Arcade Fire: The Reflektor Tapes Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

Arcade Fire: The Reflektor Tapes Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 26, 2017

I’m friends with a number of “old school” Los Angeles types who may not be members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences but at least consider themselves knowledgeable enough about such matters to opine incessantly on what they perceive as the degradation in the quality of Oscar nominees over the years, with no category receiving as much umbrage as the music nominations. Many of these supposedly wise elders grew up enjoying the classic scores of lions like Alfred Newman, Miklos Rozsa and Bernard Herrmann, and some of them probably chafed, if only momentarily, when more modern sounds courtesy of then younger composers like Henry Mancini, Jerry Goldsmith and Ennio Morricone started being introduced, but developments over the past few years seem to have pushed some of these supposed experts over the edge. Rants about “alternative” scores by the likes of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for films like The Social Network have reached virtually epic proportions at times. (It’s notable that this particular score received a Blu-ray release which is now almost prohibitively expensive, perhaps tending to indicate someone must have liked it.) But times have changed, haven’t they? And not just in the music world—and in that regard, some of these same curmudgeons complain about the loss of actual celluloid in the film world as budgets force the use of digital capture technology instead (and frankly I count myself among those who at least occasionally long for the good old days of film grain). While I don’t remember hearing any outright complaints about the score for Her from these otherwise verbose critics, the work of William Butler and Owen Pallett certainly falls into a “new school” ambience that will probably delight Millennials while further alienating those who yearn for the sweep of Korngold-esque music in their films. Butler and Pallett are part (at least tangentially in Pallett’s case) of Arcade Fire, a band which is both widely recognized (including a Grammy for Album of the Year for The Suburbs) and yet kind of weirdly underappreciated by the single buying public. While at least a couple of the band’s albums have made it to the vaunted Number 1 position in both the United States and their native Canada, tunes from those discs have met with somewhat less fervor, and in fact here in the United States Arcade Fire has managed to place only one single above the Top 20 (the same tune, Reflektor, topped out at 20 in Canada and is kind of oddly the highest charting single in the band’s native country, thus far at least).

Reflektor’s global success wouldn’t seem to need any additional marketing mojo, but The Reflektor Tapes was and continues to be marketed as a kind of “making of” documentary, though it’s notably different from entries like other Eagle Rock Entertainment releases such as Pink Floyd: Classic Albums - The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon or Peter Gabriel - Classic Albums: So. Those documentaries are clearly talking head efforts that take the viewer through the construction of their respective albums, giving tons of background information along the way. The Reflektor Tapes on the other hand is more like a hallucinogenic aggregation of brief snippets, with incessant tweaking of both image and sound to give the effort a decidedly psychedelic ambience. I’m not sure just how much actual “making of” information is imparted, therefore, and my hunch is the documentary will probably appeal to diehard Arcade Fire fans more than the general public as a result.

The second disc may in fact be more generally accessible, as it presents the band in concert on June 6, 2014 at Earl’s Court in London. While the visual excesses of The Reflektor Tapes are still at least somewhat on display, this concert video at least offers unedited performance footage and gives a better idea of how engaging the band can be in their live performances. The concert includes the following tunes:

1. Reflektor
2. Flashbulb Eyes
3. Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)
4. Rebellion (Lies)
5. Joan of Arc
6. Rococo
7. The Suburbs
8. Ready to Start
9. Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)
10. Neighborhood #2 (Laika)
11. No Cars Go
12. Haiti
13. We Exist
14. My Body is a Cage
15. Afterlife
16. It’s Never Over (Oh Orpheus)
17. Sprawl II
18. Normal Person
19. Here Comes the Night Time
20. Wake Up

Arcade Fire: The Reflektor Tapes Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Note: Screenshots 1-9 are from The Reflektor Tapes, and screenshots 10-18 are from Live at Earl's Court.

Arcade Fire: The Reflektor Tapes is presented on Blu-ray courtesy Eagle Vision, an imprint of Eagle Rock Entertainment, with AVC encoded 1080p transfers of both the documentary and the concert video in a dazzling variety of aspect ratios (mostly for The Reflektor Tapes, which has an almost ADHD aggregation of framings, while the concert video is largely in 2.44:1). (I've opted for 1.78:1 above as our database simply doesn't allow for an entry with this many aspect ratios, but also due to the fact that a lot of The Reflektor Tapes' content is in that aspect ratio.) It's hard to give a "normal" assessment of the image quality, at least with regard to The Reflektor Tapes, since director Kahlil Joseph has assembled the piece from such a disparate variety of sources, as well as what looks like different capture resolutions, and then gone on to completely tweak huge swaths of the piece with various video bells and whistles, as can be seen in some of the screenshots accompanying this review. Some of what looks like the studio bound material (nothing is overly clear in this piece, to say the least) looks like it may have been shot with a cellphone or similarly lo-fi device, while some of the more filmic elements, like the peculiar sequences with the "big heads", is much more sharp and with generally excellent detail levels. Video elements vary widely in quality, with grainy and even noisy footage popping up with great regularity. There's more consistency to Live at Earl's Court, though even this piece plays with things like quick cutting between color and black and white footage. That said, detail levels are generally quite good, though a few lighting regimens like a deep cobalt blue that bathes the players at some points tends to defeat detail levels (see screenshot 11 for an example).

Arcade Fire: The Reflektor Tapes Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Arcade Fire: The Reflektor Tapes as well as Live at Earl's Court offer LPCM 2.0 and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 tracks. Though wiseacre curmudgeons may not like their sound, Arcade Fire can hardly be accused of offering the "same old, same old," and their eclectic, free wheeling approach is represented quite winningly from a sonic standpoint across the two discs in this set. As stated above in the main body of the review, the audio much like the video has been toyed with at various times in The Reflektor Tapes, giving an unmistakably hallucinogenic ambience to the proceedings. As such, everything from song snippets to wafting bits of dialogue may not make "sense" in any traditional way, but sound clear and often incredibly forceful (some of the percussion is quite remarkable in this regard). The concert video offers a much clearer listening experience, with good separation and excellent reproduction across all frequency ranges. The massed approach that Arcade Fire like to exploit can sometimes mean vocals get slightly buried, but otherwise the concert audio is nicely balanced and problem free.

Arcade Fire: The Reflektor Tapes Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Disc One

• Here Comes the Night Time Special (1080i; 23:39) is a fun live performance by the band.


• Promo Videos

  Reflektor (1080p; 7:38)

  We Exist (1080p; 6:22)

  Afterlife (1080p; 4:55)

• YouTube Awards Afterlife Live (1080p; 5:08)

Disc Two

• Director's Cut Tracks

  Flashbulb (1080p; 3:03)

  Here Comes the Night Time (1080p; 6:51)

  Reflektor (1080p; 6:56)

  Sprawl II (1080p; 5:46)

  The Suburbs (1080p; 7:25)

Arcade Fire: The Reflektor Tapes Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Arcade Fire: The Reflektor Tapes is a really interesting package, but I personally found the titular documentary little more than a weird crazy quilt of image and sound, with very little of a "hook" (to use a much derided musical term). It's fascinating to watch and listen to, but it's resolutely uninformative and simply serves as a kind of drugged out trip with the band. The concert video is a more traditional way to enjoy the odd and maybe even outré offerings of Arcade Fire. Fans of the band will probably love this release, while those who complain about droning film scores had probably best stay far, far away. Recommended.