International Blu-ray discs

Discuss internationally-released DVDs and Blu-rays or other international DVD and Blu-ray-related topics.
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willoneill
Joined: Wed Mar 18, 2009 10:10 am
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#376 Post by willoneill » Thu Sep 10, 2015 8:07 am

feihong wrote:There are German blu rays of Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, Raise the Red Lantern, Gilda, The Big Clock and The Dark Mirror. I haven't seen those films available on blu ray anywhere else in the world as of yet.
Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry is available on blu in a double feature set from Shout Factory.

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Altair
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#377 Post by Altair » Thu Sep 10, 2015 10:36 am

feihong wrote: There's also a German blu ray of A Bullet for the General. Has anyone seen this disc? I wonder if it has the same ultra-waxy level of noise reduction as the US blu ray.
From the looks of the Caps-a-Holic comparison between the German BD and the Anchor Bay DVD, A Bullet for the General looks like it still suffers from heavy noise reduction.

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feihong
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#378 Post by feihong » Thu Sep 10, 2015 12:07 pm

willoneill wrote:
feihong wrote:There are German blu rays of Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, Raise the Red Lantern, Gilda, The Big Clock and The Dark Mirror. I haven't seen those films available on blu ray anywhere else in the world as of yet.
Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry is available on blu in a double feature set from Shout Factory.

Ha! So we're down to Raise the Red Lantern, which I am still pretty sure is not on blu ray anywhere else I've seen.


Thanks for the heads-up on Bullet for General. What a shame.

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The Fanciful Norwegian
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#379 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Fri Sep 11, 2015 4:43 am

A French Blu of Raise the Red Lantern came out in 2011, under the title Épouses et concubines. It was released alongside Farewell My Concubine and both are now OOP, with third-party sellers asking triple-digit figures for Lantern. It looks like the distributor (an outfit called "D'Vision") stopped putting out releases that same year, so they probably weren't on the market for long before the company folded.
Last edited by The Fanciful Norwegian on Fri Sep 11, 2015 4:50 am, edited 1 time in total.

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tenia
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#380 Post by tenia » Fri Sep 11, 2015 4:47 am

I just realisee that were the movies in questions. I have both BDs but havent watched them yet.

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feihong
Joined: Thu Nov 04, 2004 12:20 pm

Re: International Blu-ray discs

#381 Post by feihong » Wed Oct 21, 2015 12:57 am

Got a bunch of blu rays from Amazon Japan. Two Johnnie To films, A Hero Never Dies and Triangle, which I gave my thoughts on in the Johnnie To thread. But also I got a Japanese blu ray of The Heroic Ones, as well as blu rays for Mr. Vampire, Wheels on Meals, The Killer, and Island of Fire.

All those discs are released by Paramount in Japan, but The Heroic Ones also has a Celestial label, and the others have a Fortune Star label (Mr. Vampire, Wheels on Meals, The Killer, Island of Fire).

The Heroic Ones looks great. Sharp picture, depth, rich color, and progressive, unlike the Well-Go disc from the U.S., which is interlaced. It has a 2.0 channel PCM audio track that sounds fine. No English subtitles.

The Fortune Star discs look, unfortunately, like upscaled transfers. They are soft and without a lot of depth. The colors appear slightly unsubtle, with skin tones appearing unnaturally red on all the discs. All the discs look better than SD counterparts I've seen, but they're not good enough improvements. They don't look like blu rays. They have, for the most part, 2.0 ch Cantonese audio tracks and 5.1 Japanese dub tracks. They have Japanese subtitles, but no English. They are substantially cheaper than the standard Japanese disc, so I didn't feel terribly bad about ordering them. But still, they're real disappointments. On the other hand, I don't think I've seen Island of Fire available on blu ray before, so maybe that's something.

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tenia
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#382 Post by tenia » Thu Oct 29, 2015 11:58 am

Kieslowski's Decalogue will be released on BD in Poland on Nov 11th from remasters (good or not, recent or not, I don't know).
http://www.empik.com/dekalog-kieslowski ... 587,film-p" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

JabbaTheSlut
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#383 Post by JabbaTheSlut » Thu Oct 29, 2015 3:27 pm

Remastered image and audio. With English subtitles.

