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MichaelB wrote:I'm sure they'll be releasing it eventually, but Revenge isn't in the first Criterion WCP box.

Derp,I saw it off of Hulu and so just conflated.

According to the WCF site, Limite is still being restored?

According to this page the resto was finished in 2007.

Dry Summer was pulled from the London Film Festival a few years ago, so been looking forward to this.

knives wrote:According to this page the resto was finished in 2007.

When I clicked on the film's actual page, it said restoration in progress at the very bottom. They probably haven't updated it then.

I just finished watching Revenge and was very disappointed by it. Though it's masterfully beautiful, the overall story reminded me of Hatfields & Maccoys where, at some point, people are just exercing revenge to exerce revenge. There is no real motive in it, and the transfer of this revenge from father to son felt awfully forced. I guess the filmmaker wanted to emphasise somehow how the child is paying for the debatable revenge obsession from his father but it's just felt silly.
"Son, you will avenge us."
"M'kay."

\:D/

Most of the movie felt as forced as this single sequence, with characters seeming to wander aimlessly from scene to scene.

tenia wrote:I just finished watching Revenge and was very disappointed by it. Though it's masterfully beautiful, the overall story reminded me of Hatfields & Maccoys where, at some point, people are just exercing revenge to exerce revenge. There is no real motive in it, and the transfer of this revenge from father to son felt awfully forced.

People are people and you are one of them. Revenge is a great film, I think.

Two things:

people are just exercing revenge to exerce revenge

Well, yes - that's the film's main moral point. Would you say that Hamlet is flawed because the central character is annoyingly indecisive?

the transfer of this revenge from father to son felt awfully forced.

But, again, that's the whole point of the film - that the son's tragedy is that

Spoiler

he's been specifically bred to exact revenge after his father's death, breeding that is so successful that he literally cannot do anything else that isn't completely focused on this central objective - as demonstrated by the leg-crossingly painful scene when he's bloodily unable to consummate his first proper sexual relationship.

MichaelB wrote:Well, yes - that's the film's main moral point. Would you say that Hamlet is flawed because the central character is annoyingly indecisive?

Except that in Hamlet case, the writing is fine enough to make it OK. Here, it didn't seem to be (IMO). It's all a question of subtlety, I guess.

MichaelB wrote:

the transfer of this revenge from father to son felt awfully forced.

But, again, that's the whole point of the film - that the son's tragedy is that

Spoiler

he's been specifically bred to exact revenge after his father's death, breeding that is so successful that he literally cannot do anything else that isn't completely focused on this central objective - as demonstrated by the leg-crossingly painful scene when he's bloodily unable to consummate his first proper sexual relationship.

Again, I know this, but it's just so one-track-minded that it just all seems silly in the end. It made me think of a Bruno Dumont movie, which isn't a compliment (for me) (but I guess it will be for other people). There's no fine psychology anymore, it's just all plain and dull cruelty, without any dimensionality.

The closest I could write to express my feelings would be : it made the film seeming flat and one-dimensional. It prefers to add a cryptic character rather than trying to have deeper main characters, the worse being when Jan passes by Caj's house, laughing at his wife. Why is he so bad, could we ask ? Well, just because. He's just plain ol' bad with no reason, to the point I thought it was like this just to justify the whole narrative of the movie.. In Halloween, Michael Myers is also like this. But we're not in a slasher movie and I expected characters to have at least a bit more depth than just this.
Why does Jan's wife is told that "she can be cured, but she has to do a lot of things, including taking the worst kind of man" ? Again : because.
And why does the children bully the old man and sets fire to small animals ? Well...

Everything serves the movie, but nothing serves its characters, dull and empty shells only there for making the point of the movie : revenge itself is bad, preventing people to live. What an epiphany.

But again, I have nothing with this per se. Lots of movies have talked about this old obsession story, and there's nothing against doing it again. But not by being so dull and needlessly cruel.

No character ever discuss this, they just plainly accept it like there is no discussion possible in their fate, especially Sungu, which plainly accept what he's told to do. There's no discussion about what he's born to do and what he could live, by himself, as if he has no freewill. It's the same for Jan's wife, she is told that she has to do this sacrifice, and she dully accepts, as if it's even useless to discuss the mere existence of an other possibility.

Watching the Criterion edition of "Touki Bouki", and with the many animal throat slitting and killing scenes in the movie, I wonder if they would fall under the BBFC scissors when Eureka releases their own edition of "Touki Bouki" on a future WCF boxset. But then again the sacrificial hacking of the ox in "Apocalypse Now" seemed to be fine, so who knows.

Clean kills are fine - it's explicit infliction of pain that causes problems.

That said, I've no idea how Dry Summer got through.

I would say those animals in Touki Bouki were in a boatload of pain. Lingering shots of the animal twitching and struggling when the neck spurts out a bucketload of blood, sounds more like an 80's slasher film I'm describing, but obviously these shots in Touki Bouki are real and not staged. Although they are real, they are done not just for the sake of film, but for food it seems.

manicsounds wrote:I would say those animals in Touki Bouki were in a boatload of pain. Lingering shots of the animal twitching and struggling when the neck spurts out a bucketload of blood, sounds more like an 80's slasher film I'm describing, but obviously these shots in Touki Bouki are real and not staged. Although they are real, they are done not just for the sake of film, but for food it seems.

If the infliction of pain wasn't carried out specifically for the film, that should be OK - that's one of the escape clauses. (I call this the David Attenborough defence, even though Sir David was still at school when the Animals Act was passed).

For a parallel example, see the kangaroo hunt in Wake in Fright - there's no doubt that it contains genuine animal cruelty, but the Australian equivalent of the RSPCA not only approved the footage but actually asked Ted Kotcheff to show more violent material, in order to draw attention to what was happening with or without the presence of his camera.

What are the odds of Edward Yang's A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY being released by you fine people?

MoC Twitter wrote:Of course we'd love to do it, but there are rights issues holding things up.

Considering the fact that last year A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY was supposedly confirmed as a future release for Criterion(this did happen right? I'm not imagining this?), I'm very curious to know what their response is. Perhaps new right issues have affected Criterion's distribution of this film as well.

If MoC is having trouble sorting out the rights issues, what are the odds that Criterion is currently facing the same problem?

This has been a rumored title ever since WCF restored it five years ago, but the rights issues have also been there for years. This latest comment from MoC is just indicating that the rights issues have still yet to be resolved.

There was also this

Minkin wrote:but thats an incredible price, makes me think it hasn't sold very well - (probably neither Criterion's nor MoC's). Shame on all of you who complain about Criterion/MoC not releasing obscure stuff and haven't bought the World Cinema sets (unless you're like me and waiting for the July BN sale ). I'm guessing this all probably doesn't bode too well for a volume 2 (cough, Naruse).

I would say that this is a different situation because, unlike Naruse, the World Cinema Project films have very little in common with each other. I think MoC would be being overly presumptuous if they projected sales of a set containing The Housemaid, Touki Bouki or A Brighter Summer Day on a set that contains three titles - great as though they are - that have a comparatively small following.

Given that most of the hard work has already been done on these titles and that they're a tough sell by design, I wonder if sales are really going to matter that much as far as the likelihood of there being future volumes. This is sort of a charity project for Scorsese, and he wants these films to reach as many people as possible.

Eight months after the first release and no sign of a volume two. I hope that's a minor blip and plans are still on course for two volumes a year.

Eureka's supposed to announce another new title within the next few days. Don't give your hopes up.

I won't.