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An icon of the Hong Kong New Wave and mentor to Wong Kar-wai, Patrick Tam worked with icons including Tony Leung (In the Mood for Love), Leslie Cheung (Days of Being Wild), Kenny Bee (Armour of God) and others in these two inimitable classics. In Nomad two couples, equal parts rich and working class, bond and experience the frolics of youth. The arrival of a Red Army deserter brings violence and disruption prompting incredible plot twists and inspired set-pieces.

My Heart is That Eternal Rose finds Tam in the more familiar Heroic Bloodshed genre. A young couple are torn apart by a botched Triad job that forces Rick to relocate to the Philippines and Lap to become a gangster’s moll. Six years later they meet again but their reunion only reignites the danger that drove them apart.

Stunningly shot by David Chung (Once Upon a Time in China) and Christopher Doyle (Chungking Express) both films are newly restored and made available on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK.

LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES

4K restoration of the Nomad director’s cut, 2K restoration of My Heart is That Eternal Rose, UK premieres on Blu-ray presented on two discs
Interview with critic Tony Rayns on Nomad (2024)
Interview with assistant director Stanley Kwan on Nomad (2024)
Interview with Nomad producer Dennis Yu (2024)
A visual essay on Patrick Tam and the Hong Kong New Wave by author David Desser (2024)
Audio commentary on My Heart is That Eternal Rose by Frank Djeng (2024)
Interview with producer John Sham (2019)
Two episodes of C.I.D. directed by Tam (1976, 49 mins each)
Trailer
Newly improved English subtitle translations by Dylan Cheung
Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow
Limited edition booklet featuring an archival career-spanning interview with Patrick Tam by Arnaud Lanuque and a new essay by Kambole Campbell
Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings

This looks cool. Can't remember what I've heard about this director's cut of Nomad? Is it some travesty, or is it pretty okay? If Radiance can improve on CN's bluray of My Heart is That Eternal Rose, I'll be pleased (pretty sure they can). Maybe there's hope that Final Victory will get a genuine hi-def bluray one day.

This is a bit of an irritating release. Don't get me wrong, this looks to be a great release but I'm just annoyed that it's a double-pack since I already picked up the Kani release of My Heart is that Eternal Rose and I don't feel like owning two copies of it.

Also surprised that the theatrical cut of Nomad isn't included on here.

They usually split up the boxsets for the "standard release" though, don't they? Shouldn't take long.

Not that I'll be waiting, personally. Looks great.

feihong wrote: Wed Nov 06, 2024 11:56 am Can't remember what I've heard about this director's cut of Nomad? Is it some travesty, or is it pretty okay?

French-language info about censorship and restoration:
https://carlottafilms.com/wp-content/up ... AD-DEF.pdf

Maltic wrote: Wed Nov 06, 2024 12:15 pm They usually split up the boxsets for the "standard release" though, don't they? Shouldn't take long.

Not that I'll be waiting, personally. Looks great.

Except this isn't a boxset release and is being released in a single scanovo case, and the listing on the website makes no mention of the titles being split up for the standard release.

Haven't seen the Director's cut of Nomad (tho' I have seen the deleted scenes on the DVD, which I assume'll be what's added back). Hope the extras go into the film's troubled production, including what parts of the film were taken away from Tam.

Incredible to finally get Nomad out on bluray. Hopefully this releases raises Tam's stock more. He's a real overlooked auteur.

Tony Rayns is usually good about talking about troubled productions so I have faith he'll cover that ground pretty well in his interview. very glad I held off on the Kani release, this seems to improve on it in every way. Frank Djeng is my new favorite "hangout" commentator so I'm pretty pleased to see him on My Heart is That Eternal Rose. and also more David Desser! his A Moment of Romance essay is one of the best Radiance extras so far

Stanley Kwan being interviewed is such a massive tease for those of us hoping for Center Stage. hopefully!

yoloswegmaster wrote: Wed Nov 06, 2024 12:00 pm This is a bit of an irritating release. Don't get me wrong, this looks to be a great release but I'm just annoyed that it's a double-pack since I already picked up the Kani release of My Heart is that Eternal Rose and I don't feel like owning two copies of it.

Also surprised that the theatrical cut of Nomad isn't included on here.