Zot!
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#384 Post by Zot! » Thu Oct 29, 2015 4:35 pm

Well, my Facets Decalogue was starting to look pretty dog-eared. Thrilled about the explosion of Polish BD excellence all of a sudden!

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feihong
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#385 Post by feihong » Thu Oct 29, 2015 7:15 pm

Paramount/Twin's Japanese blu ray of Shaw Bros' The Water Margin is a very nice disc, with sharp picture quality and more than decent depth of field. It's not as good as the Heroic Ones disc, or their disc of Come Drink with Me or King Boxer, or their Mighty Peking Man. It's close in quality to their Super Inframan disc, which was very good, but just a little bit softer than the others. There is a slight red tint to the picture, very evenly throughout, but aside from that the picture and sound quality is far better than I thought it might be.

I can't remember exactly how the Celestial remastering deal worked, but I thought there were two tiers of remastering quality going on, with the films that were touring having more extensive remastering and new negatives struck, and the films that weren't touring getting some kind of digital remaster that didn't result in a new negative? Is that even close to what they did? I remember there was a definite quality difference between some of the old IVL discs, and it seemed to skew favorably towards the pictures that were touring as a retrospective. I don't recall Water Margin being one of those films that got the better treatment. At any rate, it looks quite excellent; so much so, it's a real shame these discs aren't being released in English-language friendly forms somewhere. There's a few German discs which are quite good, like The Savage 5, Crippled Avengers, 8-Diagram Pole Fighter, The Kung Fu Master, and the Sentimental Swordsman, but there's a lot of neat films, like The Magic Blade, which I would have thought might be on blu ray somewhere by now, that don't appear to be.

bergelson
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#386 Post by bergelson » Fri Oct 30, 2015 1:04 am

Decalogue is an outstanding release. With "A Short Film About Killing" being released soon as part of the big Polish classics batch I can only wander what
is the status of "A Short Film About Love", my personal favorite.

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Lowry_Sam
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#387 Post by Lowry_Sam » Fri Oct 30, 2015 3:00 am

Noticed that the French Blu-Ray box set of Johnny Get Your Gun is part of the current 50 euros off 100 euros sale. Has anyone picked this up yet & can give a review? Only dvd I've seen was awful. The included book is probably in French, so I don't need that, but I am interested in all that is included in the 4-disc set & didn't realize there was more than one version of the film. Just not sure it's worth shelling out that much for it even if it isn't likely to be (all) included if it ever gets a US release.

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tenia
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#388 Post by tenia » Fri Oct 30, 2015 5:21 am

Lowry_Sam wrote:Noticed that the French Blu-Ray box set of Johnny Get Your Gun is part of the current 50 euros off 100 euros sale. Has anyone picked this up yet & can give a review? Only dvd I've seen was awful. The included book is probably in French, so I don't need that, but I am interested in all that is included in the 4-disc set & didn't realize there was more than one version of the film. Just not sure it's worth shelling out that much for it even if it isn't likely to be (all) included if it ever gets a US release.
I wrote the review of the regular version for Retro HD : http://retro-hd.com/tests/blu-ray/1980- ... uerre.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
There is also a review of this regular version on DVD Classik : http://www.dvdclassik.com/test/blu-ray- ... europacorp" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The collector one seems overpriced to me, and is mostly interesting if you want to dig into the extras. However, seeing Tavernier and Rissient are the main bulk of the exclusive extras, they most likely only are available in French without Eng subs, so they could be of "no use" to you.

Anyway, I would suggest saving some money and buying the regular release instead (especially since it's currently in a "3 for 2" sale).

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feihong
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#389 Post by feihong » Thu Nov 12, 2015 5:38 am

Has anyone seen this bluray box of Berlin Alexanderplatz out of Japan?

http://www.amazon.co.jp/Berlin-Alexande ... VRQENFRJN5" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Does anyone know if this is legit? I am wondering if it's worth the investment.

