57 Charade

[domino harvey]

UHD upgrade in June

[mfunk9786]

What a waste not to have HDR enabled for this film of all films. Wish Criterion would put in more than the bare minimum of effort.

[The Narrator Returns]

The people demand The Truth About Charlie even as just a half-hearted special feature.

[The Curious Sofa]

What a waste not to have HDR enabled for this film of all films. Wish Criterion would put in more than the bare minimum of effort.

Might stick with the Blu-ray then, which I remember looking pretty good.

[Beloved Aunt]

I love pretty much everyone involved in this film, and especially, what an extraordinarily charming, sweet, heavenly, divine craftsman Stanley Donen was, the kind of artist and man only old Hollywood out of all of human history could ever produce, but aside from some memorable Large-Headed Celebrity moments of movie star schmoozing between Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, the highly intriguing, if perhaps rather difficult, basic premise and design of this film, and lovely work by Henry Mancini and Charles Lang, its really just not very good at all. Like the Demme remake, Charade is beset by jarring tonal problems that perhaps no screenwriter, or at least, not Peter Stone, could ever make superable. Okay, the bad guys are supposed to be sort of endearing, and Demme goes as far as to make them people Audrey/Thandie (I actually prefer Thandie Newton to Audrey Hepburn, Thandie is a smaller talent, no doubt, but one I find considerably easier to warm to and relish nonetheless) sympathizes with, and who have much vulnerability, but the Demme film just suddenly slams this twist into the viewer's lap, with the dance scene on the street and beyond, with no preparation at all and its kind of excruciatingly unnatural and preposterous on any terms. What a strange, odd duck of a film The Truth About Charlie is! I loved the first hour but beyond that I have absolutely no idea what to make of it on any level. Maybe to make the Hitchcockian humour and menace gel one has to have more darkness somewhere in their soul than Stanley Donen? (Outside of some aspects of some, like, a few, of De Palma's films, I've never seen any film that I would describe as being anywhere near to successfully "Hitchcockian". I really don't know why that word is, or used to be, thrown around so much.) Or at least a scenarist with greater abilities and sharper wits than Peter Stone. The dreadful painful bungling crooks Three Stooges shite-ola he comes up with in Charade certainly isn't it. Despite the intriguing skeleton of both films, TTAC and Charade both have a touch or two of that kind of special, overblown, totally unreal, sickeningly preposterous Hollywoodishness that completely overtakes some (much) worse films from, say, the worst James Bond films, to Peter Weir's worst Hollywood films, and probably a good many others.

[Beloved Aunt]

To clarify, I am aware that Charade and The Truth About Charlie are two different films LOL, and I'm not actually mixing them up, not really, though my paragraph is indeed a bit of a mess.

[pistolwink]

Why does it feel like this film has been released on DVD and Blu-Ray, multiple times, by almost every label under the sun at this point?
Not to complain—it's an extremely entertaining film—but I got déja vu seeing the latest announcement.

[CSM126]

Why does it feel like this film has been released on DVD and Blu-Ray, multiple times, by almost every label under the sun at this point?
Not to complain—it's an extremely entertaining film—but I got déja vu seeing the latest announcement.

Well it is public domain.

[pistolwink]

Ah, that explains it!

[andyli]

This is supposed to be from a new 4K restoration done by The Film Foundation, which was probably done in SDR, hence the choice.

[Finch]

Could be like I Know Where I'm Going! where you don't miss the Dolby Vision. Even so, I never bought the film before and the increased resolution plus better encoding on the UHD should make this worthwhile.