Sneakers [Blu-ray]

One of the greatest caper movies ever looks the best it ever has!
I really enjoy this movie, and was very happy to see it released by Universal on HD-DVD. This movie has a lot of big names in it, and they really deliver. It has great suspenseful moments, international intrigue, a believable plot, and a lot of humorous moments that are actually funny! There are plenty of other places to look if you are looking for a synopsis of the movie, including the standard DVD page, so I’ll leave it to them to tell you about the movie if you don’t already know it.My review here will be about the HD transfer itself. Overall, I was really impressed! It’s a definite jump from the standard DVD, even upconverted. I might even go so far as to say that some selected scenes look incredible. Most of the scenes in Sneakers are dialogue, and a lot of people in them, and I noticed that the clarity of people’s faces and eyes was great. The shots of the buildings, and the Scrabble tiles being rearranged I thought were great. For the most part though, the PQ is good, but certainly not demo material.There is definitely some grain noticable, but I was happy to find it wasn’t distracting. Even in some of the darker scenes where I expected some heavy grain, the grain was only noticable, not obtrusive. The sound is also excellent. I don’t know if it is better than the S-DVD, but I had no complaints with the 5.1 soundtrack. Sure I would have loved me some lossless audio, but I didn’t expect it and it isn’t really a big deal to me that it isn’t there.I have only 2 complaints about this disc. First, I wish Universal had cleaned it up a bit better. There were a fair amount of “flecks” floating through the picture throughout. Of course, once I stopped focusing on the picture and enjoyed my movie, I didn’t notice them except for a few brief moments, but they are definitely there. Is it hard to clean the master? I was a bit disappointed in that area, as most films in HD are extremely clean, with flecks only occasionally. These were fairly constant. My second complaint is extremely minor and more personal, but I wish there were some Spanish subtitles.Overall, I am very happy with this disc, and would definitely recommend the purchase to anyone who enjoyed the movie. It’s a definite improvement from the S-DVD. It’s certainly not a movie I’d pop in to show off my TV for friends, but then I never expected that. The only thing that I wish had been done differently would have been for a cleaner transfer, removing some of the larger and more noticable flecks.Bottom line? If you like this movie, this is a must have. It is an excellent step up from the standard DVD.

When Robert Redford is good, he’s so good!
No More Secrets!!! Loved this movie and the amazing cast; Redford, Sidney Poitier, River Phoenix, Dan Akroyd, Ben Kingsley, David Strathairn, and of course the wonderful Mary McDonnell.

A review I once wrote for an online site:here is a simple formula for the plot of a caper movie. You introduce the gang, and it is always a gang, performing a caper for the first act, you spend the second act motivating the gang to do a much more serious caper, and in the third act you pull off the serious caper. Fade to black.Sneakers sticks to the formula religiously. The sub-plots are similarly formulaic, and for the whole film you can’t shake the feeling that you are watching a cover version of a film you’ve seen before.We can dispense with the plot in a few sentences. Robert Redford is a security expert who tests the security of companies by breaking into them. He’s blackmailed – via reference to a shady past- into breaking into a new place and stealing the MacGuffin. He has second thoughts and breaks into the blackmailer’s place and steals it back.But… the simple story is told beautifully, even unambitiously by director and writer Phil Alden Robinson (who also put together Field of Dreams) and what the script lacks in grandeur in makes up in lovely touches of characterisation. Personally, I’m inclined to think the star of the production must have been the casting director: to line up Mary McDonnell, River Phoenix, Sidney Poitier, Dan Aykroyd, and Ben Kingsley, and not only convince them to do the movie is one thing, to ensure that the personalities have chemistry and that each star is playing a role they can clearly revel in is quite another.What elevates the film from forgettable once-seen to enjoyable Sunday-afternoon movie is the excellent dialogue and the obvious chemistry of the team (any two of Redford, Aykroyd, McDowell, and Poitier riff beautifully together and this isn’t lost in the larger groups). The director sensibly gets out of the way of his cast and lets them work with a script that carefully treads between comedy and drama. The main crew are ably supported by Ben Kingsley in chilling, rather than hammy, villain mode and Stephen Tobolowsky, whose transformation from bumbling victim to chilling creep, is handled effectively in a short amount of screen time.There are imperfections in the film, notably the opening scene ignores the main cast in favour of establishing the said shady past, and James Earl Jones‘ one scene is fabulous, but insufficiently foregrounded. It also suffers a little from not really creating much in the way of a sense of peril, the viewer just presumes that Redford’s character is going to be charming at people until everything goes to plan. However, the overwhelming feeling is of a film of enjoyable triumph.sneakers2Some points deserve special mention: the dialogue, timing and delivery is sure-footed and solid, the set pieces, which are of course the mainstay of a caper plot, are nicely held together and the plot survives repeated watching. Two things stand out as exemplars that other film-makers should pay attention to: the quality of the technical dialogue and the enduring longevity of the film.First the technical details: viewers of film and TV are used to characters delivering a few lines of technical gobbledygook whenever the writer needs a technical reason to drive the plot. Invariably this gobbledygook causes groans from those who do pay attention to technology. One of the astonishing things about Sneakers is that the technical gobbledygook – while serving the classic dialogue purposes of making the character sound smart and also driving the plot – does make sense, and does provide reasonable justification for the actions taken in the movie.All of the security plot (the creation of the MacGuffin the team is to steal and the methods used to steal it) is reasonable, possible, and, amazingly the cast manage to say the right words in the right order and stress the right words in such a way that they genuinely convince sceptical technical nerds in the audience that they know what they are doing… (sadly this only extends to the dialogue and the actors, the visual effects department didn’t get the memo and so we are treated to some very dated visuals of ‘decryption’ happening in a very odd way). This is a film that is an example of how easy it is to get small details right when you take the time.Finally, this is linked to another point: the film has barely dated. Most characters are seen as scurfy and unfashionable so the hair and clothes haven’t dated, and the technical details -somewhat fortunately – describe problems that still exist. There are almost no scenes where you think, “Well he’d just sort that out with an iPhone these days” (although someone does use a car-phone at one point), and because the direction is so laissez faire there is no sense that the film is from another time, or trying to make a particular statement.

Satisfait du dvd, bonne qualité.Je le conseille

dvd a tres bon prix. merci a vous