...a terrific piece of moviemaking--funny, thoughtful, and poignant.
Critics have also denounced the story for portraying a drunken libertine, McMurphy, as a hero and a woman doing her job, Nurse Ratched, as a villain. But Kesey never intended McMurphy to be a hero; he's an antihero in the best possible sense, just as Nurse Ratched is no ordinary heavy. McMurphy can't help himself, whether acting selfishly or selflessly, because he's basically a good man with bad faults. Likewise, the cold-blooded Nurse Ratched is a good woman who believes firmly that what she's doing is in her patients' best interest, oblivious to their real needs, something like the totalitarian societies she symbolizes. She would never admit to the evil lying within her icy self.
Among the highlights of the film, look for sequences involving the World Series, a fishing trip, a basketball game, electroshock therapy, a climactic Christmas party, and a heart-wrenching finale, all tied together by Jack Nitzsche's haunting musical score. "Cuckoo's Nest" is a terrific piece of moviemaking--funny, thoughtful, and poignant.
Video:
Warner Bros. offer the 1.85:1 ratio, Blu-ray picture in a VC-1, 1080p, BD25 transfer taken from a digital master created from restored elements. So you'll find no lines, scratches, or age marks here. Despite this, given that director Foreman filmed entirely on location and went for as realistic a style as he could get, the WB video engineers still probably didn't have the absolute best video with which to work. Warners Bros. already made a good standard-def DVD release a few years back, where the new transfer displayed a sharper image than the studio's earliest SD issue, this time with deeper colors and far less evidence of age deterioration. What I did find in that later SD release, though, was a somewhat granular aspect to many objects on screen. Evidently, for the high-definition BD edition the video engineers tried to mitigate this slightly grainy appearance and in the process seem to have softened the picture too much. In comparing the BD image with an upscaled SD image in scene after scene, I had difficulty telling many of them apart. In medium and long shots, the Blu-ray had a distinct advantage in clarity and object delineation, but in facial close-ups, the grainier standard-def picture appeared to have more detail, the BD being too smoothed over.
What we get on the Blu-ray disc, then, is a picture quality that varies from crystal clear and razor sharp to remarkably soft and blurred, almost from shot to shot. About half the time the BD picture doesn't look any better than the SD release. Fortunately, colors remain as natural as ever, and there is nothing that cries out as desperately bad. Still, the source material may not have always been the best, even cleaned up, and for the BD picture my guess is that WB overcompensated in the filtering department.
Audio:
Now here's the thing about the audio: Warner Bros. state on the front cover of the Blu-ray Digibook that the disc contains "Hi-Def Sound," yet they chose to provide only regular Dolby Digital 5.1 on the disc. This, it seems to me, could be misleading. I believe most folks think of "hi-def sound" as one of the lossless codecs, like Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio, or uncompressed PCM. Apparently, Warners think otherwise. The sound has little to do, being about ninety-five percent dialogue, so maybe WB figured it was pointless to offer it in a lossless format. Nevertheless, given the fact that this Digibook presentation is supposed to be a prestige product, it escapes me why the studio didn't use a dual-layer, BD50 transfer and include a lossless audio track, if for no other reason than public relations. In contrast, WB gave their Blu-ray edition of "Bonnie and Clyde" a fifty-gigabyte transfer, and that movie had only a monaural soundtrack. Film studios move in mysterious ways.
In any case, the Dolby Digital 5.1 continues to provide a reasonably decent sound, widely dispersed in the front channels, with good transient impact. Note again, however, that the filmmakers shot almost entirely on location, and just as the video sometimes differs in quality, so can the sonics differ from scene to scene, the indoor audio often sounding constricted, nasal, pinched, and even muffled, revealing the aural limitations of the actual hospital rooms used throughout the production. Whenever the musical track kicks in, the stereo spread increases dramatically and the sound stage opens up, but there is still never much information directed toward the rear speakers except in the isolated case of a helicopter fly-by.
Extras:
For this BD Digibook release, Warners carried over the extras from their earlier Two-Disc Special Edition DVD set, and they are still not quite as much as we might have expected. First, there's an excellent audio commentary by director Milos Forman and producers Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz. Next, there's a forty-seven minute documentary, "The Making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," made in 2002 and based on an earlier documentary, "Completely Cuckoo." It includes interviews with just about everybody associated with the film except its star, Jack Nicholson. Oh, well. Then, there are eight deleted scenes and a theatrical trailer, everything presented in non-anamorphic, standard-definition widescreen. As I say, I was hoping for a little something more, but it's what we get.
Things conclude on the disc with thirty-three scene selections; English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian spoken languages; English, French, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Swedish subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired.
The disc comes housed in the back of a forty-page, hardbound Digibook, which includes notes on the film, its stars, and the filmmakers, plus an assortment of color and black-and-white photographs. Very nice.
