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matrixschmatrix wrote:

Gregory wrote:3.5 video quality ratings are so omnipresent.

Why were elementary school kids taking a quiz about jazz musicians

Just learned that the "Adrian Belew" at the top of the paper isn't just a reference to the guitarist, but is the name of a very minor character, a fellow student of Bart's. What does it say after "Lone Rhino (Belew's first album) is a..."

Zappa's also namechecked in the third-from-right paper.

Of course, Matt Groening's a big Zappa fan and Belew played with him.

Bummer about Barton Fink. I wonder why a company like Kino was so intent on licensing and releasing the film if they weren't even going to do a new restoration.

mfunk9786 wrote:Bummer about Barton Fink. I wonder why a company like Kino was so intent on licensing and releasing the film if they weren't even going to do a new restoration.

Because Kino are all about that quick cash grab. Dumping existing transfers on a disc and calling it a day.

Probably beating a dead horse here but remember when they released Spies, Woman in the Moon and Diary of a Lost Girl in the wrong aspect ratio then refused to acknowledge the error and literally told people to fuck off via Mister Lime?

That's just Kino for you. It's pretty depressing that they went out of their way to grab The Good, the Bad and the Ugly only to mishandle the color timing, get the theatrical edit wrong and botch the transfers for most of the supplements.

The second they announced Barton Fink as a Kino release I lost all hope.

Noiradelic wrote:

matrixschmatrix wrote:

Gregory wrote:3.5 video quality ratings are so omnipresent.

Why were elementary school kids taking a quiz about jazz musicians

Just learned that the "Adrian Belew" at the top of the paper isn't just a reference to the guitarist, but is the name of a very minor character, a fellow student of Bart's. What does it say after "Lone Rhino (Belew's first album) is a..."

Zappa's also namechecked in the third-from-right paper.

Of course, Matt Groening's a big Zappa fan and Belew played with him.

The internet exhaustively backs you up

WTF is "film-like heaviness" exactly? This is noted approvingly in Beaver reviews of TGTBATU, Duel in the Sun, Who Is Harry Kellerman..., A Taste of Honey, Finding Forrester, A.I., Day of the Outlaw, 99 River Street, and the very unimpressive WAC DVD of Run of the Arrow.

WTF is "film-like heaviness" exactly?

Hmm...I think I get that feeling after too many hits. YMMV.

FrauBlucher wrote:Beaver loves The Good the Bad and the Ugly bluray

Yeah, he spent all day watching the amazing extras and yet he didn't notice that they were stuttery or ran at half the frame rate?

No mention of the 2014 disc? Nothing about the theatrical cut not being the actual theatrical cut?

Either this is amateur hour or his review was bought and paid for...

We're talking about a numpty who keeps labelling 1.75:1 transfers of late 60s Euro films as "bastardized"

This release is just so...

Has anyone mentioned the loss of detail the picture has suffered from, presumably from their digitally fiddling with the image. Compare the sky in the below screendump. Where the heck did it go??

Gregory wrote:WTF is "film-like heaviness" exactly?

Maybe "heaviness" is the new word for "thickness" or "tightness" which, in Beaverspeak, also seem to be associated with claims of a cinematic appearance. We really do need a glossary.

jegharfangetmigenmyg wrote:This release is just so...

Has anyone mentioned the loss of detail the picture has suffered from, presumably from their digitally fiddling with the image. Compare the sky in the below screendump. Where the heck did it go??

Clearly it wasn't in the theatrical version so Kino had to blur the picture. I mean it's patently obvious to anyone that this drab, awful washed out look is exactly what Leone intended.

Spoiler

Holy shit it's awful.

Has anybody mentioned Blu-ray's pan of the Prizzi's Honor transfer?

Glad I decided to pass on their sale. With few exceptions, they're consistently disappointing.

Mister Lime wrote:In hindsight, we would've not picked up The Big Country. The master is screwed up, had a 4 1/2 rating on Blu-ray.com, I guess the reviewer didn't notice the images were stretched. We now have to go back a remaster the three hour movie, additional costs we did not expect when we acquired it. Unfortunately, we've created too many extras to drop it.

I don't understand this comment, I thought the whole selling point behind KL's release was that it was going to fix the image, now they're bitching about the costs of their only reason for releasing it?

