> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong. What's in the movie is in the movie, and altering the movie to this extent is a form of revisionist history. Cinema is worse off when over-aggressive restorations alter the action within the frame. To me, this is equivalent to swapping out an actor's performance with a different take, or changing the music score during an action sequence, or replacing a puppet creature with a computer graphics version of the same creature decades after release.
It's really not the equivalent though. I don't see anything wrong with fixing a license plate or removing a reflection or a modern-day wristwatch.
It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel, or a wrong chord in sheet music. None of the filmmakers wanted those things there. They weren't done with intent. They were just mistakes.
Changing music or replacing a puppet with CG, of course I'm against. That's changing the art of it. Different music makes you feel different. A CG creature has a different personality. Just like you don't want to replace vocabulary in a novel to make it more modern-day.
I think it's usually pretty easy to distinguish the two. The first ones would have been corrected at the time if they'd noticed and gone for another take. They take us out of the movie if we notice them. The latter category is a reflection of the technology, resources, and intentional choices. They keep us in the world of moviemaking as it was at that time.
>> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong.
> It's really not the equivalent though. I don't see anything wrong with fixing a license plate or removing a reflection or a modern-day wristwatch.
I think it depends on the primary objective of the restoration. If I’m trying to preserve history, I shouldn’t fix errors. If I’m trying to make a (by implication derivative) work that maximizes enjoyability for (new) audiences, then it’s ok to fix.
e.g. a long time ago, I once transferred vinyl recordings of an extremely amateur community musical group to CD.
After thinking long and hard, I decided to fix recording technology flaws (a bad hum) and vinyl degradation flaws (crackles, dust, etc). But I didn’t fix any of the musical performance flaws.
Bottom line: I decided to respect the history of the performance, and disrespect the history of the recording and playback technology/medium.
In 100 years (probably sooner), the vast majority of people won't be watching our films anymore. Those deep catalogs of IP have lower value with each passing year.
Films are becoming less and less popular with new forms of entertainment that are more immediate, more democratized or individualistic. Our dopamine is being juiced and our attention getting sucked into games, social media, and all other kinds of long tail attractors. Influencers are bigger than Hollywood stars. They simply cater to more interests. Distribution and production are no longer hard problems, so you don't need to build up a Hollywood star.
Film is becoming what radio used to be. It may never become as niche as the radio drama is today, but it certainly won't have the same limitless trajectory we thought it would have pre-pandemic.
Whatever we do today to "fix" films or make them more accessible is accomplishing one thing: extending their lifespan for as long as most (average, non-film connoisseur) people might still be interested in watching.
"In 100 years (probably sooner), the vast majority of people won't be watching our films anymore."
I quite strongly disagree with you. I lived through the latter stages of the transition from monochrome to full colour and various other things that were hailed as game changers that would render the previous status quo as somehow defunct.
I defy you to watch something like a Harold Lloyd movie involving a clock and not have sweaty palms or at least a mildly elevated ... emotional response of some sort.
We call them films or movies or whatever but those are long form stories. A book might be one too or a pdf. The novella is a short story. A matinee was an extended session at the cinema with multiple "value adds" to the main production. Theatre ... cartoons ... you know how this goes!
Might I remind you that you have only two eyes, which means that a radio drama in your car is the only safe media for a "drama" in a car, for the driver. You do get aural distraction but it is mostly manageable. One day you will have FSD (Mr Musk says so) and you will be able to watch telly with your feet on the dash but that is not today.
Media and formats change but the purpose is largely the same: telling a story. We are, after all, the story telling ape.
It's not that older works don't have value, it is that a lot of people don't see the value. For example, changes in the way actors perform makes a lot of people claim that old movies are "cheesy" or have "bad acting" -- they can't even enjoy a movie from the 1940s, let alone a silent film like Harold Lloyd's. Hell, I know twenty-somethings that can't even stand movies from the 1980s!
Not to make you feel old, but to today's 20-somethings an 80s movie is the same time difference as a 40s movie would be in the 80s. There's some interesting stuff I read a while back about why the 80s "feels culturally closer to today" than the 40s felt to people in the 80s but it's the same difference in a purely chronological sense.
Not the poster you asked either, but another big reason why the 1980s seems more like today than the 1940s did the 1980s was that the 1960s happened in between the 1940s and 1980s. Our modern world view is greatly shaped by the struggles for racial and gender equality that occurred in the 1960s.
Not the poster you've asked, but I think you might be interested in Mark Fisher's "What is Hauntology?" (10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16). It argues the contemporary culture is incapable of coming up with genuinely new ideas because postmodernism and late capitalism constraint our imagination to the point where we can no longer imagine a wholly different system of politics and values. We're left with the upkeep of an already established system, and this is reflected in how the present crop of films and music mostly sample and rehash what's been done in the past century.
As a personal addendum, I feel this can be (partly) attributed to the loss of the Cold War's ideological struggle that drove the West to innovate, not just in technology but in societal structures and freedoms as well. This is why it can feel as if we've arrived at "the end of history", the current system has won, so what is left to seek or prove?
Re your addendum and "the end of history": I think it would be myopic for people to think that the current system has won, and that there's nothing left to seek or prove. The current system has brought plenty to many but is destroying our planet, and there's plenty of space for fresh thinking. China is taking the lead in innovation [1]; so perhaps there's a new ideological and existential struggle, just with the US as the underdogs. Hopefully people see this as motivating rather than depressing.
> I defy you to watch something like a Harold Lloyd movie involving a clock and not have sweaty palms or at least a mildly elevated ... emotional response of some sort.
Be that as it may, there's probably a day coming where only a handful of people on the planet even know who that is. Or who have even seen those films. And it'll be like that for most of our now-popular cultural artifacts.
How many newspaper stories from the 1700s have you read? The culture of those people died with them, and so too will it be with us.
Nobody is going to grow up to the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers anymore. Nobody is going to watch The Andy Griffith Show or see Last Action Hero. Even if it happens on a rare occasion, those numbers will pale in comparison to the number of Fortnite players. Or whatever's popular in the coming decades.
Our world is ephemeral and dies with us. We should enjoy our media while it is relevant to us, because that's what it's good for. Telling stories in a framework that speaks to us. In the future, it'll be a relic. An artifact of a time long ago, whose people are all dead, and whose lessons may need to come with a history book.
Apart from students of anthropology, the vast majority of future people will probably find our cultural works to be boring, irrelevant, and unworthy of their attention.
Counterpoint: the past continues to inspire, surprise, and delight.
Your comment about “1700’s newspapers” reminded me of The Past Times podcast, where comedians read random newspapers from across American history. The episodes I’ve listened to were delightful, and they covered mundane news in mundane places.
