The lavish detail before my eyes

Tonight, Lyris and me watched his recently-acquired Blu-ray release of The Life Before Her Eyes, a film by The House of Sand and Fog's director, Vadim Perelman, in which Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood play the same character in two different time periods.

In addition to being a very good film, albeit one that knocked me for six at a certain point (not unlike, say, Swimming Pool), Magnolia's Blu-ray release has a really nice transfer. The bit rate is occasionally a little low for the material being thrown at it (check the mild artefacting around the text in Example 1), but for the most part this is an excellent encode of excellent source materials. I did spot some evidence of light degraining having been applied, occasionally causing facial details to smear slightly, but this is about as far from the horror of Dark City or Patton as you can get. Yes sirree, this disc gets the thumbs-up from me.

The Life Before Her Eyes
(Magnolia Home Entertainment, USA, AVC, 15.6 GB)

DVDs I bought or received in the month of August

• Afterlife: The Complete Series 1 & 2 (R2 UK, DVD)
• The Counterfeiters (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Doomsday (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• Spooks: Code 9 (R2 UK, DVD) [review copy]
   

Waking the Dead: Series 4, Episodes 1 and 2: In Sight of the Lord

Written by Tony McHale; Directed by Andy Hay

Shortly after Waking the Dead's third series had completed its initial run, it won an Emmy (oddly enough, for what I consider the weakest episode of that series, Multistorey). The result was that, for the fourth series, it received an extended run of twelve episodes, up from the usual eight. The same producer, Richard Burrell, remained on board, and he succeeded in securing the same key writers who had been responsible for the show's growth.

Oddly enough, though, Series 4 starts with a storyline penned by an outsider. Tony McHale is the creator and current executive producer/lead writer of Holby City; he also wrote and directed several episodes of Casualty between Series 9 and 14. His scripts, particularly of late, have had something of an unhealthy obsession with religion, Christianity to be precise. In fact, it seems to be his goal to get as many storylines revolving around religion as possible in the show under his guidance. This episode of Waking the Dead is no exception, offering up a whole lot of cryptic biblical references in a storyline which involves a serial killer hammering nine inch nails into the skulls of various men who were formerly soldiers in a Second World War army battalion.

This two-parter is unusual in that whereas normally Waking the Dead's storylines start off reasonably logical and then throw you for a loop in the final half-hour, it's actually the other way round this time. That's not to say that the episode is particularly difficult to follow, but, for the first hour and a half, the writing is rather choppy, lurching from one plot development to another without a clear sense of logical progression. Boyd and the team make several rather odd leaps in logic, and while the majority of them don't end up playing out (such as Boyd's seemingly out-of-the-blue suggestion that the victims could have been Communists and were therefore assassinated for their political beliefs), I get the sense that McHale knew where he wanted to end up but had a bit of trouble actually getting there.

Actually, of all the Waking the Dead storylines, this is probably actually the most giallo-like of the lot, not only in terms of the killer's motivation but also his attire: he wears a black coat, black fedora and black gloves, and at one point even employs the sort of harsh whisper that many a giallo killer has been known to employ in order to disguise his voice. The director, Andy Hay, has clearly watched some Argento in his time.

Elsewhere, it's business as usual. Boyd has sprouted a rather alarming amount of facial hair, which in turn seems to have done nothing for his temper ("I don't give a shit about your rights!" he bellows at one suspect who has asked for his lawyer to be present). Meanwhile, see if you can spot how often Frankie is conveniently positioned behind a table or another character: the actress, Holly Aird, was pregnant at the time, and, as the series progressed, the production team had to resort to greater and greater lengths to conceal her ballooning stomach.

