Facets

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htdm
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 3:46 am

Re: Facets

#326 Post by htdm » Sun Mar 22, 2009 12:28 am

Glenn Erickson on Poil de Carotte.

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knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: Facets

#327 Post by knives » Mon Mar 30, 2009 12:19 am

Is their Satantango even worth the rental or should I not watch it until I get an all-region?

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kaujot
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Re: Facets

#328 Post by kaujot » Mon Mar 30, 2009 3:40 am

Not worth it.

Facets holding the rights to Tarr's catalog is just so, so depressing.

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justeleblanc
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Re: Facets

#329 Post by justeleblanc » Mon Mar 30, 2009 9:35 am

kaujot wrote:Not worth it.

Facets holding the rights to Tarr's catalog is just so, so depressing.
Stop with the populist outrage already. Unless you are watching the film on a 42 inch HD TV, the Facets release looks good. kaujot, have you even watched the Facets Satantango DVDs?

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HerrSchreck
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Re: Facets

#330 Post by HerrSchreck » Mon Mar 30, 2009 10:18 am

I was going to say, Kaujots reply was more than just a bit extreme.. it's a fucking rental furchrissakes. The guy just wants to see the film! This is a mentality I'll never understand-- not wanting to watch a film unless it's released with CC-level digital budgets. God forbid you get into silents where opposite-standard telecine resulted in ghosting in the regions that licensed the beta from across the pond.

I mean, for god's sakes look at the comparisons and trust your eyes. This is nowhere near the level of "badness" that makes a film so unwatchable it's worse even than a vhs or tv broadcast ripped from poor reception. Gary's review says the image is not standards converted but I don't see any ghosting or combing (from the supposed interlacing) in the caps. The only visible difference in the caps is the Facets is a taddarker.

Gary really slammed this release, but Facets is an easy target and he went to town in full Kino style (you should note that Facets went nuts on Gary's review and conradicted some of his technical claims, some of which may be blowing smoke on their part). Most of the time he slams on CC-level technical specifications not being met, and without recognition of the challenges of bringing certain material to market.. yet every here and there he'll be forgiving because it's a film he's been dying to see... like Ozu's A Hen In The Wind's typical Panorama treatment where he ends the review (the disc looks no worse than the Facets Satantango):
I The film is another strong masterpiece by Ozu. I really thank Panorama for allowing us to see this film on DVD, regardless of the, now expected, weaknesses.
Knives-- rent the film.

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knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: Facets

#331 Post by knives » Mon Mar 30, 2009 10:58 am

Yeah, so screen caps aren't so bad. The subtitles and aspect ratio, my main concerns, seem spot on with the R2 so I'll throw caution to the wind and just rent the thing.

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skuhn8
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Re: Facets

#332 Post by skuhn8 » Mon Mar 30, 2009 11:20 am

I hate Facets, but from what I can tell they did a fine job with Satantango. For what it's worth Facets claims that Tarr has approved of all their releases of his films though I have yet to see anything to substantiate any claim that he gives a shit about DVD, VHS--in short--anything other than theatre projection of his films: "yeah sure, looks fine. You gonna validate my parking or what?" Certainly worth a rental; by the time you're ready to watch this a second time it'll be available on blu or whatever.

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MichaelB
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Re: Facets

#333 Post by MichaelB » Mon Mar 30, 2009 12:26 pm

skuhn8 wrote:I hate Facets, but from what I can tell they did a fine job with Satantango. For what it's worth Facets claims that Tarr has approved of all their releases of his films though I have yet to see anything to substantiate any claim that he gives a shit about DVD, VHS--in short--anything other than theatre projection of his films:
...which is richly ironic in his case! If you totted up the total auditorium capacity for every 35mm theatrical screening ever held of Satantango, I wonder what the figure would be? High four figures? Low five, at best?

(I'm reasonably sure that it's impossible for more than a triple-figure number of people to have seen it theatrically in Britain, for instance - I think it's only been shown two or three times in toto).

