Living Landscapes: Four Seasons Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.0

Living Landscapes: Four Seasons Blu-ray Movie Review

An unusual variety of images and an excellent soundtrack help make this one of the stronger releases from Living Landscapes.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 8, 2010

Having four distinct seasons can be both a blessing and a curse. The magic of watching the weather and environment cycle through its various changes has delighted casual observers and more self-reflective artists for millennia. The whole Romantic movement might be traced to the mirror images of external seasonal phenomena reflecting what is going on inside the mind of any individual artist in the movement. Art flies out the window when you’re confronting everyday hassles like trying to get out of a snowdrift or dealing with supposedly minor issues like torrential rain or piles of autumn leaves blocking storm drains. Even those of us who live in more temperate climates can forget about the beauty of the seasons when we’re dealing with literally months of nonstop rain, as those of us in the Pacific Northwest have been experiencing now for what seems a millennium in and of itself. And so it’s somewhat refreshing to be able to vicariously experience the joy and beauty of all Four Seasons on this new Living Landscapes release, another in the series of “ambient television” offerings which exploits the image quality of Blu-ray and HDTV’s while not insisting you pay complete and absolute attention to what’s going on.

Lovely wildflowers help kick off our journey through four seasons.

Four Seasons offers both a “Play All” mode, which takes the viewer sequentially through the changing seasons, and also a “Loop” mode for individual seasons, which is interesting, but which presents some problems with the accompanying soundtrack music, which is inartfully edited at the loop point. Choosing the “Play All” option takes the viewer on an incredibly scenic tour through a wide variety of environments and weather, some of which at least seems to have been culled from some previous Living Landscapes releases.

Spring starts out in Bear Valley with some beautiful purple and yellow wildflowers. Director and editor Michael Heumann also trots out a few bells and whistles on this release and gives us a fun time lapse section showing various flowers opening their blossoms to the increasing sunlight. That same sunlight permeates more footage of California as Spring comes to full flower. Summer offers quite a disparate set of images, including some still snow strewn peaks in the Rockies, to the desert-like expanses of Oregon’s Dunes. A really gorgeous section of ocean side beach footage is from the islands of Africa’s Seychelles, including Mahé, Praslin and La Digue. The aquamarine water and blanched white sand are really remarkable looking in this segment.

Fall doesn’t exploit the beautiful maples of Vermont, as one might expect, but instead starts in Sonoma Wine County with glistening grapes reaching harvest stage. A colorful hot air balloon soars over the vineyards as the light begins that subtle change toward autumnal colors. Though the onscreen banner states “Mt. Zion National Park,” I’m assuming the footage in this fall section comes from Utah’s Zion National Park. It features a lovely stream running through a canyon with some positively New England-esque trees in full fall color. A bridging segment called “Fall into Winter” shows some high altitude footage from Torres del Paine in Patagonia, Chile, including some of the local wildlife, like llamas. Winter rears its snowy head with some beautiful footage from the Sierra Nevadas and Yosemite. Some of the most unique footage of this release is various winter scenes of Lake Tahoe, including some really beautiful shots of winter mists lifting off of the lake surface.

Heumann does a good job of capturing these various environments without a lot of busy camerawork. Typically we get either static shots or slowly panning shots which exploit various aspects of the vistas being filmed. Aside from the variety of the weather and topography itself, there’s a good variegated use of far shots, medium shots and close-ups to offer some visual variety to the proceedings. Also augmenting this release is some fine music, including original compositions by Gary Malkin, Radhika Miller, Jose Reynolds and Kollasuyo, as well as some evergreens like segments culled from Vivaldi’s own musical ode to the Four Seasons.

This “ambient television” idiom has both its proponents and detractors. While it may seem odd to use your ultra-high tech television as digital wallpaper, as it were, these Living Landscapes releases do present a no-hassle way to show off your system without insisting that visitors sit down and actually completely pay attention. With a soundtrack as enchanting as the one on Four Seasons, this particular release also functions very well as “background information,” even if you’re not in the same room all of the time. The good news is that when you do deign to pay attention, there’s actually something here to watch. You may even turn into a new adherent of Romanticism watching the parade of seasons pass by. And you don’t even have to shovel any snow.

Living Landscapes: Four Seasons Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Four Seasons is presented on Blu-ray with a generally excellent VC-1 encode in 1080i and an aspect ratio of 1.78:1. The best part of this Blu-ray is the astounding variety of colors, from the wonderful purples and yellows of the opening wildflower scenes, to the really incredibly well saturated beach scenes in the Seychelles, to the golden lit fall scenes in Sonoma, to the more muted ambience of Patagonia in early winter, to the white-filled forests of the Sierra Nevadas. The palette here is incredibly diverse, with excellent saturation. Detail throughout this Blu is also very good. You can count the hairs on a llama's head if you're so inclined, and the flowers show off every little variation in their blossoms. Sun glinting off of a wet grape refracts beautifully, and a lush rainbow shimmers between some rain and sun. As with some others in the Living Landscapes series, we get some very occasional interlacing artifacts, typically in things like busy leafwork. These are actually quite minimal and not very distracting, but they may bother some obsessive videophiles.

Living Landscapes: Four Seasons Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

For the first time, a Living Landscapes release features a DTS 5.1 mix, and the upgrade in audio is quite excellent, especially when coupled with the nice variety of music by artists like Gary Malkin, Radhika Miller, Jose Reynolds and Kollasuyo. Aside from what sounds like low level wind in the opening wildflower sequence, I personally didn't hear much if any ambient sounds mixed into this release, again a first for a Living Landscapes release. The music here is reproduced with excellent fidelity and really good dynamic range. From ethnic flutes to piano and guitar, everything sounds crystal clear and is well mixed into the surrounds for an enveloping sonic experience. My only qualm about the soundtrack, and one which is not tied directly to the music or DTS track itself, is the clumsy handling of the "Loop" individual season play mode, where pieces get cut off in mid-phrase as the loop starts over. A little more care in that transitional aspect would make the "Loop" offering more attractive to those who are actually listening to the soundtrack. Otherwise, this is a solid offering and probably the best all around soundtrack Living Landscapes has yet offered.

Living Landscapes: Four Seasons Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplements are offered on this budget priced Blu-ray.

Living Landscapes: Four Seasons Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If you haven't checked out any of these "ambient television" releases, you could do a lot worse than to start with Four Seasons. This one of the most visually diverse offerings from Living Landscapes, and its DTS 5.1 soundtrack is very enjoyable on its own, removed from its accompanying status.