443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de...

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hearthesilence
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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#351 Post by hearthesilence » Wed Jul 31, 2013 1:19 pm

Yeah, this is pretty much why I try not to buy anything until it's been seen by a good number of people - not just online reviewers, but people here as well. Especially now when it's harder to return stuff.

FWIW, if it's in new condition, try sending it back for a refund. You may be stuck with shipping though, but a few bucks isn't terrible.

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Matt
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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#352 Post by Matt » Wed Jul 31, 2013 1:24 pm

Finch wrote:Seeing Chris' caps, I've changed my mind and will sell the BD as soon as my copy arrives, and put in a new order for the DVD
It's not out for another week, you should be able to cancel a pre-order.

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EddieLarkin
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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#353 Post by EddieLarkin » Wed Jul 31, 2013 1:41 pm

swo17 wrote:I'm torn actually, because I'd rather vote with my wallet against this kind of work, but I'd also kind of like to see it in motion for myself, and as no rental service is carrying it, a purchase is my only option.

Also, the CoP transfer is an abomination, but about half of it actually looks excellent, and on the whole I prefer it to the DVD. Is there anything positive like that to be said in this case, Chris?
Despite the caps, both Beaver and now HTF have given the picture not just good, but rave reviews. And certainly not ALL the caps on Beaver look horrendous (though the ones that do are vomit inducing). I'm still holding out hope; Blu-ray.com should post a review soon (Svet did lambast the CoP disc), and hopefully RAH will chime in like he did with CoP.

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Matt
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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#354 Post by Matt » Wed Jul 31, 2013 1:56 pm

That HTF review gives the impression that the reviewer just popped the disc in the player and skipped quickly through the chapters. His highest praise and most insightful comment is to say that the image looks "appealing," twice. Not exactly a rigorous assessment.

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domino harvey
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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#355 Post by domino harvey » Wed Jul 31, 2013 1:57 pm

I think this release exposes the problems with online disc reviewers, mainly that either they don't actually watch the disc and/or extras or that they don't know good from bad. Either option's pretty bad, really

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vsski
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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#356 Post by vsski » Wed Jul 31, 2013 2:05 pm

swo17 wrote: I'm torn actually, because I'd rather vote with my wallet against this kind of work, but I'd also kind of like to see it in motion for myself, and as no rental service is carrying it, a purchase is my only option.
I feel exactly the same way and really want to see it in motion myself before buying anything. Given that you live in SLC doesn't the Tower Theater carry almost all of the CC BDs? It might be worth a try to see if they will get it.

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Finch
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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#357 Post by Finch » Wed Jul 31, 2013 3:04 pm

My copy's already shipped, together with Seconds. Might give it a look but after Children of Paradise and this, I won't be buying any further French titles from Criterion until I see reviews first. So glad that I hadn't, as first suspected, sold my Le Samourai DVD!

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Moe Dickstein
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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#358 Post by Moe Dickstein » Wed Jul 31, 2013 3:11 pm

The HTF reviewer is going to take another look at the disc when time allows in the near future and will update.

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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#359 Post by cdnchris » Wed Jul 31, 2013 3:33 pm

Finch wrote:My copy's already shipped, together with Seconds. Might give it a look but after Children of Paradise and this, I won't be buying any further French titles from Criterion until I see reviews first. So glad that I hadn't, as first suspected, sold my Le Samourai DVD!
Seconds looks exceptional, so at least you've got that going for you.

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NABOB OF NOWHERE
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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#360 Post by NABOB OF NOWHERE » Wed Jul 31, 2013 4:01 pm

In case anyone cares Le Samourai has been re-tweeked en douce


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jsteffe
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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#362 Post by jsteffe » Wed Jul 31, 2013 4:35 pm

Wow, that paint-by-numbers effect is really prominent in some of the screencaps! Between that and the caps taken by cdnchris, it's clear that this a genuine problem in at least some of the scenes. Someone somewhere in the process has funny ideas about what film restoration means.

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tenia
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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#363 Post by tenia » Wed Jul 31, 2013 6:29 pm

IMO, this does not seems to be a denoising issue like Bande à part or, to a lesser degree, A Man Escaped french BD, but really a filtering effect close to what was seen on the first encode of Le samourai.
It also looks quite far from Children of Paradise, which is just FUBAR flat, but does not have this painting-by-number / mosaïc effect.