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feihong
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#390 Post by feihong » Tue Nov 17, 2015 5:38 pm

So this BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ set is a dismal SD upconvert. Not worth the investment.

I picked up the German releases of a couple of Jackie Chan movies, the immortal classics POWERMAN and ACTION HUNTER, as they appear on the coversof the German blu rays. These are actually WHEELS ON MEALS and DRAGONS FOREVER. There are no English subtitles. The discs are advertised as full 1080P. They have Cantonese and German DTS 5.1 and Mono audio tracks, and they port over the HKL audio commentaries by Bey Logan.

I can't tell if WHEELS ON MEALS is an upconvert. It looks pretty soft, altogether, though there's none of the ghosting apparent in the Japanese blu ray. The film is still pretty red in the flesh tones, though not as all-around red as the image on the Japanese disc.

DRAGONS FOREVER looks sharp, and it looks like a true 1080P scan. The disc is very handsome. Splendid Films, who releases these discs, is trying to corner the market in Germany in Jackie Chan films. They have blu rays of the Project A films, all the 70s kung fu stuff, as far as I can see. They have City Hunter, the Police Story films, etc. At least some of these are supposed to be true 1080P transfers. I wonder how they got these from Fortune Star? The Fortune Star logos are on everything, but discs from other parts of the world don't offer these hi-def transfers.

I got the Japanese blu ray of STALKER, which is also odd. I can't tell how good the transfer is. The picture looks generally pretty soft.

The best thing I found was a DVD of Susumi Hani's AFRICA STORY. This is a very elegant-looking SD disc of a pretty loony film. Somehow this was Hani's last film, and star Jimmy Stewart's last movie, also. It features very little dialogue, tons and tons of nature photography (probably in equal proportion to the very slight plot). The film was produced by SanRio, and it features some funky pop singing in English over images of zebras and lions on the veldt. Everyone is dubbed in Japanese. There could be no satisfactory explanation of this crazy movie, but it is hugely enjoyable, and the DVD does right by it. There are no English subtitles, but that doesn't detract at all from the experience of the movie.

AFRICA STORY is exceptionally weird, but foolishly beautiful. The film captures so much natural beauty, so casually. It can seem somewhat without purpose if you're not looking closely. But spare a deeper glance and it's fascinating; I've not seen another film that dwells so intensely on the experience of the animals of Africa––and I'm including that IMAX film that focuses on the Wildebeast migration. But this is really a film whose copious nature photography dwells on the behavior and emotional life of animals in the wilderness. The people in the film are treated in a very similar way, and there's a casual sympathy for them that is sort of at one with the animals. Eleonora Vallone, daughter of Raf Vallone, shows up late in the film and brings with her the frippery and fussy weight of civilization, but there's also the pain and menace of several fires. They are captured, I think, just as exquisitely––moreso, even––than the ones in Days of Heaven. AFRICA STORY is not the naive movie it initially appears to be, but rather something more idiosyncratic and intense, something rapturous and well-realized, almost entirely expressed through the visual and through exceptional sound design. It's story, its editing, its visuals, actually remind me more than anything of Hani's previous THE MORNING SCHEDULE, which follows a lot of similar story beats and character relationships. It's a surprisingly good movie. Not even SanRio's unfettered pop-song-bombing of the picture can make it any less absorbing than it is.

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hearthesilence
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#391 Post by hearthesilence » Mon Dec 14, 2015 11:12 pm

I just got Miguel Gomes' "Tabu" from New Wave Films on a region B BD from the UK. I saw this at the U.S. premiere at the NYFF and it was one of the very few films they were projecting from a 35mm print. Looked marvelous. Can't really say the same for the BD, at least for the modern scenes-not sure if it's encoding or some other tomfoolery like a touch of grain management on what was already very clean footage, but there are artifacts in most shots. The "vintage" footage looks better-these scenes were shot on different film stock, much grainier, and they left it completely intact. If DNR was the culprit on the present day scenes, I wonder if Gomes' choice to make the past look grainier spared those scenes of the same wankery?