“O brother, where art thou” is one of my favorite movies. It’s a retelling of The Odyssey (a literally prehistoric tale) set in Depression-era Mississippi, made in the early 2000’s.
The specific question of editing out these production artifacts doesn’t rile me either way, though. I didn’t see the original mistake, and I won’t notice the fix either.
I’ll also agree that just as no one steps in the same river twice, how the past is viewed and interpreted changes over time. What is valued or not also changes. 90% of everything is still crap. And quite a bit of the interest in the past is reflected in remixes or retellings for modern audiences.
Still, people also read Beowulf or Chaucer in the original or in modern translation. Others will enjoy both Jane Austen and Bridgerton. People will listen to Beethoven and Jon Batiste. Sure, not all those things are for everyone, but neither are modern music genres, sports entertainment, or most TV shows.
Yes, Homer will outlive us all, but what 20th century film is likely to have Homer’s longevity?
I think people will still be playing Tetris and reading Homer in a thousand years, but I’m not confident at all that they’ll be watching any of our videos.
I’ve read Marcus Aurelius‘s meditations, a few Greek plays and studied kung-fu movies and Japanese cinema critically. People still endure reading Madame Bovary.
Time stands still for no man, but we’re a curious people, and folks will search for meaning in the past through our art. As a parody of the traditional action movie, I’m sure people will be watching Last Action Hero for decades to come.
I think as time goes on the emotional hooks of media outside of universal themes fade away. My son will never know the time where “It’s a Wonderful Life” impacted my parents, or how the endless repeating of of “A Christmas Story” was a part of my siblings holiday. But the stories that are important to us or capture a moment of time will endure.
Another form of this observation is what initiated the flood of private equity into music back catalogs - people will go back and listen to music many many more times than they will a lot of other content. And the longevity of it is much longer, especially when you consider remixes, covers, and samples.
Every so often I’ll throw on some old jazz standards I’ve never heard of. Some classical music. Some early soul and R&B.
Old movies though? Only the iconic ones through a sense of obligation (eg, school/study) or someone convincing me I absolutely have to. Metropolis, Citizen Kane, interesting movies for their time and contribution. I just don’t feel the need to go back to this stuff the same way I actually enjoy going back to old music or other art.
> Whatever we do today to "fix" films or make them more accessible is accomplishing one thing: extending their lifespan for as long as most (average, non-film connoisseur) people might still be interested in watching.
OTOH, it's fun to watch for goofs in movies, and if they're fixed up, then there's less reason to watch some of these movies.
I don’t really think that’s true with AI in the mix. Yes, they won’t be watching those specific movies, but AI will be trained on them and even use them as context. You could generate a new updated movie set between ANH and ESB with AI versions of the original actors when they were young and alive. Cinema could start to get really interesting, and anything new is just a remix of the old anyways (we just build on what we have done much faster and more cheaply).
I disagree. IMO the film is more like a novel. The styles will vary, but most feature films are the modern embodiment of a play, a medium that has existed for thousands of years.
Styles change and not every movie will “survive” long term. But stories endure.
> In 100 years (probably sooner), the vast majority of people won't be watching our films anymore. Those deep catalogs of IP have lower value with each passing year.
The fact that when I die nobody will care about my porn collection is deeply unsettling. I'm saying this seriously, because it's something I enjoy so much, yet nobody else cares.
I also found this take interesting coming from someone at ILM where they grafted Hayden Christensen into Return of the Jedi.
Though in this day and age I can’t help but ask “why not both?” It feels easy to add a choice to your viewing experience. If they can do it for Black Mirror then they can certainly ask up front “which version would you like to see?”
I literally just finished watching Episode IV, the one with the CGI makeover. The extra alien CGI in Mos Eisley is awful. It doesn’t stand up at all, with the one exception of the Jaba scene which gets away with it because it is pretty fun. I wish we’d watched the original version.
Is it easy to find the original? I’d love a copy of each on my Plex server, but I have had trouble finding an original copy. I admit I may not know where or how to look; advice is welcome!
That comparison is really cool. I was mostly paying attention to the 4K77 vs 2011 bluray, and in most cases I thought 4K77 looked better. Not sure why they felt the need to mess with the colors so drastically in the 2011 version.
A 4K fan scan of a 35mm print the was in cold storage since 1980.
It's great to see OG Star Wars looking like in did in '77, with all the optical glitches and the lower contrast with slightly green shadow bias of prints from that time. True time travel that makes the reworked releases look silly.
Another project worth a look is Harmy's fan cuts of the original trilogy, which are tastefully re-assembled from multiple sources and graded.
I’m a lot more bothered by the change to the color grading in the “after” of Alien than the minor change to the effect, and by the picture looking way shittier in the “fixed” Goodfellas shot (the first is blu ray, the second “blu ray and streaming”, so hopefully the example was taken from streaming and that’s why it looks so much worse)
Oh yeah. Totally agreed on not changing the color grading. That's as big as changing the music.
With blogs that take screenshots of 4K content though, sometimes that's using a media player with poor HDR color decoding though. Bad HDR always winds up with a green tint, that's the telltale sign. VLC is the worst with that.
But I don't think that's the case here. There are definitely a lot of rereleases with badly done color.
The color grading is a funny one. I worked on a large episodic animated series that was released in the US from a 16mm print copy of the episodes. The original transfer was done at a facility that I worked at, but only as a tape assistant to the colorists. It was transferred as SD to DigiBeta. Years later, the film was brought back out and sent to another local post house for an HD transfer. The person in charge of that made some "interesting" decisions, and the transfer was universally panned. Years later, the same prints were scanned again to HD, but with a different producer for the project. At this time, the colorist also took a lot of interest in the project and found reference film material on the exact same film the prints were on. Using that reference, the colors came out drastically different from anything ever made from these prints. Even though the original creator of the animated series was never involved in any of the post process decisions, it was later relayed that he was extremely pleased with the results of this release as it was the closest to the colors as he had envisioned them way back when the series was being made.
Sometimes, the post processes loses a lot when people make decisions. It might take a special released version for the director to actually get a version they feel they wanted the world to see. Sometimes, yes, they go too far, but others it's actually a decent result.
