Star Trek (2009) Blu-Ray Disc Review

Star Trek (2009)

The Video: A

The Audio: A-

The Extras: B+

The reboot of Star Trek was highly anticpated and seemed to please both die-hard Star Trek followers, casual fans, and other movie goers.  Rottentomatoes gave it an extraordinary 95% freshness rating.

The Video: A

The video here is excellent.  This transfer comes in 1080 P in MPEG AVC codec.  Shot in anamorphic widescreen 2.39:1 the image is very clear and organic due to the imperfections in shooting with anamorphic lenses.  Personally I did not enjoy a lot of the lense flares employee stylistically in the cinematography but the image still translates very well to Blu-Ray.

The Audio: A-

Presented in Dolby TrueHD with 5.1.  With such an active track being a sci-fi action film ideally I would like to have had a DTS-HD 7.1 track.  But this track is very clear and alive as needed for such a film.

The Extras: B+

Star Trek 2 Wrath of Kahn: Blu-Ray Review

Posted by Martin:

Star Trek The Wrath of Kahn

The Video: B

The Audio: B

The Extras: A

This is the fan favorite of the long running Star Trek movie series and it gets a great treatment on Blu-Ray.

The Video: B

The transfer is great.  I give this one a B because the original cinematography I would not consider A material.  There is not a lot of crispness to the image in places, but in all honesty Wrath of Kahn as never looked better.

The Audio: B

Presented in Dobly TrueHD 7.1 this is a fine sounding track.  This track is not reference level.  The track can lean more toward the higher frenquency due to the musical score.  The sound stage is not used fully for this film.

The Extras: A

This is where the disc really shines, there is a flood of extras.  There are two feature commentaries, although one of the commentaries is from the original DVD release.

Library Computer offers on-screen information about the different elements on the screen.  An interesting way to learn about phasers, and starships.

The most informative piece is about the production of the film.  You learn that producer Harve Bennet has never seen a Star Trek episode when he was brought on board, so he spent several months catching up and watching all the episodes.

You also learn that Leanord Nimoy (Mr. Spook) wanted to leave the series, he wasn’t even sure that he wanted to do the movie in the first place.  Thus the death of Spock was written into the script.  Since this came out two years after The Empire Strikes Back, I couldn’t help but think about the parallels with Harrison Ford thinking about leaving his series and the Han Solo storyline.

There are other featurettes about Star Trek collections and collectors.  A piece that passionate fans may enjoy.  I learned about the ill-fated Phase 2 Star Trek series in this section, as someone was connected enough to have clothing from that unproduced series.

The featurette about Star Trek authors is really for the true Trekkies.  Here you have two talking heads that talk about Star Trek books, these two talking heads are REALLY intro Star Trek.  The information here was well above my Trek level.

Overall, this is a great Blu-Ray.  This is a great example of how well done extras can add to the knowledge and experience of a movie, especially a well loved movie such as this one.

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Taken Blu-Ray Disc Review

Posted by Martin:

The Video: A-

The Audio: A-

The Extras: B-

Taken was written by Luc Besson of The Professional and The Fifth Element fame, and directed by Pierre Morel.  It didn’t do so well with the critics, receiving a 57% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The video: A-

The video here is presented in 1080P/AVC and formatted in 2.35:1.  This is an attractive image, Michel Abramowicz’s cinematography is well suited for the gritty story line.  Most of the action takes place at night and in shadowy rooms, and his work is excellent here.

The Audio: A-

The Audio is present in DTS-HD 5.1.  Since this is an action movie the soundtrack pops and is very active, a very attractive soundtrack.

The Extras: B-

I was surprise to see so little extras here.  The extras center around two feature length commentaries.  The first track is with director Pierre Moral, cinematographer Michel Abramowicz and Michel Julian.  This track is spoken in French and given English subtitles.  Although it is nice to learn about some of the technical aspect of the movie, reading the text makes the commentary hard to finish.  The second commentary is with screen writer Robert Mark Kamen.

Other extras include:

“The Making of” a short standard fluff piece about the making of the movie.

“Avant Premiere” five minutes of footage from the premiere, nothing much here.

“Story board to Screen” a short featurette with key scenes where the story board is shown on one side of the screen as the scene plays on the other.  I have never been much of a fan of this type of extra.

The second disc includes the digital copy for your ipod.

Overall, the movie is nice to look at and listen to there isn’t much there in terms of extras.  I’m not sure if they would double dip this one, since it didn’t recieve a lot of criticial respect, but you really never know these days.

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Quantum of Solace

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Quantum of Solace Blu-Ray Review

Posted by Martin:

Video: A

Audio: A

Extras: C

Quantum of Solace
was the anticipated follow up for Daniel Craig as James Bond after the wildly popular Casnio Royale.  Quantum didn’t seem to register with audiences as well, but you can’t strike gold everytime.  Harry Knowles was in love with the film, Roger Ebert gave it a thumbs down, and I was on the liking it side, but definately not in love with it.

The Video: A

This is a solid transfer, I saw no edge enhancement.  Although this is not the most beautiful Bond films to see, Roberto Schaefer’s cinematography looks good on Blu-Ray.  The film is formatted in 2.35:1 and is done in MPEG-4 AVC at 1080P.

The Audio: A

The audio is done in DTS-HD, this is a reference grade soundtrack.  If you are into showing off the sound of your hometheater then this is the disc to do it with.  The first scene with the car chase alone will both rattle windows and show the clarity of the mix.  This is a very clear mix and shows off the clarity of a good audio mix in DTS.

