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I first saw 'Paris, Texas' in 1985 at The Screen on Baker Street, and I still remember that the soundtrack was turned up painfully loud. Nevertheless, I loved the movie and I have
watched it countless times since on VHS. Spooky, then, to find that the long-awaited DVD issue also has major problems with the soundtrack.
Specifically, then. My ecstasy at finding a
Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack on the DVD was short-lived because, despite Ry Cooder's beautiful stereo backing to the menus, the original soundtrack has NOT
been remixed from the original mono recording. It looks like a quieter version of the existing soundtrack has merely been piped out of the rear speakers, drawing us a little bit further into the experience.
However, none of this even matters because the Dolby Digital soundtrack's lipsync is broken, rendering the movie unwatchable. Thankfully, there is a workaround: the Dolby Stereo soundtrack DOES
lipsync correctly and hence redeems what would otherwise have been an outrageous, not to say extremely disappointing, fiasco. Luckily the only other significant flaw - a vertical yellow line at the left-hand
side of the image during the opening desert scene - disappears after a few minutes. I assume this was a flaw in the print, although it seems odd that it couldn't have been corrected digitally. The strange green
colour casts in several scenes looked wrong, but the director's commentary explained that these were deliberate and I can only assume that the VHS release to which I'd gotten used had been colour-corrected
to some degree. I was disappointed to find no proper documentaries on the DVD, but the deleted scenes are interesting and the Wim Wenders commentary gives a
great insight into the craft of 'proper' movie-making in a pre-digital world. It's also intriguing to discover that more than half of 'Paris, Texas', surely one of the greatest road movies, was written on the road
by Wenders during shooting. About the movie itself, there is little to say. It's melancholy, exuberant and beautiful – or it's slow, meandering and dull. Beauty is
in the eye of the beholder, and if this movie strikes your chords you won't find anything better. Ry Cooder's wonderful soundtrack is, of course, a big part of the experience, although it seems shameful that
he takes sole credit for the music, which is actually his improvisations on Blind Willie Johnson's 1927 recording 'Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground'.
Disappointments aside, this is currently the best way to view this classic film, in a 16:9 ratio and with passable (if resolutely monaural) sound. The extras add significant value to the package, in
particular the director's commentary on both the movie itself and the deleted scenes. There aren't too many other extras, but for what is basically a low-budget independent movie we can count ourselves lucky
that they found anything at all. |
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