Universal Catalog Titles on Blu

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swo17
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#76 Post by swo17 » Thu Feb 02, 2012 7:39 pm

Feego wrote:Blu-Ray.com
So even the guy who loves DNR thinks there is too much DNR here?

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aox
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#77 Post by aox » Thu Feb 02, 2012 8:23 pm

knives wrote:That depth of field is a true wonder.
Was it shot on a 7D?

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TMDaines
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#78 Post by TMDaines » Fri Feb 03, 2012 8:01 am

Looking forward to watching this for the first time on the Bluray. Glad I held off watching a shitty DVD earlier on in the term. Always interesting to see how classic German texts made the jump to Hollywood.
Bluray.com wrote:A couple of anomalies should be noted about this Universal release. First off, this is the first Universal release that I can remember, catalog or otherwise, that does not have a Main Menu. Instead the film simply starts and you must press the Pop-Up Menu to get other choices. Also, the disc I received did not load the Chapters Menu properly. Pressing Chapters did bring up a supposed Chapters submenu, but there was nothing there, i.e., no still frames of chapters to choose, simply the heading "Chapters". It is still possible to toggle through the chapters by pressing the Skip Ahead button on your remote.
Why?!

stroszeck
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#79 Post by stroszeck » Fri Feb 03, 2012 9:47 am

This is all great news actually...now we can look forward to a Streets of Fire Blu in September! yay :)

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The Narrator Returns
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#80 Post by The Narrator Returns » Wed Feb 22, 2012 9:06 pm

DVDBeaver on The Deer Hunter

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aox
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#81 Post by aox » Thu Feb 23, 2012 10:01 am

For once, Universal didn't screw up a catalog title?

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Finch
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#82 Post by Finch » Thu Feb 23, 2012 4:19 pm

Disagree with Gary: the Deer Hunter disc doesn't look as bad as some of their other titles but compared to the Studio Canal Blu, the Universal still has that "waxfigures look". Look at the rocks DeNiro is standing on; the SC shows more texture.

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aox
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#83 Post by aox » Thu Feb 23, 2012 5:45 pm

Finch wrote:Disagree with Gary: the Deer Hunter disc doesn't look as bad as some of their other titles but compared to the Studio Canal Blu, the Universal still has that "waxfigures look". Look at the rocks DeNiro is standing on; the SC shows more texture.
You have an excellent eye. I did not notice that. Question for you: if these weren't side by side, would you have noticed the rocks if only presented with the Universal screengrab?

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Finch
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#84 Post by Finch » Fri Feb 24, 2012 5:57 am

Hand on heart: without the comparison, it'd have been more difficult to tell although even without the SC reference, I'd still have thought that the characters look a bit waxy on the Universal and that it doesn't show as much as grain as it should (the next screenshot of DeNiro talking to another character looks too clean and polished, even on its own).

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aox
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#85 Post by aox » Sat Feb 25, 2012 2:29 am


rwaits
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#86 Post by rwaits » Sun Feb 26, 2012 6:35 pm

This Universal centennial campaign is becoming incredibly disappointing. I'm tired of waiting for a region 1 release of this film. Looks like the Studio Canal is no longer available... does the Optimum disc use the SC transfer?

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eerik
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#87 Post by eerik » Sun Feb 26, 2012 8:38 pm

Optimum is/was Studiocanal.

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kinjitsu
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#88 Post by kinjitsu » Thu Mar 01, 2012 1:14 pm

Blu-ray.com on The Deer Hunter

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Finch
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#89 Post by Finch » Thu Mar 01, 2012 1:43 pm

They always seem to give the Universal discs to the one reviewer who seems most forgiving of too much DNR application.

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aox
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#90 Post by aox » Tue Mar 06, 2012 4:06 pm

I just got the Deer Hunter BD today and have watched the first hour.

My question though is dealing with the types of cameras they used and depth of field. The DOF in this film strikes me as odd. The background isn't so much out of focus (as it should be), but gives the appearance of being artificially smeared as if done in post (which I know wasn't done here). Did they use cheap cameras to shoot this? The DOF in many shots looks unnatural to me.

stwrt
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#91 Post by stwrt » Wed Mar 07, 2012 6:19 am

Present on all home video releases, The Deer Hunter still has that weird lighting thing going on at 11 minutes, where the bridesmaids are running over-laden with presents, there's a lighting glitch with ghosting on their white slips, leaving a trail behind them. It must be burnt into the master - even the DNR couldn't get rid of that !

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Dylan
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#92 Post by Dylan » Wed Mar 07, 2012 1:15 pm

It was shot by the great Vilmos Zisgmond, and every film lensed by him in the seventies had a very distinctive look - extremely wide, faded, careening camera, and (like the DOF you point out) numerous unexpected and subtly experimental choices for a drama, giving many of these films a slightly distorted mirror of reality. One of his techniques - usually employed somewhere in all of his seventies work - was to flash the negative. If you look at McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Images, Deliverance, Scarecrow, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Obsession, The Sugarland Express, The Deer Hunter, and Blow Out, that's one of the most characteristic bodies of work any cinematographer has had - you can tell in a second who shot them just by looking at a few frames. Then by the time we get to the film where this style reached its apex in every conceivable way, Heaven's Gate, it was met with such disdain (with reviewers such as Roger Ebert attacking the visual look, saying that it looked like looking through a dirty windshield or something - people said the same thing about McCabe a decade earlier, but that was a well-received film) that every subsequent film Zisgmond shot looks nothing to me like the style he'd spent an entire decade developing (with several different directors). He abandoned it and moved on to shooting things straight after bad reviews, and he never went back.

