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med wrote:Could someone direct me to any in-depth English-language writing - either in print or online - on this phenomenal film? The Tony Rayns essay and introduction from this release whetted my appetite for more.

A good intro to/overview of his films

Currently have Soul Power, Profound Desires and Le Grand Jeu postcards but no Planete Sauvage This is worse than spine numbers.

I watched this, and for 80% of the runtime I thought it dragged a far bit, and apart from the visuals and sunning Blu-Ray transfer I wasn't getting much out of it - I could understand why it flopped theatrically. In the end though it became rewarding, only when it flashed forward did I realise just how rewarding it had been to sit through the lead up to the climax. It was good, but nothing incredible. My second Imamura only, after Vengeance is Mine. I have had Black Rain and his other films on Criterion on my "to see" list for ages now, I should get to them. I think I will get more out of his other films.

But fantastic work to Nick and MoC with this, such an obscure title and it looks gorgeous in HD!

Oh, and where's my %@#$% postcards!!

daniel p wrote:Oh, and where's my %@#$% postcards!!

The first rule of Postcard Club is that you do not talk about Postcard Club.

The second rule of Postcard Club is that you DO NOT talk about Postcard Club.

RossyG wrote:

daniel p wrote:Oh, and where's my %@#$% postcards!!

The first rule of Postcard Club is that you do not talk about Postcard Club.

The second rule of Postcard Club is that you DO NOT talk about Postcard Club.

Postcard Club...

Just got my copy of Gods yesterday, popped it into my player this morning. And gawsh, does it look lovely.
Sound is a whole other kettle of fish though. To all appearances, Imamura had his entire cast overdubbed by a a swarm of thespian bumblebees. All audio is incredibly high and brittle, reduced to an indecipherable if comic buzz, as if it had been sped up Alvin and the chipmunks style, though it hasn't, because everything's still in sync.
The question is, is this a fault in the disc or with my equipment? I use my Sony laptop running WinDVD BD as a player, with a maybe-maybe not legal copy of Any DVD HD running in the background to get past region encoding. I suspect the AnyDVD software may be the culprit, but then again I know very little about this sort of thing. Can anybody help clear this up for me?

Try downloading VLC instead and playing it with that to see if the problem is your AnyDVD HD.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but VLC doesn't have Blu-ray support yet.

Carry on...

FerdinandGriffon wrote:Just got my copy of Gods yesterday, popped it into my player this morning. And gawsh, does it look lovely.
Sound is a whole other kettle of fish though. To all appearances, Imamura had his entire cast overdubbed by a a swarm of thespian bumblebees. All audio is incredibly high and brittle, reduced to an indecipherable if comic buzz, as if it had been sped up Alvin and the chipmunks style, though it hasn't, because everything's still in sync.
The question is, is this a fault in the disc or with my equipment? I use my Sony laptop running WinDVD BD as a player, with a maybe-maybe not legal copy of Any DVD HD running in the background to get past region encoding. I suspect the AnyDVD software may be the culprit, but then again I know very little about this sort of thing. Can anybody help clear this up for me?

Well the obvious start for me would be to try and update (or: find later releases of) AnyDVD and WinDVD BD. If that doesn't work then I'm not sure.

PowerDVD 10 is much more recent than the latest edition of WinDVD.

And you can always find "a maybe-maybe not legal copy" of that too.

Maybe you could try this free little program instead of AnyDVDHD. It's been working great for me the last year or so.

Watched this night. Watched this last night -- what a gorgeous BRD!

Noticed what seemed to be echoes of both Woman of the Dunes and Tabu this time around -- neither of which I recall noticing before.

Here's a review by Jasper Sharp from Midnight Eye.

Michael Kerpan wrote: Noticed what seemed to be echoes of Tabu this time around

Glad I'm not alone. This felt like the definitive Imamura to me. Making the final word on what he had done before and in a weird doing the same for what would come later (of course the documentaries are a complete blank thing for me right now). Had they been switched around I would swear that Profound was an intentional expansion of Ballad in much the same way Intentions seems to be for Insect Woman. The scene toward the end when the father was getting junk thrown at him in the pit reminds me greatly of the daughter in law scene from Ballad. There's that same disturbing feeling that people are capable of this.
The one thing I found oddly missing from this film was that distant sense of Japaneseness preventing me as an American from fully understanding the essence. It wasn't until I watched the introduction that I realized Imamura was too busy making a puzzlebox for the lost Japanese to be bothered with alienating the west.

At the risk of sacrilege, has anyone compared the DVD version to the BD? I can't see financing the leap to region-free BD for at least a year or two, so I'm considering taking advantage of current sale prices and just buying the DVD... although I'm sure I'll eventually wind up double dipping.

Oh, the DVD's terrible. The BD's amazing.

peerpee wrote:Oh, the DVD's terrible. The BD's amazing.

Exactly what I thought.

peerpee wrote:Oh, the DVD's terrible. The BD's amazing.

Great publicity!

One can't accuse you of dishonesty, that's for sure.

Is the DVD NTSC or PAL?
Amazon.UK says it is PAL, the MoC site didn't state but I know they often work from NTSC with Japanese titles.

The DVD is NTSC to retain the same running time as the BD.

Amazon is usually wrong with format and region coding info, simply because it's default info that appears on all their titles.

October 24 for Dual Format upgrade, according to Amazon

peerpee wrote:Oh, the DVD's terrible. The BD's amazing.

LOL. Not wanting to question Nick's words (because I don't have the comparison in the first place), but as I have just finished watching the DVD, let me state that it simply looks gorgeous, probably among the very best transfers of a Japanese film of that vintage on DVD I've ever seen, and it's especially amazing if you consider the length of the film. Wonderfully vivid, detailed, unmanipulated image. Truly great work.

And I found the film fantastic, too, even though I needed to get over the first thirty minutes or so to begin to appreciate it. The Futori family is bewildering at first, if not downright appalling, but the longer the film went on, the more I got interested in what was going on, especially because of the completely non-judgemental view of the filmmaker which allows the viewer to become acquainted with those people and their deep relation to the land and the nature they live in, and in the end I really sympathized with the stubbornness with which Uma and Nekichi resist the change brought by the mainland influences. And the final sequence (before the "Five years later" epilogue, I mean) was pretty much of a knock-out in its ritualised strangeness and strong play on the emotions. It's a film of incredible visual beauty, and in its nature shots often enchanting and frightening at the same time.

This was my first Imamura, I have to confess, but it surely made me interested in seeing more from the director. Which film should I try next, then, if I liked this one?

I'd say The Ballad of Narayama. You really can't go wrong with that one. And how fortunate that it soon will be available on Blu Ray!