The Blue Lagoon (1980/Sony/Columbia/Twilight Time Limited Edition Blu-ray)/The Loneliest Planet (2011/Sundance
Select/MPI DVD)
Picture:
B-/C+ Sound: B-/C+ Extras: C+/C Films: C+/C
PLEASE
NOTE: The Blue Lagoon
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.
Trying to
portray male/female relationships in a naturalistic way and light was not
always easy in filmmaking and considering outside of documentaries, boy/girl
stories that are the crux of Hollywood scripts
tend to usually have a pretension and phoniness to them. The other direction started with nudie films
and ended with the XXX hardcore cinema of the 1970s that just started to die
down as a big business thanks to the Internet and sex becoming a joke in mass
media.
Two
dramatic motion picture releases issued 31 years apart have more common
denominators than expected and are among those rare attempts at naturalism with
ambition.
The first
is Randall Kleiser’s The Blue Lagoon
(1980), the Grease director’s big,
controversial hit follow-up to his blockbuster musical, now issued by Twilight
Time as a Limited Edition Blu-ray. Two
young children get stranded on an island when their father (William Daniels)
loses them in a series of events. Lost
to their own whims, they are lost for years and the story gets more interesting
as they are about to enter puberty.
Brooke Shields (sometimes doubled by a body model) and Christopher
Atkins play the soon-to-be young adults and the film was actually a remake of
the book that was very different (and not just because it was British) from
this hit version.
Though
this is all done tastefully enough, the casual nudity and controversy about
their ages eventually caused new laws to be set about such things, so this film
(imitated and remade again as it has been since) could now not be duplicated
due to new regulations about how young a person can or cannot be on
screen. The acting is mixed at times, but
the couple has some chemistry and they were just convincing enough to make this
work. Any sex is never graphic, but some
scenes are still controversial and the script keeps always in tact this idea of
paradise and faint Biblical echoes thereof.
Leo McKern
also turns up, but this has a limited cast as the two leads have to carry the
majority of the film. To the credit of
all, the locales are made a character, but the subplot about cannibals is weak
and dated. I was surprised Sony decided
to make this Columbia Pictures hit a limited release, but it has never looked
or sounded better on home video (more on that below), but the film also reminds
us of a time that was a little more innocent, the innocence portrayed here
sometimes works and under odd circumstances, the leads did not go on to be big
movie stars despite looking like stars despite still being in the business
doing all kinds of other acting work.
The film is a mixed bag when all is said and done, but it remains
interesting and still controversial.
Extras
include an isolated music score by Basil Poledouris, now known for loud
blockbusters like the Schwarzenegger Conan
The Barbarian, original RoboCop,
Starship Troopers, Hunt For Red October and the original Red Dawn, but he is more talented and
wide ranging a composer/conductor and had scored Big Wednesday a few years before this film and is as savvy doing
outright drams as much as anything. We
also get several teasers & trailers, vintage featurette An Adventure In Filmmaking on the
making of this film and two feature length audio commentary tracks with
Director Kleiser. One is with Shields
and Writer Douglas Day Stewart, the other with Atkins, all from the previous
DVD release. Another well illustrated
booklet on the film with another solid Julie Kirgo essay can be found inside
the Blu-ray case.
Julia
Loktev’s The Loneliest Planet (2011)
has some of the same elements as Lagoon including a couple sexually involved,
though this one is older, wiser and know what civilization is, but they land up
in the middle of nowhere just the same by backpacking and they run into ugly
things eventually. However, this wants
to compare the wide spaces they walk in to their private space, the space
between them, between us all and anything else you can think of along those
lines down to the visual approach of the film which does not always have
dialogue.
It is a
nice try and co-stars Gael Garcia Bernal and Hani Furstenberg are a good match,
are convincing and sexy together, so they got that part right. However, this (DVD format notwithstanding)
does not always look that good and it suffers from being too much like many
independent films we have seen of late, save the journey is not a Horror genre
disaster. Its minimalism is not a
problem per se, just that it ends too soon at 113 minutes and does not always
say what it apparently thinks it is saying.
At least it is intelligent and mature.
Extras
include beautiful color mountain photos that look better than any shots in this
film, a trailer and Behind The Scenes Documentary.
The 1080p
1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer can on Lagoon can show the age of the film stock used at times, but the
film continues to look great in its best shots including the underwater
work. Fleshtones are consistent, though
some post-production work is at odds with the amazing naturalistic camerawork
in the Fiji locations lensed by the great Director of Photography Néstor Almendros
(Truffaut’s The Wild Child and The Green Room, Mallick’s Days Of Heaven, Imagine: John Lennon) uses the frame to capture the lush beauty of
the land and the actors at their best throughout and the film was made
available in 70mm blow-ups from the 35mm shoot which likely looked
amazing. This Blu-ray transfer is a
solid approximation of that and should be viewed on the largest screen possible
to see how good, though the print can show its age at times.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.66 X 1 image on Planet
has some good shots, but the color has been toned down and that does not always
work, plus this is soft, possibly in part from being a DVD.
The
DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix on Lagoon can be towards the front speakers and this film was originally
issued in 6-track magnetic stereo with traveling dialogue and sound effects but
not the Dolby 4.1 configuration that has only debuted in 1976. The mix can show its age and limits, but is
not bad overall and this is the bets the film has sounded since those 70mm
prints. It was still ambitious sound for
its time and the cleaning and upgrade here helps. The lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo on Planet has vague Pro Logic surrounds,
but is silence oriented and dialogue-based, so only expect so much form it
sonically.
As noted
above, The Blue Lagoon Blu-ray can be ordered
while supplies last at:
www.screenarchives.com
- Nicholas Sheffo
