Four A24s, Part 3: A Different Man

Today we have another BD-only (as opposed to 4k Ultra HD) release; but in this case, I'm a little less surprised they went that route.  A Different Man was one of A24's least successful films at the box office, not even recouping half of its modest $1.4 million budget back, which is a real shame.  If you haven't seen it yet, you might be looking at this movie wondering: is this just a Mask 2.0, another afterschool-spirited film made to tell us to be nicer to people with disabilities?  Like that inane one with Julia Louis Dreyfus and the giant parrot?  Thankfully, no.  This is a weird, thoughtful, subversive little movie, perhaps more in tune with the Jim Carrey Mask than the Eric Stoltz Mask.  Although actually, if you were to moleculary fuse the two together in a Brundle pod, you'd be getting closer.

Captain America's Sebastian Stan is surprisingly natural as a nebbish Woody Allen-type, a struggling actor with neurofibromatosis and a crush on his playwright neighbor (Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World).  He agrees to participate in a futuristic medical experiment that transforms him, both physically and circumstantially, until a sort of doppleganger (Adam Pearson, Under the Skin, Drib) arrives to take everything away from him.  What results is a dark, cutting and mind-bending look at the humiliating interplay between art and artist.  Also, the soundtrack is terrific and the special make-up effects won the Academy Award.  I enjoyed writer/ director Aaron Schimberg's first film (Chained for Life) well enough, but this is a much more self-possessed and stimulating work.

2025 A24 BD.

A24 presents A Different Man in its proper OAR of 1.85:1.  This film was shot on 16mm (another reason they might've felt this title would be fine without a 4k), so there's a lot of film grain, which is handy because it makes it easy to judge the transfer.  And I have to say, wow, once again A24 has exceeded my expectations with how perfectly encoded this is.  This is as finely captured and preserved as you could hope for outside of a UHD; and even then, the distinction would probably be fairly mild. 

And they've gone all out in the audio department, too, giving this a 7.1 TrueHD mix with Dolby Atmos, plus an English descriptive track and optional English and Spanish subtitles.

And the extras are strong, too.  Schimberg and his two leading men give a breezy but still incisive audio commentary, backed up by a solid 20+ minute 'making of' featurette.  There are also four deleted scenes, a couple of which we'd heard about in the commentary track, and a fun fifteen minute high-speed document of the entire shoot in 8mm.  Again, no trailer.  I guess A24 doesn't believe in including them.  No biggie, but considering how dedicated to perfection they seem to be with their physical releases in all other releases, it's a bit curious.  We do get another six art cards, this time with pages of the screenplay printed on the back of each one.

A24 is one more consistent production companies in cinema history, especially considering all of the big chances they take with their films.  But still, usually I'm happy to just see them once and move on.  Maybe I'll revisit 'em on streaming a decade down the line when I realize I can barely remember them anymore.  And this is one I really wasn't expecting much of, but it turned out to be a real must-have release for me.  Who knew?

Four A24s, Part 2: I Saw the TV Glow

It took me a while to get my hands on this one.  I Saw the TV Glow sold out fast upon its initial release last summer.  Apparently they seriously underestimated the demand for this title.  And then it popped up on a few online shops, but in very limited quantities.  So if you didn't snatch it up within the first day of its listing, you missed out again.  An alternative Canadian edition came out, but it was missing the special features, so pass.  By the time A24 finally came out with more copies, my enthusiasm had been sapped, and I was questioning whether I really needed this in my collection anyway.  Sure, I'd enjoyed it when it first came out.  It had some great visuals and some funky, weird moments.  But was it really an "I must own it" masterwork, or just a decent new release I got a kick out of?  So I held off.  But I eventually broke down and threw it in the cart when I was ordering some other titles (watch this space for Parts 3 & 4).  And now that I've revisited it on blu, yes, it is a must own masterwork that I needed in my collection.

2024's I Saw the TV Glow is Jane Schoenbrun's follow-up to the her initial cult hit, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.  That was interesting, but it feels like a warm-up for this far more accomplished work.  This film is directed with a more confident hand, with striking visuals and richly layered performances.  It also has a clever, original premise: where young adults' shared obsession with a young adult horror show (a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Goosebumps) overtake their lives to a shockingly literal degree.  This is obviously, not buried particularly deeply in the subtext, a story about coming out - or not - as trans.  But the themes are so personal and universal at the same time, that they should prove powerful for anyone who's ever repressed a dream.

