Welcome back! We're trying something new today: in order to make the Blogorium a little easier to read, the Cap'n is going to make the font a smidge bigger. It was requested by a regular reader, so I'll do what I can to make the experience more enjoyable. Now onto the main event, my posing the question "Now why is THAT on Blu Ray?" and exploring the possible answers.
I run the risk of almost totally contradicting my series of essays on "remastering" for some of you, but I feel that there is a sufficient difference between the two. Allow me to explain.
The format is relatively new, so we can't blame studios for dragging their feet in releasing older catalog titles or "Classic" films just yet. Blu Ray only really "won" the war with HD-DVD last spring, so companies have been adjusting to working strictly with one format and have released a relatively substantial amount of movies compared to the early days of dvd. The problem seems to be that an unusually high number of those movies don't seem to benefit from high definition releases.
For example, Predator 2 will be coming out on Blu Ray next month. As I made it clear yesterday, I have no qualms with the film itself, but I am rather confused at 20th Century Fox's desire to release that particular film in HD. It's equally confounding because their earlier releases of Predator and Commando don't really look that much better than the dvds. There is some improvement in picture clarity, but neither of them are discs you're going to put in to demonstrate just how much of a difference 1080p can make.
Warner Brothers has similarly released a wave of catalog films from the 80s and 90s, most notably Steven Seagal films like Above the Law, Out for Justice and Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. They also just put out Tango & Cash, a cop movie from the 90s starring Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell. I'm not going to be surprised if you haven't heard of any of those movies (my own personal enjoyment of them aside).
Despite liking these films on varying levels, I am confused to see them benefitting from the HD upgrade when other movies are not. It would be one thing if they looked radically improved (as some older titles do, like Batman Returns) but Out for Justice looks like a slightly clearer version of the dvd.
Then there are movies that clearly don't make sense to get a BD upgrade: the one that springs to mind is Faces of Death. The film (if you can call it that) has a reputation for being the nastiest of video nasties because of how ragged and beat up the vhs copies looked, adding to the "authenticity" of a film exploring people being killed on camera. Well, alledgedly, because now that the Blu Ray is out it's abundantly clear just how fake the "death" footage is. While it might make it easier to show to squeamish friends, the newly enhanced Faces of Death loses the one edge it had for decades: arguable authenticity.
Even more bizarre (to me at least) are movies I'm positive no one was asking for on Blu Ray that DO look better, like Short Circuit. When I put the disc in, I was stunned how much better Short Circuit looks than any other time I've ever seen it, which begs the question: Why Short Circuit?
Why does a mid-level comedy from 1986 get a full-on remaster and something like Predator doesn't? For that matter, why is Short Circuit getting this kind of attention when there are classic movies not even out on dvd that could use this attention. I continually bring up The African Queen specifically because it's never had an American release, on dvd or Blu Ray, but there are no less than seven versions of Terminator 2 on both formats. The second BD version of Terminator 2 is on the way, and that's not even the first HD "double dip.*"
Similarly, while I appreciate having them in HD upgrades, I am slightly confused by releases like The Road Warrior and The Omega Man from Warner Brothers. Sure, I enjoy both movies but neither one was something I expected to be able to find. 2001? Blade Runner? Sure, but The Final Countdown?
I don't mind giving great treatment to more obscure movies but can't we at least get the "big guns" out of the way first? The Wizard of Oz, Ben-Hur, and Gone with the Wind have been announced but are still pending a release date. There's no hint of Citizen Kane or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre on the horizon, but Big Trouble in Little China is on the way. So are Road House, Fletch, and Walking Tall.
In the meantime I can probably name all of the black and white films on Blu Ray, including Good Night and Good Luck: The Third Man, Casablanca, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The 400 Blows, The Ray Harryhausen Collection, Raging Bull, Wages of Fear, Sin City, The Seventh Seal and I guess you could count the black and white cut of The Mist. Am I forgetting anything?
