatrical trailer.

I shall definitely be picking up a copy. I’m just glad I held out and can now replace my grimy VHS-sourced dupe.

Happy Chocolate Egg Day, by the way.