What BluRay Have You Just Watched?
Posted by: Mr Underhill on 11 July 2011
Why bother with a new thread?
Often I will buy the DVD rather than the BR, but sometimes the difference is more than just a minor improvement in picture quality.
I bought the BR of El Cid. This is a great film, but one with a truly sub-standard 4:3 DVD. The BluRay is so much better.
If, like me, you love this film then it well worth the money with a 2.35:1 print and 5.1 DTS-HD soundtrack.
I haven't got to the 2nd disc of extras, but these are never of that much consequence to me - it is the Main feature that counts, and this is so much better than the DVD.
M
Possibly slightly biased as I love Iceland so much, but offset because I normally find Ben Stiller tiring to watch, but this was outstanding:
Surprised me, too. I really enjoyed it.
One of the good things about a service like Love Film is that one can catch up on old classics not seen in 20 or 30 years (in my case since I was a student).
Here's FW Murnau's first Hollywood film, and one of the very last major silents (although it had a synchronised score and sound effects). Essentially a kind of bog-standard Hollywood morality tale made in the German Expressionist style.
It looks a bit clunky and melodramatic today but Murnau's long, langorous takes and stunning sense of framing and composition, the odd [very German] perspectives, superb lighting and the stunning cinematography of Charles Rosher and Karl Struss [for which they deservedly won the first-ever cinematography Oscar] as well as decent performances from the two leads make it something of a masterpiece. It certainly has a unique sense of poetic beauty, and its effects (created mostly in-camera by Struss, Rosher and Murnau - there were no optical printers then) would have been absolutely startling to audiences of 1927/28. Moviegoers would have also been aghast at the freedom of Murnau's camera (often hand-cranked, remember) and the sophistication of his visual storytelling.
Late silent cinema - as exemplified by this and other films by Murnau, Vidor, Pabst, Lang, Renoir, Ozu and Dreyer - is incredibly sophisticated and it would take at least five years for [most] film-makers to recover from the coming of sound and the almost impossible restrictions it imposed. There are some film buffs who reckon that the cinema never recovered from sound; I wouldn't take that extreme position but it's certainly true to say that something was lost when the talkies came along.
"Sunrise" relies on purely visual storytelling [there are virtually no intertitles in this film, Murnau loathed them], rather than conventional or "realistic" narrative devices, for its power - it's impossible to imagine it as a talkie; if it were, it would be a terrible, creaky melodrama, and long forgotten.
This was Britain's greatest film maker Michael Powell's first major film (1936), about the de-population of a remote Scottish island. The acting (much of it by amateurs) is very creaky but Powell's unerring sense of place and poetic use of camera movement, as well as the dreamlike quality that marks out his greatest works, is already evident here. There's also a fascinating documentary on this Blu-ray disc which follows Powell (and the surving members of cast and crew) revisiting the island 42 years later in 1978.
Need For Speed. Great picture and sound quality make up for so, so story and acting
A brute force of a soundtrack which will test amplification and sub/s to their limits
Thanks
Rick @ Musicraft