One of the things you'll notice is that four of the movies listed are from 1980 or later, four of them were released by Criterion and not a major studio, and all of the Harryhausen films that are in black and white are also offered in "colorized" versions.
That leaves Casablanca and The Day the Earth Stood Still as the major studio releases of "Classic" titles, and the latter was to tie in with the remake from last year. I mention this because Blu Ray and High Definition in general are still largely considered "niche" markets. Like laserdiscs, some are inclined to regard BDs as a stop gap between the next big shift in home entertainment.
So why then does the product not reflect that? Laserdiscs included what could be considered the first wave of "supplemental" material (commentaries, documentaries, director's cuts) and included releases like The Magnificent Ambersons, a film that also never made its way to dvd. Why? Well, the film is more interesting as a piece of Hollywood history than as a easily marketable disc, and the studios have dragged their feet in the 12 years dvd existed to get older titles out. If Blu Ray is comparable to Laserdisc, what explains the presence of films designed at a marketdly broader audience?
Day and date release of new films makes sense, but some of the choices for "catalog" films confuses me. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and not Brazil? The Life of Brian and not The Quest for the Holy Grail? Domino? American History X? Wayne's World? Collateral Damage? Universal Soldier? Paycheck?
Seriously. Paycheck? Many of you know of my unjustified fondness for the movie even Ben Affleck disowned, but what "niche" market was looking for Paycheck in high definition?
I could seriously go on and on listing movies inexplicably available in high definition while others that you would expect languish in vaults, possibly to be released. Some of these movies look pretty spiffy and other looks negligibly different yet the one thing I notice is that none of them ever seem to be sold out in stores, even when they're on sale.
What is nice is that some studios at least recognize that if their titles aren't radical improvements, like First Look's BD of Dog Soldiers, they won't charge more than they do for the dvd. Dog Soldiers is 14.99, and so is The Proposition, which actually looks great in high definition. Short Circuit is comparably inexpensive, and for some reason Tango & Cash is perpetually marked down to 16.99. They may not be necessary but I guess you aren't always being asked to pay top dollar for the "privilege" of high definition.
As time goes by, eventually we'll get more releases like Cool Hand Luke or The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Why the studios sit on these and not their lesser selling titles remains a mystery: are they waiting to see if more people adopt the Blu Ray players / PS3? Do they think only a very specific audience wants Blu Rays, and rather than cinephiles it's action film fans? Are they simply testing the waters with the same type of crap they can't sell on dvd?
I wish I knew the answer, because many of you have asked to watch such-and-such a title on Blu Ray only to discover it doesn't exist yet. Films you would expect to be out in order to show off picture quality or representing box office power are inexplicably missing, meaning that Indiana Jones fans have only Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to show off, and George Lucas is secretly stockpiling Star Wars Blu Rays for the, uh, 35th anniversary in 2012**? Is it too much to ask for that Night of the Living Dead be able to join all of its sequels on Blu Ray? That Orson Welles could get some high def love?
Or, dare I ask for it, Night of the Lepus remastered for true 1080p fancy schmancy picture?
Okay, even I admit that Night of the Lepus would merit a "you've got to be kidding", just like Moonraker would...
oh, wait.
* Take your pick: it's either The Matrix, Batman, Casablanca or No Country for Old Men, to name a few.
** Don't think he's not. They might come out sooner but I wouldn't be shocked.
Showing posts with label colorization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label colorization. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Remastering continued.
Sometimes a subject bears more discussion. In the instance of last night's ruminating over "digital scrubbing", regular reader Tom D. had some interesting comments about the issue of remastering (visible here). His particular interest comes from two Criterion releases: By Brakhage, an anthology of Stan Brakhage's experimental films, and La Jetee / Sans Soleil, two films by Chris Marker.
The Cap'n highly recommends you read the comments in full before continuing, and I'd prefer to not paste edited versions here, even for space considerations. What it did do was get me thinking about further examples, but particularly the issue of "director's choice".
