The Covenant

1 comment on Hacker News

1. NeutralexzalgreNov 16, 2023

   I read a great user review on a film ranking site for guy Ritchie’s film the covenant that said something approximating “he liberated himself from his own genre” and I sometimes feel that Nolan’s work could use some of that.

   I have issue both outright with the material of Oppenheimer, and his handling of it, but on release I waited an extra 3 weeks to get a reasonably positioned seat in one of the imax 70mm showings.

   And it made me realize something.

   Even if people like Nolan or pta or Tarantino swear by film, and even if they’re right!, what matters is if the theater owners care about film, because the presentation was terrible.

   There were flies on the lens obstructing the image with little furry dust balls crawling all over the picture.

   There was roughly 5 minutes worth of a red line down the picture, just to the left of center, in various 20 second chunks throughout the film.

   Also just culture shocked by imax 70mm because it frames the film in essentially 4:3.

   Growing up in the states in the 90s has me associating 4:3 with sitcom tv.

   So is the 4:3 framing the “intended” framing?

   Are home media viewers encouraged to drop the majority of their screen real estate when watching this?

   Does the home release have a 16:9 cut? Did Nolan reframe it? (These questions likely have answers for anyone who really wants to know but this article was light on actionable details other than “it is cause he said it is”)

   At a similar special showing I thought hateful 8 used theatrical 70mm to great effect.

   I liked the first fifth of Oppenheimer. Mostly the imaginative practical effect asides of seeing into the mind of someone laboring over matter at this scale.

   It lost me right around the time Nolan cruelly mangled this absolutely chilling moment into a “get it up” punchline.

   https://youtube.com/watch?v=lb13ynu3Iac