The Extras: C

This is a big disappointment for such a big release.  These are also same extras that can be foung on the regular DVD.  There is no audio commentary, which is weird considering all the work that has gone into the rerelease of the other James Bond movies.  Casino Royale
was just double dipped on Blu-Ray, with additional extras including a substantial audio commentary.  All this leads me to believe that there will be a double dip on this disc in 18 months when the next Bond movie is released.

The extras you will find here are :

• Bond on Location
  
• Start of Shooting
  
• On Location
  
• The Music
  
• Olga Kurylenko and the Boat Chase
  
• Director Marc Forster
  
• Crew Files
  
• “Another Way to Die” Music Video with Jack White and Alicia Keys
  
• Theatrical Trailers

These are mostly press junket sort of segments.  They all use the same behind the scenes interviews and just cut and paste into the extras.  In fact in some of the extras they even use the same clip.  That is just lazy.  I would rather have one long documentary that doesn’t repeat itself, which these do when you watch them.

The best one is the music feature.  It begins talking about the scoring of the film, but unfortanately slinds into discussing of the theme song with Jack White and Alicia Keys.  The behind the scenes on the scoring of the feature was the one section that didn’t seem to come from a press release, hopefully there will be more on that when the collector’s edition comes out.

I would not recommend buying this disc as there will probably be a two disc release for the next Bond film, but I diffentately would recommend renting this disc and showing it off to your friends.

Please add your own thoughts to the movie and the disc in the comment section.

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Kill Bill Vol. 1 Blu-Ray Disc Review

Posted by Martin:

Video: A

Audio: A

Extras: D

Kill Bill – Volume One
is great Tarantino.  It was very well reviewed when it came out in 2003.  It is of course part of a set, with Kill Bill – Volume Two
being the second half.

When these movies were released originally on DVD there was some discussion on the net about a possible double dip, with Miramax releasing both film together as one long film.  But that never happened, not sure why, but five years later I would not be opposed to a rerelease of these films in new packaging and presentation.

The Video: A

The video here is extraordinary.  Robert Richardson’s cinematrogrophy is something to behold on Blu-Ray.  To my eye there seemed to be some edge enhancement early on in the movie, but nothing that distracts from the rest of the picture.

The video is 1080P in 2.35 format and is encoded in MPEG 4 format.

The Audio: A

The audio is encoded in uncompressed 5.1 PCM, and it is excellent.  Tarantino knows how to make music add to the cinematic experience and his great soundtrack is on fire with this transfer.

The extras: D

This is where the disc falls flat.  The extras here are recycled from the previous DVD release, and even then they aren’t that great.  There is a 22 minute behind the scenes featurette and it is nice, but nothing to write home about.  There are musical performances by the 5,6,7,8′s.  The girl band shown in the movie, as well as trailers to other Tarantino films.  For the capacity of Blu-Ray this part of the disc is very dissappointing.

Overall the transfer of the film is reference quailty.  This is how good a film can look when done right.  Miramax did a great job with the transfer.  I just wish there was more done with the extras and the potential of Blu-Ray.  With another Tarantino film coming to theaters in August, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a rerelease of this film and Vol.2 next year, when Inglorious Basterds comes to Blu-Ray.

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Dirty Harry

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Dirty Harry

Posted by Martin:

The Basics:

Video: B-

Audio: B

Extras:  B+

Dirty Harry is of course the first film in the Dirty Harry series, released in 1971.  Clint Eastwood was already a famous actor having done Rawhide and the Serio Leone Westerns, this film transfers he previous Western character into the streets of San Fransico.

It was a controversial film when it came out in ’71, Pauline Kael was particulary against the film.  The history of the film is discussed in depth in the extras that come with the disc.

The video:

The video is encoded at 1080P in VC-1 format.  Which makes it look very nice.  The film element itself that was transferred seems to have some dirt in some of the opening shots.  One of the difficulties in transfering film to Hi-Def means every little speck or scratch can be seen.  The blacks here are very deep, it is a movie shot mostly at night and it looks very good for such a film.

The Audio:

The audio on the main film is 5.1 Dolby Digital TrueHD.  And the mix here is okay, the mix is primarily out of the front two speakers.  The original source of the movie is in stereo, and it seems to stay in stereo here.

The extras:

All of the extras from the 2 disc special edition DVD are included here.  One annoying trait is that “Dirty Harry: The Original”  is presented in letterbox 16:9 in 4:3 format.  In other words it will show with black all the way around the image.  Annoying.  It is a simple documentary and does not reveal a lot of new information about the movie.

The best extra in the bunch and worth the 85 minutes is Clint Eastwood: Out of the Shadows, it is new for this release.  This documentary chronicales the carrer of Eastwood, from his very early days as a studio B actor at Universal all the way up through the 1990s.  You will learn more about Eastwood in this documentary then in any of the other extras on the disc.

Eastwood is a very hardworking actor and director, and understands his public persona very well and uses it to his advantage.  He developed the practice of doing a personal film then a more commercial film.  He seems to take it personally when a movie he loves doesn’t do well publicly, such as his bio-pic on Charlie Parker “Bird”.  This documentary will have you filling your Netflix queue up with long forgotten Eastwood films.

There is an audio commentary by Richard Schickel who is a film critic and Eastwood biographer.  Schickel speaks of how the movie is shot without close-ups and is primarily in wide and telephoto shots.  From the commentary I enjoyed learning that the suicide scene was originally scheduled to be shot over six days, but Eastwood realized that newscoverage at the time could cover the same scene without the additional expensive extra lights.  Therefore he was able to get that scene done in one evening.  A great lesson on filmmmaking.

Overall this is a good effort on an important American film from the early 70s.  Currently this is the only Dirty Harry Blu-Ray available as an individual disc.  The others are avaiable as part of the Dirty Harry Ultimate Collector’s Edition [Blu-ray]
.

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