Waking the Dead: Series 3, Episodes 3 and 4: Walking on Water

Written by Simon Mirren; Directed by Andy Hay

After yet another extended delay, I finally get back into Waking the Dead's third series, and with a significantly better episode than the season premiere. Taking the same path as Series 2's Special Relationships, the plot this time focuses on a man, Mark Lovell (Craig Kelly), who has recently been acquitted of the murder of his adoptive father, Thomas, an event which took place almost a decade ago. On the night of the murder, four other members of the family vanished without a trace along with their boat. When the latter is discovered off the coast near the family home and salvaged, Boyd reopens the investigation, the assumption being that, if they can find out what happened to the rest of the family, they stand a good chance of finding Thomas' real killer. Unfortunately, since he was locked up, Mark has changed - dramatically so. He is now Maria, and Maria is proving to be less than cooperative when it comes to dredging up Mark's past.

It's at this stage that Waking the Dead becomes very, very confusing, and I must confess that, despite having now seen the episode three times, I'm still completely flummoxed by what is supposed to be going on in the final twenty minutes. It doesn't help that the writer, Simon Mirren, inserts a Big Huge Plot Twist out of left field, involving conspiracies, espionage and drug smuggling, and it's a shame, because everything leading up to these final twenty minutes is very good. I love the way the script pokes fun at Boyd's discomfort when faced with Mark/Maria. Much like with David Hemmings' character in Argento's Profondo Rosso, Boyd isn't disgusted by the sight of a man dressed as a woman: he simply doesn't know how to deal with the situation. I've said it before and I'll say it again: for all his tantrums and crudity, Boyd is actually a pretty liberal fellow, something of a rarity in TV detectives. (When Spence asks how Mark's gender disorder affects his status as a suspect, Boyd snaps back "It doesn't.")

There's some nice direction in this episode too, including a very neat shot of a body being slid out of a storage freezer, shown from the point of view of the body. On the other hand, I'm not wild about the various shots of the dead appearing and vanishing while Frankie is working alone on the salvaged boat. It's getting a little too close to the pseudo-mysticism that plagued some of the later episodes for my liking.

Holby connections: The writer of this episode, Simon Mirren, penned several episodes of Casualty during the Series 13-14 period (he's also Helen Mirren's nephew), while Craig Kelly, who plays Mark Lovell, starred as SHO Daniel Perryman throughout Casualty's tenth series.

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.

This is a joke, I take it

Yesterday, New Line's US Blu-ray release of Dark City arrived from DVD Pacific, hot on the heels of my discovery that it had been molested by invasive digital tampering procedures. This is despite it receiving largely positive praise from most reviewers, but, as always, the pictures tell the truth that the words themselves do not.

Watching the disc tonight was a very unpleasant experience. This is not because I didn't like the film: on the contrary, I thought it was excellent, and have now added it to my "movies I can't believe I waited this long to see" list. My reason for not enjoying the experience was that, while virtually every shot in this film is an amazing, innovative piece of art, every single one of them is ruined by some form of digital meddling, whether that's grain removal, sharpening or softening. This film should look amazingly atmospheric and film-like, and all of that is removed by this shoddy, amateurish transfer. Whoever was responsible for it should be ashamed of themselves.

New Line's high definition output that I've seen has, so far, been problematic, to put it politely. That's three out of four discs (Dark City, The Golden Compass, Pan's Labyrinth) that have been ruined by utterly ridiculously levels of digital tampering, and another (The Orphanage) that has been taken from a source with a resolution lower than 1920x1080. The latter is not necessarily New Line's fault - it may simply have been what the Spanish production company delivered to them - but it does mean that I have yet to purchase a single disc from them that is anything more than deeply flawed. While Sony are doing everything they can to preserve the integrity of the films under their jurisdiction, New Line seem to be intent on fucking up the heritage of the medium by systematically mangling their catalogue of titles. I sincerely hope that the recent acquisition of the company by Warner Bros. means that any future releases are removed from the hands of the incompetent clowns responsible for this desecration of Dark City.

