Screens below are from the new Warners 4K/HDR
Blu-ray of Ridley Scott's groundbreaking Blade
Runner (1982), photographed by Jordan Cronenweth, from Philip K Dick's
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". The screens were taken
manually by Iphone of my Panasonic 4K screen, a hopelessly compromised way to
get caps, because no software is yet available to do direct lossless screens on
a PC with a regular hard disc drive.
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| Blade Runner |
I was intending to be brave and hold on until
general release of the Blade Runner 2049
sequel which seems to be opening at every cinema in the world next Thursday,
including our own here in Masterton via DCP 4K, but an early review by Peter
Bradshaw in the Grauniad has pushed me back into the here and now to review
this new 4K/HDR disc from Warners of the original 1982 movie.
The movie itself barely needs speaking to at any
length, so well covered is it, although there will undoubtedly still be others
who see it more as spectacle than art, or a triumph of production design and
breathtaking high contrast color photography. All those positions simply keep
feeding discussion of a film that possibly even more commentators feel guilty
about admitting they like, than are perhaps willing to admit. Its influence on
later movies, especially sci-fi and spectacle pictures after 1982 is simply
immeasurable.
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| Blade Runner |
Even in the earliest days of then blue screen tech
for some process shots, Ridley Scott simply blasts the screen into the stratosphere
with both sheer mouth agape spectacle for which he is a master, as he continues
to do so in sequels to the Alien
trilogy, notably Prometheus (2013),
IMO an underrated near masterpiece, and the hugely entertaining and self-reflecting
Alien: Covenant from 2017.
Scott also displays a complete command of shape,
dramatic architecture and narrative control which is as classical in its
manipulation of surprise, tension, exposition and resolution as you could hope
to get these days. And whatever weaknesses he shares with another Alpha
director like James Cameron, including spotty dialogue writing, it hardly seems
to matter when he displays so much collaborative goodwill to the extent of
handing over direction of the new 2049
film to French-Canadian Denis Villeneuve, almost certainly based on his
admiration for the latter's superb 2016 sci-fi meditation film Arrival, with Amy Adams which is a later
subject of this review.
But in anticipation of the new 2049 picture, I want to go into a little
depth about the new 4K Blu-ray, hopefully without boring the pants off
everyone. Within this story is an encouraging development for the future of
movies themselves. When Warners were looking for additional elements to make a
revised "complete Director's edit" of the film prior to 2004, their
crew including restoration maestro Robert Harris discovered among other
pristine 35mm and 70mm film elements a longer print from the UK which had
additional footage and a number of other elements that now constitute the
revised "director's cut" we know today. It included the reinstatement
of the full Vangelis score, the removal of the voice over (which I always
liked) at the end to cement the Noir mood, superfluous as it now seems, and
other bits and pieces.
Even better, Warners addressed restoration issues
using the then relatively new and forward looking 4K scanning technology, and
did all their harvest and mastering in the 4K domain. Thence to a 4K
intermediate for 35mm prints, as well as a 4K for eventual DCP theatrical
master. This was then downrezzed in 2007 to 1080p at the comparably inferior
but still regular BD AVC encoding format and those Blu-rays have been the
premium video standard until now.
Scott came to help Warners with this new 4k disc
encode this year and they were able to add the dramatically higher specced
dimension of 4K compliant HDR (High Dynamic Range) for color spacing (12 bit
over 8 bit, color spacing for 4K Rec.2020 standard over 1080p spacing of
Rec.709), and massively increased contrast from dead white at more than 1000
nits measurement to pure dead black zero nits, not the regular blacker than
black that is usually obtained from even premium Kodak 35mm stock like the
Vision series.
The result is an image of incomparable contrast,
depth, resolution, finesse, nuance, color spectrum and original fine film grain
which you can now play at home (on a 4K player and the largest 4K screen you
can possibly afford to give yourself). This is thus the exact equivalent,
lossless viewing experience of the very same master 4K DCP being projected with
carbon arc lamps under the most optimal conditions possible to a physical
cinema onto the largest screen possible.
This is the first time in the history of movies
that this has been feasible for home viewing at prices that now seem, if not
initially, laughably reasonable. ($400 up for the player, 4 grand or less for
the optimum 65 inch screen.)
If ever a movie needed and received such premium
treatment in a technologically nurtured process that parallels the sort of magnificent
restoration and archival work we are seeing these days at Bologna and elsewhere
every year, this is it. Watching Blade
Runner in 4K/HDR at home is like the first time over again, but amazingly
even better than that.
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| Amy Adams, Arrival |
Next up, Amy Adams in a field with an alien craft
carrying Heptapods at the centre of Denis Villeneuve's moving and intelligent
adaptation of Arrival, a 90s short
novel by Ted Chiang, "The Story of your Life". The material is the
sort of grown up, semi-philosophical quest that has been germane to the genre
for some years now, ever since people recognized Philip K Dick, Aldiss, Sagan
and others as serious writers of intelligent fiction in the sci-fi realm. The
question of time is at the center of Arrival,
and the narrative of alien visitation with a confluence of fortune, planning
and sheer aesthetic pleasure at the meeting of two alien cultures, humans and
the heptapods, whose purpose seems to be gifting a frankly unworthy and stupid
species like us a completely radical way of perceiving time and life and the
whole nature of memory and prediction.
