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)

DVD review: Spooks: Code 9

In a word, Spooks: Code 9 is shit. Not just run of the mill, take-one-look-and-change-the-channel shit, but oh-my-God-am-I-really-seeing-this shit. No doubt the brainchild of some jaded executive who saw the perfect opportunity to craft some exciting yoof TV and get down wif da kidz, the result is a bit like being locked in a room with Eugene Levy's character from the American Pie films. In other words, cringe-inducingly embarrassing, very probably for both parties.

As the BBC continues its tradition of running successful brands into the ground with needless spin-offs, I review Contender Home Entertainment's release of Spooks: Code 9, a youth-oriented spin-off of the successful spy series.

Additional Nightmare notes

My post from a few days ago on the new Blu-ray release of The Nightmare Before Christmas attracted some negative attention from a small number of people, including a fellow Blu-ray reviewer who accused me of "irresponsible sensationalism designed to stir up controversy". I'd like to take the opportunity to address some of the issues relating to both the disc itself and my post.

First of all, the reviewer in question feels that my post "blows any small issues with the disc way out of proportion" and "makes almost no mention at all that the disc actually looks pretty damn terrific". To some extent, I agree in principle with the latter point. The disc certainly does not look "pretty damn terrific" (then again, on certain occasions I have found this reviewer's impressions to be so far off the mark as to be laughable), but it does look pretty good for the most part, with a high level of detail in most scenes, solid compression and rich, deep colours. Admittedly, I neglected to stress these positives in my review, but here's the thing: I expect high detail, a lack of compression artefacts and an accurate colour palette in my HD transfers. So sue me, I'm an optimist and like to think, when I pop in a shiny new disc, that I'll get gold. Despite the number of times the studios have let their customers down, I still hope for the best.

As a result, when I notice flaws, I have a tendency to make them the focal point of my posts and reviews. That, to me, is not unreasonable. Of course it's important to accentuate the positive so that the studios can see that we appreciate a job well done, but it's even more important to call them on the boners they pull so they can take steps to ensure that the same things don't happen again. If you look through the various Blu-ray and HD DVD image quality reviews I've written on this site, I think you'll find that, if a disc looks particularly good, I'll be sure to shout it from the rooftops. I take the opportunity to point out problematic discs, but equally well, if a disc is flawless (or nearly flawless), I have a feeling that I'll be among the most vocal in my praise of it.

I can appreciate the need for balance in reviews, so let me take the opportunity to fill in the gaps in my previous post by summarising the situation.

The Nightmare Before Christmas on Blu-ray is:

- Colourful
- Well encoded
- Detailed in around 90% of shots
- Still the best film Tim Burton attached his name to
- When all said and done, the best representation of the film on optical disc

It is not:

- Flawless
- An accurate representation of its source materials
- Film-like
- Free of DVNR artefacts

Overall, it works out at around a high 7/10 in my book. No, it's not a "pretty damn terrific" transfer, but it's not exactly shameful either.

See the president get shot at in full HD!

Attention Disney, Universal and all other DNR bandits: here is film grain. It is not your enemy. Learn it. Live it. Love it.

Vantage Point
(Sony Pictures, UK, AVC, 22.9 GB)

Christmas comes early

My brother received Disney's recent Blu-ray release of Henry Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas today. This is a film that Disney initially got cold feet over releasing and so put it out under the Touchstone Pictures banner instead, only to reclaim it years later (quite probably after they realised what a money-maker it was).

Anyway, the disc has been the recipient of some extremely positive reviews. I'm sorry to report, however, that it is yet another DVNR victim. That's not to say that it's an awful transfer by any stretch of the imagination, but it's extremely inconsistent. Some shots are Dark City bad, but others are as good as, say, Corpse Bride, with most shots lying somewhere in between the two. Grain-sucking has been applied, but not consistently, so some shots retain their original grain, but the majority don't. For the most part, the grain reduction is not massively destructive, but some shots look extremely waxy, with the optical effects shots (basically everything with Zero, fire, glowing lights, etc.) looking particularly bad. Overall this could have been a lot worse, but don't believe the people who are claiming that this film is unmolested.

Overall, it's a definite upgrade over the DVD releases (and that includes the very good anamorphic 1.66:1 release from Scandinavia, which trounced every other version), but, as is often the case, it's frustrating to think how much better it could have been. The massive irony is that, had this been a modern film made within the last couple of years, the technicians would probably have assumed that it didn't need any sort of digital "restoration" applied to it and, as a result, it would therefore have ended up looking far grainier.

