Shinji Somai

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feihong
Joined: Thu Nov 04, 2004 12:20 pm

Re: Shinji Somai

#176 Post by feihong » Wed Dec 13, 2023 6:37 pm

Calvin wrote:
Tue Dec 12, 2023 5:21 am
I don't think it being owned by Nikkatsu would necessarily preclude Love Hotel so...we'll just have to wait and see!

Thank you for your thoughts on Luminous Woman, feihong. Do you have any ideas as to the provenance of the extended cut? Are the additional scenes what are included as deleted scenes on the Japanese Blu-Ray release (without sound, I believe)?
Yeah, high hopes for Love Hotel, but, I don't know. The Third Window disc of Typhoon Club just arrived. Unfortunately, there looks to be a lot of grain reduction––almost a total loss of grain. The Japanese disc, by comparison, has visible film grain, but the picture is much darker, and possibly a little zoomed-in versus the Third Window disc. The darkness and yellowed color-correction on the Japanese disc is a disappointment––it doesn't look like the image is taken from the recent restoration, which in the theater appeared pretty bright and colorful. In the initial scene, where the girls run into the pool, the part where they get through the pool gate is pitch black and totally indistinct on the Japanese disc––whereas on the Third Window disc you can see the characters very clearly through the whole section of the scene. The classroom scenes as the storm approaches look unnaturally dark on the Japanese disc, all the night scenes are far from clear, and the tone of the whole film is a little more grim on the Japanese disc. On the other hand, the Third Window disc looks so disappointingly soft, with so little detail––I can hardly believe we're still dealing with this sh*t in 2023. Hopefully the Cinema Guild disc handles the film grain with some...I don't know, respect, I guess. The color and contrast on the Third Window disc reflects what I saw in the theatrical exhibition, but the grain reduction is just unacceptable––especially since the film grain is clearly visible even on the Japanese blu ray (even if it is a little soft still––why are these companies still struggling to present this picture in an acceptable manner, after a 4k restoration of the movie?).

The Luminous Woman extended cut includes the deleted scenes from the Japanese blu ray––including the one scene that is extended from the theatrical, as well. Whenever there is no audio, the scene is just silent (the extended part of the other scene just drops the audio for the extended section). It looks like someone just stitched this together from the blu ray, though there is subtitle translation for the deleted scenes, in spite of their missing soundtrack.

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andyli
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Re: Shinji Somai

#177 Post by andyli » Wed Dec 13, 2023 8:22 pm

Seconded. The heavy DNR makes me worry about the eventual CG release. If the theatrical showing has grains intact then we might still have some hope?

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feihong
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Re: Shinji Somai

#178 Post by feihong » Wed Dec 13, 2023 8:24 pm

The theatrical release had grain, as did the release of P.P. Rider. Really hoping Cinema Guild comes through, hopefully on both of these titles.

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feihong
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Re: Shinji Somai

#179 Post by feihong » Fri Dec 15, 2023 6:40 am

Now that I've seen the film theatrically, I'd say both these Typhoon Club blu rays leave a lot to be desired. The Japanese disc has visible film grain––but it's very soft, and the image itself seems unrestored, very dark all over, with a bias towards blues. The disc has depth-of-field and the shots have lots of visible textures in them (textures of skin, textures of the school buildings, texture of the light passing through the rain, etc.), but many scenes are pretty unacceptably dark, including the opening pool scene and Ken's lengthy attempted rape of Michiko. When the rain gets too thick, the detail is very indistinct because of the darkness. The Third Window disc has the much brighter remaster without the blue bias, making a lot of the movie more visually distinct––but the effect of the grain management is brutal, softening the picture, flattening all the color spaces in the image. So while the darker scenes in the movie are now much easier to see thanks to the restoration, the lack of grain makes it look like every image is smeared with vaseline, and there's really never a point where you can clearly perceive background detail, for instance. Very weird. The scene in the shopping arcade, with the couple playing flutes, offers a different view of the two discs. Generally the color and contrast of the restoration on the Third Window disc is closer to what I saw theatrically, but in the shopping arcade scene, the image on the Japanese disc is much truer. When I saw it theatrically, there was light cascading through the raindrops in front of the camera, lighting the raindrops a sort of brilliant red. You can see that on the Japanese disc, but on the Third Window disc the raindrops look very dull, and don't seem to have any special lighting to them at all. The immediate next scene, however, both discs revert to type. In that scene, Mikami sits on a filing cabinet behind the origami cranes in the classroom, and on the Third Window disc his face and body are very distinct––but on the Japanese disc, he seems to be crouched in some encroaching shadow.

Tom Mes' commentary on the Third Window disc is interesting. He goes into a lot about the Director's Company and a lot about the actors in the film. He shares some fascinating production tidbits––apparently there was no inclement weather on the shoot, and the typhoon is created wholecloth by the production team and production designer Noriyoshi Ikeya (who worked initially on Ultraman, doing a lot of early creature designs, and who did production design also on Akio Jissoji's movies, on Shuji Terayama's Farewell to the Ark, and on Seijun Suzuki's Kagero-za and Yumeji, amongst other films). He frequently talks about Yuka Ohnishi, who plays Michiko. Of the leads in the film, I'd say I pay probably the least attention to Michiko, and so I never thought to look up anything about her. She was a very successful recording artist, and one of the backup stars in Sukeban Deka III and some of the subsequent Sukeban Deka movies (she's the one who fights by throwing origami cranes at the villains). Honestly, she seems to me to be playing the role of Michiko here because her face, her body––her voice, even––are permanently clenched. I think she's always embodied a kind of uncomfortable unease, as an actress...even her voice sounds uncomfortable singing her songs. She's perfectly cast for this film, but later on she looks to me the most uncomfortable movie star I can think of this side of, I don't know, Tea Leoni.

