Peter Bogdanovich’s paean to the early days of moviemaking, Nickelodeon, has been released as a 2-Disc Double Feature Director’s Choice title by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Nickelodeon / The Last Picture Show. Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show was available previously as a Special Edition. Each film is presented on a separate platter and is in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. Both presentations are ‘Director’s Cut’ versions, although Nickelodeon is presented in both its original theatrical format and Bogdanovich’s alternate format. The 1971 theatrical version of The Last Picture Show has never been released on DVD.

For the 1976 Nickelodeon, Bogdanovich has, with some care, removed the color from the image, to present it as a black-and-white film, presumably in honor of the era it is depicting (although he didn’t ‘square’ the image to 1.33:1, and the film was shot with modern wide angle lenses). The Director’s Cut runs 125 minutes while the theatrical version runs 122 minutes, adding more depth to the characters and expanding the clips from Birth of a Nation that appear in the movie’s climax.

Now, I gave Bogdanovich’s black-and-white version every chance to succeed. Having not seen the movie in three decades, I watched the black-and-white version first and then waited a full week before putting on the color version. It is clear that Bogdanovich hasn’t just hit a button on some video processor. The contrasts and shadows are often carefully graded. But it just doesn’t work. The best thing about the film is Laszlo Kovacs’ lovely, deliberately subdued color cinematography and the film’s equally beautiful production design. Without having that to soften the blow, the film’s glaring flaws and inconsistent tone are magnified all the more. It is telling that even the clips of Birth of a Nation have more of an impact in the color version, where they are tinted, than in the black-and-white version, where they are uniformly black-and-white. (One of the more clever inspirations in the script was to have Burt Reynolds’ character appear in a stage version of The Klansman at the movie’s beginning, so that Nation’s racism could be safely ignored at the end.)

Screenwriters Bogdanovich and W.D. Richter attempted to draw from all of the ‘good old days’ tales they had heard sitting at the knees of the great old time directors, and since the movie is a comedy, they also tried to incorporate classic slapstick gags. They forgot, however, to put in a story. Ryan O’Neal stars as a struggling lawyer who backs into the profession, and Reynolds is a roustabout that he turns into a star. Jane Hitchcock is an actress that they both fall for, although O’Neal’s character never really does much about it (his character is made a bit darker in the Director’s Cut, explaining some reactions from other characters that are mystifying if you don’t read between the lines in the theatrical version). John Ritter, Tatum O’Neal, Brian Keith, and Stella Stevens co-star. In 1976, without the ready availability of classic movies in every library, people didn’t know as much about the history of moviemaking as they do now, and it may have been that Bogdanovich simply thought he was doing enough by getting some of the basics down and making it entertaining, but the movie ought to have been jammed a great deal more with gags, history or what have you. The skills he had demonstrated in earlier films, both in efficient storytelling and in executing screwball comedy, completely desert him. There are a few cute moments, some haunting images (especially the final metaphor-for-movies-and-life shot of men dressed as soldiers marching in a circle so a camera can film them in an endless straight line), and attractive stars, but it can’t shake the appearance that it is a concoction dreamed up by enthusiastic movie geeks who had too much cash to burn.

The monophonic sound is okay. The theatrical version has an alternate French audio track and both versions have optional English and French subtitles. Bogdanovich supplies a commentary track over the Director’s Cut, identifying each allusion, discussing the compromises he had to make during the production, recalling what it was like to work with the cast and crew, and admitting that even with the Director’s Cut, which he thinks is better than the color film, there are still significant tonal problems and other flaws.

Occasional speckles that appear on the separate DVD release of The Last Picture Showhave been removed on the Double Feature presentation, but otherwise the black-and-white image transfer sill looks a little too soft and could use a full-fledged remastering. Even under those conditions, however, the 1971 film remains a highly compelling drama about a year in the lives of several teenagers and grownups living in a half-empty, flat Texas town. Timothy Bottoms stars as a graduating senior who ends up having an affair with his coach’s wife, played by Cloris Leachman (who won a Supporting Oscar). Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd play another couple, and Ben Johnson (who won the other Supporting Oscar) is the owner of the town’s pool hall. The 126-minute director’s cut brings back sequences that Bogdanovich was pressured to drop to keep the film’s running time under two hours, and enriches the story in a satisfying manner.

It was once something of a mystery as to why this film is so much better than any other Bogdanovich film, but listening to his commentary, which is new, and to the excellent 65-minute retrospective documentary, which also appeared on the earlier DVD release, it becomes much clearer. For one thing, he was working off of a Larry McMurtry novel instead of composing an original script, so the emotional wealth and backgrounds of the characters were already thoroughly established. But he was also chomping at the bit to make a major film. He’d done Targets, but that was a somewhat larkish project, based in part upon the limited availability of its star. For Last Picture Show, he went all out. He rehearsed extensively, had every shot and every scene visualized in his head, and it all came together just as he’d planned it. He describes these efforts in his commentary. “This next scene, which develops into a fight with Jeff and Tim, this was all shot in forty-five different set-ups, and they were planned rather carefully, and the actors and I rehearsed the scene quite a bit. I remember rehearsing that previous weekend, and I told them exactly where the cuts were going to be. I actually planned it while we were rehearsing it, so that they knew how far it would go without a cut and where the cuts would be. It was a complicated scene and we had to do it in one day, so we were very prepared. Every single shot, as you see it in the picture, is exactly the way it was shot. We did it in sequence, shot by shot.” He had a few more hits afterwards, but he probably never had the same ‘fire’ in his belly, and by Nickelodeon, it is obvious that to a certain extent, he’s winging it.

The monophonic sound is clear. There is an alternate French track and optional English and French subtitles. In addition to the documentary, the original DVD release has text profiles of Bogdanovich and the cast, a trailer, and a 6-minute promotional featurette created for the film’s first theatrical re-release. The Double Feature release includes all of those special features (except for the text profiles) and also has a 13-minute retrospective interview with Bogdanovich. The essential information is covered in the longer documentary, but the commentary and the interview add worthwhile details.

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

Most reminiscent of (and more satisfying than) Good Night and Good Luck, Ron Howard’s 2008 docudrama, Frost/Nixon, from Universal, is about a television news personality who rises to the occasion and achieves a journalistic milestone when tasked with interviewing an emotionally enfortressed politician. Yes, the imitative but psychologically thorough performances by the two stars- Michael Sheen as David Frost and Frank Langella asRichard Nixon – are admirable, and the step-by-step process in which Frost bungles his way up to and through most of the interview until he realizes he has to get his act together, and does, is entertaining in the same way that those sports movies about teams that unexpectedly win title games are entertaining, but what is most satisfying about the film is that it gets all of the small details right, so that you wholly believe that the atmosphere of each scene is what it was like in real life. The film is primarily made of conversations, and so viewers with a predilection for action movies are not going to be interested in it, and even the dramatic excitement of Sheen’s character finally rising to the occasion is at best a modest thrill, but the 123-minute film is the kind of valid history lesson that you can only get from the movies, a clearly well-researched and carefully executed re-creation of a significant event that lets you get a genuine feel for what the times were like and how the people represented by the characters and the cast actually lived, maneuvered and felt about the events they were involved with, a dimension that a documentary or shared memories of the event itself cannot come close to duplicating.

The picture is presented in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The color transfer is fine. The 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound is not showy, but it has a functional dimensionality. There are alternate French and Spanish audio tracks in 5.1 Dolby and optional English, French and Spanish subtitles. What DVDs can do better than movies is to provide a greater context for the primary program, and the special features on Frost/Nixon are excellent in this regard. Firstly, there are 22 minutes of deleted scenes that would unquestionably have slowed down the drama too much, but are for the most part marvelous, giving Langella, in particular, more chances to work his magic on the screen. The original, complete interviews are available elsewhere on DVD, but there is a tantalizing 7-minute piece about them that includes a few excerpts presented in comparison to the film’s renditions of the same exchanges. There is also a thorough 23-minute production featurette and a surprisingly touching 6-minute piece about the Nixon presidential library. Finally, Howard supplies an informative commentary track. Howard tends to approach his commentaries the way he approaches many of his films. He is so overly prepared that even when he is clearly improvising, imitating someone else’s laugh or other noises, it still sounds scripted. But the content of his talk is worth it. Not only does he describe the history of the production, he conveys the drama of its challenges and successes. He also explains the logic behind big choices and small choices, and conveys vivid pictures of the many personalities involved with the film, not only those behind the screen and in front of the screen, but those represented by the screen.

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

Running 115 minutes, the enormously popular 2008 family film, Marley & Me, depicts the full life of a family dog as the family grows up around him. In his younger years, he is especially rambunctious, which contributed to the film’s superb marketing campaign that suggested the movie would be another Beethoven-style slapstick piece. Instead, the film is truly about the role a pet plays in the emotional adhesion of a family unit, and audiences, suckered in by the ad, were then solidly hooked by the movie’s emotional payoff. Owen Wilson andJennifer Aniston, who make a terrific screen couple, star. They play journalists (the source book, a true story, was written by one), back when the profession still had a future, who marry and first obtain the dog as an interim step before babymaking. In effect, the animal prepares them, expertly, for the unanticipated disasters and challenges that children will bring later on. The film tracks their lives and the advances and hiccups in their careers as they do eventually have kids, move a couple of times, and go through the other strains and stresses that test virtually all relationships. The dog is the embodiment and guardian of their love, which he holds for safekeeping until they are mature enough to not let go of it themselves.

20th Century Fox Home Entertainment has released Marley & Me on DVD and as a 2-Disc Bad Dog Edition The second platter of Bad Dog Edition contains a copy of the film that can be downloaded onto handheld viewing devices, but the first platter also has more special features. Most smartly of all, Fox has also put out a 3-Disc Bad Dog Edition Blu-ray which has the downloadable version of the film on one platter, the BD with all of the special features, of course, on another, and a third platter containing the standard DVD, so that you can have a fancy one for the living room and a spare for the kids’ room.

