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I thought the EWS blu looked great—certainly the best its ever looked on home video. Kubrick shot on a high speed film stock, and pushed it two stops, which is why it looks the way it does. Beautiful looking film if you ask me.

The Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures documentary is included on this disc as well, but in SD resolution (as originally produced).

What a complete failure. Seriously guys: don't buy this set. If you have to get A Clockwork Orange now, go ahead and double dip on that one, but hold out on the rest until Warner troubles itself to do this right. It's will drive me crazy to not get Barry Lyndon on Blu immediately, but if the alternative is supporting this lazy cash grab, I can wait.

What Tom said.

I really want Barry Lyndon and Lolita, but not like this. I might go for the new digibook of A Clockwork Orange if the transfer is a significant upgrade, but I'll be damned if I'm going to buy that box to get a horrible transfer of Spartacus, and six films that I already own on Blu-ray. Did anyone catch the note in the press release that the $75 set is bare-bones? All of the copious supplements from the original Warner releases are only included if you pony up for the $150 set. I can't tell if the supplements from Dr. Strangelove and Spartacus (non-Warner titles) are included in either set.

They'll surely release the two new titles eventually, and if I've waited this long, a few more months won't kill me. What an utter disappointment this turned out to be.

So this is what, the forth iteration of a Kubrick box that Warner has screwed up? Seriously? How hard can it be? I'm sure the transfers of Barry Lyndon and Lolita will be lazy ports of old masters à la Goodfellas and Amadeus, or worse, meticulous restorations that alter the look of the film like North by Northwest.

Seriously? The "Life In Pictures" doc was only produced in SD? Wasn't this thing shown theatrically at one point? Will they even bother making it anamorphic this time around (no luck last time)?

Sorry about all the rhetorical questions; here's a declarative statement: "I will not buy this set."

What's astonishing to me is how truly great Warner was in the halcyon days of DVD vs. how terrible they have been with Blu-ray. The Kubrick sets have always seemed to have had issues -- even apart from the circular debates over proper aspect ratios -- but their DVD production record as a whole was, as of five or six years ago, probably the best among the studios and nearly comparable with Criterion's.

Warner's archive releases (and I don't mean WARNER ARCHIVE COLLECTION) have retained a very high standard, although the quantity has dropped off to a dribble over the past five years. And, yes, this is not counting the Kubrick releases which never seem to go right.

However, starting in about 2004, all new films released on DVD by Warner suddenly started having severe compression artifact issues. Often, the first 10 - 15 minutes of a film would look like crap, then the image would slowly become respectable only to return to an artifact-laden mess for the last 10 minutes or so. I have to assume there was a change in quality control at this time (a new company used for encoding?), but it became very infuriating. THE DARK KNIGHT DVD release has an astonishingly bad picture-quality throughout. Was this an attempt to push the consumer towards Blu-ray? Maybe. I stopped buying new Warner product on DVD because of this, but have now gone back and purchased Blu-ray editions of some of the titles I bypassed. THE DARK KNIGHT, for example, is not superlative on Blu, but it's way beyond the DVD transfer...and it really shouldn't be.

So they're just going to release Lolita and Barry Lyndon as Bare Bones Blus? lame way to celebrate a Director's cannon.

Cover art for the boxset.

Yup, that says Barry London.

They might as well just hire some NYC street corner bootleggers and pirates to produce their future releases.

If The Shiming isn't included, I'll have to pass.

I believe the actual title is The Shinning.

Do you want to get sued?

Roger Ryan wrote: (...) I definitely want BARRY LYNDON and LOLITA on Blu-ray, so they better see individual releases! (...)

Here is hope!

greggster59 wrote:Talk about getting screwed. It's being reported that Barry Lyndon and Lolita will only be available in The Limited Edition Collection. Apart from A Clockwork Orange all of the films are the current transfers.

Update:

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/mytwocentsa190.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

"We've heard back from Warner Home Video about some of our questions, and here's what we've learned: The new A Clockwork Orange: 40th Anniversary Edition features the same HD master and lossless audio that were released previously on Blu-ray. Likewise, the audio on all of the other Blu-ray titles is the same as previously released. We have, however, learned that Lolita features 1.0 DTS-HD MA, while Barry Lyndon offers 5.1 DTS-HD MA. As for the possibility of Barry Lyndon and Lolita being released as BD singles in the U.S., so that fans who already own all the other Kubrick Blu-rays don't have to buy the whole box to get them, that's still unknown. However, it does look as if both films are being released as BD singles in Europe (France, Germany, Denmark) and elsewhere in May. So if the discs aren't Region-locked, you may be able to import them.

The same HD master, are you kidding me?

mfunk9786 wrote:The same HD master, are you kidding me?

Part of the problem with the Clockwork Orange transfer is the encode; VC1, banding and noise; so hopefully they will make this one MPEG and raise the bitrate somewhat

Looks like internet bitching might work after all: Amazon has individual BD releases of Barry Lyndon and Lolita available for pre-order. No release dates shown yet though.

swo17 wrote:Looks like internet bitching might work after all: Amazon has individual BD releases of Barry Lyndon and Lolita available for pre-order. No release dates shown yet though.

I love how the one bonus feature on BARRY LYNDON, the film's trailer, "may or may not be in high definition" according to the back cover!

Great news. It's just unfortunate that WB still can't manage to scrape anything resembling a special feature together for either. Hell, they couldn't even manage to scrape new covers together. Hopefully they weren't as lazy with the transfers.

I have to say I hope (though don't exactly expect) that they'll also release a new (read: anamorphic) Barry Lyndon DVD individually. Though I suppose if there's any film that's worth finally making the jump to blu for, it's Barry Lyndon.

DV-what?

DV-R. We are talking about WB, right?

Seriously, though, if you're not going to upgrade to Blu at this point, at the very least stop buying DVDs. It's just going to drive you nuts trying to replace them once you do inevitably upgrade.

The gift that keeps giving: Kubrick OAR on home video

BARRY LYNDON and LOLITA will be Amazon Exclusives, at least for a while. I haven't seen any trace of them yet on Amazon.ca, so maybe I'll have to order them from the US? Does anyone know if Amazon Exclusives usually extend to the Canadian site?