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kaujot
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Re: Facets

#334 Post by kaujot » Mon Mar 30, 2009 2:44 pm

justeleblanc wrote: Stop with the populist outrage already. Unless you are watching the film on a 42 inch HD TV, the Facets release looks good. kaujot, have you even watched the Facets Satantango DVDs?
Yes, I have, thanks. I watched them on my 27-inch LCD monitor, and, um, they looked pretty bad.

Edit: I will recant on the rental, though. Do rent it. I did. I wanted to buy the film afterwards, though, so I bought the AE, which, by the way, is so much cheaper even after currency conversion, it's really not funny.

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HerrSchreck
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Re: Facets

#335 Post by HerrSchreck » Mon Mar 30, 2009 3:05 pm

Out of genuine curiosity, what is it that we're not seeing in the caps?

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kaujot
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Re: Facets

#336 Post by kaujot » Mon Mar 30, 2009 3:14 pm

On my system at least, the level of detail between the two is staggering (as I recall, as I don't own the Facets discs). The Facets discs are hazy and at times appear to almost be out of focus.

My anger at Facets just stems from the fact that I've never rented or bought a film from them that I've really wanted to see without it being a total mess on DVD. There apparently are good Facets DVDs. They just never put the effort out on the films that I want to see, (And I know, it's something of a cheap argument, as economics, elements, etc.) but it's incredibly frustrating from a company that has such a wide library of titles. I don't expect Criterion level jobs on every film, but 99% of the time, it looks like they just don't care. And they charge out the nose for barebones (a complaint I share about Kino).

And also I also hate their subtitling. The font is very aliased (more than most subtitles), and on some black and white films (Werckmeister Harmonies in particular) you can barely read them during some passages, as they blend right in with the film.

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knives
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Re: Facets

#337 Post by knives » Mon Mar 30, 2009 5:46 pm

kaujot wrote: And also I also hate their subtitling. The font is very aliased (more than most subtitles), and on some black and white films (Werckmeister Harmonies in particular) you can barely read them during some passages, as they blend right in with the film.
Know what you're saying with that. The color of white they used for Gomorra at a showing I went to last week blended in perfectly with the background and lighting. That's actually why I appreciate Sony, even if it is the ugliest color in the world that they choose.

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kaujot
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Re: Facets

#338 Post by kaujot » Mon Mar 30, 2009 7:05 pm

Or they could just outline the text in black, as per CC and most other companies (Sony excluded, as you mentioned, for that horrendous diseased-piss shade of yellow).

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MichaelB
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Re: Facets

#339 Post by MichaelB » Tue Mar 31, 2009 2:39 am

I strongly suspect that what you rightly call a horrendous diseased-piss shade of yellow, coupled with the fact that they're burined into the print, is a legacy of an analogue tape master originally prepared for a 1990s VHS release.

Kino's The Color of Pomegranates has similar issues (although at least their subtitles are in sync!).

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jbeall
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Re: Facets

#340 Post by jbeall » Tue Mar 31, 2009 9:24 am

Facets' subtitling is really, really horrible--mistimed, typo-ridden, incomplete, in a hideous font--it all distracts from the experience of watching the film unless you know the language. And even then, Facets' subs are burned-in. The subs on All My Good Countrymen were certainly irritating, but the film was so damn gorgeous that it's worth seeing anyway. But I feel like those interested in Facets' releases should learn Czech, Hungarian, etc., in order not to have their viewing experience ruined by the lousy subs. I've got the Czech, but no time to learn Hungarian, so I'll watch the AE instead.

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LQ
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Re: Facets

#341 Post by LQ » Tue Mar 31, 2009 1:02 pm


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MichaelB
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Re: Facets

#342 Post by MichaelB » Tue Mar 31, 2009 1:56 pm

jbeall wrote:But I feel like those interested in Facets' releases should learn Czech, Hungarian, etc., in order not to have their viewing experience ruined by the lousy subs.
Ironically, the subs are usually better on Czech/Polish/Hungarian releases, at least when they offer English subs in the first place - rarely perfect, admittedly, but I'd rather put up with a few typos and awkward bits of phrasing than burned-in yellow subs that are painfully out of sync. And it's not as though Facets' subtitles are any better written - I strongly suspect that their Czech releases were subbed in the Czech Republic by someone whose first language wasn't English.

