Vinegar Syndrome and Their Partner Labels

[jazzo]

Are we still talking about Lauzon? Because, that scene aside, Leolo and Night Zoo are incredible, and two of the better feature films to come out of my country, up there, in my opinion, with the best works of Arcand, Villeneuve and Jutra.

[Aunt Peg]

If I remember rightly, there were two cuts to the UK version - the cat scene, unsurprisingly (although enough was left in to make it perfectly clear what was going on), and a scene in which a prostitute is pleasured by obviously underage kids, which from a legal perspective was considered to be a recording of actual underage sexual activity as far as UK law was concerned - in which case context and artistic merit don't provide a defence.

But when you consider what they left in, it got away remarkably lightly.

And yes, it's an absolutely extraordinary film - it's such a shame that Lauzon died not long afterwards.

Shocks me to realise that Leolo was and still is rated M (recommended for mature audiences 15 year and older - which is an advisory rating with no age restriction) in Australia and with no cuts.

Would love to see a Blu Ray release of Night Zoo and Leolo - only have the later on DVD.

[MichaelB]

Are we still talking about Lauzon? Because, that scene aside, Leolo and Night Zoo are incredible, and two of the better feature films to come out of my country, up there, in my opinion, with the best works of Arcand, Villeneuve and Jutra.

Completely agree on both counts. I only saw Night Zoo the once, and on SD video, but it was obviously the work of the same man.

Incidentally, I didn't have any problem watching Léolo more than once - three times theatrically, as I recall. Yes, it's disgusting at times, but adolescence is disgusting, and its gloppier aspects are all too often soft-pedalled when dramatised. In which respect its only serious rival (at least in my experience) is Kuba Czekaj's Baby Bump, made over two decades later.

[Drucker]

From a recent email:

In 2021, we purchased a building in Aurora, Colorado, to improve our shipping and warehousing infrastructure while saving money shipping packages to the West Coast. We staffed it with a fantastic group of passionate and talented warehouse members, which allowed us to continue expanding our operations and product offerings while keeping ship times low and customer satisfaction high. For reasons addressed below, we have decided to close our Colorado warehouse, and last month, our dedicated crew shipped their final package. Our entire organization is incredibly grateful for what they've built over the years, and we are thrilled that a few of them will continue with us in our next major step in continued growth!

We are beyond excited to announce the purchase of a 120,000-square-foot building in Meriden, Connecticut, that will serve as the new Vinegar Syndrome HQ. With approximately 70,000 square feet of space dedicated to warehousing and shipping, we are increasing our current warehousing footprint by a factor of 5. This will mean a single shipping location for all domestic and international orders, cutting down on processing and handling times and decreasing shipping bottlenecks during our more significant sales events.

This additional space is also imperative for our growing business, including our consistently expanding network of Partner Labels with OCN Distribution and the increased output of Mélusine. Simply put, Vinegar Syndrome has outgrown our existing two warehouses, and this move allows for more discs, more merch printed in-house via VS Press, and an upcoming relaunch of our publishing division, which we are eager to share more about in the coming months. The new building will also be home to our offices, restoration suites, and, of course, our ever-expanding archive of motion picture film, which will be housed in a subterranean film vault that is currently under construction - more info on this to come!

We plan to begin shipping orders out of this new location in early 2025 and will share updates as we proceed.

For customers of our retail store, The Archive in Aurora, we will continue normal operations at the 1431 Dayton Street location through September. We will have some additional news to share shortly about our future retail location in Denver! Regarding our Bridgeport location of The Archive, this location will remain open for the foreseeable future, but stay tuned for exciting updates in 2025!!

Sorry if this is a naive question, but do all boutique labels operate their own warehouse? And own them outright? I'm endlessly fascinated in the economics behind running a home video label.

[CSM126]

I’m sure not all of them do (this is probably one of the reasons why tiny outfits sign up for VS’s partner program), but the bigger ones kinda have to, I think. At the very least I would think Criterion and Arrow do, and the medium-bigs might get away with renting space in a subdivided facility. I think Criterion used to do that for a while.

[tenia]

It's also likely it's due to VS being OCN Distribution, ie being a logistician (including for their partner labels), unlike several indie labels who are distributed by dedicated logistics companies.

