6.4 | / 10 |
Users | 4.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.7 |
A college dean and a hospital volunteer are newlyweds restoring their beautiful house in New England. Their quiet lives are disrupted when they take in a mysterious lodger in the shape of a charismatic surgeon.
Starring: Alec Baldwin, Nicole Kidman, Bill Pullman, Bebe Neuwirth, George C. ScottFilm-Noir | 100% |
Thriller | Insignificant |
Crime | Insignificant |
Mystery | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.84:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
English SDH
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (C untested)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Malice is a film so thoroughly built on deception and misdirection that even its fans accuse it of cheating. The thriller performed well upon its initial release in 1993 and received some favorable reviews, but no one found it credible. The plot was overstuffed, and the characters' motivations, once you reached the end, were baffling. Who actually behaved that way? But as I've rewatched Malice over the years, I've gained a greater appreciation for the care with which director Harold Becker (Sea of Love) and screenwriters Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) and Scott Frank (Minority Report , Get Shorty) orchestrated Malice's string of lurid twists so that they all eventually link up, just not in any way you would have expected. As for motivations, the older I get, the more I find myself willing to believe that people are capable of anything. Malice does strain credulity but only in the way that most films do, which is that complicated schemes rarely play out as their makers intend. Or to quote arch-villain Vilos Cohaagen from the original Total Recall: "Frankly, I'm amazed it worked!" Malice benefitted from a lucky combination of talent both in front of and behind the camera. Besides its director and writers, it had the elegant lighting of the late Gordon Willis, whose photographic style transformed American cinematography from the Seventies forward in both thrillers and other genres (including All the Presidents' Men, which Willis lit like a thriller). The music was composed by the late Jerry Goldsmith, in whose score you can sometimes hear echoes of his previous year's work on Basic Instinct. The cast featured Nicole Kidman, then best known as Mrs. Tom Cruise, and rising star Alec Baldwin, the latter playing a character so reptilian and mysterious that the early promotional campaign simply featured his "God" monologue and nothing else. Little more was needed to pique viewers' curiosity than the sight of a coiled and confident Baldwin proclaiming: "Let me tell you something: I am God." Although Castle Rock Entertainment and New Line Cinema produced Malice, the initial theatrical and home video releases were handled by Columbia Pictures. By the time of the 2000 DVD, the rights had shifted to MGM, which has now licensed them to Kino Lorber for its "studio classics" Blu-ray line.
Malice's cinematographer, Gordon Willis, was one of several DPs of the Seventies to earn the nickname "The Prince of Darkness" because of his fondness for hiding detail. When he shot The Godfather, studio executives complained that no one could see Marlon Brando's eyes, to which Willis replied that this made the character more interesting. Years after shooting The Godfather, Part II, Willis conceded that he might have gone too far in darkening some of its scenes, adding: "I think Rembrandt went too far sometimes." Willis would no doubt have been amused by the current internet obsession with "crushed" blacks, because to him the notion that everything should always be visible was nonsense. Like a painter, he chose what the viewer should—and should not—see. Kino's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray has been taken from well-preserved source material (although I suspect it is not the original camera negative) and presents Willis' work with deep blacks and dark textures intact. Early scenes at the college, the Safian home and the hospital are brightly lit to establish a contrast with the increasingly dark and shadowy settings that predominate as the film develops, and the Blu-ray presentation presents this evolution effectively. Fine detail is effectively rendered with a natural grain pattern, a film-like texture and a color palette that gradually shades from flat to an almost noir-ish saturation. Some night scenes may strike viewers as excessively grainy, but anyone familiar with Willis' Godfather photography will know that he never shied away from heavy grain, if the light and shadow otherwise suited his taste. The only negative (and it's a minor criticism) is an occasional layer of video noise. Given the choice, however, I prefer minor amounts of noise to heavy-handed reduction. Kino has mastered Malice with an average bitrate of 23.96 Mbps, which is OK for a character-driven film without major action.
Malice's original Dolby SR track has been encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0, and it sounds very good. There's a nice example of precise sound editing in the sequence where Dr. Jed spends the night with Nurse Tanya in the bedroom above the Safians', and the scene cuts back and forth between his room, where the stereo is blasting, and their room below, where the sound is leaking from above. Other effects, such as the sounds of medical devices in the operating room, the bar where Jed and Andy meet for drinks, a torrential downpour at the ocean front and others that can't be described without spoilers are clearly rendered and, with a good surround decoder, spread out into the listening space. Dialogue is clear, and Jerry Goldsmith's effective score is precisely calibrated to the story's many twists and turns.
MGM released Malice on DVD in 2000 with only a trailer, which Kino has included here (1080p; 1.33:1; 1:57). Also included is a trailer (1080i; 1.85:1; 1:59) for The Onion Field, another Kino Studio Classics release.
As I indicated at the outset, Malice is a sustained exercise in misdirection, and it really shouldn't work at all. That it does is a tribute to everyone involved, especially the lead cast, all of whom pitch their performances on a razor's edge of believability, and several of whom have to negotiate some tricky turns. Their performances are consistently interesting, and in Kubrick's famous dictum, interesting is better than real. Even without extras, Kino has done a nice job on the Blu-ray, which is recommended.
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