Milk Review: What is the intent?

[Michael.Schinke]

In the sections pertaining to video and audio presentation the reviewer makes a point to mention that this Blu-ray is completely faithful to both the look and sound of the original presentation. However, his scores for the film seem to reflect his judgment against the artistic merits of the film itself and not the accuracy of the presentation. I thought, perhaps naively, that the purpose of a Blu-ray was to present the film for home viewing in a manner that is as transparent to the original presentation as possible. How can a disc that is completely faithful to the original presentation not make high marks, unless the scoring is based on a subjective comparison to more eye-candy type movies.

What are the purpose of the reviews here? Are they to grade the Blu-ray presentation or are they to grade the film as it was produced? As far as I'm concerned the only subjective areas of the review should be the score for the film and extras. The score for audio and video should be based on whether or not those aspects of the film are transparent to the original presentation and not whether or not the film was pretty to begin with. If a Blu-ray of a crappy looking film shot on 16mm looks exactly like that original looking crappy 16mm film print, is that not a glorious achievement worthy of high marks? And if a Blu-ray of a slickly produced 70mm production no longer looks like film, but instead appears as some strange digital concoction that still looks slick but no longer film like, should that not be marked down for it's lack of transparency?

[Ben]

Thanks for pointing this out, Michael. As you might have guessed, when I submitted the review, I mistakenly submitted it with incorrect scores for Video and Audio. It is now corrected... thanks for bringing it to my attention.

My policy with respect to reviews, is that as long as the Blu-ray presentation is faithful to the theatrical presentation, the disc is doing its job. This is definitely the case with MILK. Apologies for the confusion.