I’m still so annoyed that the WKW collection is only being actually distributed in 1080p after being rescanned and recolourized
I get that most of criterion’s audience doesn’t have a UHD blu ray player (I mean, neither do I, of course) but these boutique physical media labels just never improve
doing 4K+ scans is time consuming and labour intensive but it’s not that expensive in real terms and there are plenty of qualified people with the hardware to do it, so smaller shops are actually in a good position with stuff that no one cares about the rights to
funnily it is criterion-type stuff that’s lagging 4K the most after it thrived in the early DVD era when it was newly cheap to distribute foreign and indie movies, mostly because other market segments are covered off now, between super cheap restorations on the one hand and tentpole movies getting rescans for streaming sequels on the other.
someone might claim that you really don’t need to watch truffaut or whatever in 4K but it’s exponentially closer to the 35mm experience than the first generation of HD rereleases, which were mostly DNRed to hell anyway due to then-atrocious consumer tastes and resolution limitations, so if you’re otherwise picking up the blu ray…
supposedly a korean release of the same remasters is going to be on actual uhd discs, and they’ll have some ones that weren’t included like grandmaster
there’s also supposed to be a korean release of refn’s drive on uhd this year
it’s sheer complacency on their part. i neither have a 4k tv or player, but you obviously should be creating uhd releases of as many films as possible if you’re a boutique physical media distributor, but criterion just rests on their stable of licenses. meanwhile, they’re just getting lapped by arrow and vinegar syndrome who has even started to release some of their vintage pornography in 4k.
finally I can get rid of 120gigs of different releases of the good the bad and the ugly, the 4k release looks definitive. not too cold looking not piss yellow not too teal. and they didn’t even bother with hdr?
Criteron has been advertising all their stuff as being produced from 4K scans for years. Arrow appears to have partially footed the bill on a couple of the recent projects and have been doing simultaneously released UK (but region free) UHD discs of overlapping projects—Crash comes to mind most recently.
Criterion and Janus are tapped into the art house circuit still and I’ve seen their 4K transfers of the King Hu stuff actually projected. That stuff’s being made available, just not “on home video.”
criterion can fuck off and die for all i care because i’m still not over that night and fog in japan is a criterion channel exclusive thing with no physical release available except some old DVD set you have to hunt for, and probably will be forever because nobody cares about oshima getting mad about annoying leftist larpers in 1960
