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Post-Christmas sales

4:07 PM / Blu-ray / 3 Comments

Five for £30 at HMV...

Released on Wednesday...

11:15 AM / Blu-ray / 10 Comments

Shall I be your guinea pig?

Arrow's upcoming release of ZOMBIE

11:46 AM / Blu-ray / 29 Comments

Well, colour me impressed: it appears that, for its upcoming UK BD release of Lucio Fulci's ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS (a.k.a. ZOMBIE, a.k.a. ZOMBI 2), Arrow Video has commissioned a brand new transfer from the original negative. The results can be seen at Blu-ray.com, and they blow last year's release by Blue Underground, a vacuum tube transfer courtesy of the notorious LVR, out of the water. The Blu-ray.com captures look strikingly good (you can compare them to Blue Underground and LVR's effort here), and thanks to them, a disc I wasn't planning on picking up has now shot to the top of my wish list.

As per the Blu-ray.com review, here's Arrow's blurb about the new transfer:

Zombie Flesh Eaters has been [missing word here - I'm guessing "transferred"] exclusively by Arrow for this release, with all work personally overseen by Restoration Supervisor James White at Deluxe Soho, London.

The film was sourced from the original Techniscope 2-perf 35mm negative made available by Variety Communications, Italy. The pictures was scanned at 2K resolution and fully graded on a Nicoda Film Master at Deluxe Soho, London. Restoration work was completed in 1080Psf HD resolution using a combination of software tools and techniques. Thousands of instances of dirt, scratches and debris were carefully removed frame by frame. Damaged or missing frames were repaired, and density and stability issues were significantly improved. Throughout the process, care was taken to ensure that the film's original details and grain structure remained unaffected by digital processing. Although every effort has been made to present Zombie Flesh Eaters at the highest quality possible, some minor picture issues remain, in keeping with the condition of the original materials.

Both the original English and Italian mono soundtracks were restored, with audio issues such as bumps, clicks or dropouts removed or repaired. Audio sync to picture remains noticeably loose at times, in keeping with the nature of the film's production.

Lastly, working from the original 2-perf negative has allowed for access to the entire exposed image area of the film, so we have chosen to retain as much of the original frame are possible for this restoration."

Restoration supervisor: James White.
Audio mastering: Gary Sanders/Deluxe 142.

The downside? It's locked to Region B. This is unusual for Arrow Video, so I'm assuming it's part of their licensing agreement.

Arrow have clearly pushed the boat out here - I suspect most of us (not unreasonably) assumed they would simply license the existing LVR transfer - so I think it's only reasonable that fans of Italian cult cinema acknowledge their effort by picking up a copy of this release, sending a message that yes, we know a good quality release when we see it and spend our money accordingly. It's only £11 on Amazon UK - so if you're a fan of these films and can play Region B discs, get cracking!

PS. You'll need to be logged into a Blu-ray.com account to see their captures at full resolution.

Comparison: Suspiria

10:53 PM / Blu-ray / 11 Comments

I apologise for the length of time it has taken for this comparison to see the light of day, and I apologise in advance for the length of the comparison. It's by far the largest I've ever done, but SUSPIRIA remains one of my favourite films, and its history on BD has been a tortuous one to say the least, so I felt it was worth the effort to get it right. I've never taken this many captures for a single BD Impressions piece, let alone a comparison with four different releases placed under the microscope. Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster for ImageShack!

Anyway, all BD releases of SUSPIRIA that I know of are derived from a 2007 high definition scan of the original camera negative, transferred at Technicolor in Rome as a joint Italian/French venture. Neither of the two releases I already owned - the Italian release by CDE and the UK release by Nouveaux Pictures - particularly impressed me. However, with the addition of another release to the roster - a French disc by Wild Side, who did excellent work on TENEBRAE a couple of years back, I've decided to start with a blank slate and reappraise all three of these releases. As a point of comparison, I've also included captures from the highly praised 2001 US DVD release by Anchor Bay, upscaled to 1920x1080.

Take a look at the captures below and then scroll down (and down, and down) for the commentary.

[Continue reading...]

Comparison: Casino Royale

12:05 PM / Blu-ray / 13 Comments

One of the more curious aspects of the recently released BOND 50 box set is the inclusion of yet another version of CASINO ROYALE. Daniel Craig's first outing as 007 has had a rough history, being censored in three different territories - North America, the UK and Germany - all in different ways, with the North American cut being by far the most heavily compromised.

