1091 Beasts of No Nation

[swo17]

Beasts of No Nation



The nightmare of war is seen through the eyes of one of its most tragic casualties—a child soldier—in this harrowing vision of innocence lost from Cary Joji Fukunaga. Based on the acclaimed novel by Uzodinma Iweala, Beasts of No Nation unfolds in an unnamed, civil-war-torn West African country, where the young Agu (Abraham Attah, in a haunting debut performance) witnesses carnage in his village before falling captive to a band of rebel soldiers led by a ruthless commander (an explosive Idris Elba), who molds the boy into a hardened killer. Fukunaga's relentlessly roving camera work and stunning visuals—realism so intensely visceral it borders on the surreal—immerse the viewer in a world of unimaginable horror without ever losing sight of the powerful human story at its center.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• 2K digital master, approved by director Cary Joji Fukunaga, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New audio commentary featuring Fukunaga and first assistant director Jon Mallard
• Two new documentaries on the development and making of the film, featuring interviews with Fukunaga; author Uzodinma Iweala; actors Idris Elba and Abraham Attah; and producers Amy Kaufman, Daniela Taplin Lundberg, and Riva Marker
• New conversation between Fukunaga and producer and cultural commentator Franklin Leonard
• New interview with costume designer Jenny Eagan
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• English descriptive audio
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Robert Daniels

[imperialwi]

This movie is so good but so hard to watch because of its content. It's a worthy addition to the Collection, and one I will probably get.

[lzx]

Is this the first Criterion release with a descriptive audio track?

[swo17]

Is this the first Criterion release with a descriptive audio track?

Rolling Thunder Revue also has one. Those are the only two releases that a search on their website pulls up. Presumably Netflix had already commissioned these tracks and Criterion figured why not include them

[cdnchris]

I'm pretty sure all of the Netflix titles have them but I'll have to double check

[FrauBlucher]

Beaver

[yoloswegmaster]

Svet of No Nation

[black&huge]

Svet of No Opinion

[domino harvey]

His review is literally just him talking about something called Johnny Mad Dog in prose that suggests a 7th grade book report. Is he Armond White-ing now?

[yoloswegmaster]

I knew this was going to be a good review when I saw the opening sentence:

Cary Joji Fukunaga's "Beasts of No Nation" (2015) arrives on Blu-ray courtesy of Kino Lorber.

[CSM126]

The people who run that site are too stupid to recognize how embarrassing it is to have this goof around and so I feel embarrassed for them while also holding them in bitter contempt.

[MichaelB]

We must be roughly at the fifth anniversary of the time when his absolutely pigheaded refusal to admit to a comparatively minor factual error (and one that I honestly wouldn’t have held against him if only he’d admitted it, as it wasn’t exactly based on common knowledge) led to the exposure of basic technical ignorance that was genuinely shocking for someone in his position.

The part I most treasure (not least because in his case it’s always a certain “tell” that he knows he’s losing an argument) is when he turned the patronising pomposity up to eleven while simultaneously revealing beyond any doubt that he basically didn’t understand what we were arguing about.

That was his final post in the discussion, and in many ways his evident inability to concoct a face-saving comeback was more eloquent than an actual attempt would have been. As was the fact that he pretty much abandoned the Blu-ray.com forums thereafter - whether out of personal embarrassment or because he’d actually been ordered to by his colleagues remains a delightfully open question.

[tenia]

To this day, I still wonder if he truly was so wrong as to misunderstand such a basic thing or if he went there as his hill to die on for the sole reason to try and prove you wrong, even if it meant putting aside the knowledge he might have had of the matter discussed.

On the topic of this haven't been his final post on the main board, considering what he writes in the comments of numerous news, I suspect personal embarrassment wasn't the reason.

[MichaelB]

It was completely stupid on his part because there's absolutely no way Nick Wrigley and I were going to back down on this, as his technical ignorance was causing him to post stuff that was potentially commercially damaging in a forum with a large readership. I have no issue with his opinions, but peddling and aggressively defending serious errors of fact are an entirely different matter - and this was far from his first offence.

And he must have known that he was clutching at straws long before it became undeniably obvious - his claim that "it's in 35mm, therefore it must have been shot at 24 frames per second" came comparatively early and was immediately exposed as technical and historical nonsense. A more self-aware person would have realised then and there that he was treading on extremely shaky ground and judiciously backed down, but no.

I'm not the least bit surprised he later became such a rabid Donald Trump fan: both of them are near-perfect Dunning-Kruger case studies.

[tenia]

Yes, I'm not surprised either that he ended up in such a predictable fashion in this regard, it made such a perfect fit.
In a sense, I'm also not surprised that the few remaining insiders there either are people managing to limit their participation (like the people from VS, Mondo Macabro, David M or, now back again, Indicator) or with bullying behavior (like KL or Code Red). Anything in-between would end up at some point rubbing the wrong persons and get banned for trying to prove they're wrong when they definitely are (like I did).

his claim that "it's in 35mm, therefore it must have been shot at 24 frames per second" came comparatively early and was immediately exposed as technical and historical nonsense.

He even doubled down by claiming the shots of European TVs that should have exhibited rolling issues (because 50Hz vs 24 fps) might have been fixed by SFX in post-production. In 1987-88's Dekalog ! "Or maybe they shot part in 25fps and part in 24fps !"
Or maybe, you know, you're just mistaken and it happens and it's OK to admit it.

[MichaelB]

I don't have any serious issue with his Indicator reviews, aside from some of them being insanely late. In particular, I don't recall any damaging factual errors on the order of, say, his claim that there were "mastering errors" on Arrow's Thieves' Highway that were actually down to unrestorable Production Code-era censorship. And I suspect that if such an error was to be made, it would probably be handled by the label themselves behind the scenes.

But yes, the various people with access to the Indicator account on Blu-ray.com operate under a strict code of conduct: basically, information only, plus occasional participation in obviously benign discussions, pretty much exclusively on either the Indicator thread itself or direct spin-offs relating to individual releases. There was one guy who asked a question fairly aggressively, which someone else immediately (and pretty much accurately) answered, to which he replied with something like "I didn't ask you, I asked Indicator" and then became increasingly vituperative, even up to the point of sending a PM hoping that the person behind the Indicator account would get fired and replaced by someone with better communications skills. At which point we just switched PMs off altogether for a few months, as that's the kind of thing we just don't want to get involved with.

(The problem in that instance was that we couldn't give him a satisfactory answer - he wanted to know when Hammer volume 4 was coming out, but the answer back then was "either when Sony delivers their restoration of Revenge of Frankenstein, or when we decided that our license is too close to expiry, in which case we'd reluctantly have to release their older master" - but because there was always a possibility of the latter happening we were under strict instructions not even to hint at the possibility that there might be a restoration. So silence really was the best policy.)