La
Grande Bouffe (1973/MVD
Visual/Arrow Blu-ray w/DVD)
Picture:
B-/C+ Sound: B-/C+ Extras: B- Film: C+
La
Grande Bouffe (1973, aka The Big Feast) is a film by a
famous Italian director, Marco Ferreri about four friends that go
away for the weekend and decide they want to eat themselves to death,
but not just eat, they want to live it up by eating delicious food,
drinking, and sleeping around. The men meet a teacher while staying
in this house trying to eat themselves to death, and you think she is
going to be the voice of reason and make them stop, but she seems to
join in.
This
is also the thing that may bother some people. There is no real
redemption in this movie, not to give any spoilers, but the four men
do not seem to learn from the experience. They start off in a darkly
funny manner, but it follows the same trend and they continue to
constantly eat. So, it really is "The Grand Feast."
It
is rereleased with brand new 2K restoration of the original camera
negative. It is presented in two different formats included here:
Blu-ray 1080p and standard definition DVD. The audio is in the
original French mono audio, uncompressed PCM on the Blu-ray with
newly translated English subtitles, while we get an anamorphically
enhanced DVD with lossy Dolby Digital Mono that is passage, but not
as good.
Giving
La Grande Bouffe the 2K restoration seems to have revived this
classic Italian film. You can watch like there is new depth and
precision that was not there before in previous video copies and
maybe some film prints, which is giving us more to see. Sometimes
when you see a movie on Blu-ray that was made before high definition
that we know and enjoy now was around you lose some quality and can
see unwanted grain and shakiness, but everything seemed to be okay.
The colors are stable and it was not very grainy, but you can notice
some moments.
There
are a few extras that come along with this feature. They include The
Farcical Movie: Marco Ferreri, a television episode dedicated to
the director in which he places his cinema within the context of Luis
Bunuel and Tex Avery, behind the scenes footage from the making of
the film and interviews with stars Mastroianni, Piccoli, Tognazzi,
Noiret and Ferren, Colours Around a Festival, an archive
interview featuring Ferren, Piccoli,Noiret, Tognazzi, and composer
Philippe Sarde, Forming Ferreri: a new video essay by Italian
film scholar Pasquale Iannone that looks at the director's career
prior to La Grande Bouffe, and select scene audio commentary
by Pasquale Iannone.
If
you enjoy eating tons of food, then La Grande Bouffe is the
movie for you, but it is perhaps not for a vegetarian though. They
eat a lot of meat in this dark political satire.
-
Jordan Whiteko
