Ines Sastre

October 26, 20222 yr

I haven't visited here for a while. Thanks RocketQueen & danny-19 for the efforts!

I was able to buy the movie Druids / Vercingétorix starring Inés Sastre on Blu-ray from Amazon.es. Spanish copyright laws makes it easier to releases movies on physical media. I owned the Nordic DVD release with Swedish title "Kampen om Gallien" of this movie before, but of course I wanted to upgrade the quality.

The good:

The Blu-ray looks a genuine Blu-ray disc and not a "burned" BD-R that can happen with these haphazard releases. The release is market (A)(B)(C) so it seems to be region free, but I can only confirm the (B) part.

The bad:

This is some kind of low quality transfer for TV broadcast I think. Yes, it is HD. but crappy HD. The colors are washed out. Increasing color saturation on my TV helped with this. The picture is soft for HD, but still sharper than the DVD. The Picture has dirt. Zero restoration work. Picture format is 1080/60i, when it should be of course 1080/24p! The movements are jagged. The running time (119 mins) is the same as for the DVD which suffers from the 4 % PAL speed-up. So, this version suffers from PAL speed up, 3:2 pull-down AND interlaced picture!! Amazing! So wrong! But it doesn't end there! The DVD release has a nice Dolby Digital sound, but this Blu-ray has MONO sound that is CRAP!!! What the hell? So, they have completely ruined this release and I payed 19,49 euros delivered for it. They didn't get even Inés' name right on the cover: Inex Sastre. Perhaps to make it "rhyme" with Max von Sydow? Naturally there is no extra material on this release. Only the movie.

The movie:

Inés Sastre is wonderful (as always) in this movie. So beautiful and sweet! She has got a decent amount of screen time, but her role as Epona is somewhat limited. Christopher Lambert is the one getting the most screentime. This is not a good movie. I wouldn't waste my time and money on it if it wasn't for TRUE Goddess Inés Sastre. Jacques Dorfmann's directing is bad and it makes this movie look messy and lacking structure. This is a borefest except for the scenes with Epona, but then again this kind of historical films have never been my cup of tea.

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