Miscellaneous Movie Musings

[mousepod]

Count me as a big Wong Kar Wai fan. Unfortunately, my favorite of his films, Ashes Of Time, is not available as a watchable DVD anywhere. The original Hong Kong release is a straight copy of the laserdisc (i.e. not anamorphic, with English and Chinese subs burned-in), the American DVD takes the HK release and blocks out the subs with a huge black bar (and obscures a huge chunk of picture) and then adds a different set of burned-in English subs. There's a French DVD that came out a couple of years ago (with no English subs - but that's fixable), which has a beautiful audio and video transfer - but unfortunately contains a new edit of the movie as done by WKW. If you think Star Wars got screwed around by Lucas, you should see how much the new "Director's cut" changed this masterpiece...