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.
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2023 A24 UHD.
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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.
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| 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 five 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.
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