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.
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2024 A24 BD.
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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.
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