There is some value in the mistakes and limitations of older movies, I am sure if you look it up people who can explain it far better than me can give lots of examples, I saw a video once about the growing trend of analog horror where people intentionally watch older horror movies in older storage and display formats like VHS and CRT televisions, because in many ways the high def modern tv screens and 4K mastered prints actually take away from the atmosphere of the original movie that was made keeping the limitations of the technology of the time. Wes Anderson also talks about how watching the fur pattern constantly changing on the model of King Kong in the black and white stop-motion movie due to the puppeteers touching the model to manipulate it inspired him to do the same in his Fantastic Mr Fox movie
Are they watching made-for-TV movies? Otherwise I’d think the movies would have been made for theater viewing, and watching it in 4k on a big modern TV would be a lot closer to how the creators wanted you to see it than using VHS and an old TV.
It's similar to how old games look so different on modern hardware: the pixel art on a current-day screen looks like high-fidelity perfectly sharp uniformly colored squares, while the "pixel art" of old games rendered on a CRT didn't look like "pixel art" at all but rather like high-fidelity art rendered on a low-fidelity screen. There's a lot of detail implied by the way CRTs render what's encoded in software as perfect squares.
The weird rainbow effects on Sonic's waterfalls are NOT due to the properties of CRT, but a result of the Megadrive's awful composite encoder. Connect the screen through a RGB cable cable, or composite through a 32X, and the resulting image is much cleaner.
It's not that easy, in my opinion. George Lucas and James Cameron have both said that their restorations were how they would have wanted to release the movie if they had had the technology/budget.
I personally hate the reworked Star Wars trilogy compared to the original, only because that's what I saw first. If I had seen them in the opposite order, would I feel the same way? I don't know.
As with anything, there is no bright line. For example, translations of The Odyssey are constantly changing the vocabulary. And more recently we've seen changes to novels to conform to modern sensibilities (e.g., Roald Dahl novels).
For me, I guess, my preference is to allow creators to do whatever they want with their creations, but I wish they would make all versions available. Steven Spielberg did that with ET when he digitally replaced all guns with walkie-talkies.
> It's not that easy, in my opinion. George Lucas and James Cameron have both said that their restorations were how they would have wanted to release the movie if they had had the technology/budget.
I dunno about Cameron's films (I don't think I've seen an original and an unchanged from him), but for Star Wars, the constraints helped make the film good. Yes, there's some rough bits, but all of the additions subtract rather than add.
Maybe it's not what his vision was, but we liked it as it was. If you watch ROTJ, you can already see where unconstrained technology distracts Lucas and it turns into too much of a green screen affair in parts. The prequel trilogy is so much green screen and it just feels so sterile and unbelievable; none of the characters interact with the environment at all; they're not hot in the desert or even when having a light saber duel in lava fields or whatever. They don't get cold or wet, etc. In ROTJ, the speeder bike stuff is mostly gratituous, but there's interaction with the environment.
The counter argument is that once art is released into the world, it becomes a conversation with the people consuming it and no longer belongs solely to the creator.
I empathize with, and see the validity in, both sides.
> If I had seen them in the opposite order, would I feel the same way? I don't know.
This can go both ways. Sometimes you like things because you saw them that way first. Sometimes you're exposed to two versions of something and the second version is clearly an improvement on the first.
Example (A): I prefer the PC speaker soundtrack to The Secret of Monkey Island. I played it on an IBM. Without the exposure, there's no real reason to believe I'd have the same preference.
Example (B): The Swedish dub of the Moana musical number Shiny enjoys the considerable disadvantages that: (1) I heard the English version first; (2) I don't understand Swedish; (3) the English version is more authoritative, because the film was developed in English; and (4) the translation isn't especially close.† But I strongly prefer it anyway; to me the Swedish lyrics (as represented in the English subtitles I found on Youtube) give a very different feeling to the song and the character, one that greatly improves the film.
I'd lean toward taking people at their word if they seem to have a reason for the preference they express. The 2011 Blu-Ray Star Wars release pans down from outer space to a view of a planet more rapidly than the original film does. This seems like an issue where views either won't exist or will be dominated by the idea that whatever it was like before, it should stay that way.
"Han shot first", on the other hand, is a strong point of characterization, and objections to the change seem unlikely to be dominated by conservatism.
† Actually, I spent a fair amount of time listening to various dubs of Moana songs, and my favorite versions all make a significant change to the message of the song as I perceive it. I didn't care too much for the English Shiny, but this was also true of the songs that I liked in the original. My best model of why that might be is: every dub makes some more-or-less random changes to the song, and by methodically searching through a large number of them, I ended up finding the changes that appealed to me.
They have millions of dollars at stake, so it is hard for me to take them at face value.
There is also decades of years between production, so the directors are different people as well. Modern George Lucas doesnt think that Han Solo is the kind of guy who shoots first, now that hes rolling is Disney franchise money. What would 1977 Lucas think if asked?
It's debatable where the line should be drawn, and the best approach is not to draw it at all. Sure, update flicks with CG fixes, but the original theatrical version should always be made available too.
That was Lucas' mistake with the original Star Wars trilogy. He fixed mistakes, CG'd characters and sets, spliced in deleted scenes, filmed entirely new sequences, replaced music, etc.. He felt he was making the movies better, but the updated editions weren't the familiar old friends people had known since childhood. If he'd made good transfers of the original versions available in the latest home video formats in addition to his newer versions, everybody would have been happy. He didn't do that.
Some people want the original versions and some want updated versions. Given that the first step to producing new spruced up versions is to restore the original, it makes sense to make both available.
The trouble with spelling errors is they drop me out of the immersion in the story. I recall reading one that averaged 2 spelling errors per page. The story and writing was fine, but reading it was like driving on a beautiful country road and hitting a pothole every hundred yards. I finally just gave up on the book.
Spelling errors also are sometimes not introduced by the author, but by the typesetter or publisher. In a preface to the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien complains about how many revisions it took to get typesetters to type the book correctly, especially with the words that he had made up or created new conventions for (elves vs. elfs, for example).
I suppose Tolkien’s work would be an exception, especially at the time. Typesetter seeing a made up word would correct it - and for most books it would have been the right choice.
“A Litany in a Time of Plague” contains a famous line: “brightness falls from the air.” Many scholars believe it’s a printing error, that the original line was “brightness falls from the hair.” But with apologies to Jay McInerney (who made this point better than I) the former is so much more beautiful. Sometimes art isn’t intentional.
If you have wide taste in film and TV, at some point you have to turn to piracy (and/or fan edits) to get the “real thing”. Impossible or impractical to get it any other way.
Because of expired licenses to use the original music. You can see the same thing happening with later releases of media. As an example, DVD releases of Scrubs were known to have switched out many songs in the entire show.
The CD release of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio program notes that it's mostly the original recordings, except for the music. They didn't have the rights to release the music on CD, so they substituted in different music. If you want the same program that was broadcast over the radio, you need to buy it on cassette, where apparently they do have the rights to the music.
