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Shitty Transfers

My sister bought me the Criterion Life of Brian DVD, the most appropriate Christmas gift ever. I didn’t get a chance to watch it until this weekend, and it left me feeling a little disappointed. Not the movie itself — the bad film transfer.

Now, look, I know Life of Brian didn’t exactly have a huge budget, so the fact that its aesthetics resemble the 1970s European “erotica” I’ve reviewed doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is that, in this age of digital wonderment, Criterion couldn’t (or didn’t) clean up the film or audio as well as they could have. It would be one thing if this were the older (now out-of-print) cheapie DVD — this is the Criterion DVD, the one that retails at $40. Most of its extras came from the old Laserdisc release, and the new ones don’t justify such a lofty pricetag, so are we really just paying for the Criterion name?

We live in a world where you can buy copies of movies made in the early ’40s that look like they were made yesterday. Why can’t ’60s and ’70s classics get the same treatment? Life of Brian is an irritating example, but other ’70s classics like The Verdict and The Conversation suffer from the same problems, while others made in the same era (like The Parallax View and The Deer Hunter) don’t. (Admittedly, some of the more popular ones, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the Godfather movies, get elaborate restorations.)

I know it depends partly on the quality of the print and the companies releasing the DVDs. They decide whether or not to devote the time and cost to restore them, which will drive up the final price of the disc, so they have to know whether or not potential buyers would pay the extra money for it. This Life of Brian thing is ridiculous, though. I’m fine with the pleasant surprise of a $10 copy of The Parallax View’s quality; I’m not fine with my sister spending $30-40 on a copy of a movie that barely looks better and, in fact, sounds worse than my VHS copy.

Posted by Stan on April 1, 2008 5:13 PM  | Permalink | Reviews | Digg It