Aggression Scale (2011/Anchor Bay Blu-ray)/The
Big Heat (1953/Sony/Twilight Time Limited Edition Blu-ray)/La Haine (1995/Criterion Blu-ray)/Telling Lies In America/Traveller
(1997/Shout! Factory Blu-ray)
Picture:
B-/B/B/B- & C+ Sound: B-/B-/B/C+
& B- Extras: D/B-/B-/D Films: D/B/B-/B & C-
PLEASE
NOTE: The Big Heat
Blu-ray is limited to 3,000 copies and is available exclusively at the Screen
Archives website which can be reached at the link at the end of this review.
The crime
film has a wider reach than we sometimes consider, as the following entries
prove.
Our
newest production is Steven C. Miller’s The
Aggression Scale (2011), yet another home invasion thriller, which has a
good cast, good locales and a really lame script. Two single parents are trying to get their
family together and the mother has a young daughter not happy with this, while
the father has a son with serious emotional troubles. There is much potential here, but it has
hardly any character development or suspense.
The title
refers to a psychological test the son took that shows he is capable of great
violence, especially when he feels trapped.
Unfortunately, Miller treats this like a hip Home Alone installment than the serious thriller it should be
treated as. I will not say much more or
what little is good here would be ruined, but what a miss this is. A Making Of featurette is the only extra.
Fritz
Lang’s The Big Heat (1953) is an
ever-hard hitting, all time real Film Noir classic and has been on DVD several
times. Now, Sony has licensed the film
to Twilight Time to be a Limited Edition Blu-ray, which is a surprise for such
a major film in their catalog. We
previously looked at the DVD version included in the first volume of the Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics
set at this link:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/9204/Columbia+Pictures+Film+Noir+Classics
That was
a good DVD, but this Blu-ray is far superior in sound and image, though that
set had some extras not here. Still,
this is the definitive playback edition and the film endures as one of the most
violent and substantial Noirs ever.
Glenn Ford was never popular on set, but was a big star and keeping to himself
seems to have helped his performances.
Gloria Grahame is unforgettable here and the rest of the cast (Lee
Marvin, Jocelyn Brando, Jeanette Nolan, Carolyn Jones, uncredited turns by John
Doucette and John Crawford) are all on the money. It is a must-see film and with only 3,000
copies, that might not be enough for all the fans out there, so get it while
you can.
Extras
include another fine illustrated booklet with another fine essay by Julie
Kirgo, the Original Theatrical Trailer and an Isolated Music Score track you
can watch with the film.
Mathieu
Kassovitz put himself on the filmmaking map with La Haine (1995), a black and white film from France about the
society’s decline and the youth criminality that develops as a result (even
when some of the people stuck in it do not want to be involved), including
racism, class division and other prejudices that are the dark side of the
country at that time and now. Also
putting actor Vincent Cassel, everyone is good here and the black and white
film is unflinching in its honest look at the decline, but if you remove the
locale and the fact that this is monochrome, this would almost be any other
exploitive “gangsta” entry. However,
thanks to its Kassovitz’s screenplay and subtle details, you can see why Criterion
has issued it on Blu-ray.
Extras
include another fine, thick, illustrated booklet with tech information and two
essays (one by Ginette Vincendeau, the other by no less than Costa Gavras) while
the disc adds a feature length audio commentary by Kassovitz, intro by Jodie
Foster who had advocated the film to begin with, Ten Years Of La Haine featurette, Production Footage, Trailers,
Stills Gallery, Deleted & Extended Scenes with an afterword by Kassovitz
and a documentary that brought all the participants together on the film’s
tenth anniversary.
Kassovitz
moved on to a commercial film career that included interesting if not totally
successful entries like Gothika and Babylon A.D., so this is a filmmaker
with some serious talent that still has not peaked. Hope we see something new from him soon.
Finally
we have two slimier films on one Blu-ray as a double feature: Telling Lies In America and Traveller, both originally released in
theaters in 1997. Both are about younger
men getting involved with older male con artists who can only bring them
disaster. Jack Green’s Traveller quickly establishes Bill
Paxton’s con artist as no good and when a relative dies, he lands up meeting a
desperate Mark Wahlberg (son of the dead relative) who needs financial help and
Paxton finally agrees to help. Too bad
it will lead to disaster.
