"Meet Joe Black". A Review Of The 1999 Film Now Reissued On A 2011 BLU RAY.

"...I Heard A Voice In My Sleep Last Night. What Did It Say?
It Said 'Yes'…"

"Meet Joe Black" is the kind of film that elicits derision and affection in equal measure - well if it’s one of your guilty pleasures – then you need to own it on BLU RAY.

I've had the now defunct HD-DVD format of Martin Brest’s 1999 movie for a while now to have the film in High Definition – and this Blu Ray reissue uses the same menus and extras. But it's the print-quality that will be the big draw here. With an aspect that fills the entire screen, the transfer is lush, detailed and a pleasure to look at practically all of the time. In short – “Meet Joe Black” is beautiful on Blu Ray...

Mixing the supernatural with romance could have been awkward and even 'silly' in places (it sometimes is - Pitt speaking jive in the hospital to a black woman who knows he’s the Grim Reaper is cringing), yet Brest has achieved an assured beauty throughout. This is a nice film in so many ways. And possibly because of its themes of death and loss and how we live our lives, it manages real warmth and a rare intelligence. The growing attraction between Claire Forlani (as Susan Parrish) and Brad Pitt (as Joe Black) is nicely set up in a café at the beginning of the film and then played out against preparations for her father’s 65th birthday in his mansion throughout the film (Death has taken over his body and is being shown around by a reluctant Hopkins). Thomas Newman’s lovely score also adds a classy feel to the film too and is used when it’s needed.

But it’s the cast that make you watch - Claire Forlani is luminously beautiful as Daddy’s ‘too busy to be in love’ daughter – she has eyes that could make most men literally lose their balance – while Anthony Hopkins as the corporate mogul William Parrish brings a sheer decency to the piece that gives it a beating heart (his dialogue above). The scene where he gets a heart attack in his office and the voice of death condescends and ridicules his advice to his daughter – is brilliant. You ‘feel’ his terror and disorientation. Throw in great supporting roles for Jake Weber as the dastardly boardroom schemer Drew, Marcia Gay Harden and Jeffrey Tambor as William’s sister Allison and his bumbling but honest friend Quince – and it zips along very nicely indeed despite its 3-hour length. Pitt is hugely impressive too - handsome, sinister, controlled and funny too. He may be eye-candy to some, but there’s real talent there – and often.

Apart from a 'Photo Montage' (still photographs of the cast and crew on location and on sets), there’s a lone extra called "Spotlight On Location" that features interviews with all the key people. It's barely 10-minutes long (and very lo-fi in terms of picture quality) but its hugely entertaining. You can literally feel the awe and affection with which Anthony Hopkins is held by the entire cast - and short as it is, the featurette provides genuine insights into why and how the movie got made.

Audio is English 5.1 with Subtitles in French and English For The Deaf And Hard Of Hearing.

“Meet Joe Black” is never going to trouble an Oscar List or be a discussion point at the next MENSA Annual General Meeting (too gushingly romantic), but for those who have been touched by its themes of enjoying life while you have it – and love getting another chance – on BLU RAY it’s a winner.

“I want to see you get swept away…” William Parrish says to his daughter. Well, now you can…

“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”. A Review of the 2010 Reissue - A New Benchmark In Transfer Quality For BLU RAY.

"...You're The Apple Strudle Of Mine Eyes..."

Little prepares you for the print on this - it's simply extraordinary.

It’s been frame-by-frame restored using the Lowry Digital Restoration process - which was used on all 20 of the Bond films, the three Godfather movies, the original Star Wars Trilogy, the Indiana Jones films and even the transfer of Avatar.

But this 2010 Blu Ray/DVD Combination pack reissue of 1968's "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" has to be a benchmark – even for them.