On all, the picture is presented in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The colors are bright and stable. The DVDs have 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound, which has a functional dimensionality. There are alternate French and Spanish tracks in standard stereo and optional English, French and Spanish subtitles. The BD had DTS-HD, which has a noticeably fuller and crisper sound, and has three foreign language tracks in 5.1 Dolby, along with six subtitling options, including English. The standard DVD comes with 6 minutes of deleted scenes and 6 minutes of bloopers. The Bad Dog Edition and the BD have 26 minutes of deleted scenes, with an optional commentary by director David Frankel, who talks a little bit about the movie’s production as he also explains why the scenes were dropped (primarily to keep the pace up). Along with the bloopers, there are also 20 minutes of production featurettes (twenty-two different dogs were used to represent the one dog during the different phases of his life and alternate behavior requirements) and a 5-minute segment about adopting dogs. The BD has two additional features, a good 17-minute segment on getting dogs to behave and a subtitling track with even more information about working with and caring for the animals.

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

There is not a quantum of solace in the latest installment of the James Bond series, Quantum of Solace, a Metro Goldwyn Mayer 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment release. The action scenes move forward relentlessly and the dramatic interims barely interfere with the pace. The film is a true installment as well, with hardly a plot to call its own. It picks up mid-car chase, about a half of a scene after the end of the previous Bond film, Casino Royale, and concludes in the same openendedness with which it began. Nominally, the 2008 feature has a story about a young woman who wants to assassinate a South American military leader, and a businessman who is trying to corner the market on water in that military leader’s country. But it is clear that the story is the least of anyone’s interests. The film’s title is left almost utterly unexplained, and nobody bothered to include what should have been an all-important shot of the South American peasants getting their water for free again once the villain is dispatched. Not even James Bond sweats the details any more. The completely absurd-looking hotel that is stuck in the middle of nowhere and is destroyed in one of the film’s climaxes, as one learns in the supplementary features on the Two-Disc Special Edition, is a genuine hotel, catering to astronomers who are visiting the nearby observatories in the Chilean desert, but in the movie there is no reference to the observatories and it is just an outlandishly fancy building with no apparent purpose except to be an object of destruction. Daniel Craig, whose Slavic features seem more suited to a Russian mobster than a British secret agent, plays Bond with such deadly seriousness, however, that he counteracts the film’s absurdities effectively, sort of like an antidote to a poison, letting the viewer bask in the movie’s luxuries and hurtle, unharmed, through its action. As escapism looms as the only true relief to trying times, the series, and Craig, can look forward to reaping untold rewards by providing a unique and reliable balm for many installments to come.

The picture is presented in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The color transfer looks fine. The 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound has some terrific separation effects, but there is a DTS track that is even better defined. The 106-minute feature (the shortest Bond movie in quite some time) has alternate French and Spanish tracks in 5.1 Dolby, optional English and Spanish subtitles, two trailers and an Alicia Keyes and Jack White music video. The best feature on the second platter of Special Edition is a 46-minute collection of interviews, original shot for Internet promotion, with various subsidiary members of the film’s crew. There is also a 25-minute production featurette and 14 minutes of shorter pieces.

The Blu-ray release is absolutely amazing. Normally, the differences between DVDs and BDs are slight or nearly imperceptible, particularly on new releases, and to begin with, the DVD ofQuantum of Solace is terrific, but the BD just blows it away. The colors are incredibly sharper and virtually flawless, and in shot after shot, the film’s images are transfixing. The DVD seems boring in comparison. And that’s just the picture. The DTS-HD sound is like a velvet fist lined with minute particles of incandescent glass. The amplification can be raised to the point where smoke starts coming out of one’s speakers, and yet every tiny music and effect detail is fully discernible amid the loudest rumbles. And no matter how noisy a scene becomes, the atmosphere of its environment is never lost, so a viewer remains totally absorbed in the action, the glamour, and the James Bondness of it all. The supplemental features available on the Special Edition DVD are repeated on the BD. Additionally, there is a Portuguese audio track and four extra subtitle tracks.

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

So you’ve just bought a Blu-ray player and you’ve never seen An American in Paris before? Well, aren’t you in for a treat. Warner Home Video has released the 1951 Oscar winner on Blu-ray, and the colors are so rapturous that even the fabulous DVD, which has essentially the same transfer, is nowhere near as satisfying. The precision of the image in shot after shot allows the movie’s visuals to move in perfect harmony with its George Gershwin musical score, so that when Gene Kelly dances, his artistic expression is a binding force that brings a human representation to the abstract aesthetics of form, light and music. Directed by Vincente Minnelli, it is no longer just the perfume store or the flowers that make the film look colorful. Even the black-and-white ball is colorful, in its own stunning way (and watch the backgrounds carefully, there is a lot of naughtiness going on). Fleshtones are so intense that they would seem absurd if the decorations and costumes were not equally vivid (one error, probably from the conflict between location and studio shooting-the two-toned limousine that Nina Foch’s character rides around in is partially bright green, but that green is made more pastel in the one long shot of the car pulling up to her hotel; the thing is, in any other format beside Blu-ray, you’d never notice it). In previous incarnations, the narrative, in which Kelly’s character rejects the sponsorship of Foch’s character when he meets a perfume counter clerk played by Leslie Caron, is a bland concoction that goes overboard with song and dance numbers, particularly in its final, artsy ‘ballet’ sequence, to compensate for its mediocrity. But on Blu-ray, each scene is so visually mesmerizing that the story and its complications and its musical asides are enchanting foreplay, and when the 114-minute feature reaches its climax with the ballet, the viewer is ready to cast away all inhibitions and let the Gershwin music and the sets and the dancing, and their reflections upon the emotions the characters have felt, transport consciousness to its highest state of sensory stimulation, and then, when at the height of the ballet, at the conclusion of the ‘Toulouse-Lautrec’ sequence, the mirrors start to spin, taking in the film crew and the entire world as they whip around, the Blu-ray’s colors and precision of detail, and the ideas they impregnate, achieve a little death, which make the dialog-free ending of the film both inevitable and sublime.

The monophonic sound can be pushed to a reasonable level without distortion and has more inherent body than its DVD counterpart. The BD has five foreign language tracks and eleven subtitle tracks, including English. Otherwise, the special features are replicated from the DVD, although they are fit onto the single BD platter. A commentary/audio essay has been put together with archival interviews from Minnelli, Kelly, Caron, Foch, producer Arthur Freed and others. It is a savvy collection of insights and explanations of how various aspects of the film came into being and what it was like working with the different personalities who contributed to the film. There is an outstanding 2002 PBS American Masters profile of Kelly, running 85 minutes. It is loaded with rare archival footage, terrific clips and no-nonsense discussions about the course his career took and the choices he made (he once ridiculed Busby Berkeleyfor doing a certain crane shot in Take Me Out to the Ballgame, but there he is, on Hello Dolly, doing the same shot). What is neat about the program beyond its basic career and biographical info is that some of Kelly’s best numbers are allowed to play out almost in full, so that the documentary becomes, in essence, a musical itself. Also featured is a good 42-minute retrospective documentary about An American in Paris. There is some redundancy between the program and the material in the commentary, but there are also some nice surprises, such as the recollections of two performers who were among the kids Kelly staged his I Got Rhythm number with. Along with a 3-minute deleted song number featuring Georges Guetary, there are 14 minutes of audio-only outtakes, including Kelly singing I’ve Got a Crush on You in a number that was dropped from the film. In the documentary, it is said that the song was dropped because it reiterated thematic points that were made elsewhere, but in reality, Kelly’s rendition of the song is just not up to the vocal quality of his other numbers. 14 minutes of audio-only promotional radio interviews are included, too, along with a nice-looking 9-minute color Traveltalks short from 1938 entitled Paris on Parade (photographed by Jack Cardiff) about the 1937 Paris Exposition, and a 7-minute color Tex Avery cartoon from 1951 entitled Symphony of Slang, which presents literal visual interpretations of slang expressions.

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

Charlotte Rampling has second billing on the ‘U.K. version’ of Vanishing Point, which runs 106 minutes (although her name does not appear on the end credit scroll). Without her, the American theatrical release runs 98 minutes. Both versions were included on the 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment DVD, and are now featured on the much improved Blu-ray release. Rampling appears right before the end of the film, as an enigmatic nighttime hitchhiker that Barry Newman’s character smokes weed with, and then makes love to. When he awakens in the morning, she has disappeared, and then he goes off to his final showdown against the bulldozers. You can see why the sequence was lifted, to sustain the 1971 film’s sense of constant movement and action, but the segment is entirely in keeping the film’s mystical undercurrent, and it gives the entire feature a stronger sense of resolution and mythos. Please do not misunderstand. The film’s symbolic and quasi-supernatural elements are totally silly, but so are the realistic sequences-the story, after all, is about the police chasing the hero in his 1970 white Dodge Challenger for two days across the Nevada desert-and the movie is more valid as an argument against mythology-that modern warfare, modern corruption, modern communications and modern information dissemination have destroyed the ability to create any reflective mythology that is not satire-than it is to be celebrated for a few esoteric sleights of hand. But mostly, fans just want to bask in Newman’s super-cool attitude, the supremacy of his vehicle over all opponents, and the lovely constant buzz of the highway whipping by.

The picture is presented in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The picture transfer on the DVD and the BD are essentially the same, although the enhanced solidity of the BD’s image is better able to deal with the somewhat grainy Seventies film stock. On both, fleshtones are fresh and hues are bright, but where the DVD has difficulty handling subtle shifts in shadows or even, at times, objects moving quickly across the screen, the BD is flawless. Fox souped up the sound on the DVD to create a stereo surround track that adds a basic dimensionality to the music and some minor directional effects to the car noises. On the BD, however, the remastered audio is presented in full DTS sound, with a more developed bass, more distinctive separations in the front and the back, and richer, more detailed tones over all. Because it was applied after the fact, the mix is not as consistent as it would have been if it had been devised during the movie’s production, but there are too many engaging moments for it to feel out of place.

