5.7 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
A biography of the civil-rights activist and labor organizer Cesar Chavez.
Starring: Michael Peña, America Ferrera, Rosario Dawson, Jacob Vargas, Yancey AriasBiography | 100% |
History | 53% |
Drama | 22% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English SDH, Spanish
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
UV digital copy
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 1.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
If you live in or near a major American city, chances are you’ve seen two major street name changes over the past few decades. While attended with a bit of controversy here and there, metropolises across the fruited plain started renaming major arterials after Martin Luther King, Jr., in honor of the slain civil rights leader. Frequently the streets named after King would pass through largely African American neighborhoods and in fact the renaming became a source of civic pride for these neighborhoods. Some years later, a number of major cities started efforts to rebrand an avenue here or a highway there after Cesar Chavez. Perhaps surprisingly, opposition to these renamings was somewhat more vocal. Why? Here in my hometown of Portland, there was a news report I still remember seeing where a woman was interviewed about the proposed name change here, and she rather intensely asked, “Why are we doing this? Why are we renaming a street after someone nobody even knows about?” And that may be at least one salient lesson to be learned about not just the street name changes which swept our country, but also about the rather bland if occasionally moving Cesar Chavez, a film that purports to detail the farm worker unionizer’s efforts in the late sixties and early seventies. Unlike Martin Luther King, Jr.’s struggle, however, Chavez’s is simply not as well known to the general public, even to those who are old enough to have (probably dim) memories of Chavez’s epic grape boycott maneuver which ultimately brought a host of growers to the bargaining table to guarantee better working conditions for the largely peripatetic migrant working class pickers who populated the fields of California and other states. Cesar Chavez starts then with a deficit of general awareness of its subject, and unfortunately the film simply assumes that viewers will either know or be able to infer enough context to make sense of what’s going on. That’s a fatal flaw in a film that serves more as a hagiography of its very worthy subject than as any kind of relatively objective film biography.
Cesar Chavez is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.40:1. Though some sources are stating this was digitally shot, it sure looks like film to me, especially when director Diego Luna and cinematographer Enrique Chediak push some of the darker sequences, making grain more apparent and adding a slight fuzziness to the look of the film. There's a nice filmic texture overall to this piece, one that feels suitably "thick" (for want of a better term). That said, contrast is sometimes lacking, leading to murkiness that is only exacerbated by the frequently dust blown outdoors locations. A lot of the film is bathed in amber, a choice which suitably offers a visual analog to the sun drenched (and usually parched) working conditions of the pickers, but which minimally depletes fine detail. Colors are accurate looking, though are frequently not very vivid. The overall appearance of Cesar Chavez is quite soft most of the time. There are quite a few archival sequences here culled from old news reports. These look like they were sourced from ancient (interlaced) video, and frequently suffer from pretty bad softness and issues like ghosting. There are no image stability issues, and similarly no overt signs of aggressive image manipulation.
Cesar Chavez offers a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix that presents some nice ambient environmental sounds in the many field based scenes. A couple of tumultuous meetings offer a wealth of surround activity as tempers flare out of control, and there are even occasional gunshots which perk up the LFE channel. Dialogue and the ethnically tinged score are both presented very cleanly and clearly in this problem free track.
Unfortunately, the story of Cesar Chavez has simply not redounded to the extent that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s has, and that lack of general knowledge probably doomed this effort from the get go. We simply jump into a story not knowing much if anything about the main characters and perhaps even less about the general state of affairs in the migrant farm worker community. Cesar Chavez's heart is in the right place, and the performances are genuine enough, but more time should have been spent explicitly detailing Chavez's background and the plight of the afflicted whom he struggled so valiantly to help. Technical merits here are very strong and fans of the film should be well pleased with this Blu-ray release, despite the paucity of special features.
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