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eerik
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#392 Post by eerik » Fri Dec 25, 2015 11:48 am

Four Warner catalog titles scheduled for early 2016 in Germany:
Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
The Big Sleep
Key Largo


A bunch of RKO titles released by IVC in Japan early 2016:
The Magnificent Ambersons
I Walked with a Zombie
Cat People
The Thing from Another World
Suspicion


Suspicion is also coming out in France with two other Hitchcock titles:
Suspicion
I Confess
The Wrong Man

Hopefully all the titles listed above will be released worldwide. The Wrong Man already has been announced for the US, and I Confess is also scheduled for Japan.

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feihong
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#393 Post by feihong » Sat Dec 26, 2015 5:28 pm

The Edko blu ray of Johnnie To's Office looks fantastic and sounds great as well. The English subtitles are very good. If anything the cinematography looks better on the new disc than it did on the DCP I saw in the theater. But basically, the blu ray transfer looks comparable in most respects.

It's a really wonderful movie as well; good the first time, but improves upon second viewing. The cast is a really lovely collection of actors; hopefully To is able to make another film soon with some of the same players. Tang Wei is very good in it, and Eason Chan is surprisingly good––I've never liked him in a movie before, but here he's a very appealing performer. The cinematography stands out quite a lot in the film, with elegant tracking shots and a broad range of color.

hanshotfirst1138
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#394 Post by hanshotfirst1138 » Sat Dec 26, 2015 6:18 pm

feihong wrote:So this BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ set is a dismal SD upconvert. Not worth the investment.

I picked up the German releases of a couple of Jackie Chan movies, the immortal classics POWERMAN and ACTION HUNTER, as they appear on the coversof the German blu rays. These are actually WHEELS ON MEALS and DRAGONS FOREVER. There are no English subtitles. The discs are advertised as full 1080P. They have Cantonese and German DTS 5.1 and Mono audio tracks, and they port over the HKL audio commentaries by Bey Logan.

I can't tell if WHEELS ON MEALS is an upconvert. It looks pretty soft, altogether, though there's none of the ghosting apparent in the Japanese blu ray. The film is still pretty red in the flesh tones, though not as all-around red as the image on the Japanese disc.

DRAGONS FOREVER looks sharp, and it looks like a true 1080P scan. The disc is very handsome. Splendid Films, who releases these discs, is trying to corner the market in Germany in Jackie Chan films. They have blu rays of the Project A films, all the 70s kung fu stuff, as far as I can see. They have City Hunter, the Police Story films, etc. At least some of these are supposed to be true 1080P transfers. I wonder how they got these from Fortune Star? The Fortune Star logos are on everything, but discs from other parts of the world don't offer these hi-def transfers.

I got the Japanese blu ray of STALKER, which is also odd. I can't tell how good the transfer is. The picture looks generally pretty soft.

The best thing I found was a DVD of Susumi Hani's AFRICA STORY. This is a very elegant-looking SD disc of a pretty loony film. Somehow this was Hani's last film, and star Jimmy Stewart's last movie, also. It features very little dialogue, tons and tons of nature photography (probably in equal proportion to the very slight plot). The film was produced by SanRio, and it features some funky pop singing in English over images of zebras and lions on the veldt. Everyone is dubbed in Japanese. There could be no satisfactory explanation of this crazy movie, but it is hugely enjoyable, and the DVD does right by it. There are no English subtitles, but that doesn't detract at all from the experience of the movie.