The DVD presents the American version on one side of the platter and the U.K. version on the other. The American version has alternate French and Spanish tracks in mono and two TV commercials, and both come with optional English and Spanish subtitles and a trailer. Both versions carry the same commentary track, from director Richard C. Sarafian (his comments over the Rampling sequence are just dropped from the American version). It is a nice talk, ranging from production details and his relationships with the cast and the crew, to the film’s narrative and production history, its financial history, its meanings, the story alternatives (he initially wanted to end the film in San Francisco, with the chase going ‘up’ hills, rather than down) and its status as a cult favorite. He shares a great story about coming across a beautifully restored white Challenger one day long after the film was released, and meeting the owner, who proceeds to get a traffic ticket for peeling out after the encounter. He also points out that the movie possibly influenced Steven Spielberg in making Duel, but he doesn’t really take it far enough, since the film’s imprint can be seen on (obviously) Sugarland Express, the brief time Spielberg spent on White Lightening, and the iconic teaser posters for Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The BD provides French and Spanish tracks for the U.K. version, with subtitles for the added scenes, but the American version has a trivia subtitle track, which focuses mostly on irrelevant late Sixties pop culture, and a kind of cute optional ‘dashboard’ that is superimposed upon the image and identifies how fast the car is driving, what its RPM is, how far it has gone, and so on, with other options identifying the musical score (on the radio) and a pull down map that shows the route from Denver through Utah, Nevada and California. Both versions retain the commentary. Along with the trailer and TV commercials, however, there are some terrific new featurettes, including a wonderful 18-minute retrospective documentary that has interviews with everyone from Newman to the woman whose youth has been eternally preserved as the ‘naked girl on the motorcycle.’ There is a decent 10-minute piece on the Challenger itself, and a nice 31-minute segment on the artists contributing to the musical score, including Kim Carnes. A trivia quiz is also included.

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

Would whoever kidnapped William Friedkin in the late Seventies and replaced him with an evil twin please let the poor man go? In addition to all of the awful movies he has made since then, Friedkin has now gone back and messed with his crowning achievement, the 1971 Oscar-winning cop thriller, The French Connection. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released the film on DVD and also put out a good two-platter 20th Century Fox Award Series presentation. The DVD release had a passable color transfer, and the sound was embellished with a 5.1-channel Dolby Digital mix that gives the musical score and a few other noises an involving dimensionality. The film was always intended to have a documentary feel to it, and so darker scenes lose detail and add grain, and the colors are the typical, slightly bland colors of early Seventies films, but fleshtones are accurate and when the lighting is bright, the hues are solid. For Fox’s two-platter Blu-ray release, however, Friedkin or someone who looks and sounds exactly like him, went in and twiddled with the picture in an attempt to underscore the film’s Seventies roots. He’s so proud of what he’s accomplished that he even shows off the process in a 14-minute featurette on the second platter. Briefly, what he has done is to flatten the colors a little by setting the film in black-and-white and then adding over-saturated colors to the image so that they register at about a third of their natural intensity. The problem, and this is something he does not mention in his featurette, is that the process has been applied in a very sloppy manner. In Gene Hackman’s opening scene, for example, he is dressed in a Santa Claus outfit, and when he runs down a perpetrator in a vacant lot, the long shot of the red outfit bleeds so much it is practically a balloon around him, as if the shot had been badly colorized. If you look at the shot on the DVD, there’s no red that isn’t part of the suit. There are other instances where the effect is equally incongruous. If you’re just a casual fan who hasn’t seen the film in a while, you can put on the BD and enjoy the show thoroughly without noticing that anything is amiss, thanks to the film’s frantic energy. But if you are a hardcore fan, a critic, or cinematographer Owen Roizman, who was not involved with the transfer, you’ll probably be wondering if that roof sniper in the movie is still available for hire.

Hackman and Roy Scheider are New York cops who begin trailing a man that is acting like a mobster and eventually discover he is indeed arranging a very large shipment of drugs into the city. The procedural is frightening, in that Hackman’s character has no regard for rights or the property of individuals in his pursuit of criminals. In the end, he actually shoots a good guy rather than the villain, and gets away with it. The very dynamic between his character’s position as a film hero and the reality of his moral sensibilities is what has enabled the 103-minute film to endure without losing its power or appeal.

The picture is presented in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The sound is punched up to DTS on the BD and it is terrific. The DVD has an alternate French track in mono and optional English and Spanish subtitles. The BD has French and Spanish tracks in 5.1 Dolby, an isolated musical score in 5.1 Dolby, two additional Chinese subtitle tracks, a worthwhile trivia subtitle track that supplies a lot of background about the film’s production, and D-Box encoding.

On both versions, Hackman and Scheider speak, separately, for a little over 20 minutes each, with their talks randomly laid over two different sections of the film. Hackman describes the harrowing (and actually insane) shoot of the chase scene, in which the car he was driving was actually hit by a civilian at one point, and also talks about his insecurities at the beginning of the production, the research he did and what the part has done for him. Scheider admits he was amazed to have received an Oscar nomination for his role, since he’s just a sidekick, and also shares a number of good anecdotes about his experiences and Hackman’s experiences, both researching and making the film.

Both versions also have a full-length commentary by Friedkin, which would generally be a waste of time-he basically just describes what is happening on the screen-except that he often relates the events depicted to the true story behind them and identifies what was real and what was altered. He does also explain how a few sequences were staged and at one point, rather bizarrely, he mistakenly references San Quentin when he intended to identify Alcatraz. How does anybody mix up San Quentin with Alcatraz?

The second platter of the DVD has two retrospective documentaries, one running 54 minutes and the other running 57 minutes, which, when combined with the commentaries, supply a reasonably complete idea of how the film was conceived and the conflicts that were overcome in its execution. There is also about 11 minutes of fairly interesting deleted scenes, which are presented alone or with optional introductions by Friedkin, and there is a trailer and still photos.

The BD’s second platter retains the two documentaries and the deleted scenes, although Friedkin’s introductions have been discarded for an optional commentary track. There is also a good 10-minute piece on the film’s musical score, a nice 20-minute segment where Friedkin and producer Philip D’Antoni retrace the car chase sequence, another 19-minute segment on the relationship between the film and ‘what really happened,’ another 11-minute interview with Hackman about his character, a 5-minute segment on how the Brooklyn Bridge scene was shot (they actually tied up traffic for a couple of hours to pull it off), and a 14-minute segment intended to draw parallels between the film and traditional film noir features but meant primarily to promote Fox film noir titles.

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

After what has seemed like an eternity, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s outstanding 1946 wartime fantasy, A Matter of Life and Death, which played theatrically in Death-allergic America asStairway to Heaven, has been made available on home video, released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment as a two-platter The Collector’s Choice DVD set, The Films of Michael Powell, accompanied by Powell’s Age of Consent. Each film appears on a separate platter, and both have optional English and French subtitles.

Running 104 minutes, A Matter of Life and Death is a brilliantly Jungian adventure about a bomber pilot who survives a deadly crash, falls in love, and must then appeal for his right to continue to live at a tribunal in Heaven, because the angel who was originally supposed to grab him from the plane got lost in the English Channel fog. The film is riveting for several reasons, but firstly because the romance is established like lightning in the opening 20 minutes.David Niven is the pilot, and Kim Hunter is the traffic controller speaking to him on the wireless, as intense close-ups convey the immediate, unreserved sympathy they exchange with one another. Characters fall in love all of the time in the movies, but it is rare that you see and feel it happening so vividly. Then, there is the film’s design. The Heaven sequences contain a number of striking special effects, such as the indelible and often imitated ‘endless stairway,’ and are presented, deviously, in black and white, while the earthbound segments are in scrumptious, otherworldly Technicolor. There is another plot twist, best left to be discovered, that serves to give the story a legitimate foundation, and there is also a lengthy but wholly welcome digression into the political, social and moral differences between England and America (which also parallel the ‘Heaven and Earth’ dichotomy). While never lessening the power of the romance, then, the film compiles philosophical exploration, phantasmagorical stimulation, visual glorification, comical respites and a transcendent patriotism, which equates loving one’s country to loving mankind. Despite components that would be the downfall of almost any other movie-along with everything else, one effete male character wears lipstick-the film is not only utterly captivating from beginning to end, it is also endlessly rewatchable and, having already proven to entertain viewers well beyond its own wartime era, will endure, thanks to its preservation and celebration upon DVD, for time immemorial.

The picture is presented as it was shot, in full screen format only. The color sequences are eye-popping. Some of the black-and-white segments have minor background flaws, but the impurities do not interfere with a viewer’s concentration. The monophonic sound is reasonably solid and clear. Martin Scorsese supplies an 8-minute introduction to the film and to Powell and Pressburger’s work as a whole. There is also a commentary track by film historian Ian Christie, who focuses on the movie’s artistic meanings and says less about the production and how some of the effects were staged, although he does touch upon those matters from time to time. The talk works as a decent introduction to the film and its complexities, and also explains its historical context. Christie points out that the death of a key character is followed by a scene of ‘optimism and enthusiasm.’ “It’s really part of the film’s great success that it completely persuades us that we should see this as something which all the characters want to happen. It’s an affirmation of the importance of the continuity between life and death. It’s something which probably owes a lot to the experience of the war, when many experienced violent death around them, and often took comfort from the idea that those who had physically died were somehow not lost, their sacrifice had not been in vain. I think that A Matter of Life and Death is taking that idea and using it to breathe new life into what could have been a rather banal idea, the idea that America and Britain should build upon wartime sacrifices to create a new alliance, a new understanding in the post-war world.”

If you intend to watch the movies together, it is probably best to put on Age of Consent first, and to take a healthy intermission before going on to a masterpiece such as A Matter of Life and Death. In many ways, the two films are exact opposites of one another except that Powell made both of them (one, of course, in collaboration with Pressburger, and one without). The 1969 Consent was shot on location on the other side of the world, in tropical islands off the coast of Australia, and the cinematography, although attractive, is always at the partial mercy of available light and other uncontrollable conditions. Its natural graininess is pointedly contrasted to the studio smoothness of Life and Death, just as is its wandering narrative stands in contrast to the tightly structured Life and Death plot. James Mason stars as an artist whose creativity is renewed when he moves to a sparsely inhabited island (there are apparently just three other people on it, all women) and meets a nubile teenager played, in one of her first feature film appearances, by Helen Mirren. Running 106 minutes, the film’s appeal also differs from the attractions of Life and Death. To be philosophical about it, although Life and Death is about the infinite, it has a very finite narrative and artistic design, while Consent, which is about the finite, has an open-ended story (its freeze-frame conclusion is a surprise because you assume the plot is going to continue for another act) and loose design. One is about Heaven and the other is about heaven on earth. One is about romance, and one is about lust. Where Life and Death comes from an era of strict moral guidelines, Consent comes from the ‘free love’ era and contains substantial nudity. Hence, while there is enough narrative to keep a viewer involved, what really makes Age of Consent enjoyable is simply its ability to transport the viewer, emotionally, to its realistic fantasy locale (even today, we wouldn’t mind getting stuck on a deserted island with Mirren, but back when she was in her early twenties?-oo-la-la!). Just as Mason’s character finds his muse in the placement of Mirren’s character, naked, amid paradisiacal surroundings, so does Powell achieve the same inspiration placing the naked Mirren in the same environment, thus doubling the power of the spiritual requiescence the film can instill with receptive viewers.