You can read about the respective versions here:

• North America
• UK
• Germany

(Note that a handful of other territories, including South Korea, got the US cut because the same disc was released there.)

In the UK, the cuts were inflicted because distributor Sony Pictures wanted a 12 rating, and the BBFC deemed certain elements of the scene in which Bond is tortured to be overtly sexualised (which, if you ask me, raises all sort of questions about how the censors get their jollies). The good news for UK customers is that, with CASINO ROYALE having changed hands to 20th Century Fox, the film has been resubmitted and bumped up to an uncut 15. The logic, I would assume, is that the dark and bloody LICENCE TO KILL already makes the BOND 50 set an overall 15, so there would have been no reason not to throw in a version of CASINO ROYALE that had the same rating. (Which deserves a round of applause, by the way: a lot of distributors probably wouldn't have bothered.) It's worth pointing out that Fox have also released the new 15 version separately, and for a very reasonable price too. (Apart from the 15 logo, you can identify it by the gold rather than white 007 logo in the title on the front cover.)

The opportunity to watch the film in its full, intended form is not a new one for me, since I picked up the uncut Finnish release of the film back in 2007. It does, however, provide me with an opportunity to compare the work of two different distributors, both using the same master as a basis for their respective encodes. What differences will their be in their approaches? And will the five years that have elapsed between Sony and Fox's releases have any impact on the overall quality? Let's find out.

[Continue reading...]

Well now, isn't this interesting

2:25 PM / Blu-ray / 18 Comments

Italian:

UK:

French:

More on this to come, but I don't want people to get TOO excited. Although there appear to have been a number of colour tweaks applied to the French release, it's still derived from the same 2007 transfer as the UK and Italian releases, and the highlights are still severely clipped, especially during the climax. Oh, and there are forced French subtitles (seriously, guy, stop doing that, PLEASE). Still, though, I consider this release an improvement. And if nothing else, Jessica Harper and Joan Bennett no longer look like lobsters in the scene I took these captures from.

How I take BD screen captures

10:11 PM / Blu-ray / 18 Comments

I quite often get emails and comments asking how to take screen captures of Blu-ray Discs. Given the frequency of these requests, I thought it would be a good idea to make a quick guide on the subject in order to avoid repeating myself.

The method I'm going to provide here is, in my experience, the easiest to follow and the one that is least likely to introduce inaccuracies. If you follow these instructions you should be able to produce captures that are an accurate representation of what is on the disc. Please note that you will only be able to use this method for titles encoded with AVC. These days, that's pretty much 99% of all titles on the market. You'll need to use different methods for discs that use either VC-1 or MPEG-2, but that's a guide for another day.

What you'll need:

1. A BD-ROM drive
2. DGAVCDec
3. A means to decrypt Blu-ray Discs

For point 3, you have a few options. The only one I know anything about is SlySoft's AnyDVD HD, which unfortunately comes with a fairly significant price tag attached. I bought mine some years back when a lifetime subscription was considerably cheaper than it is now. If you're going to be taking a lot of captures and/or intend to turn your PC into a multi-region home theatre setup, I'd still consider it a price worth paying, but I can understand people not wanting to part with €119. Luckily there's a 21-day trial version available, so you can at least sample the product and decide whether you feel it's a worthwhile investment.

[Continue reading...]

Some more Prometheus captures

1:10 PM / Blu-ray / 7 Comments

I've been asked by a couple of people if I could post some more screen captures comparing the 2D and 3D BDs of PROMETHEUS. That strikes my as an entirely reasonable request, given that I'd previously only posted a single pair of images and could have been seen to be basically expecting people to take on trust that the entire film showed a similar discrepancy in terms of detail between its 2D and 3D incarnations. I've matched 15 different frames below, including the one I posted on Sunday.

A few quick notes about these captures:

They were captured using DGAVCIndex, my preferred method of capturing for AVC-encoded titles (which is pretty much everything these days). DGAVCIndex has the benefit of bypassing any tomfoolery applied by your video card, and while I know that things like edge enhancement, noise reduction, "flesh tone correction" (seriously, that's an option in my card's control panel) and other goofy manipulations are disabled on my system, I've learned from experience that users aren't always aware of what their hardware and/or software might be doing behind their back, which is why I always generally recommend DGAVCIndex when people ask me how to take BD screen captures.