AFRICA STORY is exceptionally weird, but foolishly beautiful. The film captures so much natural beauty, so casually. It can seem somewhat without purpose if you're not looking closely. But spare a deeper glance and it's fascinating; I've not seen another film that dwells so intensely on the experience of the animals of Africa––and I'm including that IMAX film that focuses on the Wildebeast migration. But this is really a film whose copious nature photography dwells on the behavior and emotional life of animals in the wilderness. The people in the film are treated in a very similar way, and there's a casual sympathy for them that is sort of at one with the animals. Eleonora Vallone, daughter of Raf Vallone, shows up late in the film and brings with her the frippery and fussy weight of civilization, but there's also the pain and menace of several fires. They are captured, I think, just as exquisitely––moreso, even––than the ones in Days of Heaven. AFRICA STORY is not the naive movie it initially appears to be, but rather something more idiosyncratic and intense, something rapturous and well-realized, almost entirely expressed through the visual and through exceptional sound design. It's story, its editing, its visuals, actually remind me more than anything of Hani's previous THE MORNING SCHEDULE, which follows a lot of similar story beats and character relationships. It's a surprisingly good movie. Not even SanRio's unfettered pop-song-bombing of the picture can make it any less absorbing than it is.
Hong Kong films have notoriously poor storage conditions, apparently it's made mastering even more difficult.

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How rude!
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#395 Post by How rude! » Sat Dec 26, 2015 7:08 pm

AFRICA STORY is exceptionally weird, but foolishly beautiful.
Interestingly, the screenplay is based on a Shuji Terayama story.

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feihong
Joined: Thu Nov 04, 2004 12:20 pm

Re: International Blu-ray discs

#396 Post by feihong » Sat Dec 26, 2015 10:37 pm

hanshotfirst1138 wrote:
feihong wrote:I picked up the German releases of a couple of Jackie Chan movies, the immortal classics POWERMAN and ACTION HUNTER, as they appear on the coversof the German blu rays. These are actually WHEELS ON MEALS and DRAGONS FOREVER. There are no English subtitles. The discs are advertised as full 1080P. They have Cantonese and German DTS 5.1 and Mono audio tracks, and they port over the HKL audio commentaries by Bey Logan.

I can't tell if WHEELS ON MEALS is an upconvert. It looks pretty soft, altogether, though there's none of the ghosting apparent in the Japanese blu ray. The film is still pretty red in the flesh tones, though not as all-around red as the image on the Japanese disc.
Hong Kong films have notoriously poor storage conditions, apparently it's made mastering even more difficult.

But Fortune Star simply doesn't even try to do HD transfers. The company prefers to go with upconverts. I think Fortune Star looks at hi-def remastering it as an unnecessary expense.

I finally figured out WHEELS ON MEALS. The German disc and the standard Japanese disc are upconverts, with different amounts of processing and manipulation done to the image. The Japanese discs of Jackie Chan movies which have true 1080p transfers are the so-called "Extreme Editions." The true 1080p source material comes from Japanese prints, and has, in all cases, burned-in Japanese subtitles along the right side of the image. These are cuts of the films prepared for Japan, so they have in some cases some quite different editing and so on. The Japanese version of POLICE STORY, for example, contains a long opening scene of pie-in-the-face comedy in the police station before the initial briefing scene.

The reason these cuts are only in the extreme editions rather than in the regular editions is because it appears they are special second discs, only included in the special packaging. So far I've seen these versions of POLICE STORY I and 3, but I ordered WHEELS ON MEALS and PROJECT A PT I and II. The prints show some age, but the transfers are quite sharp and the films look better than I've ever seen them look before; they look much, much better than I've ever seen them look before. Looking forward to finally seeing WHEELS ON MEALS in genuine 1080p.

hanshotfirst1138
Joined: Wed Mar 12, 2014 6:06 pm

Re: International Blu-ray discs

#397 Post by hanshotfirst1138 » Thu Dec 31, 2015 2:22 pm

feihong wrote:But Fortune Star simply doesn't even try to do HD transfers. The company prefers to go with upconverts. I think Fortune Star looks at hi-def remastering it as an unnecessary expense.
Absolutely true. And sadly, they have a vice-like death-grip on the masters. Between them and the Disney fiasco of a few years ago, Hong Kong cinema is about as ill-served on home video as it could be. Even when they license out to quality labels like Shout, the distributor's hands are tied. It's a pretty crappy situation. And like I said, I don't see it getting rectified anytime soon. And why they can't even include the damn mono soundtrack is a colossal mystery to me, but that's a whole separate issue.
So far I've seen these versions of POLICE STORY I and 3, but I ordered WHEELS ON MEALS and PROJECT A PT I and II. The prints show some age, but the transfers are quite sharp and the films look better than I've ever seen them look before; they look much, much better than I've ever seen them look before. Looking forward to finally seeing WHEELS ON MEALS in genuine 1080p.
It's pretty sad that this is the kind of situation fans have, sifting through various releases, each with their own flaws, trying to find a workable version ](*,) .