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)
   

Blu-ray Stendhal this year

Blue Underground's web site has been updated to include a release date for the company's upcoming Blu-ray release of Dario Argento's splendid The Stendhal Syndrome: November 18th. This and Don Taylor's The Final Countdown are the only two Blue Underground Blu-ray releases to have release dates, and, while I'm slightly surprised that this will by the first Argento film to be released in high definition (Jenifer doesn't count), I'm more than happy that it's on its way. Now hurry up with a release date for The Bird with the Crystal Plumage!

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...

Daylight robbery

I was recently violated by the well-lubricated member of HM Thieves & Excise. As is commonly known, buying an item worth more than £18 from a non-European Union country and importing it into the UK incurs a fine quaintly described as a "customs charge". Generally I'm careful to avoid going over the limit, or if I am buying something with a value of more than £18 to order from a store with a means of slipping the package under the radar, so to speak.

Unfortunately, neither of these safety measures were worth a damn when, on Monday morning, I received a card through my door from Royal Mail informing me that they were holding on to an item of mine with a £11.36 charge on it. Knowing that I hadn't bought anything from outside the EU in the last few months that could possibly have such a charge, I was confused to say the least. Needless to say, I was even more confused when I handed over the cash at the sorting office only to be handed a copy of the Blu-ray release of Persepolis, ordered from DVD Pacific for the cost of £13.82.

You opportunistic little shits

Not only that, but, despite selecting the premium shipping option in order to ensure that the order reached me in time for my birthday, it failed to arrive in the UK until after it had passed - July 8th, according to the attached HM Thieves & Excise sticker. Of course, mail ordering is hardly an exact science, and there are an infinite number of variables that come into play when you have to send a package from one country to another. That doesn't explain why the item reached Customs on July 8th and I wasn't informed about it until July 14th.

So there you have it. Not only was I charged extortion money on a package that shouldn't have been eligible, either Thieves & Excise or Royal Mail then held on to it for a further week for the privilege. I shall of course be claiming the money back, but, given that the charge is split between £3.36 of VAT (paid to Thieves & Excise) and a ludicrous £8.00 "handling fee" paid to Royal Mail, I can see this going on forever. I first have to claim back my £3.36, which will no doubt take an eternity, and only once that has been accomplished can I then get on to the robber barons at Royal Mail to get the other £8 back.

The moral of the story? Even when you're on the side of the law, you still get buggered by the authorities. So, if you happen to dodge the odd customs charge or fiddle the system in some other way, I see no reason for you to feel bad about it.

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.

Damn your eyes!

In a previous post, I briefly mentioned that certain members of the online fan community had reacted with dismay (that's a polite euphemism, by the way) to Diablo III's richer colour palette as compared with its predecessors. Today, I want to expand on this issue.

Colour in games is a subject I've touched on before. To put it simply, I think there isn't enough of it. The trend, these days, is to go for grim, desaturated visuals in games, presumably because the developers are under the mistaken impression that using a colour palette comprised exclusively of brown and grey makes their product seem more mature and "serious". The games industry has a rather irritating habit of aping Hollywood rather than breaking new ground of its own, and I suspect that what we're currently seeing with games like Gears of War (in my opinion one of the most visually unappealing games released in recent years) is an offshoot of this. In filmspeak, "desaturated" has come to equal "raw and gritty", and game developers, thinking that "raw and gritty" beats "fun and escapist" any day (despite the fact that any game's first goal, surely, is to be fun to play), have latched on to this grim aesthetic.

I've already demonstrated the visual decay of the Unreal Tournament franchise, with the latest instalment, Unreal Tournament III, sucking all the saturation and joy out of a franchise that once prided itself on its arresting design and frankly excellent use of colour. Thankfully, there are people who understand that not everyone wants to play their games exclusively in brown and grey, with the recently released Community Bonus Pack 3 serving as an excellent example of what the game should have looked like from the outset. Here, a group of fans have taken the tools made freely available to them with the game and have created levels which, frankly, blow their official counterparts out of the water in terms of aesthetics.