In fact, even if the Czech release isn't subtitled, I've still gone for it - the Czech Pearls of the Deep is a far superior package to the Facets one (it includes all seven original films, for starters, in a much better native PAL transfer), and I ripped a copy to DVD Studio Pro and have been slowly putting the subtitles back on manually, on the rare occasions that I have an idle moment. The crucial difference is that my subtitles are white, properly timed and I've cleaned up the typos and the poor phrasing. (This experience has rather underscored just how incomplete the Facets subtitles are too, but that's my next challenge!)

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Gregory
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 4:07 pm

Re: Facets

#343 Post by Gregory » Wed Apr 01, 2009 4:34 am

Barring the completely unreadable, the worst style of subtitling is the black rectangle (often totally opaque) behind the text. It's not good to unnecessarily cover up so much of the image that much of the time, and I've even seen cases where an actor's face near the bottom of the frame is completely blacked out behind the subs.

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MichaelB
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Re: Facets

#344 Post by MichaelB » Wed Apr 01, 2009 5:09 am

Gregory wrote:Barring the completely unreadable, the worst style of subtitling is the black rectangle (often totally opaque) behind the text. It's not good to unnecessarily cover up so much of the image that much of the time, and I've even seen cases where an actor's face near the bottom of the frame is completely blacked out behind the subs.
This was common practice on British TV in the 1980s and 1990s - instead of yellow subs (which I understand was the norm in the US), the likes of BBC2 and Channel 4 preferred white subs over a black or translucent grey background.

One of many reasons I vastly preferred the Second Run version of The Party and the Guests was that I had to watch the BBC2 version multiple times when writing the booklet (I didn't get to see the final SR version until it actually turned up in final shrinkwrapped form!). Not only were the subtitles presented as described above, but they were also manifestly inadequate in terms of translation.

That said, because it was a VHS LP off-air recording, I was actually quite grateful for this - one major bonus with presenting subtitles like that is that they tend to be more readable on very low-quality media. Which of course may be the reason why BBC2 did this in the first place - they must know that most of their foreign-language films would have been taped and timeshifted, given the unsociable hours they were screened!

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HerrSchreck
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Re: Facets

#345 Post by HerrSchreck » Wed Apr 01, 2009 8:18 am

Gregory wrote:Barring the completely unreadable, the worst style of subtitling is the black rectangle (often totally opaque) behind the text. It's not good to unnecessarily cover up so much of the image that much of the time, and I've even seen cases where an actor's face near the bottom of the frame is completely blacked out behind the subs.
Sometimes this is unfortunately due to the only available extant print of a film being a set of theatrical export reels with foreign subtitles printed permanently onto the film. One case I can recall off the top of my head is the disc of Leslie Steven's fabulous Incubus (1965), sourced from the sole remaning print of the film located miraculously in a French cinema after a long hunt. The film is in Esperanto, so will require subbing in just about any market it's exhibited in.. thus it was no surprise that the print at long last discovered turned out to be subbed. It sucks seeing Connie Hall's sublime b&w photography blocked over by those unfortunate black rectangles upon which the electronic english subs are overlaid.. but hey--whatayagunnadooo?

Worst example of the phenom was one of the worst discs in the history of the digital versatile disc: Shepard's Vampyr on Image Ent., with gigantic black rectangles laid over print subs. The rectangles were nearly half the screen tall... and as the print was cropped to a probably record-setting degree, Shepard wound up obliterating at least 50% of the organic print image via both cropping and subtitle-backgrounding. Blechhh.

