The two talk about the film and how elements of Fellini's life inspired aspects of it. I sampled it this time around but my feelings are the same, and find it to be a surprisingly energetic (even fun) academic track. From the old material, things start off again with the same audio commentary (that first appeared on the 2006 DVD re-issue) featuring film scholars Peter Brunette and Frank Burke.
The colours threw me a bit at first, and that may have thrown off the blacks a bit (maybe), but I have to admit I was far more pleased with this presentation, which still looks quite a bit cleaner and more photographic when all is said and done.Ĭriterion technically ports everything over from their individual Blu-ray edition (outside of a restoration demonstration that doesn't relate to the newer restoration used for this release), though things get shifted around a bit to make room for a new feature. On top of all of that, it's worth mentioning a couple of sequences also look to be tinted differently, with the movie-theater "flashback" sticking out most: previous releases tinted it a heavier blue, but the filter has been toned down in this edition. The blacks could crush a bit in the old presentation, but I'd probably still give the edge to the blacks on that disc. Blacks appear to have been impacted a bit, though, with some muddy looking ones popping up in places, and this could be a side effect of the warmer look. Blues pop up and they look blue, not cyan (and oddly some of the sky shots in this presentation look bluer than what was present on the old disc), while the slightly boosted yellow hue seems to intensify the reds to a wonderful degree: Gradisca's red jacket really pops. par Agnès V. in that aforementioned Varda set (my apologies but that presentation really irritated me). Whites actually still look white, they're just a bit warmer, and the snow in one sequence still looks like snow and not like everyone decided to relieve themselves in it, like how the snow appeared in Jane B. Where things are a little iffy are the colours, which do lean quite a bit warmer than the old presentation, though, to be fair, the colours in that presentation maybe leaned a little too cool. Yet, while there is a yellow-ish tint to the new image, that can look greener in darker sequences, it's actually not that bad, nowhere near as ugly as what appears on most of the colour films in Criterion's Varda set or other recent 4K restorations I've come across. The new restoration also manages to remove more blemishes and the image is more stable. The background field present during the sequence with the uncle midway through also looks incredible. This new presentation improves upon that aspect significantly, grain looking far more natural and cleaner, which in turn leads to better details, the finer textures of the buildings and interiors being quite striking. Unfortunately, the age of that older master does show now, with the image looking a bit noisier, especially in its rendering of the grain. Though there are a couple of caveats I have to admit this new presentation does offer a notable improvement over the previous Blu-ray edition, which I was certainly happy with at the time. Instead of reusing the old high-definition master used for their 2006 DVD and 2011 Blu-ray editions, Criterion is instead using a more recent (from 2015 I believe) 4K restoration, which was scanned from the 35mm original negative. Bringing together fourteen of the director’s greatest spectacles, all beautifully restored, this centenary box set is a monument to an artist who conjured a cinematic universe all his own: a vision of the world as a three-ring circus in which his innermost infatuations, fears, and fantasies take center stage.ĭisc numero 12 in Criterion's large box set, Essential Fellini, presents Amarcord in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1 on a dual-layer disc. He began his career working in the slice-of-life poetry of neorealism, and though he soon spun off on his own freewheeling creative axis, he never lost that grounding, evoking his dreams, memories, and obsessions on increasingly grand scales in increasingly grand productions teeming with carnivalesque imagery and flights of phantasmagoric surrealism while maintaining an earthy, embodied connection to humanity. The Italian maestro is defined by his dualities: the sacred and the profane, the masculine and the feminine, the provincial and the urbane. One hundred years after his birth, Federico Fellini still stands apart as a giant of the cinema.
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