Night of The Hunter [Charles Laughton]

This 1955 psychological thriller, the sole directorial from lauded actor Charles Laughton, is regarded as a great classic and to an extent I can see why. It takes a story told with simple and broad strokes, and mixes it up with some of the most striking and iconic imagery. But, even if they take a lot of inspiration from this, I would say that the films in its aftermath significantly surpass it in terms of their narrative sophistication and depth of character.

In the movie Robert Mitchum is a crooked man of the cloth who's after a fortune hidden by his cell-mate somewhere in his home. To achieve his end, Mitchum charms the hanged cell-mate's widow into marrying him and then turns the screws on the children to get them to reveal the location of the hidden money.

The film has some great scenes to be sure, mainly thanks to Stanley Cortez's (Magnificent Ambersons, Shock Corridor) starkly gorgeous black and white imagery. We are served up several brilliant plays of elusive light and menacing shadow, Expressionist style. The scenes where Shelley Winters confronts a posturing Mitchum about his lies or when Mitchum goes into the cellar with the kids to look for the booty are but two among several bravura examples of the film's visual chutzpah. Mitchum's performance is also on many occasions entertaining; the man is clearly having a great time.

But really, the film is played a little too broad for my liking. Mitchum's character so obviously drips with evil intent he may as well have been wearing a large-sized flashing "CREEP" sign on his forehead, and beyond a point all the Christian malarkey begins to grate. There's none of the subtlety and poise that bolstered the creepiness of films like Peeping Tom and The Innocents, made less than a half dozen years later. Even Hitchcock's, Psycho, not a subtle film, is significantly more layered than this.

So it's not quite the enduring classic so far as I'm concerned but still worth the watch, simply for its awesome visuals.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

While I haven't finished the game (yes, it's not a comic book, but read on even if you're not a hardcore gamer) as yet, I've played a fair deal of it and these are my impressions of it thus far. To put it in a nutshell, Batman: Arkham Asylum is not a great action game, great platformer or great adventure game; what it does however is to borrow enough good elements from all of these genres to make a great Batman game. As the title suggests, the setting is Arkham asylum where Batman's most memorable enemies (perhaps all of them, even) end up. The story begins with Batman wheeling the Joker in for an extended stay; only there's something fishy about the homicidal prankster's easy surrender. It's not long before Batman realizes it's a setup. Joker and his muscle-bound goons take over the asylum, and ol' Bats must catch the clown prince of evil before he unleashes his dastardly scheme of...you find out, suffice to say it involves a few other Batman villains.

The best thing about BAA is how accessible it is to the non-hardcore player. Considering the sort of acrobatic moves people would expect Batman to perform, this could have well been one of those keyboard murdering nightmares only staunch fighting game fans would go for. As it turns out, the makers at Rocksteady studios have designed the Batman character to perform his trademark ownage maneuvers with very simple inputs from the player. It's a game for Batman fans, not just gamers that happen to like Batman. The scraps with Joker's henchmen at the beginning of the game can be won by mere random button-mashing (what I did), and the game is very ready with hints and suggestions if you're downed in a fight.

It's later on when you go up against a dozen or more thugs at a time that you begin to appreciate the range of Batman's acrobatic moves and apply them to your advantage in combat. But even in these cases you never have to press any impossible combination of keys, it's more about getting into the flow of the combat. Again the game is very helpful, with onscreen displays of which attacker is likely to strike and which keys to press for instant takedowns. In a laudatory move, the game is also very forgiving in the platforming aspect. A single key-press has Batman sending out a grappling hook and swinging himself on top of an edifice, and so long as there's ground beneath you, the game never causes you to die of even huge drops. Tomb Raider and Prince of Persia fans may scoff at all this hand-holding but better this than have Batman fans fear to undertake the very moves they see their hero performing.

There are several memorable setpieces in the game: Batman's refusal to pick up a gun is a design conceit that works brilliantly in the game's context making every encounter with machine-gun toting goons a delightful cat-and-mouse experience. The intelligence level of Batman's enemies is low but that works fine here too, because it means you can predict how the poltroons are going to react to whatever cockamamie scheme you're planning to take them down. Setting up a non-lethal explosive gel trap and luring enemies to it using one of their downed colleagues or a sonic batarang is a gas. One of my favorite set-pieces is when Batman faces off against a small battalion of electric prod-wielding thugs on a series of platforms which are randomly electrified by Harley Quinn  - leaping from platform to platform to avoid getting shocked, all the while laying down barrels of trademark Bat-whoop-ass upon the bad guys was a thrill I thoroughly relished.