Oh, and, in a further instance of tampering, the Touchstone Pictures logo at the start of the film has been replaced with a Walt Disney one. I'm not happy about that. It may not sound like the end of the world, but it's yet another example of the creeping revisionism that studios feel they can get away with inflicting on their movies. From there, it's a slippery slope towards modifications of the George Lucas variety.

The Nightmare Before Christmas
(Buena Vista, USA, AVC, 21.7 GB)

Update, September 2nd, 2008 10:19 AM: While watching the film last night, we both spotted a number of instances of the DVNR eroding picture elements such as characters' limbs. A comparison with the Scandinavian DVD revealed that this problem is new to the Blu-ray release (and probably also the concurrent standard definition re-release). An example can be seen at Lyris Lite. At least four instances were spotted in the course of a single play-through.

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]
   

DVNR city

As "a pretentious arse [...] with no sense of humour" (it's fascinating the sort of things you can happen to find written about yourself on the Internet), it's sometimes difficult for me to tell whether something is meant to be a joke, so here's my question: is New Line's treatment of Dark City intentionally funny? That's certainly how it feels to me, and I certainly can't imagine any semi-competent technician actually thinking this looked good, but oh well. Take a look at the waxworks on display and judge for yourselves.

Then have a look at how one of director Alex Proyas' other films, the vastly inferior I, Robot, looks on Blu-ray, and weep.

Dark City: Director's Cut
(New Line, USA, VC-1, 20.3 GB)

Waking the Dead: Series 4, Episodes 5 and 6: Fugue States

Written by Ed Whitmore; Directed by Ben Bolt

I have one significant complaint about this episode, and that's the suspension of disbelief required in order to accept the massive coincidence involving one character and the revelations regarding his/her relationship with another. Otherwise, this is cracking story, one of the very best of the series, which sees the team investigating the disappearance of a twin brother and sister during the Notting Hill carnival of 1990. The case is reopened when a DNA check on a young homeless man injured when he steps in front of a car reveals him to be the boy, Jason (Joe Armstrong), but a bout of insomnia (real or faked?) prevents him from revealing where he has been for nearly 15 years... or the whereabouts his sister, Cindy. In digging into the circumstances surrounding Jason's disappearance, the team uncovers a history of child abuse and dodgy dealings involving crooked goings-on with social services and an abduction conspiracy.

Any episode involving a missing child runs the risk of becoming repetitive given Boyd's own experiences in this area, and yes, it's true that he clearly sees Jason as something of a surrogate for his own missing son, becoming uncharacteristically protective of him (even turning down an opportunity to uncover further evidence as to where he has been because he is afraid it will traumatise him). However, the main personal thrust of this episode, unusually, falls on Mel's shoulders, following the revelation that she was in fact born Mary Price and, at a young age, was forcibly removed from her mother (deemed mentally unfit to care for her) and placed with foster parents. (This in turn results in a noticeable continuity gaffe in the sixth series when the issue of Mel's ancestry is raised, but I'll cover that at a later date.)

I've said this previously, but I'll repeat it here: I think Claire Goose is seriously underappreciated as an actor. Far from simply being a pretty face, she gives the characters she plays a degree of authenticity beyond what is on the page. When she was in Casualty, she gave what is in my opinion the best performance any actor has ever delivered in that show, in the episode Love Me Tender, and she does much the same here, imbuing the character enough depth that, when she flies off the handle and acts impulsively, you don't simply think she's being self-centred and projecting her own personal situation on to the ongoing investigation. Here, she commits a horrific act that is purely the result of her heightened emotional state, resulting in her jumping to the wrong conclusion as to a suspect's intentions, but she somehow retains our sympathy throughout.

Elsewhere, we get the usual witty banter between the team. I previously said Ed Whitmore's scripts tended to be drier than, say, Stephen Davis', but I should probably now take that back, as there are some absolute corkers in this episodes' dialogue, some of them rather clever. It's also, for once, reasonably coherent throughout, although I did find myself having to pause a couple of times to work out exactly what was going on in my head. Massive coincidence aside, it's all pretty logical too. A solid entry and the point at which this season, after a slightly rocky start with In Sight of the Lord, finds its feet before going to enjoy a continuous run of high quality episodes until its end.

Another day in bland collect-'em-up world

With the release of Diablo III still a long way off, many gamers are doing their best to find the Next Big Thing in the action RPG world to keep them entertained in the interim. A lot of people thought that might be Hellgate: London, designed by the creators of the first two Diablo games, but that turned out to be a disappointment for many. Others have looked to Titan Quest (which I can't say impressed me a great deal), which offered similar gameplay mechanics, this time in a world inspired by Greek Mythology.