Something has obviously gone badly wrong in the world of IP licensing. Somehow I imagine that movies don't license different parts of their soundtrack differently to make sure they can never be rereleased.
Yeah, I knew there must be a debate about this in the comments the moment I saw it.
Honestly, I personally disagree with the sentiment on all levels. Meaning, I agree with your observation that there are degrees to "restoration", and fixing a mistake is just not the same as changing music.
But then, I also have no sympathy to your objection of changing music or replacing a puppet with CG. I mean, I may like the old take better, but whatever, I'm not the one who made the movie. The people who made this particular cut for this particular release made it (duh). And these may or may be not the same directors and producers that made the cut you consider "the original one". It's their vision. Surely, it may seem surprising to a naïve viewer that it's not the director the movie is attributed to who "made it" in its entirety, but this is just never the case and obviously any cinema enthusiast knows it all too well anyway.
(But then I should probably mention that my fundamental disagreement with the sentiment spreads way farther than that, and I myself consider it kinda extreme. I often would be fine with the kind of "restoration" that essentially destroys the original thing. This would be off-topic to explain it here, because it wouldn't be about the movies anymore, but I just think that too much respect for the great things of the past often leads to losing sight of why these things were made in the first place. They were meant to be great at the time, not to be respected as a very old pile of rubbish a couple of thousands years later.)
The only thing I am kinda objecting to is when changes made reflect the current political agenda in one way or another (i.e. censorship, be it taboo on display of tits on TV, cutting out statements that seem "politically incorrect" at the time and place of the release, removing some persona non-grata who made a very minor cameo appearance in the original movie or anything else like that). But, again, I don't really object to that because "they don't have the right to do it", but because it's just irritatingly stupid and makes me roll my eyes. It doesn't necessarily make the movie worse or even substantially different (I might not even notice), but unlike with remastering of the original movie, the intent clearly isn't to make it "better" (in their opinion), but just acting out of fear to cause trouble by displaying today something that was fine yesterday as is.
What I think is kinda lacking is very clear and non-ambiguous versioning of movies. I am not that much of a movie enthusiast myself, but some people obviously care if you can see the original number-plate falling off the car, and it would be nice if these people could easily refer to that particular edit they like better. They kinda always do it anyway, but that only happens if they need to specifically mention this number plate falling off, and normally they try to pretend that 10 edits made for 10 releases on different media in different countries are all the same movie, which (almost by definition) is not the case. I mean, for books we have versions and ISBNs, and it's normal to reference specifically that, not just one of the authors and the title. Should be standard practice for movies too.
> It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel, or a wrong chord in sheet music.
Your analogies don't pass a simple self-check-- they are vastly different in scope.
At worst a spelling error will create a single alternative spelling in history. Wrong chords, however, typically create entire branches of full pieces of music that include allusions to and variations upon the wrong chord. For example-- there's no way to "correct" the C major chord in Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme by Chopin. What are you going to do, change every single variation in Rachmaninoff's piece to reflect the correct chord (C minor) from Chopin's prelude?
It gets even more complicated in jazz where chord substitutions are not only expected but often supersede the original chords. Even more to the point-- a lot of the die-hard Charlie Parker fans not only love the recording he made while obviously drunk, they love it in spite of Parker's wishes for nobody to ever hear it it (much less repeatedly play it and talk about it).
That's all to say a) correcting an entrenched wrong chord is no simplistic task, and b) in any case it's wrong to assume that the artist's intentions are always the chief concern.
The analogy was fine, you're just stretching it too far.
Of course there are times when it's better to leave a "wrong" chord in music, but it's incredibly common for sheet music to have unintentional errors, especially in an ensemble setting. If trumpets are playing a unison part but 1 and 2 have a Bb and trumpet 3 has a B natural nobody thinks twice about fixing the trumpet 3 part. That's the analogy, not jazz and Rachmaninoff
I'm sure most people know the story. In the Twin Peaks pilot, a mirror reflection of a set dresser was briefly caught by the camera. Instead of editing this out of reshooting, David Lynch gave him a role in the show.
Anyway, movies can have revisions. A movie is as much a commercial product as it is art. I don't see why people need to get all righteous about it, especially in cases where directors, actors, etc., don't care.
Novels get revisions. Even fine art prints may have editions with differences between them. Old wood blocks by a famous artist may even be restruck decades later by a different person. They're still recognized as the piece.
Not just "a" role - he became "the" key role in the series, the evil spirit that moves the entire plot. Which was both absolute genius (turning a mistake into the first, menacing appearance of a key character) and absolute madness (how do you hand a key character of your expensive production to a random set-dresser with almost no acting career?!?). David Lynch in a nutshell.
There’s a really funny duality to mistakes in recorded art that is vastly different when viewed as a fan and the creator.
As a music fan, I really love little mistakes in incredible albums. They’re humanizing, they show that the recording was made by people and it makes the highs feel so much higher.
As an artist, I loathe mistakes in my own work and I will spend a basically limitless amount of time fixing annoying performance quirks in software — I’m talking things that I can do but didn’t get quite right — so I can listen to it without distraction or regrets. I know that nobody will notice these except me and the type of listener who does catch them will either not mind or appreciate it the way I would. But when it’s my own work, it’s different. I’m sure it’s the same for filmmakers so I understand the impulse to fix it later.
>As a music fan, I really love little mistakes in incredible albums.
Me too. For me as a Genesis fan since I was a teenager, the worst example of a change has been the 'remastered' version of Supper's ready. There's a 'mistake' in the bass part right at the end, which to me is absolutely beautiful. It's about 22:46 in, right at the fade, and he plays the wrong bass note, a tone (I think) above what should be there, and then resolves down to the root note of the chord. Always loved this, it sounds lyrical and works really well.
And in the remastered version, it's not there, he goes straight to the root note.
And for me, it ruins 20+ minutes of buildup. I never listen to the remastered version and I'm glad I ripped my CDs back in the day so I have a record of the original (and for me, far better) bass part. Yes, it's only one note, but it's a great note!
I hate editing mistakes more. The Aviator has quite a few of these where for example in cut A two characters talk by walking side by side, in cut B they stop and turn towards each other (still talking), and in cut C they continue the talking but you can see cut A and C are the continuation of each other and cut B was inserted in the middle https://files.catbox.moe/dljiiw.mp4
Anybody can edit a scene so that there are no inconsistencies. The art of editing comes from maximizing emotional impact, then the story, then rhythm. When editors sacrifice matching for those, it's not a mistake -- it's intentional.
The fact is, editors work with the footage they're given -- reshoots happen when new scenes are needed or footage is unusable, but not for continuity errors. If the most emotionally impactful combination of shots has a continuity error, the worse for continuity.
