Battle
Of Chile (1975 -
1978/remastered/Icarus DVD Set)/Hard
Truths (2023/Film
4/Bleecker Street/Decal Blu-ray)/Joan
Baez: I Am A Noise
(2023/Magnolia Blu-ray)
Picture:
C+*/B-/B- Sound: C+/B/B Extras: B/D/D Films: B/B-/B
Now
for some new releases with some very serious, rich, mature content
everyone should see...
Patricio
Guzman's The
Battle Of Chile
(1975 - 1978) was planned as a documentary of the country under
democratically-elected Salvador Allende,
but landed up being a priceless record of his overthrow by outside
countries. I covered the original DVD set form Icarus at this link:
https://fulvuedrive-in.com/review/9363/The+Battle+Of+Chile+(1975+-+1978/Icarus+Films+DV
Icarus
has had the three-part classic remastered and there are enough in the
sound and image improvements that it looks and feels al the more
palpable versus the older DVD set, but just having it saved and
restored is important for so vital a document.
Extras
include the Guzman documentary (96 minutes long) The
First Year,
celebrating the election of Allende,
but does NOT
repeat the booklet
from the previous DVD release with two essays on the film (Pauline
Kael's original review of the film and excerpt of Cecilia
Ricciarelli's book on Guzman, while the DVD has a 22-minutes-long
interview with Guzman and new update documentary Chile,
Obstinate Memory
from 1997 that shows the fallout post-Pinochet, running about an
hour. Fans and scholars will want to get both versions.
Mike
Leigh's
Hard
Truths
(2023) reunites the director with his Secrets
And Lies
co-star Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who this time plays an older married
woman with serious mental health depression issues and not much help.
Her son is isolated, quiet and more to himself than he should be,
while her husband is working on home repairs and helping people move.
As
the film moves on, one of the ways she deals with her pain is to lash
out at other people and in this, it is very darkly funny often as she
comes up with just the most unexpected insults (or sets thereof) that
are funny, if for all the wrong reasons. Scripted or not (Leigh
likes improv) offers a side of people (and especially Jean-Baptiste,)
that we have not seen before. Her intensity in these sequences never
lets up and almost become too much, but are necessary to show where
she is, then we get other mood changes and situations.
The
supporting cast is solid, situations totally palpable and we get some
remarkable work that might have been too intense for recent awards
seasons. Yes, we have seen some of this before and some of it is
predictable, like such pain itself, but Hard Truths deserves a
much larger audience than it got and I am thrilled to both catch up
with it and see it arrive on video.
There
are sadly no extras.
And
that brings us to the remarkable Joan
Baez: I Am A Noise
(2023) which throughly covers the career, life and then some, of one
of the most important, groundbreaking and innovative
singer/songwriters of all time. We get her life story behind the
scenes with her family. We get how she eventually landed up becoming
a music sensation, part of the counterculture, working early on with
Bob Dylan for a time and how she did (and almost did not) survive
success and fame.
Additionally
revealing some very private thoughts, documents, recordings and more,
we also sadly discover in addition to all of this, she was the victim
of child abuse, et al, and more. I will not go into the awful
details, but she was not the only one in the family suffering this
and that she survived this above all is nothing short of amazing.
This
has three directors, which is very unusual, but there is so much to
see, show, discuss and detail, it is one of those rare times you can
see why. Cheers to Miri Navasky, Maeve O'Boyle and Karen O'Connor
for a truly exemplary job of filmmaking and documentation, as well as
to Baez herself for disclosing it all and showing a bravery we rarely
see anywhere, anymore.
I
always liked Joan, since I was a kid, down to her theme song for
Douglas Trumbull's Silent
Running (see
elsewhere on this site) and she is truly a artist among all artists
who gave way more than she ever got back, but that's part of her
greatness. And if you still do not believe me, listen to her amazing
speech when she landed up in The Rock N Roll Hall Of Fame. Joan
Baez: I Am A Noise
is highly underrated and highly recommended!
There
are sadly no extras.
Now
for playback performance. The 1080p 1.85 X 1 digital High Definition
image transfer on Hard
Truths
is well shot, but has some slight off moments in detail. Otherwise,
warmth, solid color and compositions look good, while the
DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix is very well recorded and
mixed for a dialogue-based drama and retains a nice, natural
soundfield. The music score is a plus and never gets in the way.
The
1080p 1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image on Joan Baez has
a mix of new HD interview shooting, plus plenty of older stills,
filmed footage, videotaped footage and other vintage sources, so you
know you'll run into flaws here and there by default. The
DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix has sound that ranges from
old monophonic sound to recent music performances by Baez, so you
know what you are getting. In that, it is as well mixed, mastered
and remastered as possible.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.66 X 1 black & white image on
the Battle Of Chile DVDs are an improvement from the older DVD
release by Icarus with more contrast and warmth, though since footage
is often raw, it is only going to be so much better, though I
wondered what at least a Blu-ray 1080p version could look like. The
lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono sound has slightly more detail than the
older DVD set as well, but a lossless presentation might help more if
properly remastered, though that will take some work.
-
Nicholas Sheffo
