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Best possible viewing: massive screen in a restored 2000 seater Movie palace. Sound was fine (again, you need to factor in Altman's aesthetic here), and the film is obviously wonderful.

zedz wrote:Best possible viewing: massive screen in a restored 2000 seater Movie palace. Sound was fine (again, you need to factor in Altman's aesthetic here), and the film is obviously wonderful.

Thanks again zedz, you lucky pup.

i'm hoping that maybe Warner's will put the DCP out there for other festivals to screen, or even as a select theatrical re-release in the lead up to October. It would be beyond fine to see this first on the silver screen, prior to blu.

And the logo looks sweet ~

This is playing on TCM at midnight and is advertised as HD.

Kinney Leisure - what was once a New Jersey parking lot company, before merging with...a cleaning service. Crazy that they once owned Warner Bros. The only reason DC Comics is Warner property is because of them - they went on some strange buying spree that included DC and some talent agency, and apparently someone at the talent agency encouraged them to buy WB which was then in dire financial straits.

zedz wrote:Best possible viewing: massive screen in a restored 2000 seater Movie palace. Sound was fine (again, you need to factor in Altman's aesthetic here), and the film is obviously wonderful.

I just realized I missed an opportunity for cinema porn:

October 11th is the new street date.

Does the new restoration open with the original, rarely use "Kinney Shield" logo, or does it feature a modern WB shield?

The broadcast on TCM the other night really doesn't look like the 4k restoration.

Brianruns10 wrote:Does the new restoration open with the original, rarely use "Kinney Shield" logo, or does it feature a modern WB shield?

Yep. Kinney shield.

Drucker wrote:The broadcast on TCM the other night really doesn't look like the 4k restoration.

TCM showed it in HD at least as early as February 2015 (I still have it on my DVR). I don't think the 4K restoration was even done at that point. I assume WB did an older HD master and that's what TCM has.

Yes, and it also had the modern, standard WB logo, so can't make any comment on it.

One thing I do not see on this special feature list that the WB disc had: The French language mono track wasn't just a simple re-dub. It had alternate/extended takes of the music performed by a band that collaborated with Leonard Cohen, and Cohen himself if I remember correctly also sang the songs in French. Kind of a big thing to leave off. Not terribly important in the scheme of things, but man, it's something.

Got to see the DCP of this restoration over the weekend. I would agree with zedz's assessment for the most part. Don't expect any miracles with this restoration-- it sounds like the negative-flashing and soundtrack experimentation left the original elements damaged/muddled to an extent that it likely won't ever look "great" in the way we might consider other recent 4K restorations to look. The beginning especially, shot through so much rain and smoke and glass, is a bit of a hazy mess (though that may just have been because my expectations were highest at the opening).

It gets a lot better as the film goes on, and several scenes do look quite remarkable, but then there will be individual shots within those scenes that seem far grainier than the reverse shots--typically the darker/more poorly lit ones, which leads me to wonder if the film was pushed a couple stops to raise the visibility level. I was also disappointed to find that the snow effect had not been touched up at all, as it remains distracting and unconvincing at times, but for all I know this was also unfixable.

All told, I imagine this is as good as the film can ever look and it seems to be quite true to the original intentions of Zsigmond and Altman, but it doesn't look vastly different from before and isn't much of a revelation.

pzadvance wrote:I was also disappointed to find that the snow effect had not been touched up at all, as it remains distracting and unconvincing at times, but for all I know this was also unfixable.

I imagine trying to "fix" an optical effect that was poorly done more than 40 years ago would only make it look worse.

See also the notorious white dot in The Long Goodbye, almost certainly caused by dirt in the optical printer back in 1972 (to forestall pedants, that's when postproduction was carried out). Unfortunately, because it was printing a dissolve between two fairly lengthy shots, the blemish is onscreen for over half a minute.

But without the original elements, it's pretty much impossible to remove it - because the camera is moving constantly, a digital solution would at best only tone it down slightly, as matching the constantly varying grain patterns in a way that renders the alterations truly invisible would be a challenge and a half.

Not nearly as stupid and orange-and-teal-y as I had feared. The still on the Criterion website a few months ago looked like a Powell and Pressburger fantasy film. Doesn't really look like that either. Yummy, me want!

God, those colors. Warren Beatty looks like the Grinch in the first capture

Last month, DVD Savant posted a report from Gary Teetzel from this year's AMIA and it included this bit about the color of McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Later came a presentation by Criterion's Lee Kline on the remastering of Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller. They had been hoping to work on this with Vilmos Zsigmond, who had been dissatisfied with the way most prints looked and was eager to work with them on it. But Zsigmond passed away shortly after they had completed scanning the film. They started looking at prints for reference, but no two seemed to match, with several having downright odd color choices. With the ninth print, though, they hit pay dirt -- it was a print that Zsigmond had timed himself for a Polish film festival. That became their guide for the color.

That sounds pretty convincing, and is an impressive amount of effort to make sure they got this right.

Finally his dream of the film looking like the lenses of grocery store sunglasses has become a reality

I don't think the color timing on the Criterion looks awful, but I might prefer the more reddish hue of the old DVD. The Criterion is indeed a little TOO green... To me this is a film of washed-out browns and reds and blinding whites. But then again I've never seen a print of it. It seems like we may just have to trust Zsigmond and his Polish film fest print. At least it's not an obvious case of revisionism as with Mann's Thief.

Bummed about how ugly the grain looks with Criterion's usual lousy compression. Hopefully Arrow/MoC/BFI will pick it up? Great restoration otherwise, anyway, so this'll do for the time being.

So I have seen this on 35mm a couple of times, and the caps on DVDbeaver look very much like the prints I have seen. The DVD never did. The skin tones look very true in the captures. The green light is true to some of the falloff of the shadows in the backgrounds of some of the scenes. I don't see any problem with those screenshots.

alvareo wrote:Bummed about how ugly the grain looks with Criterion's usual lousy compression. Hopefully Arrow/MoC/BFI will pick it up? Great restoration otherwise, anyway, so this'll do for the time being.

As I predicted a few months back, people are going to complain and complain about the look of this film, which is the look of this film.