Innehållsförteckning för Febuary/March 2021 från Sound & Vision

Okay, children! Time for a bedtime story! Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Goldilocks. While walking through the forest, she came upon a quaint little village. In that village there were three ways to watch movies. The first way to watch movies was on a tiny smartphone. Goldilocks happily picked up the phone and started watching a movie. wide But after a while she grew frustrated and threw the phone on the ground! The picture was just too small, and the sound just wasn’t very good. She walked further into the village and came upon a movie theater. She dug deep into her purse and bought an expensive ticket. Wow! The screen was enormous, and the sound was loud! But then she noticed other people in…

AFTER A SLEW of genuinely outstanding back-catalog reissues on 4K disc lo these many months, editor Al Griffin and I were excited by the prospect of reviewing a new movie…well, perhaps “new” isn’t the ideal word, despite the title here. By the time it debuted theatrically in 2020, The New Mutants had been delayed more than two years—and one pandemic—past its original release date, owing to creative adjustments made to exploit an ever-evolving market. Based upon the comic book series that would eventually introduce Deadpool and Cable, this movie kinda ties into Fox’s greater X-Men universe, with a namedrop here, a flashback there, and a fresh crop of youngsters struggling to cope with recent physical changes that have given them extraordinary powers. They’re the only patients in an isolated hospital…

A PROFESSIONAL assassin who lives by the ancient code of the samurai finds himself targeted by his Mafia bosses. Ghost Dog, a rare venture into genre films for Jim Jarmusch, allows the writerdirector to frequently quote, reference, and build upon many classics in his own quirkily deadpan, deceptively honest way. Dog’s unglamorous community of gangsters is reminiscent of John Cassavetes’ hoods and lowlifes in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, but—this being Jarmusch—an understated absurdist wit frequently underlies the drama. The film bears a close resemblance to Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï, in which a similar loner leads a starkly depicted life of stillness, silence, and work. Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker) is a warmer, more involved assassin who talks and even has a friendship with an ice cream man who only…

Show of hands, please—how many of you rate August 1973’s Goats Head Soup as your favorite Rolling Stones album? Anyone? No? Can’t say I blame you. Any record following The Stones’ May 1972 careerdefining double-album masterpiece Exile on Main St. would have an impossibly high bar to overcome, no matter what made the final cut. Fact is, Goats Head Soup had a master chef’s menu stacked against it from the outset. And time has very much not been on its side, as Goats Head Soup has long served as a relatively underappreciated entry in The Rolling Stones’ somewhat uneven mid-1970s studio-album canon. However, thanks to a new multidisc box set, Goats Head Soup has been served up for a well-deserved auditory re-assessment. As is often the case with deluxe reissue…

The supermarket was quite the innovation when it emerged near the outset of the previous century by offering many a consumer’s favorite products in one place for relatively easy one-stop shopping. Some of our modern-day streaming services resemble that business model by purporting to present a wide variety of viewing and listening options. Qello Concerts by Stingray is but one of those companies who prefer to go big in their desire to be the toppermost digital supermarketplace for streaming concert and music documentary content. In fact, Qello (for short) claims to house “the world’s largest collection of full-length concerts and music documentaries streamed on-demand to just about any digital device.” While I couldn’t exactly count every entry they have, I can confirm they house one of the biggest libraries I’ve…

FLAT-PANEL UHDTVS ■ PROJECTORS ■ SCREENS ■ A/V RECEIVERS ■ AUDIO SEPARATES & INTEGRATED AMPS SOURCE COMPONENTS ■ SPEAKERS ■ SOUNDBARS ■ WIRELESS SPEAKERS ■ SUBWOOFERS ■ HEADPHONES ■ EXTRAS ■ TOP VALUES THE BEST THING I can say about 2020 is that it’s over. You’d think a year that was challenging on so many fronts might result in a drought of interesting A/V gear, but that was not the case for 2020. Logistical issues slowed shipment of certain products, but most eventually arrived. When they did, Sound & Vision’s reviewing team eagerly went to work. What are the trends to take away from 2020? With people spending lots of time (too much!) at home, 2020 was the year video streaming broke out in a big way. Following on the…

Using the Parts Express Omnimic measuring system, I conducted several in-room measurements, all taken at the single, seated ear-height position in my room. (Previous experience has shown that an average of several readings, taken across a span of about 2-3 feet, differs little from the single position apart from smoothing out small ripples.) For all the figures here, red is the left speaker, and blue the right speaker.…

RATINGS What a journey. Originally conceived as a simple sequel to his popular children’s book, The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings grew to become the epitome of epic fantasy. Set in the far-off, long-ago realm of Middle-earth, it introduces the good-hearted, verticallychallenged Frodo Baggins (wide-eyed Elijah Wood), tasked with destroying a cursed ring in order to stop a great evil from conquering the world. Yeah, there are dwarves and elves and wizards, yet somehow it all works, thanks largely to director Peter Jackson, who keenly identified and brought to life the cinematic heart of the story. We soon learn that Hobbits can be a rather sentimental bunch, an undercurrent that pops up from time to time, but it serves to remind us of what they stand to…

