Recent progress on a big stack of blu rays that I’ve put off watching but I’m finally delving into. These are films that I’ve either intended to rewatch or simply haven’t gotten to yet.
Ben-hur (1959)
Although on a 1080p blu ray format for the restoration the film stock was scanned in 8K, reduced later to 6K for the transfer. I’ll certainly take a 4K version one day if one gets made, but the standard blu ray version looks sensational. This movie is in a three-way tie for most academy awards of all time with 11. Absolutely gorgeous cinematography. Every shot is beautifully composed. The reds and purples of the capes and robes of the Roman military and rulers, the soldiers’ ornate silver and gold breastplates, and pretty much all the other visual details of the ancient world look stunning. Simple, direct storytelling in the classical Hollywood style with some great actors of that era. Chartlon Heston is pretty much at the peak of his powers. This was on TV a lot when I was a kid and it was in 4:3 pan-and-scan format. Such a pleasure to finally watch it in the full aspect ratio on a really good home theater setup.
One-eyed Jacks
Finally got around to watching this. This is the only film that Brando directed and he hit a home run. Martin Scorsese loves it and he was heavily involved in the film’s restoration and transfer to 4K. Scorsese points out that One-Eyed Jacks merges Old and New Hollywood. And he notes that its cinematography is really masterful. Brando’s eye for composition, color, costuming, and use of light and shadow is indeed gifted. Old Hollywood is the classical studio system that reinforces genre conventions that in turn confirm traditional myths about Americanism. New Hollywood also known as Renaissance Hollywood uses more naturalistic dialogue and acting, and it very actively questions and explores the values system of the American myth; and perhaps more importantly it celebrates auteurism, the director as an artist and creative force in his or her own right. In this film I think there’s a metaphor for the sherif representing Old Hollywood and the roguish ne’er-do-well hero Rio representing New Hollywood.
Barry Lyndon
So glad that I finally watched this film! Stanley Kubrick is always full of surprises and I really had no idea what to expect. Bear with me on this… What struck me is how our species has shifted from pure, raw physical survival in the wilderness as hunter gatherers to more complex social survival in human civilization. I can’t say if that is what Kubrick was consciously going for. But at least to my (probably over-creative) mind the film (unconsciously?) forms a kind of commentary on that… Anyway, it’s clearly a tale of survival in a downright ruthless class system. I watched the Criterion Collection 4K remaster, and it’s a beautiful transfer. Barry Lyndon is an absolute feast for the eyes. This film deservedly won Oscars for best cinematography, best set design, best costumes, and best score. All are superb. This movie features some of the most subtle and brilliant non-verbal acting I’ve ever seen.
Watership Down
The animated film doesn’t do justice to the book, which I absolutely adored when I read it long ago. But it is still quite worthy in its own way. There’s a sense of both enchantment and a kind of… well, realism, I suppose… to the fantasy of rabbits having a sort of sophisticated animal intelligence in this tale. It works much more powerfully in the book, but this movie more or less pulls it off too. It’s a perspective that once I immersed myself in it, I could never again look at wild critters in my yard quite the same way. So it’s sort of neat to go on the odyssey of imagination about what rabbits sharing the countryside with humans would be like. Artistically and visually speaking, the painted backgrounds and the basic animation style work for me.
Chronicles of Riddick (director’s cut)
I love this movie. Some feel the script is a convoluted mess. But I LIKE that it throws us into the deep end of the pool for its world without explaining or setting up what a lot of things are. We have to sort of piece together what the various factions and interpersonal relationships are. I had never seen Pitch Black when I first watched it, but it was obvious that Riddick had a past with Jack/Kira and the Imam. I didn’t care that I didn’t know that backstory specifically. I probably watched this movie a half dozen times before I finally got around to watching its predecessor. I can draw inferences from all sorts of meta-contextual clues what the mercs, Necromongers, Elementals, and Furyans are. This is inspired by Vin Diesel’s home brew D&D tabletop campaign, and he created the setting and characters for it. For me, the move resembles the experience of a player at a tabletop D&D game in having to make sense of a world that he or she finds themself in and is continually learning about, discovering, and making sense of as they go. The 4K transfer looks great. 14:32 of footage was added to lengthen some scenes and add more dialogue to flesh out various arcs. The footage was added using a technique that makes some brief interstitial sections appear slightly distorted in time, not exactly sure why. The speed distortion is not super distracting for me. But maybe one day if AI/CGI can make it appear seamless I’d be happy with that. This is a case where the theatrical release might well be the best version. It also comes in an open matte version. I’ll get to both eventually.
Cloud Atlas
I had only watched this movie once before via streaming and I was deeply intrigued by it. I later learned it was based on a book. I’m aware that the book is very highly regarded. But anyway I clearly got the basic gist of the story and could tell that the same actors were reappearing in different lifetimes. It was obviously a movie that calls for repeat viewings—probably a great number of rewatches in fact. On the first watch some years ago I felt a little disquieted by the use of prosthetics and makeup to change the race of the characters/actors. Normally, changing race in such a way would be offputting. But for this story it is actually required. The movie more or less pulls it off. It works well enough. Didn’t bother me at all for this rewatch. There is as yet no 4K version for Cloud Atlas (at least on disk), but nevertheless but the transfer for 1080p blu ray looks gorgeous. The audio transfer is also excellent. Nevertheless I still found myself needing to switch from soundbar/woofer to AirPods so that I could clearly catch everything that is spoken in hushed tones, and in the dialect used by earthlings of the future. I was especially struck by how the tension in the story progressively ratchets up to a crescendo with the suspenseful and powerful action scenes. I still haven’t traced out the interrelationships between various characters as the reincarnate, and reflected on that. But I love the gestalt that this film gives me. It seems to me like the “block universe” conception of time in which all things that have ever happened or will happen are simply ‘one big thing’; and therefore all the past and future lifetimes in this story are connected on that level as a kind of symphony. This watch cemented for me that I love this movie. I’m very sentimental, so this isn’t that hard to do: but it made me cry several times. There are so many powerful emotional moments towards the end of the movie, but in particular the way Meronym looks at Zachry in their old age hits me like a ton of bricks.
I’m going to try to watch one film per day for the next 10 days. The remaining movies in the blu ray pile:
Oppenheimer
The Last Emperor
Malcolm X
The Revenant
Kingdom of Heaven (director’s cut)
Atomic Blonde
Tenet
The Northman
The Woman King
Pacific Rim
