Fang Zei said:
generalfrevious said:
Mike O said:
Fang Zei said:
Yeah, I hate that directors can't leave well enough alone and have to digitally erase stuff from their older films. It becomes frustrating when a movie like Evil Dead gets a beautiful restoration for its blu-ray debut but is then altered from its original version because the director wanted to "fix" things.
By the way, did Cameron actually make alterations to T1? I remember reading about one or two shots that people had spotted, but I never saw screenshot comparisons. It's probably a given that he's made "fixes" to True Lies and The Abyss, which are hitting blu-ray later this year. I should probably brace myself for when the eventual remaster of T2 suffers a similar fate.
What alterations were made The Evil Dead Blu-Ray? I know it didn't include the mono. The Terminator didn't include the original mono track, and much like he did with Aliens, Cameron has changed the color timing completely to that teal and orange that he wants it to swim in. I think the sadder part is that not only will T2, The Abyss, and True Lies almost certainly suffer the same fate (I still hate myself for supporting Wal-Mart and buying the HDX True Lies from Vudu, but it was the only place to get it.), and no one will give a damn. No one cares about the kind of revisionism practiced by Lucas, there certainly isn't anyone who gives a fuck about the recoloring on those films :(. The dark side of digital, change is easier than ever, and why? Because they can. And after Cameron spoke out against what Lucas did, too. FML.
Those were minor technical points, aren't they? Cameron really hasn't done what Lucas has (right?), changing whole scenes around where another character shoots first, people screaming nooooo when they didn't in an earlier version, editing out original actors and replacing them with actors who weren't alive when the original film was out, and shoehorning CGI from the late 90s into a film from the 70s. Then deride the real films as rough drafts and letting them disintegrate and be lost forever. This is a whole new level than just color correcting.
Raimi had some of the glaring bloopers - bloopers that kinda give the movie part of its charm - digitally erased. It's even more frustrating because they made brand new masters of both the 1.37:1 and 1.85:1 versions to include on the Blu-ray (just as the old DVD had both framings), and they both have the same digital revisions in them.
Cameron didn't quite do the same thing as Lucas with his newer transfers of Aliens and Titanic, no, but then again I think Cameron puts more emphasis on the original version's edit being what makes it the "original version" than any digital revisions that may be found within otherwise identical edits, and he "fixed" a whole bunch of things in Titanic for its most recent release. Funny enough, the theatrical cut of Aliens on the Blu-ray can't technically be called that from an editing standpoint either: Cameron corrected the order of four shots where Ripley picks up a flamethrower, puts down a machine gun, picks up a machine gun, puts down a flamethrower. Although I guess I should simply be thankful that the only thing he erased in Aliens (AFAIK) is Lance Henricksen's torso sticking out of the ground in a shot during the final action scene. It's almost like the snake pit reflection to Aliens' RotLA.
Similarly, Cameron seems to have left T1 alone for the most part, although I don't see why it was so much trouble to include the mono track. He's given it that new color timing, yeah, but those kind of things don't tend to bother me as much. I'll admit the most recent transfer of Raiders didn't look right to my eyes when the screenshots popped up online, but then again there seems to be disagreement as to just how the movie looked in '81. The new transfers of Fellowship of the Ring and AotC (Hey, back on topic!) also look weird to me, and I suspect it has something to do with digging up movies that were some of the earliest DI's after almost a decade.
Plus both The Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 both omit the original mono tracks. And I don't for the life of me understand why the hell that's so hard. Wouldn't it be more work to actually create a remix? An American Werewolf in London omits it too, and that's nothing comparted to the hideous downmixes on the Sergio Leone releases or the countless one Fortune Star tried to pass off on their Hong Kong discs. As for T1, Cameron certainly hasn't left it alone, like Aliens, the Blu-ray transfer is now awash in teal. I thought that when it was originally scanned, such revisions didn't apply? IF that's the case, that's even worse. Cameron may not have done quite the same thing as Lucas, but the principle is entirely the same, altering the way something was originally both made and shown for many years.
Apparently Cameron thinks those are the colors he always intended to use in 1986. And between the market being on its knees, the franchise being dead, and the fact that it was done by Cameron himself, I don't see it being fixed now or ever. And I can't imagine many 35mm prints of it still kick around. Subtle revisions like the snake pit reflection in Raiders do bug me, but I also have to accept that to a normal, well-adjusted person who gets laid once in a while, but it bothers me all the same the same way it does on the Evil Dead disc, and it's a slippery slope to think what they'll go changing next. In other cases, like the coloring issues on The Fellowship of the Ring or Raiders of the Lost Ark Blu-rays, I do sometimes wonder if it's not a case of revisionism, but of simple fuckups on the mastering end.
Tobar said:
Yeah I never understood the whole THX-1138 is lost thing. I saw the original a number of years ago and it certainly wasn't on VHS or laserdisc.
Where was it? I have a VHS version I recorded off of TCM (haven't watched it), maybe they'd show it again in HD?
SilverWook said:
Mike O said:
DominicCobb said:
THX 1138 is definitely not lost. I watched the original on-demand a couple years ago. I believe it was standard definition, but still.
Maybe, but it's never been released on any home video format besides VHS and LD, I certainly don't see enough interest in the original version to get a it a Blu-ray release. It's like the recolorings of Aliens or Terminator, 99% of the population probably don't care enough for it to matter.
If there's a decent SD master Warner has been sitting on of the original, it wouldn't cost them much to put out via their made on demand Archive label. If they can skirt around George that is...
That's still only SD, but yeah, you're right. I wonder what kind of sway he he holds as regard that movie? Granted, the market for the original version of that is so small that Warned probably wouldn't care anyway.
SilverWook said:
DominicCobb said:
THX 1138 is definitely not lost. I watched the original on-demand a couple years ago. I believe it was standard definition, but still.
You think you could track that down? Even an SD version might be better than the dodgy Laserdisc master that's caused the preservation project more than a few headaches.
Like I said, TCM showed it, maybe TCM HD would show it in 1080i or 720p. Not exactly like having the 35mm print there, but still...
Digital is ever the double-edge sword. God, we live in an amazing time...