Parting Thoughts:
For a motion picture that no studio wanted to produce, "Cuckoo's Nest" did all right for itself. Not only did it become one of the top box office attractions of 1975, it swept all five of the most important Oscars of the year, winning for Best Picture, Best Actor (Nicholson), Best Actress (Fletcher), Best Director (Forman), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman). Finally getting the film made was as much a triumph over adversity as McMurphy's selfless final decision in the story. It's an all-around great show.
Among the highlights of the film, look for sequences involving the World Series, a fishing trip, a basketball game, electroshock therapy, a climactic Christmas party, and a heart-wrenching finale, all tied together by Jack Nitzsche's haunting musical score. "Cuckoo's Nest" is a terrific piece of moviemaking--funny, thoughtful, and poignant.
Video:
Warner Bros. offer the 1.85:1 ratio, Blu-ray picture in a VC-1, 1080p, BD25 transfer taken from a digital master created from restored elements. So you'll find no lines, scratches, or age marks here. Despite this, given that director Foreman filmed entirely on location and went for as realistic a style as he could get, the WB video engineers still probably didn't have the absolute best video with which to work. Warners Bros. already made a good standard-def DVD release a few years back, where the new transfer displayed a sharper image than the studio's earliest SD issue, this time with deeper colors and far less evidence of age deterioration. What I did find in that later SD release, though, was a somewhat granular aspect to many objects on screen. Evidently, for the high-definition BD edition the video engineers tried to mitigate this slightly grainy appearance and in the process seem to have softened the picture too much. In comparing the BD image with an upscaled SD image in scene after scene, I had difficulty telling many of them apart. In medium and long shots, the Blu-ray had a distinct advantage in clarity and object delineation, but in facial close-ups, the grainier standard-def picture appeared to have more detail, the BD being too smoothed over.
What we get on the Blu-ray disc, then, is a picture quality that varies from crystal clear and razor sharp to remarkably soft and blurred, almost from shot to shot. About half the time the BD picture doesn't look any better than the SD release. Fortunately, colors remain as natural as ever, and there is nothing that cries out as desperately bad. Still, the source material may not have always been the best, even cleaned up, and for the BD picture my guess is that WB overcompensated in the filtering department.
Audio:
Now here's the thing about the audio: Warner Bros. state on the front cover of the Blu-ray Digibook that the disc contains "Hi-Def Sound," yet they chose to provide only regular Dolby Digital 5.1 on the disc. This, it seems to me, could be misleading. I believe most folks think of "hi-def sound" as one of the lossless codecs, like Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio, or uncompressed PCM. Apparently, Warners think otherwise. The sound has little to do, being about ninety-five percent dialogue, so maybe WB figured it was pointless to offer it in a lossless format. Nevertheless, given the fact that this Digibook presentation is supposed to be a prestige product, it escapes me why the studio didn't use a dual-layer, BD50 transfer and include a lossless audio track, if for no other reason than public relations. In contrast, WB gave their Blu-ray edition of "Bonnie and Clyde" a fifty-gigabyte transfer, and that movie had only a monaural soundtrack. Film studios move in mysterious ways.
In any case, the Dolby Digital 5.1 continues to provide a reasonably decent sound, widely dispersed in the front channels, with good transient impact. Note again, however, that the filmmakers shot almost entirely on location, and just as the video sometimes differs in quality, so can the sonics differ from scene to scene, the indoor audio often sounding constricted, nasal, pinched, and even muffled, revealing the aural limitations of the actual hospital rooms used throughout the production. Whenever the musical track kicks in, the stereo spread increases dramatically and the sound stage opens up, but there is still never much information directed toward the rear speakers except in the isolated case of a helicopter fly-by.
Extras:
For this BD Digibook release, Warners carried over the extras from their earlier Two-Disc Special Edition DVD set, and they are still not quite as much as we might have expected. First, there's an excellent audio commentary by director Milos Forman and producers Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz. Next, there's a forty-seven minute documentary, "The Making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," made in 2002 and based on an earlier documentary, "Completely Cuckoo." It includes interviews with just about everybody associated with the film except its star, Jack Nicholson. Oh, well. Then, there are eight deleted scenes and a theatrical trailer, everything presented in non-anamorphic, standard-definition widescreen. As I say, I was hoping for a little something more, but it's what we get.
Things conclude on the disc with thirty-three scene selections; English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian spoken languages; English, French, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Swedish subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired.
The disc comes housed in the back of a forty-page, hardbound Digibook, which includes notes on the film, its stars, and the filmmakers, plus an assortment of color and black-and-white photographs. Very nice.
Parting Thoughts:
For a motion picture that no studio wanted to produce, "Cuckoo's Nest" did all right for itself. Not only did it become one of the top box office attractions of 1975, it swept all five of the most important Oscars of the year, winning for Best Picture, Best Actor (Nicholson), Best Actress (Fletcher), Best Director (Forman), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman). Finally getting the film made was as much a triumph over adversity as McMurphy's selfless final decision in the story. It's an all-around great show.
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[release]23865[/release]