Given that both of these remasters were done with and approved by their respective filmmakers (Brakhage and Marker) if the intention of the director supersedes our own personal preference. It is true that unintended consequences, be they print damage, fading, poor projection, or video mastering, can create a separate version of the film that audiences come to rather than the director's desired product.
David Lynch has famously indicated that unless he can control the image output of every tv set in the world that he has no interest in pursuing another series. Both Twin Peaks boxed sets reflect his desire to control the precise image, down to "home tests" which allow you to adjust the image to his "ideal". So if we are to respect, in some ways, auteurial influence, where is the line?
George Lucas is the frequent punching bag in this conversation (not merely for Star Wars but for THX 1138's "new cut") but I am deeply conflicted about what William Friedkin did to The French Connection. His newly remastered version for Blu Ray started by splitting the negative: creating a new black and white negative which was meticulously cleaned up for the sharpest possible image. What Friedkin did next is where I find myself troubled by this "intent" discussion.
Friedkin took this black and white master and added the color back, but not in a matching system. Instead, he allowed colors to appear smudgy and bleed (particularly strong reds, like on Popeye Doyle's Santa suit), giving the effect of a "colorized" film. Frank Capra and Orson Welles notoriously threw fits when Ted Turner tried to do similar colorizations to their films in the 1980s, but this is a separate issue. The French Connection was made in color, and the image available on this High Definition release is not reflective of what the film looked like when released in theatres. Hell, it doesn't even reflect the dvd version released four years ago!
William Friedkin is well within his rights to do this but I have great reservations about buying The French Connection on Blu Ray because of his "tinkering" with the film. Unlike Lucas, who makes fairly noticeable digital additions to his older films, Friedkin erased the original picture's color palette and replaced it with something that looks like poorly synched colorization.
Similar changes have happened at Criterion, even on "director-approved" editions, most noticeably The Last Emperor and Chungking Express. Both films were re-adjusted in different ways by their cinematographers, rather than directly by the filmmakers. The framing of Emperor was opened up from 2.35:1 to 2.00:1 by Vittorio Storaro, under the claim it was the "intended" framing of the film.
What is not mentioned on Criterion's site is that Storaro developed "Univision" - a film stock designed to be shot at 2.00:1, and that accordingly demands all films he shot be transferred to 2.00:1. Which, in case you were wondering, is why no version of Apocalypse Now released on dvd has ever been framed at its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio.
Chungking Express is more directly related to color timing. Criterion had been working on Express, but Kar-Wai was too busy filming Ashes of Time to personally oversee it. Criterion producers discovered the film's cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, was in New York working on a Jim Jarmusch film and showed the BD-R to him. From their blog, On Five:
"Now, by this point, we were already at our initial DVD-R and BD-R stages for Chungking. That means that . . . we were done. Basically, we just had to go through the discs and check them to make sure there weren’t any errors or problems.
But the prospect of getting Doyle’s stamp of approval on our transfer was too tantalizing, and important, to let slip by. So our tech director, Lee Kline, contacted Doyle and persevered until he got the cinematographer to find time in his hectic schedule to swing by and check out the results of our work. Not surprisingly, Doyle did request some changes, ones that only someone closely involved with Chungking’s overall visual presentation would’ve known. They weren’t anything too major: dialing out some green in a few shots, warming up Kai Tak airport interiors, fixing a couple of skin tones. Still, it meant we’d have to “start over” to a certain extent, inserting those fixes and reauthoring both the standard-def and Blu-ray discs. "
Now, admittedly, Chungking Express does not have a "director's stamp of approval" as some of their releases do. Wong Kar-Wai was personally involved in the sound mix, but it appears that only Doyle saw the temporary work on the picture and addressed some changes. I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other on this; it is, however, interesting because we have an example of remastering that is not specifically the director.
There are a handful of other examples of this, the one that comes to mind immediately is the dvd release of Terry Gilliam's Tideland. In this case, the company who released the disc (ThinkFilm) decided not to wait for Gilliam to reframe his 2.35:1 picture into a 2.00:1 image, so they cropped the film to a 1.77:1 picture and released it on dvd as a "16x9 Full Frame" presentation. More insulting than this erroneous decision is that all of the deleted scenes and making of material on the second disc is still presented 2.35:1, so it's not like we'd never know.
When ThinkFilm received complaints from fans (and Gilliam), they acquiesed and claimed they would release the film, but they still gaffed it up. Rather than do the right thing and honor Gilliam's request to reframe the image, they said that Tideland would be released "in its original 2.35:1 format".
To add insult to injury, I've never been able to find a copy of this "fixed" version of Tideland. Amazon still lists the 1.77:1 version and no store I've ever been to carries a different version. ThinkFilm may never have released it, assuming that we were too stupid to bother checking up on that. In the meantime, Tideland is only availble with half of the image missing, a result of impatient dvd mastering.
Admittedly, this is a complicated issue. I'm sure there are people who prefer the scratchy, fuzzy versions of Eraserhead and Night of the Living Dead, among many others. I happen to prefer the newer editions, ones that reflect some degree of revisionism on the filmmakers part. Or maybe it doesn't. It's truly hard to be certain.
The Cap'n highly recommends you read the comments in full before continuing, and I'd prefer to not paste edited versions here, even for space considerations. What it did do was get me thinking about further examples, but particularly the issue of "director's choice".
Given that both of these remasters were done with and approved by their respective filmmakers (Brakhage and Marker) if the intention of the director supersedes our own personal preference. It is true that unintended consequences, be they print damage, fading, poor projection, or video mastering, can create a separate version of the film that audiences come to rather than the director's desired product.
David Lynch has famously indicated that unless he can control the image output of every tv set in the world that he has no interest in pursuing another series. Both Twin Peaks boxed sets reflect his desire to control the precise image, down to "home tests" which allow you to adjust the image to his "ideal". So if we are to respect, in some ways, auteurial influence, where is the line?
George Lucas is the frequent punching bag in this conversation (not merely for Star Wars but for THX 1138's "new cut") but I am deeply conflicted about what William Friedkin did to The French Connection. His newly remastered version for Blu Ray started by splitting the negative: creating a new black and white negative which was meticulously cleaned up for the sharpest possible image. What Friedkin did next is where I find myself troubled by this "intent" discussion.
Friedkin took this black and white master and added the color back, but not in a matching system. Instead, he allowed colors to appear smudgy and bleed (particularly strong reds, like on Popeye Doyle's Santa suit), giving the effect of a "colorized" film. Frank Capra and Orson Welles notoriously threw fits when Ted Turner tried to do similar colorizations to their films in the 1980s, but this is a separate issue. The French Connection was made in color, and the image available on this High Definition release is not reflective of what the film looked like when released in theatres. Hell, it doesn't even reflect the dvd version released four years ago!
William Friedkin is well within his rights to do this but I have great reservations about buying The French Connection on Blu Ray because of his "tinkering" with the film. Unlike Lucas, who makes fairly noticeable digital additions to his older films, Friedkin erased the original picture's color palette and replaced it with something that looks like poorly synched colorization.
Similar changes have happened at Criterion, even on "director-approved" editions, most noticeably The Last Emperor and Chungking Express. Both films were re-adjusted in different ways by their cinematographers, rather than directly by the filmmakers. The framing of Emperor was opened up from 2.35:1 to 2.00:1 by Vittorio Storaro, under the claim it was the "intended" framing of the film.
What is not mentioned on Criterion's site is that Storaro developed "Univision" - a film stock designed to be shot at 2.00:1, and that accordingly demands all films he shot be transferred to 2.00:1. Which, in case you were wondering, is why no version of Apocalypse Now released on dvd has ever been framed at its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio.
Chungking Express is more directly related to color timing. Criterion had been working on Express, but Kar-Wai was too busy filming Ashes of Time to personally oversee it. Criterion producers discovered the film's cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, was in New York working on a Jim Jarmusch film and showed the BD-R to him. From their blog, On Five:
"Now, by this point, we were already at our initial DVD-R and BD-R stages for Chungking. That means that . . . we were done. Basically, we just had to go through the discs and check them to make sure there weren’t any errors or problems.
