Fireplace and Melodies for the Holidays Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

Fireplace and Melodies for the Holidays Blu-ray Movie Review

Throw Another Blu-ray on the Fire

Reviewed by Michael Reuben November 30, 2011

I grew up in the Midwest with real fireplaces, but ever since I became a Manhattan apartment dweller, video images of a wood-burning fireplace (or "WBF" in real estate ad parlance) have held a peculiar fascination for me. When I first moved to New York, one local station used to broadcast a Yule log image for all of Christmas Day, accompanied by holiday music, and I thought it was the coolest thing on television. (Those were far less competitive days in broadcasting.) For anyone not familiar with the intricacies of Big Apple apartments, a "WBF" is a rarity, and therefore a luxury item. Most apartments don't have them, and those that do lack any storage space for firewood that won't get you cited by the FDNY for fire code violations. You have to buy wood at some corner market in small bundles that will barely last an hour before fizzling down to embers -- at a price that makes home owners used to ordering half a cord delivered to the house laugh at city dwellers' vanity (and rightly so).

Local stations can no longer afford to waste much air time on a Yule log (though one PBS station sometimes shows it for an hour after midnight on Christmas Eve), but who needs broadcast when there's home video? There's now a choice of Blu-ray options to fill your hi-def screen with realistic flames and your sound system with holiday sentiment. The latest is from Image Entertainment, and it's more specialized than the HD Moods release previously reviewed by my friend and colleague Jeff Kauffman. That disc had Christmas as an option. On this one, the holiday theme is all there is.

Although the running time on Fireplace and Melodies is two hours, the imagery is relatively simple, alternating between medium shots of the fireplace and a few different close-ups of portions of the fire. In this respect, the program replicates the classic Yule log broadcasts, at least the ones that I recall, which were no-frills affairs. The reason for the two-hour running time is to accommodate the 24 selections on the musical track, all of them played solo on a piano, which is a nice touch. Most holiday albums use band or orchestral arrangements, but a single piano makes a more natural accompaniment to a crackling fireplace. (Yes, the crackles are part of the music track.)

If you prefer a non-musical soundtrack, you can select the alternate track that just has the fireplace crackling.

If you pay close attention, however, throughout the two-hour running time, you will notice that this fire never burns down. In a classic application of editing trickery, the disc's creators replay the same medium shot each time they cut back from a close-up, thereby giving the illusion of an eternal flame. (My local corner market proprietor would not be pleased.) It's a fair enough trick, given the artificiality of the entire construct. A real fire would throw off heat, smoke and odor, with intensities varying according to the age, type and quality of the wood.

The major weakness of Fireplace and Melodies is the failure to include a song list on the disc or to divide the musical selections into chapters so that individual songs can be selected. The entire program is one long chapter. This kind of mastering detail is so easy that consumer-grade DVD authoring software includes it as a matter of course. Omitting it from a commercially released Blu-ray is just plain lazy.

The complete song list is as follows:

1. Silent Night
2. Away in a Manger
3. What Child Is This
4. The First Noel
5. O Holy Night
6. It Came Upon a Midnight Clear
7. Deck the Halls
8. Twelve Days of Christmas
9. Carol of the Bells
10. Jingle Bells
11. We Wish You a Merry Christmas
12. Jolly Old St. Nicholas
13. O Christmas Tree
14. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
15. O Little Town of Bethlehem
16. O Come, O Come Emanuel
17. Hark the Herald
18. O Come All Ye Faithful
19. Joy to the World
20. Angels from the Realms of Glory
21. Good King Wenceslaus
22. We Three Kings
23. The Coventry Carol
24. Auld Lang Syne

Fireplace and Melodies for the Holidays Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

No information has been provided about the image origination, but the credits list a cinematographer, gaffer, colorist and post-production supervisor. That's the appropriate team for digital photography and completion on a digital intermediate, and the 1080p, AVC-encoded image on Fireplace and Melodies is consistent with such a source. Indeed, the image almost looks computer-generated, except that CGI fire typically has an unnatural quality that becomes obvious when you stare at it for too long. The brick background of the fireplace doesn't look like genuine brick to my eye, but I've seen plenty of fireplaces with simulated brick, and I'm sure it's a lot easier (and cheaper) to find one of those than to simulate the background with computer graphics. Certainly the wood looks detailed and the colors are vibrant. The blacks surrounding the flames are so good that they confused the image measuring tool we use at Blu-ray.com to gauge aspect ratios; the tool thought the image was "windowboxed", when it is, in fact, simply black at the outer edges.

Fireplace and Melodies for the Holidays Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The DTS lossless track is nominally 5.1, but the reproduction of a solo piano with an occasional crackle from the fireplace is not a task that demands much from a surround system, and the music remains in the front. Listeners are notoriously subjective in their judgments about what makes a piano sound good, but this one sounded pleasant and gently musical to my ear. The fireplace crackles are thankfully presented at a low volume. Real logs often pop loudly.

Fireplace and Melodies for the Holidays Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

I keep trying to imagine what kind of supplements this disc could include. An audio commentary describing how the kindling was selected?

Fireplace and Melodies for the Holidays Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I currently live in an apartment with a genuine "WBF", but I suspect I will play this disc at Christmas for sheer nostalgia. The music track alone is worth it, even without the ability to select individual songs. With caveats as noted, recommended.