I’m celebrating buying a new, bigger 4K TV by watching this 0.7K DVD. Everybody’s so big!

I bought a new TV because I destroyed my old one by not paying attention to its OLED-ness. My fault. That is, as a screensaver I displayed the currently playing album, so that takes up an approximate square in the middle of the TV. And that started showing — a yellowing, ugly square in the middle.

So if I had to buy a new TV, I might as well go bigger, so I’m now at 77″. (Sony.)

But it looks quite nice now that I’ve switched off all of the upsampling and motion “improvements” and stuff.

This movie is pretty original — it’s about a guy that has a father that goes to jail, and the son get involved with the mobsters to get him a parole. (Somehow! The scheme seemed kinda odd.) But beyond the plot, it’s got an unusual wistful tone.

Dorothy!

It’s an odd pairing, too. Tyrone Power is slightly reticent and diffident, while Dorothy Lamour is a total predator on the hunt.

Indeed.

Unfortunately, as it winds its way to its conclusion, it loses a lot of tension. It’s not that it’s too long or anything, but it’s just hard to remain interested.

I want a control panel like that!

Johnny Apollo. Henry Hathaway. 1940. ⚂

Spider-Man!

Oh my god. That was the funnest start to an action movie evar.

Noooe! Now there’s a sensitive flash-back! Whyyy

It’s Marky Mark!

How come they never get him a better hair stylist? Or is it a wig? No, a wig would look better.

I’m not bored, but I think a lot of that has to do with Holland’s charm — he’s just fun to watch on the screen.

Aww.

Hey, it’s that guy from all the Almodóvar movies!

I think the Barcelona tourist dept. got their money’s worth.

I’m guessing the logic of this is really eh uhm simplistic (I’m trying to avoid saying “bleedin’ stupid”) because it’s based on a video game?

But I appreciate stupid in action movies.

The action stuff here is a lot of fun — the extreme silliness of some of the bits is hard to not be charmed by — and there’s a whole bunch of likeable actors here. So it’s really watchable… but then there’s these bits where they try to cram “character development” in, and the movie sags.

(The “mystery” itself is almost unbelievably stupid, but that’s fine.)

This more of a ⚃ movie, but the final action sequence had me laughing out loud several times, so:

Uncharted. Ruben Fleischer. 2022. ⚄

After watching a bunch of older movies, it’s always an adjustment going back to modern ones — everything seems unreal. That looks extremely like a CGI exterior, right? But is it? Is it just filmed in a way that’ll make it blend into the CGI-ness that’s going to happen later?

It looks like shit anyway.

And this is a 4K disc with the highest bitrate I’ve seen — it’s going past 100Mbps here and there.

Even just simple scenes like this — this totally looks like greenscreen, and somebody has rendered that wall instead of spending a few bucks on bringing a carpenter in.

It might just be the colour grading that makes everything look shitty, though.

Such real.

Did they CGI the rolls of cloth!? I think they did.

But it’s not just that it’s ugly — this is tedious as hell.

Yup:

The aesthetics of the film are also bland: the visuals are shockingly unappealing: brown, spare, with a digital sheen that makes the well-appointed period costuming and production look modern and artificial.

OK, this is beyond tedious, so I ditched it after 33 minutes.

The Outfit. Graham Moore. 2022. ☐