Nothing makes my blood run colder than to read the words “much richer grain textures” in a DVD Beaver Bluray review. But that’s what it says in Gary W. Tooze‘s assessment of Criterion’s forthcoming Bluray (4.17) of Leo McCarey‘s The Awful Truth.
That’s pretty damn close to Tooze’s assessment of Criterion’s His Girl Friday Bluray (“it has more, and consistent, grain”), and I’ve learned through hard experience what this actually means. Tooze also reports that the Awful Truth Bluray “looks wonderfully film-like“…good God.
I bought Criterion’s His Girl Friday Bluray and discovered that it’s “completely smothered in digital grain mosquitos,” as I said in a 1.13.17 review. “I kept thinking to myself ‘poor Ralph Bellamy, playing that poor dope from Albany and having to sit there and suffer as those billions of mosquitoes crawl all over his head and neck and hair, not to mention Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell and all the rest besieged by the same swarm.”
This plus the DVD Beaver screen captures of the Awful Truth disc show that this 1937 screwball classic has been grainstormed to a fare-thee-well.
I’ve said it 10,000 times, but I don’t like heavy grain. No one does except for grain monks (i.e., perverse aficionados) like Tooze. Call me a plebian but I prefer my older black-and-white films to be tastefully DNR’ed — I want them to look as sharp, clean, unfiltered and un-muddied as possible, and that means no swarms of Egyptian mosquitoes covering each and every frame.
Ditto.
