The Cup
(2010/Lionsgate DVD)/For One Night (2005/Lifetime
DVD)/The Sound & The Fury (1959/Fox/Twilight
Time Limited Edition Blu-ray)/Sunday
Bloody Sunday (1971/MGM/United Artists/Criterion Blu-ray)
Picture: C/C+/B-/B+ Sound: C+/C+/B-/B- Extras: C-/D/C+/B Films: C/C+/C+/B-
PLEASE
NOTE: The Sound & The Fury 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.
As awards
season is upon us, here are some drams to know about…
Simon
Wincer’s The Cup (2010) is a
dramatic adaptation of the true story of a hard-won, personal victory in the
Australian national horse race classic known as the Melbourne Cup. The lead has a brother who just died in a race
and their father died much the same way 27 years before, so can he be a winning
jockey to assure their legacy and win one for them as well?
Doing any
films about horses or emphasizing them usually fail because the writing has to
be exceptional to dodge the endless clichés that come with that territory, plus
this is a sports film about a contest and will the lead lose? The Australian Cinema tends to have more of
an edge than commercial Hollywood product, but
Wincer is too Hollywood and not that great a filmmaker, so this succumbs to too
much of what I expected and despite its ambitions, is not great.
The
actors and locales are a plus including Brendan Gleeson, but this inevitably is
everything we have seen before and does not work when all wraps up. Thus, this is only for the extremely
interested and a making of featurette is the only extra.
Ernest
Dickerson’s For One Night (2005)
tells the tale of a young lady (Raven-Symoné) who wants to go to a prom that is
segregated in current times, but is shocked to finds out the unbelievable
racism out there and lands up discovering how bad it is, yet decides to take a
stand in what becomes a story beyond a great night out.
With the
help of a reporter (Aisha Tyler), they take on the system and ignorance as her
status as an exceptional student is threatened.
Usually, most based-on-a-true-story films these days ring phony, but
this one is on the money enough and though I wished it went further, it makes
enough of its points and is worth a look.
There are no extras.
Martin
Ritt took on William Faulkner’s The
Sound & The Fury (1959) in the face of some censorship and as a big
color CinemaScope production at Fox with mixed results. Yul Brynner is oddly cast as the older
southern male head of a household in an old traditional southern town. Living with him is a young lady (the always
underrated Joanne Woodward, a little older looking than the age of her
character) wants to have fun and her own life, but he keeps treating her like a
child and getting in the way of any real progress in her life.
This
becomes more twisted when he as the father figure becomes sexually interested
in her and the film (along with its screenplay) can only do so much with that,
but it makes it creepy in addition to its censorship issues holding it
back. The supporting cast is a plus and
decent including singer Ethel waters as the maid trying to hold the house
together, Stuart Whitman as a circus guy interested in the young lady so much
that it threatens their whole household and Jack Warden as the mentally
disabled family member who also lives with them.
The
result is an interesting adaptation that is not literal enough and has its
moments, but leaves much unresolved and does not always work. Still, all involved were taking risks and all
would move on to more interesting work in their careers, so it is a film
seriously worth revisiting.
Extras on
this Twilight Time Limited Edition Blu-ray include a nicely illustrated booklet
on the film including informative text and yet another fine essay on the film
by Julie Kirgo, while the Blu-ray disc adds an Isolated Music Score featuring
the instrumental compositions by the much loved Alex North. Nice!
Last and
definitely not least is John Schlesinger’s Sunday
Bloody Sunday (1971) which Criterion has issued on Blu-ray decades after
issuing an older, long out-of-print 12” LaserDisc edition a long time ago. We covered MGM’s basic DVD edition at this
link:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/357/Sunday+Bloody+Sunday+(1971/MGM+D
To recap,
an artist named Bob (Murray Head, later known for the hit records “Jesus
Christ, Superstar” and “One Night in Bangkok”) is having affairs
with Alex Grenville (Glenda Jackson) without her husband Dr. Daniel Hirsh
(Peter Finch) knowing, but Bob is up to much more and the couple is not aware
of what at first. What that is will
affect everyone’s life when all is said and done.
This is a
really good drama that was Schlesinger’s first film since the massively
successful Midnight Cowboy (1969)
and though not as good, even with its rough spots here and there, this is still
a drama ahead of its time and the actors are top rate all the way. The screenplay examines their pain in honest
terms and is for intelligent mature audiences still to this day. If you have never seen this film, you must
see it at least once and if you are serious about pure cinema. Everyone was in rare form and the film
continues to age very, very well.
Extras
include a nicely illustrated booklet on the film including informative text and
two fine essays on the film (Something
Better by Ian Buruma and Making
“Sunday Bloody Sunday” by Penelope Gilliatt), while the Blu-ray disc adds
new interviews with Director Of Photography Billy Williams (who supervised this
stunning new transfer), Head, Production Designer Luciana Arrighi, Schlesinger
biographer William J. Mann and Photographer (and longtime companion to
Schlesinger) Michael Childers, an illustrated 1975 radio interview with
Schlesinger and the Original Theatrical Trailer.
Both 1080p
digital High Definition image transfers on Blu-ray here are from films, issued
in DeLuxe Color and they look as good as you would expect in this great new
format. However, the 1.66 X 1 HD image on Sunday
Bloody Sunday is stunning and one of the best of the whole year for any
release, supervised by DP Williams as noted from a 35mm internegative off of
the original camera negative. The result
is jaw-dropping warmth, color, depth, detail, color range, detail, clarity and
fine grain that rarely shows the age of the film. Shocking throughout, this is demo quality for
any serious HD playback and far superior to the old soft MGM DVD. All serious film fans and home theater fans
will want this Blu-ray ASAP.
The 2.35
X 1 HD image on The Sound & The Fury
has some fine shots and color moments, but the distortions of the early
CinemaScope lenses and aged parts of the print (note the transitions from scene
to scene) hold back the overall quality.
However, this is as good as this film is likely to ever look so Fox sent
a solid HD master over to Twilight Time.
The 1.33
X 1 image on For One Night may or
may not be the proper aspect ratio for this telefilm, but it looks good for
what we get here, while the anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image on The Cup is surprisingly weak and soft
throughout, being a tradedown from an HD shoot with mixed results. Wonder how this would look on Blu-ray?
The
DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 2.0 lossless Stereo mix on The Sound & The Fury is as clean as we could expect from a film
its age, but sadly, this was originally a 4-track magnetic stereo sound film
(the better 35mm prints) with traveling dialogue and sound effects, but that
soundmaster is apparently lost, so we only have these tracks available. The PCM 1.0 Mono on Sunday Bloody Sunday is far, far superior to the awful, lossy Dolby
Digital 2.0 Mono the MGM DVD had, which was a wreck and disaster. The old 12” LaserDisc was also PCM 2.0 Mono,
but this is lossless at a higher 24 bits/48 kHz from the original magnetic
soundmaster, so this is stunning and can more than compete with Fury’s stereo tracks down to its music
score.
The lossy
Dolby Digital 5.1 on The Cup should
be the next best sonic presentation here, but it is too low sounding, has
location audio issues, lacks surrounds and is too much towards the center
channel and front speakers except during the races. Be careful of volume switching. That leaves the lossy Dolby Digital 2.0
Stereo on For One Night sounding
better and fuller, despite its lack of channels. Odd.
As noted
above, The Sound & The Fury can
be ordered while supplies last at:
www.screenarchives.com
- Nicholas Sheffo