7.3 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Seven strangers, each with a secret to bury, meet at a run-down hotel in Lake Tahoe in 1960s California. Over the course of a fateful night, they all get one last shot at redemption before everything goes wrong.
Starring: Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson, Jon Hamm, Chris HemsworthDark humor | 100% |
Thriller | Insignificant |
Drama | Insignificant |
Crime | Insignificant |
Mystery | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1 (448 kbps)
French: Dolby Digital 5.1 (448 kbps)
English SDH, French, Spanish
Blu-ray Disc
Two-disc set (1 BD, 1 DVD)
Digital copy
DVD copy
Slipcover in original pressing
Region free
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 5.0 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Grand Hotel was one of the first, if not the first,
big ensemble films in Hollywood history, with that vaunted “all star cast”, perhaps before that term had even been properly invented (or least used
very often). Grand Hotel documented the comings and goings of a coterie of folks who were either guests or employees of the titular
lodging facility, with a number of secrets being revealed along the way, and an unfolding series of interrelationships also being offered. Grand
Hotel was a huge smash in its day and ended up winning that year’s Best Picture Academy Award (almost amazingly, the film holds the
distinction of being the only Best Picture winner not to receive any other nominations in any other categories). Bad Times at the El
Royale might cheekily be described as a post-modernist deconstruction of Grand Hotel, albeit with a rather prevalent noir
undertone that is nowhere to be found in the 1932 opus. Much as the legendary Cedric Gibbons researched opulent European hotels to create a
sumptuous production design for Grand Hotel, Bad Times at the El Royale benefits from a really appealing “look” courtesy of
production designer Martin Whist, who offers what might be called a mid-century modern orgasm of sleek lines blended with a certain stylistic
overkill in things like fabrics on upholstery and wallpapers. (A making of featurette included on the Blu-ray as a supplement shows that the team
behind the picture basically “built” an entire hotel to facilitate the shoot.) But of course a film can’t rely solely on its sets and costumes, and it’s in
a wending, interlinked story that Bad Times at the El Royale really achieves some considerable energy.
The film begins with a brief
vignette that evidently takes place sometimes in the mid to late fifties, as a man arrives at the hotel, checks into a room and then begins moving
all the furniture in order to pull up the carpeting and expose the floorboards. He then begins prying those up, finally depositing a satchel
which one obviously assumes contains some cache of cash or other valuables under the floor, at which point he puts everything back where it was.
A brief interstitial segment (which is actually kind of confusing) shows the guy going outside for a moment to perhaps “cleanse” himself in the rain,
after which he lets one of his supposed cohorts into the room, a guy who summarily shoots him dead. It’s a fascinating opening segment, made
all
the more so by writer-director Drew Goddard’s choice to shoot virtually the whole thing with a ton of “unused” space in front of the action, as if
we’re watching a play taking place on a proscenium stage. And in fact a lot of Bad Times at the El Royale is almost blatantly
theatrical in terms of both story elements and its presentational style. This may not be a film for everyone (I'm sure there will be some who feel
it's a blatant Tarantino wannabe), but I have to say for me personally it
delivered some of the most viscerally exciting material I’ve watched recently.
Bad Times at the El Royale is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. Shot on film and finished at a 4K DI, this is another fantastic looking disc from Fox, one that reproduces the film's rather interesting palette beautifully, while also maintaining a healthy and natural looking grain field (with one possible exception). The film's almost picayune attention to production design really pops nicely throughout this presentation, with textures on fabrics and props looking precise and palpable. The making of featurette gets into some of the challenges of lighting master shots, since the hotel was constructed with a low ceiling in the lobby, but overall shadow detail is very good, if arguably a little lacking in some scenes involving a hidden corridor. The one place where grain looked just a tad on the "swarmy" side to me was a beach scene which introduces Billy Lee, but it's a very short moment in an otherwise great looking transfer.
I'm giving myself just a bit of "wiggle room" by scoring the excellent sounding DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 track on the 1080p Blu-ray at 4.5, since the 4K UHD version of the film offers an even more spacious and impressive sounding Dolby Atmos track, but for those who don't get the 4K version or don't have the ability to decode Atmos yet, there should be no real complaints about the audio on this release. As is mentioned in the making of featurette, the film was pitched with a ton of source cues already in place, with a "take it or leave it" approach (i.e., if the studio wasn't willing to license the tunes Goddard wanted for the film, Goddard wasn't willing to proceed), and the music really suffuses the audio presentation with extremely appealing surround activity. There are bursts of violence in the film which offer jolts of sonic activity in terms of things like gunfire, but even in quieter moments, as in several scenes in the immense lobby of the hotel, there's appealing directionality and nicely placed ambient environmental effects.
Could Bad Times at the El Royale have been tightened and provided clearer exposition with regard to at least a couple of its characters' stories? Absolutely. I for one am still unclear who was killed in a couple of flashbacks involving both Rose and Miles, the brief allusion to Darlene's recording career is just left hanging, and a whole subplot of the secret canister of film struck me as completely needless. By the time Rose is literally swinging from the chandeliers during the film's chaotic climax, I can see how some viewers will be rolling their eyes at the excess of it all. But despite these ostensible missteps, I personally found Bad Times at the El Royale a lot of fun, and it is one of the few films in my recent memory which actually managed to surprise me with regard to at least a couple of "sudden deaths". Again, this is probably not a film for everyone, but for fans of this cast and writer-director, Bad Times at the El Royale comes Recommended.
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