An Introduction to DVDs
This is part of the introduction to my DVD and Blu-ray review compilation, DVDs, which can be obtained as a downloadable PDF file for $14.95 by emailing DVDLaser@rocketmail.com:
We are all engines of emotion. While a dream is our emotional engine in idle, language is our emotional engine in gear. It is emotion that powers the way we learn, the way we socialize and the way we survive. Words have the illusion of precision just as matter has the illusion of solidity, and several hundred thousand years ago, man harnessed the energy of emotion through language to create the culture that defines him. Superficially, stories share knowledge, but simultaneously they share experience, creating a common pool of emotion from which every listener draws emotional nourishment. Pictorial art is a representation of objects that generate emotion. Music is emotion that is free of objectification. Storytellers seek to incorporate both devices in their emotional constructs, and it was the chain reaction created by this mixture that led to the invention of drama, where a multi-dimensional fusion of emotion fuels an aesthetic energy, an experience or memory energy, and an entirely new, self-sustaining stream of emotional energy that is an imitative representation or re-creation of emotion itself. You see a tragedy and you feel its sadness; you see a comedy and you feel its joy. For thousands of years this fusion remained a confined event, shared only by those who were in the presence of the storytellers themselves, and hence the energy from that fusion would quickly dissipate. But at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the movies were invented, enabling storytellers to concentrate upon the enhancement of their craft instead of its distribution, and preserving the emotional fuel of each creation, forever.
For most of the hundred years that followed the invention of motion pictures, those seeking its emotional fuel were not in control of that fuel’s distribution. At first, people had to leave their homes, and later, when they could obtain it at home, it was never at a schedule of their own choosing. Rapid advances in technology, followed with a slight delay by modifications in marketing precepts, eventually led to the creation, at the beginning of the Twenty-first Century, of the utterly portable 12cm DVD. A person can now carry a movie in his shirt pocket and watch it wherever and whenever he wants. While the theatrical marketplace remains an important initial step in the publicizing and amortization of a film, the ultimate purpose of a movie is to become a DVD.
The movies are life without responsibility. You can drive on the wrong side of the road and teeter on the face of a cliff. You can examine a flower, hit a baseball, or make a very witty remark. You can die a thousand deaths, have a thousand loves and save or destroy a thousand worlds and the only thing you’ve given up is a few hours of your time. It is not a waste of that time because the knowledge and the emotional fulfillment of the experience are what your mind, your inner being, thrives upon. The only thing more rewarding is to spend that time with your family or your friends, and if you do so while watching a movie, then the rewards are communal, and are actually strengthened by the shared emotional exchanges of the experience, a pooling of the emotional fusion.
DVD players are everywhere. Along with traditional bookcase units, there are players inside video game machines, players in computers, players in automobiles (supposedly available only to backseat viewers), players in television sets and portable players that allow you to watch DVDs in any place imaginable. DVD players that can record program materials have also become widespread. There are occasional instances, particularly with older players, in which a DVD will be incompatible with some make or model DVD player. You can consult your retailer, but the situation, however annoying, is a good excuse to have more than one type of DVD player handy. As motion picture companies struggled desperately to regain control of their product through streaming distribution, DVDs became known as ‘physical media,’ the best way and indeed the only way to maintain personal ownership of a beloved program.
The variety of pre-recorded programs available on DVD ranges from the very first moving images ever recorded to the number one boxoffice hit three months ago. Some classic films have yet to be released on DVD, but that is only because the DVD companies want to market them carefully, and every year the number of absent titles dwindles. The compact nature of a DVD, which can hold a little over four hours of video programming on each of its two sides, has popularized the packaging of an entire season of a television show in a single boxed set—and some programs, such as Lost and Mad Men, work best if you watch them in marathon viewings (‘binging’ is unhealthy, but participating in a ‘marathon’ is good for you—remember that). The quality of the audio playback has made pop and classical music programs highly collectible. It seems that along with movies, operas were invented for DVD, as the stereo sound, luscious picture and handy subtitles present such productions in an ideal manner for viewing. Ballet is less adaptable to video, because the choices made by camera angles and editing interfere too much with the totality of a choreographer’s vision, but some programs are designed by choreographers specifically for video presentation and again, the quality of the image and the quality of the sound add greatly to the potential pleasure one can receive from the program. Sporting and news events are best absorbed live, but the opportunities to relive those experiences are widely available on DVD, as are documentaries and educational programs of all types. Children’s programming is extensive and highly practical, because activating the ‘Repeat Play’ option can keep a little tyke satisfied for an entire afternoon.
