criterionforum.org

Out of interest, since I dont have this yet, what is the provenance of the master/restoration? Not an Arrow exclusive I would imagine given it's an Academy release so where is it from?

According to the booklet, it was carried out by Technicolor in Rome, restored in 2K from original film elements. That's all it says.

What A Disgrace wrote:According to the booklet, it was carried out by Technicolor in Rome, restored in 2K from original film elements. That's all it says.

Thanks for that.

Blu-ray.com

Once again seems a rather unfair dismissal of a UK release's choice to have one of its principal features be (in this case very) substantive liner notes as lacking in bonus features. I'd go so far to say I think the booklet here is better than anything Criterion ever put out so far as comes to mind - Marcus' piece is just excellent in every regard.

The score for the picture quality is between 1 and 1.5 points too low as well.

For what it's worth (not much, it seems), I'm prouder of that booklet than I am of almost any other that I've overseen - and very grateful to Arrow for allowing me to push it to 44 pages (technically, I'm not supposed to exceed 40 on an Amaray release) and slightly reduce the normal point size in order to cram everything in. I think there's about 15,000 words in there all told.

Even more then the Borowczyk one? That's a pretty high call (unless you're discounting it as a straight up book).

The Borowczyk book was a joint effort. This one's all mine.

Do Blu-ray.com receive the complete package, including booklet, or do they just get a disc?

From the review:

Arrow's booklet details a new 2K restoration done for this release from unspecified "film elements".

Unfortunately, certain reviewers just don't regard booklets as an important part of the package, an attitude that's always seemed utterly insane to me, but there you go. Although it's quite telling that every reviewer I've come across with that attitude has been based in the US, where I think they have much less of a culture of high-quality booklets - whereas here we've got Arrow, the BFI, Eureka, Second Run and many others.

It's hard to recall just how revolutionary MoC's approach was a dozen years ago - back then, the BFI only did basic "liner notes", Arrow didn't even do that, and Second Run didn't exist. But it's always seemed blindingly obvious to me that some "extras" work better in print than they do on video - for instance, I tried to find a video piece with Francesco Rosi talking specifically about Three Brothers, but the best I could come up with was a French TV piece running about five minutes. Clearly, Michel Ciment's 4,000-word Sight & Sound interview was far meatier in terms of content (I'd say that the original must have run half an hour minimum, and most likely a fair bit longer), so it made much more sense to license that instead - not least because it was a lot cheaper.

That's why I now always make a point about at least detailing the content of a booklet so that people know what there is inside, but also try more and more systematically to leave a feedback about how the content is (quality wise).
I've been disappointed by some booklets lately because of how short or superficial they were but others were extremely good and deserved recognition.

It's a bit of a silly reason but another reason I also like booklets is for something to read on the train to work! Or in work breaks! (That is part of what made Criterion's use of those fold out multi-sheet pamphlets problematic though! They can occasionally be as difficult to deal with on a train as a broadsheet newspaper!) I suppose in some ways it works as free advertising too as fairly often I get asked about what I'm reading! I just have to make sure that I jump past any saucy pictures that may be in booklets whilst in public areas though!

That's also why I like written material : you're not stuck with needing a TV set and a DVD/BD player to go through this.

US version coming in April

If you want this and don’t have it, HamiltonBooks is currently selling this for the unbelievably low price of $3.95

Sounds interesting and many here seem to like it -- ordered! Thanks for the heads-up.