I am curious if the early CGI internet mainframe footage is also black-and-white, because i think that would look far less striking than in color. A kind of Dorothy-leaving-Kansas-and-walking-into-Oz transition back to color for that footage could be really rad.
Kind of a wasted opportunity to not include the color version as well. Does Sony not have the rights to that somehow? The Image BD is OOP, so I'm not sure I understand their reasoning for not including the original version as well and/or at least releasing it separately. I've never seen the film personally, so I'd like to have both versions
According to wiki it's produced by Johnny Mnemonic Productions and Sony is just the US distributor, so they don't own the movie... but I don't see why they didn't include both versions. Image having it OOP surely means the license has expired, so surely Sony could've got both if they wanted it seems.
Even if the specs announced here seem legit, there's not been anything official publicly yet, so assuming the theatrical version isn't included might be a little early to take 100% accurate...
Well surprisingly, Sony gave their okay when director Longo approached them to get access to their materials in order to do a proper B&W grading, whereas initially he thought of doing it from a Blu-ray copy and dump it on the internet "underground-style":
Quote:
I'm assuming you try to limit contact with the studio nowadays, but do you have any sense of how they feel about the black-and-white cut?
Originally, when I decided to make this black-and-white conversion, I ripped a Blu-ray and turned it black-and-white. I contacted one of the film’s original producers who was also a good guy, Don Carmody. I said to him, "I'm doing this, and I'm going to dump it on the 25th anniversary. I'm going to dump it on YouTube,” or something like that. And he said, "Wait, let me see it." So, I sent it to him, and he got really excited. "This is really great. We should show this to Sony." I hesitated to get Sony involved at first, but the problem with the Blu-ray version is that the quality would not be good enough to project it in a theater. So, Sony gave us the footage to work from, and they may release this new version on Blu-ray. There's never been a director's cut. Ironically, there is a version that some people misunderstand to be a “director's cut,” the Japanese version of it, but it's not a director's cut. It's basically got more Takeshi Kitano in it. That's basically what it is.
So, I got the hi-res footage from the studio, and we graded it into black-and-white. I worked with Cyrus Stowe, who was the colorist on this version. Basically, we went through it scene-by-scene, and he was really great. He's really a very talented guy.
Was that feeling of redemption there, throughout the process?
When I saw the first version of the black-and-white film, I was just so happy. It was so much closer to what I imagined it to be, for sure. I knew turning it black-and-white would get it closer to where I imagined it from the very beginning. In my work, I take inspiration from films like Alphaville, La Jetée, things like that. A lot of black-and-white movies are not really black-and-white. They're kind of gray. The contrast is really pumped up now [in this cut] so it’s very black-and-white.
If I tweak my TV well enough, will this release be in colour
I actually did this once so I could watch Dune in black and white after reading Lynch had intended to shoot it that way. Since Sony did a new scan for Johnny Mnemonic I would imagine they are prepping something more than just a B&W Blu-ray release...
I actually did this once so I could watch Dune in black and white after reading Lynch had intended to shoot it that way. Since Sony did a new scan for Johnny Mnemonic I would imagine they are prepping something more than just a B&W Blu-ray release...
Was thinking that if Keanu Reeves wasn't still popular with JOHN WICK etc, they probably wouldn't have gone for the physical release, not mentioning that the closeness with Covid and 2021 kind of made JM "trendy"...
Okay, I gotta ask, I love a lot of old films that are only available in black and white… but this film in Black and White as well as Mad Max, is there a difference in watching these B&W movies that looks differently than if I turn the color off in my Television settings??? I don’t necessarily get spending the extra cash if I can see the same thing with my old color edition.
Okay, I gotta ask, I love a lot of old films that are only available in black and white… but this film in Black and White as well as Mad Max, is there a difference in watching these B&W movies that looks differently than if I turn the color off in my Television settings??? I don’t necessarily get spending the extra cash if I can see the same thing with my old color edition.
One would presume the shots would be regraded individually to fit the B&W picture, which would definitely be different from just turning off the colors on your TV, though the difference likely won't be massive.
As explained above, the director Robert Longo went back and did a proper BW grading shot-by-shot with a colorist, so I expect this to be quite a different than "grayscale".
Also if you look at Longo's visual arts and paintings, most of his work is in high contrast black and whites so I guess his new version of JM will look similar to his other BW pieces...
As explained above, the director Robert Longo went back and did a proper BW grading shot-by-shot with a colorist, so I expect this to be quite a different than "grayscale".
Also if you look at Longo's visual arts and paintings, most of his work is in high contrast black and whites so I guess his new version of JM will look similar to his other BW pieces...
Alright, I’m going to dive in and buy a copy as an experiment to see the visual difference in tv settings vs this addition.
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