Alto Media Releases Remastered Wong Kar-Wai

Time to upgrade my 4-year-old Miramax copy, presented by Tarantino

Is there something wrong with the Miramax CHUNGKING EXPRESS that I missed, other than the framing possibly being a little tight at 1.85:1 instead of 1.66? Seems a bit silly to upgrade because it has Tarantino's picture on it. I'd lay down cold money that the only reason his picture is on ANY of the Rolling Thunder titles is because Miramax's marketing retards didn't have the mental firepower to sell the Rolling Thunder titles on their own merits as films. No surprise there, and [heretic]they probably were right to do it. [/heretic] If it wasn't for Quentin Tarantino, CHUNGKING EXPRESS would probably never have seen a US release. I know that the Rolling Thunder VHS of this film was my intro to WKW. If putting his face on the box exposes more people to films they'd never have seen otherwise, then it is only a good thing. Anybody who'd say differently hates Tarantino more than they love movies, and perhaps should consider re-evaluating their priorities. Everyone was a noob once upon a time.

Rythm-X- Sorry if you misunderstood me. The reason I would upgrade is because these are newly remastered from HD telecines, and WKW's work deserves the very best transfers possible, not because of any dislike for Tarantino. Unfortunately for those in the USA, aside from a couple of recent titles in Criterion's catalogue, Kino Video has been largely responsible for bringing WKW to DVD. And Kino's releases are not only expensive, the quality generally sucks (including the ugly packaging). Miramax's transfer is good, but when I love a film as much as I do Chungking Express, I'm willing to seek out the very best version. And Alto Media is a company that appears to meet these requirements.

Region coding?

R3, would be my guess.

I bought the recent WKW R1 box set from Kino (containing AS TEARS GO BY, DAYS OF BEING WILD, HAPPY TOGETHER, FALLEN ANGELS, plus the Miramax/Buena Vista CHUNGKING EXPRESS), and was very impressed w/ the newly remastered pic quality. Particularly FALLEN ANGELS, which was a vast improvement over the older murky 4:3 transfer. Looked pretty fantastic, actually.

I might buy the Alto version of CE if it included the Mandarin audio track. During the shot where Tony drinks his coffee in slomo as people in the fore/background are rushing by, the opening chords of Faye Wong's version of DREAMS suddenly blares (in the Canto version, there's no music), in a kitschy yet endearing mini-music video kinda way. It's the only reason I still own the old Korean VHS copy of it.

And echoing the majority of the posters' comments at DVD Prime, ASHES OF TIME, please, already.

Isao- Since I started collecting DVDs, Kino figured heavily in my purchases, simply because they were the only R1 releases of a lot of the 'strange little films' that I'm interested in seeing. I quickly grew tired of their crappy quality transfers of great films (including Klimov's "Come and See", several of WKW's films, Ruiz's "Time Regained" and other expensive non-anamorphic titles. You'll forgive me if I didn't want to make the plunge and donate another $100 to Kino for a set they should have done correctly in the first place.

Kinda harsh, don't you think? Whenever a company releases a remastered, much better edition of a film in their library, I think that's great. I've been gladly dbl-dipping on a lot of the recently remastered Mei-Ah titles, and there are the occasional R1 titles (next week's Buena Vista Bruckheimer releases are so mine) that I'm glad I held off on buying initially.

BTW, the R1 Kino WKW set's a great value, as I've seen many online places sell it in the $60~65 range. I also really appreciated the inclusion of the acclaimed BUENOS AIRES: ZERO DEGREES documentary in the HAPPY TOGETHER disc, and the Japanese trailers on the Fallen Angels disc.

Also, a friend of mine worked on the recently released R2UK 2-disc set of COME AND SEE, which has been getting great reviews for its vastly improved quality over the older R1 and R3 versions. Just FYI.

Isao....does the new R2UK version of the COME AND SEE DVD split the movie on two disks like the previous versions?

Isao-exactly where are these reviews to be found? I haven't been able to locate any tests at all of the newly remastered Come and See.

Pretty much agreed on Ashes of Time and Days of Being Wild -- those are two movies that could use a definitive release (too bad there's no English subs on the upcoming French release of Ashes). Chungking Express and Fallen Angels already have excellent English-subbed releases (from Artificial Eye in the UK and Accent in Australia, respectively) and I can't see these being a huge improvement on those, although they should be cheaper.

Incidentally, if you want to see exactly what's wrong with the Miramax release of Chungking Express, just click here.