The Human Condition

Discuss releases from Arrow and the films on them.

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tenia
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Re: The Human Condition

#51 Post by tenia » Sat Sep 17, 2016 9:09 am

I had indeed exactly the same issue with the Taviani box and had to pass on reviewing them. It's only the more unfortunate since the highest ranked review on Google research is the partially laughable one from Socialist Review.

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Ribs
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Re: The Human Condition

#52 Post by Ribs » Sat Sep 17, 2016 10:09 am

I think it's a little unfair, though; thinking back, Fassbinder didn't get covered anywhere either, but whenever Criterion or MoC put out a big box of any kind (though they tend not to get as big as Arrow's) there's almost always comprehensive coverage from every reviewing site. Does a title need to be as big a deal as the Rivette set to get attention?

(I recognize BD reviewing isn't anyone's day job and ten hours of film is a lot to get through, let alone ten films as in the Fassbinder set)

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domino harvey
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Re: The Human Condition

#53 Post by domino harvey » Sat Sep 17, 2016 10:29 am

If I got paid the same for reviewing an 85 minute Kino Lorber Blu-Ray as a 10+ hour box set, why would I ever volunteer for the worse assignment?

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tenia
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Re: The Human Condition

#54 Post by tenia » Sat Sep 17, 2016 10:35 am

Ribs wrote:Does a title need to be as big a deal as the Rivette set to get attention?
I'm not sure. I think, with Rivette, it might have to do with timing. I think the Rivette set was released at a time (Jan' 16) where there wasn't so many titles to review at once.
In the worst cases, I used to review only some movies within a set, but it felt so frustrating having to cherry pick that I chose to either do it all or not at all. Otherwise, you always end up with both a feeling of unfinished business and readers endlessly asking "When are you going to publish reviews for the other movies in the set ?" I also sometimes ended up writings very superficial reviews which, while relatively comprehensive, weren't in-depth enough to my tastes compared to what I can usually provide. It's a lose-lose in the end.

And yes, it usually relates to very heavy boxsets. You'll have exceptions (I don't find Human Condition or the Taviani set to be huge set like, say, a Fassbinder one) but on the other end, Battles without Honor was reviewed, for instance. The Outlaw VIP Gangster too, despite being 6 movies.
domino harvey wrote:If I got paid the same for reviewing an 85 minute Kino Lorber Blu-Ray as a 10+ hour box set, why would I ever volunteer for the worse assignment?
I don't think many of the reviewers are paid at all. I know it's not the case on Retro HD, and it's also not the case for DVD Classik and many other French websites (or is it just a French thing ?). I'm just happy being in touch with the labels somehow, getting early access to the BDs and trying to provide readers reliable info on whether or not the release is worthy of their money.
Last edited by tenia on Sat Sep 17, 2016 10:37 am, edited 2 times in total.

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cdnchris
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Re: The Human Condition

#55 Post by cdnchris » Sat Sep 17, 2016 10:35 am

I just got the discs a few days ago, so that's my defense (finally got through everything lastnight).

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GaryC
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Re: The Human Condition

#56 Post by GaryC » Sat Sep 17, 2016 11:52 am

MichaelB wrote:There seems to have been a similar attitude towards the Taviani box - none of the usual suspects has reviewed it to date, and the only substantial review that covers the discs as well as the films was in Sight & Sound a couple of issues ago. But that takes about thirteen hours to get through the whole thing (not counting reading time for the hefty accompanying book), and most of these people are unpaid, so...
I did cover the Taviani box (which I bought), albeit briefly, in my review column for Black Static, which is a print magazine. As the magazine is horror/dark fantasy-based, the review concentrated on Kaos, but I did refer to and list the extras for the other two films.

But the fact is that my workload has increased this year so I can't take on many large boxsets as all my reviewing and also fiction-writing has to fit round my day job. And one of the box sets I did take on (take a guess which one) frankly exhausted me so I had to take a break for a while.
Last edited by GaryC on Sat Sep 17, 2016 11:58 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: The Human Condition

#57 Post by GaryC » Sat Sep 17, 2016 11:55 am

Ribs wrote:I think it's a little unfair, though; thinking back, Fassbinder didn't get covered anywhere either, but whenever Criterion or MoC put out a big box of any kind (though they tend not to get as big as Arrow's) there's almost always comprehensive coverage from every reviewing site. Does a title need to be as big a deal as the Rivette set to get attention?

(I recognize BD reviewing isn't anyone's day job and ten hours of film is a lot to get through, let alone ten films as in the Fassbinder set)
The Digital Fix has covered 4/7 of the Fassbinder discs, all except Fear Eats the Soul by me. The remaining three disc reviews will be done, but have been delayed for various reasons, some of which are mentioned in my post above.

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Re: The Human Condition

#58 Post by David M. » Sat Sep 17, 2016 6:14 pm

GaryC wrote: And one of the box sets I did take on (take a guess which one) frankly exhausted me so I had to take a break for a while.
HG Lewis?

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tenia
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Re: The Human Condition

#59 Post by tenia » Sun Sep 18, 2016 5:21 am

David M. wrote:
GaryC wrote: And one of the box sets I did take on (take a guess which one) frankly exhausted me so I had to take a break for a while.
HG Lewis?
It was the Alan Clarke one.

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Ribs
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Re: The Human Condition

#60 Post by Ribs » Wed Sep 21, 2016 11:21 pm

Given the review here couldn't specify, here's the transfer info from the booklet (limited though it may be):

The Human Condition is presented in its original aspect ratio of 2.35:1. The HD transfer was completed on a Spirit Datacine using new prints struck from the original 35mm negatives.

Parts One and Two (parts one to four in the Japanese release version) were originally presented in mono, and the soundtracks were remastered from a 35mm optical soundtrack print. Part three (parts five and six in the Japanese release version) was the first Japanese film to be presented in stereo in its original release, and the audio was remastered from the original magnetic stems.

The restored HD master was suppled for this release by Shochiku Co, Ltd.

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Re: The Human Condition

#61 Post by MichaelB » Thu Sep 22, 2016 2:37 am

I should probably mention (given the use of the word "unfortunately" in Chris's review) that it was an entirely deliberate decision to go with the version that had onscreen Japanese "side-titles".

We were offered the option to go without, but I noted that Criterion's DVD favoured on-screen textual accompaniment too, and I suspect for very similar reasons - it allows the monolingual English-speaking viewer to clearly differentiate when non-Japanese languages are being spoken (I note that Eureka took a similar approach with The Burmese Harp), and because the text is down the side rather than along the bottom it didn't clash with the English subtitles.

Hence the decision, which I still firmly believe to have been the right one.

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Re: The Human Condition

#62 Post by Orlac » Thu Sep 22, 2016 4:12 am

I agree. It's also useful for Japanese speakers who don't want the English subtitles on whilst they watch it in Japanese.

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Michael Kerpan
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Re: The Human Condition

#63 Post by Michael Kerpan » Thu Sep 22, 2016 3:05 pm

Other than color coding and side-titling -- what other options are there for indicating/hinting exactly what foreign language is being spoken during the course of a multi-lingual film?

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zedz
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Re: The Human Condition

#64 Post by zedz » Thu Sep 22, 2016 4:33 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:Other than color coding and side-titling -- what other options are there for indicating/hinting exactly what foreign language is being spoken during the course of a multi-lingual film?
There's also the inclusion of stage directions like (in Mandarin) being added to the subs, but that can get incredibly unwieldy if it happens with any regularity.

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Re: The Human Condition

#65 Post by theflirtydozen » Thu Sep 22, 2016 4:56 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:Other than color coding and side-titling -- what other options are there for indicating/hinting exactly what foreign language is being spoken during the course of a multi-lingual film?
When I saw Les innocentes from this year I believe they used a different color text for the few Russian lines. Of course, you run into problems re:color-blindness then.

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tenia
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Re: The Human Condition

#66 Post by tenia » Thu Sep 22, 2016 5:24 pm

theflirtydozen wrote:
Michael Kerpan wrote:Other than color coding and side-titling -- what other options are there for indicating/hinting exactly what foreign language is being spoken during the course of a multi-lingual film?
When I saw Les innocentes from this year I believe they used a different color text for the few Russian lines. Of course, you run into problems re:color-blindness then.
Yes, SDH subs can use normalized color-coding in some countries (that's the case in France) : yellow for off-screen people talking, red for sound effects, pink for music-related stuff, blue for voice-over and internal thoughts, and finally green for foreign language.

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Re: The Human Condition

#67 Post by MichaelB » Thu Sep 22, 2016 6:56 pm

...and of course going down that route makes it rather tougher at the authoring end than simply using a source with non-Japanese dialogue already highlighted. And given the running time, this is an even more important consideration!

