Shout! Factory / Scream Factory

[Finch]

Bearing in mind they just had a huge sale, I'm guessing it'll take Shout more than a week to ship sale orders. What have people's experiences with shipping from previous direct sales been like?

[swo17]

I placed several orders last week. One already arrived, another (the last one I placed) shipped today, and the rest (including the first one I placed) are still just sitting there

[Finch]

I placed mine last Wednesday. I might shoot them an email tomorrow.

[Murdoch]

My order, placed on 10/22, arrived on Monday.

[Finch]

They seem to be fulfilling them randomly because some people ordered days before Murdoch did and haven't had a shipping notice either. They gave me a shipping turnaround of 5 - 15 business days.

[Glowingwabbit]

Apologies if this was mentioned before, but Shout's quality control is garbage so definitely check discs for scratches and fingerprints. I just received the Ti Lung/David Chiang collection and have a few discs with these issues.

[Finch]

I've been lucky so far that I've not had scratches on any 4ks or BDs, either from Amazon or Shout direct, but with anything being pressed in the Mexican plant, it's a crapshoot whether you get a clean disc or not.

[therewillbeblus]

I've had a few 4Ks work initially and then start skipping on revisits despite being clean

[nicolas]

I’ve 150-200 scratched discs by now, most of them made by Vantiva Mexico and a couple from their Poland plant that supplies Studiocanal, Radiance and many other UK labels. Ironically, the majority of these work as they’re not so deep that they affect the data layers. It’s mostly those small hairline scratches you barely see that ruin a disc.

[Lowry_Sam]

I ve had a few discs run into glitches on first play lately. There does seem to be a drop in quality control, which is frustrating because in the days of mass production of blurays, I had much fewer problems. We were told that UHDs were an improvement over blu-rays for resisting scratches and longevity.

[Finch]

Orbit and Brother Belial have started to cancel most of the pre-orders for Hard Boiled since Shout hasn't produced enough units and seems to have sent each boutique store only a quarter of what they originally requested. Between that and letting one of the cofounders of their Hong Kong Classics line go, I'm glad Arrow were able to license the GP films before the current upheaval at Shout.

[dwk]

At the rate they are going, it wouldn't shock me if Shout is the first big boutique label to stop releasing physical media.

[Murdoch]

Interestingly, I contacted Shout about my Nightbreed UHD case not holding the discs well and asking for a replacement case (I think this may just be a general design flaw with the case though as there was nothing that I saw broken about it). They surprisingly just refunded me the full amount of my order, which I definitely did not ask for but am not opposed to either!

Edit: They notified me they no longer replace cases and they are sold out of replacement Nightbreed UHDs. Certainly a welcome workaround (going to have to test the discs though with all these playability complaints above).

[andyli]

Orbit and Brother Belial have started to cancel most of the pre-orders for Hard Boiled since Shout hasn't produced enough units and seems to have sent each boutique store only a quarter of what they originally requested. Between that and letting one of the cofounders of their Hong Kong Classics line go, I'm glad Arrow were able to license the GP films before the current upheaval at Shout.

Who is the cofounder they let go?

[Finch]

I don't know his name but he interviewed John Woo for the Shout releases. It wasn't Frank Djeng, that's for sure.

[tenia]

That's Adam Protextor. He was Physical Product Manager at Shout, and co-founded/directed their Hong Kong Cinema Classics brand.

[Finch]

Got a shipping notice from Shout for the three Shaw sets this morning. Hope everyone else's outstanding orders are on their way, too.

[Finch]

Also, the titles are available at GRUV Canada too which is great news for our friends on the sane side of the US/Canadian border.

And the Shout site exclusives are now going to be GRUV exclusives.

Bullet in the Head and Once A Thief listings already up at GRUV for January 6 and 27.



Bullet in the Head will include the Festival Cut with the alternate board room ending.





Also, Arcane: League of Legends for January 27

[willoneill]

Kinda weird that there hasn't been a statement from Shout themselves on this, no? And the e-mail I received last month about the end of their Physical Media Forever club certainly didn't imply that they were shutting down completely.