The 3D captures represent only the left eye view, which is standard practice among "screenshot scientists" (™ and © Blu-ray.com Forums) such as myself when posting screenshots of 3D discs. I've yet to find a way to successfully decode the right eye data on its own. The left eye data is also what you'll see if you play a 3D disc on a setup without 3D capabilities (unless, as is the case with PROMETHEUS, the disc is programmed to refuse to play at all unless is detects a 3D setup).

Virtually all of these are I-frames. In something approaching 95% of cases, the I-frames on the 2D and 3D discs are the same frames.

All captures are saved in Photoshop as .jpgs with a compression level of 12 (the least amount of compression possible). See my "Lossy vs. Lossless" challenge for why I don't bother using .pngs: challenge; results.

In retrospect it was probably slightly foolhardy to post the capture I did. It's by far the most detailed shot in the entire film, and the loss of detail on the 3D disc was always going to be particularly pronounced in that instance. As you'll see by looking through the wider selection of captures below, the difference in detail varies considerably from shot to shot, depending on how much fine detail is on the screen at any given time. Sometimes there's no apparent difference at all other than that the 3D disc is slightly brighter throughout - as I noted in an earlier comment, presumably to offset the dimming that takes place when you wear 3D glasses. More problematic than the slight detail loss, I feel, is the stair-stepping that is visible on diagonal edges throughout the 3D disc. I first noticed it during the opening sequence on the credits text, but it persists throughout the film and tends to be particularly noticeable in the landscape shots (look at the rock formations in Example 3). I've noticed this on a handful of discs in the past (e.g. HIERRO, SUNSHINE CLEANING, THE ORPHANAGE), but this is the first time I've seen it on a BD of a big budget Hollywood blockbuster. (In the past, my theory was that these BD transfers were taken from masters with a resolution of less than 1920x1080 as a cost-cutting measure, but I highly doubt that was the case here.)

It's not my intention to be alarmist about the 3D disc - the picture quality is not bad by any means, and the fact that a significant number of displays don't actually display 3D content at full resolution anyway means that for many people this won't make much of a difference. Plus, 3D holds so little interest for me that I'd be lying if I claimed the fact that PROMETHEUS's 3D disc wasn't absolute perfection was causing me sleepless nights. (If the boot had been on the other foot, and it was the 2D version that was compromised, I suspect I'd be a lot more concerned.) The fact remains, though, that the problems are there, and if I was Fox, I'd want to know about this, and to find out how it occurred in the first place.

Prometheus (2D)
label: 20th Century Fox; disc country: USA; region code: A;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 2.39:1

Prometheus (3D)
label: 20th Century Fox; disc country: USA; region code: A;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 2.39:1

Just arrived...

6:53 PM / Blu-ray / 9 Comments

So, that 3D disc of Prometheus...

3:22 PM / Blu-ray / 24 Comments

...is kinda lacking on the detail front compared to its 2D counterpart. I wonder what happened there?

Above: 3D (click to enlarge)

Above: 2D (click to enlarge)

To the best of my knowledge, no-one else has commented on this yet. I guess, given that a lot of televisions don't actually display 3D content in full 1920x1080 anyway, it's going to be a moot point for a lot of people, but still I'd have expected at least someone to have spotted the discrepancy by now.

Any thoughts?

And before you ask, it's not just this shot that's affected, or even a handful of shots. It's the whole movie.

Just arrived...

11:01 PM / Blu-ray / 19 Comments

Just arrived...

1:32 PM / Blu-ray / 8 Comments

A couple of long-awaited goodies...

The Card Player BD

10:51 PM / Blu-ray / 10 Comments

Another day, another Argento film makes the leap to BD. While everything from the classic period with the exception of OPERA is now at least available, if not necessarily in particularly good quality, much of his work from the 90s onwards has yet to show up. German label Edition Tonfilm are filling in a couple of the gaps, with the (somewhat overrated, in my opinion) "greatest hits" effort NON HO SONNO/SLEEPLESS coming out in November, while the underrated (my opinion again) THE CARD PLAYER came out last week. My copy showed up today, and I've taken a quick look. Note that these opinions are NOT final: I haven't watched it from beginning to end yet, so don't take this as a definitive review.

First impressions are actually pretty positive. I wasn't sure what to expect from this title, and the beat-up, low detail opening titles didn't exactly fill me with confidence. Once the credits are over, however, things improve pretty dramatically, and the results are definitely on the watchable side:

The Card Player
label: Edition Tonfilm; disc country: Germany; region code: ABC;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 1.78:1 (theatrical 1.85:1)

Clearly no LVR jobbie, this! A couple of points: Example 1 is the last shot of the opening credits sequence immediately before the image quality improves dramatically, and Example 5 is representative of a segment of approximately 24 seconds beginning at the 00:26:16 mark, where for some reason the film drops to ugly-looking upscaled standard definition footage. The aspect ratio also switches from open matte 1.78:1 to OAR 1.85:1 during this stretch. I'm at a loss to explain why this happens, and I can't guarantee that this is the only time this happens as I haven't watched the disc all the way through yet.

