May '24 Digital Week III

4K/UHD Releases of the Week 

Queen Rock Montreal/Live Aid 

(Mercury Studios)

When this concert was filmed in 1981, Queen was literally at the top of its game: the tour supported the smash album The Game, the group’s only U.S. number-one album, and Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon were a well-oiled machine cranking out 90 minutes of pure rock’n’roll every night. (I saw Queen in Toronto on this tour and can confirm.) Showcasing the band playing one Queen classic after another, from the opening, punkish “We Will Rock You” to the final celebratory “We Are the Champions,” the film is the most satisfyingly shot of the many Queen concert movies, with excellent camerawork and editing as well as tremendous sound. There are two 4K discs, one with the film in widescreen, the other in its original 1.33:1 ratio—both look and sound spectacular. Also on the first disc is rehearsal footage for Live Aid; the second disc contains the actual historic Live Aid performance. A commentary by May and Taylor rounds out this essential document of one of the great rock bands at the height of its powers. 

Dune—Part Two 

(Warner Bros)

Frank Herbert’s colossal epic sci-fi novel has been stubbornly resistant to movie adaptation, if David Lynch’s 1984 fatally flawed version (starring a vapid Kyle McLachlan as youthful savior Paul Artreides) and Denis Villenueve’s two long entries (with a less bad but not fully plausible Timothee Chalamet as Paul) are anything to go by. As in his first film, Villeneuve has a visual sense that’s more conventional than Lynch’s, but since there’s vastly superior technology to play with, it looks more imaginative than it is. The second film is more coherent, but about halfway through it starts to repeat itself visually, narratively and thematically, and the ending is a huge anticlimax. There’s a gorgeous 4K transfer; the accompanying Blu-ray disc includes more than an hour of extras that comprise on-set featurettes and cast, crew and director interviews.

One From the Heart 

(Lionsgate)

Francis Coppola’s 1982 musical bankrupted him and his studio, Zoetrope, even though it was a labor of love: wildly stylized and surreal, the film does have its defenders, but watching it makes one realize that, despite the bold colors, Vittorio Storaro’s stunning photography and Dean Tavoularis’ vivid production design, it’s a botch as a song-and-dance musical (although not as awful as Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love). This two-disc set tries to resurrect its reputation with the “Reprise” cut, apparently Coppola’s now-preferred version, on one disc and the original 1982 cut on the other. There are also a Coppola commentary and several extras, both old and new, including featurettes, interviews and deleted scenes. At least the film still looks smashing in both versions, especially in 4K. 

In-Theater Release of the Week

Time of the Heathen 

(Arbelos)

The restoration of this obscure 1960 B movie unearthed the interestingly offbeat talent of director Peter Kass, whose intriguing if crude drama follows Gaunt, a drifter who stumbles on a rape-murder and is forced to flee—along with Jessie, the victim’s young mute son—when those responsible try to frame him. Even at 76 minutes, the story comes off as thin, while the acting is, to put it politely, very uneven. Still, there’s a kernel of originality here, particularly in Ed Emshwiller’s moody B&W visuals and the relationship between Gaunt and Jessie (played by John Heffernan and Barry Collins), which is never exploitive. 

Blu-ray Releases of the Week 

Noryang—Deadly Sea 

(Well Go USA)

In the final film of his trilogy about Korean nautical history, director Kim Han-Min effectively paints on a large canvas to dramatize the pivotal battles in the 16th-century invasions of Korea by Japan, as venerable Korean admiral Yi Sun-Sin’s decisions led to the victorious end of the war. Imposingly mounted—with eye-popping battle sequences—Kim’s film suffers from gigantism at the characters’ expense: we know precious little more about the admiral at the end as we did at the beginning, when we first see him on his death bed. The hi-def image looks impressive.

Das Rheingold 

(Unitel)

Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle opens with the shortest of the four operas, which Wagner titled a “prelude,” a two-hour-plus setup of a long and winding epic that wends its way through many subplots over the following three large-scale works. In director Dmitri Tcherniakov’s new Berlin State Opera, the disharmonious setting is an antiseptically modern office building that removes the grandeur from Wagner’s meticulously worked-out conflict among gods and humans. But there’s first-rate music making—by the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin conducted by Christian Thielemann—and splendid performances by a cast led by Michael Volle’s Wotan, the supreme god, and Rolando Villazón’s mischievous Loge. The opera looks and sounds superb in hi-def.

CD Release of the Week 

Danny Elfman—Percussion Concerto 

(Sony Classical)

Anyone who knows the music of Danny Elfman—especially the title theme from The Simpsons or the soundtracks of various Tim Burton films—will be trodding familiar territory with the trio of works on this disc. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, since Elfman’s music is always spirited and attractive to the ear; here, in something like the Percussion Concerto, with the peerless Colin Currie as soloist, it gains weight without ponderousness. Wunderkammer and Are You Lost? round out this entertaining recording, their choral parts (the musicians themselves on the former and Kantos Chamber Choir on the latter) adding extra layers of interest. It’s all played with verve by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under versatile conductor JoAnn Falletta.