7 | / 10 |
Users | 2.5 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 3.9 |
The year is 1845, the earliest days of the Oregon Trail, and a wagon team of three families has hired the mountain man Stephen Meek to guide them over the Cascade Mountains. Claiming to know a short cut, Meek leads the group on an unmarked path across the high plain desert, only to become lost in the dry rock and sage. Over the coming days, the emigrants must face the scourges of hunger, thirst and their own lack of faith in each other's instincts for survival. When a Native American wanderer crosses their path, the emigrants are torn between their trust in a guide who has proven himself unreliable and a man who has always been seen as the natural enemy.
Starring: Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Paul Dano, Will Patton, Zoe KazanDrama | 100% |
Western | 19% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.37:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English: LPCM 2.0
English SDH
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Two-disc set (1 BD, 1 DVD)
DVD copy
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A, B (C untested)
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 1.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Last year, with my wife in the passenger seat and our cat in a carrier perched on a stack of boxes in the back, I drove from western Maryland to Seattle in four days, which averages out to about 675 miles per day. The greatest inconvenience we experienced—besides the cat’s incessant meowing, which we eventually remedied by drugging her up with Benadryl—was getting stuck in Laramie, Wyoming, when a snowstorm temporarily shut down the highway heading west. We pulled into the only place that seemed to be open, a kind of mom-and-pop taxidermy museum/leatherworks shop, where we spent the next four hours chatting up the friendly owners, reading, and browsing the internet on our laptops while the cat kept warm on a graciously donated piece of sheepskin. The snow cleared, we grabbed a Thai lunch, and we were in Boise by nightfall. Some hardship. We never had to ford a river or scavenge for food. We didn’t have to worry about getting attacked by a hostile tribe or running out of water. No one died of dysentery or contracted cholera. The wild, wild west has been thoroughly tamed, crisscrossed with freeways and dotted with hotels and convenience stores.
Meek, cutoff.
The most immediately striking thing about Meek's Cutoff's 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer, of course, is the fact that the film was shot in the 1.37:1 Academy ratio, which is rarely used for movies nowadays. (Fish Tank is another contemporary example, which also uses the nearly square ratio to suggest confinement.) While this gives the film a slightly old-fashioned quality, everything else about the picture is thoroughly modern, and exemplary in both color and clarity. Chris Blauvelt's cinematography is simply gorgeous, rendering the landscape with a keen attention to lighting and mood. You'll notice some scenes at night that are exceptionally dark—so dark it's hard to make out anything but the puny light coming off an oil lantern—but from what I've read this is intentional, reflecting the reality of the absolute blackness out on the desert plains. Color is rich and natural, with creamy highlights and tight contrast, and the amount of detail visible in the image is impressive, showing off the textures of frocks and wool blankets, suede Indian garb and the characters' increasingly weathered faces. Grain is fine and untouched by noise reduction, and there are no apparent traces of edge enhancement or any other forms of digital boosting. It's simply not necessary when you have a source image this refined. Likewise, there are no overt compression problems or encode quirks. The film looks wonderful.
Meek's Cutoff is a great example of a film that doesn't need explosions or shootouts or car chases to have great sound design. The film's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track is a non-stop reproduction of the sounds of the natural world. In the first scene, a stream babbles all around us, as if we're sitting right in the middle of it, and this sense of immersion continues throughout, from the constant hum of insects and the crackle of fire to the hush of wind blowing over the desert. It sounds wonderful—all of it—rich, crisp, and detailed. I also really enjoyed the film's appropriately minimalist soundtrack, which consists of rising, vaguely electronic droning. It's almost pure tone, and it suits the story's isolation and unease perfectly. Even more interesting is the way that Reichardt intentionally makes some voices hard to understand, like when the women sit from a distance, trying to listen in on the men's decision-making process. Of course, it's not always like this; most of the time the dialogue is clear and well-balanced. The disc includes a Linear PCM 2.0 fold-down, as well as optional English SDH subtitles.
The only extras on the disc are a making-of featurette (1080i, 9:37), which is strictly a montage of behind-the-scenes footage—that is, no interviews or narration—and a theatrical trailer (1080p, 2:27).
If you've seen and enjoyed Kelly Reichardt's previous films—Old Joy or Wendy and Lucy—then you'll have a head start on understanding and appreciating Meek's Cutoff, a slow-paced survival story that trades the black-and-white simplicity of most westerns for feminism-tinted moral and historical complexity. Understandably, it isn't for everyone, but if you're looking for something more challenging and evocative than your average shoot-em-up, Meek's Cutoff is well worth checking out. It looks fantastic on Blu-ray, and comes in Oscilloscope's beautiful recycled cardboard packaging. Recommended!
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