I'm watching it right now and while it looks okay most of the time, there are places (when Annie visits the president) where the left and right thirds of the screen are blurry. This condition comes in and out of the rest of the picture as well. How does this happen? Ed
I did two different transfers of Annie for Columbia, one in the late 1980s and one in the 1990s (for Laserdisc), and it's a really soft, ugly, weird film. Tons of weird fog filters and stuff, a really ugly look, in my opinion. My bet is that this problem is due to the filtration. If it comes and goes on a cut, then it's an intentional photographic effect; if it stays throughout an entire reel (like 20 minutes), then it's a flaw with the film element or the scan of the film element. They probably went off the negative for the HD and I would bet it looks 100 times better than what I was able to do with the IP 20 years ago. I don't care what anybody says, this is a bad, bad, bad film. The play is not that bad and some of the songs are OK, but the movie is just bizarre. They spent a ton of money on it in 1982, but it's fair to say it was not a success. I think all the major actors associated with it were bummed-out by it. I think I've mentioned here before there's about an hour-long show on "The Making of Annie" up on YouTube, and thought it was excellent. I dunno if they released it on the new Blu-ray, but to me the documentary is better than the actual movie:
Thanks for answering this! The blur lasts for whole scenes. It'll disappear for a while and then come back and last for the scene. It's too ugly to be intended. Cool! Thanks for linking to it. I'll watch. It's not on the Blu-ray. You get the Aileen Quinn featurette thing, a music video featuring some girl group named Play, and original previews. Ed
I spent six weeks transferring Annie the last time, and at least a hundred times I'd stare at the screen and yell, "GOD, this is ugly! It's much too ugly for this to be intentional!" But I'm pretty sure it was. I'm convinced it's shot that way. In fact, I think they brought me more than one element to try out, because I kept complaining that it was too ugly.
