Just looked at the Raro site...

Apparently they have a couple of Mizoguchi titles coming out soon:

THE LOYAL 47 RONIN I & II
UTAMARO AND HIS FIVE WOMEN
WOMEN OF THE NIGHT

I did not see any release date. Anyone else around here have any additional information?

Any final verdicts on the older releases? I am very tempted to buy the following titles, but would like to make sure that it will not be an investment that I regret...

FASSBINDER BOX I
FASSBINDER BOX II
JODOROWSKY BOX (confirmation of EL TOPO aspect ratio?)
and the Nagisa Oshima discs

I can only answer for the Oshimas:

The following short review is from the Oshima thread:

http://www.criterionforum.org/forum/vie ... 5089#55089

Night and Fog:
Recommended for die-hard Oshima fans only.
Once again a non anamorphic, nonprogressive transfer from an analogue master w/ heavy combing and ghosting problems (especially severe in this case, for Oshima´s aesthetic main device were 360 degree lateral pans in this film). In addition the transfer is far too dark, due to contrast boosting..
Only plus of this release are the excellent engl. subs. With them, it now, is possible, for the first time, to follow the complicated relations between the characters.
12 page booklet is okay, but not great.

The same is true for Cruel Youth and Burial of the Sun: all suffer from bad analogue transfers. Save yr money until the real thing comes along.

Anyone got any of Raro's Godard discs? They have Prénom Carmen, plus a box of A bout de souffle, Le petit soldat and Made in USA, all with removable English subs. But are the transfers any good? They ain't cheap.

The CARMEN has a superb, full-frame image, a great bilingual booklet and about an hour of extras, also subtitled in English, including a 30-minute piece by Bertolucci. Far superior to the version of the film included in the Warner R2 Godard boxset.

Great, thanks! I'll pick it up as soon as poss. Any idea about the boxset?

And any word on when they're releasing Hail Mary? It's been in the works for a long time, seems like.

While it's still listed on their site as forthcoming, there's actually an Italian disc of this already available (Italian subs only). Presumably that means Raro won't be releasing it in the forseeable future.

New Yorker confirmed with me that they will be releasing this.

The R4 version is perfectly good, if you're in a hurry.

Shit. Picked up WILLIAM S BURROUGHS; THE CUT UP FILMS from these people yesterday. Made from VHS, and improperly coverted from NTSC-> PAL. It is literally a threat to your eyesight there is so much ghosting here. I had to have someone konk me inna back of the head with a dictionary to pop my eyeballs back into normal socket position as they tried to retreat back into my cerebrum and crouch hiding in my spinal fluid until the fucking thing ended.

Having all this stuff in one set is nice (having COMMISH OF SEWERS and the Brakhage as well on disc 2 be nice bonuses yes that's a given) but furchrissakes could they a put this out inna edition where my shirt wasn't soaked with eye fluid afterward? I'm still knocking over lamps & tables & people I'm so disoriented. Crossing the street this morning I saw a dude run over by a bus, and reaching under wheels to grasp him and get him someplace medical the dude & I kept missing each others hands like threading a needle.. couldn't do it.. finally he gasped through face fulla blood & teeth "Stay away from.. Raro Burroughs.. cutups.." and klunked dead in the street.

Prénom Carmen:

Beautiful! Ordering that one right away.

If you're ordering direct from Raro, they sometimes discount if you order more than one title. If you want a great quality second title, I recommend their Medea - exquisite transfer of a visually dazzling film. Here are some Beaver shots.

Just noticed that they have released von Trier's Medea, too. Has anyone seen that? It's unlikely to be worse than the Facets, of course.

I've seen the LvT version. It's interesting, shot on low quality video, which in the hands of Von Trier actually gives the image an interesting murky quality that is actually a pretty cool style, as a one-off. There is a lot of darkness in the film (interiors lit seemingly only by candlelight) so it has some of the same disorienting feel as The Element of Crime, though coming at it from a different (much lower budget) angle. The actual adaptation felt pretty by-the-numbers to me, despite LvT's claims of being in some sort of spiritual (and direct) contact with Dreyer. It's certainly worth seeing, but I'd just go with the Facets if that's cheaper, unless someone here has seen both and can compare. I don't think the film is ever going to look "great" and the Facets transfer seems to reflect that.