EDIT: received an e-mail form Shout themselves several hours later confirming this.

[feihong]

The disc of Hard Boiled looks beautiful, to my untrained eyes, at least. And the subtitles aren't so bad as on Peking Opera Blues. But I'm still pretty surprised they're so proud of the new translations for these releases that they tout them as a feature on the box. Hard Boiled isn't generally so witty a movie as Peking Opera Blues, but there's just an awkwardness to the new translation that makes the film more confusing and graceless-seeming than it ought to be. Just like in Peking Opera Blues, there's a lot of language choices which dampen the feeling a character is presenting or which muddles their previously pretty clear motivations. The fatalism of Mr. Hoi, for instance, is really rendered poorly, and the nihilism of the Johnny Wong character is soft-pedalled. A lot of the film's funny emphasis on the finality of gunplay (funny in the context of the superhuman gunbattles that fill the runtime) is muted in the new subs, too. Lines from previous translations like "give a cop a gun and he's a hero; give him two and he's god!" and "I wanted him, and I almost had him! But thanks to you, I'll never have him," are just omitted in favor of much more muted translation choices. There's some really weird translations for some exchanges. When Tequila tells his commander "if I'd had bullets in my gun I'd have killed a fellow cop tonight!" the commander tells him, "You're exaggerating." I'd think killing someone who was a cop or wasn't a cop couldn't really be a question of degrees––something you could, you know, exaggerate. Pang's answer ought to be "you're wrong," not "you're exaggerating." And later on, the owner of the jazz bar still tells Tequila in response to the photo of Ah Long, "If Pang tells you he's a triad, then he's a cop," which implies Pang has no problem lying to Tequila about who is or isn't undercover.

One of my favorite exchanges in the previous translations is when Tony is interrogating Little Mouse and he asks "if you didn't tell, how did the cops know about our raid?" "I wonder," Mouse says. "There are more cops than crooks in this gang." It's one of the rare cases where this script seems to have a little wit, and in the new translation Mouse says "It's all about money these days, not loyalty. Who can you trust?" Whoever these translators are, they seem allergic to humor, and they seem to really stuggle with how didactic the dialogue should be. I can't wait to see what they've done with The Killer, especially the scene where the cop and the crook give each other childhood nicknames. Honestly, some of these new phrases are so generic and inappropriate to the nature of the scene, that they seem like something ChatGPT would produce. I wonder if something like that is being used to generate solutions to translation challenges on the fly? The way scene-specific content gets edited out of these exchanges makes me a little paranoid something like that could be happening.