The picture is presented in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. As is mentioned above, some of the shots are a little grainy and the cinematography, in general, has a makeshift, natural feel, but the picture transfer is lovely, with bright, fresh hues and crisp details. The monophonic sound can seem distorted if it is amplified too much, but works fine at a modest volume. Along with a passable 5-minute introduction by Scorsese, there is a terrific 12-minute interview with Mirren, an excellent 10-minute interview with Ron and Valerie Taylor, who did the underwater footage (with Mirren swimming cringe-inducingly naked amid the sharp coral), and a fine 17-minute retrospective featurette that contains interviews with other artists who participated in creating the film.

Additionally, there is an excellent commentary track by film historian Kent Jones, who may not have actually been on the shoot, but seems to know every detail of every day of the film’s creation. Interestingly, he sometimes infers that Mirren was as youthful and naïve as her character, although clearly she was not, and both he and Mirren claim that Age of Consentwas her first film, even though she had appeared in a couple of other shows previously, including Peter Hall’s outstanding Midsummer Night’s Dream. Although he does not draw similarities between the film and Mason’s other movies where he played an older man involved with a younger woman-Lolita and Georgy Girl come to mind immediately-he does place the film effectively in the context of Powell’s other works and explains the thematic links to Powell’s general artistic concerns. Most importantly, however, Jones serves as a tour guide, sharing stories, pointing out details and allowing the viewer to re-visit the film with a purpose, and then leaving the viewer enlightened, and ready to go back and experience it yet again.

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

The science of sequels has bedeviled Hollywood for years. Which elements should be retained? Which altered? The makers of the follow up to The Chronicles of Narnia The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe faced an even more vexing problem. Should they go with the next C.S. Lewis book in the series, which has a compelling story but very few of the characters from the previous book, or should they skip ahead to the next book that has most of the central characters that appeared in the boxoffice hit, even if its story is moderately less involving? Well, they kept the characters and the cast for the 2008 production, The Chronicles of Narnia Prince Caspian, and did a reasonably good job of it, but were unable to break through the summer blockbuster gauntlet, and so the next sequel, which also has most of the characters, has been cancelled by Disney. Maybe they should go back to the book they missed now. It would be less expensive to make, at least.

Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment has released Prince Caspian in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. It is not exclusively a battle movie, and in fact the filmmakers have done their best to include thematic conflicts, character development and spiritual drama, but unlike the first film, which climaxed in a magnificent battle segment after a long and rewarding build up, Caspian feels like a battle movie and little else. (They also made the mouse character three or four times larger than he ought to be, which may have been necessary for the movie’s visual dynamics, but makes him look more like a rat and loses much of the humor they pretend is still there.) The heroes from the previous film-all nicely performed, but without the same excitement of discovery draped upon their shoulders-are whisked back into the fantasy world where they once ruled as kings and queens. It is centuries later, the lands have fallen on hard times, and they must help a prince regain his throne in order to protect the mythical creatures and beings that once thrived when they ruled. Where the first film was an outstanding family feature, the follow-up is just plain fantasy action entertainment, but that said, it makes a terrific DVD. The familiarity of the characters locks the viewer readily into the plot, and the battles are spectacular, with the accompanying 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound being equally rousing. That’s one thing that Hollywood does do well-even failures and superficial entertainments can be enormously satisfying if you aren’t too demanding.

The color transfer is okay, although some sequences seem to have unusually weak contrasts. The 150-minute feature has alternate French and Spanish tracks, and optional English, French and Spanish subtitles. The director, Andrew Adamson, and cast members Ben Barnes, Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley and Anna Popplewell supply a relaxed but worthwhile commentary track, mostly reminiscing about the shoot as each scene appears. They talk a lot about the challenges they encountered, what was changed as they went along, and what the other cast and crew members were like, but in addition to that, you get a good feel for their own camaraderie and can begin to understand why it translates so effectively to the screen.

Disney has also released a 3-Disc Collector’s Edition. The first platter is identical to the standard release and the third platter contains a copy of the film that can be downloaded onto handheld viewing devices. The second platter has 11 minutes of sensibly deleted scenes, 3 minutes of mostly pratfall bloopers and 119 minutes of good production featurettes. One of the featurettes also mentions the now cancelled third film, and offers a tantalizing teaser from the pre-visualization animation that had been done for it.

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

It is said that flaws can be tolerated in friends and strangers, but not in one’s parents, and that definitely seems to be everybody’s opinion when it comes to the father of Star Wars, George Lucas. It is because the first movie was so good that the other films became so frustrating and their flaws so obsessively glaring (if only, in Phantom Menace, he had shown the mother killed, like Bambi’s mother, the entire series might have been taken more seriously…). Lucas doesn’t help matters, though. When he decides to move the franchise into a TV cartoon series, he then gets the impulse to put out the pilot episode as a feature film, which is now available from Warner Home Video asStar Wars The Clone Wars. Did his idea backfire? It is probably too early to tell, but critics and fans, especially those who didn’t realize that all they were seeing was a TV pilot, felt burned by the film’s superficiality and simplified animation (the film is essentially on par, and only on par, in both narrative and animation, with the admirable Roughnecks Starship Troopers Chronicles series), and rather than making potential viewers more excited to see the show, it may have turned them off.

The 2008 film, which runs 98 minutes, has lots of action (the heroes have to rescue a kidnapped child creature, while the villains pretend it is the heroes that have done the kidnapping), a few interesting designs, and characters that are reasonably well developed. It is purposefully reminiscent of the cliffhanger serials of the past, so a certain amount of dumbing down is fully acceptable, but why does the evil count, who has immensely developed Jedi powers, not immediately sense that the backpack contains rocks and not a lifeform? Such an error betrays the internal logic of the Star Wars world and is exactly the kind of flaw that cannot be forgiven.

The picture is presented in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The cheapness of the animation is only emphasized by the precision of the color transfer. The 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound with EX-encoding, on the other hand, is a wonder to behold. The audio has such a distinctive dimensionality and such marvelous directional and bass effects that the sound designers of some major blockbuster films ought to be lining up to take lessons from the movie’s sound editors. There are alternate French and Spanish tracks in 5.1 Dolby EX and optional English, French and Spanish subtitles. There is a commentary track featuring director Dave Filoni and others, some speaking together and some providing inserted individual comments. Filoni talks a lot and in what one can only call subservient terms about Lucas and what he wanted from the project. Among his more beneficial ideas was to have the animators use discarded drawing and concepts from the development of the films for ‘new’ creatures, ships and so on. On the whole, the talk is reasonably informative and worthwhile as the speakers explain how various ideas were generated for the narrative and the designs, as well as inadvertently leaving hints as to where they might have gone astray. “We really wanted to develop the clones, as well, as, like, individuals.”

Warner has also released a Two-Disc Special Edition. The first platter is identical to the single platter release. The second platter has 11 minutes of deleted scenes, including some interesting action sequences, and a very nice collection of developmental artwork in still frame. There is also a 25-minute promotional featurette for the series that systemically presents teasers for every episode, a 10-minute segment on the voice talent, an 11-minute piece on the music, a 21-minute collection of promotional featurettes about different aspects of the film that were originally created for broadcast on the Internet (“As you make the clones more individual, you should, hopefully as an audience, care about them more.”), and two trailers.

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

The Criterion Collection release of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is so immaculate that the previous Paramount release is rendered unwatchable. Paramount’s presentation turns out to be extensively speckled-white speckles in the black areas of the screen and black speckles in the white areas of the screen-as well as being grainy and having a fairly noisy soundtrack. The black-and-white picture on the Criterion release is slick, smooth and spotless, and the monophonic sound is vivid. Since Martin Ritt’s 1964 spy thriller is dependent upon mood and atmosphere to sustain its appeal as it lays the foundation of its narrative, Criterion’s version is far more involving and far more effective. It isn’t just that the movie looks and sound nicer. It’s a better movie.

Richard Burton stars as a British agent who pretends to defect in order to discredit a counterpart in East Berlin, but even that is giving away too much of the clever plot. Claire Bloom is an innocent love interest who becomes ensnared in the ruse. Running 112 minutes, the film has a casual pace, but it builds upon it effectively, so that the long conversational scenes never feel inert or aimless. It should also be noted that there is a scene set in a strip club, but unlike countless other scenes in spy movies and crime films that are set in strip clubs, the characters are truly peeling off layers of truth and teasing one another during their meeting as the stripper does her thing behind them.

The film appears on the first platter and is accompanied by optional English subtitles and a trailer. The picture is in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:l and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback.

The second platter contains an outstanding 2008 interview with author John Le Carré about both the book and the film. He was actually called to the set by Ritt to act as a buffer between the director and Burton, and is full of marvelous gossip about the shoot and what went on behind the scenes. But he also provides an incisive, detailed analysis of the film’s plusses and minuses, as well as the aspects of it that reflect reality and the aspects that do not. It is rare that you get to hear an author speak both intelligently and without pretense about a film adaptation of his work, and the segment is spellbinding.

Before watching the interview, however, it is best to drop down a notch on the Menu and select the 2000 BBC profile of the author, which runs 59 minutes and is a more generalized look at his life and career. There is also an excellent 39-minute recollection of the film and its strategies by cinematographer Oswald Morris that plays over sequences from the film, a nice collection of production sketches, a terrific 1967 interview with Burton by Kenneth Tynan that runs 33 minutes and discusses both his roles and his craft (he also recites several literary passages, including Hamlet’s ‘What a piece of work is Man’ soliloquy), and a good 1985 audio-only interview with Ritt, who talks about his work and speaks extensively about using film to explore social and progressive topics. The one drawback to the 49-minute segment is that it only has three chapters and cannot otherwise be paused or interrupted.

