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This whole thing reminds me of F for Fake, directed by Orson Welles, about the art forger Elmyr de Hory, who claims to have forged massive numbers of works of art by Picasso and others. The film is really interesting, a quasi-documentary or "film essay" on the nature of fakery, aesthetics, and criticism.

http://www.criterionco.com/ Maybe you are just in need of something more substantial now...

Yeah, no substandard action movies, chick flicks, or cult French scifi flicks there.

Yeah, no substandard action movies, chick flicks, or cult French scifi flicks there.

Yeah, no substandard action movies, chick flicks, or cult French scifi flicks there.

That's an unfair comparison. A fair comparison would be to compare the DVD that has been released with what's available on iTunes.

What you have is more than likely a torrent of a HD rip. That, by its nature, will be superior to DVD because HD broadcasts have higher resolution. Because of file size, I don't see HD downloads being commonplace for a few years, and not de rigueur for 5-7 years, if not more. Yes, Comcast in the US has HD on-demand but the selection is paltry and limited and the quality is questionable (since it depends on available bandwidth).

Now, on to pricing...

The problem is that $9.99 per movie, across the board, is a terrible idea. When was the last time Steve Jobs shopped for a DVD? At the very low-end (not counting public domain titles), we have Wal-Mart sales for movies for under $4 each. And these are for movies which are well-known and popular and put out by the big studios. At the other end, we have publishers/distributors that sell single movies for $20-$50 regularly. (Terry Gilliam's Brazil for example, is a big box set for $59.95).

Movie prices, especially since the advent of the DVD, have been dropping steadily. For bigger movies now (say, Munich, Chronicles of Narnia, King Kong, Walk the Line), you have at least two different products on release day: one for the budget minded (MSRP $20-30), one for the collectors (MSRP $30-$40) -- some markets, especially Japan, get insanely expensive editions in the $100+ range. The less expensive version gradually keeps dropping in price, with many movies ending with a final price of $7-$15, when they were $20 or more before. (For a recent example, see The Constant Gardener). These aren't sales --- the studio is dropping the actual price.

You generally don't see that with albums. Not only is most music from $10 to $16 new, but you don't see it drop in price as time passes. Amazon has Hotel Rwanda (the movie) for $7.88, but the soundtrack is still $14.98. A year ago the movie was more expensive than the soundtrack, whose price has not dropped.

I'd say the studios have the pricing thing a bit more figured out than Apple. Now it's just a matter of time to see if Steve will use his Disney ownership to pull some weight in re: their movies. I frankly don't see Disney EVER selling every animated movie of theirs for $9.99.

I won't argue that artifacts can be magically fixed through manual or automated processes, but people make careers of restoring old media. Fixing thousands of frames in movies would definitely be harder than fixing faded and cracked old pictures, and fixing audio would make my head spin. The automated processes used to digitally "restore" movies have been known to occasionally blur out things that are not artifacts or leave some artifacts behind. Removing hiss from audio is likely complicated as well and may lose some (hopefully unimportant) sounds. The Criterion Collection has fabulous restorations of actual classics on DVD. With any restoration youll have errors still. If a majority of the viewing area is improved or maintained with a major increase in resolution people will prefer the new high definition format. If analog-sourced audio is converted to digital at a higher sampling frequency the sound will be reproduced more accurately than previous digital formats and people who think they can hear the difference will prefer the new high definition format.

I will agree with you, however, that improvement in audio and video quality could never make a bad movie magically turn good.

Check that one out, it's pretty scary. And the extras are great too (of course, coming from Criterion, no less...). http://criterionco.com/asp/release.asp?id=260

And they chose some real bombs, like Andrei Rublev. Rublev was a film I just could not sit through. Me and my dad were forced to sit through it in twenty minute blocks. I can sit through all sorts of movies, good, bad, slow, awesome, and crappy action. But Rublev was so slow, and seemed to have no plot at all. I got about half way through it and gave up.

However, the vast majority of the films are excellent, practically some of the best! Seven Samurai, Solaris, and even some Fritz Lang works (I'm actually surprised Metropolis isn't a part of it!).

I look at The Criterion Collection as any human work: it's not infallible. It's got a lot of the top quality stuff, bit they can make mistakes.

You mean this one?

It also seems that Time might be making some unusual choices in order to get cross promotion from th emovie distributors themselves. For example, it is very unlikely that a DVD of Seven Samurai will say "Chosen by Time Magazine as one of the 100 best of all time", but very likely that a DVD of NEMO will say that.

The front page of the website of the people who released the DVD of Seven Samurai has a link to TIME's article.

The Time's list is by far incomplete. The Criterion Collection is a good place to start for excellent films of high caliber (plus most have excellent transfers...making gems like Kurosawa's Rashomon look like it was made just yesterday).

Get your hands on titles from the Criterion Collection. They don't do any of that mumbo jumbo advertising. And they only distribute the best titles they can find. They're extremely picky.

Is this the same process that Criterion uses?

All of their restored movies look top notch.

Not to mention the notable omission of the Criterion Collection version of Brazil. It's hard to take any "Top DVDs" list seriously that doesn't acknowledge the grand-daddy of all over-the-top multi-disc sets.