Thelma Schoonmaker is well known for favoring impact over the tradional ideal of seamless editing. You might not like her style, but it is deliberate choices rather than “editing mistakes”. This wasn’t even her first oscar, she got one for Raging Bull and won again for The Departed
I’ve managed to make myself so sensitive to this that I get all tense when there’s a multi-camera setup for a conversation, waiting for the moment when they cut from A to B and someone’s hands or head have teleported to a slightly (and sometimes not slightly!) different position.
Very few such sequences complete without my noticing some spot where shots don’t match up.
Another one is key lights reflected in eyeballs. Nearly ruins Jackson’s LOTR trilogy for me, it’s in basically every damn scene. In several shots you can practically diagram out their whole lighting rig from a the reflections on an actor’s eye, so many lights are plainly and distinctly visible. You see it some in lots of movies but OMG it’s bad in those.
I have always considered it an actors job to ensure their hands or cigarette or whatever are in the same position when they hit the same word during multiple takes.
It's never going to be perfect or identical. Actors' #1 job is to give an emotionally believable, powerful performance. A thousand little details are different in every take, and your movements will change to reflect what is authentic in the moment. In fact, editors want emotional variety so that they have more options in assembling the scene.
Yes, things are blocked ahead of time. You'll stand up at the same moment, you'll stop walking at a particular mark. But there are limits, especially with things like hands and cigarettes. If you look for continuity errors around those, you'll find them everywhere. Actors, directors and editors have more important things to worry about.
The first time I noticed one of these errors I was pretty shocked to have spotted a clear error while casually watching a show. Now that I know to look for these types of inconsistencies though I see them all the freaking time. It's surprising how often an actor's positioning bounces back and forth between shot angles, to the point that now it distracts me from what I'm watching at times.
Oh, I have a similar pet peeve but for watching live sports. Sometimes they’ll cut from the ‘main’ camera angle to a different one mid-action but it will be slightly out of sync and noticeable. For whatever reason this is super noticeable to me and bugs me to no end.
Another infamous example is that they accidentally left a Starbucks cup on the table in the final season of Game Of Thrones: https://i.imgur.com/5tlRhti.png
Taking into account the already-negative reception of the final season, it became symbolic of the show's decline in quality. The cup was edited out in later releases.
Seeing the original live action footage reminds how challenging these productions must have been for the actors. There's nothing around you but green screen and a stunt rigger. The dialog sucks and you're little more than a puppet in these action sequences, week after week of shoots.
Lucas wanted to push the digital envelope, but the contemporary Harry Potter films also by ILM have aged much better because they relied on physical sets and practical effects as much as possible. You can tell the actors are actually within a world.
The only one I've ever noticed on my own in a long life of watching movies is the compressed air tank to overturn a chariot in Gladiator (2000).
I was told about the pole that causes the truck to flip in Raiders of the Lost Ark and now I can't unsee it.
—Warning to those who enjoy 2001 A Space Odyssey with their blinders on...—
2001 made a big impression on me as a kid and I've seen it many times. There was a point when watching for the Nth time in middle age that I first noticed that all the anti-gravity shots show the actors bodies carrying their own weight. Especially in the aisle scene with the floating pen, which itself is rotating about the center of the sheet of clear plastic it's attached to rather than its center of mass. Later in the same sequence, food trays are brought to the bridge after the long scenes of a flight attendant, who picks up trays as they slide downs from a dispenser, and as she hands the trays to the crew, one of them instinctively puts his hand out under the tray to helpfully catch its weight. In the next scene an officer joins other crew by coming up from behind them, leaning over and resting his arms on their chair backs as the scene cuts to details of anti-gravity meal consumption. Finally Floyd stands in front of a toilet reading a 1000 word hard-printed list of instructions after the viewer has been shown electronic displays used everywhere else. The self-consciousness of that clip provides a lovely relief from all the previous cognitive dissonance. I'm not able to unsee any of this now and it detracts from the spectacle. But at the same time, it makes the orchestration and ideas of the movie seem all the more artistic, so nothing lost except innocence. There are many other oddities to find in the movie working on different planes of awareness, including proprioceptive assumptions about reality, intelligence, progress, and spirituality.
> Later in the same sequence, food trays are brought to the bridge after the long scenes of a flight attendant, who picks up trays as they slide downs from a dispenser, and as she hands the trays to the crew, one of them instinctively puts his hand out under the tray to helpfully catch its weight.
Is this one clearly wrong? As you say, it's essentially an instinctive motion, so one can easily imagine the reflex taking over even if the scene were genuinely in zero gravity.
I too have seen 2001 countless times, and I missed some of these! One you missed is when food is sucked from the tube, the food flows back down into the container.
We had very little experience with zero g at the time, and surely Kubrick and his crew had zero. They did a remarkable job despite that.
Ah good call! I noticed that too, but didn't mention it because I want to believe the packaging would be designed tend to keep the food in... But yes, this too because the packages wouldn't use an open-ended straw?
At the time of that movie, my world didn't contain much of the materials and designs portrayed, so the whole production was mesmerizing with design elements that distracted from more practical details: like ZOMG what kind of plastic is that tray made out of? Look how spacey that furniture is!
The video phone Floyd uses seems ridiculous with its $5 charge for a call. But pay phones worked on dimes. On his call to his daughter, she is seen next to a totem with a touchtone keypad for dialing. ATT advertised that as a concept product at that time, and touchtone phones were still novel (as were Tang and ballpoint pens that could write upside down).
When LED pocket calculators arrived in early 70s the color red of those LEDs was unlike anything else you would see; it seemed amazing.
And at the time real tech design was often awkward and cheesy, especial goofy arrangements of car interiors, which smelled funny and had plastic that fell apart after a few years of exposure to the sunlight and heat.
In 60s it was typical for TV remotes to have just a button for channel change and that's all. And the channel change worked by an electric motor rotating the channel dial. A big feature was a second button to change down instead of up,
In the 70s when cable TV arrived the converter box added remote functions to old TVs, which was a big part of the appeal, and in 1981 MTV was in stereo if you hooked up the cable to your hi-fi FM receiver and tuned the simulcast station. You could write to MTV and there'd send you a sticker for your tuner.
So the sets in 2001 seemed like astounding fashion design for many people, and that was still so when Star Wars arrived in '77.
I remember TV remotes in the 60's that had tuning forks embedded in them. Pressing the TV remote button struck a tuning fork, and the TV picked up the sound. Wild!
The sound feedback from the machines is still ahead of our time.