I think Kani might release Nomad so I’d hold on for a bit.

you can probably flip your slipcover copy of Eternal Rose and pick up this double bill for cheaper, and it seems it'll be a better value overall

I do buy a lot of Kani releases for the record, not advocating against supporting them. but this does look like an excellent release for Radiance. they pulled out all the stops here

I'm not sure Radiance will be able to do much about that, but I received the French BD of Nomad and wow, what a mixed bag (mostly not very good though). A good chunk of the restoration is obviously manipulated artificially, with force-field grain, degraining, sharpening, and in at least a scene at 68 min 30 where the grain is there (and there's plenty of it) but is so much frozen in place that characters seem to move within it for at least 30 frames, before the grain gets nuked by DNR. There are also shots where the picture seems to be fighting filtered grain and stains and it kind of breaks the picture. Some shots are simply DNRed to oblivion, to the point the BD looks like a 720p YouTube video. And then, in the middle of all this, only a handful of shots actually look pretty good.
The restoration has been performed in 4K from the 35mm OCN by iST (associate of Mei Ah).

What did you think of the movie itself? Was it the so-called director's cut?

tenia wrote: Mon Dec 02, 2024 7:14 pm I'm not sure Radiance will be able to do much about that, but I received the French BD of Nomad and wow, what a mixed bag (mostly not very good though). A good chunk of the restoration is obviously manipulated artificially, with force-field grain, degraining, sharpening, and in at least a scene at 68 min 30 where the grain is there (and there's plenty of it) but is so much frozen in place that characters seem to move within it for at least 30 frames, before the grain gets nuked by DNR. There are also shots where the picture seems to be fighting filtered grain and stains and it kind of breaks the picture. Some shots are simply DNRed to oblivion, to the point the BD looks like a 720p YouTube video. And then, in the middle of all this, only a handful of shots actually look pretty good.
The restoration has been performed in 4K from the 35mm OCN by iST (associate of Mei Ah).

Ugh, yet another horrendous Asian DigiSmear garbage. Do you know by any chance if the restoration was supervised by Patrick Tam or Stanley Kwan? The latter’s four films that were restored under his supervision / approval all look exactly like you described. It’s bitterly ironic that these poor restorations have gotten FiM encodes.

Welp, this is getting depressing quickly. On the other hand, there hasn't been any version of Nomad available in forever––and personally, I didn't buy the Mei Ah dvd back in the day, because I hadn't seen the film back when that disc was still being sold. So I guess there's still a reason to look forward to the Radiance release, even though it sounds like there's scant hope of this looking like anything less than a disaster.

I saw the DVD version by Mei Ah that was released many years ago and it looked terrible so I’m excited for this release. Despite the poor video quality of the DVD, I really enjoyed Nomad and I’m looking forward to a rewatch.

Mr Sausage wrote:What did you think of the movie itself? Was it the so-called director's cut?

I only had a visual look at it before launching BD Info, as I received it yesterday, and have yet to watch it as a movie.
However, it is indeed conform to the description by Carlotta provided earlier, and in particular contains the bus scene, and is advertised as the "director's cut" (which I suppose should actually just be called "uncensored", by the reading of it).

There is no mention about who supervised it, but maybe somewhere on the internet, a festival where it was screened mentions that ?

I'm in the middle of the Kwan Carlotta set : they all look much better than this, though Carlotta's presentation of Rouge looks surprisingly vastly inferior to Criterion's - it looks very dark, flat as if watching a HDR presentation without tonemapping and SDR downconversion, and Criterion's version retained way more grain. Lan Yu may be the closest looking to Nomad, but even still, it looks better.

tenia wrote: Tue Dec 03, 2024 7:10 am I'm in the middle of the Kwan Carlotta set : they all look much better than this, though Carlotta's presentation of Rouge looks surprisingly vastly inferior to Criterion's - it looks very dark, flat as if watching a HDR presentation without tonemapping and SDR downconversion, and Criterion's version retained way more grain. Lan Yu may be the closest looking to Nomad, but even still, it looks better.

I thought they all looked bad and particularly Lan Yu. I’ll definitely get Radiance’s release but I should probably stay away from Nomad

Criterion did additional restoration and grading for Rouge, which likely explains the difference. Maybe they got access to the master in an earlier stage before the more excessive degraining.

