97 Do the Right Thing

[Dr Amicus]

Same here. It's 20 years since I saw it at the cinema, but I'm sure the DVD is closer than the Blu-Ray.

[Napier]

I might as well chime in also. I saw this at the Brattle a couple of years ago on a hot summer night after a Sox game. And the telecine has definitely been screwed with. I remember thinking how I loved the (hot) tint to the film.

[Antoine Doinel]

Wow, unbelievable. With the more "natural" coloring, the film loses a great deal of its impact.

[Napier]

Wow, unbelievable. With the more "natural" coloring, the film loses a great deal of its impact.

Exactly, from looking at the Beaver caps it could be December in NYC.

[Buttery Jeb]

Spike Lee is doing a signing on June 30th at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble in NYC to promote the new release. I was going to swing by and pick up a copy in order to see him (I need to replace my copy anyway); if I get a chance, I'll ask him about the transfer.

I know a few people on the board have corresponded with him or spoke to him in the past. Anyone thinking to drop him a line before then?

-BJ

[mteller]

Spike Lee is doing a signing on June 30th at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble in NYC to promote the new release. I was going to swing by and pick up a copy in order to see him (I need to replace my copy anyway); if I get a chance, I'll ask him about the transfer.

Please do, I'd love to know what he has to say. It utterly fucks up the movie IMO but I'd be interested to hear from the man himself if there's some justification for it.

[life_boy]

....if I get a chance, I'll ask him about the transfer.

You've got more courage than I would....

Different situation and context, obviously, but when Lee gave a lecture at the Savannah College of Art & Design back in '05, he got up and talked about politics and sports the whole time and when someone asked a question about the making of Do the Right Thing (during the Q&A), he made fun of the question by joking about lens selection and depth of field before saying something like "no one really cares about that stuff."

[Foam]

Moar lyke everyone stopped caring about him when he stopped caring. Seriously though, I'm not surprised, and I wouldn't be surprised if he were jerkish about this new transfer as well. He doesn't care. I mean look at Bamboozled for chrissake.

[manicsounds]

Maybe he wanted the 20th anniversary to take place in Spring.....

[domino harvey]

Only white people notice color tinting

[hearthesilence]

Only white people notice color tinting

I showed the dvdbeaver stills to someone who's a huge fan of the movie...he's got the Criterion set, and he says he heard Dickerson (POSSIBLY on Criterion's commentary, he can't remember) talk about the film and getting that exact look...he talks about it specific detail, about using filters, getting that brick wall to look the way it did, etc.

The one that REALLY got to him was these two:




You can't tell, but supposedly it was raining in this shot - they filmed him with a canopy over his head and aimed the camera at the sky. Dickerson had to make this shot look like a hot summer day (check the Criterion DVD, I think Dickerson talks specifically about this on the commentary). It is NOT supposed to look like a grey, cold, overcast day which is exactly how it looks now on the Blu-Ray disc...

I don't know if Lee asked for these changes or what, maybe they tried to 'fix' everything, but in the end they royally fucked it up.

[StevenJ0001]

Gary's Beaver review is, frankly, bizarre: he states that the color choice as represented on the Criterion was "intentional," but concludes by describing a Blu-ray which clearly misrepresents the creative intentions of the filmmakers to an alarming extent as "vastly superior" to the Criterion and "worthy of every digital library." His final words are: "Great job Universal!"

Unless he means "Great job screwing up the movie" I have to wonder how he reached this conclusion. :-k

[Antoine Doinel]

Sadly, his review isn't the only offering kudos to Universal's transfer. In the sampling of reviews I read, most of them praised the transfer as well including DVDTalk and BluRay.com.

[nsps]

Sadly, his review isn't the only offering kudos to Universal's transfer. In the sampling of reviews I read, most of them praised the transfer as well including DVDTalk and BluRay.com.

Yeah, every review I've seen is very complimentary, and one even mentioned the "warm summer colors" (!). My friend has started emailing the reviewers and trying to bring it to their attention.

[bearcuborg]

Only white people notice color tinting

Slam dunk, comic gold.

[Feego]

Sadly, his review isn't the only offering kudos to Universal's transfer. In the sampling of reviews I read, most of them praised the transfer as well including DVDTalk and BluRay.com.

Yeah, every review I've seen is very complimentary, and one even mentioned the "warm summer colors" (!). My friend has started emailing the reviewers and trying to bring it to their attention.