TOTAL RECALL is a perfect mix of sci-fi action, plot twists, and the twisted tongue-in-cheek humor we expect from director Paul Verhoeven, delivered here with gusto by Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Douglas Quaid, a construction worker. More correctly, Arnold is Carl Hauser, a secret operative for the “Agency” who believes he is Quaid due to a memory implant. After being attacked by agents from the “Agency,” Quaid escapes to Mars to aid the rebel independence movement and discover his true identity. For Total Recall’s thirtieth anniversary, Lionsgate has given it a new 4K remastering from the original 35mm negative with Dolby Vison high dynamic range. There is a fine layer of film grain throughout, and the picture mostly looks fantastic, with exquisite detail and plenty of vivid HDR highlights. Some scenes…

ERIC CLAPTON WAS IN PAIN. Deep pain. He was hopelessly in love with Pattie Boyd, the wife of his close friend George Harrison, and there was little he could do about it. Hence, Clapton did what any relatively desperate artist would to express his innermost feelings about the situation—he created an alternate identity (Derek), gathered a semi-fictional band around him (The Dominos), and channeled all of his heartache into a triumphant, sprawling double album, November 1970’s Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. Clapton’s anguish resulted in the hands-down best work of his career, though at the time of its release, Layla—named after a character in an epic, tragic 12th century Persian poem—was actually seen as somewhat of a failure. As time wore on, however, listeners warmed to all the angst found…

Review Reasonably Priced Gear! I received the December 2020/January 2021 issue a few days ago, and the products tested ranged from $2,500 all the way up to $20,000. This is all very expensive stuff and something that most people cannot afford, especially these days. Why not also review products that are good but affordable to most? There is no need to spend nearly five big ones for a streaming device when there is other good stuff at much more affordable prices. Finally, why not review turntables and other two-channel gear? Francesco Tenti / Huntington, NY Al Griffin Replies: We try to maintain an even mix of affordable and more premium-priced gear in Sound & Vision, but the price range of products reviewed in a particular issue can sometimes skew one…

PART 2 In my previous column (Buy Once, Cry Once), I considered areas in your A/V budget where you should consider splurging when building a system. The categories I listed—projection screens, amplifiers, speakers—are ones that can provide years of enjoyment, but don’t see regular or major upgrades. I also covered categories like subwoofers that have a real impact on a system’s overall performance, and ones like pre-wiring that can strongly affect a system’s future serviceability. If you’re fortunate enough to have the budget for a high-end home entertainment system, then absolutely pursue the best gear available. Premium gear does offer premium performance—plus pride of ownership—and it’s hard to put a price on the joy a top-notch system can deliver. Also, if you’ve been scrimping and saving for a specific upgrade—that…

A MOTHER AND FATHER HEAD to a new home to begin a family. Sounds simple enough, right? But in the world of HBO Max’s Raised by Wolves, the world is anything but simple. The Ridley Scott-driven sci-fi series takes place 150 years in the future, when a world war between a religious cult, the Mithraics, and those who won’t accept their life, the Atheists, has led to the Earth becoming uninhabitable. The Mithraics send a large space “Ark” vessel, Heaven, holding 1,000 settlers and military in suspended animation for the 13-year journey, to a distant planet, Keppler-22b, to begin resettling humanity. But they are beaten to the punch by an Atheist rebel, Campion Sturges, who converts one of the Mithraics’ levitating killing machines—a “Necromancer,” a female-appearing android—into a nurturing, maternal…

THE LORD OF THE RINGS was a box office phenomenon, which of course meant demand for more movies. And lo, a prequel book had already been written, so after some wrangling Peter Jackson returned to make another trilogy set within J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantastical universe. Taking place 60 years before the start of the Fellowship of the Ring, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey gives us Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), content to go about his safe, humdrum existence, until fate and a tall, pushy friend sweep him up in an incredible adventure. Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) tells us that “all good stories deserve embellishment,” and with the help of the great Guillermo del Toro, The Hobbit’s script was expanded to include material not in the book. The decision helped to embeefen…

LET’S NEVER forget that the enduring Mad Max franchise—four movies in with a fifth on the way—began right here 42 years ago with this low-budget car/motorcycle-chase gem. Relative to its more popular sequel, The Road Warrior, Max can be viewed as a sort of origin story, showing how a good cop (Mel Gibson) goes mad after a horrible act of violence befalls his family. He hits the road to exact some fuel-injected revenge, leaving behind the world he once knew. What’s striking about this movie today is seeing how much better it is than it needed to be, from the emotional story to the intense acting, superb cinematography, sharp editing, and outrageous stunts. From the first scenes we can see that Kino Lorber’s new 4K master is going to be…