Someone else who gets it is Brian Morrisroe, art director on Diablo III. Here is what he has to say on the subject of visual design:

There's a certain amount of grit and realism that we want to bring to the game, but it's important to take the player into a fantasy realm. That's what we're really all about here, is exploring that idea of giving you something you've never seen before. If we simply took photographs and just applied that to a bunch of polygons, that's really not us doing our job, so we really wanted to explore and push this idea of bringing a unique, different look to the Diablo III universe.

Quite. Rob Pardo, Blizzard Entertainment's Vice President of Game Design, expands on this when talking about the game's colour design:

If you look at Diablo I and II [...] they obviously have the Gothic look to it, but [...] they weren't very colourful games, and one of the challenges we wanted to take with Diablo III was could we add colour but still maintain that Gothic dark feel? [...] I think we want to take [...] dark as an emotion rather than actual colour art choice, and I think that's something that took a long time to get to the point that we're at now - like, I think we've probably gone through at least three pretty major art direction shifts until we got to the point where we're on stage, because I think it's really difficult to pull that off, but we're really happy with the look of the game now.

This is all well and good, and I must say that, from watching the gameplay trailer and looking at the screenshots, and perhaps most importantly from listening to what the people in charge of the game's look have to say, any fears I might have had that they didn't know what they were doing quickly evaporated. Yes, the original Diablo is a tense, atmospheric exercise in mood, and much of its success in that regard an be attributed to the desaturated palette and heavy use of shadows, but that doesn't mean that this is the only way to achieve that mood. Rich colours can be just as effective at conveying terror. Just ask Dario Argento:

Unfortunately, none of this seems to have occurred to the armchair game designers currently throwing their toys out of the pram over the new game's art style. The web, in particular Blizzard's official Battle.net and unofficial diii.net forums, are awash with people reacting with horror to the game's frankly lovely graphics. Petitions have sprung up and angry gamers have threatened to boycott the game unless Blizzard alters the art style to make it look exactly they way they want, while the less articulate have resorted to calling the graphics "gay", "cartoony" and "childish".

The reaction, from some people, has been so extreme that the subject of this negative response was even broached in an interview with Brian Morrisroe and producer Keith Lee. Mercifully, Morrisroe's response was a polite but firm "fuck off":

Diablo II had some very vibrant colours in it, and that's something we wanted to play up, and [...] something we really wanted to continue to explore was how can we use that colour, how can we use that vibrancy to really establish a mood? If you look at a lot of pop culture out there, colour is used to establish emotional states, and that's something that we've studied over the development of the product. [...] We pick our palettes accordingly, so although it might seem vibrant, the contrast levels, the dark and light values that you're seeing within the game are still within the realm of the universe that you know, but we're just adding a bit more colour to bring out an emotional response from the player.

The thing is, what the complainers seem to be forgetting is that, if the vibrancy offends their eyes so greatly, it's easy enough to dial down the saturation either on their monitor or within their graphics card's control panel, in order to get something more akin to what they're looking for. Once colour has been removed, however, it's incredibly hard to add it back, and turning up the saturation control doesn't make shades of brown and grey any less brown or grey. There seems to be an expectation among some people that Diablo III should both look and play exactly the same as its predecessors, which I honestly don't understand.

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)

Look what arrived this afternoon

Straight from our friends in the People's Republic of China, we have the first check discs for the upcoming release of Andrzej Zulawski's La Femme Publique. This will be the first commercially released DVD for which my brother did the video transfer (as well as other assorted tasks), and we hope to be able to give you a release date soon.

Some screenshots to whet your appetite:

More information about the project is available here, or visit Mondo-Vision.com for a sneak peek at what else is in the pipeline.

