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Category:    Home > Reviews > Drama > Biography > Biopic > Science > Behavior > Genocide > Totalitarianism > Police State > Literature > B > Experimenter: The Stanley Milgram Story (2015/Magnolia Blu-ray)/1984 (1984/Orwell/Virgin Films/Atlantic Releasing/MGM/Twilight Time Limited Edition Blu-ray)

Experimenter: The Stanley Milgram Story (2015/Magnolia Blu-ray)/1984 (1984/Orwell/Virgin Films/Atlantic Releasing/MGM/Twilight Time Limited Edition Blu-ray)


Picture: B-/B Sound: B/B- Extras: C/B Films: C+



PLEASE NOTE: The 1984 Blu-ray is now only available from our friends at Twilight Time, is limited to only 3,000 copies and can be ordered while supplies last from the links below.



The number one thing that stops people from a better tomorrow are... other people hell bent on power and destruction, but why? In part, because some of the more heartless types want to use, fear, terror, hate, division, then even murder and actual death to keep power on the cheap, absolutely and totally. Most people don't like this, but the ways this happens has become increasingly sinister and complex. The following releases deal with two different looks at that backwards situation.



Michael Almereyda's Experimenter: The Stanley Milgram Story (2015) is the biopic of the social scientist (played very well here by the underrated Peter Sarsgaard) who was so driven to find out why the Nazis got other people to commit the genocidal atrocities they did that he started an experiment with a twist. Get two people in a room, explain it is an experiment, have a person hooked up to a electric shock machine in a separate, isolated room and see if the people in the larger outside room with Milgram would continue to hit the shock button no matter how dangerously high the voltage would get. In real life, he was having the persons hooked-up to the electric not hooked up to anything, pretending to be in increasing pain to see how far the people pushing the button(s) would continue to do so.


At first, his work was criticized, ignored, misunderstood and eventually form what we hear, made illegal, but it turned out to be one of the most important studies of authority, conformity and why people 'follow orders' no matter the consequences and apparently, too few have grasped or understood why. Winona Ryder is interestingly cast as his wife and the biopic side has its downsides, but more maybe put off by the fact that Milgram starts talking directly to the audience early on and keeps 'breaking the fourth wall' that becomes more repetitive than it ought to be.


That also means the film has all kinds of trouble getting started and drags more than it should early on. Fortunately, it start to pick up after about a half-hour and gets really good. I knew about the man and his experiments, though I don't feel that got in the way of my getting into the film early on. Despite its issues, this is a film worth sitting through for all the good things it pulls off and is worth a long, serious look. It runs 98 minutes.


Extras includes three featurettes: a main Making Of piece, plus Designing Experimenter and Understanding Stanley Milgram: An Interview with Joel Milgram.



Michael Radford's 1984 (1984) is the fourth direct adaptation of George Orwell's book on film, one of the most important ever written about a totalitarian police state future back in 1948 when the author was concerned that any so-called post-WWII progress could just slide back, disappear and much, much worse. How right he was. Two very notable TV versions, a radio drama version with David Niven and a British theatrical film are the best-known previous adaptations, not to mention the endless (and sometimes excellent films) inspired in part by the book.


John Hurt is Winston Smith, eking out a lonely life in his job at the falsely named Ministry Of Truth where he is constantly altering and changing newspaper and other media information to fit the current stances, ever-changing histories and constant new political stances designed to fry the brains of anyone listening and keep everyone from thinking, challenging or coming to any kind of self-realization, gutted-out by a soulless, artless, heartless, angry, hateful, evil, dark, empty society that talks patriotism and loyalty but is destroying everyone and everything in its path; especially that challenges it.


Smith is in sickly shape, but a good guy like so many around him with nowhere to turn. He becomes excited when he starts to fall for a pretty young woman named Julia (Suzanna Hamilton of Tess, Out Of Africa, Brimstone & Treacle, the hit TV mini-series Wish Me Luck) who starts to confide in him, but is she for real or setting him up for a fall? He also meets O'Brien (an ill Richard Burton, chilling as he had ever been in his last big screen feature film role) who talks to him, but is a higher up Winston might want to be careful not to trust.