After the excellent 2DVD set issued a few years back, I didn't think that much more improvement could be wrenched out of the negative, but it has been. This transfer is practically faultless - BEAUTIFUL to look at for the whole duration of the movie. Directed with style and flair by Ken Hughes and filmed in Super Panavision Technicolor – it’s a sumptuous feast of colours - you see their period clothes anew, the details in the inventions inside Caractacus Pott’s hillside home, the uncluttered English countryside, the Scrumptious Sweet Factory, the seaside scenes, the two bumbling spies, the toy dance at the King’s Birthday Party in the Palace where their love shines out and almost gets them caught - all of it - gorgeous to look at. There’s old and ‘New Extras’ also…

Sally Ann Howes looks suitably wholesome and lovely, Dick Van Dyke is as likeable as ever (a much underrated leading man) and the songs are excellent if not a little twee in places. The quirks of Sixties movies remain intact too - the patience-sapping Overture at the beginning where a black screen sits there with only the roaring of car engines before the picture finally appears – the “Intermission” break in the middle (so you could go and buy sweets) where Chitty goes over the cliff-edge and you don’t find out what happens until the film starts up again and you’re back in your seats – all there – as it was in the cinema – and the original aspect retained too.

The child-catcher is still the scariest monster ever created in cinema (with Benny Hill being strangely creepy too) and the interplay between Gert Frobe and Anna Quayle as the bickering King and Queen of Vulgaria is still pricelessly funny. All this and Stanley Unwin speaking “…horribold…” English to Lionel Jeffries - which always makes me pine for The Small Faces 1967 masterpiece ‘Ogden’s Nutgone Flake’ (he spoke in between tracks on Side 2).

Sure it’ll be too saccharine for our “Call Of Duty” teenagers to enjoy nowadays, but there’s something timeless and lovely about this ‘magical car’ movie - and that beautifully evocative “Hushabye Mountain” melody always renders me a quivering mush whenever I hear it.

This 2010 BLU RAY of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” is a superlative reissue of a family classic. Ian Fleming would indeed be shaken - and possibly even stirred.

Recommended like a duet with your wife on "Chu-Chi Face".

PS: for other superb restorations on BLU RAY, see also my reviews for "The Italian Job", "Saturday Night, Sunday Morning", "The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner", "North By Northwest", "Cool Hand Luke", "The Dambusters", "The Prisoner - The Complete (TV) Series In High Definition", "Braveheart", "Snatch", "The Ladykillers" and “The African Queen”

“The African Queen”. A Review Of The 1951 John Huston Classic Film - Now Fully Restored And Reissued on BLU RAY In 2010.

"…I Never Dreamed That Any Experience Could Be So Stimulating…"

Soldier ants three inches deep on the hut floor, hornet nests alongside the river bank, twenty crocodiles ready to eat you for breakfast should you actually venture into the river, dip your feet in the black rotten water of the river to dissipate the unbearable heat and a parasite called a Jigger Bug would lodge itself between your toes and eventually kill you though liver failure... When you listen to Jack Cardiff's spectacularly good feature-length commentary on the actual filming of "The African Queen" in 1951 (he was Director Of Photography), it's a small miracle that this beloved independent gem ever got made at all...

Escaping the suffocating McCarty trials in the USA at the end of The Forties and beginning of the Fifties (Bogie, Hep and Huston were all considered to have lefty affiliations), Director John Huston set off to Africa to film C.S. Forester's 1935 novel on location (an unheard of thing at the time). He dragged with him huge and cumbersome Technicolor cameras, his sickness-prone crew and Jack Cardiff's two lamps and small generator. 1st location was in Biondo on the Ruiki River in the Belgian Congo, 2nd location was Uganda and 3rd was back in the UK (all shots that required actors getting into the river were done in water tanks in London because the Ruiki was just too dangerous in real life).

Their trials and tribulations throughout the shoot are truly the stuff of Hollywood legend - Lepers carried their equipment, they bunked in bamboo huts with all manner of creepy-crawlies joining them under the netting and an African hunter who had been supplying them with meat on a daily basis was led off by authorities for suspected cannibalism (natives going missing). The water was contaminated with parasites (neither Huston nor Bogie got sick because they were gulping back whiskey), the boiler of the boat almost fell on Katherine Hepburn and nearly killed her (she was ill throughout the shoot, but trooped on), tropical rain storms turned pathways into rivers of mud, swarms of flies ate their skin and they couldn't do their necessaries because two deadly black mamba snakes were lurking in the latrine...ouch!

