Still there were a few things that bothered me. Dialogue sounds crisp and clean, always easy to understand, and some of the louder moments, like the film’s opening title sequence with the now famous rendition of “Misirlou” playing over it, also manage to come off very clean with no distortion. The track is crystal clear with excellent volume and range. The lossless DTS-HD 5.1 surround track we get really goes the extra mile. Yet it doesn’t look much like a “film” and the strobing effect was an issue for me. There has been some obvious over-manipulation to the image, I suspect to make it an acceptable “high-def” experience geared more towards the technophiles than cinephiles but it at least doesn’t reach the horrendous extremes of something like what Universal did with The Big Lebowski. So despite the cons does it look better than other home video versions? Yes, it’s the best I’ve seen the movie since seeing it in the theater, but its competition isn’t all that great. I can’t say film grain was all that prominent and I suspect some scrubbing has gone on but if that’s the case it didn’t really harm the image as a whole and it’s not a real concern, though I would have preferred it to remain. Some darker moments look a little washed but definition was still, at least, pretty good. You notice some really fine details in clothing, pores on the faces of the actors, and the fine curls in Samuel L. On the other hand what the transfer has going for it is that this is actually the sharpest I’ve seen the movie since the theater. It’s not constant but when it’s noticeable it is really hard to ignore and irritated me to a great degree. Basically any time there was a fast moving object on screen there was a trailing effect, something I would expect from an interlaced transfer, not a progressive one. Then while doing screen grabs I found a few that presented the issue. At first I figured it may be a configuration somewhere that got changed on my set up (I have a kid who is fascinated by the remote so that’s always possible) but after verifying everything and throwing in other discs to check them, ones that I knew looked fine, I didn’t notice anything like it anywhere else. What I couldn't get around was a jittery strobing effect that occurs a lot throughout the film. Some of this I could live with and in all honesty my memory of how it looked could be wrong or this is the way Tarantino wants it to look, after all this transfer was apparently approved by the man himself, so I can accept that my memory is wrong. Skin tones lean a little on the orange/yellow side, not looking in any way natural (but in all honesty this aspect is worse in the transfer for the simultaneous Blu-ray release of Jackie Brown.) Colours appear a bit brighter than I recall, and contrast has been boosted significantly as well in quite a few sequences, with some intense whites present. The image looks like it has been severely boosted in a few ways to appeal to the high-def enthusiasts. True, the last time I saw the film theatrically was around 17 years ago, and my memory of how it looked when it played could have been replaced by some of the other shoddy or lackluster home video presentations over the years, but I’m positive the film did not look entirely like this. For a home video release the Blu-ray easily tops all of those other options when it comes to video presentation, but ultimately this could have been so much better. Other than seeing the film theatrically during its initial run my experience with the film over the last 17 or so years has been through VHS (full screen and widescreen versions), laserdisc, and of course DVD. Lionsgate presents Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in its original aspect ratio of 2.35:1 on a dual-layer disc in a new 1080p/24hz high-definition transfer.
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