I actually contacted a reviewer at Slant Magazine, who stated in his review that the Blu-ray is a "worthy successor" to the Criterion. He said that he saw the Beaver comparison and frankly questions how they grab their screencaps, because comparing the two editions side by side, he did not see that radical a difference. In his review, he describes the colors as seeming "a touch deeper and more richly saturated."

[eljacko]

Has anyone in this thread complaining actually seen the dvd yet? I mean, I look at those pictures and I think "what the hell has gone on here" but at the same time, the people saying the film has "never looked better etc" have actually watched the blu-ray. Looking back a little, I see HerrShreck saw the transfer in a theater; was it noticeable to the point of fault?

That's not to say Universal royally failed at the transfer, but maybe it does actually look better in motion? It's a shame it seems nobody can upload video samples, even a small amount, to make the comparison a little easier to make.

[HerrSchreck]

I didn't see "the transfer" in a theater-- I saw the movie in the cinema upon its original theatrical release in NYC. A transfer by it's very nature is usually (but not always) not going to be seen in the cinema, because the cinema primarily-- though it is changing w the advent of digital projection-- projects the celluloid reels... whereas the transfer is just that-- a transfer of the image on the reels to digital storage.

In some cases transfers do track backwards onto celluloid-- a case in point being La regle de jeu and it's restoration by CC. Via digital cleanup, such a massive improvement was made upon the source materials that a print was struck from the digital master used for the dvd, and the neg of this no doubt superceded the existing composite materials that went into the initial telecine prior to digital manipulation. But the typical experience is-- particularly for arthouse films-- to see the reels that are used for, say, a CC DVD but without the removal of scratches and tears and cue blips, etc.. the MTI'ing etc that went into the DVD. You simply see the reels, following whatever (if any) photochem resto went into them, that represented the film as it looked prior to digital restoration.

As for seeing the film in motion and reserving judgement until then... that can have a huge effect on a lot of factors: interlacing, ghosting, the difference between HD & SD dvd's vis a vis film grain (case in point is apparently Wages of Fear), detail, contrast and motion etc. But color is color-- seeing an off color in freezeframe and seeing an off color in motion makes little difference. The palette is still off, and whether or not it is animated really isn't going to change the resident hues. As a matter of fact, I'd gather that restorers depend quite a bit on freeze frame in the digital suite (especially since color 'breathing'-- variegation in the response of the color film stock emulsion to light, temp, etc, notwithstanding a bigger issue for vintage films than those from the past 30 yrs-- appears when the film is in motion and can throw the eye off when comparing prints to one another) when correcting /restoring a print to its original schematic.

With modern(ish) stock a la Do The Right Thing, I'd imagine color breathing to be really minimal, so that there'd be little variegation detectable in motion. What you see in the caps I'd guess is not going to waver very much in motion. And if the color wobbles that significantly-- a la the difference between a tinted silent film and a pure b&w silent film-- then their "restoration" & telecine is even more of a disaster than it looks in the caps!

[Antoine Doinel]

Here are the screengrabs from BluRay.com which actually seem to show that Universal has kept the "yellow" push of the film. They are far less "cold" than the Beevs captures and makes me question just how accurate both his Criterion and Universal caps are to begin with. But yeah, I may just buy this to see for myself because none of these caps are really helping at all.

[HerrSchreck]

I dunno, they look about the same to me, though the Blu may be a speck more warm:

Beev "Love/Hate" bluray shot

Bluraydotcom "Love/Hate" shot

Beev Ossie w Beer blue shot

Bluraydotcom Ossie w beer Bluray shot

And compared to the beev caps for the CC the dif between them is equally huge.

[Napier]

The resolution of the Blu-ray is better. But I still prefer the CC image. The CC edition is closer to what I saw in the theater.

[hearthesilence]

Yeah, the bluray.com grabs look really close to dvdbeaver's grabs of the same disc - neither is nowhere near as warm as the criterion disc.

I'd like to hear the dp's view on both transfers...didn't some radio show interview the dp on "The French Connection" regarding that fiasco? Maybe that guy can contact Dickerson and get his view on record.

[HerrSchreck]

Just for the record when I say though the Blu may be a speck more warm I mean the caps in Bluraydotcom's review of the BD disc, not that the Uni BD version is warmer than the CC SD DVD.

[nsps]

Is anyone else getting nothing but an intro on the Beaver review page now? (Trying to compare the Blu-ray.com shots, and Schreck's links are redirecting to the front page now .)

[HerrSchreck]

Still works fine for me.