You learn most of these fab titbits from two sources - Jack Cardiff's commentary and a truly superb near 60-minute feature called "Embracing Chaos - Making The African Queen" (with or without subtitles). It includes contributions from large numbers of luminaries and those actually involved in the movie - John Huston and Katharine Hepburn (excerpts from The Dick Cavatt Show 1972/1973), Guy Hamilton (Assistant Director), Sir John Wolff (Producer), Angela Allen (Script Supervisor), Theodore Bickel (officer on the German boat), Desmond Davis (Clapper Boy), Jack Cardiff (DOP), Lawrence Grober (Huston's biographer), William J. Mann (Hepburn's biographer), Laurence Bergreen (James Agee's biographer), Eric Lax (Bogart's biographer), Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni (Sam Spiegel's biographer - Producer/Financier), Warren Stevens (Bogart's friend), John Forester (C.S Forester's son) and Martin Scorsese. There's even clips of and stuff about Lauren Bacall as Bogie's husband, camp cook, medical helper and general all-round on-set good person. Their romance was genuine and real and it's treated with great affection here. "Embracing Chaos..." is a feast of detail and beautifully put together storytelling - it really is.

The "Posters & Lobby Cards" extra has 6 posters (in full colour) and 6 lobby cards - a treat to look at. The "Star Profiles" of Bogart, Hepburn, Huston and Cardiff turn out to be on-screen info snippets which are good rather than great. The "Behind The Scenes" stills are photos on set with animal noises in the background - again not great. And the trailer only shows you how washed out the original film had become.

Which brings us to the print itself - it's GLORIOUS. Digitally restored in 2009, the vast majority of the film is a joy to look at. Sweat on the hairs of Bogart's arms, the lipstick on Hepburn's lips in the church scene at the beginning, the rusty and stained woodwork of the old boat itself, Robert Morley's huge bug eyes as he watches the natives huts burn...it's all beautifully rendered.

There are drawbacks - the aspect is 14:9 - so when your player actually throws the print onto a widescreen TV, it's in a centred box. However, if you adjust it to fit the whole screen, I still found it fitted well and without too much compromise to stretching. There are also sections where there's slight blurring of the focus, stock footage of the river that was damaged - but - and I stress this - it's miniscule.
As I stood back from the 42" Sony and looked at the print - I was gobsmacked at how beautiful it looked almost all of the time.

But the film itself belongs to the astonished lead duo of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn playing Charley Allnut and Rose "Rosie" Sayer - an American gin-sozzled steamboat Captain and a straight-laced prim and proper English Missionary lady. James Agee's wonderfully loaded dialogue spiked up the tension between the two at first, then the slow burning romance and then the mutual appreciation of each other (Huston loved beautiful losers) right up the hoisting of the Union Jack and the patriotic torpedoing of a German gunboat at the very end. Such was the chemistry and force of their brilliant performances - both actors virtually reinvented their careers on the back of the movie (Charles Laughton and Betty Davis had initially been thought of for the parts). A genuinely amazed and humbled Bogart even nabbed the Oscar from the clutches of Marlon Brando and Montgomery Cliff.

This BLU RAY reissue is a triumph because it works on the two most important levels - the print is as lovely as it's ever going to be and the two main extras match that.

"The African Queen" is 60 years old next year and this superb 2010 Blu Ray reissue does that enduring classic proud.

Recommended big time.

PS: for other superb restorations on BLU RAY see also my reviews for - "The Italian Job", "Saturday Night, Sunday Morning", "The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner", "Zulu", "North By Northwest", "Cool Hand Luke", “The Dambusters” and “The Prisoner – The Complete (TV) Series In High Definition”, “Braveheart”, “Snatch” and “The Ladykillers”