Kino Lorber Studio Classics

[FrauBlucher]

As for Silents in the 4K format Metropolis would be wonderful but unlikely. If Criterion dipped their toes into the format which I expect at some point they will, a Chaplin would be amazing and very doable

[nitin]

On the subject of UHD discs of 1.37 material, while so far I think Sony's Mr Smith is the best example by far, I think there is very little or even no place in the 4K transfers for HDR. Does anyone agree?

I'm not sure what the AR has got to do with whether a film benefits from HDR or not? But I couldn't disagree more in regards to its use with b&w titles, if that's what you mean. Higher contrast but with greater shadow detail and more nuanced highlights is a hell of a look, and I found It's a Wonderful Life and Schindler's List to be transformative. If done right Touch of Evil will likely blow away all previous Blu-rays.

Re It's a Wonderful Life, do you find the UHD a massive improvement over the remastered blu? I must admit I didnt but I have only flicked through and done a cursory comparison rather than watch the UHD in its entirety.

[TheKieslowskiHaze]

Kino will be releasing Touch of Evil (1958) on 4K UHD. Three cuts of the film. No word yet on aspect ratio(s).

Not having a 4K set-up, I hope this release comes with a blu-ray (with a 1.37 option).

Imagine all three cuts, in two aspect ratios each, on both blu and UHD (adding up to 12 versions of one movie). Not gonna happen, but it'd have to be some kind of record.

[Drucker]

Kino will be releasing Touch of Evil (1958) on 4K UHD. Three cuts of the film. No word yet on aspect ratio(s).

Not having a 4K set-up, I hope this release comes with a blu-ray (with a 1.37 option).

Imagine all three cuts, in two aspect ratios each, on both blu and UHD (adding up to 12 versions of one movie). Not gonna happen, but it'd have to be some kind of record.

The in-print Universal blu-ray has almost everything you need? And if you pick up the MOC release you'll have the Academy ratio versions, too.

[therewillbeblus]

The MoC Touch of Evil was the best reason ever to jump to region-free though I have to share that motivation with Mel Gibson's then-region-A-OOP Apocalypto..

[TheKieslowskiHaze]

I prefer the 1.37 ratio and have been holding out on buying Touch of Evil until that option became available stateside (I don't have region free).

The MoC Touch of Evil would be my only real excuse to get a region-free player. But, if Kino's 4K release comes with the academy ratio, it'd be one of many excuses to upgrade my system to 4K.

Or Kino could give me a Region A/1 Touch of Evil blu-ray with a 1.37 ratio of the reconstructed cut. It'd make my dreams come true. Not my wildest dreams, but, you know, dreams.

[Boosmahn]

The MoC Touch of Evil would be my only real excuse to get a region-free player.

I can think of plenty of other excuses! And you don't even have to get a region-free player; you could always purchase a region B player in addition to your region A one.

[senseabove]

Altman's mostly abysmal Fool for Love coming from Kino+Scorpion in June.

[therewillbeblus]

Altman's mostly abysmal Fool for Love coming from Kino+Scorpion in June.

Good God, handedly Altman's worst film for me- and he's made a couple dogs..

[Adam X]

I gotta say, I feel the opposite. Very happy to see this one coming. Given how enamoured some here are with what I consider some of his worst, I can only think it’s down to liking Altman for different reasons.

[senseabove]

I like a pretty wide range of Altman, including ...Five & Dime..., 3 Women, and That Cold Day in the Park, so I'm at least a sometime fan of Altman's filmed stage play, trauma fever dream, and chamber drama modes. I'm not sure what portion of his filmography you could carve out around this that wouldn't include at least one of those... It's just firmly in the "glad I saw it once" portion of his work for me.

[feihong]

No Altman I've seen is worse than The Company. I'm mostly a huge Altman fan, but that movie was so bad as to shake my faith in Altman right to its core.

I can't believe Fool for Love could be worse.

[dwk]

Kino Insider posted about what they are not planning on releasing on UHD

4KUHD is still a format better suited for newer films and genre films. We do not think most classics like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Lost Weekend, Marty, Witness for the Prosecution... would sell on 4K. None of these movies are available in HDR or UHD SDR, so it's not just the additional authoring/replication costs, but also most would require new 4K scans and full restorations. Sony released Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but I doubt we would've released it if we had the opportunity.

Thoroughly Modern Millie has an UHD SDR master and so does many of the titles we acquired from StudioCanal, but we have no plans of releasing any of them on 4K. We're waiting to see how The Good, the Bad and the Ugly performs, before deciding to release the first 2 films in the trilogy. We have 4K rights to The Thomas Crown Affair, The Long Riders, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Irma La Douce and many others, but we have no plans of releasing any of them in 4K.