I dearly love the hotel room at the end. It's so creepy. I wondered why for a long time, and finally realized it was because it was lit from the floor rather than the ceiling. If I owned a hotel, one of the rooms would be like that! Haha!
Looking at the green screen shots of that Mustafar fight in Episode III: If that was the actual lighting of the in-camera scene, then it's not a mystery at all that everything in that movie looked so fake.
I want to believe they've improved the process by a lot since then, including getting the lighting right. Although I'm sure most of that is done in post-processing.
The making of The Mandalorian is interesting though, by using a projected screen as the set rendered in realtime, they can get the environmental lighting on the actors correct as well without much post-processing.
The Volume is pretty cool. A practical version of this that's often overlooked is Oblivion (probably because the plot is naff). The "sky tower" set is physical with 270 degrees of front projection to handle the sky. It would have been a lot harder to convincingly re-create all the optical effects and not worry about what light would look like scattered off glass or other occluding objects.
Yes, but using LED walls like that has a drawback: The scene is baked in. Although it generally looks better than greenscreen, you can't change it afterward.
By Episode II, Lucas had decided to make damn near everything green screen. They weren’t even building chairs and benches the actors sat on. Green boxes in many cases.
It looked like complete shit even by the standards of the time, and of course hasn’t aged well.
I watched a “film edits” fan edit of the Clone Wars CG cartoon, and one of the odder things about the experience was the end, where the editor cut together the final arc of that show, another shorter 2D cartoon, and the live action (well… mostly also just CG) Revenge of the Sith in roughly chronological order (including some nifty simultaneous action bits).
What was so odd was how very much worse and less-real-feeling the “live action” film was than the wholly CG cartoon. The writing, the line delivery, the sets, the action, the editing—it was all worse and came off as far more fake than a literal cartoon.
Ep I, II, III are bad in so many ways that they may end up aging the best. It's impossible to take any of it seriously, from the infidelity of the world of the first trilogy, to the ludicrous characters and situations, to the radically morphing production values, to the utter incoherence of the plotting. For an adaptation of a beloved franchise to be mishandled so badly by its original creator... it has to be something very special. I predict it will require a bit more time to become appreciated, and its substance will be regarded as having been totally misunderstood and overlooked at its inception.
Or it is meaningless tripe beyond all reckoning.
The cool thing is that everything is being coded and sequestered to history no matter how bad it is, so the future of history looks absurd and dire: everything will be recallable, but the work of reviewing it all must overwhelm its value. The act of remembering will become an ultimate adventure.
We really couldn't get the name of the person whose face has been accidentally in a movie that's part of one of the great pieces of pop culture on modern history? Was really more interested to know who it was, what exactly he was doing, and what he thinks about it.
I noticed watching the recent 4K release of The Terminator that the garage attendant in the final scene has a piece of paper in his top pocket with "There's a storm coming“ written upside down on it.
"Casualties", not kills. Perhaps using floating point is for working with another Terminator, or the decimal value being calculated based on the wound inflicted, with a whole number being a kill.
Or really, just to Look Cool And Technical And Shit.
> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong. What's in the movie is in the movie, and altering the movie to this extent is a form of revisionist history.
How many times has Lord of the Rings been revised? Dune? <Insert other long-lived actively managed novel>. Is the active management of these novels "wrong"? Is fixing grammar, spelling, or clarifying story beats "wrong"?
I personally don't think so, and I'd rather read something which has been corrected, especially if done for story clarity.
I’m not necessarily opposed to all fixes like this, but in film most of these strike me as totally unnecessary and making the movie strictly worse.
Normal viewers almost never notice these things, and movie nerds like little glimpses behind the curtain. So it’s doing almost nothing for one sort of viewer, and making it worse for another.
That’s absurd. The incident with the fresco was an outrage because it ruined the original. If the well-meaning vandal had merely defaced a copy, nobody would have cared.
If you want to see works as originally published, get a copy of the original publishing. Buying a re-issue and expecting it to be identical in every way is silly.
Is it? I can install every version of Minecraft all the way back to Alpha if I want. I can roll Factorio back to any version until 0.12. I can pick exactly which of thirty seven thousand OpenSSL commits to install. Many arcade ports of games targeted at enthusiasts come with every revision on disc and let the user decide. My copy of Blade Runner came with three different versions in one box. We have had the technology to preserve every version of every significant work for decades. If the re-issue doesn’t preserve the option to experience the original, it’s entirely because the publishers chose to not make it available.
You’re making my point for me. The original is still available. Issuing a new version does not destroy the original the way that person destroyed that fresco.
In most cases, the original is not available. I was listing exceptions showing that it was possible. People don’t reprint if there’s still lots of copies sitting on store shelves. Even going to eBay and dealing with scammers, fakes, damaged discs, and scalpers, the new thing and the old thing have the same title, so finding listings for a specific printing isn’t always possible, and information about what’s changed isn’t readily available. And of course, if you’re ‘buying’ digitally, the new version does often destroy the original, even if the original was what you paid for.
Listen to yourself. You’re equating the destruction of an original piece of art to the horrors of buying something from eBay. It’s utterly pathetic. The world isn’t obligated to cater to your desires. “But there are scammers!” Sometimes getting what you want takes a bit of effort. Requiring you to spend more than thirty seconds obtaining the original is not equivalent to destroying it.
In the referenced video, there's a clip from the movie Glory where a fair-skinned hand with a digital watch is in the frame. I like to think this must be a glib reference to Blake Edward's' The Party (1968) in which Peter Sellers dresses in dark face to play Hrundi V. Bakshi, who is introduced as a hapless Hollywood extra on the set of an Alamo-style Western. After a cut, the director asks Bakshi what time it is and Bakshi looks at his huge underwater wristwatch to tell him the time, then sheepishly realizes his mistake as the director goes apoplectic.
Great writeup, though a bit confusing to first refer to Anakin as Darth Vader when the scene takes place prior to that development in the Star Wars arc.
I watched Aliens at least half a dozen times (still one of my all time favourites), and only noticed it when a friend pointed it out to us as it was playing at New Year’s party.
Does that Civil War movie have a modern electrical box in the background? Because that's what it looks like to me - totally distracted me from the watch.
I have to agree with the article's author that what he calls "overzealous" removal of movie mistakes seems wrong. It wouldn't matter so much if the original movie was still readily available, but it's often the case that only the latest "fixed" version remains available.
With Star Wars in particular, Lucas' incessant meddling has long have gone far past the point of diminishing returns, and frequently making the movies worse.
More in general, I like watching the original movie, warts and all. I often disagree with the corrections, especially when they restore scenes that were left out for a reason, make color correction choices I disagree with (e.g. Blade Runner's "green tint" is inferior to its original bluish tint), etc.