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

I first saw David Zucker’s Airplane! in a crowded urban theater and the audience was laughing uproariously throughout the film, except for one gag, when the airplane’s wing knocks over the antenna of a radio station as the station is proclaiming, “Where disco lives forever.” The theater went dead silent, and remained that way until the next solid gag. Zucker’s entire 2008 antidisestablimentarian comedy, An American Carol, from Vivendi Entertainment, plays like that disco joke. Somewhere in America, there may be pockets of viewers that will find it amusing (according to Zucker on the commentary track, they tested the film in Plano Texas and it got an enthusiastic response, sort of), but for the most part, the film’s themes feel wrongheaded (Does anyone really believe that Michael Moore doesn’t love his country?) and except for a stray, well-timed slapstick gag here and there, the humor falls flat. Which doesn’t mean the movie isn’t fascinating. It just isn’t funny. There’s no real reason to see it, but curiosity will draw some viewers to the spectacle of talented artists getting carried away by their beliefs and letting it intrude too nakedly upon their art, and that can be perversely enjoyable, just like accidents at a NASCAR race.

Kevin Farley portrays a Moore-like documentary filmmaker and personality who is shown the realities of the world by several historical figures-primarily George Patton (played by Kelsey Grammer), who hardly seems like a promising role model. The film is bookended by Leslie Nielsen, telling the tale that unfolds to a group of children at a Fourth of July picnic, and one of the movie’s real flaws is that it does not work hard enough to truly follow the Christmas Carol template it is giving lip service to. There is a minor plot about a group of hapless terrorists who are trying to manipulate Farley’s character into helping them (Robert Davi, as the chief terrorist, gives one of the film’s better comical performances), but the lack of a strong story magnifies the aimlessness of the 83-minute film’s sentiments and, to a certain extent, makes everyone involved look foolish.

The picture is presented in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The color transfer looks fine. The 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound, as is usual for comedies, has occasional separation effects and a functional delivery. There are optional English subtitles, four trailers and 16 minutes of extended scenes, deleted scenes and alternate improvs.

Zucker, Farley and co-screenwriter Lewis Friedman supply a commentary track, mentioning that they often had to make up jokes on the day of the shoot because the gags they’d written weren’t working. And sometimes, they couldn’t get their ideology straight, either. “Kelsey had the line, ‘Enjoy your privacy rights in Hell.’ After he did that the first time, he came over to me and said, ‘You know, I’m actually for privacy rights,’ and I said, ‘Well, Kelsey, I think we all are.’ And he said, ‘Should I be saying that?’ And that’s when we added the line before it, that ‘Not when privacy rights interfere with survival rights.'”

“There was a scene where Kelsey shot the [captured Taliban fighter] in line. He said, ‘Oh, sorry.'” “It didn’t work? It wasn’t as funny?” “The way it was originally written, is he shot one of the American soldiers, and then went, ‘Oh, sorry.'” “And Kelsey was going to say, ‘That’s going to be a hard letter to write.'” “Yeah, Kelsey said he didn’t want to do it. He didn’t want to shoot an American soldier.” “And he was right.” “Still, it’s pretty funny.” “I loved it.” “I thought it was funny.”

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

It lasted just one season, but Honey West was such a breakthrough TV program that it easily overshadows Forbidden Planet as star Anne Francis’ best remembered role. The 1965-66 ABC Network series, spun off from Burke’s Law, was probably too expensive to renew, but it presented, for the first time, a female action heroine as the lead of an American network television show. Yes, she had an assistant, played by John Ericson, who helped her out in fights and also managed the electronic gadgets, but the hierarchy of their relationship was clear. She was the boss, and not some Avengers-style sidekick.

VCI Entertainment has released all thirty black-and-white full screen 25-minute episodes in a four-platter set, Honey West Complete Series. Each platter has a ‘Play All’ option and the chapter encoding jumps reliably over the opening credits. The picture transfers look very nice and the monophonic sound is solid. The music utilizes only a handful of cues, over and over, but they have a nice jazzy feel to them. There is no captioning. A total of 5 minutes of publicity photo montages are featured on the first and second platters, and all four platters have a total of 34 minutes of wonderful Sixties commercials (how come they don’t advertise hosiery on the TV anymore?) and plugs for ABC’s weekly lineup.

What is surprising is how well the series has held up over time. Perhaps having to jam a complete narrative into the half-hour time slot has something to do with it, but most of the episodes are fully entertaining (some, usually ones with good plot twists, were written by Richard Levinson and William Link), with clearly established characters, a brisk pace and efficient action sequences. Francis’ outfits are terrific, and while her karate chops and judo tumbles are a little arch, she nevertheless projects a blend of unashamed femininity and take-charge confidence that made an indelible model for all who followed her path.

The episodes are varied in tone, with some having strong comical underpinnings (and involving gorillas, robots and such) and some being straightforward crime dramas. The heroes use advanced (for the time) gadgetry, including having rotary phones in their cars. Francis plays a dual-role in one episode and is visited in others by guest stars such as Michael J. Pollard, Dick Clark, Bert Parks, Kevin McCarthy, a very young Joe Don Baker, Edd Byrnes, Bobby Sherman, Wayne Rogers, Everett Sloane, Alan Jenkins, Richard Kiel and so on.Ida Lupino directed an episode. One of the high points of the series is a terrific after-hours fight in the sporting goods section of a department store, as the characters grab everything that is available to them in the displays. Francis’ character also has a pet ocelot, one of the icons of the show, and it is fairly amusing to note, assuming the episodes are presented in pretty much the order in which they were shot, that when every new director comes on board he tries to use the ocelot creatively. The ocelot, however, clearly wants nothing to do with filmmaking, and thereafter, in that director’s episodes, its presence is minimal.

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

With the elimination of a competing format, 2008 saw the establishment of the backwards compatible Blu-ray (BD) system as the high-end subset of the DVD format. While it is less flexible and does not offer significant improvements in supplementary features (except enhanced interactivity and an ability to connect with other fans of a title online), the BD’s sound and picture advantages are spectacular. For enthusiasts who have more than two speakers in their living rooms or a monitor that exceeds 45 diagonal inches, the improvements offered by the format are well worth the investment (although, beware-most newcomers will end up wanting to upgrade their receivers/amplifiers in tandem with obtaining a player). 2008 also saw the proliferation of the dissemination of copies of a title (within DVD and BD sets) that can be downloaded onto computers, iPods, cell phones and so on, thereby expanding one aspect of the format’s flexibility at the same time it is being constricted on the other end. Hence, DVDs themselves are by no means dead and will not be so for some time to come. In order to achieve the improvements of picture and sound, a BD platter cannot hold much more of a film than a DVD already holds (although movies that had to be split onto two DVD platters do, comfortably, fit onto one BD platter; so far, however, the releases of TV episodes have mirrored the four-to-a-platter DVD design). As the BD penetration increases, some producers will undoubtedly decide to compromise image quality in favor of squeezing more titles onto one platter, just as there are sets of DVDs now that offer scores of public domain genre titles in moderately sized and priced boxed sets. The economic logic behind manufacturing or purchasing a BD title that does not attract viewers in part because of its picture or sound components, however, remains questionable. While classic movies with a strong artistic component, such as The Third Man, are unquestionably worth upgrading to BD, popular but ordinary movies, like Dumb and Dumber, are not so much so.

Hence, in assessing the best DVD releases of 2008, the BD format has been singled out only if it offers a significant programming or playback improvement over its DVD counterpart. When both formats are cited, the BD is preferable, but the DVD still offers essentially the same value and quality, particularly if you just want to watch the movie in your bedroom at night without disturbing the rest of the house. DVDs and BDs may well end up existing side by side until a scheme to download high-end video playback replaces them both.

The following represent the most exciting releases and trends of 2008:

1. The Dark Knight (Blu-ray, Warner)

Only the Blu-ray presentation incorporates the film’s extensive IMAX footage in its playback (the DVD presents the IMAX material as a separate special feature), with the aspect ratio shifting between the dazzling action scenes that utilize the enhanced IMAX focal detail and the standard widescreen images to keep a viewer’s adrenaline pumping. Although the release has a collection of decent but still primarily token supplementary features, the quality of the BD’s picture and sound transfer is so thrilling, and dovetails so well with movie’s own intelligent exposition, that if sales of the Blu-ray system have not exploded in tandem with the blockbuster’s release, then they never will.

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2. How the West Was Won (Blu-ray, Warner)

The previous releases of the classic 1962 Cinerama western combined the three Cinerama panels to present the image with awkward lines dividing it, sometimes unevenly, in thirds. The new transfer makes the image looks seamless, and has also sharpened the colors and strengthened the sound, enhancing the entertainment significantly. Along with the film, there are retrospective documentaries, a commentary track and an excellent history of the Cinerama process. Unique to the BD release, there is an additional presentation of the film in what is called ‘SmileBox’ format, ostensibly designed for curved screens, in which the edges of the image are taller than the middle. You don’t need a curved screen however, because with the resolution solidity of the Blu-ray format, you can sit very close to a regular widescreen monitor and the curved image will accommodate your peripheral vision anyway, conveying a remarkable sense of depth, without distortion. Hence, it is actually called ‘SmileBox’ because as it plays, you cannot help but to grin from ear to ear for the movie watching experience it brings you.

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3. Hellboy II The Golden Army (DVD and Blu-ray, Universal)

Many movies, and particularly movies based on comic books, are full of elaborate special effects, but that’s what they look like, elaborate special effects. Guillermo Del Toro’s fully entertaining Hellboy comic book sequel, however, is so adeptly scripted and executed that the special effects deliver the pleasures they are intended to deliver without taking the viewer out of the movie. The images are creative and the action is witty, and the film is ideally suited for DVD and especially Blu-ray, where the audio detail is extensively engaging. Del Toro is also enthusiastic about the home video concept, and so the supplementary features are exhaustive, including two commentary tracks and about three hours of behind-the-scenes footage.

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4. The Godfather The Coppola Restoration (DVD and Blu-ray, Paramount)

Although The Godfather (and the rest of the trilogy) was released previously-and except for some token retrospective documentaries, the bulk of the supplementary features are simply carried forward from that earlier release-the picture and sound transfer on the new release is so exquisite that the previous release must be tossed away immediately in favor of this replacement. It isn’t just that the colors are more accurate and the sound is better detailed. Each scene has been enhanced emotionally by the improvements, so that the already classic film becomes that much richer and more captivating. The DVD looks and sounds fantastic, but the BD is definitive.

