"Dan Rempel" <drempel@hurtly_flurty> wrote
> >>Have you seen the Criterion stuff? The old Kurosawa ??? look
> >
> > pretty good.
> >
> > I have seen several (and own a couple) and honestly they look like
> > crap. The films are either too dark or too light and in Seven Samurai
> > they didn't correct for streaks on the original film. They also don't
> > do anything to make the subtitles more legible; often they get lost in
> > the dark background.
<...>
> I think you must have some early ones; the ones I have (e.g. Yojimbo)
> are quite clean, good contrast, and I don't remember any serious
> streaking/film damage. In fact, to check, I just dug out "The Hidden
> Fortress," and there were a couple of streaks in the first few minutes,
> then pretty much as above. The subtitles are white on black below the
> actual film, and quite legible. I guess YMMV.

I guess Criterion is pretty variable.  I rented Ozu's "Tokyo Story" and the
subtitles were crap, plain white at the bottom of the screen that just
disappeared against the intricately patterned clothes in many scenes.  The
overall film quality was OK but not great (then I don't know what they were
working from), but my recollection is that there was stuff that should have
been removable if any real digiprocessing had been done.  (The commentary
kind of sucked, too much on camera angle details and not enough on meaning;
and the guys voice was like fingernails on blackboard.)