Howards End (Ivory, 1992)

Howards End (Ivory, 1992)



Cast:



Anthony Hopkins - Henry Wilcox

Vanessa Redgrave - Ruth Wilcox

Emma Thompson - Margaret Schlegel

Helena Bonham Carter - Helen Schlegel

Samuel West - Leonard Bast



Based on the novel Howards End, by E.M. Forster



[Complete cast listing available from IMDB.



***



It's been difficult for me to obtain any one description that does justice to the film or the novel its based upon, and even more so to write one myself. Ostensibly it's about the interaction between three highly different families from three widely separated social classes and their slow, inevitable, and sometimes tortuous collision with one another. Howards End, the Wilcoxes' eponymous estate, becomes as main of a character as any throughout the novel and film; and though a large part of the action takes place in the urban areas of London, an eventual return to Howards End becomes the "touching point" for the characters and heralds a major development. The cast is superb even for a Merchant-Ivory film, and I highly recommend this one and the novel it's based upon (one of my favorites in any language,) to all those who are curious.



One IMDB reviewer spoke of the film, and specifically, Emma Thompson's performance as Meg Schlegel in this way:



If it's raining, if it's late, if I'm tired of working, if I'm restless or if I'm in a quandary of sorts, "Howard's End". I put the film on and Emma Thompson - presumably with the help of her accomplices, Ivory, Jhavhala, Hopkins etc - takes me away from whatever mood I'm trying to escape and leads me through her own, brilliantly drawn, gently torturous path. I don't recall when was the last time an actress has had this kind of power over my own psyche. The film is constructed with an Ivory attention to detail worthy of a vintage Visconti. The screenplay has no lapses of any kind and never falls into the usual traps. Loyal to its source material and yet, cinematic in the most revolutionary traditional sense of the word. The Britishness of Anthony Hopkins character is turned upside down giving us a glimpse into a character that's a mass of contradictions. But it is Emma Thompson's film from beginning to end. What a glorious achievement.



This is by far my favorite Redgrave film, and an extremely close second in terms of Hopkins's role, my favorite of his being 84 Charing Cross Road. It's an incredibly engrossing film that can be watched day or night, time and time again. Redgrave's part is played with a remarkable sensitivity; and in all honesty, I can't really think of anything I don't like about it.



(Great pains have been taken to ensure this was an improvement over the version currently available on the Pirate Bay, as well as the one floating around various private trackers. It was a labor of love and some frustration from start to finish - being the first time I have used Gordian Knot with any efficacy at all, haha.. Since the original AC3 audio track was extremely quiet I've taken the liberty of normalizing it before the upload, and haven't noticed any problems in sync or a loss in quality. In retrospect, maybe I should of cranked the bitrate up a bit more for such a long film, but ~1400kb/s suits it well. I'm a little disappointed how it looks when stretching to fullscreen, but am at least glad that I did my best in translating an extremely lush and high-quality film to a semi-portable file. If you end up enjoying it, Criterion printed a limited run of most of the Merchant-Ivory films under the Merchant Ivory Collection banner.)



Now, the specs!



***



General

Complete name : Howards End.avi

Format : AVI

Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave

File size : 1.61 GiB

Duration : 2h 22mn

Overall bit rate : 1 620 Kbps

Writing application : Nandub v1.0rc2

Writing library : Nandub build 1852/release



Video

Format : MPEG-4 Visual

Format profile : Simple@L3

Format settings, BVOP : Yes

Format settings, QPel : No

Format settings, GMC : No warppoints

Format settings, Matrix : Default

Muxing mode : Packed bitstream

Codec ID : XVID

Codec ID/Hint : XviD

Duration : 2h 22mn

Bit rate : 1 227 Kbps

Width : 640 pixels

Height : 272 pixels

Display aspect ratio : 2.35

Frame rate : 23.976 fps

Resolution : 24 bits

Colorimetry : 4:2:0

Scan type : Progressive

Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.294

Stream size : 1.22 GiB (76%)

Writing library : XviD 1.0.3 (UTC 2004-12-20)



Audio

Format : AC-3

Format/Info : Audio Coding 3

Codec ID : 2000

Duration : 2h 22mn

Bit rate mode : Constant

Bit rate : 384 Kbps

Channel(s) : 6 channels

Channel positions : Front: L C R, Surround: L R, LFE

Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz

Stream size : 391 MiB (24%)

Alignment : Split accross interleaves

Interleave, duration : 42 ms (1.00 video frame)

Interleave, preload duration : 500 ms



Personal rip.



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