Time and prediction are not new themes, certainly
and concepts of simultaneous dimensions of time as it were, are also prominent
in numbers of Aboriginal and other prime cultures, the Aborigines of Australia
for example and the dreamtime, the Swedish/Nordic Sami, the Native Americans
and others. The joys of the novel and film are many, even down to the
predictable if narratively "logical" outcome of human hostility in
the last act of the movie propelling what should have been a friendly
visitation into warfare. We are hopeless. ….And
who can disagree?
But we can be thankful for enlightened humans like Amy
Adams (Louise) and a very agreeable secondary male character in Jeremy Renner,
as Ian, in an admirably gender leading role reversal for Hollywood.
An equally gratifying pleasure is the direction of
Denis Villeneuve, none of whose earlier films had I seen and which I must now
catch. Villeneuve directs classically well with such oft ignored basics as
setup , blocking, staging , composition travelling shots and every other
imagineable tool of mise-en-scรจne
firmly under the belt to maximise the intimacy of the show while playing off
the spectacle which indeed carries its own particular personal intimacy, one
which Louise constantly shares with the audience.
Villeneuve apparently dislikes blue or green
screen CGI material intensely and he built actual scale sets for the internal
space ship and other sequences, which were then lit and filmed
"naturally" without optical processing. The result is a picture
quality that dazzles with almost impossibly humble elegance and simplicity. The
director also storyboarded everything down to the physical scale of the
visitors to their habitat and to the natural human world. The movie was shot
with Arri Alexa cameras and Arri and Zeiss primes, in the 2.8k domain and DI
was executed in 2K which was then used for 35 Scope Deluxe film prints.
If I suggest a very, very slight disappointment
with the visual quality of the Australian Blu-ray disc from Roadshow, it's
probably because it follows multiple viewings of a truckload of 4K native
material here recently. The movie and disc come highly recommended.
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| Tuesday Weld, Nick Nolte, Who'll Stop the Rain |
And now here's to rescuing from the just viewed pile
two superb Twilight Time Blu Rays of 2017 from new masters of both titles.
Karel Reisz's 1978 literally raging Nam/Heroin gig, Who'll Stop the Rain, and Ivan Passer's fantastic, barely released Cutter's Way from 1981.
The latter film was issued on a very fine Twilight
Time BD much earlier this year and is still in print (the label does runs of
3000 which sometimes sell out quickly.) I acquired an earlier Blu of this on
the French SIdonis label a year or more ago. That transfer unfortunately
suggested a less than ideal 35mm source which appeared to be digitally scrubbed
to erase both grain and surface emulsion damage, which was then given the usual
high frequency "sharpening" process, one which simply creates
artefacts, haloes and other awful digital noise that make viewing on a large
screen basically unbearable.
The new TT disc is from another much better
source, mastered very nicely with a warmer color temperature, relatively little
emulsion damage and a very balanced digital encode. This is typical of the care
this label always gives to the materials they use. The movie has a Blade Runner link via Jordan Cronenweth
as DP, who shot this the year before Scott's movie. The picture gets an added
period bump, to share with Wenders and others, in the form of a Jack Nitszche
score.
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| John Heard, Cutter's Way |
The lead acting trio includes the late John Heard
as Cutter in career peak as the damaged Vietnam vet, Lisa Eichorn his alcoholic
girlfriend who shares their bed with a spineless gigolo and boat salesman Jeff
Bridges who is eye-opening in a role which revels in shallowness and smug self-regard.
The sheer rage of Cutter alone as an oppositional figure to a probable murder
by an establishment "pillar of society" in their town drives the film
to an end with the trio's ill executed and doomed raid on one of the Bigwig murderer's
massive garden parties, ending with Bridges dead, and Cutter smashing his way
through the house into the sitting room on a white horse. It's a literally
stunning final shot.
I remember seeing this for the first time in 1982
at a small rep theatre in the West Village in NYC with a near empty house. All
of us left the theatre shell shocked after the screening - no one could speak.
Passer made a number of other movies in America but I can't really rate any of
them at this astonishing level.
Another expat, the Brit Karel Reisz made the
equally rousing and off the wall post-Nam picture Who'll Stop the Rain in 1978, a film whose subject matter must have
scared the literal shit out of then distributor United Artists. Not only were
Vietnam War pictures BO poison, unless they were cheer fests like the misguided
The Green Berets (John Wayne, Ray
Kellogg & Mervyn Leroy, USA, 1968) but
they were even more untouchable if they fingered one of the major cores (if
hidden) of the "secret" war, the massive heroin trade the CIA
introduced into the Vietnam scenario from the mid-sixties, a neat little trick
which addicted a generation of young poor white and black conscriptees into
smack and sent them home doubly or triply crippled, if not in a body bag.
The picture remains probably too tough for most
modern audiences, even allowing for the calming manifestations of cinema
goddess, Tuesday Weld an actress of supernatural powers to heal the soul, and
Nick Nolte in peak pre-convulsive hysteria who wears the bulk of the picture's
motivation. The Twilight TIme Blu-ray uses a near pristine 35mm source and
grading and rez are, as always with this fine label, beyond criticism.
Editor's Note: For some more of David's unique Blade Runner screen shots Click here
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