Judy
Collins Jonas Field: Winter Stories: Live From The Oslo Opera House
(2020/MVD/Cleopatra DVD w/CD)/Nick
Mason's Saucerful Of Secrets: Live At The Roundhouse
(2020/Sony Blu-ray)/Valley
Girl
(2020 Musical Remake/Orion/UA/Warner Blu-ray)
Picture:
C+/B/B- Sound: C+ (CD: B)/B/B Extras: D/C+/D Main
Programs: C+/B-/C-
Here
are some more music titles, all with video and a mixed bag....
In
the late 1960s, Judy Collins became a leading voice in Folk music and
had several hits that were also part of the counterculture wave,
albeit the peace and love section, including Joni Mitchell's Both
Sides Now,
Amazing
Grace
and a version of Send
In The Clowns
so good, it charted twice. A non-stop presence in music since, still
touring and making records, it is a pleasant surprise indeed to see
her still in action live and now on DVD. Judy
Collins w/Jonas Field: Winter Stories: Live From The Oslo Opera House
(2020) shows the icon still able to sing and play as well as ever,
even if it is now with some 'I told you so' without saying or trying
irony.
Songs
include Mountain Girl, City Of New Orleans, Winter Stories, Sweet
Refrain, Northwest Passage, Wildwood, When Morning Comes To America,
Hum Kom Som En Engel, River, Angels In The Snow, Highwayman, Frozen
North, Bury Me With My Guitar On, Both Sides Now and Amazing
Grace. This runs about 75 minutes and that's fine, but it would
have been nice if it ran longer.
The
Chatham County Line also joins the duo for what is a solid eventing
of her kind of music and the kind of civil discourse (in and out of
music) we do not see as much as we would like. The songs are good
and Collins finishes on two of her best-known hits. It is a nice
record of her later abilities and work, she was always about the
music and it is nice to see her again. As we keep losing singers of
her era (Helen Reddy and Mac Davis passed away the same day as we
posted this) and the most prolific era of music ever, we cannot have
enough vital materials on these artists.
There
are no extras, though anything would have been nice.
With
a length that is more like it, Nick
Mason's Saucerful Of Secrets: Live At The Roundhouse
(2020) has the Pink Floyd drummer in a fine solo show with energy,
some good music, a good audience and people who actually have music
talent. Doing just fine without Roger Waters, the band's one-time
drummer and his band deliver these songs:
Some
people try to say Rock Music is dead, but this is yet more solid work
to disprove that with ease, a consistent show with the energy and
tone you would expect from a veteran with superior talent and more
than holding his own against some younger newcomers in the genre who
are not as good as they think they are. Of course, Floyd fans will
want to get this one immediately, but anyone else interested will be
pleasantly surprised. Not bad at all.
A
colorfully illustrated book with text is the only extra.
Finally,
there have been several attempts at 1980s nostalgia, especially with
music, but they always miss the point with phony, feel-good, fantasy
versions (often whitewashed) of the era instead of dealing honestly
with the decade. Rock Of Ages was a bad attempt with some
commercial success, but it just was not that good. However, MGM
thought it was time to try again (as if their Fame remake
worked, it did not) and they decided to try to make a 1983 Nicolas
Cage curio into a musical.
Rachel
Lee Goldenberg's Valley
Girl
(2020) is that catastrophe and it features a bunch of young non-name
singers (if that is not some of them being sung over by anyone else)
and dancers in a horrid 102 minutes of taking a few dozen 1980s pop
hits (as if someone just punched up a list of popular songs on a
computer, picked ones they could wedge into a would-be storyline and
come up with this)
and every remake being as awful as you could imagine.
Judy
Greer shows up, but she cannot save this mess and whether we see
leads Jessica Rothe and Josh Whitehouse remain to be seen, but they
can only go up from here. This thing has mostly valleys and no
peaks, so skip this one and take a peak at something else. No, they
do NOT have the beat!
Digital
Copy is here, but there are really no extras. No sleep lost on that
one.
Now
for playback performance. The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image
on Collins looks good for this older format, but is a little
soft as expected, though this is shot well enough and the lossy Dolby
Digital 2.0 Stereo (why no 5.1 mix?) is passable, but only so good.
Fortunately, the PCM 16/44.1 2.0 Stereo CD that is included sounds
really good.
The
1080p 1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image on Mason looks
the best of the three releases with a more colorful and more stable
presentation than most of the HD-shot concerts we have covered
(classical releases included) and the
DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix is warm, has a fine
soundfield and is very enjoyably mixed and presented.
Finally,
the HD-shot 1080p 1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on
Valley
is a little softer than it should be and though you can see good
color, some of this is a little underwhelming and we get motion blur.
A few patches are sloppy. The
DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix is professional at best
allowing you to hear very clearly how badly all these remakes of
1980s pop music classics are.
-
Nicholas Sheffo