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5. Vampyr (DVD, Criterion)

Every year The Criterion Collection releases two-dozen or more outstanding DVDs and the only challenge here is to pick out the one that is the best of the best. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s mesmerizing 1932 horror film has in the past been compromised by video transfers that were so bad, fans had to guess at the film’s true appeal through a haze of deterioration and neglect. The fabulous two-platter presentation, however, redresses those flaws and presents the movie in its true light-that it is as great as the Universal horror films being produced during the same era and is less impacted by age than any of them. Along with a commentary, there is an excellent deconstruction of the film’s images, a profile of Dreyer and other features.
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6. El Cid (DVD, Weinstein)

Most fans will forgive the narrative and emotional flaws in epic movies because the experience of viewing a big-budget extravaganza is in itself a rare and memorable experience. There are not that many times in the history of the cinema that talented producers have managed to gather a great enough investment to create a widescreen, costumed adventure full of action, passion and at least a nod to real historical events. The release of Samuel Bronston’s grand production directed by Anthony Mann, which was shot in Spain in the early 1960s (as well as Weinstein’s parallel release of Bronston and Mann’s Fall of the Roman Empire), has been long awaited, and the DVD lives up to the event of its release. The transfer is outstanding, and emphasizes the film’s ‘movieness,’ which is central to its appeal. The film is also accompanied by excellent supplements that chronicle the production and profile Bronston, who, as a corollary to his filmmaking efforts, almost single handedly brought Spain out of post-War political and economic isolation.

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7. Budd Boetticher Collection (DVD, Sony)

Every DVD company puts out collections of some sort. The best collections are not simply repackaged bundles of individual DVDs undergoing a clearance sale. They are, instead, a grouping of titles that have a common appeal and are more attractive as a group than they might be individually. Even Criterion has gotten into the act with their superb ‘Eclipse’ series, resurrecting films of Yasujiro Ozu, Ernst Lubitsch, Samuel Fuller and others that would not so readily attract collectors if they were issued separately, and Fox followed its 2007 release of John Ford movies with a similarly gargantuan gathering of F.W. Murnau and Frank Borzage films. The Boetticher collection, however, provides a unique opportunity to present five westerns that the director made with the magnificently aged Randolph Scott during a brief explosion of incredibly competent creativity in the late 1950s. Not one of the films-The Tall T, Ride Lonesome, Comanche Station, Buchanan Rides Alone and Decision at Sundown-runs longer than 80 minutes, so they can be comfortably viewed in a single day, although each one is so utterly entertaining that it is probably better to stretch out the viewing schedule, in order to savor the memory of every adventure after it is concluded. Three of the films are accompanied by commentaries, all have retrospective featurettes, and The Tall Tplatter also includes an excellent biographical portrait of Boetticher. For movie collectors and fans, it is a stampede of delights, and the sheer pleasure awaiting those who have never seen the movies before is enviable.

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8. George Méliès First Wizard of Cinema 1896-1913 (DVD, Flicker Alley)

The contributions DVDs have made to cinema have been many-faceted, and one great breakthrough they have enabled is the ability to gather and disseminate comprehensive selections of a single type of film, so that even enthusiasts who are not dedicated scholars can immerse themselves in a set of movies that will not only provide basic entertainment, but will instill an awareness of how the art of motion pictures developed and advanced-an awareness that increases the viewer’s appreciation of the ways movies manipulate emotions. Méliès was a stage magician and the innovations he brought to motion pictures (film was being used, universally by other filmmakers at the time, as a documentary tool) were the natural applications of stagecraft and sleights-of-hand to film, with the added trickery that film enabled-editing, and superimposition, such as in his masterpiece, the joyful A Trip to the Moon. The outstanding five-platter set, containing 173 of the still existing 202 films created by Méliès (as well as a half-hour biographical portrait), and will enable any fan with a passing interest in the birth of cinema to understand and enjoy the works of one of its most important founding artists.

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9. Battlestar Gallactica The Complete Third Season (DVD, Universal)

It becomes more tempting every year to construct a secondary ‘Ten Best’ list consisting only of television programs, and more challenging every year to keep up with all of the outstanding collections that have become available. Even when a TV series is issued without embellishments, it seems that the DVD format is better suited than the broadcast format for its presentation if it is at all decently produced (it is only shows that have redundant plots or other shortcomings that will work better when you have to take a week’s break between each episode). The best TV collections combine unique character explorations and narrative flexibility (which, because of the length of presentation and the economics of production, the best television shows can do better than theatrical films), with exhaustive supplementary features that also take advantage of the extended programming scope.Battlestar Gallactica also has the advantage of being a splashy, effects-heavy sci-fi show, which looks and sounds terrific on DVD, while delivering penetrating stories about sympathetic terrorists and other only slightly veiled parables of contemporary life. Each episode has an informative commentary, the DVD is loaded with more than an hour of deleted scenes, and a key episode is presented with extensive and rewarding footage that could not be squeezed into its broadcast time slot. In effect, the series broadcast was just the teaser for the DVD.

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10. Cloverfield (DVD and Blu-ray, Paramount)

A film that is, by design, more palatable on the confines of a TV screen than in the expanse of a theatrical screen, the nightmare dreamscape the ingenious makers of Cloverfield created is ideally suited for DVD playback (the BD playback is preferable, but not obligatory). There is just enough dimensionality to the audio track that it can tweak the viewer’s nerves without spoiling the film’s central conceit, that it is all being recorded, basically in real time, by its characters, as a monster destroys Manhattan. There is also some interesting alternate footage, and an excellent commentary by director Matt Reeves, who essentially explains that the film is about the necessity of focusing on the important people in your life, because you never know when an unexpected event will take them away from you, whether that event has four legs or just four wheels.
December 30, 2008

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

The lovely 2008 Pixar feature about a robot who rescues humanity, WALL-E, has been released by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment. With minimal dialog but plenty of sound effects and music, the 99-minute computer-animated film depicts the robot cleaning up the trash on Earth left after all of the people have long since departed (in Disney cruise ship-style spacecraft). The robot then meets and essentially falls in love with a sleek advanced robotic probe sent to determine how much Earth has changed, following the probe back into space and causing a major ruckus onboard one of the cruisers. What happened to all of the other cruisers is never explained. The sequences set on Earth are gorgeously realistic, while the segment set aboard the spacecraft is more cartoony, but by then the viewer is entirely won over and ready for an energetic romp. There are visual references to many sci-fi films, with 2001 at the top of the list, and a great deal of humor in the slapstick encounters the robot has with the world around it, and with the human and mechanical population it finds on the ship. Pixar’s very first film was a short about a desk lamp that is alive, and their first feature film was about toys that are alive, so the skills that led to WALL-E were well established and rise quite gloriously to the occasion.

The picture is presented in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The color transfer is immaculate and the 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound, with EX-encoding, is super, with many directional and surround effects. There are optional English subtitles, 10 minutes of deleted scenes (the plot underwent a substantial number of alterations as the film was constructed, also leaving some minor but dangling plot points which are partially explained in the deleted scenes), a good 19-minute segment on creating the film’s sounds that also explores sound effect traditions at Disney, an amusing 8-minute short based on a throwaway gag in the film (in the movie, a robot gets locked outside the ship; in the short, you see much of what happened, both before and after, from that robot’s point of view), and a very funny 5-minute short entitled Presto, about a rabbit battling with a magician on stage.

Writer/director Andrew Stanton supplies a commentary track, systematically going over his creation process and the contributions of others. He describes the various story paths that were followed and then changed, describes in detail how the non-verbal emotional expressions of the characters were developed, points out a few of the cultural references and in-jokes, and generally supplies a comprehensive and informative talk.

Disney has also released a 3-Disc Special Edition. The first platter is identical to the single-platter release and the third platter contains a copy of the film that can be downloaded onto handheld viewing devices. The second platter contains a number of special features. While the story of Pixar’s development has been well documented in other special edition DVD releases of their films and shorts, the central program on the platter is an outstanding documentary about the history of the company that somehow manages to come up with all sorts of fresh and insightful material, from the first animated films John Lasseter created in college to the positioning of Pixar’s leaders in key positions at Disney after their merger (the personal stories of several Pixar figures are adeptly woven into the narrative). Running 89 minutes, it is an engrossing tale that charts not only the success of the company, but the advancement of the art of animation through computer applications, from the very first efforts to the sophisticated and far-reaching storytelling it has facilitated.

The deleted scenes on the first platter feature completed or nearly completed animation, but there are another 13 minutes of deleted scenes on the second platter from an earlier point in the film’s development, further explaining a few otherwise curious details in the completed film. The backstory is also enhanced with 10 minutes of ‘industrial’ shorts presented as if they had been created by the mega-corporation that created the robots, the spaceship and pretty much everything else in the film’s future world. There is an outstanding 15-minute production featurette about how the animators programmed their computers to better imitate the flaws and idiosyncrasies of genuine cinematography (several cinematographers stopped by to advise them), a passable 11-minute piece on the music, an enjoyable 5-minute short depicting the film’s hero interacting with various objects (a soccer ball, a magnet, headphones and so on) on an otherwise white background (with consistent shadows), and 26 minutes of other featurettes focusing mostly on the characters. Curiously, however, you learn more about the human animators of Finding Nemo in the Pixar film than you do about any of the animators working onWALL-E in the rest of the DVD, although otherwise, the segments are highly informative and worthwhile. Featured as well is an interactive look at the various robot characters and their functions, and a well-designed ‘read along’ game.

