Imprint

[dwk]

The Parallax View
Outrage
The Naked Jungle
The Country Girl
House Of Cards
Lady In A Cage
Kitten With A Whip
Last Train From Gun Hill

[swo17]

Haven't seen most of these but I'll gladly pick up at least Outrage, which was missing from Kino's Lupino set

[L.A.]

The Naked Jungle had ants. I saw the old Paramount DVD a long time ago but remember being quite good. I will take it for another viewing sure. Plus it has some nice extras too.

[Ribs]

Random aside but the Silver Screams Cinema set has a bonus film, The Lady and the Monster, that appears to be at least an HD master (more unrestored then the other films in the set which aren't exactly lookers to begin with). Kind of odd that it was something that got swept under the rug but also I feel this entire set has kind of quietly been the exact type of the thing Imprint should release considering their wider access to the deeper Paramount catalog no one else is able to match in quantity.

[swo17]

Though I think we all know what to expect from Imprint; probably not the absolute best presentation of a title if it's had other recent releases

Are there examples you can name where the Imprint release has an inferior presentation to a competing release? I'm struggling to think of any. I think for War of the Worlds, the PQ was about the same as the Criterion and there were unique extras on each making them both potentially worth owning. Like Indicator, there have been some releases with lackluster transfers, but I think in each of these cases, they're still your best/only option

[Ribs]

I would say, toe to toe, Imprint’s encoding does not ever seem to rise above “fine,” which, as I’ve said, is fine for their many releases that are not likely to be matched by an equivalent edition anytime soon! I am not an armchair expert who believes in complaining about encodes and grading except for the egregious examples where discs have been jammed full of content for no reason and it drags the entire release down with it (the two Dekalogs the best example of the difference an encode makes, regardless of the frame rate issue that was out of ant US release’s hands), but I have definitely noticed these releases just don’t quite look at the same level as many of their fellow labels. Whereas Indicator is uniformly and totally excellent and often makes dated, decade-plus old transfers look better then newer ones for other films. I think it seems extremely likely in the case of that set that if individual releases of some of the titles from these same sources were to appear it would look better from many other labels.

And the specific example you did cite did have that weird error in the restoration where Mars did not appear Red which, while it would be insane to view as make-or-break on which to get, is not nothing. I will concede that there hasn’t been some extremely screwed up release that another label easily superseded immediately, but I still don’t really think there have been any releases that really seemed to move the needle in terms of being top of the line technically and not just for the content being released.

[swo17]

That's fair

[dwk]

Though I think we all know what to expect from Imprint; probably not the absolute best presentation of a title if it's had other recent releases

Are there examples you can name where the Imprint release has an inferior presentation to a competing release? I'm struggling to think of any. I think for War of the Worlds, the PQ was about the same as the Criterion and there were unique extras on each making them both potentially worth owning. Like Indicator, there have been some releases with lackluster transfers, but I think in each of these cases, they're still your best/only option

The Dead Zone. The Scream Factory release was from a new 4K scan, while the Imprint disc used the older Paramount master.

[swo17]

I asked Imprint's customer service if they could officially confirm The Straight Story's commentary making it to final product (citing the concern over The Apostle as an example), and got the following affirmative response:

I can confirm Peter Tonguette's commentary will definitively be on The Straight Story blu ray

Thanks

Imprint Films

Two things I learned from this Norm Macdonald clip but not Tonguette's commentary:

1. The scene late in the film where two brothers fix Farnsworth's tractor? Those are Chris Farley's brothers, and apparently if he hadn't died he was slated to appear with them!
2. Richard Farnsworth is actually the villain of the film!

[therewillbeblus]

Nice find! I still haven’t listened to the Tonguette commentary besides sampling it- any good?

[swo17]

Not my favorite, honestly. He references IMDb a lot, spends the first 20 minutes going on about how weird it is that Lynch made a Disney film, and goes on random tangents about Roger Ebert and others. In fact, during the Farley scene, he actually happens to mention Adam Sandler for another reason without acknowledging who's right there on the screen!

[therewillbeblus]

That’s a shame, considering this may be the one and only opportunity for a Lynch commentary, you’d hope someone passionate about the format would go all out

[dwk]

I'm not familiar with Tonguette's commentaries, if he has any other tracks, but maybe he half-assed it under the assumption that Lynch would find out about it and have it dropped.

