Mr. Bongo Films

[MichaelB]

As I said in the comments, this is pretty crappy by normal standards, but still a fairly huge improvement on The Adversary. The subtitles are burned in, but electronic this time, so they're completely readable throughout - albeit decidedly incomplete. My guess is that it's sourced from an old TV master.

[MichaelB]

I think we'd pretty much settled this already, but I can now confirm with 100% certainty (having just seen a new 35mm print projected) that The Hourglass Sanatorium is definitely 2.35:1, and that Mr Bongo's DVD is therefore cropped.

The grabs on this page suggests that the French edition is too - and there's every likelihood that they're both sourced from the same master anyway. I'm not aware of another edition.

[Yojimbo]

DVD Times on Two Daughters

I've just watched this now and would largely agree with the reviewer regarding the quality of the print.
As regards the film itself, 'The Postmaster' is for me by far the better of the two, and stands as one of Ray's finest works; 'Conclusion' has some wonderful scenes, and some nice comic touches to add to the usual humanism but, on the whole its rather unevenly paced

[menthymenthy]

I think we'd pretty much settled this already, but I can now confirm with 100% certainty (having just seen a new 35mm print projected) that The Hourglass Sanatorium is definitely 2.35:1, and that Mr Bongo's DVD is therefore cropped.

Wow, big statement. Having watched the film twice, the thought of it being cropped never entered my mind at all.

Let's hope the upcoming TVP release (if it happens anytime soon) rectifies that.

[Stefan Andersson]

MichaelB & dmk_world: if you want to, go to malavidafilms.com and look up their Has DVD releases. There are video excerpts for at least some of the titles. BALTHASAR KOBER looks pan & scan. Has´ 80s version of Hogg´s MEMOIRS OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER is good-looking and could be full scope, I´m not sure. I don´t think Malavida would put stretched footage online. Lionel at Malavida answered my e-mail upfront, there´s only a 1.78 master available of SANATORIUM (like KNIGHTS OF THE TEUTONIC ORDER and the Polish DVDS of Wajda´s POPIOLY and Hoffman´s Sienkiewicz movies, at least the first two ones and the TV version of FIRE & SWORD.)

Lionel usually answers e-mails promptly, in French. Last time he told me Malavida does their own restorations, or words to that effect. Don´t know how extensive the work is. Seems they fine tune subtitle translations also. Lionel also believes their restoration effort on MARKETA is better than Second Run,
but he didn´t elaborate on it.

OT: For reviews in French and screencaps from Malavida´s recent East European releases, check out the recent reviews at http://www.dvdrama.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. No Eng subs on DVDs.

OT: MichaelB, do you know if the Polish DVDs of the TV version of NOCE I DNIE are pan & scan from 65 or 35mm or full frame TV version? The movie seems interesting and some info on the net (sorry, lost the link) indicates separate versions were shot.

[zone_resident]

DVD Times on Ray's Goddess

[Jonathan S]

Can anyone comment on the Mr Bongo edition of Huston's Under the Volcano please? According to an Amazon review:

the picture 'ghosts' like crazy. Unless my copy was a faulty disc (I doubt it) this is the worst transfer of any film I've seen on DVD

Maybe another NTSC to PAL conversion? I'd buy the Bongo edition if it were a decent transfer but I don't like the film enough to pay three times more to import Criterion.

[MichaelB]

I remember it being perfectly watchable, though I watched it on an Oppo 983, which is outstandingly good at filtering out conversion nasties prior to upconverting to HD, so it might well look different on another setup.

Unfortunately, I can't check because I sold my copy - ironically via Amazon, despite that review!

[Cash Flagg]

Ray's The Stranger on 12/1. List price of £17.99 seems high for Mr. Bongo. First I thought it might be a 2-disc set, but Amazon says 1.

[Ben Cheshire]

OK, I have a checkdisc of The Saragossa Manuscript and...
It also appears to be native PAL, as I couldn't detect any telltale NTSC motion judder.