Mes has read the script to the film, so he knows more about the intent behind certain scenes, perhaps, but I found I had some different readings of what was happening some of the times when the commentary would briefly drift into analysis of what we were seeing. He seems to regard the teacher as a cad, and he frequently references the scene where Sensei Umemiya is confronted in the classroom by his girlfriend's mother as being dispositive of this. The suggestion Mes makes is that Sensei Umemiya is a stand-in for the let-down adults prove for the children of the film. He describes the scene between Umemiya and Junko afterwards as indicative of passion between them. But the dialogue in the scene tells a very different story, I think. The confrontation scene in the classroom paints Umemiya as a cad who borrowed a lot of money from Junko and refuses to marry her. The scene between them in Umemiya's apartment later reveals that Junko left Umemiya for another guy, who was the one who borrowed Junko's money and ran away with it. When we next see Umemiya at home, he's getting drunk and singing karaoke with Junko, Junko's mother, and her uncle––which is where Mikami confronts him over the phone, and we get that maybe most important line of the movie, where Umemiya says to Mikami that he'll turn out to be the same as Umemiya when he grows up. "One day you'll realize that you're just...like...me." What's the purpose of that line in the movie? Right before he says it, Umemiya looks in on his would-be in-laws, and Junko's uncle has just let down his robe to reveal a yakuza tattoo. Mes says this is probably an in-joke, about how many yakuza actor Makoto Sato has played in the past, but I think the point of this is to show the threat of commitment that Umemiya faces. He's getting into bed with Junko, who doesn't really seem to love him anymore, and now he's getting into bed with her family––not a group we're at all happy about from what we've seen already in the movie. The point of the scene is compromise, and Umemiya is telling Mikami over the phone that he'll end up compromising his ideals eventually, and that somewhere down the line, he'll be on the other end of the phone call, telling off his own smartass student. So going back to the scene between Umemiya and Junko, I don't think what we're seeing is any passion, so much as Junko trying to convince Umemiya that their marrying has now become the path of least resistance. Umemiya thinks that he let her wait too long, and maybe it's true. But the real sense we get, I think, is that they'll both be compromising here––and their next scene is, indeed, a farce of compromise, where they both have to get pretty drunk in order to fake that they're having a good time with Junko's overzealous family.

