Hoosiers Blu-ray

Hoosiers

 (1986)

Drama | Sport



Nominated for two Oscars and hailed by Sports Illustrated and ESPN as one of the best sports movies of all time, this triumphant tale of a high school basketball team's long-shot attempt to with the state championship is filled with edge-of-your seat suspense and breathless excitement! Featuring "fast-break cinematography that catches the pace of the game" (The Washington Post) and powerful performances from Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey and Dennis Hopper, Hoosiers is "a winner" (Boxoffice)!

For more details about Hoosiers on Blu-ray, see the Hoosiers Blu-ray Review

Starring: Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey, Dennis Hopper, Sheb Wooley, Fern Persons
Director: David Anspaugh

Hoosiers Blu-ray, Video Quality

 


Hoosiers premiered on Blu-ray in March of 2007, sporting a 1080p/MPEG-2 transfer that really didn’t do the film any favors. Looking at Hoosiers today, the video deficiencies are all the more evident when you consider some of the remarkable restorations given to catalog titles in the past two years. I’m no fan of DNR—if a movie was shot on film, I expect it to look that way—but Hoosiers is speckled with a persistently heavy grain field that commingles with source noise to create a buzzing, fluctuating membrane that covers the image almost constantly, but is especially apparent in shots of the sky and characters’ faces. Granted, I prefer this to waxy smearing, but a good bit of detail is lost in some of the heavier patches of grain. The image is at its best during game time—in the well-lit gymnasiums—with nicely carved contrast, a satisfying sense of clarity, and the Huskers’ red and yellow uniforms popping cleanly off the screen. Outside the gym, however, the picture often falters. Black levels can crush the detail in Hackman’s pea coat or else look hazy and insubstantial, contrast is sometimes bland, and sharpness varies from scene to scene. The film is occasionally very crisp—see the wrinkles on Hackman’s face or the weft in his tweed suit jacket—but this simply doesn’t hold up throughout. The image certainly isn’t bad, but you get a feeling watching Hoosiers that it could certainly look a lot better.

Hoosiers Blu-ray, Audio Quality

 


While Hoosiers ships with a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track, the sound is nearly as disappointing as the visuals. This is an almost entirely front-heavy track, and there were instances when I craned toward my rear speakers, wondering if perhaps they had come unplugged. There’s almost nothing here to suggest a dimensional soundfield. While you’ll occasionally hear cheering in the surround channels and a modicum of environmental ambience —like the reverb during Norman’s introduction of the team at the school assembly—this track misses a lot of opportunities for true 5.1 engagement. When Norman first enters the school and students flood down the stairs and out of classrooms past him, where are their footsteps or the sound of casual hallway chatter? There’s a decent spread across the front channels, but there are long stretches of the film where it might as well be monophonic.

As I mentioned in the review, I’m not a big fan of Jerry Goldsmith’s score here—seriously, why the big drum machine beats?—and the music, along with being monumentally incongruous, sounds unremarkable, with hardly any real bass response. Dialogue is mostly clean and clear, but every once in awhile it seems boxy and thin, particularly when Norman shouts from the sidelines. And what’s up with the cheering from the stands? Instead of thunderous uproar, it sounds like a crowd as filtered and flattened through the speakers of a portable AM radio. I understand that this 5.1 track has been repurposed from somewhat dated source material, but I’ve heard other films from the same era that sound much bigger, immersive, and dynamically solid.

Hoosiers Blu-ray, Forum Discussions

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