Try as I might, I could not get this looking good on my Aussie plasma. I appreciate Mr Bongo's distributing it, in that I was able to see it relatively cheaply, compared to what the OOP DVD was going for, and am glad it improves on the other issues MichaelB mentioned in the rest of his post on p2 of this thread; but PQ and AQ upscaled were definitely in the lower half of DVD quality. Great great film to be seen at all costs, though.

[Person]

OK, I have a checkdisc of The Saragossa Manuscript and...
It also appears to be native PAL, as I couldn't detect any telltale NTSC motion judder.

Try as I might, I could not get this looking good on my Aussie plasma. I appreciate Mr Bongo's distributing it, in that I was able to see it relatively cheaply, compared to what the OOP DVD was going for, and am glad it improves on the other issues MichaelB mentioned in the rest of his post on p2 of this thread; but PQ and AQ upscaled were definitely in the lower half of DVD quality. Great great film to be seen at all costs, though.

I have the Image Ent edition and the French edition (can't recall who distributes it). The former is cropped to 2.00:1 as the Bongo is. The French DVD is 2.35:1 and also has English subs. You might want to try the French edition if you can get it at a reasonable price, but frankly, it deserves a new HD transfer and Blu-ray edition... from Criterion, hopefully.

[Ben Cheshire]

OK, I have a checkdisc of The Saragossa Manuscript and...
It also appears to be native PAL, as I couldn't detect any telltale NTSC motion judder.

Try as I might, I could not get this looking good on my Aussie plasma. I appreciate Mr Bongo's distributing it, in that I was able to see it relatively cheaply, compared to what the OOP DVD was going for, and am glad it improves on the other issues MichaelB mentioned in the rest of his post on p2 of this thread; but PQ and AQ upscaled were definitely in the lower half of DVD quality. Great great film to be seen at all costs, though.

I have the Image Ent edition and the French edition (can't recall who distributes it). The former is cropped to 2.00:1 as the Bongo is. The French DVD is 2.35:1 and also has English subs. You might want to try the French edition if you can get it at a reasonable price, but frankly, it deserves a new HD transfer and Blu-ray edition... from Criterion, hopefully.

Who knows when that might happen... At least now I know I love the film and want it on blu ray...

[Cash Flagg]

From DVD Outsider:

Directed by Humberto Solás in Cuba in 1968, Lucia tells three stories of three periods of Cuban history, from the vantage point of three women, each called Lucia. Directed by the world famous Humberto Solas (Manuela, Simparele) this tri-partite feature melds Cuban revolutionary fervour with feminist and social politics, catapulting Solas into the international spotlight. Lucia will be released in March by Mr. Bongo.

Focusing on women from different classes – aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and peasantry - with each participating in the struggle for Cuba’s liberation, this two-an- half hour political allegory is segmented into three episodes, with each set in seminal historical periods during Cuba’s beleaguered history – the independence war against Spain, the Machado dictatorship and post-Revolution.

As each woman confronts the specific historical dilemmas - personal liberation in the face of class and sex discrimination and the decolonisation and reformation of Cuba - their stories provide an accurate and illuminating historical survey of an emergent national consciousness, leading up to and following the Revolution.

With a unique and stunning documentary style that insists on showing, rather than telling, the filmmaking itself bears testament to the struggle, detaching itself from imposed styles of Western filmmaking to become a pioneering piece of Latin American cinema. It is easy to see why critics site Lucia as a landmark in Cuban cinema, as well as the most important film in the nascent feminist cinema of the period.

Lucia will be released on UK DVD on 1st March 2010 by Mr. Bongo at the RRP of £12.99. No extras have been listed.

[zedz]

Lucia is a fantastic film, with three sections in three distinct styles (approximately Rocha, Visconti and - I dunno - Les Blank?), but I'd wait to hear what Mr Bongo's transfer is like before taking the plunge.

