Well, 2017 Academy Award nominee
The Florida Project just touched down this past week on blu-ray, except for a few lucky pre-orderers on Amazon, who wound up getting their discs a month early due to a little screw up. But hey, I'm not bitter... At least not like I was two weeks ago. haha But it's funny how all release data drama washes right under the bridge once we finally get our hands on what we want. And now I do:
Sean Baker's latest and greatest film on blu, by way of Lions Gate.
Update 2/25/18 - 7/12/18: I've added the DVD edition for comparison.
Update 10/25/25: I never thought we'd get another upgrade on this title, but then
Anora went ahead and swept the Academy Awards, so here we are with a fancy special edition UHD from Second Sight!
Well, I call this Baker's greatest film, but to be fair, I haven't seen all of his earliest work. I've seen most of it, though, even that IFC show about the stuffed bunny. And I just recently revisited his last and probably mots popular feature,
Tangerine, which is particularly interesting having now watched
The Florida Project. You can really see how the look and feel of this picture, from the style of the performances and editing, right down to specific shots, are directly carried over from there. Like, the precious framing of the locked establishing shot of businesses like the Orange World or Wizard Gift Shop feel like they're taken from the same movie as the Donut Time shot in
Tangerine. Even if you had no idea the same filmmaker made both movies, you'd instantly recognize that somebody behind the camera of the one film had clearly worked on the other.
But where
The Florida Project excels is in its maturity.
Tangerine had a touching, poignant ending that really elevated the preceding 90 minutes or so. But until then, it felt like a pretty superfluous, entertaining piece of fluff.
Transgender characters constantly cracking about having penises felt like a young straight writer playing out of his element. But what everybody's latching onto here is how authentic the characters in this film come across, especially the children. We're really drawn into this world of dirt poor Floridians living in the shadow of Disney World. We find Halley (newcomer
Bria Vinaite, who really should be among this year's nominees) and her children having lunch on a pink park bench giving the middle finger to one of the low flying helicopter tours that are constantly buzzing past them day in and day out. It's really more of a character study than plot-driven narrative as we explore the world of a handful of impoverished families living month to month in a cheap hotel called The Magic Castle,
not to be confused with The Magic Kingdom.
Willem Dafoe is the manager who also lives there, trying to maintain order but who can't help but empathize as the lives of people around them fall apart.
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1) 2018 US Lions Gate DVD; 2) 2018 US Lions GateBD;
3) 2025 UK Second Sight UHD.
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Lions Gate's discs were contemporary new releases when I first posted this, so I think it's safe to assume we're getting the final DCP straight out of the filmmakers' editing software slapped onto a disc, so there's not a lot of potential issues to police. This was shot on both 35mm and digital, and they do a fine job blending them together. Grain looks natural, even where it's presumably a fake added to blend the two formats, and the colors are bold and appealing without being overly saturated. The film is presented in 2.39:1 (on all three discs) with a lot of high focus, wide angle imagery, so you're really going to want to see this eye candy in HD.
Or even Ultra-HD, although don't set your expectations too high in terms of the resolution. Rather famously, the digital stuff was shot on an iphone 6s, so it's not 4k footage with a ton of new detail to unveil on Second Sight's new disc. The text on that STOP sign in the background of that second set of shots, for example, is no easier or harder to read than it was on the blu. Film grain just looks soft, which is presumably intentional on behalf of the director, who did produce this new restoration. The colors are even stronger now, though. It's a cliche to say they "pop," but here they really do, which is fitting for the visual style of this particular film.
The audio is a strong, if a little low on
dialogue (I found myself cranking the volume higher than I do on most discs) 5.1 mix, in DTS-HD on the blu and UHD. Lions Gate included optional English and Spanish subtitles, which Second Sight has pared down to just the English.
Now just reading the back of the case, LG's release may've looked disappointingly light: a 'making of' featurette, a gag reel and cast and
crew interviews. That's it. But actually, some of this is a lot
better than they make it sound.
That 'making of' featurette is not the generic, promotional featurette
we see on just about every disc. It's an original, 22 minute
documentary that uses no clips from the film, but instead gives us a
very candid look behind the scenes, from the early production meetings
to the director yelling at a truck for spoiling his shot. The gag reel
is what you'd expect, a very short but amusing string of outtakes,
mostly involving the precocious kids. And the cast and crew
interviews? They actually run for almost a full hour, and while the
cast interviews are a little softball and repeat the same anecdotes
you've probably already heard (i.e., they cast the lead off of Instagram), but
the interviews with the director and co-writer are particularly
interesting. Lions Gate also loads this disc with bonus trailers (but
not the film's official trailer!) that will play for like half an hour
on start-up if you don't do something about it, and it does come in a
slipcover.
And here's where Second Sight really shines. They keep all of that,
but they've also produced a whole ton more, starting with an audio
commentary by Baker, co-writer
Chris Bergoch and DoP
Alexis Zabé.
If you've heard previous Baker commentaries, you know he does upbeat
and informative ones, and this is no exception. Then there's a second,
expert commentary by
Kat Ellinger and
Martyn Conterio. And we get all new, on-camera interviews with Baker, Willem Dafoe, Vinaite,
Brooklynn Kimberly Prince,
Valeria Cotto,
Christopher Rivera, another group chat with Prince, Cotto & Rivera (they played the kids), Chris Bergoch, producer
Andrew Duncan, co-producers
Kevin Chinoy &
Francesca Silvestri, associate producer
Samantha Quan,
Rev. Mary Downey from the Community Hope Center, and casting agent
Patti Wiley. Still not enough? There's another featurette where the three kids revisit the hotel they filmed in and a visual essay by
Rohan Spong. Still no trailer, though. It does exist; I looked it up on Youtube. But apparently nobody wants to stick it on disc.
Anyway, that's just the standard edition. If you spring for the limited edition, you also get 2 BD discs (the film and extras... the UHD has everything all on one disc), a 160-page hardcover book with a series of essays and photographs, eight art cards and a slipcase.
So Lions Gate's blu already proved to be more rewarding than I
was expecting. But if you're a fan, Second Sight has created a new, definitive edition. And if you're an uber-fan, there's the fancy limited edition. Of course, a lot of people will be fine with just the DVD, and the curious will just stream it. Choose according to how you identify! Me, I'm a standard edition UHD kinda guy.
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