Marian Schedenig

I'd like that, not least because I'm already doing playlists with trailers and commercials and automated light dimming when I have movie nights with friends, and I'd like to integrated the actual feature film with that. Only I've still got several issues with that: I haven't found a player that can play ripped Blu-rays smoothly and with full audio pass through and proper remote controls (on Linux; but when it comes to these things, any video players I've seen on other systems usually fare worse) (I can play downloaded multichannel videos just fine, but I'd really like to preserve the original compressed streams from the discs) I'd want full rips without re-compression, and ripping all my Blu-rays (about 800 now) would take dozens of terabytes of space, and then I'd have to double that to have a backup in case something goes wrong (because see next point) Ripping Blu-rays is incredibly slow - seems to take at least an hour for an average film. The limit seems to be the drive speed, and pretty much all drives seem to be equally slow (2x seems to be the usual speed for video Blus, the "video" suggesting that there's some sort of deliberate hardware throttling involved to inconvenience ripping) And when I finally transition to 4K, these problems will only get worse.

Tried wiping it with a microfiber cloth, and with water. The problem persists on all players and at the more or less same location of the disc. No visible marks on the surface. It has to be some degradation inherent to the material or pressing.

Sold.

Every time. Always broken at the same spot on every player. Two Sonys, one Samsung, and an external computer drive. From what I remember, I've had it happen with The Departed, Wall-E, Cloud Atlas, CE3K, and now OuaTitW. Some basically break down altogether at some point in the film, other go all stuttery and garbled for a while (so that the player software hangs and only reacts to button presses every 10 seconds or less). With CE3K I had to skip several minutes, OuaTitW has at least half an hour that's unplayable. There was another one I can't remember now. And who knows how many that I haven't discovered yet…

I'm getting increasingly unhappy about spending money on Blu-rays since more and more of mine have been dying. The latest was Once Upon a Time in the West. Always in the middle of the film - must be either related to the layer change or to the radial distance of the affected part. I keep spending tons of money on films only to randomly have them fail in the middle of watching them (sometimes with friends).

That is correct.

But at least you can tell that it's not the original title (because it's not in English).

Yup. That's German titles for you. Sometimes nowadays the German titles are even in English, but still different from the original English ones. For example, Taken is called 96 Hours in German. Took me years to figure out they're the same film (I've never seen it).

Wikipedia lists that under "The following songs were recorded during the same set of concerts and later released as B-sides". The album is compiled from two (!) concert tours, so while the album is pretty much maxed out for a single CD release at 76 minutes, there's bound to be lots of stuff from the tours that wasn't included, even if it was released separately. As Fart mentioned, your best bet for getting more of those is probably one of the full live concert releases - they have tons of those, so many that it's become hard to keep track, but they're usually (? or at least often, I've lost track) worth it. My father had the Four Flicks DVD box that contains four separate full concerts, all from the same tour, and while there's naturally lots of overlap between them content-wise, they're still worth having. As for Flashpoint, the list of separately released tracks also includes Gimme Shelter, presumably with Lisa Fischer (she's listed on the album for backing vocals), and those are usually outstanding. Several full concert releases include the song with Fischer (and I'm lucky to have caught one myself in Vienna back in 2014), but I'm not sure now if there's one on CD?

The Flashpoint album has two extra non-live tracks, but aside from that, as Fart explained, it's compiled from live performances of existing songs. Of course, with the Stones, you could always add multiple discs of extra tracks from live concerts or discarded studio material, but as far as I'm aware, the album as presented is in no way "incomplete".

No, the suite takes about 20-30 minutes, depending on the version and performance. Having not listened to it in so long: What's wrong with it, specifically?

One of the suites, I suppose? I still need a full recording - I know I asked for recommendations here some time (probably years…) ago, but I still don't have one.

Maybe. There's certainly some sympathy for Alberich (I don't remember noticing much for Hagen), at least initially (yes, his "origin story" is relatable). But despite that, they ultimately seem to come across as "evil" (however justified or not their motivations may be), while Wotan, despite all his failings and twisted actions, seems more "tragic" than "evil". There may be some "I'm not antisemite, but…" component in that, or not. Much of the Ring certainly deals with shades of grey rather than black and white, and how they are intended and perceived isn't necessarily clear. And in any case, it leaves enough room for presentations to leave out whatever specific connotations there (intentionally or unintentionally) may be. Which I guess is more complicated with those final lyrics in Lohengrin and Meistersinger.

I suppose a good deal of the potentially antisemitic content is about things that we today still tend to consider "bad", but which also have a history of being attributed to Jews. Given Wagner's background, that might well have been intentional, even if the broader aspects he criticises about them still ring true with us today. He does get rather explicit in his wordings at least at the ends of Lohengrin and Meistersinger though, even if it may seem authentic for the time the operas are set in. But contemporary implications of his stories and lyrics are hardly accidental with Wagner.