Agree 100%. In addition to fixing mistakes and changing the color palette, I also object to the use of DNR and similar techniques to remove the film grain from older movies, in order to make them look more "modern", like films shot on digital. Unfortunately Cameron's recent 4k remasters of his classic films all suffer from this problem.
It's a travesty. I was sourcing video for an Alien/Aliens watch party (for a couple of adolescents who had never seen either) and I had to hunt down a copy of the older HD Bluray of Aliens because the 4k remaster looked so awful.
I get it though, it’s crazy that I know so many people who now say “I don’t like old movies” or “I don’t want to watch this movie, it looks old” when what they see and are really saying without realizing it is , it was shot on film.
It’s especially worse since the hit rate of actually good, creative movies is so much lower in the digital era.
My big pet peeve now is these “ew, this movie looks old” attitude.
I was watching Sum of All Fears the other day and my partner had this attitude. Funny though as soon as people in tuxedos showed up on the screen she changed her mind and started watching. Tuxedos are one of those movie magic things.
Weird how what we grow up with influences our tastes. To me the look of films shot on old school film signals “high quality” and overly digitally edited movies signals “cheap” in the sense of being shot on a green screen lot to save on shooting on location.
I think people who start to get into the craft of film-making (even academically, not making their own films) even a little tend to open up a lot to older films.
It’s so much more impressive when they had to actually arrange for the thing you’re seeing to exist, at least in some sense, in real life, so light could bounce off it and hit the film. That is a real landscape that the actors and crew had to travel to! They really made horses jump off that train car! They really had two thousand extras for this shot! That kind of thing. If there was a set at least they had to build it, and even if the results look a little janky it’s usually interesting and the craft impressive.
They shot with environmental lighting? They had to rig their other lights just so and maybe just work with what was available to get a good shot. The light is the light. The constraints on their options often seem to improve, rather than harm, the final product.
Now it’s like oh they couldn’t even be bothered to film on a real damn street. Ugh. All the location shooting is just getting backgrounds to composite in later. The light on the actors didn’t even exist when and where the background was shot. It sucks and is boring.
I agree with you. I can't stand any of these modern superhero movies because they are all hyper digital / green screen. For all I know they might have amazing acting and storylines etc, but I'll never know because they are basically unwatchable to me.
> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong. What's in the movie is in the movie, and altering the movie to this extent is a form of revisionist history. Cinema is worse off when over-aggressive restorations alter the action within the frame. To me, this is equivalent to swapping out an actor's performance with a different take, or changing the music score during an action sequence, or replacing a puppet creature with a computer graphics version of the same creature decades after release.
It's really not the equivalent though. I don't see anything wrong with fixing a license plate or removing a reflection or a modern-day wristwatch.
It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel, or a wrong chord in sheet music. None of the filmmakers wanted those things there. They weren't done with intent. They were just mistakes.
Changing music or replacing a puppet with CG, of course I'm against. That's changing the art of it. Different music makes you feel different. A CG creature has a different personality. Just like you don't want to replace vocabulary in a novel to make it more modern-day.
I think it's usually pretty easy to distinguish the two. The first ones would have been corrected at the time if they'd noticed and gone for another take. They take us out of the movie if we notice them. The latter category is a reflection of the technology, resources, and intentional choices. They keep us in the world of moviemaking as it was at that time.
>> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong.
> It's really not the equivalent though. I don't see anything wrong with fixing a license plate or removing a reflection or a modern-day wristwatch.
I think it depends on the primary objective of the restoration. If I’m trying to preserve history, I shouldn’t fix errors. If I’m trying to make a (by implication derivative) work that maximizes enjoyability for (new) audiences, then it’s ok to fix.
e.g. a long time ago, I once transferred vinyl recordings of an extremely amateur community musical group to CD.
After thinking long and hard, I decided to fix recording technology flaws (a bad hum) and vinyl degradation flaws (crackles, dust, etc). But I didn’t fix any of the musical performance flaws.
Bottom line: I decided to respect the history of the performance, and disrespect the history of the recording and playback technology/medium.
In 100 years (probably sooner), the vast majority of people won't be watching our films anymore. Those deep catalogs of IP have lower value with each passing year.
Films are becoming less and less popular with new forms of entertainment that are more immediate, more democratized or individualistic. Our dopamine is being juiced and our attention getting sucked into games, social media, and all other kinds of long tail attractors. Influencers are bigger than Hollywood stars. They simply cater to more interests. Distribution and production are no longer hard problems, so you don't need to build up a Hollywood star.
Film is becoming what radio used to be. It may never become as niche as the radio drama is today, but it certainly won't have the same limitless trajectory we thought it would have pre-pandemic.
Whatever we do today to "fix" films or make them more accessible is accomplishing one thing: extending their lifespan for as long as most (average, non-film connoisseur) people might still be interested in watching.
"In 100 years (probably sooner), the vast majority of people won't be watching our films anymore."
I quite strongly disagree with you. I lived through the latter stages of the transition from monochrome to full colour and various other things that were hailed as game changers that would render the previous status quo as somehow defunct.
I defy you to watch something like a Harold Lloyd movie involving a clock and not have sweaty palms or at least a mildly elevated ... emotional response of some sort.
We call them films or movies or whatever but those are long form stories. A book might be one too or a pdf. The novella is a short story. A matinee was an extended session at the cinema with multiple "value adds" to the main production. Theatre ... cartoons ... you know how this goes!
Might I remind you that you have only two eyes, which means that a radio drama in your car is the only safe media for a "drama" in a car, for the driver. You do get aural distraction but it is mostly manageable. One day you will have FSD (Mr Musk says so) and you will be able to watch telly with your feet on the dash but that is not today.
Media and formats change but the purpose is largely the same: telling a story. We are, after all, the story telling ape.
It's not that older works don't have value, it is that a lot of people don't see the value. For example, changes in the way actors perform makes a lot of people claim that old movies are "cheesy" or have "bad acting" -- they can't even enjoy a movie from the 1940s, let alone a silent film like Harold Lloyd's. Hell, I know twenty-somethings that can't even stand movies from the 1980s!
Not to make you feel old, but to today's 20-somethings an 80s movie is the same time difference as a 40s movie would be in the 80s. There's some interesting stuff I read a while back about why the 80s "feels culturally closer to today" than the 40s felt to people in the 80s but it's the same difference in a purely chronological sense.
> There's some interesting stuff I read a while back about why the 80s "feels culturally closer to today" than the 40s felt to people in the 80s
Would you still have these articles by chance? This sounds interesting and is something I "felt" myself.