Finally got my hands on Raro's 3 DVD Godard set (all with removable English subs), and will post caps from all 3 over the next few days. Tonight, Made in USA (a port of the Studio Canal, it seems - did that have English subs?):

Le petit soldat:

No, but the Warner UK release (which also seems to have been based on the Canal version -- their logo is all over it) did.

Yeah, but according to the DVD Times review of the Warner UK set the subs were fixed, as were the ones on Pierrot le fou (whereas the Studio Canal release of that does have removable English subs). And the Warner UK version of Prénom Carmen was cropped to 1.66:1, which is clearly inappropriate (see cap of TV screen above). The Raro set also has the original trailers for all three films - the one for Made in USA is very funny. Anyway, hasn't the Warner UK set been deleted already?

Hard for me to see how cropping this a bit would be clearly inappropriate. The compositions in the UK Warner Prenom: Carmen look fine. though maybe 1.33:1 is better for this film. "Better" is, I guess, a question of taste. What Mr. Godard intended is something we should probably ask him.

We've gone over the issue of aspect ratio in late Godard a few times and the question is certainly more complex than those who say the films should all be 1.33:1 suggest. fwiw, I've seen every late Godard feature shown in the US and don't think I've ever seen one projected at 1.33:1. That said, 1.33:1 for my Hail Mary [r4au], Passion [r2fr], Detective [r2uk from Studio Canal], Prenom [r2it above], and Germany Year 90 Nine Zero [r2jp] all look fine to me. But they'd probably look great cropped a bit too. :) I think Keep Up Your Right [r1us] looks awful at 1.33:1, but maybe that's just me.

Suave qui peut [r2uk] and Nouvelle Vague [r2fr] look perfect at 1.66:1. So does Prenom [r2uk], iyam.

And Godard himself has said at least re some of these films that they should be projected at 1.66:1. [See this thread. And more discussion here.]

Yoshi, I was waiting for someone to call my bluff on the aspect ratio thing! Sure it's all subjective, and I'm aware of Godard's comments, and the oversimplification of saying all his "late" films should be shown at 1.33:1 (I'm pretty confident Week-end, Tout va bien and Sauve qui peut [la vie] were designed and shot at/for 1.66:1), but it seems to me that unlike other directors who shoot fullframe and then matte to, for example, 1.85:1, (eg Woody Allen), Godard's stuff (or the ones I've seen - which doesn't include Soigne ta droite or Nouvelle vague) looks better (to my eyes) at the most "open" ratio possible. When the Artificial Eye DVD of Sauve qui peut (la vie) came out, some people presumed that as it was 1.66:1 it had been cropped top and bottom from the "correct" 1.33:1 ratio - it turned out (see the AE thread) that the VHS version had been cropped at the sides from 1.66:1 to 1.33:1. The Warner UK DVD of Prénom Carmen is the opposite of this: a fullframe version exists, and has been matted to 1.66:1 by cutting off information from the top and bottom, inappropriately in my opinion, and I referenced the shot of the TV screen to try to give a specific example of a shot that "makes better sense" in an open framing.

I've watched countless films in cropped versions, on TV, VHS and DVD, and it's pretty rare that a great movie is entirely destroyed (the Criterion I pugni in tasca should be 1.66:1, not 1.85:1, but I'm sure it plays OK as is), but I still prefer to watch films in the right ratio. Adjudicating what that is can be tricky, and as David Hare has posted elsewhere, there are many films which are/were shot with multiple ratios in mind, so in some cases it's subjective. Nevertheless, my personal opinion and my personal experience is that Godard's films look better at the most open framing available, whether that be 1.33:1, 1.66:1 or 2.35:1.

so does anybody have the Raro El Topo/Holy Mountain twofer? how's the quality? are they the uncensored versions?

Don't have the Jodorowsky discs, but I hear they should be avoided. One of the films at least (can't remember which one) is a very poor, VHS quality transfer.

I have heard that El Topo has severe color problems and they both may be optically fogged to obscure genitals.

Some ambitious new releases from Raro, with the Rossellini probably the most eagerly anticipated: