[The Movie Critic (Quentin Tarantino's supposed final movie)]

23 minutes ago, Edmilson said:

Of course he loved OUATIH so much ... That movie was made more for himself ...

 

That's how it always should be, IMO. And it's what Spielberg said about Empire Of The Sun (without saying it's his best movie, of course, I don't think Spielberg likes to speak in those terms, neither did Kubrick). Ridley Scott describes Blade Runner as his most personal movie. Somehow I'm more drawn towards their most personal movies than towards their 'audience movies'. 

[The Movie Critic (Quentin Tarantino's supposed final movie)]

1 hour ago, Brundlefly said:

A pretty solid indication of the fact that an artist's evaluation of the own work often is totally amiss.

 

"They are all my children, but, I really do think that Brundlefly's favorite movie of mine is my best movie." - Quentin Tarantino

 

Better now?

[Anyone here succumbed to 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray?]

On 13/04/2024 at 7:43 PM, filmmusic said:

I don't know if you guys have followed the debate and arguments in blu-ray related forums about the new UHDs of James Cameron films (namely Aliens, True Lies, The Abyss, Titanic).

They have been degrained and AI upscaled resulting in controversial results.

Here's an interesting article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/13/movies/ai-blu-ray-true-lies.html

 

  Reveal hidden contents

In 1998, Geoff Burdick, an executive at James Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment, was hunched in front of a 12-inch monitor at a postproduction house, carefully preparing “Titanic” for release on LaserDisc and VHS. A state-of-the-art computer process had made it possible for Burdick and his team to scour the film frame by frame, removing tiny imperfections embedded in the original negative: little scratches, flakes of dirt, even water stains that smeared the image. The computer could erase these blemishes using a kind of copy-paste tool, concealing the defects with information from another frame.

Burdick, now a senior vice president at the company, told me that this process “seemed like freaking magic at the time.” And yet the results were not entirely well-received. “There were a lot of people who said that this was the most beautiful VHS they’d ever seen in their life, because we’d gotten rid of all that gobbledygook,” he recalled. “But there were a lot of folks who said, ‘This is not right! You’ve removed all of this stuff! If the negative is scratched, then we should see that scratch.’ People were really hard-core about it.”

In the decades since, home video formats have reached higher and higher resolutions, with VHS and LaserDisc giving way to DVD and Blu-ray, and eventually to ultra high-definition 4K discs, known as Ultra HD Blu-rays. As the picture quality has improved, restoration tools have evolved with them, making it easier than ever for filmmakers to fine-tune their work using computers. Several of Cameron’s films, including “The Abyss,” “True Lies” and “Aliens,” were recently released on Ultra HD Blu-ray in newly restored versions that are clearer and sharper than ever before — the product of painstaking attention from Lightstorm and Cameron himself. “I think they look the best they’ve ever looked,” Burdick said.

But as with the old “Titanic” home video, these restorations have proved controversial, with many viewers objecting strenuously to their pristine new look. What has caught the particular ire of critics is the fact that these versions have been restored, in part, using artificial intelligence. Park Road Post Production, the New Zealand company owned by the filmmaker Peter Jackson, helped clean up Cameron’s films using some of the same proprietary machine-learning software used on Jackson’s documentaries “The Beatles: Get Back” and “They Shall Not Grow Old.” The images in Cameron’s classic blockbusters were refined in a way that many felt looked strange and unnatural.

The level of detail is eye-popping. Water looks crystalline; colors are bright and vivid, while blacks are deep and inky. Some surfaces, however, do look a little glossy, with a buffed sheen that appears almost lacquered. It can be hard to pinpoint what is changed. But there does seem to be a difference, and depending on the viewer, it can feel slightly uncanny.

“It just looks weird, in ways that I have difficulty describing,” the journalist Chris Person said of these releases. “It’s plasticine, smooth, embossed at the edges. Skin texture doesn’t look correct. It all looks a little unreal.”

Person is among a number of viewers who are skeptical of the need to use A.I. to “enhance” the appearance of films that seemed to look fine to begin with. Although he said that there were “legitimate use cases” for A.I. in restoration, such as when a film’s original negative has been lost or badly damaged, he suspected that with something like “True Lies,” they were “using it just because they can.”

The recent Cameron releases, and particularly “True Lies,” have become the subject of intense scrutiny and fervent debate online. Home video reviewers have described it as an overly sanitized presentation, with one faulting its “routinely odd-looking images” and another arguing that it appears “almost artificial.” Web forums are teeming with complaints, often vicious, while social media posts criticizing it have spread widely.

Dan Best, the general manager at Park Road Post, acknowledged the debate around remastering movies. “The thing is, technology is changing,” he added. “People are viewing things at a lot higher resolutions at the moment. Therefore, a lot of recent films are being enhanced for these new viewing platforms.” Traditional home video releases were adequate for the days of tube TVs and 1080p video, in other words. But in the era of OLED screens and 4K smart TVs, restorations need a little more to meet increasingly high standards.

Burdick, who has been dealing with this kind of criticism since the “Titanic” days, seemed resigned to the fact that “you can’t please everybody at the end of the day,” though he accepted that the response to these Ultra HD Blu-rays was especially heated. The dissenters, he argued, were mainly just disappointed that “Aliens,” “True Lies” and “The Abyss” no longer look like they did in the VHS or DVD eras.

“People love these movies, which I think is great,” he said. “And they take that love to heart. So when the movie suddenly doesn’t look like they remember it looking, or the way they think they remember it looking, or it just doesn’t look the way they think it should, they get upset. What can you do?”

It doesn’t help that there is a stigma around the technology: Dissenters not only bristle at the appearance of these restorations — they are also unhappy that it is A.I. being used to make them appear that way.

But, Burdick said, that disapproval is based partly on misconception: “People hear, ‘Oh, they’re using A.I.,’ and they’re thinking about pirate ships and the cup of coffee,” — a reference to a recent viral video of a miniature ship sailing in a coffee mug, all generated with A.I. — “and they’re like, ‘What are you doing to it?’ But nobody is doing that to these movies,” he explained. “It’s not the same A.I., conceptually. It’s more like, this piece of negative looks kind of cruddy, and we can use some software to improve it, carefully.”

Best, at Park Road, said that this kind of A.I. upscaling was “definitely not the same” as the kind of generative A.I. used in apps like Midjourney or ChatGPT. Generative A.I. is a type of machine learning model that creates information, including images and videos, from users’ prompts. A.I. upscaling is subtler and less intrusive, using machine learning to refine an image without inventing new material from scratch. Generative A.I. could, say, add more aliens to “Aliens.” A.I. upscaling just adds more pixels, polishing the pre-existing images.

Eric Yang, the founder of the A.I. upscaling company Topaz Labs, said that one of the main differences between A.I. upscaling and generative A.I. was fidelity to the original source: With upscaling, “the enhancement that you get does not measurably change the meaning or the content of the image.” Nevertheless, he said that misunderstandings about the technology have given the whole enterprise a certain ignominy.

“People try not to talk about it,” he said. “Nobody likes to say that their film was A.I. upscaled or that a certain release had A.I. applied to it.”

The reluctance to admit to using A.I. is understandable given some recent controversies. In 2021, the filmmaker Morgan Neville came under fire when it was revealed that his documentary “Roadrunner” used A.I. software to create a deepfaked version of Anthony Bourdain’s voice for narration; last month, the horror film “Late Night with the Devil” was criticized for using A.I.-generated imagery, with some critics going so far as to call for the film’s boycott.

Although “Get Back” and “We Shall Not Grow Old,” which involved footage from World War I, made extensive use of the same A.I. processes, they did not receive as much criticism. That’s partly because of the condition of the source material: Both films took damaged archival images and appeared to reverse the deterioration, and in one case, to also colorize it. By contrast, the recent Cameron restorations were based on new 4K scans of the original negative, none of which needed extensive repair of that kind.

“It’s not a question of the negative being damaged,” Burdick conceded. “But back on the set, maybe you picked the shot that had the most spectacular performance, but the focus puller was a bit off, so it’s a bit soft. There could be a million reasons why it’s not perfect. So now there’s an opportunity to just go in and improve it.” The A.I. can artificially refocus an out-of-focus image, as well as make other creative tweaks. “You don’t want to crank the knob all the way because then it’ll look like garbage,” Burdick said. “But if we can make it look a little better, we might as well.”

For viewers like Person, the problem is what those minor enhancements entail: That uncanny smoothness, though perhaps more in focus, can look oddly fake. “I don’t want to sound anal, but it really is egregious,” Person said. “It’s the same thing as TV motion smoothing — they say it’s better, so you feel like you’re the one person cursed with vision who can see that it looks bad.”

 

The 2 sides are those that like this new re-visualization look, including the esteemed film preservationist Robert Harris who has given the releases a 10/10 for picture/audio quality over at hometheaterforum and the so-called "purists" side.

If you ask me, I prefer the original look of the films with grain, and in no way I'm gonna support this travesty by buying these discs.

What is your side?

Both sides have become the object of hot arguments and sarcasm from the other side, and generally there is a heated debate in the internet.

 

I've heard that the AI enhanced Aliens still has a bit a grain and that it looks stunning. Would love to check it out but I'm not going to buy the movie again. To be honest, I've seen Aliens enough by now. The only Cameron movie that I'm not yet tired of is T2. 

