Hungarian Rhapsody: Queen Live In Budapest (1986/Eagle Blu-ray w/CDs)/The
Miners’ Hymns (2011/Icarus Films DVD)
Picture: B-/C+ Sound: B- Extras: B/C+ Main Programs: B-
Now for
two unique music releases…
Eagle has
issued many Queen releases, including more than usual lately, but the
concertfilm Hungarian Rhapsody: Queen
Live In Budapest (1986) is an unusual set that offers the 35mm-filmed
theatrical release on Blu-ray and a 2-CD version of the same show. Directed on location by Janos Zsombolyal,
there are some behind the scenes moments and that is enough to qualify it as a
latter-day Rockumentary, but it is still 27 songs performed by the original
band with Mercury in his later glory before he began to get ill from what
turned out to be a devastating, fatal encounter with AIDS before the disease
became manageable with various treatments.
For the
most part, the show is pretty good and the performances are not bad, yet the
show is a little uneven and not because of the band or the audience, but simply
because it just did not gel like many of their other shows. I still like it and it is obviously it is a
more historical document than anyone could have imagined between the loss of
Mercury and fall a few years later of the Soviet Union, but it is also the band
in unusual form as well and that is why it is worth a look even if you are not
a fan of the band.
Besides
the CDs, a nicely illustrated booklet on the film including informative text
and a 26:50 length documentary featurette entitled A Magic Year.
Then we
have Bill Morrison’s The Miners’ Hymns
(2011) which is more experimental and a compilation of mostly vintage footage
of the rise and fall of a coal town in North East England set to a new extended
instrumental by Johann Johannsson that is a tribute to the unknown miners who
worked the mines, often died because of them while working or form black lung
disease and how the mine is as gone as those never-paid-enough workers in a
remarkable series of usually silent 35mm black and white films that show what
once was.
Margaret
Thatcher, in part to break labor unions, started to close coal mining all
around the country and the soon-to-be politically correct left enabled her in
part because of their own environmental concerns. This runs only 53 minutes, but its impact is
impressive and even haunting as people long gone are celebrated and saluted for
what they gave to their country and the world.
Morrison previously assembled old film footage that was falling apart
and deteriorating in his popular film Decasia
(reviewed elsewhere on this site) and this is every bit as interesting. I definitely recommend it and the music is
also very effective.
Extras
include three shorts by Morrison: Release (13 minutes of split screen
using a mirrored image of single 1.33 X 1 framed footage of Al Capone being
released from prison), Outerborough (9 minutes a trolley
crossing the Brooklyn Bridge is shown in the same technique, over and over
again, then at faster speeds) and The Film Of Her (12 minutes of a
narrative tale of how one man saved some o0f the earliest films ever made on
paper copies in the Library of Congress and how one film with a nude woman
particularly stuck with him.)
The 1080p
1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Queen has its share of grain and some varied-looking footage, but
as the film was shot with every available camera in Hungary, I think problems include
older cameras and lenses that might not always be the best so this looks as
good as it is going to on Blu-ray. The 1.33
X 1 image on Miners is most composed
of footage 70 to 80 years older so it is only going to look so good itself, but
it is consistent, well edited and has survived better than you might expect so
it gives us a window into a time that would otherwise be lost.
The
DTS-HD High Resolution 96/24 5.1 mix on the Queen Blu-ray is a little towards the front speakers and by not
being lossless here, the recording is likely an older digital master with
limited dynamic range. Still, it sounds
good and the PCM 2.0 16/44.1 Stereo on the CDs are also decent, though I wish
we had Super Audio CD DSD 5.1 or 2.0 tracks as the CDs are almost are as good
as the DTS, but not quite. The lossy
Dolby Digital 5.1 on Miners is
better than the 2.0 Stereo lossy Dolby, but actually offers a nice soundfield
and is well recorded overall.
- Nicholas Sheffo