[Awesome Welles]

Lots of Bongo films £5.99 at HMV, now which ones weren't awful?

[MichaelB]

Company Limited is the best Mr Bongo Satyajit Ray release by a fair margin - it's the restored version with optional subtitles (a first), and while you still have to make a few allowances for dodgy Indian film preservation, when compared with the dreadful disc of The Adversary it's like night and day.

The Stranger is also not bad - much more recent film vintage means the print is in pretty good nick, and while the subtitles are compulsory they are at least electronically generated and clearly readable.

[perkizitore]

Company Limited isn't available from HMV.

[TMDaines]

Lots of Bongo films £5.99 at HMV, now which ones weren't awful?

They've all just gone up in price it seems. Most of the Italian releases were around £5.40-5.50 odd.

[MichaelB]

Company Limited isn't available from HMV.

It's not out yet: I've just reviewed it.

[MichaelB]

Lucia is a fantastic film, with three sections in three distinct styles (approximately Rocha, Visconti and - I dunno - Les Blank?), but I'd wait to hear what Mr Bongo's transfer is like before taking the plunge.

VHS quality, I'm afraid - in fact, I shouldn't be at all surprised if it was a VHS original blown up to anamorphic 1.66:1, with some obtrusive edge enhancement added along the way. I'm trying to find reliable info on the OAR (I think I can discount the IMDB's 1.78:1 as historically implausible), as some shots definitely look compositionally dodgy - but so much of the camerawork is handheld that this is hard to judge by eye. And the picture is so terrible that Humberto Solas' use of contrasting tones is near-impossible to appreciate - the deliberate overexposure of the nightmare flashes in the first episode just looks like a badly-processed source print, though from what I've read about the film I'm tempted to give this the benefit of the doubt.

I'm also very suspicious about the running time, which is exactly 159 minutes - but the Monthly Film Bulletin confirms that the UK release print was 14,490 feet, or exactly 161 minutes. A two-minute discrepancy is too little for PAL speedup (at that length it would be more like seven), and in any case there's ghosting evidence that this is a NTSC-PAL transfer - so where did the missing footage go? It's not as though the more graphic scenes (the nuns being stripped and gang raped) aren't present and correct. The BBFC provides no clues - it was presumably released uncut under club conditions in 1972, and if they don't have a problem with the rapes (which have clear contextual justification), I can't see what else would be an issue.

The one positive thing I can say is that the subtitles are optional and electronic, so it's ultimately better than an off-air VHS recording - but not much. And this is a final production copy, not an interim DVD-R.

[jsteffe]

There's also this NTSC edition from Zafra Video. It's non-anamorphic 1.66:1 and might be a different transfer, but I'm not sure whether it represents any kind of improvement over Mr. Bongo. It certainly should be stronger than it is.

Because of how it uses different stocks/photographic styles, this is exactly the kind of film which demands a great deal of care in the transfer. New Yorker Films used to rent it in 16mm, which is how I saw it originally.

[triodelover]

Dovzhenko's Earth in May. Supposedly fully restored with all deleted scenes.

[GaryC]

The BBFC provides no clues

Am I the only one to notice that almost none of Mr Bongo's releases have certificates listed on the BBFC website? In fact, if you search for "Mr Bongo" as a distributor, the only one that comes up is I am Cuba.

Two minutes of missing footage could be play-out music or an intermission card. (I'm guessing, as I haven't seen this particular film.)

[MichaelB]

I've long had suspicions about the bona fides of Mr Bongo's BBFC certificates - the box for Boccaccio '70 claims that it has an 18 certificate, which in no way it deserves by any stretch of the imagination. I'd say it's a 12 at most by today's standards - even in 1962, its X certificate would only have barred sixteen-year-olds.

[TMDaines]

Let's keep schtum. I'm not going to hate on a minor label avoiding the stupid red tape. What would happen if they were caught not submitting to the BBFC?