We'll see the Gaumont in a few months, but looking at Jérome Soulet enthusiasm, the Criterion results is surprising, and I'm wondering what we will get in France. As Svet noted, the notes seems to point that we're likely to have the same kind of PQ, but on the other end, what was on the first encode of Le samourai was not seen on the theater prints, nor in the 2nd encode, so I guess some doors are still open (fingers crossed).
david hare wrote:The degree of filtering and clean up is mirrored somewhat in Gaumont's overly DVNRed Bande a Part but that film has the benefit of a new encode from the Crit team. If only they ahd done the same thing here. Svet's textual quotation on production credits gives the game away I think.
Remember that usually, Gaumont does 2 transfers/masters : one degrained, one untouched. If you take Rififi, Gaumont released the degrained one while Arrow released the untouched one, with obvious superiority for Arrow. Gaumont might have chosen to only give the FUBARed material to Criterion, and kept the good one for themselves. Which is still pretty bad practice anyway.
david hare wrote:The whole fuckup is down to the Gaumont and/or Éclair technicians and production staff. This now gives us the sad certainty that any BD product coming from Gaumont/Pathe can no longer be relied on for quality.
Again, I'd like to emphasise that, this year, Gaumont have released 2 movies which are better than their US counterpart, including one Criterion title (Identification of a Woman) (the other Conversation Piece). Their 6 Pialat releases have received almost unanimous good reviews, and their 3 other releases of the year don't have any notable issues. They're also likely to top Criterion a 2nd time on Fanny & Alexander by splitting the TV cut on 2 discs. And L'assassin habite au 21, while not being perfect, is quite good looking already at MoC.

It seems unfair, IMO, to go to this type of length due to a couple of major FUBAR releases and rejecting now almost spontaneously / systematically anything from them when 90% of their 70 other releases don't have any problem even remotely close to this. Yes, they screwed up pretty bad about 10 titles, but that's still leaves 85% of pretty neat releases, including the beautiful France-exclusive BD of Le général Della Rovere, Les maudits, La traversée de Paris, Alexandre le bienheureux, French Cancan, Elena et les hommes (but I read it has slight compression issues), etc etc.
david hare wrote:I simply cannot believe M. Soulet thinks this is all perfectly OK.
He just posted this on DVD Classik : http://www.dvdclassik.com/forum/viewtop ... 6#p2329586" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
"You're scaring me with the review at criterionforum. I'll gather information. I didn't received any alert from my tehcnical team"

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jsteffe
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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#364 Post by jsteffe » Wed Jul 31, 2013 7:41 pm

Soulet made some additional comments, translated (roughly) below:
Yes it's the same master. The difficulty comes from being part of a nitrate element which is less that ideal. I will go fishing for information from the team charged with supervision of encoding and authoring. What astonishes me is that when the material doesn't satisfy Criterion, they don't accept it.
I agree with tenia that Gaumont has put out many good discs recently, so maybe it's not entirely fair to condemn them out of hand. In fact I just ordered CONVERSATION PIECE because the screenshots on Blu-ray.com look vastly superior to the American Raro Blu-ray.

The problem is that MADAME DE... is one of the greatest films ever made, certainly one of the greatest of all French films, so naturally the Blu-ray will receive a close degree of scrutiny. I think people are right to complain about this, and loudly. I do hope that it at least spurs some discussions about how liberally some studios apply degraining and digital repair techniques, to say nothing of encoding practices.

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tenia
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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#365 Post by tenia » Thu Aug 01, 2013 1:21 am

I'd like to add that I perfectly understand David's (and all the others') frustration : when 1% of a collection get screwed, the concerned titles are 100% screwed (like Toyota would say).

My concern is to start to distrust on a spontaneous base Eclair and Gaumont.
Eclair is currently, I believe, the only remaining lab in France doing 4K and 2K restorations, so that would mean ANY French base restoration would be distrust.
Gaumont, as I wrote, has also put up lately some very nice releases.

So, yes, I've started since quite some time now to stop pre-ordering any Gaumont and Pathé titles, always waiting first for a couple reviews to ensure the PQ is OK (and maybe that's what David was saying overall and I misunderstood him), but I wouldn't just fully distrust them.

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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#366 Post by Rupert Pupkin » Thu Aug 01, 2013 1:32 am

• do you think that Gaumont refuses to Criterion to sell a pre-DNR transfer (Criterion was able to get the restorated HD transfer of Band Of Outsiders but pre-the Gaumont'DNR'touch) ?
if this is the case - "a take it or leave it" (like it was with another studio with Les Enfants du Paradis), then Criterion should not release such Blu-Ray; even if that means, no blu-ray upgrade for the next years. It's sad, very sad but I don't consider such blu-ray being an "upgrade".

the funny thing would be - since the Criterion release of "Madame de..." was before the Gaumont release (planned for September) : if Gaumont sell to Criterion is own DNR'Gaumont touch transfer, and then release in septembre a "rough" HD transfer with no DNR (I don't know if they have already pressed the Gaumont Blu-Ray, but Gaumont have still the time to make a "step back")
that would be very """funny"""

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domino harvey
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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#367 Post by domino harvey » Thu Aug 01, 2013 1:36 am

Post/username combo

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Ashirg
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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#368 Post by Ashirg » Thu Aug 01, 2013 1:36 am

It's really sad that Criterion chose this film in the running for the worst release of the year.