While it's a shame about the transfers, I do hope people seek out these movies and post their thoughts. Tam is an undersung director and one of the biggest discoveries for me in the last couple years. These movies are well worth everyone's time.

Oh absolutely, this is purely 2 technical cents and in no way a feedback about what the movie might be worth cinematographically.

As for the Kwans, Rouge and Center Stage seem to have gone through 2 restorations each, the later ones used by Carlotta and sadly the additionnal work hasn't gone in the right direction (though it does seem Center Stage is uncut).

This is sad.

I always wonder who's in the market for scrubbed versions of relatively "rare" films like these.

When I used to frequent Hong Kong-er and Taiwanese video stores in Alhambra and Monterey Park, you could tell there was simply a different set of market values, reflecting different viewing priorities in the Taiwanese, Hong Kong and Southeast Asian home video market––a preference for immediacy over quality. Not sure I've told the story of an elderly gentleman who saw me with the VHS of Once Upon a Time in China, took the tape out of my hands, put it back on the shelf, and led me to the new release section, where he handed me Once Upon a Time in China VI. I asked him if it was important to know the story in order to see this new one and he put OUATIC VI in my hands, saying: "This one is new. New is better." I waited until the guy left the shop to reclaim the tape I'd spent nearly an hour searching for.

The large and long-running market for VCDs in those regions speaks to that priority on the immediate sensation over, you know, any kind of quality (and there are still a few really great Hong Kong films, like It's Now or Never," whose last and latest home video release was a VCD). I guess I wouldn't be surprised if the restoration of Nomad was done with television broadcast or streaming in mind, using the movie's rareness and retro as appeal to the now––but without much priority on collectors' experience, and then if the resto is seen as grist for a mill of particular content, then a lot of corners might get cut.

I guess another way of saying that would be that most owners in the Hong Kong film market have never seemed too interested in preserving or future-proofing their film products, and there isn't the perception of any customer base that discriminates on the basis of quality. Some friends of mine who had lived in Taiwan were talking the other day about the Taiwanese movies that used to rip of Hong Kong blockbusters (e.g.:Hello Dracula, Killing in the Nude, A Heroic Fight). One of the things that came up was that Hong Kong film had a much larger production base in the 80s and 90s because of its perceived coming obsolescence––the idea that, once the handover happened, people wouldn't likely be able to capitalize on these films, and hence, there was a greater interest in maximizing movie production, in getting hits out the door before the party was over (Taiwan, with no necessary expiration date, seemed to invest much less in making their own film industry prosper). The result was a higher standard of movie production in Hong Kong, but also a dismissive attitude towards the quality of the movies that trickled down from the top. For now, it seems like the interest in restoring these films is the chance to recapitalize them in the television/streaming markets. But this is being done in a space of film production that has schooled itself and its viewers in productivity over quality. As for international rights, the Hong Kong film community has always looked at those as a tenuous extra. Their main export markets were always in Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and India, where the film viewing and home video priorities have been largely the same. I don't have any info about this restoration, but I could imagine it might be done in this sort of environment, so that the result wasn't being aimed at the export market, and so the priority was on creating viable content, rather than preserving anything of rare value.

The Asian market is notoriously difficult to work with from a preservation point of view, in part for the cultural reasons you're mentioning, but also because it's a younger market overall, and thus falls within 2 related issues : first, it's going through the early mistakes US and European markets made 3 decades ago; second, it doesn't have a film-sourced frame of mind like the Euro and US markets have, but instead is relating more to digital, with smartphones, digital HD screens, digital cameras, and so on. That's the look that right-holders are used to see everywhere around them, and what they suppose viewers are more easily expecting too.

This can create tensions when the older frame of mind is working with these newer markets, and right-holders end up twisting the lab's arms to get the movies graded and filtered like bonkers, and that's how Arrow end up having to go back and pretty much redo the Bruce Lee almost from step 1 (not that Euro/US markets are flawless either, but it's the exception rather than the norm, while there definitely is a higher occurence rate in Asia, particularly in China, HK and Taiwan).

feihong wrote: Wed Dec 04, 2024 11:22 pm When I used to frequent Hong Kong-er and Taiwanese video stores in Alhambra and Monterey Park, you could tell there was simply a different set of market values, reflecting different viewing priorities in the Taiwanese, Hong Kong and Southeast Asian home video market––a preference for immediacy over quality. Not sure I've told the story of an elderly gentleman who saw me with the VHS of Once Upon a Time in China, took the tape out of my hands, put it back on the shelf, and led me to the new release section, where he handed me Once Upon a Time in China VI. I asked him if it was important to know the story in order to see this new one and he put OUATIC VI in my hands, saying: "This one is new. New is better." I waited until the guy left the shop to reclaim the tape I'd spent nearly an hour searching for.