Mes also suggests that when Rie oversleeps on the day of the typhoon, and misses Mikami going to school, that she climps into her mother's futon to feel her mother's warmth and smell. That could be in the script, I guess. But it looks and sounds to me like Rie is supposed to be masturbating in her mother's futon. That was certainly the feeling the audience felt in my theater when I saw it––a couple of people got up and walked out on that scene. I think the trajectory of Rie's character is helpful in determining this. Rie's character arc, as I see it play out, goes like this: 1) After the girls nearly strangle Akira in the pool, Rie sees Akira's erection before anyone else, and is shocked by it. 2) Rie tries to paper over the sexual nature of the girls' teasing of Akira to Mikami the next day. Rie spends most of the next day trying to get Mikami's attention––unsuccessfully. Mikami wants to study, and then when Rie corners him at home, Mikami goes out to hang out with his guy friends, Ken and Akira. In this scene it's clear Mikami feels no special attraction to Rie, and doesn't think of her as his girlfriend––even though Rie clearly thinks of Mikami as her boyfriend. 3) At this point Rie is in a highly-agitated mood. She misses her chance to walk to school with Mikami––her mother was out and didn't wake her up––one reason why Rie probably isn't trying to capture her mother's warmth in the empty futon (also, Rie doesn't spend any time in the futon smelling anything––instead, we see a bunch of movement constricting the comforter, and we hear a bunch of pants and moans). Here is where, I think, she masturbates in an attempt to release some of the pent-up tension she's facing. 4) Rie arrives and the school crossroads near lunchtime. She sits on the ground, trying to decide what to do. An idea flits through her mind––an adventure. The publicity stills of Rie sitting on the concrete seem to be from this scene, but there are crucial differences between them and what is filmed. In the publicity stills, Rie looks unhappy, unfulfilled, even melancholy. In the film, she is smiling almost euphorically, and there's a sense that the smile is somewhat dissonant from how we might expect to find her. She's taken, here, by the chance to escape: to slip the routine of her life and have an adventure (she admits as much a couple of scenes later)––or maybe to leave the countryside behind for good, and make a new future for herself in the city. 5) When next we really see her, Rie has made it to Tokyo, has found a guy (Toshinori Omi, star of a bunch of Nobuhiko Obayashi's movies––even though Mes compares and contrasts Obayashi and Somai frequently in the commentary, he mentions others of Toshinori's credits, but never references the way he was clearly a sort of totemic actor for Obayashi, appearing in cameos in Obayashi films long after he was no longer the star of the pictures). The guy takes her shopping––everything in Rie's fantasy is working out so far. 6) Kobayashi (Toshinori Omi's character) takes her back to his apartment, and clearly intends to sleep with Rie. Rie's fantasy is turning a different shade than what she wanted from it, and she has a moment of self-realization, expressed by her monologue––she doesn't want to be trapped, getting old in the countryside. Mikami, if he is talented enough academically, will leave, and Rie––no one special to Mikami, she has come to realize––will be left there, growing old in the countryside, being some farmer's wife, getting worked to the bone. But she also realizes that she doesn't want what Kobayashi is proposing, and she ditches him. 7) Rie's experience in the city turns sour. She is repeatedly prey for the typhoon, and she's alone (there's actually a fake police officer, a life-size display of a cop, which she trips over––and he doesn't come to her rescue). She sings her school song into the wind in defiance. She starts home. 8) Rie encounters the couple tied to each other, playing the flutes. Are they a projection of her future? is she seeing herself, tied to Mikami forever? The figures appear grotesque and alien to her, and though she wants to understand them, they remain closed off and inaccessible to her. 9) Rie returns to school the next day. She's seen visions of the future, she's stared into the typhoon––she is tougher than when she left, more resilient against growing up. When she meets Akira on the road, she asks him if he got taller over the night––but she's really maybe thinking about herself here. Akira certainly seems to be his goofy self here (we learn in this final scene why he was at the pool at night in the first scene of the picture––if he doesn't escape home at night, his parents scold him constantly until he can't stand it), and he runs off to play in the mud. Rie has grown up a bit. She makes a literary allusion to the Golden Pavilion. That allusion is perhaps not accidental––the Mishima novel is about a man who longs to sacrifice himself for an ideal––and Somai has just finished showing us Mikami––unmoored after Rie leaves him––attempting to sacrifice himself for an equally absurd ideal. In fact, one gets the sense that Rie and Akira are about to encounter Mikami's absurd corpse (Mes does point out that this death is an allusion to Kon Ichikawa's film The Inugami Clan, which features a murder with the victim's legs sticking out of a lake in the same way). The mother/abandonment theme certainly fits with the rest of the story, but I think that at the point Rie gets into her mother's futon, the film has been setting up her character to be frustrated and horny. Her adventure plan continues in this vein––she is actively looking to get it on with some guy from the city––but at the moment it's going to happen, she's overwhelmed, and more than a little frightened, and she essentially runs away. So if Rie isn't masturbating in her mother's futon, there's far less of a through-line for her character's evolution. Interestingly, Mes never mentions the missing scene I identified, where the lesbian girls apparently have some sort of altercation with Mikami, Ken and Michiko––the point at which Yasuko gets her uniform torn up and gets her hair taken down. Very clearly something was filmed and then cut––Yasuko suddenly has a bloodied scab on her forehead in the gymnasium scene, and her uniform has been just wrecked beyond repair––but there's no scene in the movie where this happens. I don't mean to be criticizing Mes, who does a hero's job introducing a great filmmaker nobody in the west has ever heard of. I just can't help but pick apart the way I think a movie works, vs. the way other people think it does. In his early films, I think Somai really admires characters like Rie, who weather all the hardships and challenges thrown at them and embrace life with arms open wide––even if these characters are, say, dumber than the sharper characters in any given Somai picture. In fact, Somai's more intellectual characters are ones he frequently mocks. Mikami gets the brunt of that, here––we feel that even Ken, the witless would-be rapist, is more admirable a character in Somai's eyes than Mikami––who dies not for the ideal he drives at (an ideal I think Somai makes clear is just an expression of Mikami's sense of intellectual superiority and entitlement), but rather because the way the other children give in to their so-called "basest" instincts during the typhoon intimidates and emasculates him. But Rie, who returns from the city bent but unbroken, is more Somai's idea of a "hero." You see similar characters in Lost Chapter: Passion in Snow (here it's adorable original Sukeban Deka star, Yuki Saito, played as awkward, almost slow-witted, but sensitive) and Luminous Woman (Sensaku is perhaps Somai's dumbest protagonist, yet Somai is determined to make him virtuous), and protagonists of Tokyo Heaven, Moving and The Friends are intellectually stunted just by being young––it's their resilience Somai admires (though I'd say the resilience of Renko in Moving is a little more forced than what we see in the other movies). Somai seems so much more ready to value Rie, Michiko, and even Akira and Ken before he values Mikami. Rie's adventure, perhaps designed to humiliate and endanger her, is a challenge she surmounts and grows from; Mikami's adventure takes him to the essence of humankind. It chafes against his pristine, virgin soul, and he would ultimately rather die than face the challenges ahead. Mikami's death-splits––even as an allusion to another film––is meant to show how stupid and short-sighted is his cowardice. By that logic, Umemiya isn't so much a stand-in for parental indifference as he is a man who has hesitated in the past, but whom Somai is giving a sort of reprieve, because has finally committed, and is charging ahead. The compromise Umemiya is making (marriage) alienates Mikami, who was his erstwhile fan in the past (he refuses to join Michiko in her outrage at Umemiya's girlfriend's family's interruption of class, and there's a shot during that conflict of Mikami looking up at the teacher with a sort of bemused admiration). Mikami doesn't recognize what Umemiya is doing as committing to a path. I guess Mikami doesn't recognize such commitment as success unless it avails Umemiya of the kind of superiority Mikami longs to feel. Meanwhile, Mikami commits to the horny madness of the typhoon, with his classmates––but then instantly repudiates it when the storm has passed, and then builds a literal throne for himself out of desks, and tries to make a grand exit––something Somai immediately undercuts, because as a filmmaker, he only respects the characters who embrace life, not the ones who manufacture a grand fate for themselves (Lost Chapter: Passion in Snow does something similar with Yuki Saito's love interests).