This was
poor when I saw it then and has aged very, very badly, leaving one to say “look
how young they are” and that includes turns by James Gammon and Juliana
Margulies, hoping to have a big screen movie career that did not take. The corn pone music score becomes tired
quickly and early on, this starts slowly imploding, but all the lame twists and
turns in the end ruin it all.
On the
other hand, Guy Ferland’s Telling Lies
In America is an underrated work that was written by the very successful
Joe Eszterhas (in the news lately for fighting with Mel Gibson) in a
semi-autobiographical story about a young man (the late Brad Renfro as a
surrogate for Eszterhas) coming to America (specifically Cleveland, Ohio)
hoping for success and meeting a con artist (Kevin Bacon) involved in the dark
side of the music business.
I bought
this one, it is one of the best scripts Eszterhas will ever write and this is
just an all around underrated film that totally captures its time period and is
totally believable. It was ignored
because no one wanted to take the writer of Basic Instinct seriously, but it works. I hope this Blu-ray helps it find a long
overdue new audience because it is also amazing it works so well with such a
limited budget, but rights on the film have been all over the place (legal
troubles did not help) and it is also one of Renfro’s best performances in an
all too short career.
Calista
Flockhart, Maximilian Schell, Paul Dooley, Luke Wilson and Jonathan Rhys Meyers
make up the fine supporting cast and it is more than strong enough to recommend
you get the entire disc. There are no
extras.
The 1080p
black and white digital High Definition image transfers on Big Heat at 1.33 X 1 and La
Haine at 1.85 X 1 are the visual winners on this list with fine Video
Black, good detail and depth throughout.
Heat (lensed by Director of
Photography Charles Lang, no relation, of Sabrina
(1954), Some Like It Hot, One-Eyed Jacks and Charade) has the advantage of real black and white film with
serious silver content and the old Hollywood classical camera approach, plus
the best Noirs use deep focus and you can see that in many shots here where the
film gets a nearly 3D effect without 3D.
La Haine (lensed by Pierre
Aim of Café au Lait) has a dulled
look, pushing the stocks they have and stylizing it some, but it still looks
amazing and about as good as it could ever look with Kodak black and white of
the time.
The 1080p
2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image transfers on Scale (an HD shoot) and Lies
do not look as good, with the color on Scale
limited by the HD shoot and color on Lies
(a Super 35mm shoot lensed by Reynaldo Villalobos of Nine To Five, Risky Business,
A Bronx Tale and TV’s Breaking Bad) from a print with
fading. In addition, Scale has motion blur that does not
help, while Lies has some shots that
look thinner than they should, but this is a big improvement over the butchered
pan & scan DVD we reviewed elsewhere on this site. That leaves the 1080p 1.85 X 1 digital High
Definition image transfer on Traveller
the poorest here, with a mixed transfer and one too many reddish shots
throughout along with color, definition and detail issues.
The
DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix is on La Haine can be sometimes towards the front speakers or center
channel, but not always and this is a rare upgrade from a film issued in
Dolby’s advanced Spectral Recording (SR) analog format that has translated well
to 5.1, whereas in most cases, the upgrade is botched badly. The result is the best sounding film
here. The winner sonically here should
be the Dolby TrueHD 5.1 on Scale,
but the mix has a limited soundfield and the recording quality is
inconsistent. DTS-HD MA (Master Audio)
1.0 Mono lossless on Big Heat is
superior to its DVD version and nicely cleaned up here, while Traveller and Lies were originally Dolby theatrical releases, but are both here
in DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 2.0 Stereo lossless presentations.
Traveller was also a DTS release and so it
has a 5.1 soundmaster unfortunately not used here, but it still sounds good and
Pro Logic type decoding yields healthy surrounds. Lies
was likely a older Dolby A analog recording, possibly bounced to Dolby Digital
at the last minute, but it has the poorest sound of all here with sonic limits
and a lack of soundfield with or without Pro Logic decoding. It still sounds better than its DVD
counterpart.
As noted
above, The Big Heat can be ordered
while supplies last at:
www.screenarchives.com
- Nicholas Sheffo