Decloaking

12:46 PM / Blu-ray / General / 9 Comments

Greetings, programs!

It's been nearly a month since my last post, which must stand as some kind of record in the Land of Whimsy annals. I never intended to leave it this long, but for a variety of reasons I've let this site go to the wayside.

The first and most significant reason is that I've been busting my hump over the last six weeks or so working on a chapter for my thesis. This chapter, Chapter 2, is both the most important of the bunch and the most difficult to get right, given that it serves as both a historical overview of the years leading up to the giallo boom of 1970-1975 (basically I give a potted history of sociocultural developments in Western Europe in the years 1945-1970 - no small undertaking) and an explanation of the theoretical frameworks (mostly derived from criticism of film noir) with which I engage in my analysis chapters. I finally handed in a draft a little over a week ago and will be meeting my supervisors to discuss it on Tuesday, but there's still a fair bit of work to be done with this chapter and, once I'm done with it, the rest of the thesis still has to be redrafted. Basically, I'm unlikely to have significant quantities of free time any time soon.

There's another reason, though, and if I'm being honest it's that I don't get the same amount of enjoyment updating the site as I once did. For a number of years, most of the site's content consisted of screen captures of and reviews of the video quality of Blu-ray Discs. These subjects still interest me a great deal, but the actual act of writing about them and in particular the laborious process of going through entire discs to select captures that are representative of the image quality as a whole were starting to feel like more and more of a chore. It's entirely possible that I'll feel differently when I have some free time on my hands, but I don't want to promise anything. In the meantime, I'd recommend Matt Paprocki and Adam Tyner's BD reviews if you want insightful criticism coupled with accurate screen captures.

[Continue reading...]

Recent acquisitions

4:49 PM / Blu-ray / 8 Comments

A mixture of second-hand cheapies and heavily discounted unopeneds.

#1179: The Simpsons: The Complete Ninth Season

12:49 PM / Blu-ray / 10 Comments

(DVD, 20th Century Fox, Region 1, USA)

I've a feeling this is the season where everything starts to go south for THE SIMPSONS, but I got this set second hand for buttons and, judging by the Wikipedia entry, there are at least a handful of enjoyable episodes in it. And I'll be curious to see the seemingly universally reviled "The Principal and the Pauper" for the first time... though I note that, as a holdover from the previous season, it's actually a Bill Oakley/Josh Weinstein episode and not one that can be pinned on the fans' usual whipping boy, Mike Scully.

Four Flies on Grey Velvet: Shameless vs. Koch Media

5:42 PM / Blu-ray / 10 Comments

Once the most elusive of all Dario Argento's gialli, it now seems as if every man and his dog has a version of FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET either on store shelves or in the pipeline. While the likes of OPERA, SLEEPLESS and THE CARD PLAYER have yet to make their high definition debut, FOUR FLIES now has now been released twice on BD, first in the UK by Shameless Screen Entertainment back in January of this year, and now by German label Koch Media, who have treated the film to a deluxe 3-disc digibook (the film on both BD and DVD, plus a DVD for the extras), similar to their recent release of INFERNO.

FOUR FLIES has, to say the least, a troubled history. Originally, it was available only on horrendous-looking bootleg tapes and DVDs, owing to complicated rights issues. Then in 2007, German distributor Retrofilm somehow got their hands on a beat-up old print, scanned it and put it out on a DVD that was of questionable legality and both looked and sounded like a dog's dinner, but was by anyone's standards measurably better than any previous version. This was suplanted a year later by another DVD release, this time by US distributor Mya Communication. Although its English language audio track was botched beyond belief and it was missing around 40 seconds of footage at the start and end of reels due to damage to the source materials, it was a revelation: transferred in HD from the original camera negative, for the first time outside of a movie theatre FOUR FLIES actually looked half-way respectable.

