I saw this film a few years ago on DVD and, after seeing it listed on BBC Four this week, I went in search of a Blu-Ray version. Currently a snip at £8.

The film itself is not the usual French style-fest, with a complex plot and a lot of action it more resembles a Hollywood movie in it’s style and delivery. Unsurprisingly, it looks like an remake is on the way. If Harrison Ford were younger he’d be a shoe-in for the lead role, requires expertise in ‘familial angst’…

Based on the novel Ne le dis à personne… by Harlan Coben, the film tells the story of a pediatrician 8 years after the murder of his wife as he starts to think she might be alive. Avoiding spoilers at all costs I’ll say no more about the plot other than to say it is as good as it is complex ( very much in the style of that excellent novel The Beatle Man ). And, unlike another film I reviewed here Caché, it does provide a more pleasingly complete dénouement.

Tell No One Movie Poster

Visually, being a city-based thriller, the film was never going to be a stylish beauty but the Blu-Ray print is excellent. Being a thriller, there is a fair bit of dashing around at times with some wild camera work that doesn’t care about image quality but, when required, most scenes pop off the screen very nicely indeed.

I’ve read complaints about the sound in other reviews but it didn’t trouble me overly.

A highly recommended film but not one that absolutely have to see on Blu-Ray ( but for £8 you may as well ). Of course, you should see if before the Hollywood remake so you can say “well, of course, I’ve seen the original French version mwhaa mwhaa mwhaa…<flounce>” and because I have a horrible suspicion that the plot may have to be simplified or heavily clued for the popcorn bucket test audiences.

Other reasons to watch it:

• Kristin Scott Thomas is in it acting in French.
• He drives a big Volvo.
• Jeff Buckley is in the soundtrack. ( so are U2 but we can gloss over that )

They don’t make them like this any more. Except, they do. Well, Woo does. Epic is perhaps slightly overused when it comes to films. You can’t argue if it is applied here. Everything is on a huge scale, not least the 293 minute running time across the two halves.

Red Cliff is actually two films that were originally released 6 months apart. We’ll ignore the much shorter single film Western release. At a pathetic 150 minutes it’s not worthy of consideration.

The film tells the story of the Battle of Red Cliffs which took place in China in 208/9 AD. (The Wikipedia link contains spoilers for obvious reasons!)

This is film making on a very grand scale. Check out this spanking HD trailer, you’ll see what I mean and will give you a far better flavour than my attempts and finding more and more words that mean “big”.

Looks cool, eh? Well, it is. And in Blu-Ray it looks consistently great. The video quality is excellent throughout, helped by some excellent cinematography and vivid colours, especially in the customers. I’m almost certain at one point of the film you will say “nice helmet” with abandon. Sound too is very good although I found the soundtrack to be good not excellent. Not quite of the quality of a Tan Dun meets Yo Yo Ma.

Now, I understand that approaching 5 hours of subtitled Chinese history may not be for everyone. But you could easily watch this as a mini-series spread over 5 nights. You watched Shogun didn’t you? Bet you did. This is MUCH better.

Sometimes the plotting of ‘true’ events can be a little pedestrian, real life doesn’t always have the twists and pace to build tension or surprise – but there is enough artistic license allowed by the lack of known detail that the story entertains consistently. Although I suspect that much of the interesting detail was added by the historians much later.

Obviously, some of the fighting could be seen as a little silly. Single heroic warriors take on large gangs on baddies single-handedly in very choreographed sequences. You either like this or you don’t but it is entirely fitting with the genre and I’m sure it played very well with Chinese audiences. And, I suppose, post-Matrix, we have more of a fondness of it.

For a film that is essentially about a single battle, there is obviously a huge amount of depth around it. So battle lovers may drift off waiting for it to kick off. There are big lull’s between the 3 main battle sequences but these are just as entertaining in their own way. And when the final battles comes, you won’t be disappointed. It makes Helm’s Deep look like a square-go in the playground.

There is some pretty decent CGI woven in here too. The shot of dove flying over Cao Cao’s fleet is rather smart (you can see a short piece of this in the trailer) and I like the shots of the arrows flying straight at the camera.

All in all, it’s a cracking piece of entertainment and should be part of any Blu-Ray collection.