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MichaelB
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Re: Facets

#346 Post by MichaelB » Wed Apr 01, 2009 9:26 am

HerrSchreck wrote:[Sometimes this is unfortunately due to the only available extant print of a film being a set of theatrical export reels with foreign subtitles printed permanently onto the film. One case I can recall off the top of my head is the disc of Leslie Steven's fabulous Incubus (1965), sourced from the sole remaning print of the film located miraculously in a French cinema after a long hunt. The film is in Esperanto, so will require subbing in just about any market it's exhibited in.. thus it was no surprise that the print at long last discovered turned out to be subbed. It sucks seeing Connie Hall's sublime b&w photography blocked over by those unfortunate black rectangles upon which the electronic english subs are overlaid.. but hey--whatayagunnadooo?
I was talking about issues like this with someone from Poland's national film archive - they've painstakingly managed to track down about 75% of Poland's feature-film output from the 1930s, but because so many Polish (i.e. unsubtitled) prints were destroyed during World War II they have to put up with loads of unwanted extras on either the image or soundtrack.

But if it's the choice between that and not seeing the films at all... as you say, whatayagunnadooo?
Worst example of the phenom was one of the worst discs in the history of the digital versatile disc: Shepard's Vampyr on Image Ent., with gigantic black rectangles laid over print subs. The rectangles were nearly half the screen tall... and as the print was cropped to a probably record-setting degree, Shepard wound up obliterating at least 50% of the organic print image via both cropping and subtitle-backgrounding. Blechhh.
The other classic example is World Video's notorious Ashes of Time (my own nomination for worst DVD ever), which as far as I remember took a 1.85:1 image that had been cropped at the sides to 4:3, and then cropped still further by a huge black bar across the bottom, onto which the English subtitles were printed. It's so ineptly done that you can occasionally glimpse the reason why they did this - the print's original non-English subtitles occasionally peep furtively over the top. And unlike Vampyr this was continuous throughout the film - the saving grace of that film is that the dialogue is pretty sparse!

I think Artificial Eye's Ashes of Time Blu-ray must be pretty unassailable for the crown of "most dramatic improvement between DVD and Blu-ray" - it's utterly unrecognisable.

Perkins Cobb
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Re: Facets

#347 Post by Perkins Cobb » Wed Apr 01, 2009 12:22 pm

Oh, man, the mind reels trying to contemplate all the ways in which Facets could fuck this up.

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Kirkinson
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Re: Facets

#348 Post by Kirkinson » Wed Apr 01, 2009 9:39 pm

Perkins Cobb wrote:
Oh, man, the mind reels trying to contemplate all the ways in which Facets could fuck this up.
It's really no different than what they've been doing for ages. I've had a rental account there for a few years and their service has always been excellent. The only real difference now is that they've got a new, more attractive web site (which ironically contains less information about each title than the ugly old web site had, but whatever), you can build your queue online instead of having to e-mail or call or go to the store and tell them what titles you want, and they're offering some less expensive plans than they used to have. Everything else seems to be exactly the same.

It makes a lot more sense to have an account at Facets if you're in Chicago, though. The real benefit is having access to their immense VHS library (you can actually rent the VHS titles by mail, too, but you pay shipping on each one, so I can't imagine many people take advantage of it on a regular basis). That, and they have DVDs from all over the world -- I just about squealed the last time I visited the store and saw the Complete Iosseliani box set on their new arrivals wall.

Perkins Cobb
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Re: Facets

#349 Post by Perkins Cobb » Thu Apr 02, 2009 12:55 pm

Kirkinson wrote:That, and they have DVDs from all over the world -- I just about squealed the last time I visited the store and saw the Complete Iosseliani box set on their new arrivals wall.
Wow - that puts you way ahead of New Yorkers, then. No rental stores left here with major collections of non-R1 DVDs, as far as I know.

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Adam X
Joined: Thu Apr 16, 2009 5:04 am

Re: Facets

#350 Post by Adam X » Thu Apr 16, 2009 5:25 am

Has anyone seen their recent release of Go Shibata's LATE BLOOMER, who'd care to offer up thoughts on the transfer?

Sounds like a real interesting film, but since the DVD-age began, I find it more and more difficult to buy a disc that looks like crap. It just becomes too distracting...

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