832 The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum

[Michael Kerpan]

It's obvious Dr Svet has a bias in favouring Criterion - expect when he's caught out because he alreadly criticised the same transfer on an exisiting disc, such as the King Hu films.

Pathetic.

How does a direct personal attack add to this discussion?

[domino harvey]

I don't see a direct personal attack in that comment, Michael. Describing Pro-B's actions as pathetic may be harsh, but it's not name-calling and it's not out of line given that the poster has backed it up with evidence to show how he came to that conclusion. We can't all be as elegant and civil as Brian C in our responses!

[Orlac]

I'm actually an elegant and civil person, but we all have our moments!

[Michael Kerpan]

We can't all be as elegant and civil as Brian C in our responses!

We can try -- since we have a golden example shining before us.

On another topic -- I guess what we really need to ask reviewers to do is provide an intelligible textual description of what they find -- and we should remember that -- if the reviewer bothers to provide such description -- it supersedes any arbitrary scoring system that might be used.

[tenia]

Now, my colleagues' idea to build a lexicon seems way less silly to me.

[hearthesilence]

I would say that the Shochiku disc sounds very much like the 2 screenings I've seen (prior to the blu-ray era) -- while the AE version sounds nothing like what I recall hearing. So it is possible that AE's version features a lot more audio processing/improving. Very mysterious.

No way AE's has more processing, the Shochiku disc is clearly (no pun intended) overuse of noise reduction tools. Again, massively disappointing, especially since the PQ is a definite improvement. It's terrible, on the one hand they've left the grain intact (the AE BD looks like video), and yet they've used the opposite approach with the sound. This is a pretty horrible trend, one painfully familiar to anyone who has collected archival music reissues.

[whaleallright]

So the audio on the Shochiku and Criterion blu-rays is garbage, but is the image any better than on the AE or is it essentially the same?

[tenia]

The AE disc wasn't sourced from the new 4K restoration, which remains limited but is still a notable improvement IMO.

[domino harvey]

Upper tier price with only one fucking interview for on-disc extras. Looks like we can all safely just hold onto our AE copies...

Well, since no one has weighed in on it... I actually thought this was a good extra! Lopate is clearly a big fan and hits all the topics one would want touched on (in fact, he addresses the very topics that instigated the kerfuffle in the first couple pages of this thread-- tl;dr: He comes somewhere in the middle, but acknowledges the political spirit in Japan and notes with some amusement that the film was awarded what amounted to a "Family Values" recognition from the government). He's also not quite PC with some of his observations on women, so enjoy this one while you can folks!