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Re: The Human Condition

#68 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Sep 23, 2016 6:43 am

This is all from the perspective of someone who has not seen the films as yet, but I always think its best to leave subtitles in films where the original audience would have needed them in the first place. It's not just good for differentiating languages for those of us at an even further remove but it could also be argued that its part of the original aesthetic of the film. Although granted I doubt we are talking Night Watch and Day Watch levels of flashily integrated CGI subtitles here! But still I think its good to preserve those aspects (and original font choices, and screen placement, etc) as much as possible as they can tell you as much about a filmmaker's intentions as the film itself sometimes! Especially for the realisation that they really want the audience to understand the content of the dialogue in a different language, and that there is a difference there versus say avoiding subtitles to place the audience more in the shoes of a character who might not understand what is being spoken at all - both equally valid approaches but with different aims.

I know that bumps up against what aesthetically looks pretty and overlaying another layer of English language subtitles onto the image too, so there must be difficulties and considerations for how cluttered the screen is going to become, but I always find it interesting to see 'original' (i.e. intended for all versions of the film at the time, not just added for specific territories later) subtitles and intertitles. Its part of why I got so annoyed with MGM in the early DVD era when they scrubbed out theatrically added subtitles and intertitles and replaced them with electronic (and presumably easily interchangable for other local language) ones! Sure that probably practically made sense, but you don't get the same effect from say Silence of the Lambs' 'official looking' location titles when they are just generic ones and don't look typed. The best films usually try to at least make the subtitles and intertitles that they feel necessary to include look interesting and tied to the aesthetics of their world.

I know I bring this up a lot, but the anime Macross: Do You Remember Love? is a good, if extreme, example of multiple things going on at once in its climactic 'love song saves the universe' muscial number. That's a film with a big subtext of division and misunderstandings between humans and aliens, and is part of the reason why 'protoculture' in the form of a song cuts through all of that and speaks across racial divisions. In that final sequence you have the Japanese dialogue, the musical number going off in the background (with its Karaoke-style singaong subs!) and at least in my VHS version all the alien dialogue is subtitled in Japanese too! The attached video has kind of cleaned it up a bit, but in doing so loses a little of the power of the moment when the aliens speak directly to the humans in their own language to say they will defend them.
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Re: The Human Condition

#69 Post by MichaelB » Fri Sep 23, 2016 6:54 am

I wasn't too concerned about clutter, as the Japanese side-titles are on the extreme right of a Scope-framed image, so are easy enough to tune out. Had they been along the bottom, I would almost certainly have favoured the "clean" masters.

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Re: The Human Condition

#70 Post by cdnchris » Fri Sep 23, 2016 11:43 am

MichaelB wrote:given the use of the word "unfortunately" in Chris's review
If there's any consolation there was, at one point, a statement that somehow got lost when reworking it where I said it wasn't a big deal (just noticeable) and I assumed it was because these were the best materials available, though it appears that wasn't actually the case. I had originally came to that conclusion because Criterion's DVD did the exact same thing.

The reality is I really don't care that they are there so "unfortunately" was more than likely not warranted.

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Re: The Human Condition

#71 Post by PianoMan88 » Sat Jan 07, 2017 10:31 pm

Has the Blu-ray offering from Arrow gone on sale at any point? As far as I can see it is going for £45 on Amazon UK and £50 on Arrows website at the moment.

Any advice if one should wait for a sale (what's the likelihood of that?) or get it now. I wish Arrow would let us know how the sales of their Academy boxsets are going, especially the Limited Editions such as this.

Thank you for any advice/pointers on how to go about getting this.

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Re: The Human Condition

#72 Post by swo17 » Sat Jan 07, 2017 11:09 pm

It was 50% sold out in October. Many of their limited editions like this completely run out before ever having been offered on sale, so if you want to make sure you don't miss out you should probably get it sooner rather than later. If you're willing to take a chance that it will still be here in March (when we're due for another sale), you might buy it then so that you can get double points on your order. When you do, order it separately from any sale items, and redeem any points that you might have saved up by then to optimize their value.

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Re: The Human Condition

#73 Post by Ribs » Sat Jan 07, 2017 11:15 pm

Counterpoint: Every single Academy box is still in print, except for Boro and Koyaanisqatsi+Powaqatsi.

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Re: The Human Condition

#74 Post by Lowry_Sam » Sun Jan 08, 2017 3:15 pm

I'm still waiting (and I'm sure a few others are too) for Criterion to release their upgrade so we can see whether there will be anything added before plunking down $ for this one.

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Re: The Human Condition

#75 Post by Drucker » Sun Jan 08, 2017 4:06 pm

I would say there's no certainty Criterion upgrades this.

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