1.33:1 DVD capture: The Good German The DVD

Warner presents The Good German on DVD in a formidable fullscreen transfer. "Fullscreen?" you ask, incredulous. Well, yes--the 1.33:1 aspect ratio is part and parcel of the film's admittedly confused M.O., which makes Steven Soderbergh the first director to have framed a studio picture for Academy projection in decades. (Gus Van Sant's hardscrabble indies Elephant and Last Days don't count.) "Peter Andrews"' b&w cinematography looks astonishing on the format, the anachronistically high-veering-on-hot latitude of many an image--think 1964's Dr. Strangelove--a result of the movie's pastiche aesthetic more than anything else; Soderbergh can't seem to decide if he's Michael Curtiz or Stuart Cooper. (On that note, no sense complaining about the decay of stock-footage inserts.) To cut to the chase: this thing probably causes erections in HD. As for the film's soundtrack, it's rather dubiously rendered in 5.1 Dolby Digital, but I guess it qualifies as retro or old-fashioned in that there's very little dimension to the mix. (Fidelity is smashing, though.) Sadly, there's no commentary from the normally-garrulous Soderbergh--The Good German's theatrical trailer plus a startup block of previews for Infamous, Letters from Iwo Jima, Ocean's Thirteen, The Painted Veil, and American Pastime comprise the special features.-

Steven Soderbergh's The Good German is meant as a film set in the 1940s that looks as though it were released in the 1940s, too. Inasmuch as a self-consuming experiment can succeed, it succeeds, though proof of Soderbergh's ability to emulate Guy Maddin proves very little indeed. The Good German is ultimately a slack noir with an oft-beaten anti-hero Geismer (George Clooney), a hissing fatale in the Dietrich mold Lena (Cate Blanchett), and a pseudo-Lorre toad in army driver Tully (Tobey Maguire). It all amounts to not much as Geismer rekindles his wartime flame with turned-out Lena in post-war Berlin while Soderbergh builds a visually-arresting shrine to Weimar filmmakers and expats like Michael Curtiz.

A journalist who's seen more than he should, Geismer wanders around in a wide-eyed gape that skirts on the perilous edge of Clooney's O Brother Where Art Thou? moron performance. He's too smart to be this far behind, and all that's left for us to do during the downtime is contemplate how the picture is really about moral relativity in the pre-Cold War machinations of the Russians and Americans and their German scientist pawns. It wouldn't pass muster in the company of John Huston, Jacques Tourneur, or Jules Dassin; this is less Out of the Past than it is mired in the meta, its only import located in the furious exculpatory labours of critical admirers and, ironically, the one or two viewers still titillated by ugly words and brief flashes of doggy-style sex. For as much as Soderbergh's Solaris was a wonderfully intimate update of Tarkovsky's canonical vision, The Good German attests that any act of critical mimic experimentation (Gus Van Sant's Psycho, for instance) requires the same core of human failure and desire, lest it come off as just so much masturbation and self-congratulation.- (excerpted from a longer review found here)

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DVD VITALS:
Running Time
108 minutes
MPAA
R
Aspect Ratio(s)
Standard 1.33:1
Languages
English DD 5.1,
English Dolby Surround,
French DD 5.1,
Spanish DD 5.1
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English, French, Spanish
DVD-9
Region One
Warner

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Published: May 21, 2007