6.3 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
A documentary about actor/director Dennis Hopper, showing him at his home and studio putting together his film "The Last Movie."
Starring: Dennis Hopper, L.M. Kit Carson, Lois UrsoneDocumentary | 100% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.34:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.37:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Two-disc set (1 BD, 1 DVD)
DVD copy
Region A, B (C untested)
Movie | 3.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 3.0 | |
Extras | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
When actor and director Dennis Hopper died in 2010 at the age of 74, he was probably best known for his maniacal villains in films both mainstream (Howard Payne in Speed) and arthouse (Frank Booth in Blue Velvet), as well as for supporting parts that often provided some of a film's most memorable moments (e.g., his famous confrontation with Chrisopher Walken in True Romance or his alcoholic father in Hoosiers). All of these roles followed a long exile from Hollywood after the disastrous 1971 project known, appropriately, as The Last Movie, a film that has been little seen for almost 35 years and that Hopper was still trying to have re-released at the time of his death. The Last Movie was a dream project for Hopper, much like Heaven's Gate for Michael Cimino or Apocalypse Now for Francis Coppola. After directing and co-starring in Easy Rider, the success of which baffled studio executives grasping for relevance in a rapidly changing culture, Hopper was given a million dollars by Universal and free rein to do whatever he wanted. After spending most of 1970 shooting in Peru, Hopper returned to the U.S. with hundreds of hours of footage, which he proceeded to edit for months on his ranch in Taos, New Mexico, while Universal kept pressing for a release date. The cut that Hopper delivered in April 1971 was a trippy, disjointed tale that no one could follow. It had something to do with a film crew making a Western in Peru, which inspires an indigenous tribe to make their own movie with fake equipment and real violence. Universal dumped The Last Movie into a few theaters to fulfill their contractual obligations, then shelved it. Even less seen was the documentary called The American Dreamer, which was shot by L.M. Kit Carson and Lawrence Schiller during the editing of The Last Movie. Exploiting a loophole in Hopper's contract with Universal, a newly formed company called EYR (or "Educational Youth Recreation") hoped to show American Dreamer strictly on college campuses, a market that EYR believed to have moneymaking potential in the era before home video. But EYR carelessly booked American Dreamer into a commercial theater for one of their college screenings, and Universal's lawyers pounced with a vengeance. The film became unavailable for years. Etiquette Pictures, the recently established arthouse affiliate of Vinegar Syndrome, has partnered with the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis to return this piece of cinema history to circulation. The challenging restoration efforts are discussed in the "Video" section.
The American Dreamer was shot on 16mm film by co-director Lawrence Schiller and several additional camera operators. As explained in the restoration featurette included in the extras, the original negative was destroyed in a fire. The insert included with the Blu-ray/DVD set provides the following information about the restoration:
The American Dreamer was completely scanned & restored in the USA by Etiquette Pictures artists. The picture was scanned in 2k on an Arriscan, from the four remaining 16mm theatrical release prints. The raw scans were then edited together to create the best and most complete version possible. The film was then manually restored using the digital restoration suite PFClean. Color Grading was performed on DaVinci Resolve 11. The soundtrack was transferred on a Magna-Tech Sound Reproducer from the 16mm theatrical prints. The digital preservation master was approved by both Lawrence Schiller and L.M. Kit Carson. The final uncompressed picture & sound files are preserved for posterity on multiple LTO tapes.A few examples in the restoration featurette demonstrate how the image from the theatrical prints had to be re-colored because of age-related fading. Etiquette's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray has the appearance of a 35mm blowup release print of the 16mm original, after said release print has been in circulation for several weeks—which is to say that the image is reasonably detailed but seriously grainy, and significant print damage remains despite the restoration. Numerous vertical scratches run from top to bottom, and hairs and other flaws are sometimes visible, possibly dating back to the original photography. Still, the colors are remarkably strong for the 16mm film stocks of the period, and the restoration is free of obvious digital sharpening or grain reduction. American Dreamer was a seat-of-the-bell-bottoms project made years before anyone could even imagine the kind of miniature digital cameras available to documentary filmmakers today. Etiquette Pictures has made the most of the extant sources to present the film as a product of its era, and their efforts deserve high marks. Anyone questioning my high video score for this image should be prepared to explain why the Blu-ray image (from a master approved by the filmmakers) is not an accurate representation of the source. As an additional mark of Etiquette's commitment to the best possible presentation, American Dreamer has been mastered at an average bitrate of 34.46 Mbps, which is probably essential for preserving all the grain in the image without compression artifacts.
As described in the restoration notes quoted above, the Blu-ray's mono soundtrack has been taken from the theatrical prints. It is presented in lossless DTS-HD MA 1.0. Here, again, the limitations of the source must be considered. While the soundtrack is generally free of pops, clicks or crackling, a persistent hiss accompanies the entire film. It's the kind of background interference that the then-newly developed Dolby noise reduction was eliminating in professional studios but was almost certainly unavailable at the time on portable equipment available to crews like the one that shot American Dreamer. Still, as one's ear adjusts, the dialogue (or, more often, monologue by Hopper) is intelligible, and the style of the Sixties tunes sprinkled throughout the film is easily recognized. One can also make out the lyrics of Gene Clark's title song, "American Dreamer".
Even though The American Dreamer was made in 1971, it is tempting to regard the film as an artifact of the Sixties, in part because Easy Rider remains a cinematic landmark of the era. Certainly much of what Schiller and Carson captured with their cameras plays today like a string of Sixties cliches: the flower-power clothing and hairstyles, the hippie commune surroundings, the would-be guru spouting pseudo-profundities, the paranoia about the establishment. But eras are notoriously hard to define, and these phenomena say more about Dennis Hopper than about the time in which the film was made. Most people were living ordinary lives while the events filmed by Schiller and Carson were unfolding in the desert of New Mexico. I know I was. But then, most of us aren't American dreamers. Recommended.
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