After my eulogy to all that is worldly and indie in cinema, a spanking Blu-ray copy of Gus Van Sant’s skater drama, Paranoid Park, arrived. Without giving too much away (our forthcoming issue will feature the review), the film did come as somewhat of a double-edged sword. With said review mapping out the film’s glories, I see it as being a slight issue when, despite best efforts from both sides – Tartan has given the film a dutiful transfer spec while, to encapsulate, the film itself rocks! – the relationship doesn’t gel when cast in HD.

Shot on less than DV quality, 35mm and merged with the kitsch images of Super 8 filming, Van Sant’s indie feel never ceases to shine through. But where the boot doesn’t fit is with Paranoid Park’s HD treatment, although in this case nobody is actually to blame. The distributors and those involved in production have dutifully seen that their product/baby reaches the public, but the aesthetics so vital in creating this left-field piece cannot marry with the future format.

Saying this, Paranoid Park needs to be seen to be believed, with its shining qualities hardly dealing a death knell to left-field cinema and its future on Blu-ray.

I started to watch Cloverfield the other day, but after 30 minutes my girlfriend asked me to switch it off. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy the opening third of the post-modern monster movie, more that the handheld Blair Witch-style camera work was so jarring that she was suffering from motion sickness. As a gamer I’m used to the first-person perspective of many a shooter, but I have to admit I was rather relieved when we stopped the DVD – my eyes felt like they had been through the wringer just making sense of the constantly moving images. It got me thinking, would I have coped in the cinema? Camcorder footage on a 20-foot-high screen is not a good combination, and even the film’s producer, JJ Abrams, was quoted recently saying that he thought Cloverfield was a rarity in that he think it actually works better on the small screen.

There may be some connotations for the future of HD. Will the effects of eyestrain and motion sickness be amplified in HD when Cloverfield hits Blu-ray? With the emergence of stereoscopic (3D) filming, will we find it harder to make sense of images that fool our brains to represent reality more accurately? Maybe it’s down to filming techniques, although static cameras are rare in this age of action blockbusters and CGI. The biggest indicator that our eyes may need to adapt to catch up with technology is the Ultra Definition system currently being developed in Japan – it’s in the experimental stage, but the 450-inch screen can cover a wall and induce motion sickness whatever you’re watching. With any luck, when we’re all watching our home-cinema walls in 20 years’ time, Cloverfield 7 will be less jerky…

First Pan’s Labyrinth and now The Orphanage; creeping onto HD with superb Blu-ray releases, are these contemporary world-cinema gems setting a precedent? One would hope.

With Bergman’s The Seventh Seal receiving a faithful transfer in a recent Blu-ray outing, seasoned film aficionados out there (myself included) are suffering from a distinct lack of HD culture. Italian neorealism powerhouses such as Rome, Open City, the French New Wave chic of Breathless and the sword-waving classicism of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo – will all these feature on a Blu Disc in the near future? Possibly. With world and left-field cinema distributor Tartan sporting a new Blu release slate – headed by Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park – expect to see us going all Mark Kermode in the not-so-distant future with highbrow reviews of some of cinema’s finest.

Catch our reviews of both Paranoid Park and The Orphanage in Issue 7 of HD Review, set to hit shelves 5 June.

Welcome to the brand spanking new HD Review blog, which we’ll be using to dispense pearls of high-def wisdom to you all. We’ll still be active on the forums so, as always, feel free to give us a shout there (www.hdreviewmag.com/forum) with your letters, ideas, feedback, questions and… err, anything else you might think of related to all that is high-definition entertainment. For those of you not sure what this HD is all about, checkout www.vimeo.com/hd and take a gander at some superb user videos streamed at 1,280 x 720 – for all intents and purposes it’s the high-def version of YouTube.

Cheers,

Tom

Want to extend your Blu-ray Disc collection and add that innate touch of randomness to it in order to wow your friends? Well, head over to www.xploitedcinema.com and check out the joys of Nordic and Australian imports – and wherever else the smaller distributors are churning out impressive Blu-rays from – at affordable prices to boot!

All compiled on an easy-to-navigate website, it is always nice to see alternative outlets for hungry HD lovers to find some hidden gems.

Hi everyone,

Welcome to our brand new blog feed on all things HD. Here at HD Review we’ll endeavour to fill you with as many insightful/pointless/damn right left-field stories all about the world of high definition.

Enjoy!

Shaun