Is this an "Asian" thing or just a "normie" thing? I find it's pretty common for people to think of, say , a remake of or even a sequel to a film not as just another version of a story but as a superseding film, rendering the older one(s) irrelevant. Or simply to think of newer films as better. Indeed, I think this was and to some extent remains a default attitude in the entertainment industry (albeit one in which aesthetic preference follows commercial imperative) — one reason why, when a studio either bought the rights to or simply set out to make a new version of an old story, they would often withdraw the older films from circulation.

Sometimes when I'm teaching a film course I find a few students who say of whatever is the most recent film on the syllabus "It's amazing to see how far film has come!" (with the implication that the older films we've seen are invariably worse and, at best, "good for an old film"; keep in mind that for undergrads of the 2020s, anything before 2010 is an "old film"). Of course, I die inside a little bit each time this happens, but it's a nearly ubiquitous sentiment.

pistolwink wrote: Tue Dec 31, 2024 11:17 pm

feihong wrote: Wed Dec 04, 2024 11:22 pm When I used to frequent Hong Kong-er and Taiwanese video stores in Alhambra and Monterey Park, you could tell there was simply a different set of market values, reflecting different viewing priorities in the Taiwanese, Hong Kong and Southeast Asian home video market––a preference for immediacy over quality. Not sure I've told the story of an elderly gentleman who saw me with the VHS of Once Upon a Time in China, took the tape out of my hands, put it back on the shelf, and led me to the new release section, where he handed me Once Upon a Time in China VI. I asked him if it was important to know the story in order to see this new one and he put OUATIC VI in my hands, saying: "This one is new. New is better." I waited until the guy left the shop to reclaim the tape I'd spent nearly an hour searching for.

Is this an "Asian" thing or just a "normie" thing? I find it's pretty common for people to think of, say , a remake of or even a sequel to a film not as just another version of a story but as a superseding film, rendering the older one(s) irrelevant. Or simply to think of newer films as better. Indeed, I think this was and to some extent remains a default attitude in the entertainment industry (albeit one in which aesthetic preference follows commercial imperative) — one reason why, when a studio either bought the rights to or simply set out to make a new version of an old story, they would often withdraw the older films from circulation.

Sometimes when I'm teaching a film course I find a few students who say of whatever is the most recent film on the syllabus "It's amazing to see how far film has come!" (with the implication that the older films we've seen are invariably worse and, at best, "good for an old film"; keep in mind that for undergrads of the 2020s, anything before 2010 is an "old film"). Of course, I die inside a little bit each time this happens, but it's a nearly ubiquitous sentiment.

I see what you mean, but I wonder if that reflects attitudes towards media in the west catching up to attitudes towards media that have been imported from Hong Kong and Taiwan, say? What happened in my recollection took place back in 1997, and the attitude that was expressed to me surprised me in the way it would have if someone at my local Blockbuster Video wanted to rent Back to the Future Part III before seeing either of the first two films. I feel like back then there was a sort of perceived cannon of films that were understood to have value that surpassed most new releases. I remember around the same time in Blockbuster Video they would run an in-store commercial where they asked a group of commercial actors what their favorite movie was (presuming Blockbuster had it in stock at the time). The one that really threw me was a 20-something-year-old man claiming his favorite movie was "Dr. Zhivago––in the Ice Caves!" For years that made me wonder if there was some kind of action sequel to Dr. Zhivago I just hadn't located yet on the shelves. At the time of the commercial Blockbuster wanted all the 20-something-year-olds in the store to rent a 32-year-old film, and it was understood to have some lasting value––though its' maybe a little ironic how the value of that particular film has depreciated for me since seeing that commercial, and subsequently the film.

