Branded Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		3.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.0
Overall		2.0

Branded Blu-ray Movie Review

Dude, where's your film?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 25, 2012

The Coen Brothers often don’t just introduce an unexpected element in any given film of theirs from out of left field, they seem to place entire films so far in the outfield (whether left or right) that they’re virtually in the bleachers or even the surrounding neighborhood. But one of the oddest subplots in any Coen Brothers film is surely the extremely peculiar reference to the rather short-lived Chuck Connors television series Branded which becomes a recurring motif of sorts throughout The Big Lebowski in a number of piquant dialogue sequences featuring Jeff Bridges' character of The Dude. Branded wasn’t exactly a barn burner when it originally aired for a season and a half in the mid-sixties, and so its inclusion in a film that came over thirty years after its brief broadcast shelf life would seem to be peculiar at best, almost inexplicable at worst. So some cynics might wonder if somewhere down the line, say circa 2042 or so when some descendant of the Coens is churning out weird little movies for an adoring public if some future film is going to make fodder out of “another” Branded, a 2012 film that is peculiar in its own right, but which in a very tangible way shares the Coens’ proclivity for talkiness, if not the Coens’ proclivity for brilliance and the unexpected. Branded doesn’t seem to quite know what it wants to be, and the film was pilloried in its brief theatrical run (including by Blu-ray.com’s own Brian Orndorf) for having been marketed as either a science fiction tinged conspiracy thriller or even a monster film while at its core it seems to want to be a supposedly scathing satirical look at rampant consumerism and what might be termed the “lemming class” of easily duped prospective product purchasers. The fact that any given episode of The Simpsons manages to completely skewer the febrile world of crass consumerism (and in less than thirty minutes to boot) might be at least one indication that Branded is not just ridiculously hyperbolic, it’s also incredibly pretentious, working in a sort of magical realist (or perhaps surrealist) element that only makes the proceedings all the weirder and, frankly, even harder to understand.

Some films fail by having nothing at their center, but perhaps the most maddening thing about Branded is that there is a wealth of really fascinating ideas crammed into this film, perhaps too many for co-writers Jamie Bradshaw and Alexander Doulerain to adequately manage. Bradshaw and Doulerain also co-produced and co-directed this effort, and one gets the impression that their creative process was never really vetted through any editorial process, leaving a big, messy and frankly incomprehensible film as the result. But there are several compelling nuggets at the core of Branded, not the least of which is contemporary society’s obsession with branding.

The film follows the life and career of Misha (Ed Stoppard), a half-Russian whom we meet as a little boy when he has a vision of a constellation turning into a cow (one assumes this is not some reference to Taurus), and who in quick succession is then hit by a lightning bolt. As a man Misha becomes an advertising wunderkind, helping to make “The Burger” an international sensation. Meanwhile some mysterious cabal led by the generically named Marketing Guru (Max von Sydow) evidently has some nefarious master plan in the works which somehow ties into an Extreme Makeover type of show that Misha gets involved in when he falls for the show’s creator, a young American woman named Abby (Leelee Sobieski).

It turns out that the cabal wants the makeover show to fail (spectacularly so, in fact, with its subject in a coma after a botched liposuction operation) so that they can promote the idea of “fat” as the new “thin”. Lurching through this supposed conspiracy is the continuing drama of Misha, who first gets jailed and then becomes a sort of shaman in the woods, slaughtering a cow of a different color (if you see the film, you’ll understand that reference) in a ritual divined in a dream that supposedly allows him to see things that no one else can. What that turns out to be is some of the most patently absurd CGI of any film in recent years, huge wavy balloon like objects which evidently are meant to symbolize marketing’s leech like attachment to various individuals. Abby of course simply assumes Misha has gone off the deep end, and the film makes no real attempt to dissuade the viewer from that opinion either, though Misha is wild eyed and a raving lunatic one moment and then a completely calm, put together and buttoned down ad executive the next. Continuity is not exactly Branded’s strong suit.

The final act of Branded plays almost like an inept version of Buñuel, with Misha’s hallucinatory vegetarian “dragons” fighting the big beef “balloons” for market dominance, and then all hell breaking loose with an almost quasi- Frankenstein moment of the “villagers” (in this case, the denizens of Moscow) storming the advertising battlements not with pitchforks and torches but batons and guns, demanding the end to all of the corporate sloganeering lies. It’s certainly a worthwhile sentiment, but Branded is such a muddled and hard to follow affair, few if any will probably care by the time the film gets to this point. Good advertising is brief, to the point and should at least flirt with the unforgettable. Branded misses all three of those targets by a long shot.

Branded Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Branded is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer (mostly) in 2.40:1 (a few expository flashbacks are letterboxed in something approaching 1.66:1). To pun rather horribly, this film could have been titled Banding, for it exhibits some of the worst live action banding I've personally witnessed in some time, especially as scenes fade in or fade out (for some reason a number of high profile anime releases I've reviewed recently have suffered this same banding fate—maybe like the mad cow disease that is one of countless subplots in Branded, it's a virus "going around"). The film has been rather aggressively color graded in post, with a lot of sickly green and cool blue sequences that tend to suck some of the fine detail out of the proceedings. Large swaths of the film are rather gauzy in appearance, though some of the extreme close-ups pop magnificently, with really excellent fine object detail. The less said about the third act's CGI, the better.

Branded Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Branded's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 audio is a good deal better than the image quality, with a well rendered and frequently quite immersive mix that offers excellent fidelity and some nicely done surround activity. There are occasional nice bursts of LFE (courtesy of a couple deafening lightning explosions early and late in the film), and a lot of the hustle and bustle of the dystopian Moscow setting are nicely captured and placed throughout the side and rear channels. Dialogue is cleanly presented and the film's occasionally very effective music score also is well mixed and prioritized. Dynamic range isn't huge, but is fairly wide.

Branded Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Commentary with Writers, Directors and Producers Jamie Bradshaw and Alexander Doulerain. This commentary would have been the perfect place for Bradshaw and Doulerain to get into some of the nuts and bolts of what they were trying to express. Instead we get a nonstop array of "and now we're seeing" moments. It's as if the filmmakers themselves didn't know how to explain what was actually going on in any meaningful way.


• Theatrical Trailer 1 (HD; 2:31)


• Theatrical Trailer 2 (HD; 2:32)

Branded Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

You know you're in trouble when all you can think about during a film is something completely unrelated to what's actually going on. And for me, Branded came down to marveling over how much Leelee Sobieski looks and sounds like Helen Hunt. I kept thinking about how great it would be to see them as mother and daughter or even sisters in a film. That makes about as much sense as anything you'll actually see in Branded. The sad thing is the partners who wrote, produced and directed this film obviously have at least a modicum of craft, and there are some really great ideas buried in the morass of incomprehensibility that makes up the bulk of this film. Maybe Bradshaw and Doulerain just needed someone like Don Draper to come along and fashion their pitch a little more artfully.