5.6 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.0 | |
Overall | 2.0 |
Writer Hall Baltimore, in career decline, comes to a small town during a book tour, and becomes involved in the murder investigation of a young girl. In a dream, he is approached by a youthful ghost named V, whose connection to the murder is unclear.
Starring: Val Kilmer, Bruce Dern, Elle Fanning, Ben Chaplin, Joanne WhalleyHorror | 100% |
Surreal | 12% |
Thriller | 7% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.00:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.00:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH, French, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
UV digital copy
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 1.5 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 2.0 |
Who'd've thought we'd see the day when the once-great Francis Ford Coppola, the New Hollywood icon who brought us The Godfather and
Apocalypse Now, would be reduced to releasing a cringe-worthy straight-to-video horror movie? Twixt, or Twixt Now and
Sunrise—as it was originally titled—was born out of a Poe-like, particularly melancholy dream the filmmaker had a few years ago after a drunken
night in Istanbul, and early reports
of the experimental project were intriguing. After shooting the film in 2010, Coppola devised a way to cut, edit, or otherwise remix the footage in real-
time via an iPad interface, and he planned to take the movie on a 30-city tour—along with star Val Kilmer and composer Dan Deacon—tweaking the
material live in accordance with the mood and reactions of the audience.
This was tentatively praised as a possible answer to "what's next?" in cinema—increasing interaction, a more concert-like atmosphere—but 20th
Century Fox abruptly cancelled the tour for reasons unexplained. Unexplained, yes, but not inexplicable, especially once you've seen the movie here in
its locked
down, definitive form. Twixt is awful. Embarrassingly awful. I can't believe one of the best directors of the '70s made this
awful. The films of Coppola's latter-day career renaissance—Youth Without Youth and Tetro—haven't been great, but they at least feel
like fully-formed works with comprehensible stories. Twixt, though, operates with a sub-David Lynchian dream logic, and worse, it's almost
indescribably tasteless. Not only is it bland—the story has all the excitement of a bowl of oatmeal—but Twixt is more unfortunately tasteless in
the "lacking aesthetic judgement" sense of the word. You know that selective coloring effect overused by amateurish wedding and baby
photographers? The one where they'll desaturate an image to black and white but leave a rose, say, in startlingly gaudy red? Coppola goes nuts with
that trick, giving the impression that he's lost all artistic discernment.
One of Coppola's further experiments in low(er)-budget digital filmmaking, Twixt was shot with a mid-range HD camcorder and then wildly manipulated in post-production. It's hard to judge the film's 1080p/AVC-encoded presentation—framed in the rather unconventional 2.00:1 aspect ratio—by any standards other than its own. Aesthetics are highly subjective—I personally think this is an ugly, tacky film—so I'll try to stick here with what you'll see in the image. Namely, lots of inconsistency. Some scenes are wicked-sharp, with easily visible fine detail in faces and clothing, while others are gauzy and soft, with noticeably indistinct textures. Likewise, some night scenes are buzzing with source noise, while others have clearly been smoothed out with some manner of digital noise reduction. We can presume that, color-wise, the film probably looks as intended, but the grading is harsh and intentionally stylized, with lots of day-for-night digital conversions, selective coloring, and amped up or flattened contrast. It is what it is, and the best I can say is that the Blu-ray release is definitely a truer-to-source-and-intent version of the film than the DVD.
The film features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track that's somewhere twixt "acceptable" and "excellent." That is, this is a workmanlike mix that gets the job done and rarely draws any attention to itself. Projection is good from the front speakers, and the rears pipe up often for quiet ambience—town sounds, wind, sirens, a tolling bell—along with offering some bleeding room for the witchy musical cues of Baltimore-based electro- wizard Dan Deacon. Dialogue is clear and consistently balanced, and there are no major sound quality issues to report. The disc includes optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles.
New York Observer critic Rex Reed wrote of Youth Without Youth, "The only way to survive [it] is dead drunk. The least Mr. Coppola could do is provide free Cabernet Sauvignon from his own vineyards. One bottle going in, another bottle staggering out." It was maybe an unfair assessment of Coppola's 2007 drama—which is at the very least watchable—but it could certainly apply to Twixt, which is soon to appear on every list of worst films by the best directors. It's an irredeemable movie, and nothing says more than 20th Century Fox's decision to nix Coppola's planned 30-city theatrical tour and instead shuffle the film out onto video, with no fanfare, two years after it was made. At best, it's worth watching as a curiosity, a failed experiment by the man who was once the high hope of American moviemaking.
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