Lolita 4K UHD (1962) Coming Soon from Criterion!

[yoloswegmaster420]

New 4K restoration by Criterion and WB will be playing at the Venice Film Festival. Will update this once it is officially announced.

[JoelGoodsen]

When Criterion released Risky Business, I always suspected that they may have also got Eyes Wide Shut. Hopeully this adds some weight to that, and EWS 4K comes to fruition.

[CompleteCount]

Well, there goes my wallet. And my wrist.

Erm... sprained from picking up the wallet, of course...

[Fat Phil]

Love both Lolitas so will absolootelly buy day one, but Adrian Lyne's film is the better adaption and a straight-up masterpiece, IMHO. Jeremy Irons is freakin' incredible in that movie.

[Mr. Kino]

Originally Posted by Fat Phil

Love both Lolitas so will absolootelly buy day one, but Adrian Lyne's version is the better adaption and a straight-up masterpiece, IMHO. Jeremy Irons is freakin' incredible in that movie.

Never seen the Lyne version. Kubrick’s version was always going to be compromised, giver the time when it was made. It’s my least favorite of Kubrick films, but I can’t see myself not picking up the eventual 4k.

On an even happier note, Venice Classics will also include restorations for House of Strangers, Port of Shadows and KWAIDAN!!!!

https://www.labiennale.org/en/news/v...-film-festival

[Hedrox]

Originally Posted by Fat Phil

Love both Lolitas

[Driver78]

Originally Posted by Fat Phil

Love both Lolitas so will absolootelly buy day one, but Adrian Lyne's film is the better adaption and a straight-up masterpiece, IMHO. Jeremy Irons is freakin' incredible in that movie.

Never seen the Kubrick film but I love the '97 version. It's a gem but apparently we may never see a 4K. The KL Insider responded to someone who asked about it that the Owners wanted too much money.

[Kyle15]

Originally Posted by The Sovereign

Keeping in mind that “coming soon” can be within the next 10 years per Criterion timeframes, this is excellent news. Hopefully sooner than later.

It won't be, it's going to screen soon. It'll be within the next year or so.

Originally Posted by Driver78

Never seen the Kubrick film but I love the '97 version. It's a gem but apparently we may never see a 4K. The KL Insider responded to someone who asked about it that the Owners wanted too much money.

That'd be Pathe or Samuel Goldwyn then. Wonder how much they want if Kino balks at the price? lol

[yoloswegmaster420]

Originally Posted by Driver78

Never seen the Kubrick film but I love the '97 version. It's a gem but apparently we may never see a 4K. The KL Insider responded to someone who asked about it that the Owners wanted too much money.

I'm fairly certain that WB has the '97 version as well, since it was listed on that WB survey from last year (alongside the '62 version). Either it gets added to the Criterion release of the original film or WB releases a standalone version.

[Rzzzz]

Originally Posted by Fat Phil

Love both Lolitas so will absolootelly buy day one, but Adrian Lyne's film is the better adaption and a straight-up masterpiece, IMHO. Jeremy Irons is freakin' incredible in that movie.

But there is no Peter Sellers in the second one...

[Show spoiler]

[HundredYearLurker]

Originally Posted by Fat Phil

Love both Lolitas so will absolootelly buy day one, but Adrian Lyne's film is the better adaption and a straight-up masterpiece, IMHO. Jeremy Irons is freakin' incredible in that movie.

Oh dude, no. Lynne (or Schiff, the screenwriter) either failed to comprehend the novel at a fundamental level or simply wanted to film a different story. Which is fine, but I still recall a lot of sentiment around the false notion that it was "more faithful to Nabokov's novel". No. Kubrick's film alters and adds scenes, but nonetheless those alterations and additions more faithfully convey the themes and tone of Nabokov's darkly tragicomic satire than Lyne's lush, gauzy, woozy period piece.

Consider the opening. Yes, Lyne's film begins with a voice-over rearrangement of the famous opening lines from the novel with some omissions. Arguably it's "closer to source" than Kubrick's HH-Quilty confrontation, but look deeper. Aside from omitting the amusing and quintessentially Nabokovian "tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap..." it removes every hint of humor, every self-reflexive contrivance from Humbert's self-serving musings: "You can always count on a murderer for a a fancy prose style" is of course a line that has no place in Lyne's superficial romance nor Irons' grim reading.

And what's the ultimate contrivance? Only the entire motivation for Jeremy Irons' Humbert. "But there might have been no Lolita at all had I not first met Annabel..." (fade to flashback of tragic love).



Yeah, facepalm. Or maybe laugh out loud. If you've read the novel, you know this self-serving bullshit is just that ... a fanciful justification by Professor Humbert, a literary scholar, who is here very directly quoting Poe's famous poem, Annabel Lee. But Lyne simply takes it at face value.

We already know from the forward that the pages we're reading are attributed to Humbert, who wrote them in prison before dying of coronary thrombosis a few days before his trial was to start. He is the ultimate unreliable narrator and mounts his self-defense upon the linguistic and literary games played throughout the novel.

Again, Lyne takes it all at face value, removing all the psychological depth, barbed humor, and dark satire. He either doesn't realize that Humbert is bullshitting or he simply hacked off all those portions of the novel, the elements that are in fact most distinctly Nabokovian.

Yes, we are supposed to realize that Humbert's tragically lost "Annabel Leigh" is really Poe's "Annabel Lee". That Humbert's idyllic "princedom by the sea" is Poe's "kingdom by the sea". That the entire first four paragraphs comprising Chapter 1 are utterly contrived and riddled with allusions to Poe's poem. And that these obvious contrivances set the stage for how the reader is meant to read the novel - beneath, between, and behind the actual lines.