I mentioned the January 2012 BD release by Shameless briefly, but didn't get a chance to do a fully in-depth review of it. In brief, Shameless used the same HD transfer as Mya, but filled in the gaps where footage was missing by dropping back to the grotty old standard definition source used by Retrofilm, offering viewers the option to watch this less than seamless presentation of the film or skip the damaged section in the same manner as the Mya DVD. It also featured a vastly better English audio track than any previous release, with significantly improved clarity and none of the excessively low pitch afflicting the Mya disc. It was a release with problems, however. Most egregiously, the English language track suffered from moments of severe distortion in the last 10 minutes of the film, and an attempt to remove a visual defect during the extreme slow motion shots at the climax (a black horizontal line running across the screen) simply made matters worse. There was also an issue with the gamma being slightly elevated throughout, resulting in some very noticeable posterisation in some of the darker scenes.

The Koch Media release again uses the same incomplete HD transfer, but takes a slightly different approach so solving the issue of the missing footage. Commendably, Koch have gone back to a print source and actually retransferred much of this footage in high definition. The source isn't ideal, with a fair amount of print damage and an overly dark, contrasty appearance, but it's worlds better than the SD gunk used on the Shameless release (Shameless, Koch). Unfortunately, there are two instances in which Koch either haven't bothered to or haven't been able to replace the SD footage with the new, improved HD material: these are a few seconds of Roberto (Michael Brandon) walking past the river at 00:21:38 (Shameless, Koch) and, more problematically, 35 seconds of Roberto talking to Dalia (Francine Racette) starting at 00:52:19. The latter was less of an issue on the Shameless BD because the material in SD amounted to only a few seconds at the start of the scene, after which Shameless simply switched back to the HD version mid-shot. With the exception of the aforementioned river shot, however, Koch's approach has been not to jump between two different sources mid-shot. As a result, the Koch version remains in grubby, heavily cropped SD until the shot ends (Shameless, Koch). This approach is used throughout the disc, in all other instances, the switch is between two different HD sources rather than an SD and an HD one (Shameless, Koch). What it means is that, despite Koch's efforts to source a print and scan it in HD, their version actually ends up having MORE "compromised" footage than the Shameless version. I'm not really sure how I feel about that... or about the fact that, unlike Shameless, Koch haven't provided any means of watching the film with the compromised footage simply skipped over.

These discrepancies aside, the two releases are actually reasonably comparable in terms of picture quality. The Koch release improves on the Shameless version in most respects, but it would be a mistake to describe this as anything of a revelation because the Shameless disc already looked pretty good to begin with. It was certainly miles away from noise-riddled monstrosities like THE CAT O' NINE TAILS and CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD and... well, to be honest, the vast majority of all Italian cult titles released thus far on BD. The Koch release has the correct gamma, meaning that the image appears darker and the posterisation issues noted in the Shameless version are gone (Shameless, Koch). Colours are also slightly richer across the board, though to what extent that's a result of the gamma change isn't clear (Shameless, Koch). Neither release appears to have had any additional dirt and scratch removal or grain reduction applied, and both suffer from the exact same occasional DVNR errors (Shameless, Koch). Compression is slightly improved on the Koch release too, though the differences aren't significant enough to be a deal-breaker (Shameless, Koch). Bizarrely enough, for some reason there are two copies of the film on the Koch disc. The only one actually accessible from the disc menu is a 25.6 GB file of the entire film; the other is 13.6 GB, has no audio and cuts out just after the one-hour mark. I'm not even going to attempt to theorise as to why this is sitting on the disc taking up space - apart from the lack of audio and the fact that it cuts out part-way through the film (minor quibbles, I'm sure you'll agree), I can't see any difference in content between this and the 25.6 GB file.

Audio-wise, both versions have English and Italian language options, although only the Shameless release offers English subtitles of any kind. They're not perfect and suffer from some noticeable errors (the more blatant of which is that the film's title is subtitled as "Four Flies OF Grey Velvet"), but they're perfectly serviceable if you want to watch the film in Italian. With only German subtitles provided on the Koch release (they are enabled by default if you select English or Italian audio from the menu, but you can disable them with your remote), the Italian track is going to be out of bounds for those who don't speak the language. This also creates a slight issue when it comes to the killer's confession during the climax, some of which wasn't recorded in English, meaning that the English track dips in and out of Italian during this scene, much like DEEP RED. On the Shameless disc, the requisite lines are subtitled in English; on the Koch release, they predictably aren't. On the plus side, the extreme (and potentially speaker-damaging) distortion that was intermittently present during the final 10 minutes of the English track on the Shameless disc (primarily affecting the Italian dialogue segments but also a large explosion just before the end credits) is mercifully absent from the Koch version.