BAA also incorporates some light detective work for the Darknight Detective with a player-activated objective mode in which Batman tracks down clues like cigar ash or fingerprints or even DNA traces (no deduction here, it's a follow the arrow mechanic). Objective mode also improbably allows Batman to have X-ray vision in which he can see enemies through walls and gauge how many are carrying firearms. It's a nice addition, but my only gripe is that it should come with some penalty on Batman's reflexes to restrict the player being permanently in X-ray vision mode. As of now the eye-strain of this mode is the only deterrent from keeping it always on. Apart from the aforementioned grappling hook, Batman gets a score of other useful devices including the trusty batarang, explosive gel aerosol, electronic lock decrypter etc.

The plotline isn't all that (Joker's scheme, at least so far as I have got, is disappointingly mundane), but the writing by Bruce Timm (who helmed the much-loved animated series) superbly evokes the Batman comics I loved as a kid (late 70's stuff) - y'know, serious but not mopey/psychotic. Even the obligatory “Batman relives the episode where his parents got killed” bit is handled with finesse. Throw in voice acting from series regulars Kevin Conroy as Batman and Mark Hamill as the Joker and you have major league goodness happening.

BAA also succeeds in being restrained in the use of Batman villains. The Scarecrow I have so far encountered only in dream levels where the game beautifully transforms itself into a side-scrolling stealth platformer where Batman must make his way over an obstacle course, avoiding the gaze of a giant Scarecrow till he reaches and manipulates the Bat-signal to dissolve the fearful phantasm. The Riddler from what I know is not actually seen in the game but his presence is conveyed in the form of riddles and collectible artifacts spread throughout the Arkham premises. Solving these little puzzles gives Batman experience points which he can use to upgrade his abilities or gadgets None of this is ground-breaking, but the implementation is impeccable and adds greatly to the fun of the game.

So if you're a Batman fan and own a reasonably recent computer with a decent video card you owe it to yourself to try this game out. The sequel Arkham City has already been announced and features Hugo Strange (mmmmm...). My wishlist for the sequel would include a little time for Bruce Wayne. Wayne himself was a bit of a badass as written in the Julius Schwartz era and the limitation of not being able to use all of Batman's tricks would add some spice. And yeah, tone down X-ray mode a bit.

Quatermass and The Pit [Roy Ward Baker]

Having not seen any of the BBC televsion series, my exposure to Quatermass is restricted to two Hammer films, The Quatermass Xperiment and this one. Xperiment had good atmosphere and direction, and I am naturally a sucker for old-skool pulp science-fiction, but it was in the end more monster movie than hardcore SF. The Pit however, has greater ambitions.

The film starts with the discovery of proto-human skulls at a digging site in the underground rail station for this place originally called Hob's Lane (as one of the characters helpfully reveals, Hob is another nick name for the devil). Local science man Matthew Roney believes that the skulls date to a time well before previously known existence of man. More mystery unfolds when the digging crew unearths a metallic compartment never seen before. Colonel Breen and Professor Quatermass come in as the government's military and scientific representatives. While Breen is quick to dub the compartment as an unexploded German warhead, glossing over such inexplicables as why the metal is hazardously cold to the touch and can resist any amount of heat/drilling without disclosing its insides, Quatermass, alongwith Roney's assistant Barbara, undertakes a more holistic investigation, linking events in the local history of Hob's lane to the presence of the alien compartment. The script by Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale interprets old superstitions in the light of an alien intelligence and its impact on the human civilization. In fact, The Pit's major idea is that modern man was an engineered product of the aliens as a means of transferring their mindset, and thereby surviving by proxy, when their own race died out. Shades of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey there, but in a far more accessible package.

Roy Ward Baker's direction maintains a serious scientific tone and the solid acting does a lot of service to the immersion factor here, necessary since the props and optical effects are distinctly low-budget and unsuited for the script's ambition. Andrew Keir is a good Quatermass, more pleasant-mannered than Xperiment's Brian Donlevy (Apparently that was a very wrong portrayal, rendering Quatermass an egomaniac, but I actually liked it a good deal and thought it added a certain bite to the character), but not afraid to talk tough when the situation calls. The supporting characters are all strongly etched in this film, although Col. Breen suffers from a lack of depth.

While the bombastic trick solution climax (all these alien invasion films have to have them, don't they?) is not particularly satisfying, the film on the whole is a good one, traveling a long way on interesting concepts delivered with respect and intelligence. Consider that a strong recommendation.

