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Matt wrote:Those of us in Region A will just have to wait for the Criterion release in 2012. They'll be delayed that long so Criterion can film a 10-minute interview with one of the actors and tack on some god-awful Italian TV documentary about Pasolini.

Region A here as well but I've got a LG BH 200 which will enable me to watch these classics once my pre orders arrive.

No great surprise (I'd have been more surprised if it had gone the other way, given the source), but I can confirm that the Pasolinis are definitely Region B.

DVD Times on The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights (Blu-rays in all cases).

The Decameron

Special features on both sets

• Notes for an African Oresteia (1970) – Pasolini’s visual notes for a never-realised feature film

Besides "Arabian Nights" (which had some of the mythological scope of "Medea" and "Edipo Re") I did not like the trilogy of life and hence have not looked into this thread. So I only got to know that "Notes for an African Oresteia" will be a special feature when I visited the Beaver. What great, great news. In the Beaver review I read that the Notes are HD, too. Is this really a 1080p transfer for that bonus feature?

golgothicon wrote:Is this really a 1080p transfer for that bonus feature?

Yup - it's the Cineteca di Bologna restoration.

A reviewer at amazon:

Another very poor Pasolini Blu Ray from the BFI that features a transfer that is severly undermined by clueless, agressive bad quality noise/grain filtering that eats away at fine detail and covers everything with ugly noise. Bye bye film look. In addition edge enhancement halos grace high contrast edges. BFI has got quite a nerve to release in 2009 such transfers that would have been objectionable 5 years ago.
BFI, please remember your own name: The British FILM institute. Blu Ray is such a wonderful medium when it is used to show us the look of film which it can do quite accurately. On this Blu Ray we see no film, only an overprocessed nasty video image.

Are these complaints legitimate?

Not as far as I'm concerned. As you'll see from his other reviews, he has a habit of giving one star to otherwise acclaimed Blu-ray releases (Zulu, for instance), a practice that has already attracted quite a few complaints (scroll down to the bottom of that link).

I must admit I haven't watched The Decameron Blu-ray all the way through, but what I did see looked more than acceptable for a high-def transfer of a nearly 40-year-old film, and the three longest reviews that I've read (Beaver, Blu-ray.com, DVD Times) are pretty much in agreement. In other words, not perfect, but probably as good as you're likely to get without an expensive Red Shoes-style photochemical restoration.

denti alligator wrote: Are these complaints legitimate?

The "reviewer" is a well known poster at AVS. Do a search for mhafner (Michel Hafner) and read some of his posts. I encourage you to also do a bit of research on his statements addressing the BFI. Then, I encourage you to find out on which side of the fence he found himself during the Blu-ray/HDDVD "war".

Pro-B

Looking at the Beaver screen-caps, that IS a somewhat questionable transfer. Presumably these are the elements that the BFI were landed with, but the excessive DNR, digital noise, lack of detail and edge enhancement that the reviewer mentions are all present. The best this currently looks on home video, I'm sure, but certainly not photochemical problems (and not a patch on the BFI's own transfers of Arden, Douglas, etc).

My copy of Arabian Nights isn't running smooth. has anyone else had this problem?

Would any one really pay $18,000 for a blu ray?

Arabian Nights went out of print less than a year ago. I can't believe anyone would list it at that price. Must be the highest price I've seen for any disc.

I'm tempted to put my copy up for sale at half that price and see what happens.

MichaelB wrote:I'm tempted to put my copy up for sale at half that price and see what happens.

Surely it must be a typo initially and then the second seller has got one of those programmes that updates your listings by undercutting the next higher price by a certain percent automatically. Of course if I'm wrong I'll undercut you by 10p manually.

I was flogging a CD once and saw that the only other Marketplace seller had it for £99.99. So naturally I advertised it as £98.99, and we gradually beat each other down until it finally went for £9.99.

Which was pretty much the most I ever expected to get for it in the first place, so no complaints.

On the other hand, I really did sell a DVD for nearly £200 after slightly undercutting someone in similar fashion. I felt so guilty about it that I paid for ultra-secure special delivery out of my own pocket, as I just didn't want to deal with the hassle of any fallout (and I also wanted the certainty that it would actually arrive!)

Similarly I got £250 for Syberberg's Parsifal as a VHS box set but I think eleven grand is a just a shade outré.

NABOB OF NOWHERE wrote:...but I think eleven grand is a just a shade outré.

Don't forget the deal breaker of £1.26 for shipping.

I bought my copy of Arabian Nights for no more than, like, £6 in that Zavvi sale a few months back

You can still buy it there for like 14 pounds, it's just a silly fluke on amazon.

It's also being reissued on Dual Format, and I'm reliably informed that the Blu-ray disc in the package will be identical to the OOP one.

Upgraded version to be released on 19 August:

Some of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s best-known works will receive new Blu-ray reissues this month: The Trilogy of Life set collects together The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), and Arabian Nights (1974). Making use of High Definition masters new to the UK, the set will feature new and existing extras.

So that explains why the previous dual format releases have reduced in price recently!

With regard to additional extras, I wonder whether Terry Gilliam might be persuaded to talk about 'Arabian Nights' in particular as he is apparently a fan. Tony Rayns might be willing to contribute some introductions possibly.

With the 'Salo' BluRay featuring 'Ostia' with Derek Jarman playing Pasolini, maybe there would be an opportunity for someone to talk about Pasolini's influence on Jarman (Lee Drysdale springs to mind for some reason).

Widening the scope a little, Stephen Sartarelli has translated some of Pasolini's poetry: an extra feature on the poetry might be really interesting. The poetry project was part funded by the Merchant-Ivory foundation and James Ivory has been quite talkative recently. It would be a bit left-field but I imagine it would be fascinating to hear him talk about what Pasolini meant to him.

The only additional extra on this set compared to the previous dual format releases is the interview with Robin Askwith previously included on the release of Abel Ferrara's 'Pasolini', which is obviously worth including. However, the new masters have been encoded by David Mackenzie so, although I am not competent to accurately make such a judgement, I imagine that this is the best these films are ever going to look!

Anyone done a screenshot comparison with the Criterion box? Pretty difficult to give up all those extras.