And there are DVDs that defy categorization. Mike Figgis’ wonderful comic experiment, Timecode, which contains four simultaneous inter-connected movies presented in four quadrants of the screen, is uniquely suitable for DVD, where the viewer controls the access to the sound on each quadrant. Short film anthologies, such as the Film-Fest series, can sometime have extremely complex presentation designs to obscure their marketing purposes. There are also interactive programs, such as I’m Your Man, where the viewer is in charge of the narrative vectors.
To curtail marketing problems that developed for home video companies with earlier formats, DVDs are encoded to prevent playback except on players intended for specific world regions. Japan, for example, uses the same NTSC television format that America uses, but Japanese DVDs will not play on American players because of this ‘Region’ encoding. Nevertheless, foreign genres of films have grown highly popular in America in part because of their imported distribution on DVDs compatible with American players. Like television programs, the fabulous episodic Japanese animation programs, or ‘anime,’ with adult themes and mind-bending sci-fi and fantasy plots, are ideally suited for presentation on DVD, with multiple language options and superb picture and sound quality. Imports of Hong Kong and Taiwanese action films have also thrived in the DVD market. Geared more for an ethnic market, a wide variety of Hispanic films and Indian ‘Bollywood’ films are readily available in America and can be obtained easily on the Internet. In fact, DVDs, with their minimal shipping costs, could be considered the first ‘product’ of the Internet, and storefront retailers have had a difficult time competing with retailers on-line.
The success of DVDs has changed the way motion pictures are made. Directors are more willing to compromise with film companies over the cut of a theatrical movie, knowing that they will get to do it their way once the final product, the DVD, is released. In the case of the magnificent Lord of the Rings movies, the theatrical films can be looked upon as simply teasers for the longer, definitive Extended Edition DVDs.
Film companies that own the rights to various titles put a great deal of effort into producing the best possible presentation of a title. Filmmakers themselves are usually very eager to participate, since a film represents a sizable portion of how they spent their lives and the DVD is the most functional memento they have of that effort. Films that are in the public domain, that don’t have a specific copyright holder, are of less dependable quality, though some have been rescued by fans and given the same treatment as a major blockbuster—Elite’s version of Night of the Living Dead is one of the best DVDs ever produced.
Along with being a vast mechanical engine feeding on emotional energy, a person’s subconscious is also a snooty schoolteacher with her arms crossed and her foot tapping, demanding neatness, cleanliness and straight lines at all times. Even though you may not consciously notice it, if there is something flawed about the picture you are watching or the sound you are hearing, you are distracted, and your emotional connections are disrupted. If there is no distraction, then the flow is unimpeded and even a bad or silly movie can seem fabulously entertaining, especially if it matches the mood you wished to fulfill.
In the early days of home video, films were slapped together for consumers any old way, but the only programs that were really enjoyable were the ones that were transferred with care. For the most part, that lesson has been learned. While bargain basement DVDs taken from public domain titles sometimes have a look and sound commensurate with their price, the picture and the sound on most DVDs are of a very high quality. Even older films will have nothing more than a few dismissible scratches marring their presentation. Nevertheless, one of the primary purposes of this book is to let you know which programs have been transferred well to DVD and which have not.
Nobody cares how a DVD works, except when you get too many smudges on the face of a DVD platter and it doesn’t work at all. There’s a laser in the player that is bouncing off little holes hidden under the plastic of the discs, which is why you need to keep your dirty fingers off the platters, so the laser can see the holes and measure them (if a platter does get dirty, just use a damp rag and then a dry rag to wipe it off). The little holes can mean either ‘one’ or ‘zero,’ and there are so many of them that their arrangements tell the DVD player what color dots to display across a TV monitor in striped half frames, sixty times a second. Except that there aren’t enough holes on a DVD to really do that, so what happens instead is called ‘data compression,’ where the DVD guesses that if a color is going to be on the screen for part of a second, it is going to be on the screen for several seconds more. It is the job of DVD engineers to arrange those guesses so well that you don’t notice them. When you don’t, the image on your TV is incredibly crisp and vivid, seducing that schoolmarm inside you until the doors to the playground are flung open with wild abandon. Your subconscious has to be as engaged by the DVD as your conscious is. When flaws in the data compression do appear, they can turn parts of the picture into tiny squares that look like tiles, or they can cause a color or a shade to smear across the image, or they can cause an object or a color to appear displaced from its background. When a film source is especially worn and rickety, then these flaws may be impossible to avoid entirely. But other times, it may just be that the DVD engineers have not done the best job they can. It is said that people who communicate by reading lips find DVDs particularly frustrating at times, because the compression alters the movements of faces in subtle ways that most viewers do not notice. Nevertheless, it is the subconscious that keeps you engaged or disengaged from the show you are watching, and the fabulous success of DVDs is proof that for the most part, the process of their creation has been executed with smashing success.
