Search results

The people who butchered The Magnificent Ambersons probably thought as you do: detail must be probably lit or it is bad for the film's presentation. Here is Robert Carringer's audio commentary for the Criterion edition of the film explaining this point. The original shots by Stanley Cortez are...

It may be an "objective" scientific truth that picture is lost due to brightness and/or contrast, but filmmaking is an art, not an objective science. If it serves the film's purpose to obscure certain detail on the screen, it is the right choice for the film. A great example is the Criterion...

Hi Robert, or anyone who has seen the disc. Does the 1.20:1 version look vertically stretched to you? I have not seen the disc, but DVDBeaver's captures of the 1.20:1 version are actually in 1.10:1 ratio (!!) if you actually measure the pixel dimension, which I did. Either DVDBeaver made an...

I get what you are saying. You seem to be saying that while AR is important, the framing doesn't have to be pixel-perfectly exact. Even in home video releases, we see this often. For instance, a Criterion disc may have a sliver more or less picture on the side (or sides) of each frame than a...

Hi Robert, when you made those wonderful restorations of "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Vertigo," I bet you cared deeply about AR. The viewers may care less about AR, but the people responsible for creating prints, scans, discs for the movies have to. If the person who scans the negative thinks...

The only times I buy movies I don't necessarily watch (at least not right away) are movies that I haven't seen and may have only a passing interest in (which I have no way of knowing for sure without seeing them first), and yet are hard to find for rental, streaming, or rarely shown on TV, etc...

Just ask yourself: does your home look like a garbage dump like the homes of these hoarders (pictures)? If not, then you don't have a disorder.

At first I was hesitant to buy this. I was hoping and believing some of these films would show up in streaming and/or standalone disc releases. But then I wasn't so sure. Some of these films are quite obscure, so this box set may be the only way to see them, ever. I was hoping TCM would air...

When you are home, you can still watch Vudu. As I said, Vudu is not just for smartphones and tablets, but also TVs. If you have wife and kids with multiple devices in multiple rooms, that adds so much more value and convenience for everyone. The user interface is so much simpler too. A...

It's for the convenience. You can watch your movies anywhere on any device, including your home TV. Even though I have a home theater with multiple Blu-ray/DVD players, I often find it more convenient to pull up a movie on Vudu on that same setup even if I own the disc. You bring a...

Vudu's disc-scanning service indeed has no limit (AFAIK), but its UPC-scanning service does have a 100-per-year limit. To have UPC-scanning work, your Vudu account's billing address has to match the location where you do the UPC scanning. You also have to turn on your mobile device's GPS...

Hi Jonathan, the comics I saw were not the MAD spoofs, but a sort of dramatic recreation of the movie, drawn in color, and obviously quite rare, or I would have found it with Google. I just hope someone here had seen it. A popular movie like this back in those days must have lots of...

I own the Vudu version of "The Towering Inferno" and it has the wrong aspect ratio. The correct ratio is 2.55:1, but the Vudu version is cropped to 1.78:1. The Blu-ray, of course, has the correct ratio. It is not Vudu's fault because Vudu uses what the studios give them. I own hundreds of...

In the 70s when the movie came out, I distinctly remember having seen color, Marvel-style comics that were published to promote the film. This was not some MAD comic spoof nor newspaper comic strip, but full-page, color, graphic-novel-style drawings that quite faithfully depicted scenes from the...

He is a great writer, but very old-school, though. I bought Version 1 of his DVD review book back in 2010 and asked him why it didn't have a table of content nor an index. And he said, well, the reviews were in alphabetical order so why would you need a TOC or index? He didn't get that while...

How big is each issue nowadays? In its heyday, it had 80-90 reviews per issue. In 2011, when I last subscribed it, it was down to 30-40 reviews and only about 6-10 Blu-rays. The Dec 2010 only had 16 reviews with 3 Blu-rays; maybe he was on vacation then.

I only found one movie in 720p so far: The Loved Ones (2009)

If a disc is made for a movie that maybe 5 people in the world will buy, then it IS chump change, and that may even be overstating it. You may be able to buy DVDs and BDs 10 years from now, but the SELECTIONS will definitely be a lot fewer, and you may be buying from the digital market a lot...

Maybe they had planned to put in another special feature and later took it out. The 2002 Kino DVD does have a 44-minute excerpt of director Robert Wiene's less successful followup film to "Caligari", "Genuine: Tale of a Vampire". Maybe the Blu-ray was originally to include that. Still, a...

I have both the Kino disc and the Masters of Cinema disc. Yes, Kino has noticeable pixellation, and the MoC disc has very little. Perhaps this screen capture of the Kino disc would illustrate the problem more clearly. I brightened the image and also decreased the color depth, making the...

TCM broadcast this film recently but I managed to record only half of it. It was shown again online at "Watch TCM" but my TV provider wasn't supported. I also missed the Kickstarter event for this DVD. But fortunately, the seller was able to sell me a DVD. But when I played the DVD, I was...

The Cohen Media Blu-ray (corresponding DVD also available) is easily the best-looking version of the film for home video ever, but in terms of the footage available, it is less complete than the Image DVD edition that came out way back in 1999. I wrote a review about the differences of various...

Sometimes the English closed captioning shows the lyrics even if the subtitles don't. On "A Night at the Opera" DVD (also from Warner), the English CC shows all the lyrics, even the Italian ones ("Cosi Cosa ..."). But the English subtitles only show nothing. The "Billy Rose's Jumbo" Blu-ray...

Blu-ray screenshots. The HD picture does not look perfect but it looks pretty nice.

Got this today. The 1080p picture is sweeet. Colors are rich, great for such a colorful film. The lossless 5.1 audio sounds great but doesn't seem to have a lot of rear action. English subtitles for the hard of hearing are provided. Can anyone explain why only spoken dialogs are subtitled...

Amazon videos are just like iTunes videos: they have copy protection that prevents you from doing any conversion and/or DVD burning. The one you were able to convert & burn probably had no copy protection. Amazon videos need to be watched on compatible devices. If your TV and Blu-ray player...

VCI Blu-ray screen captures for your viewing (dis)pleasure. Direct comparison of the VCI Blu-ray and the Image DVD. Note how little difference between the two in terms of details and sharpness. I forgot what a Blu-ray should look like after watching the VCI BD for 90min! Just to remind...

I got the VCI Blu-ray today. I see fine grains that indicate a high-def transfer, such as in this screenshot. But for those with smaller screen, where grains may not be as obvious, the lack of sharpness may make this BD look like DVD, frankly. Will Krupp may be right that this may be from a...

It's from the Image version. From the terrible-looking opening credits (picture looks great after the credits) to the lack of cropping, all indicates this is the Image print. Screenshot. Note the framing is the same as my earlier screenshots of the Image DVD.

The old VCI disc from 1999 actually looks pretty bright: screenshot. But it has no sharpness at all as you can see. The Image disc does have a scratchy and blurry opening credits, but the special features include the offensive "Ten Little N-----" opening credits that look great. So it seems...