Amazon.co.uk lists "Selected audio commentary by Josh Slater-Williams" as an extra on the Third Window blu ray, but I can't find it anywhere––and the film only has two audio tracks––the Japanese soundtrack and the English-language commentary track with Tom Mes. The other extras mentioned do seem to be there.

At the end of the day, though...why oh why, is the grain in these films so hard to capture? I'm watching Lost Chapter now––it has slightly softer grain than Typhoon Club––whereas the trailer on the disc is full of grain and looks diamond-edged sharp. I hope Cinema Guild is able to work this out.

Calvin
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Re: Shinji Somai

#180 Post by Calvin » Sun Dec 24, 2023 7:12 am

Josh's commentary turned into the video essay that's on the disc instead.

Third Window have put Love Hotel through the BBFC so that one's also coming from them, in addition to Luminous Woman.

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tenia
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Re: Shinji Somai

#181 Post by tenia » Sun Dec 24, 2023 7:23 am

About the grain : I do wonder when those remasters are from. Too often, there are myths around these movies originally being soft looking or heavily altered photographically, but almost every time, we're just looking at the simplest quickest cheapest HD masters created at least 15 years ago, and that's why they look that sub-optimal (and then obviously, they might have been filtered too).

Calvin
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Re: Shinji Somai

#182 Post by Calvin » Sun Dec 24, 2023 7:26 am

tenia wrote:
Sun Dec 24, 2023 7:23 am
About the grain : I do wonder when those remasters are from. Too often, there are myths around these movies originally being soft looking or heavily altered photographically, but almost every time, we're just looking at the simplest quickest cheapest HD masters created at least 15 years ago, and that's why they look that sub-optimal (and then obviously, they might have been filtered too).
I've yet to watch the Third Window disc so I can't comment on how it looks, but my understanding is that it is sourced from the new 4K restoration done just this year following the discovery of the original negative. It's a newer master than the Japanese Blu-Ray that came out last year.

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tenia
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Re: Shinji Somai

#183 Post by tenia » Sun Dec 24, 2023 8:44 am

Eh, then my bad, and it might just be a poorly done new restoration.

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RitrovataBlue
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Re: Shinji Somai

#184 Post by RitrovataBlue » Sun Dec 24, 2023 3:27 pm

With the caveat that the tweet has since been deleted, yesterday Cinema Guild producer Ed McCarry tweeted re: Typhoon Club, "We're putting Somai's film on UHD disc next year, along with a very rare, never released work by Somai." I'm not sure what occassioned the deletion. But, given the issues raised with the Third Window release, is enough detail/color range present in the master to justify the upgrade? Here's hoping it's a vast improvement...

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feihong
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Re: Shinji Somai

#185 Post by feihong » Sun Dec 24, 2023 8:45 pm

Not sure I'm clear but I think you're asking whether the Third Window disc is an upgrade on the Japanese blu ray? I think it's not an upgrade on the Japanese disc, but I'll try and post some screencap comparisons of the two discs later this evening.

re: film grain in the restoration, I did look for it specifically at the screening I went to, since the film was being digitally-projected, and I'd heard of some of these remasters being not so great in the past. But from what I could see, the restoration looked great, and there was clear film grain on display. The Third Window disc looks way softer than what I saw in the theater.

There's this promotional video recently listed on Letterboxd, directed by Somai. Maybe that's the rare, never-released Somai mentioned in the tweet? Aya Katsuragi, the subject of the video, is the star of Evil Dead Trap:

https://letterboxd.com/film/film:1062684/
Last edited by feihong on Mon Dec 25, 2023 7:58 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#186 Post by vsski » Mon Dec 25, 2023 1:28 am

I also recently bought and watched the Third Windows release of Typhoon club and while neither my current set up nor my technical knowledge is sufficient enough to make a call on the disc, and I have never seen the film in any form or shape before, I do have to say that what I was watching never felt like it was from a 4K presentation which the disc advertises (compared to other 4K presentations). The image is very soft at times and the skies looks often strange, but I can’t say what the correct technical term for it would be, nor, given the subject matter of the movie, whether these sky shots weren’t intended to look somewhat unnatural.

I see Feihong is describing a waxy, smeary effect at times and I have to admit I’m usually sensitive to that and can’t say that I observed this like for example on the Criterion disc of Children of Paradise and Madame de, both of which I consider unwatchable.

So while this definitely didn’t come across as a strikingly beautiful image, it never felt so bad that it pulled me out of the movie or that I wanted to stop watching.

Since Feihong has seen it in theaters and has known the film before, I defer to his judgement, but at least for me I wouldn’t consider this an unmitigated disaster.
But here is hoping that CG will do it justice on UHD as it is a film well worth seeing.

