8.3 | / 10 |
Users | 4.5 | |
Reviewer | 4.5 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
The film recounts the adventures of Gustave H., a legendary concierge at a famous European hotel between the wars, and Zero Moustafa, the lobby boy who becomes his most trusted friend.
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, F. Murray Abraham, Mathieu Amalric, Adrien Brody, Willem DafoeDrama | 100% |
Dark humor | 44% |
Period | 43% |
Comedy | Insignificant |
Adventure | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.30:1, 1:82:1, 1.33:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1, 1.85:1, 1.33:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1 (448 kbps)
French: DTS 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
Portuguese: Dolby Digital 5.1
Russian: DTS 5.1
Czech: Dolby Digital 5.1
Hungarian: Dolby Digital 5.1 (448 kbps)
Polish: Dolby Digital 5.1
Turkish: Dolby Digital 5.1
All DD dubs are 448kbps, both DTS dubs are at 48kHz, 24-bit.
English SDH, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Mandarin (Simplified), Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Turkish, Ukrainian
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
UV digital copy
Slipcover in original pressing
Region free
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 5.0 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
Sprinkled throughout Europe are any number of hidden gems for lodging, many of them incredibly opulent and harkening back to a gilded era of almost exaggerated luxury and impeccable customer service. Many of these establishments have equally ostentatious restaurants which in some cases at least offer almost an embarrassment of riches in terms of baked good like cakes and pastries. Imagine being a visitor at one of these redolent facilities, sitting back and being served one sugary morsel after another until you near the point of bursting and you might have a slight idea of the dense but sweet offerings that Wes Anderson has in store for filmgoers checking into The Grand Budapest Hotel. The Grand Budapest is not in fact in Hungary as one might expect but instead perched atop an improbably precarious mountaintop in the fictional republic of Zubrowska. It’s a six or seven layer cake of a hotel, pink and rose colored and existing in its own sugary ambience seemingly removed from the vagaries of time. Time is actually a rather fluid element in this latest Anderson film, for within just the first few minutes this sometimes intentionally twee filmmaker careens the viewer through several different eras, unfolding an interlocking series of flashbacks that reside within each other like nesting dolls. After a brief prelude that sees a young girl with a Grand Budapest Hotel book staring at a statue of the book's author, that author himself (Tom Wilkinson) begins to narrate his adventures at The Grand Budapest in the late sixties, when the grand structure had already begun to fall into a state of dissolution from which it would never completely recover. This author (now played by Jude Law) meets the hotel’s owner, the enigmatic Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), quickly befriending the man and relaxing over an perfectly crafted multicourse dinner as Zero regales the author with how he came to own the motel. That finally sets the film zinging back to yet another era, the early thirties, where a now young Zero (Tony Revolori) begins working at The Grand Budapest under the natty aegis of the establishment’s all knowing, all seeing concierge, Monsieur Gustave H (Ralph Fiennes). For film lovers who often lament the dearth of storytelling in a lot of contemporary film, there’s enough pure tale spinning in just the opening few minutes of The Grand Budapest Hotel to provide a rather filling main course. The fact that the film actually continues spinning out yarn after yarn, eventually more or less centering on a plot to deprive Gustave H of an inheritance, is testament to the fact that Anderson, for all his excesses, simply refuses to deal in cut and paste screenwriting. It’s an exceptionally concentrated approach that almost gluts the screen with an outré assortment of characters and situations, all unspooling in equally jam packed sets where so many bizarre accoutrements fill the frame that one almost wants to manically pause the film just to be able to take it all in.
The Grand Budapest Hotel is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in a rather bewildering array of aspect ratios (the bulk of the main reminiscence is in 1.33:1). (Note the 21st screenshot included with this review which alerts viewers to set their monitors to 16X9, surely one of the few times that particular warning has shown up on a Blu-ray.) Anderson and his cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman are obviously in a playful mood throughout this film, doing things like framing the sixties' material in a warped fisheye lens manner. Quite a bit of the film has been oddly color graded with a purplish hue overlaying the image, which can make flesh tones look slightly odd at times. Contrast is strong throughout the presentation, but the purplish tint sometimes adds just a hint of that color to the blacks. Despite some of these gambits, the presentation here is stellar all around, with exceptional fine detail revealing items like pill on costumes and even the very slightly plastic look of some of the makeup used to age Swinton. Anderson indulges in patently artificial looking elements like establishing shots of the hotel which intentionally resemble illustrations and which can appear soft when compared to the bulk of the live action footage. The film utilizes its actual European locations marvelously, with an almost candy coated approach that is ornate and exotic and which pops magnificently in high definition. The film rests comfortably on a BD-50 with no problematic artifacts to report.
The Grand Budapest Hotel's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix is quite subtle at times but is as aurally stuffed full of immersive events as the visual side of things. While narration and voiceover are understandably anchored front and center, there is fine attention to detail in terms of great placement of ambient environmental sounds that wonderfully recreates the cavernous interior of the hotel, whether it be bustling with activities in the early 1930s or nearly vacant in the late 1960s. Several of the film's key sequences are rather manic, including some of Gustave's attempts to outrun his adversaries, and in these moments the sound design becomes almost frenetic, but never overpowering. A charming musical score by Anderson's frequent collaborator Alexandre Desplat is effectively splayed through the surrounds. Dialogue is very cleanly presented on this track which boasts great fidelity and no issues of any kind to report.
- The Making of The Grand Budapest Hotel (1080p; 18:08)
- Cast (1080p; 3:24)
- Wes Anderson (1080p; 3:46)
In a world of cookie cutter entertainments, it is beyond refreshing to encounter something like The Grand Budapest Hotel, a deliberately dense offering that feels like a six or seven course meal comprised almost entirely of sweet desserts. Anderson's ultimate point in the film may be a bit vague (is it simply the melancholy nostalgia that frequently accompanies memories of a brighter time?), and so his destination might not seem particularly profound, but the journey itself is simply magnificent, full of bizarre characters and situations and always infused with his very dry, wry sense of humor. This is a film which virtually demands repeated viewings, for any given moment has so much occurring in the frame that it can become difficult to track it all. Luckily this Blu-ray is a first rate presentation which will make those repeated viewings a pleasure. You've never seen anything remotely like The Grand Budapest Hotel, and as far as I'm concerned, that's a very good thing indeed. Highly recommended.
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