[MichaelB]

In the UK, Lime Wood Media is an offshoot of Powerhouse Films, but handles logistics for Indicator, Second Sight and Radiance. Smaller labels are often literally one or two-man shows, so they simply don't have the resources to handle this sort of thing themselves.

[andyli]

Film Movement just revealed The Poetry of Lee Chang-Dong: Four Films as a partner labels release. Includes Green Fish, Oasis, Peppermint Candy, and Poetry.

Not so good news for the Lee Chang-dong set. Apparently Green Fish is not from the new 4k restoration.

[dwk]

70 copies of the OOP Rad UHD are available

[TechnicolorAcid]

And it's gone!

[tenia]

Film Movement just revealed The Poetry of Lee Chang-Dong: Four Films as a partner labels release. Includes Green Fish, Oasis, Peppermint Candy, and Poetry.

Not so good news for the Lee Chang-dong set. Apparently Green Fish is not from the new 4k restoration.

Oh come on !

[yoloswegmaster]

And it's gone!

Fear not, you can buy the VHS! Only 150 left in stock.

[What A Disgrace]

Film Movement just revealed The Poetry of Lee Chang-Dong: Four Films as a partner labels release. Includes Green Fish, Oasis, Peppermint Candy, and Poetry.

Not so good news for the Lee Chang-dong set. Apparently Green Fish is not from the new 4k restoration.

I can't believe I got suckered into buying this. I'm guessing Arrow will announce their own vastly superior edition before year's end.

[criterionsnob]

Surely this is a mistake and there will be a replacement program? Very disappointing.

[Maladroit Aggregator]

Surely this is a mistake and there will be a replacement program? Very disappointing.

Well, it's been months and still no word on any replacement for their Phase IV release, so I'm not holding my breath.

[olmo]

Look more closely at the mission statement:

Cinématographe is a new sub-label from Vinegar Syndrome that seeks to fill gaps in the canon of American cinema

In other words, bad movies by people that have made great movies

Don't really get the mean-spiritedness, Thieves Like Us a bad film? And Last Embrace is a great thriller, which is derided by some as Hitchcock-lite but stands up very well on it's own whilst tipping its hat to Hitch - the Cinématographe UHD looks wonderful also. Ferrara's Dangerous Game is mediocre but so is most Ferrara and it contains another combustible Keitel performance.

Nicholson directed three films and Goin' South is the most accessible of them, a joyous little film, certainly not bad. Red Rock West, a perfectly serviceable pot-boiler and Joyride was not on my radar but I really enjoyed it. The only one I have struggled with is Little Darlings which is of the genre I have always disliked.

The label's mission statement holds true your take on it is specious at best, just a lazy snipe, basically.

[MichaelB]

I haven't yet got round to buying it, but Little Darlings was the first film that I sneaked into underage, so it'll always have a place in my heart for that reason alone. And it's also one of the few US features to be shot by Bedřich Baťka, who also worked extensively with Jiří Weiss and shot František Vláčil's monumental Marketa Lazarová before permanently emigrating westwards, although I obviously wouldn't have been aware of any of that at the time. (In the US, Baťka mainly taught cinematography.)

[therewillbeblus]

I'll second Little Darlings as a good movie, their second best release after Red Rock West

[tenia]

IIRC, that take was done quite early in the label, and VS is used (that's pretty much their trademark at this point) to overselling what they're releasing. "Bad" things is exaggerated, yes, but it's clear that the statement aims at saying "all those tremendous forgottent movies lucky to have us because the canon is too elitist and we're not" but movies that wouldnt make it into any canon anyway.
They might be fine movies per se, but within the context of this label and this topic, I'm not surprised it'd be perceived as VS amping their movies' average score from 3-4 out of 10 to maybe 7 while selling them as too-rarely-curated 9.

[olmo]

IIRC, that take was done quite early in the label, and VS is used (that's pretty much their trademark at this point) to overselling what they're releasing. "Bad" things is exaggerated, yes, but it's clear that the statement aims at saying "all those tremendous forgottent movies lucky to have us because the canon is too elitist and we're not" but movies that wouldnt make it into any canon anyway.
They might be fine movies per se, but within the context of this label and this topic, I'm not surprised it'd be perceived as VS amping their movies' average score from 3-4 out of 10 to maybe 7 while selling them as too-rarely-curated 9.