2024 A24 BD.

A24 slightly mattes this film to a proper 1.85:1, and occasionally pillarboxes it to 1.38:1 for the show-within-the-show scenes.  You might be surprised to hear that this film was shot on 35mm rather than digital, and it's very well captured and encoded here.  Film grain is consistent and rendered as well as you could ask for on a 1080 blu-ray.  The director refers to this getting a 4k release in the special features, but A24 only sprung for a BD.  That's a little disappointing (again, it seems like they didn't anticipate the audience this film would develop), but as good as this looks, it's hard to complain.  In other hands, this could've looked worse on a UHD.

A24 has also given this an impressive 7.1 TrueHD mix, with an English descriptive track and optional English and Spanish subtitles.

And the special features are more satisfying than they were on Showing Up, starting with an audio commentary by Schoenbrun and star Brigette Lundy-Paine.  They start off unserious and frankly a little annoying - I was starting to think maybe I should've just picked up that Canadian disc and saved myself the hassle.  But as the film unfurls they find their groove and start providing some genuine insight.  Then there's a 'making of,' which is just over ten minutes, but offers a pretty fun look behind the scenes, followed by a collection of deleted and extended scenes.  Like the other A24 releases, this is a digipack housed in a side-loading slipbox and includes six art cards, in this case styled to look like Polaroids.

So it was a bit of a rocky road, but I'm glad I've finally got my grubby little hands on this.

Four A24s, Part 1: Showing Up

To start off the new year, I'm introducing A24 to our label collection with the next short series of posts.  Now, you might be saying, hey dummy, you've already made several A24 posts: The Lighthouse, On the Rocks, You Hurt My Feelings, Zola...  To which I would say, first of all, "dummy?"  Let's try to keep it civil here.  But no, those were all A24 films they released in conjunction with other labels.  These next four discs are from their own in-house label that they sell primarily through their website.  And depending on the title, specialty dealers like Diabolik might stock a few copies; but they tend to sell out of there fast.  Their first release was Krisha on blu-ray in 2017 and they've got BD and UHD releases of The Smashing Machine due out at the end of the month.

We're starting today with 2022's Showing Up on 4k Ultra HD (they do also have a 1080p BD version).  This film has writer/ director Kelly Reichardt reuniting with Michelle Williams, who'd also starred in her films Wendy & Lucy, Meek's Cutoff and Certain Women.  This time they've created what I would call an especially light comedy about the academic art world.  At least that's the milieu; I guess you'd say the story is more just about Williams stay afloat within this world, which is also populated by her dysfunctional family, passive aggressive landlord, and an ailing pigeon she feels responsible for.  Reichardt isn't really following a plot here so much as just building a world breathing life into it.  It's populated by a bunch of fun supporting players including James le Gros, Amanda Plummer, Matt Malloy (In the Company of Men), Andre 3000 of Outkast and Judd Hirsch.  And the artwork itself fleshes the viewing experience out further.

2023 A24 UHD.

This is framed at 1.78:1.  And, well, as I'm always reminding you guys, HDR screenshots look darker than in an online, SD format, because they're intended to be viewed on a higher nit display.  But even on my HDR set, this transfer is kinda low-lit.  I assume this is a originating factor of the film itself, rather than the home video transfer, since new releases being put out by their own distributor are surely taken more or less directly from the DCP.  It's not like we're judging a restoration made from old film elements here.  In fact, despite the deep 16mm-like grain structure here, this movie was shot on digital and made to look more film-like in post.  But the grain is helpful because it shows us this 3840p disc is perfectly rendering each fleck, authentic or not.  This is as sharp and detailed as you can get.  The saturation isn't super high, but the colors are natural and vivid in those scenes where the artwork is prominent and appropriately muted when characters are in their dingy home environments.

The audio is given an impressive True HD 7.1 with Dolby Atmos track.  It also includes an English descriptive audio track for the visually impaired and optional English subtitles for the hard of hearing.  There are Spanish subtitles as well.

Cal State, Long Beach, CA, January 2020

And A24 tends to cook up some nice extras for their releases.  The main special feature here (the specialist?) is an audio commentary by Reichardt, her DP Christopher Blauvert and Michelle Segre, who made a bunch of the art featured in the film.  It's a good chat, but they're diligent in crediting all the local artists whose work appears throughout the movie, and unfortunately this winds up equating to them spending a lot of time dropping an alienating and seemingly endless list of names that means nothing to almost all of the listeners.  Still, most of it is engaging and insightful.  Then there are two "short films" by Reichardt, which are nice to have here, but it's kind of overstating the matter to call them short films.  They're under ten minutes apiece of 1.66:1 footage of some of the art pieces from the film being created.

And that's it; no trailer or anything else.  Like all of these, it's a digibook in a side-loading slipbox and includes six art cards (particularly appropriate in the case of this movie).  Of the four, this is the slimmest special features package.  But it's an ideal presentation of the film itself, which is a joy that doesn't need to be adorned with bonuses.