But the prospect of getting Doyle’s stamp of approval on our transfer was too tantalizing, and important, to let slip by. So our tech director, Lee Kline, contacted Doyle and persevered until he got the cinematographer to find time in his hectic schedule to swing by and check out the results of our work. Not surprisingly, Doyle did request some changes, ones that only someone closely involved with Chungking’s overall visual presentation would’ve known. They weren’t anything too major: dialing out some green in a few shots, warming up Kai Tak airport interiors, fixing a couple of skin tones. Still, it meant we’d have to “start over” to a certain extent, inserting those fixes and reauthoring both the standard-def and Blu-ray discs. "
Now, admittedly, Chungking Express does not have a "director's stamp of approval" as some of their releases do. Wong Kar-Wai was personally involved in the sound mix, but it appears that only Doyle saw the temporary work on the picture and addressed some changes. I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other on this; it is, however, interesting because we have an example of remastering that is not specifically the director.
There are a handful of other examples of this, the one that comes to mind immediately is the dvd release of Terry Gilliam's Tideland. In this case, the company who released the disc (ThinkFilm) decided not to wait for Gilliam to reframe his 2.35:1 picture into a 2.00:1 image, so they cropped the film to a 1.77:1 picture and released it on dvd as a "16x9 Full Frame" presentation. More insulting than this erroneous decision is that all of the deleted scenes and making of material on the second disc is still presented 2.35:1, so it's not like we'd never know.
When ThinkFilm received complaints from fans (and Gilliam), they acquiesed and claimed they would release the film, but they still gaffed it up. Rather than do the right thing and honor Gilliam's request to reframe the image, they said that Tideland would be released "in its original 2.35:1 format".
To add insult to injury, I've never been able to find a copy of this "fixed" version of Tideland. Amazon still lists the 1.77:1 version and no store I've ever been to carries a different version. ThinkFilm may never have released it, assuming that we were too stupid to bother checking up on that. In the meantime, Tideland is only availble with half of the image missing, a result of impatient dvd mastering.
Admittedly, this is a complicated issue. I'm sure there are people who prefer the scratchy, fuzzy versions of Eraserhead and Night of the Living Dead, among many others. I happen to prefer the newer editions, ones that reflect some degree of revisionism on the filmmakers part. Or maybe it doesn't. It's truly hard to be certain.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
The Cap'n Presents: Best of the Blogorium Chapter 4
Film and Crayons
This is a strange sort of question, but does anyone understand the "colorization" movement? The process of taking black and white films and arbitrarily colorizing them?
Ted Turner had a hankering to do just such a thing in the mid-eighties when he started buying up movies like crazy to air on his "superstations", TNT and TBS. For a while, he'd just have his team go in and make color where there was none on classic films. Finally, directors like Orson Welles and Frank Capra raised such a stink about it that he stopped and the issue seemed put to rest.
But Sony didn't get the memo somehow. They've been putting out dvds for the last few years, starting with Three Stooges shorts, in colorized form. Then they went back and colorized black and white tv shows, and in defiance of the ghost of Capra himself, released It's A Wonderful Life in color.
Lately the new trand is to drop old Ray Harryhausen movies like 20 Million Miles to Earth, It Came from Beneath the Sea, and Earth vs the Flying Saucers in newly colorized forms. Legend Films has been offering public domain films like Carnival of Souls, Reefer Madness, and Night of the Living Dead in similar fashion. To be fair, many of these offer both black and white and colored versions, but the whole process puzzles me.
I understand there's a stigma against black and white films. I've seen it, and I've heard people say they'd never watch a movie that wasn't in color because it's "old" and "boring". Getting around this sort of ridiculous blanket statement is difficult enough, but I've never heard anyone who wouldn't watch a movie in black and white suddenly change their mind because it was artificially colored.
