Pandoran seeds have borne sweet fruit for Panasonic, as their wildly popular Avatar Blu-ray 3D exclusive partnership with Fox led to not one but two much-buzzed-about events at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And for those of us who turn up our noses at a sighting of a certain Dark Lord of the Sith, there was "The Director's Vision" panel hosted by Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment at the crazily well-equipped Panasonic booth.
This was the first event of its kind for Fox, featuring a lineup of three well-respected directors who--not coincidentally--have recently seen their work released on Fox Blu-ray. Oliver Stone (Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps), Michael Mann (Last of the Mohicans) and Baz Luhrmann (Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge) were in attendance, and the panel was moderated by Geoff Boucher of The Los Angeles Times.
The focus was of course Blu-ray, and the directors not surprisingly gushed about the significance of the high-def video disc. Michael Mann, who has shot his last few films on digital video, extolled the technical virtues. "It has more space and it has more bitrate. It's the premiere format to reproduce all the work we do. And I believe it is probably going to sustain itself as the premiere format, meaning the best reproduction format, for a good number of years. Six, seven or eight years from now."
Oliver Stone put into context the historical value of Blu-ray, comparing recent discs he's seen to how he remembered viewing classic films for the first time as a young film student. "(Blu-ray is) like having a print at home. It's a dream. I have a ball with Blu-ray. It looks great. It's a movie theater in your home, no question."
And the always animated Baz Luhrmann brought his unique brand of enthusiasm to the proceedings, making an unusual analogy for the step up represented by Blu-ray. "In the days when I first got a cassette player, Sony made them... I know we're on the Panasonic stand... but Sony invented this thing called the Walkman. And you got a Walkman cassette, and you put it on, you go, 'That is incredible!' And then someone gave you a CD: It was a new world."
From there, he went a bit more technical. "But I think what's really been exciting for me, specific to these films, is that when I made The Red Curtain Trilogy, we tried to ape three-strip Technicolor, old MGM color. We tried to get there. And to be honest with you, it was only a pretense. We couldn't do it. When I went back into Blu-ray, Jan Yarbrough, who's an absolutely gifted colorist, and he'd just done Fight Club and he had done the Godfather movies, Jan spent 1,000 hours, and I spent 100--just shows who does all the real work--rebuilding from the negative, in pursuit of the right color look. And I can honestly say, if you want to see Moulin Rouge or Romeo + Juliet in the way that I had dreamed to see it, please rush out and buy the newly released Blu-ray. To me that's a gift."
Luhrmann was also the only director present to critique the slight inconsistency between the multiple Panasonic monitors on display.
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