UHD Review A Few Words About A few words about...™ - The Creator -- in 4k UHD (1 Viewer)

[jayembee]

Sarah Polley's Women Talking (2022) was also 2.76:1.

I was thinking that I'd seen something recent that was 2.76, but then I figured I was confusing it with Old Henry. Thanks for pointing out what it was.

 

[Jeff Cooper]

Wow, ok, I'm usually right in tune with Robert's very dry sense of humor, but this 'a few words about' is the first one that has completely baffled me.

First off with the story, I knew nothing about it going in besides the trailers, and what I read here. With Robert's synopsis in the back of my mind, as I was watching the movie, I became increasingly upset with Robert for spoiling the plot, as what he described had not yet happened, and was going to be the giant twist at the end. Why in the world would he spoil that for people who hadn't seen the film? Except then the twist never happened. It turns out that the synopsis here was so far off the mark it wasn't even part of the plot and I was waiting the whole time for the inevitable that never came. I know Robert put down that he was confused by the plot, but I couldn't make heads or tails if he was serious about that or it was his humor. To be honest, I still am not quite sure.

Enough about that though, the more important thing is the slipcover. Based on this write up, I was even more baffled when the slipcover I got was a bog standard ordinary boring slipcase that did nothing but reproduce the cover artwork in flat matte graphics. No where anywhere was the glossy effects, and mind boggling thingymajiggers that Robert described in his write up that made this the slipcase to end all slipcases. This was even more baffling to me than the story issues I listed above. I bought this day 1, so I don't think it would have been a first pressing thing.

Anyway, I'm off for a gin and tonic to calm down.

 

[Malcolm R]

Enough about that though, the more important thing is the slipcover. Based on this write up, I was even more baffled when the slipcover I got was a bog standard ordinary boring slipcase that did nothing but reproduce the cover artwork in flat matte graphics. No where anywhere was the glossy effects, and mind boggling thingymajiggers that Robert described in his write up that made this the slipcase to end all slipcases. This was even more baffling to me than the story issues I listed above. I bought this day 1, so I don't think it would have been a first pressing thing.

Did you get the 4K format? There appear to be different slipcovers for the 4K and blu-ray editions.

 

[Jeff Cooper]

Did you get the 4K format? There appear to be different slipcovers for the 4K and blu-ray editions.

View attachment 206457 View attachment 206458

Yup I got the one on the left. It looks exactly like that except that there's no depth, glossy effects, nothing. It's like that picure was just printed on matte cardstock and that's that.

 

[David Norman]

Damn, I'm tuning in to most to these new reviews as much for the Slipcover reviews as anything. This one had me doubled over laughing so hard I couldn't breathe (OK that passed too).

While I enjoy the actual real Words, the add-on extras are worht their weight in Gold Ingots

 

[Tino]

Im pretty sure RAH is being sarcastic and facetious when he includes slipcover info in his reviews….or at least I hope he is.

 

[cineMANIAC]

And while everyone of course free to their own opinions, I humbly submit that there's far more to the stories in Edwards' films than meets the eye. It's just that it's not always the stories that people are expecting. Monsters isn't really about the monsters, and The Creator isn't really about A.I. Both films actually have far more in common thematically than is immediately obvious -- The Creator is almost a spiritual sequel to Monsters. I'll have more to say about that elsewhere.

Just give me a decent, good-looking popcorn flick to unwind with. Not looking for messages or second meanings in films - that's not why I watch movies.

I've heard good things about this but it's probably just another 'Robots have feelings too' type of film. Seen my share of those but I'm still going to order a copy. Weird that it was shot in 2.76, tho. This isn't Ben-Hur lol.

 

[Jeff Cooper]

Im pretty sure RAH is being sarcastic and facetious when he includes slipcover info in his reviews….or at least I hope he is.

I'm all in on the facetiousness of reviewing the slipcover in the first place. But beyond that, I thought they were meant to have actual factual information in them, as there *are* definitely higher quality slipcases than others, with embossments, reflective foil, etc...

 

[sbjork]

Just give me a decent, good-looking popcorn flick to unwind with. Not looking for messages or second meanings in films - that's not why I watch movies.

That means you're cutting yourself off from a vast quantity of the very best that the movies have to offer. Your choice, of course, but I presume that you don't mean that you want the rest of us to be deprived of things that we enjoy?

 

[sbjork]

Thank you for the further information. I have a copy of Women Talking, but have not yet found the time to screen. Your comments just moved it up. Digital capture enables us to use any ratio we like, captured in different ways by the optics, and further controlled via cropping.

Theaters, on the other hand, won’t be thrilled.

We’ve just booked the 1959 Ben-Hur for our theater, for (I believe) April 24th of next year. Our screen and markings allow us to properly screen the film in its original Camera 65 ratio og 2.76:1.

As an aside, the original C65 Panavision optics were incorrectly marked as 1.33:1 as opposed to 1,25:1.

An addendum about The Creator after staying up for hours last night researching the cinematography, because I just had to know. I had previously found a comment by Edwards in regards to ScreenX where he said that the full width of the frame that they captured was actually 3.5:1, but the math on that didn't work when comparing the anamorphic squeeze of the Kowa lenses to the full image sensors on the Sony ILME-FX3 cameras. Those are just shy of 1.5:1 (1.496, to be precise) which would have yielded 2.99:1. The discrepancy is explained by the fact that the FX3 is also a still camera and the top and bottom edges of the sensor are only used for stills. It outputs RAW video files at 4264 x 2408 at more or less 1.78:1 (1.77:1 in this case, but that's splitting hairs). With the Kowa lenses, that would have yielded a 3.55:1 image. Regardless of the disparaging remarks made about Edwards elsewhere in this thread, he does know his stuff, so I shouldn't have doubted him on that one. The sides the the image that were cropped off for 2.76:1 were indeed used to help generate the side panels for 270° ScreenX presentations.

Edwards also went back to his roots by being the primary camera operator on The Creator. Soffer and Fraser facilitated that by lighting everything first for 360°, then getting out of the way (along with the rest of the crew) so that Edwards could block everything on-the-fly as the inspiration took him, sometimes in takes that lasted 20-30 minutes. The shots weren't planned in advance at all. That's hardly the normal way to shoot a big budget effects film, but thanks to the location shooting, small crew, and lightweight cameras, Edwards was able to pull it off, and that's one reason why The Creator doesn't quite look like any other sci-fi epic made today. The effects had to follow the practical creative decisions on-set, not lead them and force everything to be storyboarded and planned in advance.