A Few Words About A few words about...™ An American Werewolf in London -- in Blu-ray (1 Viewer)

[Josh Steinberg]

I want to ask again a question from earlier.

I read an interview with Landis where he praised the previous Blu-ray release, and said that he almost didn't like how clear the new restoration looked - here's the relevant quote (added emphasis mine):
"I think the Blu-Ray of Werewolf looks very good, I was happy with it and I supervised that. But now they did a 6K scan of the original negative and it was a remarkable thing, it was so weird because it was not like looking at a movie, it was like looking through a window. I didn’t like it actually because the clarity and depth of field is such that you can count the blades of grass. It’s unbelievably crisp and what the most remarkable thing is that black is black. On film black is never black. Here, black is black and that is cool, and it was so clear it was weird."

Is there a chance that whatever is going on with the disc is not an accident, but was an intentional decision made by Landis so that the disc wasn't as clear as the scan of the OCN may have been?

 

[dvdclon]

Wasn't there more to that quote where he was concerned that the added clarity would expose flaws in the makeup, but instead found that Rick Baker's work looked better than ever?

If that were the case, you wouldn't expect him to want to back away from that.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Wasn't there more to that quote where he was concerned that the added clarity would expose flaws in the makeup, but instead found that Rick Baker's work looked better than ever?

If that were the case, you wouldn't expect him to want to back away from that.

There was more about that in the full interview, yes - there's a link to it somewhere earlier on this thread. There was another interview that I had read some months prior where Landis again referred to the new scan from the OCN as being too clean, but I can't recall where I read it. I really wish I could find that earlier interview, because at the time, it seemed like Landis was suggesting that the image might need to be intentionally degraded to get it back to looking the way he imagined it should look. But since I can't find that at the moment, I don't want to cite that as fact because I could be misremembering the quote or the context.

I just thought it was interesting that some early reviews are essentially saying, "It looks good, better than ever before, but perhaps not with the same clarity as some other new restorations" and that Landis has been quoted as saying that looking at the clean scan of the OCN was weird, so putting two and two together, it seems that the possibility could exist that something was done at Landis's request. That's my question about the whole thing. But I have absolutely no insider information on this, and even further in the interest of full disclosure, I don't have the new BD yet and I never owned the older BD, so I have no basis for comparison. I feel like in my case, it's going to be one of those instances where the new disc looks better than any other version I've ever seen by default, so I probably will be too wowed by that to go looking for any imperfections.

 

[Steen DK]

Well, there seems to be a disconnect doesn't there, because Mr. Harris is saying in order to see ANYTHING untoward he had to go stand next to his screen.

Maybe he's just wrong, like he was about Back to the Future and Elizabeth and Coppola's Dracula. It happens.

 

[Robert Crawford]

We need to stop the personal references towards each other and just focus on your personal experiences with this disc. Many are happy with this BD Release. Some of us are unsatisfied with it. Looks like business as usual when it comes to subjective viewings of the same video product, but with different set of eyes, expectations, knowledge, HT equipment and viewing environments. Agree to disagree and stop with the "tit-for-tat" exchanges as it does nothing, but insult each other and is a distraction for the rest of us.

 

[Dick]

So, Universal, when are you gonna do a 6k scan and 4k Blu-ray release of COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT?

Anyway, so as not to subvert this rather interesting thread, I will add my own take on the new AWIL: It looks great. Thank you.

 

[davidmatychuk]

All of you are welcome at my place any time, because I'm keeping both Blu-Rays. You know, in the interest of world peace.