Like movies, television monitors used to be squarish, with a length-to-height aspect ratio of 1.33:1 and now they are more rectangular, with an aspect ratio of about 1.78:1. This has caused problems in the past, because movies have an even wider array of aspect ratio formats (created initially to compete with television), and will continue to cause problems in the future as people try to watch older programs on new monitors. The monitors themselves often have toggles so a viewer can either eliminate blank areas of the screen or embrace the original format of the program on view. DVDs provide additional options, but to understand those options you must know a little more background information first. Some movies are made in a really widescreen format, with an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1 or more. Others are made with a moderately wide format, which has an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1. In some cases, the celluloid film itself has these aspect ratios and no other picture information to deliver, but in other cases, the celluloid contains more picture information on its top and bottom, and when the film is projected in a theater, that information is purposefully masked off. Therefore, when you see a film presented on the full screen of a video monitor, it may be chopping off picture information that appeared on the sides of the film, or it may be adding picture information that is contained on the top and bottom, but was not intended to be seen—or sometimes there’s even a bit of both. To make things more confusing, sometimes in a cluttered comedic film, that unintentional, masked off picture information is funny as all get out and worth being seen. And to make things even more confusing, on some special effect films, such as the Back to the Future movies, the shots without special effects will have more picture information on the top and bottom and will not be cropped much on the sides in full screen format, while the shots with special effects will have nothing on the top and bottom, making the full screen presentation of those shots substantially cropped.
‘Letterboxing’ is the practice of ignoring a monitor screen’s dimensions and presenting a program as it was originally intended to be viewed in a theater. Some DVDs of films are issued separately in letterboxed and full screen or cropped formats. The economics of obtaining copies of the movies in both formats are prohibitive, however, so except where noted, only the letterboxed version has been reviewed in this book and the existence of an alternative version is unacknowledged. Other DVDs, however, contain both the letterboxed version and the full screen or cropped version on the same platter, or on two platters in the same jacket, and in these cases both versions are reviewed and compared (home video companies have found they can market a two-platter DVD, where each platter has program material on just one side, better than they can market a single-platter DVD with program material on two sides). Most DVDs, however, are issued only in the original presentation format, be it a full screen version of an older movie or TV program, or a letterboxed version of a widescreen film. When a DVD is in a widescreen format, it is also often encoded with an enhancement for widescreen televisions. When this ‘16:9’ enhancement is activated on the DVD player, it delivers a larger and richer image on a widescreen television than a standard playback does, but if the function is activated and played back on an old, square monitor, the image appears squeezed.
Before DVDs, the best home video format was the laser video disc (LD). Sometimes in this book, the LD version is used as a benchmark to judge how much improvement or lack thereof the DVD presentation has undergone. When it comes to the picture, there is usually no contest. For the most part, a DVD’s image is immaculate. The sound, however, is more problematic. The best audio transfers on LD remain superior to those on DVD, not only for the spectacular blockbuster sound mixes, such as Jurassic Park, but even for many old monophonic films. The compromises on audio delivery that DVDs undergo are similar to those that the picture undergoes. If you’re listening to a DVD without a superior reference, it usually sounds just fine, or way better than fine. With films encoded by some sort of surround sound format, the atmosphere of the movie fills your room and the directional sound effects place you in the middle of the action, heightening your experience and making the program a great deal more pleasurable. If at all possible, hook your DVD player up to a stereo system. There are many to choose from, and surround sound is not complicated or messy if you don’t want it to be. The addition of a subwoofer, for bass effects, sends a movie’s vibrations into the most secret corners of your body.