Yeah, just like another famous "documentary" called "Hearts & Minds". I know a little bit about film theory so its heavy-handedness was obvious to me and I stopped taking it seriously after early in the film the director, in trying to make a point about militarism being a fundamental part of the American character or something, cut w/o warning or clue to soldiers marching in-step from some corny WWII-era propoganda film. Other blatant stuff I remember were cutting off the response of an opposed speaker in mid-sentence and the bit where he showed footage of a high school football game in high-speed to make it look scary and disturbing and again make some point about the fundamentally brutal nature of American society. Actually the last one is so out there and crazy it's almost brilliant in a way, like looking inside a lunatic's brain and briefly seeing the amazing colors and shapes it can produce.

I agree completely. But then, New Line has made a habit of releasing some of the best DVD's available. Cf. David Fincher's Se7en, which also featured four very informative commentary tracks by a number of cast and crew personnel. Admittedly it was not of the scope of LotR, but a fascinating movie nonetheless. That and Fox's special edition of Fincher's Fight Club were pretty much my favorite DVD's as far as fulfilling the promise of "film school in a box." However, New Line's edition of P.T. Anderson's Boogie Nights is another great one. Basically, no one has done DVD as consistently well as New Line -- with the possible exception of Criterion.

Ah - I've just posted Brazil is one of the best.. Brazil is now available in a 3 DVD collecters special on Criterion DVD Here's a review

If DVD movie directors/manufacturers of computer aided or graphic films included some "How To" Documentaries on what it takes to be this sort of film maker or how to create the scenes, in their releases it would be a great start.

I noticed that The new Star Wars films don't include much info like this but other films like Shrek have great information on how films are made.

A great example of a good, non-computer film (education) documentary is the Criterion Release of Stephen Soderbergh's Traffic. There's an incredible section on this DVD that goes into great detail on how many of the scenes were filmed and processed. You get to see how Benico Del Toro's scenes in Mexico were shot versus other geographically different scenes of the film.(Things like this are why DVD's rule!)

Showing how movies are made, in detail, behind the scenes, are a great way to generate interest in Computer/Digital Filmmaking. Especially when said documentaries are added to DVD packages.

Dolemite

I must have different tastes than a lot of /.rs, as I thought their catalog was sadly lacking. For example, they are woefully light on the incredible restorations done by Criterion.

That took a bit of effort to determine, too, as your choices of categories to browse by are pretty limited, and certainly don't include production house. Their site is generally clunky to browse, as others have mentioned. It's easy to find what you want it you know exactly what it is, but how hard is that?

Cancelling is a hassle, too. You have to speak to a rep and convince them that you really, trully want to leave, you can't just use the site.

They guy I spoke with was surprised that I found their selection so weak. "We stock pretty much everything that gets released," he said. When I mentioned that I couldn't find anything by Ingmar Bergman, he asked, "who's that?" Could explain a few things.

Now, all this said, their actual get it in the mail, keep it 'til you're done service is great. And they gave me no hassle when the second disc they sent me got lost in the mail. If I looked again and saw a broader catalog, I'd sign up.

I hope they make it.

(Actually, as I'm in the US at the moment, it's not much of an argument. It's my laptop I'm not allowed to play CSS encrypted DVDs on. Bastards. Still, there's a few outlets like Criterion who put out quite a few region free and CSS free DVDs, but they're few and far between.

*sigh* The DMCA. Designed to protect Hollywood from nasty evil hackers who, but for that wonderful law, would be going into video stores right now and giving Hollywood their money. Stupid gits.

Add to this the idiocy of the BBFC: they demand that SUPPLEMENTS on DVDs, such as outtakes and making of documentaries, need a BBFC certficate in order to pass, henceforth the DVD producer has to submit that material and a fee to the BBFC. This is supposedly one of the reasons Criterion doesn't release their discs in the UK.

Add to this that it is not technically illegal to chip, modify, or hack a DVD player to play all Region discs - but it is illegal for a store clerk to suggest to you how to do it or provide help with it. All European DVD players can play NTSC or PAL - and several have super easy hacks to defeat the coding, such as a combination to put in the remote. Search the web and thou shalt find...

Now it gets even weirder. Some DVDs in the UK are released as anamorphic (enhanced for widescreen TVs) when they aren't in the U.S. because of wider market penetration of widescreen TVs in Europe.

Region Coding is extremely defeatable. I recommend heartily anyone with a Windoze system to watch DVDs on to use the Creative Labs DXR3 kit - a DVD drive, and a dedicated decoder board ready for 5.1 surround sound for 150 - 200 US dollars. Go to This site and download a 500 k app that lets you defeat region coding piece o cake. Basically, for about 150 dollars for DXR3, 300 dollars for my Videologic 5.1 surround kit, and a simple app I have a region free DVD player routed to my 16x9 capable television.

I buy some Region DVDs of movies that haven't been released here in the U.K. because a) I'm an American, moving back to America in a year, and I want DVDs that will work there b) American DVDs tend to have more supplements and c) A movie in Central London will litearally cost you 20$ for a decent seat. This way I can watch a movie without a dim projector bulb and crappy reel changes and some idiot's mobile phone going off while they're talking during the movie.

The Criterion Collection is released by a company (Criterion) that specializes on high quality transfers of films to DVD often with alot of extras. they started doing tis for Laser Disc and are now doing it for DVD. They are not doing anymore LDs and IIRC are stopping production of their LD becuase they feel that LD has been supersceded by DVD.

There web site is here.