Touted by many as a great film, there is so much the film gets right about the world of the book, but more than a few things are altered and too much of the book gets jettisoned for our own good, thus the mixed response to it despite some good critical press and a very mixed (some say botched) theatrical release. Cyril Cusack (Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451), Roger Lloyd-Pack (The Go-Between, TV's Spyder's Web, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) and Phyllis Logan (TV's Lovejoy and Downton Abbey) are the other familiar faces (and voices in Miss Logan's case) amongst a cast of unknowns that make this all the more creepy.


It could be argued that certain political interests, the kind that stopped the original cut of Gilliam's Brazil (see the Criterion edition reviewed elsewhere on this site) from being released the same year, wanted this film to stay unseen, flaws or not. Still, there are connections to Pink Floyd's The Wall and later films like V For Vendetta would have a nod to two to it. Hurt is fearless in his performance and to finally see the film as intended was a mixed experience for me. At least now, like Brazil, you can finally see it as intended... and judge for yourself.


Extras includes an illustrated booklet on the film including informative text and informative Julie Kirgo essay, while the Blu-ray adds an Isolated Music Score (more below on that one) and an Original Theatrical Trailer. Sad there's not an audio commentary track.



Playback performance here is not bad with the digitally shot 1080p 1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on Milgram showing some flaws, but not in the surreal moments that scream fake (partly from the budget, yet add to the unique feel of things) but from some shots that don;t work as well as the best ones here. This is as good as this is likely to look and better than most low-budget productions of late.


The 1080p 1.66 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on 1984 rarely shows the age of the materials used, but this is far superior a transfer to all previous releases of the film, especially as this is presented in the darker version intended by Radford and Director of Photography Roger Deakins (A.S.C., B.S.C., later of Skyfall and several Coen Brothers and Scorsese films) used the bleach bypass method that is applied to release prints (versus leaving the silver in the negative) that was later used on films like Fincher's Seven (with Deluxe Labs' version of the format) and Jeunet's Alien Resurrection (with Technicolor's version of the format). This was always a good, looking film that looked like the book played and felt, but in this more darkly intended variant, it is even more visually effective and the Blu-ray really delivers as a result.


Both also offer DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) lossless mixes with a pretty consistent 5.1 mix on Milgram is well mixed and presented, managing to be very active for an often dialogue-based work. The soundfield is more consistent and effective than more than a few action films we've come across over the years. 1984 comes with two DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 1.0 Mono lossless mixes that come down to the music score. The first one strictly features the original music score by Dominic Muldowney (later of the hit Sharpe's series) that keeps the situations toned-down, unhyped and creepy in a gutted-out way.


The second has a bit of Muldowney's score, but adds mostly instrumentals from a second soundtrack created by the great New Wave duo Eurythmics (Annie Lennox & Dave Stewart) that they were hired to make not knowing the director already had the music he wanted. A totally MTV move from Virgin's end, the duo cut ten songs with some great vocals by Lennon (as usual), but the film only uses mostly instrumental parts of what become a ten track album (rarely in print) issued as ''1984 (For The Love Of Big Brother)'' that included music videos for two singles (''Sexcrime'' which is hardly heard in the film and ''Julia'' that is awkwardly stuck in the end credits) and the isolated music score for the film on this Blu-ray is the one with Eurythmics on the soundtrack.


Needless to say this was a disaster (the late, great David Bowie rejected Virgin's offer before Eurythmics signed on) and you never see Lennon sing these songs. Still, some scenes are creepier with Eurythmics music in it, leading one to ask if the traditional music by Muldowney might negate the evil here at times by its score signifying that nothing is wrong. Its something to ask. Ironically, a semi-musical opera based on the Eurythmic songs would probably work nicely, but Orwell himself thought those genres were not befitting of his book, so we'll never see that either. Still, the actual album is worth seeing out because it is up there with Savage and Revenge as the duo's best album works.


With that said, both soundtracks sound fine for their age and being late monophonic theatrical releases, but Eurythmics music (at least) was recorded in stereo, so hearing it sounding a little muffled by comparison to the original stereo recordings (the two Music Videos are in stereo on the Eurythmics Greatest Hits DVD, long overdue for a Blu-ray upgrade) making what we get seem like a last minute addition. Virgin should not have second-guessed Radford, but it is a shame the 10-track album could not have been on this Blu-ray as a lossless audio-only bonus.



To order the 1984 limited edition Blu-rays, buy it and other great exclusives while supplies last at these links:


www.screenarchives.com


and


http://www.twilighttimemovies.com/



- Nicholas Sheffo


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