Chimes at Midnight & Too Much Johnson on Blu-ray

[atcolomb]

Just got the notice from Amazon UK that my blu-ray is on the way so once i have received it i will do a comparison to the Mr. Bongo dvd and the TCM broadcast which is still in my dvr.

[atcolomb]

Just received my blu-ray copy and went and played a few minutes of it and also switched back and forth between that and the TCM broadcast that i kept on my dvr. Both have the same Filmoteca logo at the begining and the blu-ray is sharper as expected but it is brighter then the TCM version with the same print damaged thru out the film. There are posts that this might be overly bright and washed-out apperance and it's not that bad but could have been a little darker. I paid $14 so happy with it but will buy the Criterion version when they do their magic and clean it up, lower the brightness and add some extras to it.

[atcolomb]

Very curious...i went and compared the Mr. Bongo blu-ray to my Mr. Bongo dvd released a few years ago and the dvd is much darker so now i would say the blu-ray is overly bright and close to having some washed-out scenes like the sky or bright areas
of the image. Suprised Mr Bongo did not use any imaging tools to tone down the brightness so i wonder what happened?

[Jay]

Do everything you can to avoid the Mr. Bongo blu-ray of Chimes at Midnight. It's not restored, the picture looked utterly washed out with a complete absence of actual blacks, and audio sync problems remain. Wait for the Criterion release. Mr. Bongo completely botched it.

[tonyw]

Thanks, Jay. I need to replace my DVD from the Japanese laserdisk with embeded Japanese subtitles at right frame. I'm sure Criterion will do a better job - with extras!

[atcolomb]

I also had the dvd from the Japanese laser it was poor looking but the only way to see it the time i bought it many years ago. Then i got the Spanish dvd version from Suevia films and was a good improvement then got the Mr. Bongo dvd a few years ago and that had a much better picture then the Spanish one and now the Mr. Bongo blu-ray that should have been much better and is not and it seems like they rushed to have it out there without some contrast correction and brightness. Like all of us here knows the Criterion release will be something special.

[Le Chiffre]

I have the Japanese laserdisc of Chimes, and even though it's an outdated medium and has those distracting subtitles strung along the side, I think it looks better than any DVD edition I've seen, except for the now-out-of-print French Studio Canal DVD, which the version currently available on Youtube was ripped from.

My guess is that the version you have, Atcolomb, is a DVD taken from a VHS bootleg made from the laserdisc. If that's the case, I'm not surprised it has poor picture quality.

[atcolomb]

I would not be suprised at all if my copy came from a vhs copy of the Japanese laser. Even with the poor quality it was worth it since it was my first time seeing the film at all and this was around 1999. I did have laserdisc player at the time and even getting the laserdisc version was hard to get and never saw it on sale anywhere.