Killing Me Softly Torrent X264 1080p
Roseanne Gennett
I don't even have to read the negative reviews (but I did) to know what they're going to say - too much talk, not enough action, undeveloped characters, no story, too confusing and on and on. It's almost precisely why I found the picture so fascinating. Set against the backdrop of the 2008 financial meltdown and the presidential election cycle, the mob business is undergoing it's own downturn, made worse when a free lance criminal (Vincent Curatola as Johnny Amato) hires on a couple of hit men to duplicate a staged robbery that Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta) successfully pulled against himself to set up the story. The picture takes it's own sweet time to develop the characters of Frankie (Scoot MacNairy) and zoned out partner Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) in a buildup to the actual heist, putting the mob on defense in a protracted cat and mouse game over who's going to pay for this latest indiscretion.
I read a couple reviewers who were of the belief that Brad Pitt was making a political statement here as a noted Hollywood liberal and supporter of the President. Let's keep something in mind, Pitt's an actor and he didn't come up with the script. In fact, Pitt probably had to choke down his dialog in the final scene when he confronted the mob lawyer (Richard Jenkins credited as Driver in the story) after checking his payoff - "I'm living in America and in America you're on your own". Meaning that he expected full payment for services provided after intermediary New York Mickey (James Gandolfini) crapped out on his end of the deal. The message was a decidedly capitalist one, and if the picture had gone on, I'm pretty sure Jackie Cogan (Pitt) would have been made whole one way or another.
In my estimation, the film's best sequence occurred when Jackie performed the hit on Liotta's Markie character. Done in extreme slow motion and highly stylized, the scene is destined to be a classic of mob movie inspired violence. One might even say there was a distinct poetry to rubbing out Markie Trattman. Jackie's other victims weren't done quite as creatively, let's just say he was efficient at his job. Come to think of it now as I write this, there wasn't too much 'softly' about it either.
Anyway, going in one should temper expectations against one's preferences in movie styles. Characters and dialog are my thing and this one delivered along with the expected violence. I'd put it up there with some of the year's best output.
Most of my 4k films are 6Gb x265(HEVC) files and i can stream them directly just fine but transcoding them to basically any other format yields 100% CPU usage and the video basically buffers constantly. So that's just not an option. I don't have x264 4k files.When transcoding 2Gb 1080 x264 (not HEVC) files and i convert them to 720p (2mbit) or any 420p i have 90-100% cpu usage but the video can run after some buffering in the beginning (check image below on a 420 transcode). A strange thing is though that for some reason the 720 (2mbit) kills the cpu but 720 (3mbit) is a walk in the park with next to no CPU usage.
I have seen a blog from Nas Compares where he shows x265 and x264 transcodes running much better than mine. Especially this image which shows much better performance on a x264 transcode to very low quality. So i have a hard time understanding what's going on..
Bonus conversation: Due to x264 being much less complex, presets can pretty much maintain only a slight loss in quality as you encode faster. This gives an illusion that slower presets are slower due to spending more time compressing. The more correct way to see this is that slower presets are slower due to doing more motion calculations and finding the best scheme that best describes the frame, which in x264 just so happens benefits compression too. However, x265 is waaay more complex with motion algorithms, meaning that accurately describing motion actually increases bitrate.
Side note: If you want x265 to behave similarly to x264, use these: no-sao:no-strong-intra-smoothing:deblock=-1,-1. Your result video will be very similar to x264, including all its flaws (blocking behavior, etc.).