December 23, 2008

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

Every year, hundreds of movies are produced and twenty performers in a few of those movies are justifiably honored with Oscar nominations, but it is far less often that a film performance occurs which is so utterly spellbinding that it transcends the movie it is in to captivate the viewer with the sheer joy of witnessing the art of acting. James Dean in East of Eden, Marlon Brando in The Godfather, Judy Garland in A Star Is Born, Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice. There are maybe a dozen or two-dozen others, but in 2008, one more has been added to this exclusive group, Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. Here you have an enormous summer blockbuster film and, from past examples in various media, one of the showiest roles an actor can land, and Ledger’s take on the part is completely counter-intuitive. He underplays every moment, but as a result, every moment is bursting in its containment with the wit of the unexpected. The director, Christopher Nolan, has also accomplished something remarkable. He has made a sequel as if it were not a sequel, completely re-imagining the movie’s setting and its rules. No director following up upon the success of an initial adaptation of a comic book has ever done this before. Most good comic book sequels are likeTim Burton’s second Batman movie. Freed from the need to establish origins, they expand the palette and take on riskier narrative choices, but all within the safety of the ‘formula’ that worked the first time out. In Nolan’sBatman Begins, the city where the hero lived had a fantasy design and there were elements of the supernatural blended into the action. The film was legitimately hailed for bringing a new sense of realism and sobriety to the franchise, but that was in comparison to the previous installments. It still had elaborate model work and far-fetched action scenes that were appealing but well in keeping with the exaggerations of the genre. Even the best directors will trust in what has succeeded for them in the past, but Nolan, perhaps taking a cue from the ‘Dark Knight’ comic book source that was also one of those periodic upgrading and re-imaginings of a series that had gone a bit stale, went for an almost radically different and substantially more realistic environment this time out. The city is Chicago with a few extra buildings. The action could almost actually happen. And in the center of these changes is Ledger’s portrayal of the villainous Joker character, whose insanity is so quiet that it is unnervingly scary, because you let him get closer to you than you would ever allow a more flamboyant character to intrude. All of the actors get to act, and do it well (Christian Bale returns in the title role). One of the compelling aspects of the 153-minute feature is that while it does have a constant stream of excitements (enough to sustain its extended running time), it also takes on complex philosophical conflicts that are blended adeptly into the drama. They include the expected moral quandaries about vigilantism and leadership, as well as less easily defined explorations of free will and the nature of evil. That is the substance that allows a viewer to view the film again without growing impatient, but it is the anticipation and the satisfaction of seeing Ledger conduct his craft that generates the reason for wanting to watch the film over and over.

Yeah, it’s coming out on DVD, but Warner Home Video is also releasing The Dark Knight on Blu-ray and there is every reason to believe that it will be a defining title for the format. The Widescreen DVD is letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 2.4:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. However, a half-dozen action sequences in the movie were shot in IMAX, and while the rest of the film (and even shots within the sequences that weren’t IMAX shots) are presented in the 2.4:1 aspect ratio, the IMAX shots are presented in 1.78:1 on the BD. The film is so enthralling that you are barely aware of the shift, but however crisp and immediate the movie looks in the regular scenes, the IMAX segments quicken the pulse with an even greater immediacy and vividness. One of the reasons the action sequences are so effective is that the visual effects are held to a minimum. It looks real, not fantastic, and the quality of the picture does nothing to dissuade one’s subconscious from believing it. The 5.1-channel TrueHD sound on the BD is appropriately impactful, with clear separations, an active directional surround, and plenty of bass with every smackdown. Unlike some big films, the movie’s audio design is not a centerpiece of its showcase, but it underscores the emotional flow of the entertainment with complete authority and takes full advantage of the Blu-ray’s range of capability. It is because the dynamics of the Blu-ray system are so ideally suited to the film that fans will want the BD for their collection, and it is because Ledger is given such a thrilling proscenium that fans will want the Blu-ray system to best savor his exceptional, giddy, and timelessly surprising performance.

Without the BD superseding it, the DVD’s picture looks excellent, and the 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound has plenty of power and dimensional presence. Both versions have alternate French and Spanish tracks in 5.1, and both have optional English, French and Spanish subtitles.

Warner is also releasing a Two-Disc Special Edition on DVD. The first platter is identical to the Widescreen release. The second platter has a copy of the film that can be downloaded onto handheld viewing devices. It also has an elaborately produced collection of TV news program profiles set within the film’s universe and featuring several supporting cast members. The 47-minute segment also works fairly well as a prolog to the film itself, although there is nothing exceptionally witty or inspired in any of the pieces. Also featured is a separate 26-minute presentation of the IMAX sequences in their proper aspect ratio, 24 minutes of interesting production featurettes, three trailers and a collection of promotional materials in still frame.

On the BD, the copy available for downloading to handheld viewing devices is presented on a third platter. The first platter has 64 minutes of good production featurettes (of which the DVD’s 24 minutes are a subset) available both separately and in coordination with the film’s playback through prompts. The second platter has the news report section and the trailers, along with six TV commercials, a passable 46-minute piece on the technology the hero (and his comic book predecessors) utilizes, and a less interesting 46-minute piece on the psychologies of the hero and his antagonists.

December 9, 2008

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

As the pool of epic movies yet to be released on DVD diminishes, each release that does appear seems to become all the more significant. Warner Home Video has issued an impressive Two-Disc Special Edition of the 1951 MGM production, Quo Vadis. 1951, remember, was before widescreen or stereo sound was utilized to make such movies really special, but at 174 minutes, with an Overture and Exit Music (there is no Intermission), the film still conveys the kind of ‘event’ atmosphere that encourages a viewer to set aside an afternoon or evening for uninterrupted escapism. Directed byMervyn LeRoy, the film depicts the final days of Nero’s rule in Rome. It is stated in the opening narration that Nero is an ‘antichrist,’ and the term is not employed for exploitation or nonsense. The film is about the spread of Christianity in Rome, and in addition to the conversion the hero, a Roman commander played by Robert Taylor, undergoes over the course of the story, the film doesn’t just present the teachings of Christ and what it means to be a Christian, it also presents the opposite sort of behavior, ideally embodied in Peter Ustinov’s sniveling, self-centered and empathy-lacking Nero. Ustinov’s performance may be over the top in places-there are moments in the movie that are stodgy, wrongly exaggerated or otherwise mishandled by LeRoy-but the essence of what Ustinov does is highly enjoyable and quite memorable-a regular poster boy for how one should never conduct oneself. Taylor’s character converts because he falls for a Christian played by Deborah Kerr, and this being the movies, the film’s other lesson seems to be that a person’s moral conscience is formed in the crucible of sexual desire. For 1951, the film’s period detail and special effects are outstanding, and even for today’s viewers, its depiction of Roman life is not entirely dismissible. Action scenes occur at regular intervals, and there is a wide enough range of characters to make their exchanges continually intriguing. Ultimately, however, there just are not enough movies staged as grandly or as meticulously as the film has been conceived and executed, and it is for this reason as much as any other that Quo Vadis is an overdue and very welcome addition to the DVD catalog.

The film is spread to two platters with a somewhat arbitrary break separating the first part from the second part. The full screen picture is darn near flawless. It looks so good, in fact, that you can easily make out some of the matte work, although the best effects remain completely invisible (those aren’t people in the upper decks of the Colosseum, even though they look like they’re moving around). Fleshtones are precise and the costumes have vivid textures. The monophonic sound, which supports an appropriately ambitious Miklos Rosza musical score, is stable and clear. There is an alternate French audio track and optional English, French, Spanish and Japanese subtitles. The first platter contains two trailers. The second platter has a comprehensive 45-minute retrospective documentary, and on both platters, film historian F.X. Sweeny supplies a commentary track, with some redundancy to the documentary, talking about the cast and crew, its interesting production history (John Huston did substantial pre-production work before dropping out; this was the movie that rebuilt Rome’s Cinecitta studio after the war), the effects and other aspects of the film’s artistry. There are gaps in his talk, but it is reasonably extensive, and he is actually at his best when discussing the movie’s philosophical meanings. “You’re not concerned about Christ’s divinity when you’re talking about Christian times, what you’re talking about is the revolution that he sparked with the word, ‘love.’ Love was not regarded as much of anything except maybe an erotic pastime in the times prior to the rise of Christianity, and love here is seen as something more, something more profound, something that actually exists outside of oneself in a way. And that idea is being dramatized here, that’s what is taking Rome over and shaking Rome to its roots because if you are capable of a love that’s greater than just your own selfish desire, then, of course, you’re capable of being a free person, under yourself. And that is the opposition to slavery that is being dramatized quite skillfully throughout the film.”

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

Opening in March of 1960, the outstanding AMC cable series, Mad Men, is a glorious period drama about the generation that parented the Baby Boomers. It is also an incisive analysis of the advertising business during one of its greatest growth spurts, and above all else, it is a superb analysis of the human condition achieved by contrasting the manners, morals and psychology of the late Fifties and early Sixties in America with the presumed viewer’s awareness of those same values and states in the present day. For the musical score, outfits and hairdos, and the depictions of people smoking everywhere you turn, the show is a gas, and despite acting like cavemen and cavewomen at times, the characters still manage to reveal enough vulnerabilities to hold onto a viewer’s sympathies even as they come into conflict with one another. The show’s creators are obviously energized by their archeological and anthropological discoveries, and there is inherent humor in the strangeness of the world they are excavating, but the truths are always right near the surface and are too compelling to be dismissed as antiquation. Instead, there is the lingering fear that the values of today, whether it is the driveways filled with SUVs or everyone stuffing themselves with french fries and potato chips, will look just as alien and comical a couple of generations from now.

Lionsgate has released Mad Men Season One in a four-platter set containing thirteen episodes, originally broadcast in 2007. Jon Hamm won a Golden Globe for his performance as the show’s hero, an executive at a fictional New York ‘Madison Avenue’ ad agency, with a mistress in town and a wife and kids in the suburbs, who works on historically genuine advertising accounts and campaigns. The show then expands to follow the stories of some of the men who work for him, some of the men he works for, their wives, and a few of the secretaries. In an inspired piece of casting, Robert Morse, the up-and-coming go-getter inHow To Succeed in Business without Really Trying, portrays the agency’s senior partner. When the show begins, the impression one has of all of the characters is that they are impossibly archaic, but each one is actually striving to understand what life is all about, and since the viewer has a perspective that the characters do not, a sense of collusion develops, enabling an appreciation of each character’s small victories over ignorance. Not only is the program dense in nostalgia (although there is not as much awareness of television among the characters as there ought to be), but the final episode is a self-appreciative tribute to the very concept of nostalgia, and the pitch that Hamm’s character delivers to a potential client near the episode’s climax is so emotionally penetrating it is best to have more than one tissue box handy as it plays out. It will definitely leave you lining up to be the first one on your block to have Season Two.

The season runs a total of 617 minutes and each platter has a ‘Play All’ option. The picture is presented in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 1.78:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. Since the costumes and set designs are so intrinsic to the show’s appeal, the cinematography is exceptionally well composed for a TV series, and the color transfer on the DVD is solid and precise. The 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound provides a generalized but effective dimensionality. There are optional English subtitles.

