OTOH, I've never understood why other people feel need to be such a dick about the fact that he's not.

I just thought it was odd/unnecessary for him to give this uh...overview...of blu ray releases at the beginning of his review, rather than just stick to the release at hand. Kind of pointless.

He has a highly-visible platform in which to influence potential consumers. If labels/studios see that it doesn't bother someone in that position, they're not gonna be in any hurry to change their practices, and then those who feel DNR is an abomination are screwed on future releases also

I should state that I'm firmly in the anti-DNR camp and not defending his glossing over (whoops) the excessive use of DNR. I just wonder how many people are there who are actively incensed about this (i.e. the general buying public) outside a few specialty forums and how being a dick about it on the selfsame forums ameliorates anything. But perhaps I underestimate the influence we have here.

We don't have any influence, but a Blu-ray.com review probably gets the most hits for people interested in such things. Plus everyone knows Blu-ray.com is Illuminati

829.

Give or take.

Now that Phase IV is being screened tomorrow in uncut form, here's hoping Olive see fit to ask Paramount to supply a restored edition for a future blu ray release...

Disappointed Devil Probably not coming out on blu ray - so if I want to get the DVD is it worth waiting for this Olive release or should I just get the AE release from the UK? I have a multi region-player so can play both but I wondered whether this is a restored print - has any notable extras etc...

Get the AE.There's no extras but it's usually very cheap,around £5,on Amazon.I doubt Olive's dvd only release will be significantly better.

WOW. For me this is one of the most desired pieces of lost footage from any film. The brief clips of the ending found in this trailer are tantalizing. Had I the money (and were I not working) I'd fly out to LA today to see this! I really hope Olive puts out a blu ray and sticks this on there one way or another.

Just clarifying, but Phase IV is NOT being screened uncut. The uncut ending was found in the Academy archive, but will be screened after the normal cut of Phase IV. It' still an amazing find that I'll be watching enthusiastically tonight! Crossing my fingers that Olive Films actually cares about special features for once and releases it.

Review of the original ending of Phase IV.

Beaver on Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Still don't understand how you can release a Blu Ray where the Disc Size is only 14 Gb, whatever how good the movie can already look.
Just use the freaking disc space !

I've never understood why they don't use the space. I've got a one release that proudly boasts a BD50 but for some reason they only decided to use 27GB of the disc.

That sounds like Warner, they often only use only few gigabytes of the second layer.

Blu-ray.com on Johnny Guitar

Bob Furmanek's research here suggests that this should probably be matted 1.66:1, but for those OK with the Academy unmatted framing this looks to be a quality HD version of what was done for the R2 DVD.

Once again Kauffman parades his stone headed idiocy ("Can't help laughing... Johnny Guitar"). This is a Ray so many people revere as one of the three or four greatest.

He takes over from Armond for me as most redundant dvd writer on the web.

I had often wondered about JG in widescreen. Given Republic's distribution arrangements during the 50s one imagines a great many theaters could or would only screen in Academy. But JG looks perfectly well covered for 1.66 if not even 1.85. Furmanek's Research on Republic at least acknowledges the variability factor for that studio. I certainly welcome it for the excellent results they obtained with the 2.00:1 Invasion of the BS. Great result. ut the Academy still looks good IMO. The Oz Paramount R4 SD disc is also from this source.

Based on the screen caps, "Johnny Guitar" looks like a zoom-in with cropping on all four sides. I'd prefer an orthodox 1.66 crop, myself, but it still looks pretty nice.

That's interesting but I suspect unlikely. It was very obviously shot open matte for Academy and very obviously pesents in that ratio for the discs. There are no horizontal cropping compositional issues. None. Any grain or "Zoom" problem you refer to is almost certainly the color process, Trucolor which was a three strip multi neg, like Tech. It was less quality controlled than Tech and there is inevitably more grain in the matrix neg strip and thus the positive.

Can you send comparison caps to demonstrate what you see?

Zooming problems are not at all uncommon in the 50s, especially with Paramount, but not with Republic particularly.

According to a couple posts over at the HTF by our friend Mr. Lime, Olive is no longer going to release the following films:
Baja (1995)
Black Day Blue Night (1995)
Bulletproof Heart (1994)
Count Dracula (1970)
Dorian Gray (1970)
Fear is the Key (1972)
Femme Fatale (1991)
The Final Cut (1996)
The Long Day's Dying (1968)
Macaroni (1985)
Promise Her Anything (1965)
The Proud and the Profane (1956)
The Savage (1952)
The Savage Innocents (1960)
The Sea Shall Not Have Them (1954)
Shanks (1974)
The Turning Point (1952)
Warpath (1951)
Witchboard III (1995)

I can't cry enough tears.

I'm surprised and disappointed by this one too. Surely they know that since the MoC release has gone out of print people would pick this one up if they could.

They dropped most of those titles because the film elements available to Olive were not good enough.

The version of Shanks they showed on TCM looked good to me. I really would love even just a DVD of that masterpiece even if it were wrapped in a ball of dog doo.

Agreed. Most theaters that would've played a Republic Picture probably wasn't even equipped to screen in widescreen. Two small scans (one never even mentioning Johnny Guitar) isn't convincing to me one bit. Looking at each framegrab, nothing seems cut off and everything seems beautifully framed for the 1.37 format.

I'd also like to say I saw an archival print of the film last year at the Aero Theater and can say it was projected beautifully in 1.37 with nothing cut off from the frame.