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feihong
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Re: Shinji Somai

#187 Post by feihong » Mon Dec 25, 2023 5:23 am

I misspoke, I think, describing it as smearing. The figures do look waxy on the disc, but there's this strange edge enhancement I think is also going on, trying to compensate for having destroyed the grain structure on the disc. The only smearing I saw was on some of the dark shots with a lot of movement in them (especially in the extended rape scene) and when the rain gets especially heavy. This doesn't look as bad as Children of Paradise to me because they didn't go and try to re-grain the movie after softening it. Rather, it looks bad the way a lot of Hong Kong blurays look, things like Johnnie To's Vengeance or the Hong Kong disc of Drug War.

Let's see if I can share these screencaps successfully. Here's some early shots from both discs...

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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This shot is low-light and hard to see, period. When I first saw the Third Window disc, I thought it was an improvement on the Japanese disc.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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Third Window here represents what I saw in the theatre, in terms of what was visible. The Odessa disc is so dark here you can't see anything happening. You can't see the girls climb over the fence and pass their boom box over it on the Odessa disc.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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But when you start to see more, the Third Window starts to show its deficiencies. Here the texture is absolutely gon on the characters' skin. For some reason, the halo around the light above Midori's shoulder is really diminished on the Third Window disc.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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Now we start to see the central, distinguishing problem of both discs. This shot is real dark on the Odessa disc, but I think you can begin to see the waxiness on the Third Window disc here. The sharpness of the focus on Rie's face is gone on the Third Window disc.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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You can see it better here, where the grain from the Odessa disc––not as sharp as it could be in the first place––is flattened out on the Third Window disc. In this shot you can see it even more clearly in the sky and in the grass next to Mikami––that grass gets flattened completely on the Third Window disc

I'll share some more....
Last edited by feihong on Mon Dec 25, 2023 8:02 am, edited 2 times in total.

Calvin
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Re: Shinji Somai

#188 Post by Calvin » Mon Dec 25, 2023 5:56 am


RitrovataBlue wrote:With the caveat that the tweet has since been deleted, yesterday Cinema Guild producer Ed McCarry tweeted re: Typhoon Club, "We're putting Somai's film on UHD disc next year, along with a very rare, never released work by Somai." I'm not sure what occassioned the deletion.
I suspect it was deleted because it seemed quite unreasonably snippy about the fact Mubi had included the Third Window disc in their holiday gift guide - presumably because he thinks it will threaten their sales, but the timing of the Cinema Guild UHD announcement (without date or pre-order) was clearly intended to siphon off sales from Third Window in the first place so it's all in good sport.

The mention of an unreleased Somai is interesting - it may be the promotional video that feihong mentioned or Somai's final feature, Gassan. Can't think of what else it could be.

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feihong
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Re: Shinji Somai

#189 Post by feihong » Mon Dec 25, 2023 6:06 am

Here is where I really started to notice the particular way the Third Window disc disappoints. In terms of texture and depth, the noise reduction starts to become apparent in these.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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The light coming through in the background is without grain on the Third Window version.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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Two things here. After I saw the screening, I put in my Odessa disc, and when I got to this shot I was surprised how dark it looked, because it was much brighter in the cinema. On the other hand, holy sh*t, look at how the Third Window disc flattens this shot into oblivion.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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Here's where I was sure the Third Window disc looked wrong. Mikami looks waxy here on the Third Window version––all the texture on his face is gone. It's complicated to see, and I think some edge sharpening has been done on the Third Window disc, because the characters look sharp enough on screen––they just have no surface textures.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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Hard to express how the Third Window disc looks in motion. The sharpness around the edges of characters remains, but the lack of detail on their every surface is disconcerting to look at. You don't see grain moving at all, and this is especially obvious in these kinds of still shots, where characters stay still for long periods. In these shots in particular, the presentation on the Third Window disc looks substantially less than alive.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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Here's a great example of the manipulation I think has gone into the Third Window disc. On the Odessa version you can see that this is a very shallow-focus shot, in which Junko is actually out of focus in the background. Around the edges of the frame, we can see the shallow depth giving way––except on the Third Window version that's not apparent. This is part of what makes me think some edge sharpening has been applied to the softened Third Window picture––it looks like an edge sharpening tool is finding out-of-focus edges on buildings in the background and tightening them up––ruining the shallow-focus effect the filmmakers chose for the shot.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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I wanted to see what some half-light shots looked like. This one is magic hour, and meant to be so. And while you don't see the emptiness inside Ken's house on the Odessa disc, I can't help feeling like the look of the Odessa seems truer here. While the Third Window version does accurately replicate the colors and brightness I saw in the theater, on bluray the Third Window version frequently looks a little too bright––just as the Odessa version frequently looks too dark. Neither one seems across-the-board the winner in this category.

Sorry if a couple of these comparisons are a frame off from each other. I'm not an expert in this, and the contrast differences between the two versions make it really hard to make the eyeball comparison (to say nothing of the slightly different framing on the two discs––not new for the people who do this a lot, but I hardly ever do any screencaps). I'll share some more....