Recently, a little game called Space Siege, developed by Gas Powered Games, came out for the PC. This is a game that sounds like great fun on paper: a slick, down-and-dirty ARPG pitting a solitary hero against hordes of aliens - a sort of heavily streamlined Diablo set in space. Its creative director - Gas Powered Games' CEO, Chris Taylor - also has an interesting pedigree, having masterminded a number of successful games, including Total Annihilation, Dungeon Siege and, most recently, Supreme Commander. Barring the latter, which I haven't played, his games have never done a great deal for me, with Total Annihilation's revolutionary use of terrain elevation and real-time 3D models (a rarity at the time in real-time strategy games) seeming to distract people from the overall blandness and homogeneity of the games design, and Dungeon Siege playing like a third-rate, dumbed-down version of Diablo with a few interesting tweaks in the form of party support and a dynamic character development system which automatically adjusted to the player's style of gameplay instead of going down the usual rigid class-based route. Still, despite not being particularly impressed by any of these games, I was more than willing to give Space Siege a go. After all, Diablo in space? Sounds like fun.

Then the reviews started coming in, basically summing up the game as bland, easy, dumbed-down beyond belief and completely, utterly generic. Undeterred, I downloaded the demo and had a go myself. Fifteen minutes later, having completed it, I promptly uninstalled it from my hard drive.

It's interesting, because one of the main criticisms levelled against Hellgate: London was that its developers were guilty of overreaching, setting their goals too high and over-hyping what was otherwise a pretty unremarkable game (which has always slightly confused me - were people expecting them to trumpet their game as "a middling game that doesn't aim too high" or something similar?). Space Siege's problem is the exact opposite: it's essentially a freeware casual game with lavish production values and an A-list price tag. Everything about it has been pared back to the barest minimum, resulting in a game that can't be accused of aiming too high because it doesn't seem to aim at all. There are no character classes, just a single generic hero with the mega-bland name of Seth Walker who gets access to a range of around ten guns over the course of the game. There are no stats or experience: instead, you level up at pre-determined moments and occasionally find a new weapon to replace your current one (you can't keep both). Effectively, the experience, loot and currency have all been homogenised into a single system of mechanical parts which are periodically dropped by fallen enemies, and in turn can be used at various stations to buy health, grenades etc. or upgrade your weapons and armour. It's all very flat and unimaginative, and the lack of a meaningful stats systems means that it's unclear what an upgrade of "+4 to armour" actually means in practice. It doesn't help that all of this is visualised in the form of graphics that are technically proficient but completely and utterly unimaginative, making Hellgate: London's oft-criticised monotonous environments look positively varied. In a sense, I suppose it looks the same as it plays, which is to some degree appropriate.

The one relatively original idea in the entire game is its system of cybernetics upgrades, in which Seth can choose to replace various body parts (e.g. eyes, arms, legs) with various robotic equivalents, which improve his abilities but in turn reduce his "humanity" rating. I'm told that the absolute ultimate is a cybernetic brain, but that in practice even this barely changes the gameplay one iota, beyond slightly altering other characters' reactions to him and resulting in a slightly different ending. As the inimitable Jeff Green (one of my favourite gaming journalists) said in his review at 1UP:

I went full robot, taking the ultimate final step: a cybernetic brain, which -- all told -- reduced my humanity to 5 percent. Fully expecting a dramatic or even traumatic change in my character (would I still be speaking the same heroic-yet-wooden dialogue?), I discovered that the game barely acknowledges it. In the final cut-scene, I saved the world...and apparently lived happily ever after as a robot.

If a bland, derivative, completely unimaginative and over-simplified point and click action game pitting a witless hero against hordes of witless space mutants sounds to you like a good use of your $50 and a fine way of passing the time before Diablo III's release, knock yourselves out. Myself, I think I'll just play Diablo II some more.

Could you shake that camera a bit more, Mr. Bay?

At the time of its release, Transformers was the fastest selling film on any HD format, shifting 100,000 copies in its first day, for a total of 190,000 in the first week. As such, it's fair to say that this would be a large number of people's first introduction to high definition, so it's probably a good thing it looks as great as it does. That's not to say it's perfect: in terms of compression, the action-packed final half-hour is something of a struggle for the encoder, whether because of disc space or bandwidth limitations, but by and large it looks excellent. I suspect that it may have been pre-filtered just a teeny-tiny bit, but this is still a sterling effort from Paramount and one that would belong in every HD enthusiast's collection if the film itself wasn't such a heap of dung.