These glitches aside, however, the English track on the Shameless disc actually sounds significantly better than its Koch counterpart in terms of clarity. I was struck by how crisp and clear the Shameless disc sounded when I first got it, not just in comparison to the notoriously botched Mya DVD but also compared to just about every other Italian cult title of this vintage. The Koch disc sounds, dare I say it, far closer to how I would have EXPECTED the film to sound. The Koch version also suffers from what I can only describe as a heck of a lot of "warbling" (not an audiophile, sorry) during the music that plays before and after the car crash that closes the film. (The Italian track is also affected on both discs, suggesting the music came from the same compromised stem.) Neither version sounds bad per se, but were it not for the almost crippling glitches in the final ten minutes, I suspect I'd be recommending the Shameless version unconditionally.

...So yeah, which version to recommend? They both have their ups and downs. The nature of the available materials being what they are, any presentation of FOUR FLIES seemed destined to be compromised. Myself, I suspect I'd be more inclined to overlook the more minor flaws of the Shameless release were it not for the crippling nature of the audio glitches in the film's final moments (and the situation has certainly not been helped by Shameless' jaw-droppingly ignorant response to viewer complaints, which among other inanities saw them try to claim that different BD players rendered lossless audio differently). It's a shame, because in every other respect the Shameless disc sounds much better. On balance, I'm going to have to lean towards the Koch release, both for the overall better image quality (though I'm still not happy about the increase in sub-optimal footage thanks to Koch's "no jumping between sources mid-shot" rule) and because their audio track won't potentially wreck your speakers, but it's not an ideal situation whichever way you cut it.

Shameless
country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 2.35:1

Koch Media
country: Germany; region code: ABC (incorrectly labelled as B); codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 2.35:1

Recent acquisitions

5:06 PM / Blu-ray / DVD / No Comments

My post-birthday acquisitions, because I'm too lazy these days to do individual posts for all of them.

What is this handsome product?

10:12 AM / Blu-ray / 18 Comments

Sayonara BD & DVD section

4:55 PM / Blu-ray / DVD / Web / 7 Comments

As part of my ongoing efforts to streamline this site and give me a few less lists to keep up to date (see my removal of the film diary back in May), I've decided to junk the "in-house" BD & DVD section and simply have that page redirect to my DVD Profiler page from now on. Their site isn't as purrty as mine, but it's much less of a hassle for me to update, and it contains more information on each disc, including bonus features, audio and video formats, and even (if you're in the mood for a giggle) parental advisory information.

Please note that the DVD Profiler page doesn't show discs that I've since sold or given away, so a number will have disappeared.

#1162: Perfect Sense

9:05 PM / Blu-ray / No Comments

(BD, IFC Films, Region ABC, USA)

#1161: Treasure Planet

9:05 PM / Blu-ray / No Comments

(BD/DVD combo, Buena Vista, Region ABC/1, USA)

The Aristocats captures

7:44 PM / Blu-ray / 8 Comments

For Robin:

The Aristocats
label: Buena Vista; disc country: UK; region code: ABC;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 1.66:1

Note: Full size captures are hosted on ImageShack and may take a while to load.

#1160: The Aristocats

5:45 PM / Blu-ray / 2 Comments

(BD, Buena Vista, Region ABC, UK)

Yeah, speaking of dodgy botox jobs... this is another of those completely grain-scrubbed releases, which took me by surprise as I'd expected it to be a "minimal effort" job like THE FOX AND THE HOUND. The film is certainly a long way from being the cream of Disney's crop, so I hadn't anticipated it to qualify for special attention (particularly after HD clips showed up in the WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY documentary with grain intact). The lack of grain or any sort of life to the image really draws attention to the cost-cutting, pared-back nature of the films Disney was producing during this period. I must confess to being rather worried about the upcoming release of THE RESCUERS now...

Oh, and the Disney aspect ratio lottery continues. This time it's 1.66:1, offering slightly more headroom than the 1.75:1 DVD, but still way too tight compared to the old 1.33:1 release. I swear, someone's just throwing darts at a dartboard, with each concentric ring representing a different ratio.

#1159: The Artist

10:57 PM / Blu-ray / 15 Comments

(BD, Sony Pictures, Region A (mislabelled ABC), USA)

This will be the last BD I ever receive from PlanetAxel, which went bankrupt on Monday. I'm truly sorry to see them go. They were my number one source for US BDs and DVDs for the last couple of years and offered truly excellent customer service. RIP PlanetAxel. You will be sorely missed. :(

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