Reviewing by the Numbers

[bigshot]

Today, I read DVD Beaver's review of Vincent Price's "The Haunted Palace" and it struck me how little actual practical information some blu-ray reviews have in them. It described the Arrow transfer as "more robust with maxed out bitrate" and says "the atmosphere" of the music score benefits from lossless audio "rendering". Now the bitrate of the video and audio might be important in extreme cases, but I look at those frame grabs and they all look exactly the same to me. In motion, it probably looks indistinguishable from the US Vincent Price box. And I have 320 AAC and MP3 LAME files on my computer that sound exactly like the original CD, even on my best equipment. Did he determine the "robustness" and "atmosphere" with his eyes and ears in a controlled A/B comparison? Or did he just let numbers do his review for him?

It seems to me that details about the film element used and color correction and digital restoration applied and missing footage and supplements are MUCH more important than saying one is better than the other because the file size is a little larger. I understand that some people are anal about that, and it's good info to include, but it seems that Beaver focuses on that as the central part of its reviews sometimes, giving the impression that there are differences between releases in different regions when there really isn't any difference. If there is no difference, say there isn't any real difference, don't just point to abstract numbers on a spec sheet to claim one is "more robust". That sounds like the description of a fat lady, not a blu-ray!

I see the EXACT same film transfers and restorations being released in different regions, and aside from the supplements and packaging, there usually isn't any real significant difference between them. The big exceptions being Flicker Alley's Chaplin Mutuals, which are out of sync, and Kino's Nosferatu which has a messed up frame rate- neither of which were even mentioned in the reviews I read before buying these turkeys!

I read the blu-ray.com review of Cohen Group's "Syncopation" the other day, and the reviewer didn't even bother to mention that the film came with almost two hours of extremely rare jazz shorts featuring Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong from 35mm fine grains at the Library of Congress. Instead, there was a whole lot of talk about the plot of the movie and some generalized comments about the condition of the film, which appeared to be based on contemporary films, not films from the early 40s. Getting those jazz shorts in beautiful HD transfers is more important to any jazz fan than Syncopation- not saying there's anything wrong with Syncopation, mind you... but we're talking Louis and the Duke here!

I understand that there are an awful lot of blu-rays to review, but I'd like to see blu-ray reviewers put a little more attention into their reviews and not just approach a review like filling out their tax return. If they don't have experience or interest in a particular title, for goodness sakes, let someone who knows something about it do the review.