BFI: 32 Ozu Films

[Finch]

Ben replied to my email within minutes of receipt - my replacement disc is due in the post tomorrow. Truly excellent customer service from the BFI

[Ozu Teapot]

Got my replacement disc this morning (in the UK) - excellent service from the BFI!

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

Me too.. in France. Top notch service

[Finch]

The replacement disc arrived - thank you very much indeed.

[feckless boy]

Got my replacement disc this morning (in the UK) - excellent service from the BFI!

Old disc: 13783 MBytes
Replacement disc: 22487 MBytes

I wonder how the first encode made it all the way to the pressing plant? Maybe, at some point, they were planning to make a split blu-ray and a test encode was made to see if it was possible to jam two films onto a single-layered disc. Anyway very happy that BFI decided to do a new encode, as someone said above: top-notch!

[MichaelB]

I wonder how the first encode made it all the way to the pressing plant?

Without being privy to the actual logistics, I don't know - but it's worth noting that things do occasionally go wrong at the pressing stage. For instance, the technical problem with The Leopard that led to a recall and repress seems to have happened after the master had been signed off.

In fact, one of the reasons it took so long to establish that there was indeed a problem with that release stemmed from the fact that the master was fine - and retail copies should in theory be identical. Except when they're not.

[Oedipax]

Got mine in the U.S. yesterday, awesome service from BFI!

One note of caution, I can't discern any difference on the disc artwork at all, so you might want to mark your old copy before they get mixed up.

[skuhn8]

Very interested. I recently loaded the recent firmware upgrade the other day... and just tried my Late Spring disc, and now it doesn't work either. Hmmmm, I'm going to send Oppo and email and let them know. My Late Sping BFI BD just won't work at all anymore... the wrong region screen won't go away. ](*,)

I asked Oppo about this problem, and this was their reply:

We have not changed anything in our firmware to affect this kind of interaction. We have not made any alterations to the way in which the player should interact with region modification kits.

If you rollback to a previous firmware, such as the 50-0424 Firmware) does the disc still fail to load?

Best Regards,

Customer Service

Any update on this? I finally got my BFI Late Spring Blu and got the region code message on my Cambridge Audio 650BD (Oppo guts)--B region player; B region disc. My poor kids were actually awakened by the cursing that ensued (10pm). Other Region-B locked BFI's Saturday Night/Sunday Morning and Red Desert function fine as did MOC's B-locked Make Way for Tomorrow. I think this is a quality control issue on BFI's side. Any word if they are aware of this?

[Peacock]

Sorry to interrupt skuhn, but I have to quickly ask: are the new An Autumn Afternoon disks being sold by Amazon, as they were out of stock for a few weeks prior to MichaelB's announcement, or would I have to order the Amazon disk then send it off to BFI to get swapped? Is there any way of telling with a PS3 the file size or anything?

[Anthony]

Any update on this? I finally got my BFI Late Spring Blu and got the region code message on my Cambridge Audio 650BD (Oppo guts)--B region player; B region disc. My poor kids were actually awakened by the cursing that ensued (10pm). Other Region-B locked BFI's Saturday Night/Sunday Morning and Red Desert function fine as did MOC's B-locked Make Way for Tomorrow. I think this is a quality control issue on BFI's side. Any word if they are aware of this?

Very strange fix, but what I did was try out a bunch of other Region B blu-rays (that would load just fine) and kept going back to load the Late Spring BD... and eventually the movie would load OK (without the wrong region screen showing up)... and I haven't experienced the problem since.

[skuhn8]

Any update on this? I finally got my BFI Late Spring Blu and got the region code message on my Cambridge Audio 650BD (Oppo guts)--B region player; B region disc. My poor kids were actually awakened by the cursing that ensued (10pm). Other Region-B locked BFI's Saturday Night/Sunday Morning and Red Desert function fine as did MOC's B-locked Make Way for Tomorrow. I think this is a quality control issue on BFI's side. Any word if they are aware of this?

Very strange fix, but what I did was try out a bunch of other Region B blu-rays (that would load just fine) and kept going back to load the Late Spring BD... and eventually the movie would load OK (without the wrong region screen showing up)... and I haven't experienced the problem since.

How many did it take? I did three in succession immediately prior to writing my message.

[Anthony]

How many did it take? I did three in succession immediately prior to writing my message.

I can't quite remember, but I had almost given up when all of a sudden it worked fine. I must of tried of bunch of combinations of turning off the player, then changng the region coding back to "A" and then back to "B" several times, and then trying several different BFI locked "B" discs before then trying the Late Spring BD. And all of a sudden it worked, and like I wrote earlier, I've loaded the disc several times since then without a problem. Be patient, it will work eventually. Also, I am running the most recent firmware update on my player. Just keep trying.

[zedz]

For what it's worth, I hadn't tried playing my Late Spring disc up till now, but doing so on my Oppo I found the same zone mismatch message (and the same with Early Summer). However, I managed to fix it with the following voodoo:

1) Switched off the player; re-set the Zone to 2 (B); turned player back on.

2) Inserted another BFI Zone B disc I'd previously had no problem with (in my case, The Bed Sitting Room). Waited till it played the BFI logo then ejected it.

3) Re-inserted Late Spring disc.

4) It gave me the option of resuming play (Press Play to resume or Stop to cancel). I pressed Stop to cancel, then pressed play to reload the disc. It played perfectly, as did Early Summer.