[The Movie Critic (Quentin Tarantino's supposed final movie)]

31 minutes ago, GerateWohl said:

Yes. And in a way he ended his film series with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood on a perfect note.

 

"They’re all my children, but, I really do think Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is my best movie." - Quentin Tarantino 

[What is the last Television series you watched?]

 

After two episodes I can tell the writing and storytelling is very run-of-the-mill. It feels like the people who made dozens of others shows are now making Fallout in the same way they made all the other shows.

[The Movie Critic (Quentin Tarantino's supposed final movie)]

Let's hope his last movie won't be another Western, because let's face it, that's not his forte. Heck, even a Tarantino Bond movie would be better than a Western. 

[What Is The Last Film You Watched? (Older Films)]

I only have it on CD-R and I forgot to write down the title of the CD. I might upload the track tomorrow so that you can hear it. 

[What Is The Last Film You Watched? (Older Films)]

8 minutes ago, Marian Schedenig said:

Where?

 

Spiral, the first track on Spiral.

 

 

Press play and it starts right where Vangelis is 'borrowing' from Stravinsky.

 

[What Is The Last Film You Watched? (Older Films)]

Williams did a bit of Stravinky, but so did Vangelis with Spiral, where he perhaps unintentionally quoted him verbatim. 

[What Is The Last Film You Watched? (Older Films)]

14 hours ago, Tom Guernsey said:

Yeah it’s something about Planet of the Apes being ripped off from Stravinsky which shows an astonishing lack of knowledge of Planet of the Apes and Stravinsky…

 

Yeah, I don't hear anything resembling Stravinsky in Goldsmith's POTA either. 

[First Impressions: The FILMS of 2024]

 

- Simply put, 'Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child Of Fire' was terrible, and by some miracle, 'Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver' is even worse. - NBP

 

- The good news about Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver is that, without a doubt, it’s better than its predecessor. It’s more focused, cohesive, and character-driven...The bad news is it’s [also] slower, unbalanced, and emotionally vapid. - io9

 

[First Impressions: The FILMS of 2024]

9 hours ago, JNHFan2000 said:

Rebel Moon Part Two

 

This was bad. How can such a big film have such an awful script. It just baffles me ... Dialogue is laughably bad and generic. 

 

Snyder really needs to stop writing. I don't like his more conventional film style either. Like it or not, but it was his over-the-top hyper stylized comic book style (300 and Watchmen) that set him apart. 

[What is the last piece of classical music you listened to?]

[Upcoming Television Shows (and general TV chitchat)]

Started to watch Fallout S1 yesterday after finishing Halo S2. Funny, I thought I was going to bail out on Halo after 15 minutes or so. Let's hope Fallout is worth watching as well.

[Upcoming Films]

1 hour ago, Naïve Old Fart said:

True, but Cruise has had his fair share of unsuccessful (or should I say: unprofitable?) films.

 

Okay, maybe Tom Cruise was a bad example. What about Mel Gibson? 

 

If a star has a misfire, does that mean he is no longer a star? 

[Upcoming Films]

I'm only saying it because some say that you're only a star when your name is enough to ensure a hit, like Tom Cruise.

[Upcoming Films]

Was Philip Seymour Hoffman a star?

[Steven Spielberg will be making a UFO movie based on an original idea with a David Koepp script]

 

Doesn't Spielberg check IMDb? Most of the movies Koepp has worked on end up being 6/10 movies. JP is one of the few exceptions. 

[The Official Pop and Rock Music thread]

11 hours ago, Naïve Old Fart said:

 

Ergh! That's terrible. I listened to it once, and that was once too many.

 

I play it once a year. 

[The Official Pop and Rock Music thread]

23 minutes ago, Thor said:

 

Yeah, I looked it up. Some A.I. shit experiment. No thanks.

 

AI? No, it's a thorough remix and sounds quite different, dare I say better? The original sounds a bit too much like the third CD from the BR soundtrack.

[The Official Pop and Rock Music thread]

On 16/04/2024 at 5:04 PM, Thor said:

Another great album (my cover is different), but again -- it's from 2010. 

 

That's because it's a 2023 reimagining of that 2010 album

[Upcoming Films]

 

Not sure how authentic this poster is but I did find it (the sequel to It Follows) on IMDb as one of the upcoming movies by David Robert Mitchell. 

[Villeneuve's DUNE]

James Cameron wrote and produced Battle Angel Alita, which I like (and I didn't expect that). 

[The Official Pop and Rock Music thread]

22 hours ago, Thor said:

 Wish Gilmour released music more often these days.

 

[The Box Office thread]

"Director Alex Garland’s provocative dystopian thriller “Civil War” lit up the box office with $25.7 million in its debut. It’s the first A24 movie to lead the charts in North America, setting an opening weekend record for the New York-based specialty studio. It also marks the biggest R-rated start of the year." -Variety