We had asked for the two Cape Fear films and hoped to release both films in 4K as a set, but they were acquired by another label. But we were only interested in releasing the original in 4K if the remake was also available to us, otherwise we would've passed.

Touch of Evil was one of the pre-1970s classics we felt would sell on 4K. So, we decided to acquire the rights.

[therewillbeblus]

No Altman I've seen is worse than The Company. I'm mostly a huge Altman fan, but that movie was so bad as to shake my faith in Altman right to its core.

I can't believe Fool for Love could be worse.

I haven't seen that one yet, so I'll look forward to comparing them... I'm with senseabove on liking most Altman, and That Cold Day in the Park gradually emerges as a quiet masterpiece and is my pick for his most underrated film (along with Brewster McCloud, if that counts as underrated)

[captveg]

More OOP based on previously being in the "While Supplies Last" sale and now no longer appearing on the website:

Assassination (1987) (DVD still available)

[Adam X]

I like a pretty wide range of Altman, including ...Five & Dime..., 3 Women, and That Cold Day in the Park

Coincidentally, ...Five & Dime... is one of his films that I couldn’t stand to the point of not making it even half-way through; That Cold Day in the Park was fine for me, but that was about it. For me it was just a curious early work. I guess that’s what I meant about different reasons? I remember enjoying The Company too, just to continue sounding a bit contrarian.

I can’t really put it into words right now, given it’s been about 6 years since I went on a gap-filling wander through his filmography, what I like in his films, only to say that some of my favourites are Images, 3 Women & Kansas City.

[domino harvey]

Two of those three would rank below Fool For Love for me!

[bearcuborg]

No Altman I've seen is worse than The Company. I'm mostly a huge Altman fan, but that movie was so bad as to shake my faith in Altman right to its core.

I can't believe Fool for Love could be worse.

I’m a huge fan of The Company. Fool for Love is great too, it manages to utilize his idiosyncratic style while still remaining a distinctly Sam Shepard piece. The cinematography is dreamy too.

[feihong]

No Altman I've seen is worse than The Company. I'm mostly a huge Altman fan, but that movie was so bad as to shake my faith in Altman right to its core.

I can't believe Fool for Love could be worse.

I haven't seen that one yet, so I'll look forward to comparing them... I'm with senseabove on liking most Altman, and That Cold Day in the Park gradually emerges as a quiet masterpiece and is my pick for his most underrated film (along with Brewster McCloud, if that counts as underrated)

I haven't seen Fool for Love. Brewster McCloud is definitely underrated as far as I'm concerned, just based on the fun I have had seeing the movie over the years. As for The Company...it may be my closeness to the ballet scene that makes it so bad to me. My sister has had a career as a professional ballet dancer, and I've worked for companies she has danced with; when I was a teenager I spent a lot of time sitting in ballet studios after school, doing my homework while the dramas of that space played out in front of me (if you are not dancing or a parent of a dancer you are invisible in such an environment). The Company seemed laughably inauthentic––it really seemed that Altman didn't know anything about ballet or the work culture surrounding it. Neve Campbell's character moonlights as a bartender, which is pretty much physically impossible for a professional dancer-–even one with a cocaine addiction (which is not suggested in the movie), and she has an impossibly plush New York apartment she could never afford on a dancer's salary.

Spoiler

At the end of the film, she sustains an injury that is, without exception, career-ending.

This happened to girls my sister knew, and they were always hysterical afterwards. It wouldn't be just the pain, which would be excrutiating; it was in each case the knowledge that their years of study and sacrifice were suddenly undone in a heartbeat; that they would never have that thrill of dancing on-stage––which they really gave their whole lives to achieve––again. In the film, Campbell's character just seems to walk it off. We understand she's out of the performance, but everyone just runs in backstage to check on her, and she's smiling beatifically and saying she's okay. It's heavily implied that this is just a bump in the road for a career ballerina, instead of what it is; the abrupt end to her career.