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feihong
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Re: Shinji Somai

#190 Post by feihong » Mon Dec 25, 2023 6:24 am

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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The restoration really shows on the Third Window disc in the night scenes, where there's a lot more visual information.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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The way the Third Window disc looks so pale and flat in this comparison seems wrong to me. This is the first scene where there's a strong magenta light coloring the image, and I think the Third Window disc handles this magenta just terribly. It's very washed-out, and there's a lack of atmosphere that accompanies the paleness of this treatment. By comparison, though the dark shadows on the Odessa disc make it hard to see what's happening in these scenes, the thick atmosphere of the scene feels much richer, and is much more in-keeping with the way this scene looked in the theater, and the way it's looked in past versions of the film which have been available.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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And yet, the improved lighting in this set of caps doesn't trump the loss of grain for me.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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A low-light shot, but I think it suggests that the Third Window version is unnaturally contrast-boosted and just too soft to look real.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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This set of caps was really hard to match up on both discs. I was shocked in the theater that I could see the wrestling Ken and Akira and that third kid (I think it might be the actor who played Debu in P.P. Rider? the face looked very close) are doing in the background––on the Odessa disc––and on the 1080p TV transfer and the DVD from the past––it didn't look like anything. And the shot doesn't linger long––the camera moved to follow Yasuko and her friends leaving the classroom, and then Michiko enters from the same door they leave. Then the camera follows Michiko across the classroom, leaving the wrestling boys behind. The darkness lets the Odessa disc down here––the bulletin board in the back is so dark it looks pitch black––and yet in the restored version, it's a medium brown.
Last edited by feihong on Mon Dec 25, 2023 5:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#191 Post by feihong » Mon Dec 25, 2023 6:39 am

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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See, I think that if you only saw the Third Window disc, you couldn't tell that this was a dirt road headed towards the school. And the point of the shot is that Rie is standing right off the concrete main road, which will take her away from the town.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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Losing the grain makes a real difference here; the shot has tremendous depth, until you remove all the grain that's left.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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Here's a miserable compromise, where neither disc looks right. The Odessa is way too dark, and the Third Window way too bright, in this shot where the rain first starts.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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We lose a lot of atmosphere in the shots on the Third Window version––here the thickness of the rain only comes through on the Odessa version––on the other hand, the color is so much more delimited on the Odessa disc.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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And the same thing holds true here, where there is no rain. The drama club has this thick, moody atmosphere on the Odessa disc––but you can hardly see what Midori's doing in the background, like you can on the Third Window. On the other hand, the Third Window version looks too bright, considering the mood the characters are trying to create. I think you can see the remnants of the magenta lighting in the Third Window version, but the shot looks just too pale, as the Third Window version frequently does. Whenever the magenta light comes out, as with the flashback in the infirmary, the Third Window version looks like it's just preserving the memory of that magenta lighting, rather than embodying it. Also, there's just no texture on the girls' skin, or on the tatami mats on the floor.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#192 Post by feihong » Mon Dec 25, 2023 7:00 am

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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This is Ken creeping on Michiko, and it's meant to look fairly sinister. More of the same from the two discs––one too dark, one too bright. You can see on Ken's shirt the loss of grain between the two editions.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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Though here, obviously, the Odessa disc is too dark. It's not unwatchable, because the actors and the camera are constantly moving, but seeing the restoration in the theater was the first time I ever saw what the actors were doing with their faces in this scene.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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The rain is where the Third Window disc really falls down. Here you see it streaking, whereas in the grain on the Odessa disc, the atmosphere it creates is palpable, and the depth-of-field in the shot is maintained.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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Here you lose the gun poster behind Kobayashi in the dark of the Odessa disc––but the depth-of-field of the shot on the Odessa disc is really diminished on the Third Window edition (also, the lighting just looks artificially boosted on the Third Window version––I did find myself wondering if the restoration wasn't too bright even when I was watching it in the theater).

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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Big example of the softness of the Third Window version––in spite of maintaining sharp edges, there's just no texture left. And then there's the lighting on the gymnasium stage, which looks much more true and natural on the Odessa version than in the restoration.

Also, something I discovered and wrote about back a ways on the thread––wtf happened to Yasuko between scenes? Huge welt on her forehead, big cut on her lip, her hair is down, and her uniform is torn up (when she turns around we see the whole shirt is shredded the way Ken demolishes Michiko's shirt). Never explained. In the scene before this, she is calmly stacking chairs and desks in a classroom (this is the scene where Midori is dancing on the chalkboard rail), her hair pulled into her tight ponytails, her uniform totally tightly pressed-looking, as in every earlier scene. There is a sign of conflict between Yasuko's group and Mikami's when they first discover each other trapped in the school together, but this seems to have been dispelled by the following scene, where Yasuko and Ken are stacking the chairs and desks and Midori is hanging out on the chalkboard rail. I wonder what cut scene was placed before this one, where Yasuko gets roughed-up this way––and I really wonder why it was cut?

Incidentally, Tom Mes details a lot about the actors in the film, and what they did later on––since for many of the kids, this was their first film. Most of them did more work in film and television later on (Yuka Ohnishi and Yuki Kudouh being the ones with the most successful entertainment careers), save for two: the actors playing Ken and Yasuko. Now, I can maybe understand they kid who played the rapist in the 10-minute stalking/rape scene maybe seeming too intense for most casting directors to reach out to later on––kind of the difference between the Anthony Hopkins' charismatic turn as Hannibal Lecter and Brian Cox's far more chilling version––which did seem to keep him from catching on in American movies for a long time. But it is interesting that the other actor that doesn't get any later chances after a big performance in this movie is the one who plays the out-and-out lesbian character––the others are much more ambiguous––you could read the actress playing her girlfriend as not really being into the romance, but not wanting to say no to Yasuko (I don't read it that way, but I think there's the space to do that read), but Yasuko is 100% committed. It's just interesting that those are the actors who have the fewest opportunities after this movie.
Last edited by feihong on Mon Dec 25, 2023 5:38 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#193 Post by feihong » Mon Dec 25, 2023 7:27 am

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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Losing the grain here means losing the textures of the environment. Especially noticeable on the overturned desk near the front center of the shot, and the worn wood on the floor.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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If you're doubting what the grain management on the Third Window disc does for the film, this shot should tell you what you need to know. The rain is a gooey sluice down the screen on the Third Window disc––on the Odessa disc, it's clear and crisp. The depth is there on the Odessa disc, and the colors––again, when the magenta comes out in a shot, the Third Window disc fails to deliver.

