criterionforum.org

It's official : the Gaumont French BD is the same fiasco-disaster-shame than the Criterion BD (what a twist).

And Criterion also seems to have boosted the contrast or at least lowered the luminosity (another unexpected twist).

Which also means that any other release, whether it's Second Sight in the UK or anyone else, is going to look shit too unless a more conscientious and enterprising label decides to do their own resto and do it proper.

Mind, Second Sight did perform some additional cleanup on The Long Riders on the master provided from MGM but getting Madame de right would mean to have to start from scratch. Not sure Second Sight would have the budget for that or even be inclined to do their own work. As of now, they haven't even announced a BD for any of their Ophuls titles.

DVDTalk rates the Madame De Blu PQ 4.5 stars out of 5....

The same site that gave 5/5 on picture quality to Children of Paradise.

manicsounds wrote:DVDTalk rates the Madame De Blu PQ 4.5 stars out of 5....

Well, it doesn't look all that bad in their tiny screen captures. ;-}

HA, see, that's the problem, they forgot to put on the "Mastered for iPhone" logo on the front of the package.

Actually the DVDTalk review states that the screen shots are from the DVD version not the reviewed Blu Ray, no wonder they look decent.
What really makes me sad is that DVDTalk, Beaver, HFT and RAH have all given the disc stellar reviews, even though they all should know better, but either don't care or didn't bother to look properly. So what is the incentive for CC or anyone else to ever redo this and how much will the few folks on this forum who refuse to buy this travesty really impact sales?

This year's Gaumont release of Madame de... just got cancelled.

tenia wrote:This year's Gaumont release of Madame de... just got cancelled.

Is that official Is there a link to an announcement?
Wonder how Criterion feel about being palmed off with it?

M. Soulet announced it on DVDClassik.

Doesn't that post say the release has merely been postponed?

That's how I read it as well.

It says the scheduled release has been canceled and postponed to a date to be determined. Everybody's right!

Matt wrote:It says the scheduled release has been canceled and postponed to a date to be determined. Everybody's right!

I should have been more precised, but yes, it has been postponed without any new date.

This could get very interesting if Gaumont actually goes back and fixes it. (If that's even possible/practical.)

It's certainly possible. There would have to be an untouched digital scan of the film on which they can redo all of the digital restoration (more carefully and lightly this time around). And if they are unsatisfied with the restoration work that was originally performed (and they certainly ought to be), Gaumont should expect the work to be redone at minimal or no additional cost.

Matt wrote:It's certainly possible. There would have to be an untouched digital scan of the film on which they can redo all of the digital restoration (more carefully and lightly this time around). And if they are unsatisfied with the restoration work that was originally performed (and they certainly ought to be), Gaumont should expect the work to be redone at minimal or no additional cost.

Someone at Gaumont must have signed off on the digital restoration work. I expect they'll have to pay in full to redo it properly because of that.

After the CHILDREN IN PARADISE letdown, it's unfortunate that Criterion didn't bump the MADAME DE master back to Gaumont instead of upgrading it to Blu (particularly when pristine HD masters have been available for years for other upgrades (RIFIFI, FRENCH CANCAN, BOUDU, etc). They've dodged a number of bullets in the last year (PURPLE NOON and BAND OF OUTSIDERS) and ended up with superb results there, which makes these two slip-ups all the more noticeable and alarming.

It's almost certainly the forensic online post-mortem of the Criterion MADAME DE Blu-ray that has made Gaumont realise it was a digital dog's dinner.

EDIT: Deleted one accidentally repeated word.

it's a little concerning that reviews were not particularly damning. The screen caps on a small screen alone look pretty terrible, but how could you overlook it on a projector or larger screen?

peerpee wrote:It's almost certainly the forensic online post-mortem of the Criterion MADAME DE Blu-ray online that has made Gaumont realise it was a digital dog's dinner.

Not only, actually. The fact is that they allowed one DVD Classik forumer to see the BD-R / BD-T at Gaumont, and then to take it back home, do screencaps and post a sum-up of all this online. Reaction there has been overwhelmingly negative, so it's likely that this, on top of the awful grades the Criterion got in the English online test websites, made them change their minds about the release, with which they were quite confident at the beginning.

This confidence is, actually, what bothers me the most, because either Gaumont was happy with this awful result and thought everybody would be, or they never saw the finished result before the Criterion backlash. In both cases, it seems as major letdown from a process point of view.

Has Criterion ever done a recall/replacement for something like this? All the replacements I'm aware of were due to bugs in producing the disc, not because they accepted inferior elements.

Great news, I'm kind of amazed they did this (how often this happen exactly!?) and that we can hope for a better release at some point. While I prefer every other Ophuls I've seen over Madame de... I might purchase the future release simply because of this and give the film another chance. I hope it's a permanent step in the right direction. I've grown kind of fearful of french films on blu-ray, I waited a long time for definitive positive reviews on the Pialat films before getting them, and I guess the habit won't go away for a while.

Possible "Gladiator" Blu-ray replacement in the future would be nice.

edit: Pardon me, I should've said "Gladiator"-type Blu-ray replacement, with Universal and Paramount replacing the badly mastered old discs for customers.

..../...

manicsounds wrote:Possible "Gladiator" Blu-ray replacement in the future would be nice.

I can only assume this means you wish Criterion would replace every copy of Madame De... with a copy of Gladiator.

I'm pretty sure he means he hopes Criterion follows Paramount's lead in releasing an improved edition of Madame de... and offering an exchange program for those who already bought it, just as Paramount did for their originally blundered Gladiator release.