I perused the 4K edition of TMWKTM last night and I think it looks beautiful, much better in the location scenes with semi natural lighting than the studio ones (and there are plenty of those, with lots of visible rear projection) but an enormous improvement over any version I previously saw...
As far as I remember from the reissues of Vertigo and The Ten Commandments, SuperVistaVision was VistaVision blown up to 70. Have they done a blow-up of TMWKTM? Incidentally, I can hardly wait for the 4K Bluray next week.
Universal has the rights for a number of 3-strip Paramount productions but they have done nothing to bring them back, much less bring them back in all their glory. Frenchman's Creek, Lady in the Dark and the DeMille color titles come to mind.
The commentary extra is definitely squeezed. That has to be a mistake, there's no other way, and it should be fixed. Try to watch it and you'll get a headache. Are the studios still doing exchanges on incorrectly produced discs like they used to? Warners used to be quite good about that.
I saw this film in a 70mm blow-up when it was first released. Twisted take, quite handsomely made even if a bit predictable. Narciso Ibañez Serrador is considered one of the greatest creative minds in Spanish television from the 60's and 70's.
Streisand seemed too young for Dolly back in '68 but through the magic of time appears perfectly cast when you watch the movie today. What is that about? I didn't care for the movie when it first opened but it's now a semi-annual event for me.
Adding to my impressions about the HBO MAX, which I sort of scanned through today, the color in some of the outdoor scenes looks quite rich and natural but a lot of the studio scenes have that brownish quality that is so pervasive in Warnercolor. This is especially evident in the skin tones...
LotP is one of my favorite camp epics. I watched the HBO transfer a couple of weeks ago and it's a vast improvement from the old Warners DVD BUT... It's still Warnercolor so don't expect miracles. The blues and purples pop in ways I didn't expect but the overall look reminded me of color...
The Crusades was not a major success but won DeMille the sympathy of the Egyptian government because of his positive portrayal of Muslims in the film so the story goes that Egypt opened its doors to the director when he went there to film scenes for The Ten Commandments in 1954.
I can only add that one of the great losses of the Bond series was not having Lazenby return as Bond. He was 007 to the hilt and OHMSS is the one to prove it. The movie is fantastic and Diana Rigg beats all other Bond girls, hands down.
Yes, I have. His performance in this is worse but it's easy to forgive him because it's actually a very good movie and he directed it, whereas those other three are total clunkers.
Olivier gives what is perhaps the worst performance of his career, overblown, theatrical and thoroughly unsympathetic. His direction, other than himself, is quite on the mark however. I'm sure MM wasn't easy to deal with but she deservedly won the Best Actress David di Donatello that year and...
Thank you, RH, for recommending this disc. I just watched it in projection with friends who had seen it several times before and we were all blown away by the picture quality. The colors and textures are indeed otherworldly. An indescribable experience.
I thought the nudity as well as the "conspicuous" flies in the boy's costumes in R&J appropriately suggested the heat in the adolescent sexuality that was absent in previous versions of the story.
Totalscope lenses were different from Cinemascope lenses in that they allowed for minimal distortion by comparison but they were both anamorphic lenses of course. Supertotalscope is the same as Totalscope with an added touch of schmeer to attract audiences.
I'm quite surprised by how few comments there have been in this thread about the fact that this UP70 movie is being released on Blu-ray cropped to scope.
The only thing that would make me want to buy this release is if it was 2.76:1. The movie has a high cringe factor in its depiction of indigenous people and the jokes fall flat on their face from the prologue on. So, no thanks.
This particular film doesn't sound like an extraordinary candidate for 4K to me. That heavily filtered, heavily desaturated cinematography wouldn't gain much from a 4K transfer.
SPOILER AHEAD:
I suppose that works if you want to make Jack into an unredeemable A-hole with no morals but I seriously doubt that this was De Palma's intention given the preceding 2 hours. However, what you do get is what De Palma thinks about women, whom he's slashed, power drilled, cut...