That blu-ray thingy

Having acquired a blu-ray disc (BD) drive and watching stuff on it for the past week or so, I'm just giving off a few of my collected impressions of the format and what I feel it's worth.

First off, I'm not one of those people that want “the latest and the greatest” as soon as it's available, so my reason to go BD was not simply because “it's there”. But to be frank it was also not because I felt that there was some unbridgeable gap in visual quality between DVD and BD. Depending wholly on the type of film, available source material and the quality of the transfer that is made, the difference can sometimes be quite fine. An indispensible guide for me in this regard has been DVD Beaver, which gives you not only erudite “not-muddled-in-jargon” opinion but also provides actual screencaps through which you can make your own opinion.

My first inclinations towards blu-ray came when the major studios in a bid to push the blu-ray format on to a reluctant public started piling their “extras” aka bonus features onto the blu-ray versions of their releases; Star Trek and Up are prime examples of such favoritism. Also, while initially there was a significant price difference between BD and DVD, that difference has come down to the point where unless you buy everything at launch, you're paying the same price for BD as you did for DVD some years back.

But a major sticking point for me was still the player. I did not want to invest Rs. 10,000 (>200USD) in a new blu-ray player, not especially after I had just set up my own decent DVD-based home viewing setup. The other aspect here is that, unlike the mature DVD, blu-ray as a format is still evolving, a point on which I will elaborate later in this update. Then came my PC upgrade and the building of a system that had the horsepower to, among other things, effortlessly play high-definition media. This neatly coincided with the arrival of low-priced blu-ray drives for PC. Since I'm not looking to write blu-rays anytime soon, I went in for a cheap ASUS drive that essentially serves to only read disc media, be it BD/DVD/CD.

So having gotten a player and a half dozen films on the BD format (Adventures of Robin Hood, Avatar, Star Trek, Terminator 2, Up, Wings of Desire), what are my impressions so far regarding the benefits of blu-ray?

In the case of new films shot on High-Definition (HD) video or featuring significant amounts of computer generated imagery, the shift to blu-ray is a no-brainer. Having seen the BD version of James Cameron's Avatar on my home system, I can attest to that from personal experience: the gob-smacking clarity and level of detail, rock-steady stability of the image in motion and ability to handle strong color contrasts without any noticeable flicker/graphic artifacts is beyond what I have seen on DVD thus far (granted I have not seen Avatar itself on DVD but IMO the DVD versions of Pixar films (The Incredibles, Wall-E, Up) form a sufficient benchmark to hold against). This sort of film is what will act as the game-changer in swaying the minds of the public at large towards adoption of the blu-ray format.

But is blu-ray only good for the latest sci-fi action blockbuster with heavy CGI use? Not necessarily. A shift to higher resolutions and bitrates will benefit almost any sort of film. But in the case of older classics, the benefits are of a different sort. It's not so much in terms of giving a pop-out shiny quality to the visuals. That would be a wrong thing to aim for too; these classics were shot on film, some under low-budget conditions or using soft lighting schemes, and the transfer should faithfully reflect the source. With a skilled blu-ray transfer of an older classic, there will be an incremental (ranging from just noticeable to significant) increase of detail but the main benefit will be in terms of stability of the image, lesser need to manipulate the contrast to show detail and the accurate reproduction of the color tones of the original film to the highest extent. Check out DVD Beaver's screencap comparisons of the Criterion DVD and BD versions of Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha here. This is a very relevant comparison given that both these versions come from the same HD master, but the BD is able to depict the detail without the contrast boost and unnatural hue seen on the DVD transfer. If your aim is to see the masterpieces of cinema with the highest possible fidelity to the original source (and after all, isn't this why studios like Criterion enjoy their premium prices and their dedicated fanbase?) there is a tangible benefit to making the BD shift. Also unless you're the sort that feels some value-addition to having stuff spread out over multiple DVD's instead of being contained in a single BD, it's a damned sight more convenient.

But there are also reasons to hold back right now, especially if you want to be the pop-in-and-play user. As of now there is no widespread availability of region-free BD players, at least at reasonable cost; if you want to mix and match BD's from different regions based on content or availability, you're out of luck. Also, while DVD is a mature standard, BD technology is still evolving: Player firmware may require to be upgraded to support new copy protection measures if you want to keep playing the latest discs. With successive generations players will improve in speed of access to content. Since my BD's are played on an internet-connected PC drive using readily upgradeable software (to play the media and allow multi-region access) I have a greater flexibility than a conventional BD player owner would. If you're not comfortable with this kind of software upgrading, one suggestion would be to hold off buying loads of new content for maybe a couple of years now and then plunge whichever way you are suited.

