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Summerslam2000 wrote:Dersu has a brilliant region 2 realease by Artifical Eye.Hopefully for people in the US Criterion will work from this DVD print which is in great condition.I feel its Kurosawa's best film.I hope Ran (with the optional english dub) and Dreams is included in this boxset.

Brilliant? The Artificial Eye DVD is absolutely terrible. It was one of the most disappointing and widely panned releases of its year.

Brilliant? The Artificial Eye DVD is absolutely terrible. It was one of the most disappointing and widely panned releases of its year

I'm not sure which edition the Australian dvd was sourced from , but it is the worst released dvd image I have viewed. I gave up after five minutes. Fortunately I had borrowed it from the library. I would have felt intense rage if I had paid for it.

This is from dvdtimes.co.uk....."Dersu Uzala is released in the UK by Artificial Eye. A port of the edition released by the Russian Film Council – Ruscico - the film is split over a 2-disc set, both discs are dual-layer disc in PAL format and not region encoded". I do have the Ruscico version and it is almost unwatachable becuase it has very bad shimmering problem. But the extras are excellent and worth buying it for that alone!

Of the AE edition, DVDTimes also says:

‘Although this edition is, unlike the Kino, at least anamorphic, the print used is still very poor quality indeed . . . the transfer seems to be derived from some low-quality degraded analogue master, exhibiting instead softness, ghosting, discolouration and noise reduction.’

And DVD Outsider on the same AE package:

‘To put it bluntly, the picture here falls a long, long way short of my hopes and even expectations . . . the biggest problem is a constant flickering of brightness and contrast (and sometimes colour) that at worst looks almost as if the film has been dropped in a damaging chemical before the transfer was made. . . The fact that it was released some years ago on laserdisc by Criterion and apparently far better condition only drives a spike into the wound.’

The Artificial Eye version is perfect it has an optional english dub as well. I dont think the picture is all that bad. BFI have released horrible transfers of Kurosawa movies. Dersu would like brilliant on Blu Ray. Is this Kurosawa set going to out on Blu Ray anytime soon?.

summerslam wrote:The Artificial Eye version is perfect it has an optional english dub as well.

Prefer your foreign films dubbed?

I thought we were supposed to get a big announcement on this one yesterday? Looking forward to it. I've been VERY SLOW with replacing my Criterion Laserdiscs and this is the perfect opportunity to get all my beloved Kurosawa films in one fell swoop. At roughly $11 a movie I can't resist. All I own on DVD are The Bad Sleep Well and the recently released Blu-Ray of Kagemusha. Would love to see a version of this box in Blu but the price would shoot up dramatically I'm sure. I'd be quite content to own the set and pick up the key titles on Blu as they're released. Was really hoping for Ran on Blu but Kagemusha will have to do for now.

From Home Theater Forum:

"Box/Packaging art not final."

I would hope they wouldn't decide to throw 25 films into a shoebox.

I was just going to say, I assume the art isn't final yet because they are still waiting on the license for usage of the Nike Swoosh.

Wow, it really is a shoebox! (for Shaq's sneakers of course)

The box is, of course, a sly reference to all of the characters in Kurosawa's films that wear shoes.

Oh... oh dear.

And they sure are keeping the Wacky Font thing alive with that bizarro AK. Flop that "A" around 90 degrees over onto its flat side and you've got a rough diagram of the skateboard ramp over in Riverside Park.

I actually like the packaging a lot more than I was expecting. I was fearing something like the 50 Years 50 Films box with the disks shipping prescratched in little pockets! Nice to see each disk gets it's own protective case. I suppose the fact each film is a single disc and there's no mention of extras other than the booklet we can expect bare-bones editions of everything. Still, I'm frantically trying to figure out how to cough up $300 without getting killed by my wife.

Oh, so you don't actually get Stephen Prince's book, The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa. You get a book with an introduction and notes by Stephen Prince, author of The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa.

Same double take here. Very pretty book, but it looks like it's just delivering three or four paragraphs of liner notes per film. And the brand new transfers are now just 'restored digital transfers' (the same ones already out?). The packaging looks nice enough, but this is really just the world's biggest Eclipse set.

The covers look pretty cool, at least from what I can see.

It comes to $16 a disc, which isn't much better than what I can do (save for the 3 films being released for the first time) with some patience in the Amazon Marketplace. Of course the box will go down, but still.

Well at least we got the entire AK filmography on DVD now.

aox wrote:It comes to $16 a disc, which isn't much better than what I can do (save for the 3 films being released for the first time) with some patience in the Amazon Marketplace. Of course the box will go down, but still.

You can't compare MSRP on one to bargain basement prices on the others. I'm sure that within six months of its release, there will be some 50% off Criterion sale that will bring this down to $200, or $8 a film.

oldsheperd wrote:The covers look pretty cool, at least from what I can see.

I agree. The box I don't like, but all the packaging on the movies themselves looks quite nice. Certainly not canceling my pre-order just yet.

http://www.criterion.com/boxsets/678" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

the link doesn't yet work but that showed up on the mainpage as AK100 under the coming soon section (of the main page), if you refresh the mainpage you'll see cover art for different Kurosawa films on the new releases section (of the main page) I saw Ikiru, Kagemush, I live in Fear and Yojimbo).

movielocke wrote:http://www.criterion.com/boxsets/678

the link doesn't yet work but that showed up on the mainpage as AK100 under the coming soon section (of the main page), if you refresh the mainpage you'll see cover art for different Kurosawa films on the new releases section (of the main page) I saw Ikiru, Kagemush, I live in Fear and Yojimbo).

They're all over the place if you keep refreshing - New Releases and Coming Soon - and the Eclipse covers for a couple are appearing too. I saw the AK100 cover for One Wonderful Sunday but the Eclipse covers for Scandal and The Idiot.

Appears they're back off again. Guess they realized they weren't being that sneaky putting them in the "other" tab.
That or they didn't feel like making the Sanshiro Sugata page yet.