The DVD would be terrific even if it held just the show and nothing more, but the supplementary materials are outstanding as well. Three of the episodes have a single commentary track, while the other ten each have two commentaries. Comprised of various members of the cast and the crew, the talks are almost consistently enlightening, whether the speakers are simply pointing out subtle story nuances or relating incidents that occurred on the sets, or whether they go into detail about the designs (and the pains of wearing) the costumes, the music choices, the ad business, the show’s historical context, the narrative development, the cinematography and lighting, and almost every other significant component of the production.

Additionally, most of the platters contain excellent production featurettes that serve as a superb foundation of reference for the commentaries. On the first platter, there is a 7-minute look at the show’s musical scoring and a marvelous collection of thirteen audio clips from the show’s soundtrack album. The second platter has an excellent 19-minute piece about the advertising business and a detailed 30-minute segment on the costume, hair and set designs. The third platter features a 61-minute production featurette that explores the casting, the sets and the highlights of various episodes, all with exceptional insight.

October 7, 2008

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

When it was made, the story in How the West Was Won concluded at a point that reached the lifetime of some of the 1963 MGM film’s oldest viewers (and background extras), so that its own narrative span, depicting in an episodic fashion, the gradual settlement of western America during the Nineteenth Century, could present a graspable vision of how America was formed (with one character, played by Debbie Reynolds, surviving from the beginning to the end). Viewers who saw the film when it first opened (most of them who are still around now are starting to comprehend that same generational arc of existence themselves) were treated to a fabulous innovation of cinematic showmanship, Cinerama, in which the movie had been shot simultaneously on three conjoined cameras and was then projected with such a wide aspect ratio (on three projectors) that it could partially surround and completely immerse the viewer in its thrills and drama.

All previous manifestations of the movie on home video that were not cropped to begin with, including the first DVD release, have left the evidence of the triptych in tact, with two obvious vertical interfaces separating the letterboxed image into three ‘panels.’ The letterboxing on the first DVD had no 16:9 enhancement, and while it had an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1, there was still a fair amount of picture information missing from the sides. Dirt and minor speckling were also present on the image at times, and the colors, while good, were inconsistent from one ‘panel’ to the next. Warner Home Video has at last eliminated all of those distractions with their dazzling new Three-Disc Special Edition. The picture is slightly windowboxed, with an aspect ratio of about 2.85:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. It is spotless, vividly colored, and distortion-free (at the most, there is a vague shadow on the lighter portions of the screen at the demarcation points).

What immediately hits you with the Special Edition DVD is how odd the screen compositions look, with the characters sometimes pushed into the center of the image, or held unnaturally apart with a gap of space, or the sight-lines not always matching exactly, but it is far less distracting than having those lines in the middle of the picture, and it isn’t just the action scenes that are improved by the delivery. Each ensemble shot, many dramatic scenes, and every gorgeous landscape vista are absolutely riveting, and continue to be across the film’s entire 163-minute running time. Just as the movie was not depicting what the West was really like, but rather what the spirit of its settlement has passed along to us, so does the DVD’s image not convey what Cinerama was like, but does suggest the majesty and excitement that viewers who beheld the process felt when they first experienced it.

The film is spread across two platters and is split at its Intermission point. There are an Overture, Entr’acte and Exit Music. The 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound is similar to the previous release, but conveys the marvelous, old-fashioned separation effects and left-right dialog delivery, as well as a reasonable surround presence. There is an alternate French track in 5.1 Dolby and optional English, French, Spanish, Japanese and Thai subtitles. The first platter also has a trailer, and a terrific quintet of experts provides an excellent group commentary track for the entire program (it is hard to tell if they are always sitting together, but sometimes their talks interact with one another; the commentary, incidentally, has optional Japanese subtitles). Historian Rudy Behlmer, stuntman Loren James (who played just about every bad guy and every good guy in the film), film music expert Jon Burlingame, Cinerama historian David Strohmaier and Cinerama technician John Sittig talk about every aspect of the movie, such as what the sets were like, what locations were used, how the cast members adapted to the challenges of the shoot, the use of folk music on the soundtrack, how a major plot change to the final acts was put together after production had begun (Hope Lange shot some scenes before her character and pessimistic storyline were dropped), and what the challenges were for shooting in the Cinerama format. “A loudspeaker warned the crew when the cameras were rolling in order to get everyone to hide behind something, because otherwise, the crewmembers would be in the shot since it incorporated so much area with the three Cinerama cameras. You can’t assume you’re not in the shot. MGM created a bunch of fiberglass rocks, paper maché rocks or something, because there weren’t enough trees for people to hide behind. So people would scurry and get behind these rocks and huddle, waiting for the take to be over.”

Even if you aren’t that interested in seeing How the West Was Won again, the movie on the third platter, an outstanding and definitive 2008 retrospective history of Cinerama entitledCinerama Adventure, makes the DVD worth obtaining. Directed by Strohmaier, the 97-minute program is thoroughly researched and traces the development of the process before and during World War II, when it was used for early and successful virtual reality anti-aircraft gun training. There are terrific clips from almost all of the Cinerama travel documentaries, in full widescreen format, and equally engrossing tales of how the most spectacular sequences were achieved. As is pointed out in the documentary, unlike today, very few people who saw the first Cinerama films had ever even flown before, let alone experienced, through film or otherwise, many of the adventures the Cinerama shows had to offer. Even now, the mix of daring cinematography and the preservation of natural and cultural imagery from what has become the past give the movies an enduring fascination. Until such time as the Cinerama films themselves appear on DVD, the documentary is easily the next best thing.

There are people who insist that movies, and DVDs for that matter, are supposed to be Art, and you wonder what these people do for relaxation. How the West Was Won is art all right, folk art. The technology that was used to create it was aiming not for a high ideal, but for a mass entertainment. With as many directors as it has panels and four times as many stars, it is a conglomeration of talent with no individual’s imprint looming larger than another. In telling a generational story that codifies the growth of the American West in a collection of movie action sequences, the film’s limitations are readily apparent. That was why the cropped presentation is so bad. When the widescreen images are employed, however, the film justifies itself. The vignettes are precisely what the filmmakers intended them to be, enough of a story to provide a mild commentary on the path of generational growth, while stringing along the thrills. It has one grandstanding moment after another, and when you become attuned to them you can get excited just seeing the shot of the St. Louis street, because looming in the center is a large show palace and you just know the next cut will be to a widescreen dance number. What the movie is really saying is that our forefathers fought to expand and settle America so that we could sit back and enjoy movies like this, and we certainly do not intend to let them down.

September 25, 2008

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

Too comic booky for the masses, or even the WB subset thereof, the short-lived Birds of Prey TV series, about female crime fighters in ‘New Gotham City,’ has finally been delivered to the medium where it can be the most appreciated, as Warner Home Video has released Birds of Prey The Complete Series, a four platter set featuring all thirteen 40-minute episodes originally broadcast in 2002 and 2003. The finale is a makeshift double episode, but it forms an excellent resolution to the program, so that while the show’s discontinuation is truly lamentable, the DVD serves as a coherent and resolute miniseries. Additionally, the superficiality of the character relations gives way to deeper emotional conflicts and rewards across the length of the work. Dina Meyer plays the former Batgirl, now relegated to a high-tech wheel chair and directing the operations from a penthouse lair. Ashley Scott is the daughter of the late Catwoman and the absent Batman, generally following the guide of Meyer’s character but with a distinctive independent streak and no costume or mask-she just assumes that the city is so big, no one is going to recognize her. Rachel Skarsten is a younger runaway with psychic powers who joins up with the others in the first episode, as her origins are revealed later on. Delivering the most delicious performance in a show filled with delicious performances, Mira Saraportrays the shrink of Scott’s character and, unbeknownst to the heroine, the former main squeeze of the permanently absent Joker.

The show’s immediate appeal is of course in the depiction of the stylish actresses in hot getups, kicking butt and otherwise fulfilling the many dark, naughty boy fantasies fans of such programs inevitably harbor. Most of the episodes feature a visiting villain with a special power or quirk, and it is the repetition of this dynamic at first that emphasizes the show’s comic book roots and supposed limitations. It may be sophisticated camp, but it is still camp. As the show progresses, however, the relationships between the heroines, and a couple of their boyfriends, continue to develop, as do the moral explorations of vigilantism and that sort of thing, so that while the show’s basic, visceral thrills advance unabated, its emotional foundations become stronger and more compelling with each installment. It is a fantastic mix, and it is only a shame that viewers didn’t give the show more of a chance in its day.

The picture is presented in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 1.78:1, but Warner pulls one of its occasionally shortsighted blunders and does not provide 16:9 enhancement, as sorely as the show could use it (Warner also should have released the DVD immediately after the show was cancelled, as there may still have been a faint chance of kickstarting a revival at the time, such as what happened with Fox’s better marketed Firefly). Otherwise, the picture looks slick and glossy. Warner also leaves the sound in standard stereo rather than splurging for 5.1 Dolby, although again, the show could have really benefited from the upgrade. There are a lot of front channel separations, but no significant rear-channel activity (in one episode, the voice of a ‘chameleon’ bad guy ought to be bouncing all over the place, but instead it just jumps from right to left and back again). Some of the music has also been changed from the original broadcast. There are optional English subtitles.

The fourth platter contains the show’s first stab at the pilot episode, with Sherilyn Fennmaking a less effective presence in Sara’s role. That is the major difference between the two, although there are other, minor alterations. Adding insult to injury, this is the one episode that does have 16:9 enhancement. It can be enjoyable, however, to revisit the pilot-either this one or the one on the first platter-after watching the whole series, because the characters carry a greater resonance and also because, in a nice touch of symmetry, both the first and the final episodes involve hypnotism.

The collection’s one other special feature is inspired. There are three ‘seasons’ of brief, animated episodes originally broadcast on the Internet of a program entitled Gotham Girls, with one season on each of the first three platters. Set before the time of Birds of Prey, the cartoons feature various combinations of Batgirl, Cat Woman, Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn interacting with each other and getting into mischief. Each cartoon in the first two seasons is basically a blackout sketch, and the best ones are the ones that build to a single punchline. The third season then advances to one cliffhanger-generated narrative, in which someone makes all of the men in Gotham disappear. The first season on the first platter has ten episodes (one is a two-parter) and runs 27 minutes. The second season has ten episodes and runs 35 minutes. The third season has ten installments and runs 36 minutes.

September 11, 2008

– by Douglas Pratt

Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
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