'Cinématographe is a new sub-label from Vinegar Syndrome that seeks to fill gaps in the canon of American cinema. Offering a mix of auteur driven studio films produced during the New Hollywood era of the late 1960s and 70s all the way through the indie boom of the 1980s and 90s, Cinématographe will explore the wide breadth of American moviemaking, spanning numerous genres and scales of production'.

I'd suggest a slight agenda on your part as they have said nothing of the sort.

Forgive me but I think to suggest that any film doesn't belong in any canon is foolish let alone the likes of Thieves Like Us & Last Embrace.

[MichaelB]

We get this all the time at Indicator, including sometimes quite epic finger-wagging lectures about how we're going down the "wrong" route. Someone sent us a PM worrying about our financial future after we had the temerity to announce a month with Cisco Pike, Spring Night Summer Night and Watermelon Man (all three of which I'd defend to the hilt, and Cisco Pike ended up as one of Indicator's faster sellers), and I also recall someone arguing at length that we shouldn't be wasting time with Mexican genre films as he could assure us upfront that they were all rubbish and not worth exploring.

But I've seen virtually everything that the label has put out, and I can't think of anything that wasn't worth releasing at all - even the truly terrible films (some of the Ormond Family ones, or Rosie Dixon - Night Nurse) had ample contextual justification, even if a standalone release might be hard to defend.

(Rosie Dixon, for instance, is an excellent counter-example of why casting was so critical to the success of the Confessions films - because there's nobody in it who's as disarmingly charming as Robin Askwith, and although I can appreciate the intention was to do a gender-swapped Confessions film, it fundamentally doesn't work for all sorts of reasons. A key one being that while the notion of an essentially quite shy young man being bombarded with the attention of rapacious and slightly older sex-starved women is appealing to audiences of both genders - men because it's a standard-issue fantasy, women because they're the ones very much in control - if you swap the genders you basically end up with an eighteen-year-old nurse being constantly sexually harassed by predatory men, which may have been considered normal in the Seventies but comes across as decidedly unpleasant now, especially post-#metoo. And the film was a calamitous box-office flop, so it wasn't that appealing even back then.)

[tenia]

I don't have any agenda against them. They're doing what they do, and as a label, they do it extremely well (except for the occasional QC slip-up). As it stands, I do own probably around 40 of their releases, a couple T-shirts, and am on the verge of purchasing their Lost Picture Show set.
Still, I do believe part of their brand is to be very hyperbolic when marketing their releases. Here, it's "filling gaps in the canon of US cinema".
This being written, yes, there are technically tons of differents canons, and my sentence was harsher than it should have.

And I certainly never mind any variety in what is being released, as Indicator is doing (love seeing Mexican movies, because I can't say so many of these were easily accessible in the past).

I just think that this Cinematographe statement is quite on-brand with VS' marketing ways.

[olmo]

I just think that this Cinematographe statement is quite on-brand with VS' marketing ways.

They're simply laying out the kind of releases we can expect, I don't see any self-aggrandising at all.

And I'm specifically talking about the Cinématographe mission statement.

[tenia]

Cinematographe isn't a Partner Label though, but a VS sub-collection, like VSA and VSU. VS, thus, have chosen the statement and how it's phrased.
Now, about VS as an operation : I think that as a label, but also as a host for partner labels and as a laboratory with OCN-Labs, they're doing a great job on movies that probably wouldn't get much attention, let alone preservation, otherwise. Sincerely. They're my go-to exemple about movies that still do deserve preservation no matter how consensually not-particularly-great they might be found, and they did shape my view that no movie deserves to be poorly treated, and that if it can be preserved, then let's go ahead.

My only bother is how they write their marketing. Maybe it's because I'm French and am over-reading their English blurbs, but there's something that I feel is specific to them, like their newsletter clues often reading as way overblown compared to the actual releases, and I simply felt that Cinematographe's statement was fitting this.

But maybe I was overly harsh anyway, and/or I'm not reading this right for whatever reason.

[Peacock]

Whatever VS are doing with their marketing and copy it must be working. Craig Keller used to playfully use hyperbole on the back of some of the MoC releases; it added a lot of charm and if it helped to shift a few more copies then I’m all for it.

VS aren’t going to advertise a release as “an average coming-of-age film that has been mostly forgotten due to poor acting and pedestrian direction.” They are a business at the end of the day!