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Beaver

Spoiler: It looks unsurprisingly spectacular.

The return of the teal... Does anybody know if Bologna or Eclair was turning the color wheel? Who did the restauration? No mention of that in the Beaver review.

Oh, it's also a tad oversaturated, with bleeding reds and all... Why do people (colorists) think films should look so glow-in-the-dark these days? It's a little ridiculous.

I last saw it in 35mm, and the thing I most vividly remember were the heightened, far from naturalistic colours.

That looks pretty amazing. I was worried about the 200+ minutes of extras hurting the PQ, but it seems like that isn't an issue.

Well, it's one thing to have saturated, unnaturalistic colors or oversaturated ones that extinguish nuances and your video codec can't handle properly (usually reds, which need to be dialed down if you increase the saturation of your image to bring out more muted colors since they tend to bleed). As it is, the picture is way too "hot". It's beautiful, but it would be even nicer without the oversaturation. See also: LADY SNOWBLOOD.

dwk wrote:In-house job with Lee Kline working with cinematographer Shoji Ueda using "hundreds of Kurosawa’s original drawings from Dreams" as reference

They should've used fritz78 instead, as he's Takao Saito reincarnated.

Ít would have been my pleasure

The "tealing" is even more extreme than I initally thought, but funnily enough, I have to say that in the case of DREAMS it works better than the naturalistic color grading of the DVD. It has to be said, though, that this impression might be influenced by the bad-quality-SD-blow-up-screenshots in the comparison:

http://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?go=1&a=0& ... 95&i=9&l=0

http://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?d1=9251&d ... =9&l=0&a=1

As with Female Prisoner Scorpion and Lady Snowblood, this looks better than the previous editions.

The way Stephen Prince early in the commentary continually mentions how Dreams, Rhapsody in August and Madadayo thematically tie together makes me think he's recorded commentaries for upcoming releases of those films, too.

Haven't heard the commentary yet but it seems obvious that Kurosawa's final few works were connected in important ways creatively and that Criterion will keep releasing his works in a way we've come to expect (Dersu Uzala next?).

Mungo wrote:That looks pretty amazing. I was worried about the 200+ minutes of extras hurting the PQ, but it seems like that isn't an issue.

150 minutes of those are (unavoidably) SD, which probably helps.

Well, I watched some of the Lone Wolf & Cub and Criterion gave the Wild Side SD doc a higher bitrate than the movies so you never know...

Well, you do know in this case because the Beev makes it clear that the feature occupies 27 gigabytes. Which seems about right in terms of proportions - and it's quite a static film much of the time, so I imagine a bitrate of nearly 27Mbps is equally healthy.

Oh I know. I just meant that before having more info about the encode and the disc space handling, the fact that the documentary was SD wasnt enough to reassure people about the movie allocation.
If Criterion was always limiting the bandwidth of SD extras, that would have been enough but since it isnt the case...

Kinda loved this overall, the earnest sincerity of the stories becomes overwhelming after the Tunnel, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. There's a lot to unpack in the film, and one and a half viewings is not enough. The way the stories interlock in subtle ways to build a structure of an entire life's dreams is fascinating.

The dance of the dolls was really just a totally stunning experience.

movielocke wrote: The dance of the dolls was really just a totally stunning experience.

Indeed, it's what hit me the hardest when I saw the film in its original release, and again while viewing the Criterion disc. Pure elegant grace transcending words and underscoring the sadness of that sequence's ending.

Stephen Prince's commentary is as good as expected, though it was amusing after his pronouncing Van Gogh's name correctly several times, he slips once and says it the commonly mistaken way of "Van Go".

I haven't listened to it yet, but I assume he has botched the pronunciation of every single Japanese name or place name he could.

4K UHD upgrade coming in August.