But I've got to point out here, the magenta was present in the theatrical version. The raindrops close to the camera glowed in the theatrical version, the way the raindrops glow in the Odessa version. I don't know why the green is so overwhelming on the Third Window disc. Bottom-line, this shot looks terrible in the Third Window version, even in motion.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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Here the grain provides structure for the depth and color and everything in the shot, and the Third Window disc does not deliver.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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The texture on the windows and the window frames gets lost on the Third Window disc, and pleasing grain that makes texture for the out-of-focus leaves in the foreground is gone on the Third Window disc. Also, the green bias on the Third Window version seems to get more extreme as the film goes on.

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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The magic hour shot looks very red on the Odessa disc––but there is an explanation for it, actually, on the Tom Mes audio commentary on the Third Window disc. Mes mentions that this scene was meant to be shot in the morning, but rehearsals went long, and meant that they shot the scene at sunset instead of sunrise––which I think goes some way to explaining the mellow warmth of the image on the Odessa disc. I chose this cap because it really shows how much grain the Odessa disc has, that is missing from the Third Window version.

One last cap...

Odessa Disc

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Third Window Disc

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The ripples in the water are clear on one of these discs, but on the other...


Like I said before, neither version is ideal. The dark scenes on the Odessa are just too dark to see sometimes. But I think the color seems richer and truer, and the added depth, texture and detail the grain provides really improves the experience. The grain seems to get more robust as the film goes on, and the Odessa disc really shines once the typhoon arrives in earnest. By contrast, the Third Window disc has this weird combo of sharp edges (in some cases a little too sharp, I think) and almost no grain in the image otherwise––so the shots look flatter and less rich. The brighter image sometimes really helps show the information in a scene (principally in the night scene at the pool, in the rape scene, and in the early scenes of rain set in the drama club and the teacher's offices), but it often seems too bright, too high-key to seem natural––and the Third Window edition seems to get greener as the film goes on.

I think Cinema Guild has a great opportunity here to come in with an edition that has decently improved contrast over the Odessa and sharpness and grain denied us in the Third Window release. It would be nice to have some Somai rarity paired with it, but all they really need to do in my mind is to make this image right. Neither disc released so far does it yet.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#194 Post by Peacock » Mon Dec 25, 2023 8:58 am

I hope Cinema Guild sees this page on the thread so they can see what they can do with the 4K master - if anything. I don’t think it’s like Third Window to apply DNR, I mean this is heavy filtering and the example above make that as clear as day. The Odessa is far too dark in many places but yeah, on the UK disc that’s some of the worst denoising I’ve seen in a while. I wonder what went wrong here and if Cinema Guild can do something or will they just try to hide it by slapping on some fake grain? Here’s hoping not.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#195 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon Dec 25, 2023 11:01 am

feihong -- did you take a peek back at the ancient DVD (for color and "darkness: etc comparisons)?

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Re: Shinji Somai

#196 Post by Finch » Mon Dec 25, 2023 11:49 am

Thank you for the detailed breakdown of the two Typhoon Club discs, feihong. I wonder if Adam Torel raised this with the licensor and got rebuffed. Either way, I too hope that Cinema Guild are made aware if the files they've received or are about to receive look different from the theatrical print.

EDIT: I took the liberty of sending cinemaguild a PM with links to feihong's comments and screenshots.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#197 Post by feihong » Mon Dec 25, 2023 4:51 pm

Finch wrote:
Mon Dec 25, 2023 11:49 am
Thank you for the detailed breakdown of the two Typhoon Club discs, feihong. I wonder if Adam Torel raised this with the licensor and got rebuffed. Either way, I too hope that Cinema Guild are made aware if the files they've received or are about to receive look different from the theatrical print.

EDIT: I took the liberty of sending cinemaguild a PM with links to feihong's comments and screenshots.
Fortune Star has always done something like this to their films, and I seem to recall someone saying that it came down to a question of asking them not to degrain the supplied material. Looking at the Lost Chapter: Passion in Snow blu ray, it looks very likely that the grain reduction they've done is after-the-fact––none of the other 1080p elements in the features on the disc have it done, and they look otherwise identical. I'll share some caps from Lost Chapter and Tokyo Heaven as well. Maybe Luminous Woman, too, while I'm at it.

Thank you for sending Cinema Guild the link! I think they need to know what people are looking for out of their release.
Michael Kerpan wrote:
Mon Dec 25, 2023 11:01 am
feihong -- did you take a peek back at the ancient DVD (for color and "darkness: etc comparisons)?
I didn't, but I'll try and dig the old Pioneer DVD out of my garage. The image on that thing, as I recall, was like something dug out of a mouldering grave––non-anamorphic, windowboxed, and so grungy, with such boosted black levels that it was hard to tell what was happening on-screen. But I'll see if I can get some screencaps and add them to the comparison.

