I received an email from a reader a month or two back saying they were having trouble with the time-base correction (TBC) functionality on the Snell and Wilcox TBS-185. Thinking back to my review, I actually always tested with Laserdiscs, and generally played through players with integrated digital TBCs. I didn’t think much of this at the time – after all a TBC should, you know, correct timebase errors.
Moscow: Cassiopea (Москва́ — Кассиопе́я) and Teens in the Universe (О́троки во Вселе́нной) are a duology of mid-1970s Soviet science-fiction comedy films, directed by Richard Viktorov (Ричард Викторов), and written by Isai Kuzentsov (Исай Кузнецов) and Avernir Zak (Авенир Григорьевич Зак). Originally intended to be a single film, a glut of footage enabled producers to split it into two eighty minute features.
The films are enduringly popular in the former Soviet Union, and were unavailable in any digital format until a 2007 DVD release, in 2016 both films were added to iTunes in high-definition, so I thought I’d take a look.
Bogart has a 007 moment at the Casino in Dead Reckoning
Dead Reckoning is a brutal, bitter, 1947, post-war film-noir thriller starring Humphrey Bogart. The story is very much in the Mickey Spillane mold, and was crafted by no less than five writers, which results in the narrative arc being ‘like Morse code’. Given the resumes of some of those involved the picture is somehow less than the sum of it’s parts, still, it’s unavailable on Blu-ray so I thought I’d have look at the iTunes HD version.