When I used to rent Hong Kong movie it was primarily from a video store in Alhambra, California, called ES: Entertainment Superstore. The owner introduced the place to me, pointing out a few shelves. "Here's Jackie," he said, pointing to a couple of rows of Jackie Chan films. "Here's Chow Yun-Fat. Here's Andy (he meant Andy Lau), Stephen Chow...Here's the new releases..." here he gestured to a breakout shelf in the middle of the store, and then he spun around and gestured to the row after row of double-stacked VHS tapes. "And here's the rest of the store." Nothing but the movies of the big stars and the new releases were organized. To find movies I had to sift through row after row, taking out each tape, or set of tapes (any hit movie would be split over two VHS tapes to maximize profits––even though almost all Hong Kong films in that era were roughly 90 minutes, or edited down to that length for home video), and finding the English-language title somewhere on the box––or contextual clues to what movie I was looking at. The tapes in the front row were not the same films as the tapes behind them in the back row. The place was huge, and I would spend hours in there...and I was the only person I ever saw renting anything from that backlog of earlier movies. Whereas in Blockbuster people used to pick up a lot of movies that were perceived to be perennial, like Halloween, or Kramer vs. Kramer, or Dr. Zhivago in the Ice Caves, apparently, or Grease, or My Dinner with Andre, or Carrie, or what have you. There was definitely a palpably different attitude––at least at that time––in the video stores renting Hong Kong movies. And in terms of preservation––I feel like I ought to point out––there wasn't a single movie available to rent that had come out before about 1983. The Shaw Bros. catalog was in vaults somewhere and hadn't been seen for years, there were no pictures from Cathay or pre-80s Golden Harvest, no King Hu or Li Han Hsiang films. Because in that media culture at that time there seemed to be little appetite for those older films. In the aughts this changed considerably, because cable and satellite TV entrepreneurs needed back-catalogs of content, and––probably at the same time as western film viewers began thinking of films as content, classic movies re-entered the Chinese-language market as a form of nostalgia content.

In the aughts, when I worked briefly programming film screenings of Asian movies in Los Angeles, we encountered a similar sense of relative disposability in the Hong Kong film market. Most Hong Kong movies we licensed through Tai Seng. They would charge almost nothing for screening permissions––I think it was something like a $75 flat rate per screening, something in that ballpark; they just wanted us to pick up the prints from their office in San Francisco. South Korean companies would often pay out of pocket to ship their films to us for one-off screenings. And Japanese companies would ask hundreds of dollars for a single screening. Then the Hollywood remake of The Ring became a huge hit. Japanese companies raised their single-screening price to thousands for dollars. All the South Korean companies immediately stopped taking our calls. And the Hong Kong films remained the same price, same deal as before. The other companies suddenly perceived a much higher value they could generate from keeping these films off the market and available for remakes; the Hong Kong movie companies really did not care, did not make any adjustment (there were a few exceptions; the principal one I can think of was Johnnie To's The Mission, which got optioned for a remake by Robert De Niro and was taken completely off the market for years as a result). By and large they seemed to regard their past product as worth very little. And I'd say that the long-running popularity of the VCD home video format in Hong Kong and Taiwan––an MPEG-1-encoded compact disc that played crunchy, bleary little home video images––spoke somewhat to a comparative disinterest in the image and sound quality of the home video experience––at a time when Hollywood movies were being released on DVD with quality standards which seemed to be continuously advanced––and being advertised as such (things like Superbit DVDs never caught on in Hong Kong).

This reminiscence goes a bit all over the place, but to me there was significant contextual clues all over the place that the Hong Kong film companies and the viewing public had a palpably different attitude towards the disposability of a film––viewing it as a product with an expiration date. That might have become the case in western media as well, but I think culture in the west has arrived at that place, rather than it always having been there.

In their booklet Radiance address the DNR applied to Nomad's restoration and that they've tried to minimise it a much as was possible. I did notice some digital artefacts but nothing distracted me too much from the film itself which I quite enjoyed. Again in the booklet, Tam says in an interview from the early Aughts that he'd have preferred for the closing scene to have taken place on the boat but got overruled by the producers. I think feihong or MrS addressed that in the HK cinema thread. Looking forward to revisiting My Heart Is That Eternal Rose in the morning.