Am I committed to buying only blu-rays from now on? Absolutely not. For me it's a wait and watch game. I intend to look through trusted review websites to give me their viewpoint (and yes, actual screen comparisons, more of them should do that). Remember that BD cannot give you a good experience if the source material or digital mastering is not of a high caliber. I certainly wouldn't want to upgrade my existing DVD's unless I see a massive level up in video quality or a boatload of new extras on the blu-ray version (So no Superman The Movie BD for me, unless someone is feeling generous :D). For new purchases, price will be an important factor. I would go for a cheaper DVD version if I thought the blu-ray didn't give me a significantly higher wow factor on the visuals / bonus content.

So that's my take on the thing...so far.

Heads-up

Sorry for having avoided you so long, blog. Things have just been like that, when typing more than a Facebook status update has seemed taxing to the mind.

Lots of good things happened today, and a few nasty ones (they have to, don't they). First off, a trip to my Santa Claus cousin who now appears almost every quarter with bags full of goodies. Feast your eyes on these:

The main haul of course is the ASUS Blu-Ray drive. With this I finally enter the realm of HD movies, fuck YEAH!
Movie haul is a mix of DVD's and Blu-rays. Wings of Desire, a beautiful film by Wim Wenders, is my first Criterion Blu-Ray. I was a little apprehensive after rumors that the blu-ray cases being smaller the booklets accompanying the disc would be badly affected. Yes, it is smaller in size, but the quality of paper and print has been maintained so Criterion blu-rays are very much in the running so far as future purchases are concerned. Star Trek and Avatar Collector's Edition blu-ray hauls were no-brainers. Another look at the movie hauls:

Off to Lamington road then to get another fan for the PC, forgot to get those darned L-shaped connectors for SATA drives which I need to be able to hook up both my optical drives and also any future hard-drive, given that my gargantuan video card has nicely seated itself over the existing ports.

Okay, the BAD. After getting home, put the drive in and installed the software, told my bro we would be soon watching the new Star Trek movie on  fucking blu-ray. I then discover that switching the display to my plasma TV causes the PowerDVD to throw up a warning that the "Protected content cannot be played on this output" because it's not HDCP compliant! OK now, my TV is connected  by HDMI to the DVI port on my card through an adapter. So I take the cable and plug it directly into the HDMI output on my card. and vice-versa for my monitor. Fine? Not so. As various combinations brought to light the horrible fact that for some reason, my plasma TV refused to accept HDMI connections from anything other than the DVI port. I have no idea where the problem is. The plasma TV manual says that the HDMI connectors are HDCP compatible, the card is HDCP compliant. Then why the FUCK does it not accept a direct HDMI (or even a Displayport to HDMI adapter) output from the PC?

So I was going to be resigned to watching blu-ray movies on a 22" monitor while my 50" plasma TV would lie unused? Searching through the internet reveals no clue as to the problem. But in the end I found one solution. I installed a program called AnyDVD HD which strips off the copy-protection and allows me to play the disc on an unprotected digital video connection. So yes, I saw a bit of Star Trek on the bigger screen and it was good. I still think the image is not optimal (colors sometimes seem a bit off and I'm not sure smoke and fog look as natural as they should), but at least it works.

A software hack that may be defeated is not the solution I would have wanted but it's the one I have to use because nothing else works you mother-raping movie industry jerks! I will evaluate this trial version and if it proves universally suitable I may have to give the makers of this software my money for their useful program.

P.S. Update on the visual quality bit: Turns out some of the wonky quality visuals I had been getting was because of settings on my video card. The main culprit was this setting called "Dynamic Contrast" which makes on-the-fly adjustments to maximize the contrast in any given frame. Totally fucks up dark scenes / scenes with fog. All is good now.

The Princess and The Frog [Ron Clements & John Musker]

If you have kids at all, I would have no hesitation in recommending The Princess and The Frog (TPATF). It's a short breezy adventure in the classic Disney mold, with a handsome prince, a spunky damsel, assorted animal sidekicks, even the archetype witch...OK, voodoo priest

The film is set in a Jazz era New Orleans, albeit a cleaned up version, where blacks work as servants to whites but are not subjected to any remarkable degree of discrimination, at last so far as the principal characters go. TPATF introduces Disney's first black heroine Tiana, whose ambition is to fulfill her father's dream of opening a classy restaurant (which one suspects few of their neighbors could afford to eat at) and, as she indicates in the zesty art deco inspired ditty “Almost there”, will work no end to reach that aim. The handsome prince is Naveen of fictional Maldonia, recently landed in New Orleans. Naveen leads the high-life and is in consequence dangerously low on funds. He aims to rectify this by marriage to the pampered Charlotte, Tiana's constantly sympathetic friend and daughter of the town's leading moneymaker.

