frank678 said:
Re: the flatness of faces, i wonder if in part this has to do with the fact that they used gauze in front of the lens (which i read about in the making of star wars book) to give the film a soft retro look.

No, it is from botching the scanning and subsequent grading. Film has so much latitude for peak whites to be 'whiter than white', such as the specular highlights on a chrome bumper, the little highlights in people's eyes etc. are what make film seem alive.

When you scan it, if you don't take into account the toe and shoulder of the film, you end up setting your white point at for example at 255/255/255 (in 8bit) and have nowhere to go for the bits of the film that are whiter than that. This leaves you with flat, leathery looking faces and no life in the eyes and a matte feel to everything in the film, and crushed blacks.

When we used to do conversions, black was set at 95 and white was set at 685 (the scale was from 0-1023) that left lots of headroom for lovely shadow detail and lively highlights off the skin, eyes, metallic surfaces etc.