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I don't have the MoC so I don't know what's in the booklet, but I'm guessing it includes his statement for the Directors' Fortnight, in which he actually expresses regret that the film wasn't commercial enough. In the book of interviews he did with Michael Berry, he also states that he'd become overconfident in his ability to handle non-professional actors and feels he didn't get a good performance out of Yang Lin. Hou doesn't come off to me as an exceptionally self-critical director, but he's also been open about his dissatisfaction with Good Men, Good Women, partly because of similar reservations about Annie Shizuka Inoh's performance.

He doesn't seem excessively self-critical, but of major directors he's notably modest and unpretentious.

Drucker wrote: Sun Oct 29, 2017 1:28 am Anyone else notice the distorted audio throughout the film? Blu-ray.com briefly mentions it, but it's very noticeable. If it's natural distortion that's baked into the materials, I understand, but just trying to make sure. The second scene at KFC, in particular, is very distorted with a weird echo when the whole group of people is laughing.

I watched the Eureka release with a friend last night and the audio was almost unbearable at parts, so bad we ended up pausing the movie while I double checking settings, pushed cables in a little tighter, etc. While I was doing that, my friend google reviews and found a few that mentioned the audio being poor. Hard to believe it's that poor, though. (And it sounds like the Region A Cohen release suffers the same problem, so it must be baked into the source...)

The image, however, is absolutely stunning. The depth in some of those night shots of the city streets is unbelievable.

This was my first Hou, and I liked it quite a bit. The adjectival drift, for lack of a better way to phrase it, is an interesting way to ground the film and emphasize the lead's sense of displacement without overplaying it. Very curious to see more.

Is it a post-dubbed film?

All Taiwanese films were post-synced until A City of Sadness.

Care to educate me regarding the significance of that for audio quality of restorations making their way to BD?


When I say the audio was bad, I don't mean "oh that was hard to understand." Rather I mean that there's distortion throughout. It sounded like my speakers were clipping or about to clip for any sound above the level of quiet conversation, and even then sibilants usually sounded distorted.

Perhaps I was so enchanted by how lovely the BluRay looked that I failed to notice aural problems....