USC is staging the musical of Legally Blonde.
Their content warning (full screenshot):
Students have to be warned about “descriptions of academic pressure???” What are they doing over there? All this kind of excessive CYA warning does is create people who grow up with no backbone and no gumption.
And that’s ignoring that the musical is significantly watered down from the movie, which had genuine struggle, tension, and wit. The musical is inoffensive puff.
De-grained by Q-Tec. The de-graining itself is kind of impressive. It leaves a significant amount of cel dust, film dirt, and doesn’t really destroy lines. In a way, it’s less destructive than many “faithful” restorations.
However, Q-Tec failed to de-grain every frame. For almost every shot, the first and last frames have intact grain. Shots begin with grain, but then melt into smeariness. It’s as if it constantly goes in and out of focus. Going from grain to no-grain also looks a lot like interpolation.
Occasional magnetic grain. For this sample, I had to convert from AVC to H265 to get a small file size, but it’s still visible. This was the most glaring bit of magnetic grain on the UHD.
Compression or bad restoration, it’s impossible to tell which. Still, watchable.
Most of the supplements, including Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980) are 1080i upscales.
The technicians used interpolation in an attempt to remove all splices at each cut on the top of the frame:
And on the bottom:
Sometimes, retouching at the bottom doesn’t match at all, causing explicit screen tearing:
Retouching is so poor that the cement line is still present. Leave the flaw alone if you can’t do a flawless repair:
Frame blending on thrown grapes:
Full-frame interpolation. Not only is it ugly, at full speed, the picture appears to freeze:
See the mark that disappears in the upper-left corner? That’s part of the texture and supposed to be there:
Interpolation:
Interpolated spot repair propagates the scratch:
In motion, interpolation looks completely unnatural. Replacing one flaw with another is not an improvement.
Processed by Lithuanian Film Centre.
Edit 1/20/26 : The color looks absolutely bizarre. Is this really what it actually looks like? (I HAVE MY DOUBTS.)
No complaints. Video looks good.
I really wish Vinegar Syndrome wouldn’t attach their noisy logo to the end of every movie, though.
However, my BD player (Sony BDP-S6700) did not like the disc. About halfway through, it started occasionally dropping frames as if the video was a crude 25->24fps conversion. In slow-mo it looked ok, and when I later checked the files on my PC, they were fine. Anyone else have this problem? Seems that model overheats. Lucky it’s lasted as long as it has. I really don’t want to buy a new player…
