"Ordinary People" Due For the Criterion Treatment
Caught "Ordinary People" on TV late the other night, and the poor quality of the transfer prompted me to send a note to the Criterion Collection folks about doing a remastered DVD with a new transfer. The film looks muddy and flat now, especially in low light scenes, and in spots it looks like a bad 70s TV movie. That's not my memory of seeing it in the theater, although that was 27 years ago. But to me it was luminous and even the dark stuff, like the sequences in the therapist's office were rich, and the low lighting seemed to hum. Of course the performances were unusually immediate.
Even though the print was bad, the distortion from shooting a digital image from the film on a TV screen makes something kind of nice and actually very evocative of that look that I remember.
Give me the camera. Give me the camera. Would you give me the goddamn camera????
Posted by: kenneth | May 11, 2008 at 06:50 PM