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New UK label. Seem to be focussing primarily on French titles from the last 15 years or so.

They don't appear to have a website yet but a full list of initial titles is here

I should be meeting them sometime in the next fortnight and will report back then.

Bikey wrote:I should be meeting them sometime in the next fortnight and will report back then.

Will you be upbraiding them for nicking your cover concept?

I wonder if they'll improve on the absolutely terrible R1 Venus Beauty Institute. Anamorphic and Removable subs would be well worth an upgrade.

That choice of titles looks a bit lightweight compared to Second Run (not that I am conscious of having seen any of them). Are they aiming at the Amélie-type market?

I agree, gropius.

For my part, I hated The Venus Beauty Institute. The sound of that infernal door-chime nearly made me start throwing objects at the television, and although I realize that was the point, the rest of the film didn't do anything to make the aggravation worthwhile.

I suppose my dislike stems in large part from the way the film was marketed. The back of the dvd cover says the film is about "four strong, smart women", but that's hardly the case; the women in the film are so neurotic that I thought I was reading a "Cathy" comic strip, and if they were any less fucked-up they wouldn't be working at the VBI. Only Audrey Tautou's character seems to be even remotely stable. Nevertheless, any film featuring female leads in this country has to have 'strong' and/or 'smart' women if you expect the armchair feminist crowd to show up.

There are too many good French films needing a dvd release (in R2, no less) for me to really care about lightweight fare. That said, I haven't seen the other films they've put out, so perhaps the rest of their collection is better than VBI.

Bikey wrote:New UK label. Seem to be focussing primarily on French titles from the last 15 years or so.

any update bikey, they are apparently going to release three Rivette movies in January...

Bluebell have a handful of films up for pre-order by Edgar Reitz (under the banner of The Edgar Reitz Collection):
The Tailor from Ulm
Lust For Love
The Golden Fleece
Cardillac
The Trip to Vienna
Zero Hour

I was sent checkdiscs of Lust for Love and The Tailor of Ulm, and I suspect the others will be very similar packages.

In other words, they'll be sourced from the recent Reitz restoration project, with excellent transfers* (for SD) but burned-in English subtitles and no extras.

I suspect they're from the same masters as the ones that fuelled this German box set, which I don't believe is English-friendly.

(*Lust for Love suffers from some noticeable wobble on the piano-based score, though this thankfully isn't featured very often. It's a shame, because the transfer is otherwise lovely - the print is spotless, and the black-and-white cinematography comes across beautifully. There is, of course, every chance that this is down to the original materials, especially given that it's the 2008 restoration.)