Transformers
(Paramount, USA, AVC, 25 GB)

The only waxiness here is in Rowan Atkinson's facial expressions

Mr. Bean's Holiday seems like a slightly odd choice for a day-and-date high definition release. Even stranger is how good it looks. If I were to use the words "demo material", you probably wouldn't normally expect me to utter this film's title in the same breath, but, honestly, I think I would. It has exactly the same look two other Universal 1.85:1 releases, Children of Men and Eastern Promises, and by that I mean that there is a small amount of filtering going on, resulting in a very slight loss of detail and some ringing, but nothing overly wondering. I wonder if Universal have two different algorithms for their day-and-date releases: one for 1.85:1 movies (slight filtering) and one for their 2.39:1 ones (no filtering). I'd have to investigate more 1.85:1 titles in order to be sure, but it honestly wouldn't surprise me at all.

Mr. Bean's Holiday
(Universal, UK, VC-1, 16.1 GB)

Things can get a little hazy in the Bayou

For a catalogue title from Universal, The Skeleton Key actually looks pretty decent, probably due to the fact that it was taken from a Digital Intermediate rather than Telecine source. It does look a little soft at times, but I'm inclined to attribute at least some of this to the way in which it was shot: it certainly has the "Panavision look", where things tend to appear smooth rather than pin-sharp. Certainly I don't see any of the ringing that normally shows up in Universal's filtered titles. Unfortunately, the image has at some stage been subjected to a fairly intensive noise reduction pass, sucking out the grain and resulting in some trailing artefacts. Still, as far as catalogue releases go, this is a pretty reasonable one, and one that I'm inclined to look upon more favourably in light of recent developments regarding Universal's Blu-ray ports.

The Skeleton Key
(Universal, USA, VC-1, 16.7 GB)

Universal mangles some more

A while back, I did a series of posts on some of Universal's particularly repugnant-looking catalogue HD DVD titles, in which I warned Blu-ray users that they had these transfers to look forward to when Universal began rolling out its back catalogue for the winning format. Unfortunately, it appears that I may have been a little premature with this statement. You see, it turns out that, far from simply porting over the same flawed encodes, Universal have, in some cases, taken the opportunity to go back and make them look worse.

I first got wind of this when I took a look at DVD Beaver's review of The Mummy on Blu-ray. The article features a number of full resolution 1920x1080 screen captures, which immediately struck me as quite a bit more waxy-looking than how I remembered the HD DVD, which I had briefly rented some months prior. Of course, memory can play funny tricks on you, but a little later, the proof arrived in the form of an image comparison by AV Science Forum member Xylon, whose screen captures are one of the main reasons I visit that forum and are worth more than a thousand text-based reviews. The difference may not be massive, but it's there: Universal have added further noise reduction for the Blu-ray release. The Mummy Returns shows a similar situation: again, the Blu-ray version is noticeably less grainy and more synthetic-looking than its HD DVD counterpart.

Finally, today's scandal involves U-571, once again released on Blu-ray by Universal with a vulgar level of noise reduction applied to it. The difference should be clear to even the most visually-impaired of viewers: the HD DVD (and its D-Theater counterpart) was hardly a stellar-looking disc, but the Blu-ray version looks positively alarming, sucking much of the grain out of the image and rendering it fake-looking and waxy. Predictably, the usual suspects have emerged from the woodwork to decry Xylon's findings. Unfortunately, whatever such individuals might attempt to claim, the pictures speak for themselves and reveal the truth that no amount of whitewashing or "it doesn't look like that on my screen" nonsense can hide.

In summary: as a rule, Universal treated their catalogue titles rather badly on HD DVD, and now they are making them look even worse on Blu-ray. What will it take to hammer it into these fools' heads that this sort of image degradation is neither necessary or wanted?

Waking the Dead: Series 4, Episodes 3 and 4: False Flag

Written by Stephen Davis; Directed by Suri Krishnamma

This was Stephen Davis' final episode of Waking the Dead, and it's a good one, not least because it feature the top brass finally doing what she should have done for ages now: commission a psychological report on Boyd. This is part of a rather interesting storyline which involves plans on the part of the Assistant Commissioner to either dismantle the Cold Case Squad or at the very least bring it under her direct jurisdiction. The catalyst for this is a breach of protocol in which Boyd admits to having entered a property without the appropriate warrant. As a result, the rest of the team feels that he has jeopardised their jobs. As later becomes clear, however, the culprit was in fact not Boyd but Spence: Boyd took the rap because he didn't want Spence's prospects of promotion to be affected. It's little moments like these that help make the characters more multi-faceted, something that is particularly important given Boyd's ever-increasing instability.

