Behind the Red Curtain |
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Behind the Red Curtain |
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| BUY IT |
| General | Extras | ||
| Category | Documentary |
Main Menu Audio & Animation Featurette-The House Of Iona Featurette-Red Curtain Cinema Active Subtitle Track Featurette-Now Until The Break Of Day DVD-ROM Extras-Dubsy's Dirt; Screensavers; Toulouse Tonight Music Video-One Day I'll Fly Away-Tony Phillips Remix Gallery-Strictly Ballroom Comic Script-Moulin Rouge; Romeo + Juliet; Strictly Ballroom Credits |
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| Rating |
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| Year Of Production | ? | ||
| Running Time | 19:09 | ||
| RSDL / Flipper | No/No | Cast & Crew | |
| Start Up | Menu | ||
| Region Coding | 2,4 | Directed By | None Given |
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Studio
Distributor |
 Twentieth Century Fox |
Starring | Baz Luhrmann |
| Case | ? | ||
| RPI | Box | Music | None Given |
| Video | Audio | ||
| Pan & Scan/Full Frame | Full Frame |
English Dolby Digital 2.0  (192Kb/s)
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| Widescreen Aspect Ratio | Varies | ||
| 16x9 Enhancement | No | ||
| Video Format | 576i (PAL) | ||
| Original Aspect Ratio | Varies | Miscellaneous | |
| Jacket Pictures | No | ||
| Subtitles | English for the Hearing Impaired | Smoking | Yes |
| Annoying Product Placement | No | ||
| Action In or After Credits | No | ||
The box set is not a phenomenon unique to DVD. There have been box sets of VHS cassettes, of CDs, of vinyl LPs, even of books. Some DVD box sets are easy to understand — they might contain every film about a particular set of characters, or they might be all the films in a series, or all the films by a director that are of a given kind. Others are harder to grasp — I'm sure we're about to see a box set like "films whose covers do not have people on them"...
Once they decide to make a box set, the next question is how to make the box set enticing. After all, they're asking us, the consumers, to fork out quite a sum of money on some of these box sets, and it is possible we don't want all of the titles they've chosen to put in the box (Lethal Weapon 4 comes to mind...). The most obvious way to make it enticing is to make it cheaper than buying the discs individually — that's a common device, but can be unconvincing if we don't want all of the films (unless they make it a lot cheaper). Or they can change the packaging so the box set versions look nicer together than the individual discs — that's not too common, because the packaging is a significant cost for DVDs. The most compelling reason, for me, is when they include something interesting in the box set that is not available separately.
What I'm trying to explain, in my roundabout way, is what may have prompted the creation of this disc. It is only available in the Red Curtain box set. But I think it goes further than that. This disc also serves to explain the rationale behind the Red Curtain concept. Behind the Red Curtain is a good name for it... It increases the value of the box set, by explaining it.
Baz Luhrmann's Red Curtain films are not linked in any conventional way — they have no lead actors in common, no characters in common, not even a common style: one is a romantic comedy-drama, one is a re-telling of a Shakespearean play, and one's a musical. They are set in different eras and different worlds. The one thing they have in common is the high level of theatricality.
Baz Luhrmann could hardly be accused of having a fear of trying something new. And so it is with this disc. He sets out to explain what Red Curtain Cinema is about, but he does so in an innovative way. The best way I can describe it is as "hyperlinked video". It is centred on a talk by Baz Luhrmann that runs for 19:09, but at intervals words appear on the right that you can select. When you select them, it is equivalent to clicking on a hyperlink on a web page, and something new appears. Many of the links lead to new pieces of video (some quite short, some a bit longer), but some lead to screens of text (especially the script links), some even to photo galleries (including photos of Baz Luhrmann as a boy and young man, as a ballroom dancer). This is probably easier to navigate on a PC, where you can use a mouse to click, and using a PC makes more sense when the scripts become DVD-ROM features (more on that below). I cannot give you a complete running time for this feature, but the opening screen suggests that there is over 2 hours of viewing included - I cannot contradict that.
There is one thing that annoyed me slightly — I studied French in high school, so I know the correct pronunciation of "Moulin Rouge"; it grates to hear Baz Luhrmann saying "Moolon Rouge". Still, that explains why Nicole Kidman (in particular) mispronounces the name in the film.
If you liked one or more of the Red Curtain films, then you will probably find this quite interesting.
The video quality is quite variable, because this work assembles footage from a variety of sources, some of it footage that was never intended for publication. To be honest, the value of the footage generally outweighs the quality.
The video is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1. I think this is probably the intended aspect ratio.
The sharpness of the core piece is perfectly adequate. Shadow detail is fine, but unimportant. There's no low-level noise. Some of the ancillary footage is soft, a bit harsh, and displays some low-level noise. There are lots of variations between these extremes.
Colour is fine in the core piece, and there are no colour-related artefacts. Some of the extra footage, however, displays heavy smearing.
The core piece is free from significant film artefacts. Some of the other footage is riddled with film artefacts, some possibly intentional, but most not. I won't attempt to give the locations, because the route you might take to get to the pieces could well be different to mine.
There are no significant film-to-video or MPEG artefacts in the core piece. There is a little bit of aliasing in some of the extra footage, but it is not especially notable. There's no real moire, and no major MPEG artefacts, but there is quite a bit of background shimmer.
This is a single-sided, single-layered disc, so there's no layer change. That's fine - there's not enough stuff on this disc to need a second layer.
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There's only one soundtrack, and that's in English Dolby Digital 2.0, surround-encoded.
The dialogue is clear and easily comprehensible in the central piece. There are no audio sync problems.
The only music in this piece consists of quotes from the three movies, so there's no single composer responsible.
The surrounds and subwoofer aren't really needed. I suspect the reason for the surround encoding is to get a centre channel, rather than surrounds.
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The menu is animated with music, nicely themed to match the discs in the box, particularly Moulin Rouge.
This featurette, short though it is, is a tour of the mansion that is headquarters to Bazmark, the production house that made these films. The footage is deliberately poor quality (part of the affectation that afflicted the opening of Moulin Rouge), but that doesn't stop the tour being quite interesting. There's a credit to the BBC for the footage, but I don't think the BBC would be thrilled about that, given the deliberately poor quality.
This is a collection of stuff that they wanted to provide, but without a single theme. Some of the content (the scripts) can be accessed through the interactive piece, but I am glad they also provided a more straightforward and direct way of getting to it. The items are arranged as books on a shelf — just pick one and press Enter.
NOTE: To view non-R4 releases, your equipment needs to be multi-zone compatible and usually also NTSC compatible.
The box set containing this disc was released in Region 1 just recently. The contents sound identical to the Region 4 version, and I doubt there'd be any visible difference between the two versions.
This is a convincing reason to buy the box set — if you like extras, then you need have no doubt — you want the box set!
The video quality is immensely variable, and it doesn't matter.
The audio quality is adequate.
The extras are profuse, and interesting.
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| Review Equipment | |
| DVD | Pioneer DV-S733A, using Component output |
| Display | Sony VPH-G70 CRT Projector, QuadScan Elite scaler (Tripler), ScreenTechnics 110. Calibrated with Video Essentials. This display device is 16x9 capable. |
| Audio Decoder | Built in to amplifier/receiver. Calibrated with Video Essentials. |
| Amplification | Denon AVC-A1SE |
| Speakers | Front Left, Centre, Right: Krix Euphonix; Rears: Krix KDX-M; Subwoofer: Krix Seismix 5 |