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Bleddyn Williams wrote:According to Shannon Nutt of DVD Talk, they've all been bumped...

Criterion has bumped the street dates on all November releases.

The Man Who Fell To Earth, Bottle Rocket, The Chungking Express and The Third Man now have a street date of 12/16

The Last Emperor has been bumped to 1/6

denti alligator wrote:

Bleddyn Williams wrote:According to Shannon Nutt of DVD Talk, they've all been bumped...

Criterion has bumped the street dates on all November releases.

The Man Who Fell To Earth, Bottle Rocket, The Chungking Express and The Third Man now have a street date of 12/16

The Last Emperor has been bumped to 1/6

The worst part about this is that I paid one flat shipping fee to Criterion for all three of these through their replacement plan on the grounds that they all ship together, when available. Now I'll have to wait an extra three weeks for Third Man and Man Who Fell to Earth. Sucks.

magicmarker wrote:Well, no one has seen any packaging. I suspect they did some test packages (maybe with the blu header thing), thought they looked awful and decided to go with a different design (Viridiana pink borders?).

marcus wrote:yeah, i guess i wasnt really thinking about how well element of crime would "sell". i just thought of all the criterion releases, the element of crime would be an obvious choice for blu-ray, because of the beutiful sepiatone look that element of crime has. which i imagine would look awesome in blu-ray on a big HD screen

...

i guess its just wishful thinking on my part. oh well.

Rich Malloy wrote:

marcus wrote:yeah, i guess i wasnt really thinking about how well element of crime would "sell". i just thought of all the criterion releases, the element of crime would be an obvious choice for blu-ray, because of the beutiful sepiatone look that element of crime has. which i imagine would look awesome in blu-ray on a big HD screen ...

i guess its just wishful thinking on my part. oh well.

More wishful thinking was my suggestion upthread of a "EUROPA" blu-ray. The SD-DVD will be released in early December, but no indication of a BD in the offing.

dx23 wrote:Blu-Ray.com has the first Criterion review, which for Chungking Express. The packaging doesn't look good at all. Fucking small digipacks!

Criterion releases first wave of Blu-ray titles
Packaging will not be traditional blue-colored boxes
By Laurence Lerman -- Video Business, 11/26/2008

NOV. 26 | The first wave of Blu-ray Disc titles from the prestigious Criterion Collection will finally be issued on Dec. 19, following delays from their original release dates set in October and November. As far as Criterion’s technical director Lee Kline is concerned, the wait will be well worth it.

“If our Blu-ray discs are going to come out, then they’d better look right,” Kline told VB. “We had to make sure that the compression was right, that the audio encoding was up to par. And we had to make sure that the discs played on all players, particularly the older generation models, as well as PlayStation” 3.

Kline, who has been Criterion’s technical director for the past 13 years, is naturally excited about the high-end label’s entry into the high-definition market. He also is quick to point out that Criterion has been in the high-def business for the past decade with its library of standard-definition releases, approximately 90% of which are remastered in high-def and then down-converted for a standard-def release, giving them “a more film-like look.”

“We pulled the high-def masters that we’ve done [for the films in the first wave of Blu-ray releases] and looked them over—and we haven’t had to go back to change anything,” Kline said. “All the technology we’ve taken to make these high-def masters are still fine.”

Titles included in this first wave include Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket, Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express, Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor and, most intriguingly, Carol Reed’s The Third Man, a 1949 film noir classic known for its Oscar-winning black-and-white cinematography by Robert Krasker. Kline said that he and his team are “really surprised” at the perception of black-and-white films such as The Third Man on DVD.

“Grain in black-and-white films is something that we think [DVD producers] have been trying to cover up, but we feel that grain is part of the original film, and we want to reproduce the film as it originally looked,” he said. “Now, we can calm it down a bit, but people who are expecting there to be no grain shouldn’t buy our DVDs—they should buy films that have been made over the past five years.”

In a notable packaging decision, Criterion’s Blu-ray discs will not be housed in the traditional blue-colored Blu-ray boxes that the major studios have adopted. Nor will they carry the Blu-ray Disc logo. Rather, the Criterion titles will carry a small credit on the back of the box indicating that the title is in the Blu-ray format, and there will be a blue sticker on the shrink wrap indicating the same. All the titles will be priced at approximately the same price point as their standard-def counterparts and include most of the same supplemental materials.

Criterion distributor Image Entertainment will make a noticeable initial push for the new Blu-ray titles in December and January. The releases will be highlighted on Amazon.com, and an AEC distributor “boutique” program will feature them on such retail Web sites as SamGoody.com, Blockbuster.com, Suncoast.com and CircuitCity.com, among others. Additionally, early January will see a Criterion Blu-ray sale at BestBuy.com.

According to Image, a group of bricks-and-mortar stores known for strong Criterion collections, such as Seattle’s Scarecrow Video, will support the product by doing special promotions and window displays devoted to the new line.

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