But, circling back to your observation, I don't know what kind of techniques were used for that effect in The Deer Hunter you described (also important to note that while I think this is a great film, I haven't seen it in about nine years, but I think I know what you're talking about and it's in other movies he shot) I would estimate that the DOF was a completely intentional creative choice, as there are a few visually audacious (but subtle, again in my opinion) choices throughout the film and indeed in everything he shot in the seventies.

That said, my favorite work from Zsigmond is probably in Images and Obsession, in both cases because the reality in each narrative just goes completely out the window and his creative choices were obviously embraced (fog filters, weird lenses, split diopter, spiraling camera, lots of in-and-out of focus shots, interesting distortion techniques, etc.). But his greatest work is in Heaven's Gate, hands down - the roller skating scene? One of cinema's highlights for me.
Last edited by Dylan on Wed Mar 07, 2012 9:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

stroszeck
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#93 Post by stroszeck » Wed Mar 07, 2012 7:50 pm

I share the same sentiment that Dylan does. I really am a huge fan of that early, faded, "otherworldly" Zsigmond photography. I think something happened with his work, particularly after Heaven's Gate that basically made him, more or less, rethink his approach to saturation, to color, to filters, even to light. Those movies he lensed are just so incredibly audacious in that they attempt to literally transport the viewer back in time, an approach that for the longest time was done with simple black and white photography once color came into the picture (the other major picture of the era I can think of right now which used a different approach was the Godfather Part 2 and its dark amber/sepia tones). With the exception of Blow Out, the films he worked on right after HG were very safe, unusual studio pictures (anyone remember Jinxed!?). Thats why I think many of us cherish those early hollywood films, because you can see on the screen that Zsigmond saw the world through a different kaleidoscope and there's a solemn, melancholy nostalgia to those movies, peaking with the works he did with Cimino.
But this doesnt exactly explain whatever ghosting stwrt saw, and I can't judge because my copy of the goddamn movie has been delayed by amazon... :roll:

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Gregory
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#94 Post by Gregory » Wed Mar 07, 2012 7:58 pm

Wouldn't the StudioCanal/Optimum be pretty much a no-brainer? The comparisons seem to show that it's sharper, and it's Region A+B and currently only £6.29.

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Dylan
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#95 Post by Dylan » Wed Mar 07, 2012 9:01 pm

I think something happened with his work, particularly after Heaven's Gate that basically made him, more or less, rethink his approach to saturation, to color, to filters, even to light.
He definitely lent an idiosyncratic East European visual interpretation to the early works. What's amazing is how consistently "Zsigmond" they all look considering how incredibly different each of the directors are - I think each of them (Spielberg, De Palma, Altman, Cimino) knew they were working with a genius who was moving cinematography into a place it hadn't been before, so they gave him a lot of creative freedom.

Zsigmond has said numerous times in interviews that he developed depression after the failure of Heaven's Gate and the incessant pans of his and Cimino's work. Although Blow Out was released the same year (1981), it was shot while Heaven's Gate was being edited so that's why it still looks like the old Zsigmond. By the time subsequent projects came around the finished products no longer had his "stamp" and indeed nothing since (that I've seen, which is a lot) looks anything like his seventies work. It was probably a combination of him changing and all of these directors going to different cinematographers and the new directors calling something more workman-like from him. And once he worked with one of them again, De Palma, the old style didn't come back - The Black Dahlia, for example, looks like it owes a lot more to Janusz Kaminski's work for Spielberg than anything Zsigmond did with De Palma in the past (lots of artificial white light and some digital post-production coloring).

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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#96 Post by stroszeck » Thu Mar 08, 2012 12:57 am

That digital post production that you talk about has been the absolute bane of my existence for the last decade or so...it just looks so murky and artificial and yet everyone laps it u as new and inventive.

stwrt
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#97 Post by stwrt » Thu Mar 08, 2012 5:53 am

Agree with the comments on Vilmos post-HG, though the black and white sequences in Black Dahlia looked beautiful in the cinema.

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The Narrator Returns
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#98 Post by The Narrator Returns » Sat Mar 10, 2012 10:03 am

Blu-Ray.com reviews Parenthood Blu-Ray

Apparently, the reviewer has been reading this thread.

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domino harvey
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#99 Post by domino harvey » Sat Mar 10, 2012 10:23 am

Considering Parenthood isn't even available in a non-P+S version, anything would be an improvement

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mfunk9786
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Re: Universal Catalog Titles

#100 Post by mfunk9786 » Sat Mar 10, 2012 11:02 am

I felt the same way when From Dusk 'Til Dawn came to Blu... hey, at least it's finally anamorphic!

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