1233 Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy

[mhofmann]

sometimes Criterion can also "save" an old DVD release : remember the amazing picture quality of Todd Haynes's "Safe".

Meh. The underlying master of Safe used by Criterion is fantastic but the encoding on that Blu-ray is rather suboptimal, if not to say bad. The grain on there is not well-represented grain but thousands of swarming artifacts in each frame, instead.

[tenia]

You also *cannot* "rescue" a filtered restoration. If it's baked in the source, it's baked in the source. Even Radiance had to deal with meh masters. The only possibility is to manage to get a digital file more upstream in the restoration flow, like going back to the raw scan, like Arrow did withe the Bruce Lee movies.
If Strand's Suzhou River BD is filtered and Radiance isn't, AFAIK, it's most certainly because either Strand's encode is rubbish and Radiance isn't, or that Strand filtered the movie specifically for their release but Radiance didn't.

Also, the Gaumont stories are of a different kind : Gaumont used to commission 2 masters, one degrained and one untouched. So in their case, there were 2 sources.
Madame de is yet another different story, as the restoration was FUBAR, and they got it redone (at least once).

[Rupert Pupkin]

You also *cannot* "rescue" a filtered restoration. If it's baked in the source, it's baked in the source. Even Radiance had to deal with meh masters. The only possibility is to manage to get a digital file more upstream in the restoration flow, like going back to the raw scan, like Arrow did withe the Bruce Lee movies.
If Strand's Suzhou River BD is filtered and Radiance isn't, AFAIK, it's most certainly because either Strand's encode is rubbish and Radiance isn't, or that Strand filtered the movie specifically for their release but Radiance didn't.

Also, the Gaumont stories are of a different kind : Gaumont used to commission 2 masters, one degrained and one untouched. So in their case, there were 2 sources.
Madame de is yet another different story, as the restoration was FUBAR, and they got it redone (at least once).

I understand; I should have wait for the vidcaps but since this was an G.Araki box set. My fault. With G.Araki's entrance into the Criterion catalogue I was thinking that Criterion did something special for The Doom Generation and that the transfert won't be just a carbon copy of the Strand release. Since "The Doom Generation" released by Strand (which I bought) was released last year, I was expecting (in fact I should have just hoping and burn candles) from Criterion to get their hold on the restoration before he got filtered by Strand when they release the blu-ray. Of course I did not know when the grain was filtered that much (at which step of the restoration); and aif Strand release would permit to get an untouched master (but it implied that they agreed and that they kept this step before filtered the grain).
I have to add that the amazon WEB 4K restoration (the Strand release) looks exactly like the Strand blu-ray so I should have been more suspicious about it.

[knives]

Finally finished off the trilogy with Nowhere and it’s a really great cap in part thanks to how different it is from the rest. In the first half there’s this almost John Waters corniness to the perversion with its joy at meaningless beyond the flesh (which admittedly is a theme not in Waters though the expression is similar). The end of the world almost seems good, a theme explicitly explored in Kaboom, until the cruelty hits the fan. The movie swivels so quickly I almost jumped. The film still has elements of joy here and there, but the lighting and mood is just permanently changed suggesting the inherent poison in death. If any work is truly similar to this one it’s probably the comic Black Hole.

[Red Screamer]

For a while, I found Nowhere, like, so totally lame. Its post-teen movie parody or pastiche is late and reheated, without the purpose or self-implication you find in Donnie Darko, Hairspray, or Dennis Cooper’s Closer. How many “creative cursing” insults per minute can really you stand? But at a certain point, like knives mentions, it stops being (primarily) sarcastic and goofy and starts becoming a genuinely unnerving horror movie with the tonal dissonances and emptiness ripping the film away from its own surfaces. Thematically, it shares with Stranger by the Lake or La Dolce Vita the fear that nothing is ever bleak enough to stop the party.

[Adam X]

I honestly feel like Gregg Araki’s films were the closest we had to Dennis Cooper’s writing on screen, until he started making films himself.

I really loved seeing Nowhere when it first came out, and was one of a handful of films that made me realise my cinematic tastes were in some ways drifting far away from what my friends were into at the time. That and finding I was really becoming interested in film as something to think more deeply about; something for more than just entertainment or a world to get lost in.