6.4 | / 10 |
Users | 4.5 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Alex Owens is a female dynamo: steel worker by day, exotic dancer by night. Her dream is to get into a real dance company, though, and with encouragement from her boss/boyfriend, she may get her chance. The city of Pittsburgh co-stars. What a feeling!
Starring: Jennifer Beals, Michael Nouri, Lilia Skala, Sunny Johnson (II), Belinda BauerRomance | 100% |
Music | 46% |
Drama | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
French: Dolby Digital 2.0
Spanish: Dolby Digital 2.0
English SDH, French, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 3.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Beginning with Saturday Night Fever in 1977, American filmmaking briefly reforged the connection between popular music and mass entertainment that had been broken with the decline of musical theater. Fame, Footloose, Dirty Dancing and especially Flashdance are all examples of commercial hits that were also accompanied by best-selling singles and albums as successful as the films themselves. But Hollywood stumbled into this new style of "soundtrack musical" by accident. In the golden age of Rodgers and Hammerstein, shows arrived from Broadway prepackaged with story, songs and sometime even stars already attached. The "soundtrack musical" was different. Characters didn't burst into song to express their feelings, so that songs weren't written to a script (or "book", in theatrical parlance). The songs had to work independently of the film to be suited for radio play (and later, music video), but at the same time they had to serve a purpose within the film. It's no accident that dancing replaced singing in movie musicals after Saturday Night Fever. It was kinetic, it was visually interesting, and it was a lot easier to work into a film script than singing. Still, studio executives remained uneasy with the format, because they didn't have Broadway as a filter to separate the flops from the hits. Saturday Night Fever was made on the strength of John Travolta's popularity. Everything after that was a gamble, usually made against great resistance. Flashdance was one such project. Paramount had so little faith in the film that it hedged its bets by selling off 25% of the rights shortly before release. When a preview audience scored the film highly, Paramount executives accused director Adrian Lyne and producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer of fudging the numbers. Polygram Records so underestimated album sales that the record went temporarily out of print shortly after the film debuted. No one expected what Bruckheimer describes in the 2007 documentaries included on this Blu-ray: patrons leaving a theater in Westwood, crossing the street to buy the record, then returning to the theater for a second viewing. During the summer of 1983, the look and the sound of Flashdance were everywhere, as anyone who remembers that year can attest. The film's influence on fashion, music and general attitude was unmistakable. At a mere eighteen years of age, first-time star Jennifer Beals became one of the world's most admired women, because so many female viewers projected their hopes and aspirations onto her character, Alex. (Much the same thing would happen seven years later with Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, which also told a variation on the Cinderella story.) At least two songs from the soundtrack, "Flashdance . . .What a Feeling" and "Maniac", remain pop standards to this day.
Continuing the theme of contrasts, Lyne and cinematographer Don Peterman (Men in Black) shot a movie about artistic aspiration in the gritty urban style pioneered by Lyne's countryman Alan Parker for Fame (1980). Lyne then softened the imagery by dispersing smoke into the air in almost every shot such that, according to editor Bud Smith, there were always a few takes that couldn't be used because the actors were obscured. (Midway through production, the studio panicked and ordered that no more smoke be used, and Lyne posted an assistant to watch for the approach of any studio people, so that the smoke machine could be hidden before they arrived.) The result is an often soft, delicately colored image of a type that has gone almost entirely out of fashion in today's world of digital photography and post-production. Paramount/Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is a superb rendition of Lyne's and Peterman's vision, as it was seen by audiences in 1983. The grain and texture of the imagery have been retained without diminishment, but they never become obtrusive (unless one is allergic to even a hint of grain). No attempt has been made to compensate for the original photography's softness with digital tools, which is the correct choice, because the image has fine detail that artificial sharpening or excessive contrast could easily overwhelm. Besides, Lyne and Peterman carefully designed Flashdance for visual contrast between the muted everyday world and the garishly "hyper-real" stage show at Mawby's, with its intense colors and bright lights. A Blu-ray treatment that failed to render both ends of this contrast accurately would not do justice to the film. This Blu-ray does. Blacks are deep and accurate, and shadow detail is properly rendered in places where you're supposed to see it. Minutia of hair, faces, costumes and the rusting Pittsburgh cityscape are readily discernible, even if they don't pop off the screen in every scene (they're not supposed to). The average bitrate of 26.44 Mbps is sufficient for the rapid dancing scenes, primarily because there are more than a few episodes of simple, quiet conversations in between. In any case, I saw no compression artifacts.
Flashdance was released in Dolby Surround and has been remixed for 5.1, which is here presented in lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1. As is typical of Paramount's remixes, the approach is conservative and does not attempt to create gimmicky rear channel effects where none are warranted. The stereo separation in the original mix was often effective in placing sounds of such locations as the steel mill to the left or right of characters, and those effects have been preserved. Otherwise, the chief beneficiary of the lossless multi-channel treatment is the historic soundtrack. The songs sound airier and more "opened up" than I have ever heard them before, from the moment Irene Cara's voice comes in over the opening titles. The dialogue is occasionally overwhelmed by Giorgio Moroder's instrumental score, but this has always been the case with Flashdance. The sound mixers understood what was important, and dialogue took a backseat to the beat.
Paramount has released four DVD editions of Flashdance. The first in 2002 was featureless. A "special collector's edition" in 2007 added the array of features that have been ported over to this Blu-ray; that edition was reissued in 2010 (without the "special collector's edition" label) under the same cover used for the Blu-ray. In between, in 2009, Paramount re-released the featureless disc as part of their "I Love the 80s" series but included with it a limited edition CD of the soundtrack. Some pre-release announcements indicated that the soundtrack CD would also accompany the Blu-ray, but unless there is a retailer special of which I am unaware, that is a mistake. No CD is included. Note that all of the featurettes listed below are essentially part of the same documentary, cut up into segments.
Once upon a time, popular music and Broadway musicals moved in sync, but after the Beatles, the Sixties and rock music, popular taste shifted, which I think is the real reason why traditional movie musicals have never again caught on, despite the occasional exception like Chicago. The "soundtrack musical" might have survived to become a perennial, but it suffered from one flaw that studio executives simply cannot tolerate: It didn't have a formula that they could understand. Successful soundtrack musicals usually arrive from unlikely stories that no one "gets" except their creators. When someone tries to "reverse engineer" one of these films from the soundtrack backwards, the result is almost always stillborn (e.g., Alan Moyle's 1980 Times Square). Nothing discomfits the executive suite more than a creative process they can't keep some sort of rein on. (It's not an unreasonable concern; look what Heaven's Gate did to United Artists.) Whether or not Flashdance is to your personal taste, it should be recognized for the marvel it is: a genuine artistic statement produced at just the moment when corporate consolidation was hardening Hollywood's shell against precisely such endeavors. A worthy Blu-ray presentation of an iconic film. Highly recommended.
1983
Retro VHS Collection
1983
Remastered | Paramount Presents #4
1983
40th Anniversary Edition
1983
40th Anniversary Edition
1983
40th Anniversary Edition
1984
35th Anniversary Edition
1987
1983
2014
2006
2008
2013
2018
1957
Dance-Off Edition
2008
Young Man of Music / Warner Archive Collection
1950
Warner Archive Collection
1955
Reissue
1972
2007
2010
1948
2007
2010
2009
2009