Shout! Factory / Scream Factory

[Finch]

Thank you for clarifying, andyli. Appreciate it!

[dwk]

...
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.
...

It is funny you mentioned AI, because the person credited in the booklet for the Hard Boiled subtitle translation is Tim Wong. There is a Tim Wong that founded something called CantoSub AI. No idea if they are the same person.

[ftsoh]

I watched Swordsman I and II on the Criterion Channel. The end credits of Swordsman II does not feel right to me either. Doesn't have that feel with Swordsman I though.

[feihong]

It is funny you mentioned AI, because the person credited in the booklet for the Hard Boiled subtitle translation is Tim Wong. There is a Tim Wong that founded something called CantoSub AI. No idea if they are the same person.

That might save them money paying an actual person to do this, I guess? Or production time? Now I'm wondering if the old subtitles are just entered into this CantoSub AI and they're spat back out slightly modified to take out the flavor. I've seen ChatGPT paraphrase content in exactly this way. Tim Wong's bio is all about how he uses CantoSub AI in his video content creation, so it seems possible Shout Factory has hired him to plug these subtitles into AI for them?

I suppose they would have had to license the previous subtitles, but I wish they had just done that instead of tried to redo all the aspects of the subs that were already working.

[nicolas]

Nightcrawler 4K upcoming

[JamesF]

It is funny you mentioned AI, because the person credited in the booklet for the Hard Boiled subtitle translation is Tim Wong. There is a Tim Wong that founded something called CantoSub AI. No idea if they are the same person.

I don't think they are, no - the Tim Wong who translates for Shout and Eureka (part of the Irongod2112 crew) lives near London, whereas the app inventor lives in Hong Kong.

(No word from me on what Arrow may or may not be doing to address some of the issues discussed in this thread, just know they've been heard.)

[Finch]

Glad to hear reassurances on that front, James! Not that it ever was in doubt but welcome just the same!

[dwk]

Thanks for that info James. Still, given the complaints, it is a pretty funny coincidence

[Finch]

Started the Ti Lung & David Chiang set tonight and was mostly on board with Have Sword Will Travel until the protracted finale where one of the two heroes sustains a fatal wound that would have killed most other characters instantly and he not only flights on to kill the villain and a bunch of particularly dirty-playing henchmen but descends the tower and has a farewell scene that thanks to Cheh's slow motion use drags on for several minutes. I can suspend disbelief but when you take forever to close your movie, then it diminishes the entire experience in retrospect for me. One of the two stars is also saddled with the thankless role of the sulking, jealous boyfriend of the mutual love interest. Lung and Chiang are among my two favorite Shaw stars but on first viewing, Have Sword Will Travel wasn't a standout film for either actor or Cheh for me.

[JamesF]

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.

Was just re-reading this post and wanted to point out that both of these examples ("Give the guy a gun and he's Superman; give him two, and he's God" and "I wanted him alive though, and I nearly had him! And thanks to you, I'll never have him!") are actually from the English dub. Some previous video releases of the film (specifically the Dragon Dynasty edition) have had dubtitles rather than a proper translation, but no version of the film I've watched with an actual translation, be it the Tartan CE DVD, the Hong Kong Rescue Blu-ray, the Shout UHD, or even the hardsubbed Taiwanese print, has anything like this dialogue because it's not what's being spoken in the original soundtrack. So just to set your expectations accordingly at this early stage, you also won't see those lines in the subtitles on the Arrow disc either.

[Stefan Andersson]

Details on A Better Tomorrow II workprint:
https://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=246410

[Finch]

The Big Heat (1988) and Prison on Fire 1+2 4ks coming on February 10th and 24th

For March so far: Flintstones, Outbreak, Little Nicky and the Swordsman trilogy with Jet Li (all 4K)

[yoloswegmaster]

The Big Heat is a weird one since the action is fantastically done and the gruesomeness sets it apart from other HK action titles from the same time period, but the film itself is just so forgettable. I've seen it twice, including a rewatch earlier this year, and I can't even remember what the film is about. It also doesn't help with having Waise Lee in the lead role, as he's just wooden and stiff, while Joey Wong is completely underutilized and wasted in a empty role.

[beamish14]

The Big Heat is a weird one since the action is fantastically done and the gruesomeness sets it apart from other HK action titles from the same time period, but the film itself is just so forgettable. I've seen it twice, including a rewatch from earlier this year, and I can't even remember what the film is about. It also doesn't help with having Waise Lee in the lead role, as he's just wooden and stiff, while Joey Wong is completely underutilized and wasted in a empty role.

I don’t know, I think The Big Heat is probably the most Freudian HK action film I’ve ever seen, with some really explicit gun/male deficiency parallels. Really entertaining to boot, and it shows how To would mature into one of the truly great filmmakers

[Mr Sausage]

I think it’s obvious The Big Heat was helmed by four different directors. It feels cobbled together, like Tsui Hark kept changing his mind on what it was supposed to be and then hiring a new director to film each new vision. The thing’s inconsistent in terms of pace, tone, and style. The only thing that distinguishes it is the extreme violence, as tho’ Tsui wanted to one-up his former partner, John Woo, by throwing in as much mean spirited carnage as he could. I’m surprised it’s getting this kind of push over better and more famous films.

