939 A Matter of Life and Death

[hearthesilence]

Nice! Looks like the Criterion disc has a different (and to my eyes better) color timing. The grain looks a touch better too.

[Orlac]

He really does insist on a nude pic per review

[mteller]

A Matter of Life and Svet

[domino harvey]

David, there's no uploading here but you can use this site for reliable image hosting

[diamonds]

So 2 and 3 are how the disc looks, 1 and 4 are what it should look like? Or vice versa?

[tenia]

David M would know certainly this better than I do, but IIRC, the use of the wrong color matrix regarding REC. 709 directly impact the rendering of red. It could be that one presentation is correct and the other not, but am totally unsure here which is the right one.

[cdnchris]

Are those taken from the restoration demonstration?

Yeah, when watching the film, I was struck by the intensity of the reds and they became even more pronounced when watching the comparisons in the demonstration. But the before shots were really green I thought, particularly when they compare the sequence where Niven wakes up on the beach (which also removed some severe pulsing). The skin tones I guess look better but there was a lot of green everywhere else, with the blues even looking green. Between the two I prefer the restoration but it's probably somewhere between.

[movielocke]

Watched this last night. Holy shit this looks amazing. I’ve seen it three times on film in the last twelve years, and I’ve always been disappointed by the dvd presentation which didn’t transmit the look of the film very well at all.

But on the Blu-ray right away in the first scene we can see how right this is by looking at the three face tones, the sallow dead Sparks, the fire lit niven, and the gauzey Hunter. It’s a subtle thing but the dvd just never seemed right to me the way these colors interplayed with each other, the Blu-ray feels exactly right.

Just phenomenal perfect work on the image all around. I’m staggered and couldnt be happier.

[TheKieslowskiHaze]

Here is a blog post I recently wrote for this movie:

Powell and Pressburger’s WWII-era films seem today like dispatches from a besieged England, offering modern viewers a taste of that uncertain time. But rather than dwell on panic or despair, the movies exude aspirational resolve and an English fighting spirit. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp perhaps best exemplifies this. Released in 1943, well before Allied victory was a certainty, it offered a forceful thesis about how to win the war and how to grieve for what would be—already had been—lost in the process. But, in our own uncertain times, the Archers movie I recommend is their post-war sigh of relief, A Matter of Life and Death. That aspirational resolve is apparent from the opening scene, an oddly static but rousing plane crash during which the (supposedly) doomed pilot falls in love with the radio operator and espouses the virtues of “Plato, Aristotle, and Jesus.” Thus begins a plot too complicated to summarize here, but one that barrels through catharsis and whimsy toward its celebratory final minute. It’s that final exchange between the not-so-doomed-after-all pilot and his American lover that both addresses the movie’s central mystery with perfect ambiguity and offers, sub-textually, the affirmation that war-exhausted viewers needed. He wakes up from brain surgery, certain he’s bested divine providence in a heavenly trial, she possibly thinking his hallucinations fixed with medical science (the film noncommittal on an answer). He looks into her eyes and tells her, “We won.” She replies, “I know.”