Ang Lee's Pushing Hands (1991) coming from Film Movement

[James Luckard]

So I just watched the disc just now.

The movie: a charming, beautifully observed little film, demonstrating stunning technical skill. Ang Lee may have had few resources here, but his breathtaking ability to stage a scene for the camera was there from the beginning.

The disc: Watchable. Just barely.

This is possibly the worst BD I've ever seen. I'm talking Family Plot bad.

It's a combination of two things:

1) the gamma problem is clearly a technical error. It's bad enough in daylight scenes, where everything looks milky and desaturated, but it's absolutely hideous in night scenes, where everything looks totally off. (Note that the gamma problem is present in the trailer above too, I compared it to the BD.)

2) possibly the worst compression I've ever seen on a BD. If you had told me I was watching a DVD, I'd have believed it. This doesn't even look like HD, honestly. In fact, a couple of times, when there was a static background in a scene, the background froze completely, so it looked like a bad CGI effect.

In addition, the master has had so much DNR applied to it that there is zero fine detail.

I'm 99% sure this is the same Taiwanese BD master, only with the gamma nuked.

Unfortunately, this is the only way for an American audience to watch this film easily.

The film is set in New York, and is about 50% Chinese and 50% English, quite often mixed in the same scene.

An unsubtitled version, like the German BD, would be incomprehensible to most Americans.

Meanwhile, the Taiwanese BD, with English subtitles for both Chinese and spoken English, during scenes where both languages are being spoken very quickly, becomes a jumble of competing subtitles that is completely bewildering.

Also, the subtitles are not great. I compared a few scenes to the ancient US DVD, and those are much better. These appear identical to those on the Taiwan BD, and they're fairly clunky at times. A few times, they were briefly incoherent. Once, they even mistranslated a conversation about going back to Mainland China to be about "Taiwan," making the remainder of the conversation, about visiting Beijing, nonsensical.

This isn't a visually stunning film, it's mostly set in one house, so again, the disc is watchable, but be prepared for minimal quality.