[yoloswegmaster]

I'm still holding out hope that we see a release of Tiger on the Beat and School on Fire soon.

[Mr Sausage]

School on Fire is at the top of my list, too. Hope they can include the uncut version.

Incidentally just noticed today that the three Swordsman films are up on Tubi from Shout. Not a fan of the first one, but the other two are wild queer fantasy action films. The third one has some As You Like It levels of gender performativity, with Joey Wong playing a woman who’s pretending to be a man who’s transformed into a woman (while romancing the very man who’s transformed into a woman that she’s pretending to be!). Not sure it hangs together as a story, but everyone is something other in that crazy thing.

[Finch]

The Big Heat is certainly not one to recommend to ryan to dip his toes into. Like yolos, outside of the violence, I don't remember much about the film itself. Prison on Fire (not seen the second one yet) isn't my favorite Ringo Lam but I might get it eventually (from Arrow). The cover for PoF1+2 is terrible by the way in capturing the cast's likenesses; I have no idea who on that cover Chow Yun-Fat is supposed to be, but Shout have form in this with the Ti Lung & David Chiang cover.

[kekid]

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.

Is there any reason to keep Criterion DVD's of "Hard Boiled" and "Killer" if one gets the Shout! 4K versions?

[feihong]

Maybe others will know better. If I get good picture quality, I usually don't complain much. I brought up the subtitles because the subs on Peking Opera Blues were pretty bad quality, and I wanted to confirm with people here that what I was reading on the disc subs wasn't really a better translation than past versions. It sounds like people generally agree the Peking Opera Blues subs are not great, but that the issues I thought might be continuing on the Hard Boiled disc were my misconception this time and people don't have issues with the Hard Boiled subs (I can only read the text and wonder if it's right, so I'm really just looking for more informed opinions here). I liked the presentation a lot, so I'm not going to be looking back at previous editions of the movie unless I hear there's something notably wrong.

[Finch]

Here's what Dylan had to say about the POB subtitles on blusky:

My main issues with City on Fire's subs were tonal, but Peking Opera Blue's are an absolute mess. Whoever did them doesn't understand the language, some lines even having the exact opposite meaning, and they're also completely unfamiliar with the history so it's full of made-up references.

The strangest mistranslation though was how the police are now ticket inspectors. I don't even know how you reach that conclusion. The archaic term used could be misunderstood to mean customs officers if anything, and that would still make more sense than ticket inspectors.

I think thornycroft already quoted him in Arrow's POB thread but it bears repeating here.

[Peacock]

There’s a lot of intense talk about the Shout subtitles of these recently acquired titles, and that’s a good thing as James F is clearly listening.

But I’ve noticed this affecting some Hong Kong titles in the past from older 88 releases as well, I’ll need to pull out the discs to see who the translator/s was/were. Cantonese must be a tricky one to find people who can accurately translate without it sounding awkward.

[yoloswegmaster]

Full list of extras for Prison on Fire I and II have been revealed:

Special Features:

Disc 1 (4K UHD) - Prison on Fire:
- 4K Scan from the Original Camera Negative Presented in Dolby Vision
- Optional English Subtitles Newly Translated for this Release
- Audio Commentary with James Mudge, Hong Kong Film Critic at easternKicks

Disc 2 (Blu-ray) - Prison on Fire:

- 4K Scan from the Original Camera Negative
- Optional English Subtitles Newly Translated for this Release
- Bravery Behind Bars: Interview with Post-Production Manager Tony Chow
- Burning Ambitions: Interview with Production Manager Chan Lam
- Hong Kong Confidential: Inside Prison On Fire with Author Grady Hendrix
- Convicts and Convictions: Interview with Author and Critic David West
- Audio Commentary with James Mudge, Hong Kong Film Critic at easternKicks
- Archival Interview with Director Ringo Lam
- Theatrical Trailer

Disc 3 (4K UHD) - Prison on Fire 2:

- 4K Scan from the Original Camera Negative Presented in Dolby Vision
- Optional English Subtitles Newly Translated for this Release
- Audio Commentary with James Mudge, Hong Kong Film Critic at easternKicks


Disc 4 (Blu-ray) - Prison on Fire 2:

- 4K Scan from the Original Camera Negative
- Optional English Subtitles Newly Translated for this Release
- A Fiery Follow-up: Interview with Editor Tony Chow
- Hong Kong Confidential: Inside Prison On Fire II with Author Grady Hendrix
- Stars Behind Bars–Interview with Author and Critic David West
- Audio Commentary with James Mudge, Hong Kong Film Critic at easternKicks
- Archival Interview with Director Ringo Lam
- Theatrical Trailer

[jt938]

https://deadline.com/2025/12/paramount- ... 236633390/

Paramount & Pluto Vet Jeff Shultz Named CEO Of Radial Entertainment, Parent Of Shout Studios And FilmRise

[captveg]

Oliver Stone on Facebook:

"I’m pleased to announce the 4K releases of two of my more recent films, “Snowden” (2016) and “Savages” (2012), from the always-reliable Shout! Factory, which has taken care of all my films (with the exception of “Platoon,” for which, I’m told, a redo of their last version is in the works, as it was poorly produced – apologies!)."