7.2 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
From dawn to dusk, a few hours in the life of Monsieur Oscar, a shadowy character who journeys from one life to the next. He is, in turn, captain of industry, assassin, beggar, monster, family man...
Starring: Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Denis Lavant, Kylie Minogue, Jeanne DissonForeign | 100% |
Drama | 89% |
Imaginary | 8% |
Dark humor | 8% |
Video codec: MPEG-2
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
French: Dolby Digital 5.1
English
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Have you ever had a dream which when upon waking and thinking about it obviously made no (or at least little) sense whatsoever, and yet while you were actually dreaming it seemed to be the absolute height of logic and rationality? For those of you who haven’t had this experience, there’s a way to recreate it: simply watch Holy Motors, one of the oddest, most quasi-hallucinatory films in recent memory. While it can't be stated that Holy Motors moves with anything approaching a standard narrative form, while it's unspooling it at least has a certain cohesion of tone, if not of content, but after it's over, you may be wondering what the frell you've just witnessed. Written and directed by controversial French filmmaker Leos Carax (Pola X), Holy Motors might seem to be about film itself (more about that in a bit), but is it really? Holy Motors begins with a bizarre scene of a man (some sources state this is played by Carax himself, others state it's star Denis Levant, but I personally found it impossible to accurately tell due to the deliberate obfuscation involved) waking up in a hotel room next to an airport. Strangely, even though we can clearly see jets landing outside seemingly within inches of his room’s window, the only sounds we hear are the lapping of waves and occasional call of seabirds. This man affects an odd, almost dance like, walk over to a wall covered in an abstract wall paper that resembles birch trees in a forest. The man finds an outcropping of sorts in the wall and bends down to peer at it. Is it a porthole, a window into an unseen dimension? No—it’s a lock, and just as in many dreams, the man suddenly realizes he has the key to the lock literally growing out of one of his fingers. The door is opened—with difficulty—and the man stumbles into a hallway with a seizure inducing flickering light. There’s another set of doors, and the man pushes through them to find himself—in a movie house. And that’s when Holy Motors gets really weird.
Holy Motors is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Indomina Films with an MPEG-2 encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1.
As I have mentioned
several times in my reviews, I am not an especial fan of the look of Red shot features, so I probably would not have
given this the stellar review my colleague Dr. Svet Atanasov did in
his write up on the British
release, but I also have to wonder if perhaps the fact that this domestic release utilizes the MPEG-2 codec (as opposed
to the British use of AVC)
has contributed to what I personally would call a kind of drab looking outing some of the time. The film is simply swathed
in shadows and
darkness a lot of the time, and unfortunately that tendency when added to the Red proclivity for kind of flat, textureless
appearances add up to
what seems to my eyes a sometimes overly soft and ill defined presentation. That said, things pop really well in the well
lit sequences (see
screenshot two of Eva Mendes for a great example). In those moments, fine detail improves dramatically and colors are
also much more robust.
But a lot of this presentation left me wanting more—more detail, more visual information in the dimly lit parts of the frame
and just overall more
crispness and clarity.
(Rather oddly, all of the supplementary material is in fact encoded via AVC.)
Unlike the British release's lossless audio offerings, Indomina's version presents the soundtrack via only a lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 mix. What's here is certainly fine sounding, and some might argue about how much more lossless audio could have added to a film that is frankly not awash in huge sound effects or overwhelming immersion to begin with, but of course most Blu-ray consumers want lossless audio one way or the other. Fidelity here is quite good, and the surround activity, while sometimes quite subtle, is nicely done, especially due to the fact that Oscar visits such a huge variety of environments. Dialogue is clean and the entire mix is well prioritized.
As I watched Holy Motors, I said to myself, "This is exactly the kind of film [my colleague] Svet Atanasov would love," and after I completed watching and writing about it, I noticed that in fact Dr. Atanasov had recently reviewed the British Blu-ray release of the film, giving it a more or less unqualified rave. Further poking around our site revealed that our feature film reviewer Brian Orndorf had also given his response to the movie here. I have to say my overall response to the film is probably closer to Brian's than to Svet's. I can admire the film's strangeness, its technical craft and its oddly hypnotic tone, but at the same time I was rarely captivated on an emotional level as to what was going on. Holy Motors succeeds admirably as an intellectual exercise, but any film lover will tell you the best movies are the ones that speak directly to the heart. This Blu-ray offers very good video (with some notable caveats) and acceptable (lossy) audio, but it also comes with some excellent supplementary material. For those who are on the hunt for something truly unusual, Holy Motors comes Recommended.
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