Cue in the film's bad guy and it's most interesting character, Dr. Facilier. A voodoo priest dressed up to resemble Baron Samedi, Facilier snaps his slender bony fingers, turning Naveen into a frog and induces Naveen's disgruntled valet to impersonate him and claim Charlotte's hand, upon which they will share her father's bounty. Naveen in an effort to get rid of the curse mistakes Tiana for a princess and they kiss, turning her into a frog as well.

It's all quite predictable: our frog protagonists must race against time to regain their human form and in the process fall in love, yada yada. The animal sidekicks this time around are a friendly jazz trumpet-playing crocodile named Louis (in capital letters, REFERENCE) and a jive-talking firefly mistakenly infatuated with a star.

So yes, no surprises here, but keep your expectations child-high and the film delivers. The return to 2D warms the cockles of this nostalgic fan and the film's settings, be it the flashy town with its gaudy nightclubs and mardi gras parades or the night-shaded bayou swamps, allow for Disney's artists to whip up rich backgrounds and amazing riots of color and movement and shadow. The best example of their artistry is Facilier's song “Friends on the other side”; it is for me the film's outstanding moment. It also helps that Facilier himself is an awesomely etched character, falling only a little short in the eeriness department of Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty.

The film is sadly tamer than the classic Disney films it aims to evoke. After pre-emptive protests from pressure groups, Disney dropped the race card and there is no indication that Afro-Americans at the time then had any less rights than their Caucasian counterparts, making Tiana's struggle an entirely personal one; but the catch is, she's not interesting enough as a person for adult audiences to care about what happens to her. It would have been a nice counterpart if Naveen had been a black African prince with a humiliated white serf but that's not happening either. Actually most characters apart from Facilier have been painted with a pleasant but unmemorable brush. Even the illustrators seem to have been instructed to trim the scare elements (like the spirits raised by Facilier to help achieve his ends) in their work, mixing in cheerful colors and reducing darkness levels to keep things within the kiddies' “comfort zone”. All this toning down is a little disappointing because Disney classics like The Fox & The Hound had some poignant moments drawn from the characters' struggle with their role in the world, and I can attest that the moodily lit scene in Sleeping Beauty where Maleficent draws an entranced Belle into activating the curse still creeps me out.

But with its thankfully limited number of songs, frequently eye-popping visual chutzpah and a breezy pace with little downtime, TPATF will delight the kids without putting off their parents much.

The Coroner's Lunch [Colin Cotterill]

Equal parts crime thriller, ghost story and political lampoon, The Coroner's Lunch mixes these éléments divers to provide an engaging tale. The unlikely hero here is Siri, a septuagenarian doctor in communist Laos compelled by those in authority to be the state's sole coroner, though he has neither aptitude nor inclination for the job. With only a cheerful magazine-reading nurse and a Down Syndrome afflicted attendant by his side, Siri must rely on outdated manuals and scarce chemical resources to do the best he can, which is barely competent, and only his wry humor keeps him from losing his control with an incomprehensible bureaucracy. And oh, Siri often encounters the ghosts of his autopsy 'patients'.

The mystery kicks off with the death of the wife of a high-ranking bureaucrat, seemingly an accident. But aided by his investigative instincts and more than a little help from his "friends on the other side", Siri finds himself reeling in a tangled thread of murder and conspiracy that would not be out of place in a Raymond Chandler book. Siri however is no Marlowe clone; his bitterness is far mellowed by age and resignation, and he retains more faith in his fellow-men (and their post-death avatars) than that archetype of the burned out sleuth.

Cotterill's prose has that very enviable quality of “readability”. Indeed, it was a cursory glance over the first few pages that prompted me to buy a book by an author I had never heard of before. The characters are sharply etched and the humor, be it the digs at the state's absurd Big Brother mentality or bawdy age-related jokes, constantly nails you - This could easily be the script for a Joon-Ho Bong film (Memories of Murder, The Host).

The Coroner's Lunch is not quite a masterpiece. There are several instances of deus ex machina including Siri's all-too-convenient encounters with the spirit world, which sully the process of unraveling the puzzle. But it's still an entertaining ride, holding up a lot better than Smilla's Sense of Snow so far as stories of unlikely detectives goes.

My verdict for The Coroner's Lunch: Quite palatable!