Waking the Dead: Series 2, Episodes 1 and 2: Life Sentence

Written by John Milne; Directed by Edward Bennett

A playing card, the Queen of Hearts, is left on the windscreen of Dr. Claire Delaney (Susannah Harker), who, several years ago, was the first of six women to be abducted by Thomas Rice (Samuel West), and the only one to survive. All the others were raped and murdered, and, on each occasion, a pack of playing cards was delivered to the investigating officer, with the instructions that he gamble for the victim's life by picking a card. Now, working under the assumption that Rice in fact had an accomplice, Boyd and his team set out to re-interview the notoriously slippery killer, now serving a life sentence.

It strikes me that this plot is rather similar to that of Dario Argento's The Card Player, albeit without the Internet factor. This episode initially aired on September 2nd 2002, and The Card Player premiered in Italy in January 2004. Now, I'm not for a minute going to suggest that Dario Argento spends his time watching British television to get ideas for his film plots, but the likeness is nonetheless striking. The other point of reference, of course, is The Silence of the Lambs, the parallels being virtually impossible to ignore when you consider Rice's "quid pro quo" attitude and Boyd's use of Mel as a honey trap of sorts. Of course, Samuel West is no Anthony Hopkins and Claire Goose, good as she is, is no Jodie Foster, but the encounters between them (and Grace) are well-written and result in one of Waking the Dead's truly tense scenes, as Rice systematically blocks his cell's security cameras with various paintings, circling around Mel as he moves in for the kill.

Otherwise, this turns out to be a fairly conventional, albeit nasty, tale of kidnapping and murder. Certainly, after tales of bodies being found in churches and photojournalists burning to death in Series 1, this one seems a bit more like "real life", while certain aspects of this case do bear a passing resemblance to the abduction storyline of the pilot. It's an assured start to the second series, however, and one with a set of suspects that is manageable and at the same time not so limited as to make the culprit seem obvious. Actually, several people are hiding something, and the various allegiances are not all what you would expect.

Incidentally, from this episode onwards, the team have moved into their permanent location - the rather snazzy-looking headquarters with the transparent evidence boards and a lack of sufficient lighting. The episode also contains what is, to the best of my recollection, the first time Boyd uses his favourite interview technique of leaning forward and asking a suspect a question, then asking it again ONLY THIS TIME SHOUTING IT SO LOUD THE SPIT FLIES OUT OF HIS MOUTH. Truly, a man of tact and subtlety.

Holby connections: Paterson Joseph, who plays Dermot Sullivan in this episode, starred in Casualty as nurse Mark Grace from Series 12 to mid-Series 13. Nowadays, though, he is probably best known as Johnson in Peep Show.

Stair-stepping ahoy!

On Wednesday, I finally got round to watching The Orphanage on Blu-ray. I knew next to nothing about the film beforehand, so was very pleased to discover an excellent piece of work, definitely one of the best horror films I've seen recently and every bit as good as, if not better than, the other recent film to bear Guillermo Del Toro's name, Pan's Labyrinth (although he mere produced The Orphanage, which was in fact directed by a fellow called J.A. Bayona). I highly recommend checking out this film if you haven't seen it yet - an imaginative and highly effective take on the "spooky old house" and "creepy child" sub-genres.

The Blu-ray release, unfortunately, is marred by the fact that it appears to have been taken from a source with a horizontal resolution of less than 1920 pixels. A certain blockiness is evident throughout in diagonal edges, which take on a stair-stepped quality: look, for example, at Fernando Cayo's nose in Shot 7 and Mabel Rivera's cheek in Example 9. Basically, it's like a less extreme version of the effect visible in Warner's early so-called "1080i upconverted" transfers. It's not dreadful, and it's somewhat ironic that the end result actually looks somewhat better than the full 1920x1080 The Golden Compass in all its noise reduced glory, but it's disappointing nonetheless. New Line's HD output, so far, has been pretty problematic to say the least, and it's a shame (but not entirely surprising) that reviewers haven't been picking up on these faults.

The Orphanage
(New Line, USA, VC-1, 26.1 GB)