So, if you have a spare 5 hours to waste and you love great looking movies then get Red Cliff, especially as the full two-disc Blu-Ray is only £9 on Amazon.

Mr Woo, what shall I do? I’ll watch Red Cliff again for sure.

Where do you start? Or, perhaps more importantly, where do you end? Let’s get the obvious things out of way. The plot revolves around a TV presenter (Daniel Autueil) and his wife ( Juliette Binoche ) who are being sent VHS tapes (wrapped in alarming child-like drawings) of themselves being watched and their subsequent quest to find out who is doing it.

Also worth very quickly stating that while the Blu-Ray print is decent enough, this is not a film that is in any way enhanced by watching in Blu-Ray. This is lo-fi French cinema. There are a few shots that look quite sparkly but, on the whole, you’ll lose nothing from watching this on DVD.

So, it seems to be quite a straightforward thriller plot. And, for the most part, it is. But you would be wrong to get drawn into the film on that basis alone. Fans of Michael Bay should stay well away. The pace is very slow, quite deliberately so. It’s very stripped down and bleak. You get drawn in to the languid style so when the shocking moments come you really do get a shock and remain a little wary thereafter. And I did get a shock, I actually threw my hands up over my face like a Victorian woman on seeing a man’s ankle.

*** Caution : slight risk of spoiler from here ***

What will make this film linger in the mind is the one thing that is the most irksome as you watch. We are used to a shape of cinema with a nicely defined beginning, middle and end. At the end of Taggart, we always know who did the murrrdurrr(sic) and we have fun trying to guess which of the low-grade Scottish actors it was. We are used to neat resolution. Even the most challenging and convoluted of Hollywood movies like The Usual Suspects does it’s best to explain to the audience what has been going on so you can leave the cinema thinking “ooh, that was clever”. Hidden doesn’t do that. It makes no allowances for our stupidity. You don’t get a resolution. You are left with clues and the desire to work the rest out for yourself. There is even evidence online that many people missed the big clue at the very end of the film completely.

What is revealed is that the film isn’t about the central plot at all, it is about how the characters react to the plot. It’s not that the plot dooesn’t matter but it is simply the bones on which the messages of the film are hung. So, it’s a good job that the acting performances are great. Autueil seems to do well at the guilt and retribution thing (albeit with nothing as colourful as carnations on show here).

Did I enjoy it? Yes. Did it annoy me? Yes. Was I more interested in the plot afterwards because of the lack of discrete ending. Most definitely. And I’m not the only one. A very quick trawl of the interweb found many discussions on what exactly was going on.

If you don’t get irritated by the style and pace of French (or, more accurately in this case, German ) cinema and you don’t mind being left with a challenge at the end, then I would definitely recommened this film. Although I’m almost certain that many people will get to the end with a simple “Eh? That was shite.” type reaction.

Buying a film solely on the basis of being promised stunning visuals is perhaps not always the best of approaches. But since that is what Blu-Ray & HD is all about, I didn’t hesitate in pre-ordering The Fall [Blu-ray] [2008].

You can tell that, at its inception, this film was built around the question “Where would be really cool places to shoot?“. The fantasy sections have no grounding in any actual location so this leaves the director free to pick and choose his shots from many of the most dramatic places in the world. Strangely, it seems as this questioning on location ended up with some of the same answers as the team behind Baraka as at least two of the locations appear in both films. Or, perhaps more likely given the relative age of the films, Tarsem saw Baraka and thought “I’ll be having some of that“. Certainly, there aren’t many places in the list of filming locations that you wouldn’t want to go to with a camera and a lot of batteries and memory cards.

Sadly, this scattering of the location inevitably leads to the fantasy sections not being all that involving. Perhaps, given their context in the film, this is how it was designed to be. But they lack any kind of dramatic or narrative tension and rely solely on looking really, really good. Which they do. So that’s OK then.

The story itself is very simple and, avoiding spoliers : A stuntman and a young girl are both patients in a hospital. He tells her stories and what you see in the fantasy sections are the young girls visualisation of the story she is being told. ( You could perhaps draw some wavy lines between this and Baron Munchausen ). You don’t need to now any more than that.

