Third Window Films Discussion Thread

[Yami]

Originally Posted by Broomey

Alot of debate about a label thats probably going to release a film called Kandagawa Pervert Wars.

And I'll pay £19.99 for it and not a penny more! (Unless it's a double-bill with Excitement of the Do Re Me Fa Girl)

[T4ffer]

Sad to hear that Third Window Films is single-handedly ruining the market, making it toxic, exploitative and abusive, damaging the buyers. Had I known that before, I wouldn't have gotten into Tsukamoto at all, and I should probably burn my Obayashi box sets just to be safe - they even have slip covers!

[logboy]

Originally Posted by kmhofmann

If you complained about some companies releasing $60+ special editions only, I'd give you a tiny little bit of credit.

amongst many errors and failures in what you've stated, this is the clearest one to me.

i've said just as much, several times, in recent days.

the reasonable people can accept there's more than one perspective. it appears you can not.

if i could point to the flaws in releases from across the decades, i'd be here for years doing it. plenty of half assed work has gone on too, to undercut price points, even by .... criterion ..... who have cheapened pressing plants at times to increase profits, and left the market with discs that bronzed and failed.

that you can't recall lower prices but can claim to find inflation acceptable and entirely measured and justified is just bizarre.

here's another thread you'll want to avoid, then :

https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=349413

... or read it, complain about it, and unsubscribe from following it.


and now this >

Originally Posted by T4ffer

Sad to hear that Third Window Films is single-handedly ruining the market, making it toxic, exploitative and abusive, damaging the buyers. Had I known that before, I wouldn't have gotten into Tsukamoto at all, and I should probably burn my Obayashi box sets just to be safe - they even have slip covers!

i've said nothing of the sort. i've also mentioned a couple or more specific labels, and clarified i'm also talking generally about people releasing foreign genre films here and in the USA.

[Zodiac]

@logboy
You are writing in the wrong topic. You should have written about this in the Second Sight thread. Their limited edition prices are utterly ridiculous

[Stanshall]

The more time I spend here, the more I think this might be the maddest forum I've ever been on. I love it!

[thenexus6]

This thread could be a zany Japanese comedy. I'd happily pay £20 for the blu ray!

[Yami]

The list of Directors' Company negatives found appears to be (partially):

Door (Banmei Takahashi, 1988)
Evil Dead Trap (Toshiharu Ikeda, 1988)
Typhoon Club (Shinji Somai, 1985)
Luminous Woman (Shinji Somai, 1987)
The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1985)
Halber Mensch (Sogo Ishii, 1986)
ポップコーンLove (Hironari Yano and Takeo Moriyasu, 1990)
Mourning Work (Takumi Kimizuka, 1991)
Original Sin (Takashi Ishii, 1992)

The tweet seems to suggest that there's a follow-on tweet but I can't find it!

[thirdwindowfilms]

Originally Posted by Yami

The list of Directors' Company negatives found appears to be (partially):

Door (Banmei Takahashi, 1988)
Evil Dead Trap (Toshiharu Ikeda, 1988)
Typhoon Club (Shinji Somai, 1985)
Luminous Woman (Shinji Somai, 1987)
The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1985)
Halber Mensch (Sogo Ishii, 1986)
ポップコーンLove (Hironari Yano and Takeo Moriyasu, 1990)
Mourning Work (Takumi Kimizuka, 1991)
Original Sin (Takashi Ishii, 1992)

The tweet seems to suggest that there's a follow-on tweet but I can't find it!

The person who made this discovery is interviewed on the Guard from Underground disc. His name is Takashi Ikoma (he was also the producer on Guard).

Though Original Sin is not a Directors Company film.

[TheHistorian]

Originally Posted by roguejp

Which damage do you mean? That some people are drawn away from physical media altogether because of this?

Originally Posted by logboy

it's increasingly niche. it doesn't secure as much as it shrinks a marketplace and makes it vulnerable because all the eggs are increasingly only in one basket

This is what I was getting at.

As the industry becomes more and more collector focused instead of mass market, the risk / damage of any one person giving up on the hobby is magnified. It's a downward spiral.

Should collectors simply not worry about buying everything? Of course. With a perfectly logical mindset that's what they'd do. But that's not how many collectors are wired. Which is what labels are counting on.

I think we end up with contraction of the number of labels. Collectors will make the choices they have to make, because they aren't all independently wealthy, and that will strain some companies' balance sheets. We recently lost Network and Olive (and Code Red, Scorpion, and Twilight Time for different reasons). More will follow.


(I don't think Third Window is particularly guilty of this, as I can think of probably ten other labels doing more egregious things with releases. I don't even recall how we got on the subject here, but it's where I noticed it, so I commented.)

[Ben_C]

For some unknown reason I was originally a teeny bit lukewarm on those upcoming Directors Company releases, but having looked into them a bit more (and having also received a 10% off code from Terracotta a couple of weeks ago), I reckon I’m now going to preorder all 3

[CelestialAgent]

Don’t know if Third Window would be able to upgrade their DVD in the UK, but Film Movement are releasing a 4K restoration of Green Fish in the US.

Originally Posted by MifuneFan

Film Movement has added the S. Korean classic crime film Green Fish (1997), from director Lee Chang-dong, to their site. The release is sourced from a new 4K restoration.

https://filmmovement.com/green-fish

[Salgueiro]

Film Movement are also releasing Peppermint Candy and Oasis

[Ben_C]

A three film Lee Chang-dong Blu-ray set would be nice, and undoubtedly a decent upgrade on the old Korean region 3 dvd set.

[KaizerChef]

Just watched Party 7 from the Katsuhito Ishii Collection and the subtitles are full of what appear to be OCR errors, namely full stops instead of commas (followed by non-capitalized words), and worse, lots of "l"s in place of "i"s. I am surprised they got through QC to be honest because there are so many errors they become quite distracting after a while.

Shark Skin Man's subtitles are completely free from this, so maybe the subtitles for Party 7 where sourced from an old DVD and nobody bothered to fix the OCR errors? Don't know if they can be considered to be egregious enough to warrant a disc replacement program (they are for me but I tend to be a bit particular about these things), has anyone else here watched it?

[Yurakucho]

I generally like Adam's (for I believe he does them himself) subtitles, with liberal use of English colloquialisms and ALL CAPS when someone's really angry - and the subtitle style is fine, with a thick shadow making them easily readable...

...but the spelling and grammar is crap.

[roguejp]

I did watch the movie but I can't remember anything about those OCR errors in the subs you've mentioned. Then again, I'm not one that really focusses on things like that, so maybe I missed them completely.

[KaizerChef]

Some examples of what I'm talking about (there are more, at least 23 instances of full stops in place of commas according to Subtitle Edit, not as many wrong "l"s to be fair):

[Yurakucho]

Very noticeable, and very poor.

[Cinematt]

Yeah those definitely look like OCR problems.
I've watched enough fansubs that I'm pretty used to them and they don't pull me out of the movie (possibly because I used to work in a video shop and watched many a movie with full on timecodes across the screen and regular copyright warnings so you get quite desensitised!) but there's definitely enough that it should be being caught on QC.

[bleedandtrim]

Yeah, pretty sure those same issues were present in the version I saw at the PCC theatrical screening too.