Yes, it's there. There is a peel-off with the description and details:Minkin wrote: Looks like there is indeed a Criterion spine on it (if you look carefully enough - opposite side from the gold "100 Years").
And then under that is the spine:
Yes, it's there. There is a peel-off with the description and details:Minkin wrote: Looks like there is indeed a Criterion spine on it (if you look carefully enough - opposite side from the gold "100 Years").
1912 is year 0Gregory wrote:Summer Olympics 1912 through Summer Olympics 2012 is 101 Years of Olympic Films, not 100.
Oh I do hope we get some obtuse obsessive insisting that the 1990s ran from 1991 to 2000. It's happened before; it can happen again!Drucker wrote:The millennium actually starts in 2001.
I'm surprised that Criterion missed that one. I know that White Rock was released with a four-track stereo soundtrack.Ribs wrote:Went on to The Melbourne Rendez-vouz, which was substantially less exciting. It’s basically just an extended newsreel, with that same type of corny non-humor in its overpresent narration. It spends way too much time interested in everything but the Olympic sports - there’s ten minutes before they even get to the opening ceremony about how cool Melbourne is, and there’s constant diversions to the home lives of the athletes and things like that. Almost the only thing thar really stood out to me was a sequence dedicated to what it is, exactly, the Officials do at the events. Looks fantastic, though.
The films are all Monaural, until the 1984 film when they switch to stereo. Four films are included in 5.1:
Games of the XXI Olympiad, Olympic Glory, The Everlasting Flame, and First.
tenia wrote:In the end, do we know which / how many movies exactly have been restored in 4K (in opposition to only 2K) ?
As I had pointed out, based on the site, Olympic Gold was scanned at 8k as it was shot on IMAX, also making this the first time Criterion has released something scanned at that resolution (currently the highest commercially possible ... I'm sure the concept of anything greater than 8k has been done in some prototype form.)Ribs wrote:The included book doesn’t explain each film’s restoration in detail, so presumably it would require going through the restoration Credits at the end of each film. Adrian Wood’s piece is very detailed and explains that the Mexico City 1968 and Seoul 1988 were the only two film-based titles that were only done in high-definition rsther than 2K or 4K though.
Wait until you get around to The White Stadium. It's a good half hour of setting up "the scene" in St. Moritz before we get to anything, by which time it's better. But the opening shows the town and its people and then endless shots of the winter landscape, I guess so that we know there is snow there in case we hadn't figured it out yet. Thankfully it was shorter but for some reason I felt the length of this one more than the near-three-hour ones that came before.Ribs wrote:Went on to The Melbourne Rendez-vouz, which was substantially less exciting. It’s basically just an extended newsreel, with that same type of corny non-humor in its overpresent narration. It spends way too much time interested in everything but the Olympic sports - there’s ten minutes before they even get to the opening ceremony
djproject wrote:tenia wrote:In the end, do we know which / how many movies exactly have been restored in 4K (in opposition to only 2K) ?As I had pointed out, based on the site, Olympic Gold was scanned at 8k as it was shot on IMAX, also making this the first time Criterion has released something scanned at that resolution (currently the highest commercially possible ... I'm sure the concept of anything greater than 8k has been done in some prototype form.)Ribs wrote:The included book doesn’t explain each film’s restoration in detail, so presumably it would require going through the restoration Credits at the end of each film. Adrian Wood’s piece is very detailed and explains that the Mexico City 1968 and Seoul 1988 were the only two film-based titles that were only done in high-definition rsther than 2K or 4K though.
It's in 1.33:1.MSTie2016 wrote:I am very interested to know if Olympic Gold's IMAX full square aspect ratio is preserved here, as opposed to cropping that to a 16:9 that's used for most movies filmed in IMAX.
You definitely should! When I saw 16 Days of Glory on VHS for the first time as a kid in the late 80s, it changed my entire perception of sports coverage. It's a stunning work of art and you can see how live event directors use its film and editing techniques to this very day. I was excited to see this set includes both parts of the original 16 Days of Glory for a total running time of around four and a half hours. Part II was released separately on VHS in the 80s, but was not as well received by video stores at the time and it has since become a rarity. I have not see Part II since renting it at a kid and I'm very excited to see it again on this set. Greenspan's Olympic films since then maintained a high standard of quality, but still went slightly downhill after the popularization of digital video, so starting from his Salt Lake films on, they're a little more jarring to the eye than his previous features.Ribs wrote:I'm deliberately trying to save the "better" films for towards the end, other than that I want to watch the first Greenspan film before the others so it'll probably be the first of the "major" works I get into.
I remember those games well, but even as magnificent as those opening ceremonies were, nothing tops the torch lighting in Barcelona in 1992. It's the most memorable ever in my opinion. Does the book mention anything about why some Olympic Games have multiple films in the set and others do not? While Marathon, about the 1992 Barcelona Games, is a magnificent film, Bud Greenspan also made a 16 Days of Glory entry about the Barcelona games which was excellent and captured the lighting of the flame better than Marathon did. I am confused and a bit disappointed that it was left off this set. Similarly, he made a Seoul '88 16 Days of Glory which is not included, but I am excited to see there are not one, but three films covering the '88 Seoul Games. I'm really looking forward to those because that was the first year I started watching every second of coverage I could see. Greenspan also made a documentary in the early 80s about the 1932 L.A. games which have no film included on this set. While it's not an official Olympic film, it would have made a nice place holder in lieu of not having one for the '32 games. But, I hesitate to criticize this set at all, seeing how much they did includeRibs wrote:Yesterday I watched The Everlasting Flame, which I found interesting as one of the few Olympics I actually really remember (I was super into the 2006 Torino games and haven't really paid attention since). It's actually somewhat interesting, because while it's mostly just HD digital footage I'm fairly sure there are a handful of inserts that are actually from film stock for certain events. But these are an Olympics it was impossible not to pay attention to - it will always and forever be the biggest Olympics ever, because of the absolutely ludicrous expense, and the downright bonkers scale of the opening ceremony. It's changed the Olympics that now the Opening Ceremonies are *the* thing and they are supposed to find visionaries to guide them as the biggest live performances in the world. This does the same trick structurally as I expect many of these films will do, which is following a handful of athletes before the Olympics before getting into the actual ceremony maybe 15 minutes in; in this case it feels utterly necessary, as just starting with that production would be just visual overload. I don't really have too many thoughts about everything after that, other than the amusing "oh, by the way, Michael Phelps beat 7 world records, anyway, back to other sports" swipe away of literally the only thing people seemed to talk about here in the US during the games. Diving, boats, and horses are all inexplicably saved for literally two shots each of the ending montage.
I'm *adoring* this set, incidentally. I didn't mean to just go through one a day but I honestly can't bring myself to try and watch something else when there's so much more of this left. And I'm already hoping there's plans in place for a good release, probably not by Criterion, of the 2014 and 2016 films (both are available for streaming online, which'll suffice in the interim).