Good question, because I've been meaning to ask the same thing. I grew up with Karajan & Berlin and always liked that, though it must be 20+ years since I last listened to it. Apparently it doesn't have a good reputation. In the early 2000s, I got Rattle & CBSO, which was considered one of the best back then. I haven't listened to that in years, either.

In any case, the pointing thing is adapted from the original Nibelungenlied, where Siegfried's wounds begin to bleed when Hagen approaches (apparently a standard proof of guilt at the time - similar to the Gottesgericht in Lohengrin I guess). Wagner transfers it to Siegfried raising his hand (the one with the Ring, I suppose; if the printed libretto in DG's Karajan box is complete, Wagner doesn't actually specify that, but at least I've seen it staged that way). Whether that's because of some inherent power of the Ring of just a "natural" reaction of the dead is maybe up to interpretation. Apparently, there's an antisemitic background to the whole concept, too…

Isn't that the power of the Ring alone? Or maybe it doesn't have a specific explanation. But it doesn't exactly make Siegfried a zombie.

I don't know about cinema setups. But the home consumer version of "Dolby Surround Pro Logic" is actually a 2.0 format, because the additional channels are not discrete. Instead, they're encoded into the stereo signal: When decoding (i.e. during playback), anything that's exactly phase identical between the left and right channel is removed from those and instead sent to the centre channel. Anything that's exactly phase inverted between both channels is sent to the rears (there are usually two of them, but they're mono, and from what I remember their frequency range is limited as well). This also means that the "surround" part of the whole system was very limited. It wasn't directional surround, it was just able to play ambient sounds in the back of the listener. Nothing like spaceships zooming from behind your rear left to your front right. A nice side effect is that a regular stereo recording can also make use of the centre channel as long as it contains mono components. E.g. if you have a film mix where the music and sfx track is stereo, but the dialogue is mono (i.e. phase identical between both channels), you automatically get a free centre channel for the dialogue. And apparently (from what I remember reading), real life acoustics also have the effect of making ambient sounds more or less phase inverted between the left and right channels, effectively sending them to the rears). On home video media, this means that a "Dolby Surround" track is effectively just a stereo track. To allow the receiver to automatically activate Dolby Surround encoding, there's a flag on the audio track that tells it whether or not it's a DS track. Unfortunately, many receivers don't allow you to manually override that flag - if a track has the flag, it is played in surround mode, if it doesn't, it isn't. I find that extremely annoying in the case of mono films that are encoded as a stereo track, without the DS flag (which seems to be the norm for some reason). A receiver would send a 1.0 track to the centre channel, but a 2.0 track without the DS flag will be sent to the left and right channels and leave the centre unused.

Of course I don't. For a long time, I used to think the director is directly responsible for everything, and the "camera" people (the whole discipline is simply called "camera" in German, which I'm sure misled not just me) just handle the cameras. If anything, I try to compensate now by focusing more on the cinematographers. But certainly directors like Leone and De Palma have a strong influence on this, maybe more than their cinematographers. On the other hand, Villeneuve seems to put a lot of focus on it as well, and yet his Deakins films look distinctly different from the ones he did with other cinematographers. In the case of JCSS, that second shot above reminds me of Indy digging up the ark. Whether that was originally Slocombe's doing, or him looking back on his earlier work for Raiders, or Spielberg telling him to repeat what he did for Jewison, I don't know. I haven't seen much else by Jewison, I think, but The Cincinnati Kid is also very classy looking, and that was shot by Philip H. Lathrop, who I'm mostly unfamiliar with. So much of it may well have been Jewison's own doing, but even then it was "Slocombe's cinematography" insofar as he was the one realising it, or at the very least being credited for it.

The preview clip video is too patchworky for me to come to decide whether I like his style or how accomplished it seems. I guess I'll just wait until more of it is revealed.

He seems to genuinely have a special love for the genre, so I think that's alright. It took me a long time to appreciate The Core, but after several years (and thanks to @crocodile endlessly singing its praises here) it's evolved into one of my favourite Young scores. Bless the Child and Drag Me to Hell are two other seminal Young horror scores. Urban Legend is overdue for an official release. As for less typical stuff, The Shipping News is very lovely. And Hard Rain is one of the better Goldsmith action scores that Goldsmith never wrote.

I wasn't even aware they were two different masters! I also have the older one.

Two comments: I was talking about Arrow's "2-disc special edition", which no longer seems to be available. But according to their website, the regular release also includes both cuts. I wonder if the bitrate is reduced, because the 2-disc version has a separate disc for each version of the film, and the regular has both on one disc. Or perhaps the regular is dual-layered and the 2-disc wasn't. Arrow is having a sale right now, and Cinema Paradiso is only £10.00.