There are a number of audio formats encoded on most DVDs. In the reviews in this book, basic Dolby stereo mixes and PCM stereo mixes are lumped together with the term, ‘stereo surround sound,’ because for the most part that is what they are providing. The same is true of PCM mono and Dolby mono, which are identified as ‘monophonic.’ The two more advanced delivery systems, 5.1-channel Dolby Digital and DTS are noted separately. Each supplies five distinct sound channels—a center channel, a front left and right and a rear left and right—along with the less detailed bass channel, with Dolby being the more ubiquitous and DTS being the better of the two. Additionally, some DVDs have a 5.1 Dolby Digital track with EX-encoding or a DTS track with ES-encoding, which adds additional rear/side channels. Of course, you’ve got to obtain the audio equipment to accommodate it. The more elaborate your audio system, the better the entertainment, but even with a rudimentary set up, the thrills of DVD audio playback are irresistible, particularly with a showcase mix such as Terminator 3. You hear it once, and you won’t ever want to turn it off.
The range of audio options on a DVD goes well beyond the audio playback formats. Alternate language options allow viewers to listen to films in a variety of languages. In addition satisfying the desires of consumers whose native languages differ, the language option can be an outstanding learning tool. On simple programs such as the Scooby-Doo cartoons, the alternate language tracks make terrific primers (as do the language subtitling options) for students trying to get a handle on a foreign language requirement in school, and there can be something inherently amusing about watching comedians, such as the Three Stooges, spew invectives at one another in a language other than English.
Audio commentary tracks were first developed for the LD but have become so widespread on DVDs that, with major releases, a DVD is more likely to be accompanied by one than not. Most feature members of the cast and crew discussing the program’s creation. Older films are more likely to have commentaries by film historians, analyzing the artistry of the creations at hand. Documentaries or films based upon historical fact will also include commentaries by scholars, who discuss the actual events and how the program depiction compares to what really happened. If you listen to enough commentaries you get what is tantamount to a professional seminar on filmmaking (especially if you use this book to guide you to the best talks), but even casual listeners can be entertained by the most adept speakers, and some commentary tracks can be highly amusing—when Robert Zemeckis and Kurt Russell joke over their sophomore production efforts in Used Cars, their laughter is infectious. Some commentaries are deliberate gags, such as the amusing false director’s track on Godmoney. One is less likely to come across juicy gossip because commentators learned early on that their talks were being preserved for posterity and carried more weight than an offhand remark shared on a cable interview program, but once in a while there are intriguing revelations about on-set romance or discord. For those interested in the filmmaking process, however, the most informative commentators include Ridley Scott, Robert Rodriguez, Martha Coolidge and Philip Noyce. When you finish listening to them, you’ll be ready to buy a camera and shout, ‘Action!’
The most popular extra feature on a DVD is probably the inclusion of deleted scenes or other unused outtake footage. For obvious reasons, fans of a film are delighted to have any material that shows the stars in character expanding aspects of the narrative, even when the scenes were wisely removed from the program itself because they took the program’s emotions in the wrong direction. Well made production and retrospective documentaries can supply a definitive portrait of why and how a program was produced and can explore every aspect of its creation. Other common features include a collection of ad materials and trailer, which give the viewer an idea of how a movie was originally perceived by potential audiences; trivia subtitling, which supplies everything from informative background information to arcane facts about something depicted on the screen; music videos; shorter films made by the same filmmakers or otherwise related to the feature program; cast & crew filmographies and profiles; complete audio-only presentations of a program’s musical score; simple interactive games; and collections of archival materials related to the production of the featured program. The potential utilization of DVD-ROM encoding on a standard DVD has barely been tapped, but some of the more creative uses include a one-to-one link between a film’s screenplay and its finished cut; samples of more elaborate video games; and text materials that are too extensive to include on the standard DVD playback. BFS Video, for example, has featured the original novels in DVD-ROM on Little Men and the Raffles programs.
Few things in life are more obnoxious than a badly designed DVD menu. While fans seem to get a kick out of elaborately animated menu designs and a few are legitimately entertaining—check out MGM’s amusing prompts for This Is Spinal Tap—designers sometimes let the form get in the way of the function. Particularly irksome is when a menu features just two choices and the selected choice is highlighted in color without any other sort of prompt. Well, how do you know which color is the highlighted color? Sometimes, the only thing you can do is guess and hope you hit the right one. Be aware as well that sometimes a tiny little arrow sitting on the bottom right of the screen will be the only indication that a wealth of special features is awaiting on a second menu page. There are also deliberately hidden menu options, known as ‘Easter Eggs,’ a marketing ploy to enamor the video game generation. Most of the features accessed in this manner, however, are inconsequential—a flash of Jason Mewes’ bare rear end on Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is about as substantial as such options get—and are barely worth the trouble it takes to search for them.