Like one of the writers' previous episodes, Special Relationships, this one ventures into political conspiracy territory, beginning with the discovery of a man's body in a car, a bullet through his head and an unexploded bomb strapped underneath. The body is identified as that of Gerald Doyle (Dan Morgan), a young man with decidedly pro-Republican views on the conflict in Northern Ireland, and his death is dated to the late 1970s, roughly coinciding with the assassination of Duncan Sanderson (Christopher Strauli), a prominent Conservative MP whose attitude towards Republicanism was nothing if not hard-line. Sanderson was killed by a bomb strapped under his car, and the similarity of the modus operandi between the two murders leads Boyd and the team to suspect a connection. Working on the hypothesis that Doyle was part of a Republican splinter group, they begin to uncover disturbing evidence suggesting that he and several other like-minded individuals were in fact assassinated at the behest of the British government.

As I've said before on numerous occasions, Waking the Dead is nothing if not a confusing programme, and, whenever they tackle high level conspiracies, things have a tendency to get really confusing. This is certainly the case here, and once again I found myself beginning to wonder if I'd lost my marbles during the final half-hour, but along the way there is some choice interaction between the team to keep the viewer engaged. Particularly choice are Grace's attempts to build a profile of the uncooperative Boyd, not to mention a particularly delicious opportunity to watch the man squirm in which Frankie assures him she can defuse an unexploded bomb, before proceeding to ask him which colour of wire he thinks she should cut first. It all gets a tad muddled towards the end, and the denouement for the individual behind the killings is less than satisfactory, but it's once again a strong episode and a nice swansong for a writer whose standard of episodes has been consistently high.

Holby connections: Peter De Jersey, who plays Dr. Chris Reed in this episode, appeared in Holby City as charge nurse Steve Waring between Series 3 and 5.

More thoughts on Red Alert 3

I've played quite a few more matches of the Red Alert 3 beta since my last post on the subject, and am slowly but surely forming an overall understanding of the game. I'm also getting a bit better at it too, winning a handful of games while playing as the Allies, who are not as underpowered as I first thought.

Above all, what impresses me about this game is that EA seem to finally be intent on moving the Command & Conquer franchise away from the old "mass a load of units and steamroll your opponent with superior numbers" mentality that has, to an extent, characterised the past games. Watching some of the replays and shoutcasts over at Red3.org, it has become pretty clear to me that, in this game, there is an increased focus on hard (as opposed to soft) counters. In other words, each unit in the game has a direct counter that can completely obliterate it, which can then, in turn, be obliterated by another unit, and so on and so forth. This is in stark contrast to many of the older games in the series, where this rock-paper-scissors dynamic was a lot less pronounced. The result, I think, is that the game is more rewarding to play, particularly if you take the time to learn the various counters, because you're forced to actually think about which units you're building, and adapt your strategy depending on what your opponent is doing. There's something very satisfying about spotting an enemy player making for your base with a gaggle of heavy-duty Airships (huge flying balloons which can decimate your base by carpet-bombing them), and then quickly training a handful of anti-air Apollo Fighters to take them out before they even reach you (Airships can't attack other air units).

What I have been noticing, however, is a tendency towards games developing into a stalemate in which the two theatres of land and sea end up being controlled by different sides, with neither able to make a sizeable dent in the other. This is, in part, due to the fact that, if one player rules the seas, it's virtually impossible for the other to venture into them without being hammered. Land units can't really do anything against sea units, unless the sea units venture too close to the shore, while the Soviets' impressive naval-based anti-air capabilities tend to make it difficult to bomb them from the skies (not impossible, but difficult). Add to this the fact that resources in Red Alert 3 are finite, and you can often end up in situations where neither side is able to build new forces, meaning that it's essentially a case of one side waiting for the other to get fed up and go on a suicide mission, or quit in frustration. Of course, this is an problem inherent in virtually any RTS, but one that I suspect could be smoothed out with a bit more balancing in terms of the land/sea/air spread between the various factions.

Then again, I'm still learning the ropes, so it could be that something obvious is eluding me. Given that every unit in the game has a secondary function, the applicability of which is often somewhat vague, requiring to be used in tandem with the abilities of one or more other units, there's rather a lot to get your head around. What I am fairly sure of, though, is that Red Alert 3 is shaping up to be a great RTS, and one that I'm definitely looking forward to picking up when it's released.