If you've never seen a colorized film, please do check one of the above titles out. The first thing you'll notice is just how off-kilter it looks. Skin tones never look right, the sky always looks a little too bright, and primary colors stick out like a sore thumb. It's not easy to mask the greyscale on black and white films, so the artists often overcompensate, creating a reality that's too removed from "normal" color films. Click here to check out some images that have been "colorized" and see what I mean.
Maybe it's just me being confused, but nothing about the process ever made sense. It isn't merely that the colorizing makes a film more artificial than it already would be, but it doesn't seem to change the stigma of an "old" film in the minds of people predisposed to avoid them. It's A Wonderful Life and A Miracle on 34th Street still air every Christmas and they're always in black and white. The color or lack thereof doesn't really impact the quality of the movie.
Personally I couldn't imagine watching Carnival of Souls or Night of the Living Dead in color. A big part of why they work is the stark black and white photography, and as you can see in the photos linked above. At the same time, I don't really have a problem with tinting silent films, particularly if that's what the director had in mind. Since a particular system of color tints correlated to what time of day it was in film (blue being night, for example) it can be helpful. Nosferatu doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you see Count Orlock in broad daylight after all.
Recently I talked about Frank Darabont's The Mist, which is offered both in black and white and in color. It was shot in color, and to be honest, sometimes one works, and sometimes the other is better. The black and white does a great job of making interior scenes more claustrophobic. Dodgier cgi effects are less noticeable on a grey scale, but the primary effect (the mist) doesn't play at all in the beginning of the movie anymore. It's just a window with opaque white outside. All of the nuance of shooting mist in color is lost. Later in the film things kind of even out, but I have to say that it's a trade off.
Are you in favor of colorizing films? Does it interest you, or does the heightened artificiality provide a new way to watch movies? Inquiring minds await your thoughts.
***EDIT***
Future Cap'n here with a few additional thoughts.
After some discussion with others, it becomes clear that keeping black and white films in black and white is actually beneficial if for no other reason than it removes the distraction. The reason The Mist becomes more claustrophobic is because you can't allow your eyes to wander and look at items in the grocery store. Everything is a shade of gray, so you are, in effect, forced to see what the director is presenting to you.
I talked recently with a professor of mine who first saw David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly in black and white by accident. He had no idea the film was supposed to be in color but the end result was that he found the movie more disturbing. Unable to look away or be distracted by the makeup nuances, his eyes were forced to focus on what Cronenberg intended audiences to see.
The Cap'n is sorely tempted to buy a black and white tv set (on the cheap, of course) so that I can run similar tests on other films. It would also be fun just to have a black and white television in the house for people to look at curiously. Using the settings on color tvs to achieve a similar effect just doesn't seen to work.
This is a strange sort of question, but does anyone understand the "colorization" movement? The process of taking black and white films and arbitrarily colorizing them?
Ted Turner had a hankering to do just such a thing in the mid-eighties when he started buying up movies like crazy to air on his "superstations", TNT and TBS. For a while, he'd just have his team go in and make color where there was none on classic films. Finally, directors like Orson Welles and Frank Capra raised such a stink about it that he stopped and the issue seemed put to rest.
But Sony didn't get the memo somehow. They've been putting out dvds for the last few years, starting with Three Stooges shorts, in colorized form. Then they went back and colorized black and white tv shows, and in defiance of the ghost of Capra himself, released It's A Wonderful Life in color.
Lately the new trand is to drop old Ray Harryhausen movies like 20 Million Miles to Earth, It Came from Beneath the Sea, and Earth vs the Flying Saucers in newly colorized forms. Legend Films has been offering public domain films like Carnival of Souls, Reefer Madness, and Night of the Living Dead in similar fashion. To be fair, many of these offer both black and white and colored versions, but the whole process puzzles me.
I understand there's a stigma against black and white films. I've seen it, and I've heard people say they'd never watch a movie that wasn't in color because it's "old" and "boring". Getting around this sort of ridiculous blanket statement is difficult enough, but I've never heard anyone who wouldn't watch a movie in black and white suddenly change their mind because it was artificially colored.