[therewillbeblus]

I believe he has other tracks with Imprint, though I haven't listened to them, but one would hope that someone commissioned to do a commentary in general, let alone a singular precious opportunity, wouldn't put in all that research and constructive effort with deliberate half-measures!

[dwk]

You'd hope so, but I've seen some comments on the Classic Horror board about one of the commentaries in Arrow's recent Cold War Creatures box set that makes it sound like the person doing the commentary knew nothing about the film they were hired to provide a commentary for.

[beamish14]

I'm not familiar with Tonguette's commentaries, if he has any other tracks, but maybe he half-assed it under the assumption that Lynch would find out about it and have it dropped.

Tonguette's commentary on Kino's disc of James Bridges' September 30, 1955 is very solid, which is unsurprising given that he's written the only book-length analysis of that long underappreciated filmmaker.

[swo17]

That reminds me, he also wrote a book about Bogdanovich so he spends a few minutes on that, comparing Blue Velvet, Fire Walk with Me, and Lost Highway to Targets and Last Picture Show, and then concluding that Straight Story is Lynch's What's Up, Doc?, Daisy Miller, and At Long Last Love all rolled into one. Basically, he reads a lot into MPAA ratings

[Ribs]

Imprint has put up their teaser image for the month ahead of announcements later today. All I can spot is the middle one being Return of the Pink Panther (and proud of myself for remembering off hand which it was!)

[fiendishthingy]

The second is The Odd Couple and the fifth is The Out-of-Towners.

[cdnchris]

The Odd Couple looks thicker. Is it possible it could contain the sequel as well? How horrible would that be??

[Pavel]

Turns out the other two are a Jerry Lewis at Columbia set (featuring The Big Mouth and Hook, Line and Sinker) and The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. And The Odd Couple does indeed contain the sequel, as well as some of the TV show

[swo17]

And The Odd Couple does indeed contain the sequel, as well as some of the TV show

More specifically, a whole extra disc containing "ten classic episodes." Looking forward to this extra: "Audio commentary by __________ on ‘The Odd Couple II”"

Re: the Lewis set, I won't miss Don't Raise the Bridge, Lower the River but where's Three on a Couch? Also, just like Chabrol, the bulk of his best work remains elusive on Blu-ray.

Finally, it looks like the "Silver Screams Cinema" set has recently sold out

[therewillbeblus]

Re: the Lewis set, I won't miss Don't Raise the Bridge, Lower the River but where's Three on a Couch? Also, just like Chabrol, the bulk of his best work remains elusive on Blu-ray.

Three on a Couch is a glaring omission- a painfully funny look at psychotherapy and also teetering towards a tone that will puzzle some Lewis fans, depending on whether or not they think he's playing any of the drama straight. I haven't seen Hook, Line & Sinker, but The Big Mouth was forgettable (in that I remember nothing about it despite having watched it less than five months ago)

[swo17]

I haven't seen any of these since I wrote them up here almost nine years ago, but here were my brief reviews at the time:

Three on a Couch may also be ever so slightly misogynistic, but fares much better (than Boeing Boeing). The film takes a tad too long to set up its somewhat obvious premise (husband of psychiatrist must find love for three of wife's patients so that she can go away with him to Europe) but takes an inspired turn when Lewis' character decides to unnecessarily complicate matters by playing every single role in his hairbrained scheme himself. The Big Mouth has its moments but you can start to sense that Lewis is running on fumes at this point (e.g. needing to come up with a disguise, he simply reprises his Julius Kelp character from The Nutty Professor). Also, for some reason, the actual Colonel Sanders is in this movie. The greatest flaw of Don't Raise the Bridge, Lower the River is that it forgets that it stars Jerry Lewis, and tries to mine laughs instead from its ridiculous, twisty plot, leaving Lewis with little to do besides get all the ethnic accents out of his system. There is a nice moment though where Lewis is playing chess with himself. True to its name, Hook, Line and Sinker starts off fairly strong as a sitcom-style depiction of life for a suburban husband and father, veers into questionable male wish fulfillment territory, and then cleverly turns this around as a commentary on the naivety of Lewis' man-child character. Not necessarily essential, but a standout among the later films, and a nice note to end the decade on.

[yoloswegmaster]

Is there a reason why we have never seen proper Blu releases for 'The Bellboy' or 'The Ladies Man'?