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vsski
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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#369 Post by vsski » Thu Aug 01, 2013 2:26 am

tenia wrote:I'd like to add that I perfectly understand David's (and all the others') frustration : when 1% of a collection get screwed, the concerned titles are 100% screwed (like Toyota would say).

My concern is to start to distrust on a spontaneous base Eclair and Gaumont.
Eclair is currently, I believe, the only remaining lab in France doing 4K and 2K restorations, so that would mean ANY French base restoration would be distrust.
Gaumont, as I wrote, has also put up lately some very nice releases.

So, yes, I've started since quite some time now to stop pre-ordering any Gaumont and Pathé titles, always waiting first for a couple reviews to ensure the PQ is OK (and maybe that's what David was saying overall and I misunderstood him), but I wouldn't just fully distrust them.
I don't think anybody has said they will never ever buy another Gaumont / Eclair title, but given what happened people are becoming more careful with pre-orders like yourself. As the saying goes in some circles: you are only as good as your last movie.

And to be honest, it seems hard to believe that no one did any quality control. From all acounts what happened here was clearly avoidable. As to why CC chose to accept the master I have no idea, but given that this is now the second high profile title and they are getting this feedback, even if they remain silent, I certainly would start becoming more discerning going forward if I were in their shoes (unless of course other than a few people on these boards no one cares and sales isn't impacted one ounce - but even then I would hope their pride and reputation would make them rethink).

I personally know after seeing the report from Dr. Svet that I will not buy this title, as sad as this makes me, since it's a film I truly love, and hold on to my DVD, which as far as DVDs goes has been an excellent release.

One can only hope that a better BD will surface in the not too distant future.

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tenia
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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#370 Post by tenia » Thu Aug 01, 2013 10:21 am

vsski wrote:I don't think anybody has said they will never ever buy another Gaumont / Eclair title, but given what happened people are becoming more careful with pre-orders like yourself. As the saying goes in some circles: you are only as good as your last movie.
I might then have misunderstood what David was writing about the "certainty that any BD product coming from Gaumont/Pathe can no longer be relied on for quality" for something more extreme than he actually feels.
vsski wrote:And to be honest, it seems hard to believe that no one did any quality control. From all acounts what happened here was clearly avoidable. As to why CC chose to accept the master I have no idea, but given that this is now the second high profile title and they are getting this feedback, even if they remain silent, I certainly would start becoming more discerning going forward if I were in their shoes (unless of course other than a few people on these boards no one cares and sales isn't impacted one ounce - but even then I would hope their pride and reputation would make them rethink).
That's probably the most striking part for me. It seems to me that for the 2nd clear time, they chose money over quality. I understand Jerome Soulet's defence by saying "It's weird because when they don't like what they get, they usually refuse it", but on the other end, it's a quite bad defence because it doesn't say at all "it's not that bad", more more "hey ! they chose to use some bad stuff, that's their problem".

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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#371 Post by krnash » Thu Aug 01, 2013 11:20 am

From a Facebook user in regards to the transfer:

"I'll still buy it."

And in those four simple, horrific words, we understand why they went ahead with this after the Children of Paradise debacle- and why they'll probably continue to do this with films to come.

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tenia
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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#372 Post by tenia » Thu Aug 01, 2013 11:33 am

Let's face it : we have a French saying : Si ça se vend, c'est que ça s'achète (If it sells well, it's because there's people to buy it). We hada a French famous comedian (Coluche), who said "And to think we just need to stop buying shit, and shit wouldn't sell anymore".

That's the exact case.

Of course Criterion can go on and release sub-par transfer like this. If it sells well, then, in the end, only us (people caring about the original look of the movie, nice restoration, and all) will be screwed over, and I doubt we represent a big % of the whole market.

It's even worse, to some extense : why troubling oneself and use that amount of money to buy a beautiful restoration or command a nice restoration, if it can sell in a poor condition ? Fortunately, only a few editors do this, but still.
Look at the latest Bruce Lee boxset, full of bloody upscales. Bloody upscales in 2013. It's only possible because it sells.

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Matt
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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#373 Post by Matt » Thu Aug 01, 2013 11:43 am

Heaven help us if every company's mantra becomes "well, it's good enough for the Facebook crowd."

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domino harvey
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Re: 443-445 La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de.

#374 Post by domino harvey » Thu Aug 01, 2013 11:49 am

Matt wrote:Heaven help us if every company's mantra becomes "well, it's good enough for the Facebook crowd."
Criterion should sell little Wacky C stickers so users can stick them on their existent Blu-rays and DVDs and stop asking for superfluous editions of stuff like Requiem for a Dream


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