Update: Looked all over my garage, could not find my Pioneer DVD of Typhoon Club, I'm afraid.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#198 Post by thethinwhiteduke » Mon Dec 25, 2023 9:57 pm

I think it's very important to note that there are some things being conflated here - the grain structure found in the new 4K restoration and the one found in the authored Blu-ray Disc. The point here is the compression of the 4K restoration and the representation of grain differs greatly from what's on the disc versus what is found on the 4K master. There has been discussion questioning the new 4K restoration of Typhoon Club (noting shoddy cheap remasters in the past and filtering), and a lot of conjecture. The version that was seen in theaters is the same source master that will/has been used for the Third Window/upcoming Cinema Guild blu-ray releases. So, as it's been said, the master has grain. In terms of the color grade, that was supervised by Koji Enokido, Somai's AD, and neither Third Window nor Cinema Guild have or would likely correct that. Somai's films are spread across several different distributors who work with different restoration houses—Luminous Woman is an IMAGICA 2K restoration from a 4K scan, handled by Kadokawa; Tokyo Heaven and Lost Chapter are likely just an HD masters, one from Shochiku and one from Toho—so I'm not sure if comparison is really that useful.

This seems to be a question of the disc authoring process, and its ability to retain detail and grain while also compressing the film to fit on a disc. This is all to say, it's not a poor restoration, or that Third Window DNR'd and denoised the master, but that the encode on the blu-ray simply wasn't the best, which happens quite often. The film itself doesn't have as heavy grain like the Odessa transfer might suggest, it's much finer and that can be difficult to retain when taking a 4K master that is 1TB in size and squeezing it into a 30 GB file.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#199 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon Dec 25, 2023 11:51 pm

feihong -- I have it somewhere but finding it could be tough. My recollection is also that it looked bad -- much worse than Ohikkoshi (of similar vintage). So any new release has to be a big upgrade, I guess.

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Re: Shinji Somai

#200 Post by feihong » Tue Dec 26, 2023 1:10 am

Michael Kerpan wrote:
Mon Dec 25, 2023 11:51 pm
feihong -- I have it somewhere but finding it could be tough. My recollection is also that it looked bad -- much worse than Ohikkoshi (of similar vintage). So any new release has to be a big upgrade, I guess.
Recreating the movie as a puppet show would be a huge upgrade from the Pioneer DVD. There was a re-issue of Typhoon Club and Moving when Odessa acquired the rights, but I never had that disc––I imagine the color scheme there looked similar to the other Odessa releases––the Wowow television broadcast and the blu ray. What I remember of the color on the original Pioneer disc was that it was hard to see, but when it was visible, it was pretty much in-line with what is on the Odessa bluray. The more I look at the Third Window captures, the more positive I am that the film's brightness has been boosted unnaturally high on the Third Window disc, with a concomitant desaturation of the color. The color choices on the Third Window disc look just limited and unnatural in a lot of cases––the light on Yasuko in the gymnasium stage cap, or the way in which Rie singing in the rain looks so pale and grey in the Third Window version––or all the shots where there's magenta light on the image––the infirmary flashback with the cherry blossoms in the foreground, Yasuko's seduction scene in the drama club, or Rie's scene in the shopping arcade with the couple of flutists all lose considerable depth and atmosphere because their image looks so washed-out on the Third Window disc.

The other Third Window discs I have––The Guard from the Underground and Hana-bi––don't, to my recollection, have any of these problems, so I tend to suspect this version has been handed over to them in this state. But I think the rights-holder that would have supplied this to them is Odessa, who released the Japanese blu ray and provided the source for the Wowow TV broadcast. And yet, I saw film grain on the 4k restoration when I watched it theatrically––the screening did look bright like on the Third Window disc––and at times I wondered if the image looked too bright (I should say that P.P. Rider, which I saw later in the day, never sparked such questions––it looked absolutely great). But I didn't see the edge-sharpening or the flattening and grain reduction in the theatrical version. It's harder to gauge, but I don't think the scenes with magenta looked washed-out in the theatrical version, either. The scene of Rie in the shopping arcade, is a key one––what I saw on-screen in that case looked like what I see on the Odessa blu ray, not the green slurry from the Third Window disc. I can't figure out quite why it looks the way it does––maybe the color-timing was done for the theatrical distribution, and that paler color scheme looked better on a big screen? And then the noise reduction too that color palette and rendered it much, much worse (color frequently gets distorted when we have to deal with compressed images in publications, for instance)?

Cinema Guild seems to have been a little quieter in general about P.P. Rider, but I hope that a home video release of that is still on the table. The best-quality version of that I have seen is a 720p transfer which has been available for streaming on iTunes in Japan. That version has no issues of visibility or darkness, and the theatrical version I saw matched that release in terms of colors and brightness/contrast pretty well. Love Hotel, Luminous Woman, and Tokyo Heaven––all part of the Director's Guild collection Third Window is maybe planning on releasing––have high-quality Japanese blurays currently. Tokyo Heaven is maybe the best-looking Japanese bluray I have yet seen.

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