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feihong
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#398 Post by feihong » Sun Jan 10, 2016 3:48 am

It's true, it's pretty sad, but on the other hand, I've never seen these movies looking better.

I got Project A and Project A Pt. II, the Japanese Extreme editions. The HK cuts are standard upconverts, washed out and miserable-looking and overmatted. The Japanese cuts are true HD, 1080p, with beautiful color, much better balanced contrast, and really great depth of field. They are framed better, including a lot more information in the frame. The quality is not perfect. These are taken from prints, and there are lots of pops and scratches, and the black levels in Project A Pt. II are a little crushed (this looks like a defect of the print, rather than a compression issue). Print damage is much less severe on the original film, though the opening credits begin roughly, with lots of damage. The color separation on both films is far above anything I've ever seen, and the films look quite a bit more elegant than they have in past versions. There are the burned-in Japanese subtitles on the far right of the screen for both films, but those hardly distract at all.

I haven't tried to find subtitles to match up with these discs yet, but I'm wondering if it will be a challenge. The Japanese cuts of these films are supposed to be somewhat different. Police Story in Japan begins with a long sequence of pie-in-the-face pratfalls at the police station, before the initial action sequence at the shantytown. It's a scene that adds something like 5 or 6 minutes to the runtime. Still waiting for Wheels on Meals to arrive. I ordered it from CDJapan, and they are really dragging their feet. I'm wondering if they can get it in stock at all.

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feihong
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#399 Post by feihong » Wed Jan 13, 2016 7:08 pm

The Japanese Wheels on Meals Extreme Edition is interesting. It does sport a true HD transfer of the film, from a Japanese print, with Japanese subtitles burned in on the right hand side. The image improvement is good, for sure, but not as drastic an improvement as on Police Story or Project A. Nonetheless, there is true sharpness and depth in the picture, unlike on the Fortune Star upconvert. However, the audio for the Japanese edition is less comprehensive. There's an English dub track and two Japanese dub tracks (2.0 and 7.1), but no Chinese audio tracks for the HD print. It's pretty odd, for sure. Still, it's a lot more fun to see the film with a sharp picture, no digital moire, and decent colors. So for fans of the film, though it's a bit expensive, it's pretty much worth it.

I wish Paramount Japan would do these Extreme Editions for some other Hong Kong classics. It would be great to see something like Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain in true hi-definition. Though I suppose the Jackie Chan movies have a degree of popularity that justified the commercial risk, and they wouldn't see other HK movies as being worth that risk.

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feihong
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Re: International Blu-ray discs

#400 Post by feihong » Sun Jan 17, 2016 3:06 am

Not really answering the question, why release this just exactly now, of all times they could have released an aging cult anime, Uk outfit Anime Ltd.'s Collectors Edition blu ray of Baccano! is everything a fan would want. The transfer is extraordinarily sharp. There are layers of smoke and backlighting in Baccano threatening to compromise a hi-def transfer, but the discs have wonderful solidity and exquisite depth-of-field. There are Japanese language and English dub options, English subtitles, and textless openings and closings as an extra feature. The 16 episodes fit on 3 blu ray discs. There is a booklet that presents translated creator interviews and production art. And then there is the series itself, a dazzling and bizarre cocktail of inexplicably diverse ideas. The set retails for about $40 USD, which is a nice change from the Japanese set, or even the more expensive French set. The discs come in a cardboard fold-out case, which slips into a glossy hardback cover. It's a keeper.

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