Altman wouldn't necessarily know these things, but that is in and of itself the point: Altman didn't know these things, and the film, which purports an inside look at the life of this ballerina (which is suspiciously bereft of dramatic tension of any kind), clearly was made without access to any inside experience of that milieu. By comparison, The Red Shoes––so much older, so much more melodramatic and fanciful––is far more true to life, more precise at evoking the febrile intensity, the all-or-nothing sadism of the ballet world (Altman similarly does not seem to notice the oppressive sexism of the ballet environment, or the harsh economics of trying to achieve and sustain such a career). Now, I love watching Nashville, but I'm aware of how country music aficionados and professionals feel Nashville didn't capture the Nashville scene. Ultimately, I do feel like there was a lot more going on in Nashville, and that helps the movie rise above some of those complaints of inauthenticity, but watching an Altman film fixed in a world I know a lot more about, and finding it so offensively poor a take on the material––superficial to the point of unreal––it made me wonder and worry about Nashville, and whether or not I was giving the film too much benefit of the doubt. Knowing a little about ballet made The Company unwatchable––though in fairness, there is no dramatic urgency at all in The Company––not even any friction between characters––and that makes it far, far less engaging. I think this is part and parcel of the way Altman seems so uninvested in exploring the mis en scene ballet could have offered––it is an environment that can offer far more conflict than he has seen fit to present––at least of the variety we saw which made Nashville more engrossing. Wiseman's La Danse several years later did a far better job at evoking the atmosphere of a company at work. Even though the dancers of that European company have a very different work culture to what you see in the ballet companies of the United States, with dancers competing for more positions and companies supported by more funding and more engaged audiences, there was evidence in that film of the struggle the dancers go through to be fit to perform, how it takes everything else from their lives, how these careers feed the drug of ambition to these dancers, all the while starving their artistic expression and intellectual curiosity (Bastien Vives graphic novel Polina is a vivid view inside of this exact strain and contradiction). Altman just never digs into any of these things in the film; he doesn't seem to know that they're there. And his view of the beauty of dance is similarly canned and incurious; the ballet scenes themselves were laughably corny. The movie was so bad I felt like maybe all the Altman movies I liked were similarly bad; but I think ultimately this is just one picture where Altman is totally unengaged, where there is no screenwriter providing meaningful critical perspective on what the film is depicting, and where the vanity of the star––ex-ballet-dancer Neve putting herself in the fantasy role of herself as a successful ballet dancer, with a beautiful apartment, luxurious baths, a cool night job tending bar and hustling at pool tables until she meets a handsome and agreeable James Franco, and absolutely no conflict in any of these varied scenarios, not to mention in her ballet dancer job, which she seems to have earned at the expense of many more outwardly ambitious and competitive dancers (because in the U.S. there are tens of thousands of girls competing for a few hundred professional careers, so dancer Neve must have made it there at the expense of somebody)––was the paramount concern.

[senseabove]

Please throw some spoiler tags around that description of the end The Company, feihong, given that multiple people in this thread have said they haven't seen it (including me... so, thanks...) and this thread isn't even about Altman in particular.

[Adam X]

As for The Company...it may be my closeness to the ballet scene that makes it so bad to me.

While as I said, it’s been too long to remember why I apparently liked it (going by my Letterboxd entry for it, anyway), but I assumed it was due to my familiarity with that environment too, that helped me find enjoyment where others may not (I work in the live performance industry, though have been around contemporary dance far more than ballet productions. I always find I’m especially picky over cinematic representations of theatre productions, which are generally far from convincing). After reading your post feihong, I’m not so sure.

[feihong]

I mean, I wouldn't really know if the stagecraft on display in the film had any fidelity to it; though I do recall that the camera does not follow the dancers during the performance scenes, which makes it seem like Altman and his cameraman don't really know what is supposed to be happening on stage. This is another way in which The Red Shoes is far superior; the purpose of the movement in ballet––both the preparation behind the curtain and the action in front of it––seems more readily understood by everyone on the Archers' production. The purpose is clearly communicated to the audience watching the film, as well. We see Victoria page move from the backstage, where her private life is being mocked and challenged by Lermontov, out to the stage, where she is able to transform for her audience into a figure from another drama––but we do not forget Lermontov's insistence that she give up her love for Julian or her dreams of stardom ("You cannot have both," simple enough, but brutally true to many ballerinas lives). That visual passage puts together the logic of Victoria's harsh position. But on The Company Altman filmed as a spectator with little knowledge of what he was going to see; because of that, there's no coherent through line from backstage to the front of the stage, to the audience in The Company, as there is in The Red Shoes. I think that illustrates somewhat the difference between a film made by passionate but critical fans of ballet (the Archers) and a filmmaker famous for capturing large milieus, covering a subject that doesn't really interest him.

Everything I heard about the film was that it was Neve Campbell's project, and that she brought Altman on. And apparently Altman said this to Barbara Turner, upon reading the script: "Barbara, I read your script and I don't get it. I don't understand. I don't know what it is. I'm just the wrong guy for this."

That seemed to me a pretty canny assessment, and I think he should have gone with his gut on the film. It also seemed, as I recall it, that the participation of the Joffrey Ballet came with lots of stipulations, and maybe be the reason the filming of the dance sequences are done as if the filmmakers are spectators––it seems almost like some action movies' arrangement with the U.S. military, where they can't say anything critical of the military if they want that support.