If you've never seen a colorized film, please do check one of the above titles out. The first thing you'll notice is just how off-kilter it looks. Skin tones never look right, the sky always looks a little too bright, and primary colors stick out like a sore thumb. It's not easy to mask the greyscale on black and white films, so the artists often overcompensate, creating a reality that's too removed from "normal" color films. Click here to check out some images that have been "colorized" and see what I mean.
Maybe it's just me being confused, but nothing about the process ever made sense. It isn't merely that the colorizing makes a film more artificial than it already would be, but it doesn't seem to change the stigma of an "old" film in the minds of people predisposed to avoid them. It's A Wonderful Life and A Miracle on 34th Street still air every Christmas and they're always in black and white. The color or lack thereof doesn't really impact the quality of the movie.
Personally I couldn't imagine watching Carnival of Souls or Night of the Living Dead in color. A big part of why they work is the stark black and white photography, and as you can see in the photos linked above. At the same time, I don't really have a problem with tinting silent films, particularly if that's what the director had in mind. Since a particular system of color tints correlated to what time of day it was in film (blue being night, for example) it can be helpful. Nosferatu doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you see Count Orlock in broad daylight after all.
Recently I talked about Frank Darabont's The Mist, which is offered both in black and white and in color. It was shot in color, and to be honest, sometimes one works, and sometimes the other is better. The black and white does a great job of making interior scenes more claustrophobic. Dodgier cgi effects are less noticeable on a grey scale, but the primary effect (the mist) doesn't play at all in the beginning of the movie anymore. It's just a window with opaque white outside. All of the nuance of shooting mist in color is lost. Later in the film things kind of even out, but I have to say that it's a trade off.
Are you in favor of colorizing films? Does it interest you, or does the heightened artificiality provide a new way to watch movies? Inquiring minds await your thoughts.
***EDIT***
Future Cap'n here with a few additional thoughts.
After some discussion with others, it becomes clear that keeping black and white films in black and white is actually beneficial if for no other reason than it removes the distraction. The reason The Mist becomes more claustrophobic is because you can't allow your eyes to wander and look at items in the grocery store. Everything is a shade of gray, so you are, in effect, forced to see what the director is presenting to you.
I talked recently with a professor of mine who first saw David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly in black and white by accident. He had no idea the film was supposed to be in color but the end result was that he found the movie more disturbing. Unable to look away or be distracted by the makeup nuances, his eyes were forced to focus on what Cronenberg intended audiences to see.
The Cap'n is sorely tempted to buy a black and white tv set (on the cheap, of course) so that I can run similar tests on other films. It would also be fun just to have a black and white television in the house for people to look at curiously. Using the settings on color tvs to achieve a similar effect just doesn't seen to work.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Horror Fest III Day 1: The Mist (in glorious black and white)
Although Mssrs Davis and White slept through various portions of The Mist (it was 3am when we started), I believe both of them enjoyed the film. Liz and Randy did as well, and I'm just going to have to disagree about the "top 4 worst ending" ever that Mr. Cranpire feels the film deserves.
Turns out that black and white really suits the film well. Not only do the dodgy cg effects look better, but the grocery store feels more claustrophobic. The mist itself becomes more oppressive when the grays are drained out; the impenetrable whiteness makes shapes in the distance all the more unnerving.
As everyone is turning in, The Orphanage will have to wait for tomorrow, but we're off to a good start. The Cap'n and friends will be back soon with more updates from the Season of the Beast.
G'nite.
Turns out that black and white really suits the film well. Not only do the dodgy cg effects look better, but the grocery store feels more claustrophobic. The mist itself becomes more oppressive when the grays are drained out; the impenetrable whiteness makes shapes in the distance all the more unnerving.
As everyone is turning in, The Orphanage will have to wait for tomorrow, but we're off to a good start. The Cap'n and friends will be back soon with more updates from the Season of the Beast.
G'nite.
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