On 4K UHD - David Hare enthuses over BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (Ang Lee, USA, 2005) + THE CONVERSATION (Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1974)

 New arrivals.

Brokeback Mountain has a very nice new 4K scan and transfer from Universal, released on Kino Lorber. I have plenty of time for it still, especially for the critically ignored beauty of Michelle Williams’ sweet, nuanced performance. Lee was and still is too sophisticated a chronicler of sexual mores for the Anglophone world where Brokeback died in a welter of Bumfuck Texas gaggery. Alas.

The new 4K scan and especially the color grade for Coppola's The Conversation is absolutely astonishing. It’s as though he’s finally enabled a kind of dual extreme hot-cold color scheme for razor sharp blues, grays and greens which are always in some sort of aesthetic suspension with fiery reds and skin tones. The opening telephoto shots have a previously unseen warmth, as though they had magically gone back to the original dye transfer printing in 1974 (which closed shortly after The Conversation was made.) The new image looks in some ways like IB printing on acid, but without a hint of fakery or artificiality. This single disc bare bones option is backed up for English and German options and gets an Oz release here at the most competitive price. There’s no regular Blu-ray in the box, nor any of the deluxe edition tat. A must get, but you need to be 4K enabled.