There are DVDs that lock you into an open spiel of commercials before you can access the menu or the feature program, but if you try all the buttons on your remote, there will usually be one that will enable you to circumvent the worst of it. If you know there is a lengthy march of opening logos before a movie itself kicks in, instead of choosing ‘Play’ on the menu, go to the ‘Scene Selection’ and start there. You would think that somebody would put commercials onto DVDs and then give them away for free, and that really does happen. The DVDs that are distributed on cereal boxes obligate you to sit through various promotions before the show begins—and you do have to pay for the cereal as well—but it is another example of the format’s versatility and potential.
Some DVD packages include audio CDs, books, posters and other materials, and the reviews here acknowledge these inclusions but rarely dwell on them. Other DVD packages are works of art in and of themselves, and are so cool you almost don’t want to break open the shrink wrap—Rhino’s Gumby box set, for example, comes with a real Gumby inset in the front of the box. There are films of 3-D programs that come with glasses, and because of the precision of the DVD playback, the 3-D effects are pretty neat.
As technology advanced, a high-end subset of the DVD market, the Blu-ray (BD), was developed. Smoother on the edge and a tiny bit thicker, BDs are essentially the same size as DVDs, and BD players are perfectly capable of playing DVDs as well. Although presenting, at times, more elaborate special features, BDs are also more restrictive in their playback functionality than DVDs. They normally take an itchingly long time to spin up, and players can even take an unconscionable amount of time to turn off. None of that matters, however, once the program is playing. Hooked up to a 1080p monitor with HDMI cables, the picture delivered by a well-produced Blu-ray creates a near-theatrical experience that can be utterly transporting. Colors are spectacular in both solidity and detail, but even black-and-white films look richer and more ‘movie like’ on BD. Criterion’s BD presentation of The Third Man is, in many ways, the definitive Blu-ray, the one that comes the closest, as you watch it, to making you believe you are sitting in a movie theater.
Additionally, Blu-ray eliminates the compromises in sound delivery that are inherent in the DVD format. BDs are capable of delivering as much as 7.1 discrete channels of sound, and every single one of them can knock you out of your sofa. And 4K Blu-rays are yet a subset of the subset, delivering an even more detailed picture and a more elaborate audio track. We would recommend the 4K presentation of The Shining as an example of how the additional data can, subliminally, improve a viewer’s emotional response to the entertainment.
Even the monophonic audio tracks on older films have a greater timbre on BD, but except for the popular classics, the cost of preparing and transferring older films onto the format is prohibitive. Therefore, shortly after BDs hit the market, another variation of DVDs appeared that, for dedicated movie fans, was equally exciting. You can record home movies on DVDs yourself, using recordable DVD-R and DVD+R discs that are available not only in electronics stores, but even local grocery stores and pharmacies. The DVD production houses use more sophisticated authoring and production methods, but what several studios discovered was that by eliminating distribution links and selling DVDs and BDs directly to consumers through the Internet, and utilizing the cheaper generic ‘on demand’ production method, very similar to what consumers do at home, many obscure and esoteric titles could be marketed to eager fans in a profitable manner. Spearheaded by Warner’s Archive Collection series, which presents everything from James Whale’s forgotten comedic masterpiece, The Great Garrett, to the obscure Sixties cult title, The Picasso Summer, scores of movies that consumers once thought would never be available for ownership are, instead, just a few mouse clicks away. Other series available only on the Internet include Fox’s MGM Limited Edition Collection, Fox’s Studio Archives Collection, Universal’s Vault Series, and Sony’s Columbia Classics. As the technology advanced, recordable BDs were also put into use in this manner.
Although there were a few stabs at creating 3D DVDs using the old red-blue method, such as the Rhino release of The Bubble, but with the advent of BDs, sophisticated players and monitors (and glasses) were devised that can give the viewer a complete 3D experience. The glasses talk to the TV and coordinate the flashing alternate angles with it, to imitate how humans perceive depth from slightly different, simultaneous angles. Colors are unharmed because no distortion of the image is involved, you are just getting flashed at a very rapid rate to one eye and then the other and then back again. The results can be delightful, and the great classics from the 3D era, including House of Wax and Dial M for Murder, are readily available. In order to expand the market even more, Kino began releasing 3D films such as Dynasty and Revenge of the Shogun Women in both 3D formats (as well as a 2D version) on the same platter.
This book is a collection of reviews that originally appeared in The DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter, and if you like what you have read, then put the book down immediately and go request a free sample copy. You can obtain one by sending an e-mail to DVDLaser@rocketmail.com, calling (212)242-3324 or writing PO Box 382, Glen Cove NY 11542.