They also cancelled Valmont cause they couldn't get the new 4k master and only had access to the older MGM one.

Mister Lime wrote:(...) we don't need the headache - I could see all the negative posts by trolls and nut jobs... how we cut corners and don't care about the customer and so on. It was an executive decision, maybe another label will pick it up and if they do, they'll know where to come to get the Michael Hausman interview, thank god Milos Forman turned us down.

Pathé wanted a bunch or arms and legs for it. Region A releases already in the market, now I'm really happy we dropped it.

Trolls and nut jobs... This guy reminds me of Donald Trump.

Perhaps someone should let Mister Lime know that too much transparency is not a good thing for any business. He's approaching Code Red Guy levels

It's almost like he's surprised that people expect these discs to be good. I get the impression he'd rather just slap whatever existing master they have on a cheap BR and overprice it, but those damn pesky kids keep foiling him by pointing out how shitty that is.

Poor baby. Go work at Mill Creek, why don't ya?

Mister Lime wrote:trolls and nut jobs

Choo Choo!! the Kino Lorber Express has just left the station.

domino harvey wrote:

Mister Lime wrote:In hindsight, we would've not picked up The Big Country. The master is screwed up, had a 4 1/2 rating on Blu-ray.com, I guess the reviewer didn't notice the images were stretched. We now have to go back a remaster the three hour movie, additional costs we did not expect when we acquired it. Unfortunately, we've created too many extras to drop it.

I don't understand this comment, I thought the whole selling point behind KL's release was that it was going to fix the image, now they're bitching about the costs of their only reason for releasing it?

How expensive can it be to fix anyway? The master simply needs a tiny stretch applied to bring it from 2.35:1 to 2.25:1 and the job's done. I don't know how much work that involves but it takes 10 seconds of changing settings in MPC using the current disc. Presumably it would take a short amount of time to adjust the master and then carry out authoring as Kino would have planned anyway?

Or are Kino that misinformed they're under the impression the master is unusable and they need to go back and create their own?

domino harvey wrote:Perhaps someone should let Mister Lime know that too much transparency is not a good thing for any business. He's approaching Code Red Guy levels

I got banned for life from blu-ray.com for offering no more than politely expressed, constructive and thoroughly evidence-backed criticism of their factually flawed reviews, and yet MisterLime seems to get carte blanche to write posts that would get him banned from here, a far more grown-up forum when it comes to censorship.

Don't get me wrong: I genuinely don't care, and even when I wasn't banned I'd often take breaks of several months - but there really does seem to be a completely absurd inconsistency at play there, and it would be curious to see them justify it.

domino harvey wrote:

Mister Lime wrote:In hindsight, we would've not picked up The Big Country. The master is screwed up, had a 4 1/2 rating on Blu-ray.com, I guess the reviewer didn't notice the images were stretched. We now have to go back a remaster the three hour movie, additional costs we did not expect when we acquired it. Unfortunately, we've created too many extras to drop it.

I don't understand this comment, I thought the whole selling point behind KL's release was that it was going to fix the image, now they're bitching about the costs of their only reason for releasing it?

He makes it sound like they bought the master based on the Blu-ray.com review without looking at it properly...

New restoration of Woman in the Window coming to Kino!

I'm still waiting for a release date of Covered Wagon and Old Ironsides, but this is good news.

Ugh, the Good/Bad/Ugly BD is a bigger disappointment than I was prepped for. I think the colours are "better" but those black levels are awful.

Also, I rewatched Gorky Park for the first time in well over a decade. I remember liking it but was underwhelmed this time. Still works as a snap shot of a certain time (and it's actually quite gorier than I remember, though probably nothing compared to TV crime shows of today).

Couple of questions:

1.) I'm trying to remember how rotary phones work but sticking the pencil in the dial when it's in mid-dial, would that have the same effect as leaving it off the hook?

2.) I was actually a bit confused by the murders and the motivation this time around:

Spoiler

Why did Lee Marvin kill the kids? Was it to avoid taking the Russians back to the States with him? Or because of issues with the KGB (i believe they were detained at one point) and them discovering he was smuggling the animals? And the American kid was just collateral damage? I get the whole smuggling angle but even in that context the murders made no sense and I feel like I've been missing a plot point all this time.