Gothika takes a credible idea and makes it preposterous.
The Warner Bros. affiliate, Dark Castle Entertainment, produced "Gothika," and it's the same outfit that previously gave us "House on Haunted Hill" (1999), "Thir13en Ghosts" (2001), and "Ghost Ship" (2002), and since has done "House of Wax" (2005), "The Reaping" (2007), and "Return to House on Haunted Hill" (2007), so you know going in what to expect. There will be plenty of moody special effects, some atmospheric set designs, and a multitude of bumps in the night. Just don't count on much more than a dubious and oft-taken approach to horror. The movie earns its R rating for brief nudity, blood, and violence.
Video:
The Warner Bros. video engineers transferred the 1.85:1 ratio movie to HD DVD using a VC-1 codec and 1080 resolution. The screen is generally clean and very clear, with beautiful detailing. Occasionally, we see a mild degree of print grain, but it's only in a few scenes. Halle Berry's face never looked so perfect as in the opening shots, so perfect, in fact, that she looks almost unreal. This, we soon find out, is a plot device, and high definition helps it immensely. Further on, one begins to notice that the darkness of the image also includes a degree of softness. As the movie progresses, the image seems to fluctuate between crystal sharpness and what appears to be deliberate murkiness. Finally, by the last half of its running time, the film seems to be slightly grainier and more obscure. I have to assume this is the way the director intended the film to look, along with some deliberate color adjustments like blue tints, and any flaws I noticed the director meant to be there to help lend the film its "gothic" aspect. In any case, I saw nothing wrong with the HD encoding.
Audio:
The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio projects a naturally balanced midrange; a deep, well-controlled bass; a strong, solid transient impact; and a few room-filling reverberations. Although there aren't a lot of rear-channels effects, they are impressive, with a realistic sense of thunder, wind, and rain in the surrounds. A car crash makes its presence known with authority, followed by a host of creepy noises like whispering voices, creaking boards, things of that kind. I think if I had turned off the picture and just listened to the sound, as with old-time radio, the story might have frightened me more.
Extras:
The HD DVD contains almost the same bonus items found on the Two-Disc Special Edition. There's an audio commentary, naturally, with the director, Mathieu Kassovitz, and the director of photography, Matthew Libatique. Next are two featurettes, although neither of them is particularly significant. The first one, "On the Set of Gothika," is sixteen minutes long and made up mostly of clips from the film and promotional filler. The second featurette, "Painting with Fire," is seven minutes long and deals with the film's visual effects, a more interesting topic to me than a rehashing of why the film was so wonderful. After that, there's a music video, "Behind Blue Eyes," with Limp Bizkit, the group that sings the tune during the film's closing credits. Then in a "Punk'd" segment lasting four minutes there's an MTV practical joke played on Ms. Berry at the film's première. Following that is a nineteen-minute feature on MTV's "Making of the Music Video" with Limp Bizkit and Halle Berry. I find it odd that the featurette on making the music video is longer than either of the featurettes on the making of the movie. Finally, there are visual notes on the fictional patients in the movie, interviews of the patients, and fictional drawings made by the fictional patients.
Things wrap up with twenty-six scene selections but no chapter insert; English, French, and Spanish spoken languages and subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired. As with all Warner Bros. HD DVDs, the disc also includes pop-up menus, bookmarks, an indicator of elapsed time, a zoom-and-pan function, and an Elite Red HD case.
Parting Shots:
Let me describe my problem with "Gothika" by putting it this way: I pretty much determined early on what was happening in the story and most of what was going to happen later. Now, I figure I'm just an average sort of guy, and if I could foretell the plot developments and the ending in advance, then probably anyone could. There were no surprises for me in "Gothika" and no real frights. The acting is impressive, I'll admit, and the director is a skilled filmmaker. It was the story that didn't hold up. "Logic," says Miranda toward the end of the picture, "is overrated." It must be; the story line shows very little of it.
And even in high definition I still don't know what "Gothika" means.
Video:
The Warner Bros. video engineers transferred the 1.85:1 ratio movie to HD DVD using a VC-1 codec and 1080 resolution. The screen is generally clean and very clear, with beautiful detailing. Occasionally, we see a mild degree of print grain, but it's only in a few scenes. Halle Berry's face never looked so perfect as in the opening shots, so perfect, in fact, that she looks almost unreal. This, we soon find out, is a plot device, and high definition helps it immensely. Further on, one begins to notice that the darkness of the image also includes a degree of softness. As the movie progresses, the image seems to fluctuate between crystal sharpness and what appears to be deliberate murkiness. Finally, by the last half of its running time, the film seems to be slightly grainier and more obscure. I have to assume this is the way the director intended the film to look, along with some deliberate color adjustments like blue tints, and any flaws I noticed the director meant to be there to help lend the film its "gothic" aspect. In any case, I saw nothing wrong with the HD encoding.
Audio:
The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio projects a naturally balanced midrange; a deep, well-controlled bass; a strong, solid transient impact; and a few room-filling reverberations. Although there aren't a lot of rear-channels effects, they are impressive, with a realistic sense of thunder, wind, and rain in the surrounds. A car crash makes its presence known with authority, followed by a host of creepy noises like whispering voices, creaking boards, things of that kind. I think if I had turned off the picture and just listened to the sound, as with old-time radio, the story might have frightened me more.
Extras:
The HD DVD contains almost the same bonus items found on the Two-Disc Special Edition. There's an audio commentary, naturally, with the director, Mathieu Kassovitz, and the director of photography, Matthew Libatique. Next are two featurettes, although neither of them is particularly significant. The first one, "On the Set of Gothika," is sixteen minutes long and made up mostly of clips from the film and promotional filler. The second featurette, "Painting with Fire," is seven minutes long and deals with the film's visual effects, a more interesting topic to me than a rehashing of why the film was so wonderful. After that, there's a music video, "Behind Blue Eyes," with Limp Bizkit, the group that sings the tune during the film's closing credits. Then in a "Punk'd" segment lasting four minutes there's an MTV practical joke played on Ms. Berry at the film's première. Following that is a nineteen-minute feature on MTV's "Making of the Music Video" with Limp Bizkit and Halle Berry. I find it odd that the featurette on making the music video is longer than either of the featurettes on the making of the movie. Finally, there are visual notes on the fictional patients in the movie, interviews of the patients, and fictional drawings made by the fictional patients.
Things wrap up with twenty-six scene selections but no chapter insert; English, French, and Spanish spoken languages and subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired. As with all Warner Bros. HD DVDs, the disc also includes pop-up menus, bookmarks, an indicator of elapsed time, a zoom-and-pan function, and an Elite Red HD case.
Parting Shots:
Let me describe my problem with "Gothika" by putting it this way: I pretty much determined early on what was happening in the story and most of what was going to happen later. Now, I figure I'm just an average sort of guy, and if I could foretell the plot developments and the ending in advance, then probably anyone could. There were no surprises for me in "Gothika" and no real frights. The acting is impressive, I'll admit, and the director is a skilled filmmaker. It was the story that didn't hold up. "Logic," says Miranda toward the end of the picture, "is overrated." It must be; the story line shows very little of it.
And even in high definition I still don't know what "Gothika" means.
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[release]21780[/release]