As a bonus, having done all this, the only other disc I've had this 'Zone Mismatch' problem with, and one which I've never been able to play at all (The African Queen), also played immediately.

So from now on, The Bed Sitting Room is going to be my voodoo talisman for any such problems.

[skuhn8]

For what it's worth, I hadn't tried playing my Late Spring disc up till now, but doing so on my Oppo I found the same zone mismatch message (and the same with Early Summer). However, I managed to fix it with the following voodoo:

1) Switched off the player; re-set the Zone to 2 (B); turned player back on.

2) Inserted another BFI Zone B disc I'd previously had no problem with (in my case, The Bed Sitting Room). Waited till it played the BFI logo then ejected it.

3) Re-inserted Late Spring disc.

4) It gave me the option of resuming play (Press Play to resume or Stop to cancel). I pressed Stop to cancel, then pressed play to reload the disc. It played perfectly, as did Early Summer.

As a bonus, having done all this, the only other disc I've had this 'Zone Mismatch' problem with, and one which I've never been able to play at all (The African Queen), also played immediately.

So from now on, The Bed Sitting Room is going to be my voodoo talisman for any such problems.

Followed your steps, zedz...and IT WORKED! Thank you so much. Afterwards I turned off the player loaded a couple other blus and went back to Late Spring and am watching it now. You just provided something of an antidote to the heat wave here.

I also used Bed Sitting Room. Perhaps if BFI won't fix the issue they can add a blurb to BSR indicating that it'll fix Ozu Blu's.

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

Was there anything on the Bed Sitting Room menu telling us what the next Ozu releases are?

[MichaelB]

I encrypted all the Ozu titles and their release dates in my Bed-Sitting Room booklet essay.

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

I encrypted all the Ozu titles and their release dates in my Bed-Sitting Room booklet essay.

I am busy feeding the shredded booklet into my Enigma machine as we speak.
Ah I see now that for Xmas we're getting 'Slightly premature Winter' and 'Better late than never Twilight'. What more could we ask for?

[unclehulot]

I thought my region mod kit was acting up after the recent BDP 93 firmware upgrade, and actually went as far as to rollback the firmware, but here's what I think happened, and from what I read above, it has happened to several of us. If, for some reason, the region switch via remote, doesn't "take", there is no way to know this until a disc is loaded. So, you put a disc in, get the region bark screen, and say WTF. Then, going through the power off, and retry of the remote sequence, you may very well have correctly set the player. But if you pop the same disc in you get the same error screen. Only when I hit the stop button twice, and had a disc load correctly, did I realize that the oppo was doing a resume play on that very region bark menu, having nothing to do with the region being changed correctly or not!

[zedz]

I think the resume play issue is part of the problem, but it's definitely more complicated than that, because when my player wouldn't play Late Spring (or The African Queen) it would happily play every other Region B disc I threw at it. In fact, when I performed the procedure described above, I'd just finished watching Deep End (so I guess loading that particular disc didn't have the magic Bed Sitting Room effect).

[antnield]

The surviving fragments of I Graduated, But... have just been classified by the BBFC. So it shouldn't be too long before we see the next Ozus announced...

[Michael Kerpan]

The surviving fragments of I Graduated, But... have just been classified by the BBFC. So it shouldn't be too long before we see the next Ozus announced...

The surviving "I Graduated But" is not really fragmentary, but rather the complete "condensed home movie" version (11.5mm). I don't believe anything remains from the full 35mm film version.

[knives]

Still better than nothing. Any guesses on what it will be paired with?

[Peacock]

This is pretty speculatory, but seeing as Criterion said to someone on facebook that Green Tea and Tenement Gent might be coming in 2012, I'd guess BFI will wait and use their HD master like they did for The Only Son/There Was a Father. So let's cross those off. Floating Weeds and The End of Summer might take a bit longer due to them being fairly recently Artificial Eye, so probably not either of those. So if there is another two releases on their way next my guess is they'll be Tokyo Twilight (using the same master as Tartan) and Early Spring (using the same master as Criterion).

P.S. While I'm here, I watched the Blu of An Autumn Afternoon, and beyond the frame jumps near the beginning during the first dialogue scene, it was great, really beautiful. Although I was disappointed that the opening title's subtitle was AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON and not an actual translation (perhaps with the American title in brackets afterwards)

[Michael Kerpan]

I don't know if there is ANY current source of Sanma no aji without the frame jumps. This seems to reflect the state of the best possible sources that still exist. Not sure what happened between the time that this was released on videotape and the first time it first appeared on DVD. Apparent;y some sort of irreparable deterioration.

As to the English title of Sanma no aji -- Not sure that "The Taste of Mackerel Pike" or "The Taste of Saury" would mean anything to Western viewers (maybe if the fish species was one that was familiar here, a literal translation would work better). Still, Autuman Aftenoon IS awfully bland (and not at all reflective of the real title). ;~}

I would _love_ to have a proper HD transfer of Tokyo Twilight, I suspect it would benefit greatly from a better transfer than the one done Criterion.

[MichaelB]

For the record, the producer of the BFI's An Autumn Afternoon is well aware that it's nothing like a literal translation of the actual title - but it's been known by that title in English-speaking countries for nearly fifty years, so it was considered a bit late in the day to change it.

It's one thing to introduce a subtle corrective shift from The Bicycle Thief to Bicycle Thieves (as Criterion did a few years ago), but changing a well-known title to the point of unrecognisability is a different matter altogether.

And at least the booklet spells out the linguistic issues.