Instead, Lyne takes you now to France, 1921. To adolescence, when a boy's romantic heart is formed. All in soft-focus montages, and so so self-serious. One might even say they loved with a love that was more than love, "[w]ith a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven coveted her and me."

Nabokov, on the other hand, ends Chapter 1 with this: "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."

[dallywhitty]

It's gonna be another digipack and I'll have to import it and it'll arrive damaged. I'm shitting!

Negativity aside... I'm still glad it's getting a boutique UHD release. It's a brilliant film and WB have treated it like a red-headed stepchild for far too long.

[Fat Phil]

Originally Posted by HundredYearLurker

Oh dude, no. Lynne (or Schiff, the screenwriter) either failed to comprehend the novel at a fundamental level or simply wanted to film a different story. Which is fine, but I still recall a lot of sentiment around the false notion that it was "more faithful to Nabokov's novel". No. Kubrick's film alters and adds scenes, but nonetheless those alterations and additions more faithfully convey the themes and tone of Nabokov's darkly tragicomic satire than Lyne's lush, gauzy, woozy period piece.

Consider the opening. Yes, Lyne's film begins with a voice-over rearrangement of the famous opening lines from the novel with some omissions. Arguably it's "closer to source" than Kubrick's HH-Quilty confrontation, but look deeper. Aside from omitting the amusing and quintessentially Nabokovian "tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap..." it removes every hint of humor, every self-reflexive contrivance from Humbert's self-serving musings: "You can always count on a murderer for a a fancy prose style" is of course a line that has no place in Lyne's superficial romance nor Irons' grim reading.

And what's the ultimate contrivance? Only the entire motivation for Jeremy Irons' Humbert. "But there might have been no Lolita at all had I not first met Annabel..." (fade to flashback of tragic love).



Yeah, facepalm. Or maybe laugh out loud. If you've read the novel, you know this self-serving bullshit is just that ... a fanciful justification by Professor Humbert, a literary scholar, who is here very directly quoting Poe's famous poem, Annabel Lee. But Lyne simply takes it at face value.

We already know from the forward that the pages we're reading are attributed to Humbert, who wrote them in prison before dying of coronary thrombosis a few days before his trial was to start. He is the ultimate unreliable narrator and mounts his self-defense upon the linguistic and literary games played throughout the novel.

Again, Lyne takes it all at face value, removing all the psychological depth, barbed humor, and dark satire. He either doesn't realize that Humbert is bullshitting or he simply hacked off all those portions of the novel, the elements that are in fact most distinctly Nabokovian.

Yes, we are supposed to realize that Humbert's tragically lost "Annabel Leigh" is really Poe's "Annabel Lee". That Humbert's idyllic "princedom by the sea" is Poe's "kingdom by the sea". That the entire first four paragraphs comprising Chapter 1 are utterly contrived and riddled with allusions to Poe's poem. And that these obvious contrivances set the stage for how the reader is meant to read the novel - beneath, between, and behind the actual lines.

Instead, Lyne takes you now to France, 1921. To adolescence, when a boy's romantic heart is formed. All in soft-focus montages, and so so self-serious. One might even say they loved with a love that was more than love, "[w]ith a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven coveted her and me."

Nabokov, on the other hand, ends Chapter 1 with this: "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."

Your post is giving me ‘school writing assignment’ flashbacks. My own particular literary hell was ‘5000 words on John Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men and its various screen adaptions’.

The horror…. The horror….

[sidetracked1]

Originally Posted by HundredYearLurker

Oh dude, no. Lynne (or Schiff, the screenwriter) either failed to comprehend the novel at a fundamental level or simply wanted to film a different story. Which is fine, but I still recall a lot of sentiment around the false notion that it was "more faithful to Nabokov's novel". No. Kubrick's film alters and adds scenes, but nonetheless those alterations and additions more faithfully convey the themes and tone of Nabokov's darkly tragicomic satire than Lyne's lush, gauzy, woozy period piece.
C.[/I]"

Just (finally!) read the book (the annotated edition with excellent supporting material by Alfred Appel) and for me your comments are dead on. If anything even Kubrick's version (which I love) still humanizes, sentimentalizes and takes Humbert more seriously/literally than the book.

[dwk]

Originally Posted by JoelGoodsen

When Criterion released Risky Business, I always suspected that they may have also got Eyes Wide Shut. Hopeully this adds some weight to that, and EWS 4K comes to fruition.

On Sunday I was watching the Let's Get Physical Media show on youtube while I did some laundry and Robert Burnett was talking about Barry Lyndon and he seemed to hint that Criterion had the two remaining unreleased Kubricks. I don't think he was aware that a festival screening of the Criterion restoration of Lolita has already been announced. So it wouldn't shock me if they also have Eyes Wide Shut.

[Urizen200]

is there a link to this YT video?

[Kyle15]

Well there it is! TBH I was hoping they'd have cold feet so a different boutique would get it. Oh well it's coming at last!

[The Sovereign]

Keeping in mind that “coming soon” can be within the next 10 years per Criterion timeframes, this is excellent news. Hopefully sooner than later.

[SpookyDollhouse]

Can't wait for this. Is it possible for a Kubrick movie to be underrated? The music is amazing

Here's the full lineup of restored classics for Venice, a lot of good stuff happening

[Mr. Kino]

Originally Posted by The Sovereign

Keeping in mind that “coming soon” can be within the next 10 years per Criterion timeframes, this is excellent news. Hopefully sooner than later.

Once the restoration is out there, being shown in theaters, they don’t typically take that long putting out the discs. I expect this and A History of Violence to be out this fall, in time for November sales.