Elements from her life are woven in, which would be quite clever, if it wasn’t so obvious. The old “line between fiction and reality starting to blur” is a difficult one to tread and The Fall largely succeeds, only because it is kept very, very simple. It doesn’t manage to pull off anything like the real-life/fantasty crossover plot depth of Pan’s Labyrinth. Comparisons will be made and, while The Fall stands up on visuals, it loses out on depth of plot and story. The fantasy sections work really well because they are in stark contrast to the real life story going on behind. The Fall is much less gritty.

The emotional climax of the film seems a little rushed and, while it works well enough, it probably could have been so much better. This ties back to the weakness of the fantasy narrative and in particular, the final fantasy scenes feeling a little empty. Talking of which, it is odd generally about quite how empty it all seems, presumably deliberate, but leaving the locals in wouldn’t have made it any less beautiful and could have added some depth.

Obviously, we have a linger a while to discuss the visuals. The fade from the butterfly to Butterfly Reef is just lovely. The low horizon shots are peachy in the extreme (you don’t get this kind of gold from Barry Norman). I’m a sucker for low horizons and an even bigger sucker for abstract compression, of which there is lots. Clearly, its all about location. And the list of places I feel compelled to visit has increased again.

One thing that stands out is the natural, understated performance of the young Romanian actor Catinca Untaru as the little girl. She gives a very un-Hollywood performance both in terms of looks and delivery. And is all the better for it.

On an acting note, a special commendation should be given to the monkey who carried off its death scene far better than I’ve seen some/most human actors attempt same.

This is a good film that looks great. What the Blu-Ray world needs now is something with the depth and scope of a David Lean film that takes the same thirst for spectacular visuals and adds a more gripping, detailed plot.

Style over substance some will cry. But it don’t half look nice.

It has not been customary herein for me to review much in the traditional sense, but I thought I should scribble a few words about a movie I watched last night, Baraka: Remastered (Blu Ray) [1992].

Although nearly 17 years old, the remastering and transfer to Blu-Ray has given this a new lease of life and it doesn’t show anything of its age.

To be lazy, here is how it describes itself:

A visually stunning film shot over 13 months, in 24 countries; Baraka is an overwhelming experience that spans the geographical, cultural and social diversity of our changing planet. Set to an atmospheric sountrack inspired by various rituals and nature itself, the film captures the very essence of man’s relationship with the earth, both harmonious and catastrophic. Baraka is a journey of rediscovery. It is the power, the beauty and the rage of life itself. It is the world we live in.

Don’t let that put you off. OK, 90-odd minutes of pictures and music maybe isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but the images rarely leave you bored. If you’re like me and you love to flick through large books of great photos then this is the same, but without the weight on your knee and the spine down the middle. The imagery is that good. It is a dream to watch for a photographer. It feels like a moving photo. Every shot is a great still in its own right. It wasn’t surprising to hear in the accompanying ‘Making of…’ that they had used local still photographers to give them a guide to location, light etc.

Use of stop-frame tracking shots also adds a whole new dimension to the visuals. Some of the effects achieved are very special. People, cars streaming about at high speed take on a whole new unseen rhythm that is quite beguiling.

The movie clearly has a message and how you react to that will be entirely based on your own personal level of cynicism to such things. I’m not going to labour any overly worthy points but, for me, it certainly has an impact that goes beyond “wow, that’s looks cool”. But I’m not going to go all preachy. It certainly reinforced one thing, I’ve not even begun to see enough of the world. (something I’ve touched on before).

On a purely technical level, this film is what a 1080p HD TV and Blu-Ray setup is for. Much as you can probably buy Daddy Day Camp on Blu-Ray, there really isn’t much point (for many reasons, but you can see what I’m getting at). The transfer is stunning and if you have an HD setup, you should buy this just to show friends and doubters.

So, whether or not you want to immerse yourself in the whole Gaia message and just want to show off your AV setup, this film is a must on Blu-Ray.

I bought Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi on DVD ages ago and never got round to watching them. I might just do that now but with the understanding that I’ll be less enchanted with the SD-ness, could be a good upscale test though.

In the end, Baraka leaves you feeling more than a little small. Which I think is a good thing. Coz that’s how it is.