[HinkyDinkyTruesmith]

For what it's worth, I watched The Company late last year and loved it. I've been around dancers, theatre people, never ballet although I've known some ballerinas. I love that world, and indeed The Red Shoes's opening in the theatre is one of the few films that so fully captures the excitement of hearing an orchestra tune up, of the show about to start... That being said, I don't really care about authenticity in movies. I can understand and appreciate the motives behind those who do, but what I enjoy about Altman's film is the sort of no-stakes attitude about it. Anyone who is worried about spoilers for this film, shouldn't be. It really is unspoilable. There is simply no dramatic tension. And I love it that way! I love just watching, just enjoying watching this group of people do things, sometimes connected, sometimes not. I think the dance pieces are gorgeously photographed, and actually the most exciting moment in the film is during one that unfolds during a developing storm. I like that we never really ever get a full sense of anyone. It's an impressionist sketch of a movie, a stoner's vision of ballet.

[feihong]

That being said, I don't really care about authenticity in movies. I can understand and appreciate the motives behind those who do, but what I enjoy about Altman's film is the sort of no-stakes attitude about it. Anyone who is worried about spoilers for this film, shouldn't be. It really is unspoilable. There is simply no dramatic tension.

I can definitely understand that approach––it's what allows me to be the only person in the world who likes Dr. T and the Women, and makes it so I still think Nashville is a great movie, in spite of objections to it's failure to encapsulate the Nashville scene. But I do think Altman approaches many of these movies with the goal of capturing their milieu, and he generally manages more variety of event, and a more critical take on what he's seeing. The exploitation inherent in the country music scene lurks in every corner of Nashville; the seedy conflation of politics and popular entertainment; the endless deaths and resurrections of Barbara Jean, and the everyday compromises of an altogether ordinary working woman when a charismatic star singer is momentarily taken with her. These scenes have emotional and thematic truths to them, and I don't see those critical observation in The Company. I think, when you get down to it, I wouldn't balk at the errors of inauthenticity so much if the emotional reality of the milieu was more true-to-life. That's what The Red Shoes captures with such precision: the abnegation of self the dancer faces in pursuit of dancing the roles they dream of is very true to the compromises and sacrifice required of ballet dancers––especially female ballet dancers (male dancers, because of their comparative rarity, have a very different experience). And there are moments of critical observation in Wiseman's La Danse like the one where a woman we've seen as an administrative assistant takes her lunch break, walks into an empty studio, strips down to a leotard, tights and legwarmers, and starts slowly running through barre exercises with practiced precision. It's never stated, but we can tell that this woman danced with the company, and has been kept on after she was considered too old to dance. Typical of Wiseman, there is no commentary that accompanies this scene––but we are introduced to a critical question the film will touch on again in several places: what happens to these dancers when they can no longer perform? The real answers to that question are often frustrating and sad, and Wiseman doesn't go out of his way to illuminate this––but it is reflected in the tone of that scene with the assistant at the barre.

I do not feel that level of critical savvy in The Company, and I don't feel as if the film has any emotional reality behind it––and I do need that, if not realism. Certainly The Red Shoes has no sense of realism; but it has an emotional reality that is true to its subject––it captures the spirit of dance, the good along with the ill––and I don't see Altman capturing any of that. The film reads as insincere to me as would a musical about the charmed life of workers in a nuclear power plant, or a ribald, Tom Jones–style sex comedy about homeless people––in each case, the absence of any critical filter means that the emotional backdrop the film purports to explore is ersatz from the get-go, and that definitely hits me differently than magical realism or fairy tale does. I think ultimately Altman was right; he didn't get it, and he was the wrong person to make the movie. Even as a fantasy it doesn't play well for me. But I do agree it's impossible to spoil the film: it just plays out, without character challenges or issues. The part I ended up putting in spoiler tags happens literally less than a minute from the ending credits, and it changes absolutely nothing (another way in which I feel the emotional reality of the scenario is being cheated). I guess if you haven't seen the film, such an event would sound like spoilers. Sorry, I guess; I think the film is interesting as a telling misstep for Altman, and an interesting critical measure against other ballet movies, but I don't feel like the movie is ultimately worth it.

[Ribs]

There have been interesting conversations about Kino’s process for these 4K titles on Blu-ray’s forums, where they’ve revealed they’ve passed on getting UHD rights for both Double Indemnity and To Kill a Mockingbird because they don’t have the sales potential of Touch of Evil. They reiterate that while they *could* release Marty or Irma La Douce or Thoroughly Modern Millie in UHD per their existing agreements they don’t think it’ll be worth it. They were interested in doing a double UHD release for both Cape Fears but another label has acquired the US rights to those (which isn’t Arrow, per Fran Simeoni’s Twitter, so seems likely to be at Criterion). Doesn’t sound like they have any plans for any other 4K releases remotely as old as Touch of Evil in the near term.