****Total Tangent****

I don't know if the new translation really brought this to the fore for me, but I've come to realize that in 30+ years I've never really understood the terms of the conflict in the police station scenes. I read an interview where John Woo said the film was inspired by the same rash of crimes depicted in Long Arm of the Law, and he really emphasizes there the way the cops' guns were outclassed by the firepower of the robbers coming over from the mainland, but the debate between different police methods seems really purely academic here. It's hard to get a fix on what positions are actually expressed, but I guess, adding up the various things Tequila wants over the course of several scenes, he seems to despise the idea of undercover work, and is advocating strongly for the cops to have more firepower in order to fight more heavily-armed crooks. He can, in fact, get that firepower from the armory, but his boss ties his hands. Superintendent Pang, conversely, wants to do, I guess, almost exclusively undercover work, in which he's happy to let his undercover guys kill almost anybody in pursuit of their goals, but he hates sending cops into these situations directly. In both instances, the motivating factor for their positions is this intense, almost physical revulsion at the idea of a cop killing another cop, but is there really much daylight between their positions on this? The debate seems to be settled when Johnny Wong decides to shame Tequila in an emasculating way, and everyone but Tequila decides it's better to risk their lives wasting Johnny than to see Tequila publicly humiliated. Or, in earlier translations, Tequila doesn't despise undercover cops so much as that he just wants to know who they are, and really, if he's a squad commander, there's a pretty good case for letting him know, at least when he's going into an action, . Also, this may just be me, but I don't quite get who is supposed to be the undercover cop in the teahouse shootout? I feel like the visual emphasis in the scene is clearly on Jun Kunimura's taut, humorless face, but seeing it in high-quality here, I think we see another character's picture in the undercover file, some guy who was...maybe at the teahouse shootout, but I don't know that I recognize him. It doesn't seem that, if Kunimura's character is the undercover, he would start the shootout at the teahouse, but who knows really, because the police as an organization seems super cool with Ah Long killing Mr. Hoi by his own hand, in the pursuit of Johnny. And I never really thought of this before, but Superintendent Pang actually shows up for the final showdown essentially "undercover" in a doctor's coat. It's like he's "all-in" for undercover work, at the expense of straightforward police confrontation. Theresa Woo has to scold him for not considering Tequila as important as his precious undercovers, which is just the weirdest climax to this whole confrontation. Then again, both Tequila's and Pang's methods seem to work pretty well in the film, for different purposes. Ah Long succeeds in wiping out Mr. Hoi's triad while undercover, and Tequila's methods break up Johnny Wong's group––in both cases with extreme prejudice, I suppose you'd say, and in both cases through strokes of dumb luck. The cops aren't arresting anybody in this movie. Recalling the bizarrely emphasized debate in the hospital over whether Ah Long shoots a cop during the final police action, it seems like the idea is that undercover work unleavened by straightforward cop tactics doesn't result in cop fatalities––that being the special category of death the film is more preoccupied with than any other (in that way more emphasis in dialogue and scenecraft is spent on cop deaths than criminal or civilian casualities). As if Ah Long had only remained undercover, he would never have shot that cop (of course, he's dressed as one of the villainous hospital security guards in this scene, so by this point he's sort of triple-under-cover). I know none of this really matters, and that the final shootout just kind of dispels all this conflict as fast and carefree as possible, but it is interesting to me how convoluted the text of the film's notional conflict is, given the relative clarity of the conflicts in most of Woo's movies. It's like they were reaching for the same level of interpersonal conflict/appreciation as the killer and the cop have in The Killer, but that relationship was based on a kind of shared appreciation for an extrasocial concept of identity and morality, and it was easy to appreciate the irony inherent in the premise. I don't think the same dichotomy can really exist between the cop cop and the undercover cop. They're part of the same team, but it's the film's very strained premise that they see themselves as being on different teams until the end.

[andyli]

I find the computer-generated credits at the beginning very jarring. And guess what they introduce at least one typo in the process.

[feihong]

It definitely felt as if something was off about the credits, but I guess I was ready to look past it. There are new title cards too, aren't there? I don't remember the title being on a black background. I've got to check the old Japanese blu ray.

[andyli]

The title has always been on a black background as far as I can tell (I've checked the old Criterion as well as the Dragon Dynasty). What's changed about it is that with the 4K restoration they've now got rid of the text animation, i.e. words do not fly into the screen from the center any more.

[Finch]

Unbelievable though shouldn't have been surprising after how City on Fire and Peking Opera Blues turned out. Shout had to have been hellbent on getting all of them out as soon as humanly possible for digital release. I wonder why they futzed with Hard Boiled's title cards though. Arrow must be wondering what else they have to fix for their releases with all the other films.

[andyli]

I wonder why they futzed with Hard Boiled's title cards though. Arrow must be wondering what else they have to fix for their releases with all the other films.

The simple explanation is that they didn't scan the negatives for the title/credit sequence. Ideally these should be scanned and overlaid on top of the scanned camera negative. One interesting example for this methodology is the Hong Kong edition of The Valiant Ones, where they scanned everything and went on to recreate the (undesirable) burnt-in subtitles throughout the film. Eureka was able to reverse this process by undoing the re-composition. Now what Shout should have done and what Arrow could do to remedy this mess is the exact opposite.