Not the poster you asked either, but another big reason why the 1980s seems more like today than the 1940s did the 1980s was that the 1960s happened in between the 1940s and 1980s. Our modern world view is greatly shaped by the struggles for racial and gender equality that occurred in the 1960s.
Not the poster you've asked, but I think you might be interested in Mark Fisher's "What is Hauntology?" (10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16). It argues the contemporary culture is incapable of coming up with genuinely new ideas because postmodernism and late capitalism constraint our imagination to the point where we can no longer imagine a wholly different system of politics and values. We're left with the upkeep of an already established system, and this is reflected in how the present crop of films and music mostly sample and rehash what's been done in the past century.
As a personal addendum, I feel this can be (partly) attributed to the loss of the Cold War's ideological struggle that drove the West to innovate, not just in technology but in societal structures and freedoms as well. This is why it can feel as if we've arrived at "the end of history", the current system has won, so what is left to seek or prove?
Fascinating, thanks for that!
Re your addendum and "the end of history": I think it would be myopic for people to think that the current system has won, and that there's nothing left to seek or prove. The current system has brought plenty to many but is destroying our planet, and there's plenty of space for fresh thinking. China is taking the lead in innovation [1]; so perhaps there's a new ideological and existential struggle, just with the US as the underdogs. Hopefully people see this as motivating rather than depressing.
[1]: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/06/12/... (also https://archive.ph/urpbY )
> I defy you to watch something like a Harold Lloyd movie involving a clock and not have sweaty palms or at least a mildly elevated ... emotional response of some sort.
Be that as it may, there's probably a day coming where only a handful of people on the planet even know who that is. Or who have even seen those films. And it'll be like that for most of our now-popular cultural artifacts.
How many newspaper stories from the 1700s have you read? The culture of those people died with them, and so too will it be with us.
Nobody is going to grow up to the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers anymore. Nobody is going to watch The Andy Griffith Show or see Last Action Hero. Even if it happens on a rare occasion, those numbers will pale in comparison to the number of Fortnite players. Or whatever's popular in the coming decades.
Our world is ephemeral and dies with us. We should enjoy our media while it is relevant to us, because that's what it's good for. Telling stories in a framework that speaks to us. In the future, it'll be a relic. An artifact of a time long ago, whose people are all dead, and whose lessons may need to come with a history book.
Apart from students of anthropology, the vast majority of future people will probably find our cultural works to be boring, irrelevant, and unworthy of their attention.
Counterpoint: the past continues to inspire, surprise, and delight.
Your comment about “1700’s newspapers” reminded me of The Past Times podcast, where comedians read random newspapers from across American history. The episodes I’ve listened to were delightful, and they covered mundane news in mundane places.
“O brother, where art thou” is one of my favorite movies. It’s a retelling of The Odyssey (a literally prehistoric tale) set in Depression-era Mississippi, made in the early 2000’s.
The specific question of editing out these production artifacts doesn’t rile me either way, though. I didn’t see the original mistake, and I won’t notice the fix either.
I’ll also agree that just as no one steps in the same river twice, how the past is viewed and interpreted changes over time. What is valued or not also changes. 90% of everything is still crap. And quite a bit of the interest in the past is reflected in remixes or retellings for modern audiences.
Still, people also read Beowulf or Chaucer in the original or in modern translation. Others will enjoy both Jane Austen and Bridgerton. People will listen to Beethoven and Jon Batiste. Sure, not all those things are for everyone, but neither are modern music genres, sports entertainment, or most TV shows.
Yes, Homer will outlive us all, but what 20th century film is likely to have Homer’s longevity?
I think people will still be playing Tetris and reading Homer in a thousand years, but I’m not confident at all that they’ll be watching any of our videos.
I’ve read Marcus Aurelius‘s meditations, a few Greek plays and studied kung-fu movies and Japanese cinema critically. People still endure reading Madame Bovary.
Time stands still for no man, but we’re a curious people, and folks will search for meaning in the past through our art. As a parody of the traditional action movie, I’m sure people will be watching Last Action Hero for decades to come.
I think as time goes on the emotional hooks of media outside of universal themes fade away. My son will never know the time where “It’s a Wonderful Life” impacted my parents, or how the endless repeating of of “A Christmas Story” was a part of my siblings holiday. But the stories that are important to us or capture a moment of time will endure.
Another form of this observation is what initiated the flood of private equity into music back catalogs - people will go back and listen to music many many more times than they will a lot of other content. And the longevity of it is much longer, especially when you consider remixes, covers, and samples.
Every so often I’ll throw on some old jazz standards I’ve never heard of. Some classical music. Some early soul and R&B.
Old movies though? Only the iconic ones through a sense of obligation (eg, school/study) or someone convincing me I absolutely have to. Metropolis, Citizen Kane, interesting movies for their time and contribution. I just don’t feel the need to go back to this stuff the same way I actually enjoy going back to old music or other art.
> Whatever we do today to "fix" films or make them more accessible is accomplishing one thing: extending their lifespan for as long as most (average, non-film connoisseur) people might still be interested in watching.
OTOH, it's fun to watch for goofs in movies, and if they're fixed up, then there's less reason to watch some of these movies.
I don’t really think that’s true with AI in the mix. Yes, they won’t be watching those specific movies, but AI will be trained on them and even use them as context. You could generate a new updated movie set between ANH and ESB with AI versions of the original actors when they were young and alive. Cinema could start to get really interesting, and anything new is just a remix of the old anyways (we just build on what we have done much faster and more cheaply).
> Cinema could start to get really interesting
Not if you do this:
> You could generate a new updated movie set between ANH and ESB with AI versions of the original actors when they were young and alive.
The story is told! Let's have something new instead of rehashing the same thing with fake actors.
I disagree. IMO the film is more like a novel. The styles will vary, but most feature films are the modern embodiment of a play, a medium that has existed for thousands of years.
Styles change and not every movie will “survive” long term. But stories endure.
> In 100 years (probably sooner), the vast majority of people won't be watching our films anymore. Those deep catalogs of IP have lower value with each passing year.
The fact that when I die nobody will care about my porn collection is deeply unsettling. I'm saying this seriously, because it's something I enjoy so much, yet nobody else cares.
I also found this take interesting coming from someone at ILM where they grafted Hayden Christensen into Return of the Jedi.
Though in this day and age I can’t help but ask “why not both?” It feels easy to add a choice to your viewing experience. If they can do it for Black Mirror then they can certainly ask up front “which version would you like to see?”
> I also found this take interesting coming from someone at ILM where they grafted Hayden Christensen into Return of the Jedi.
Presumably the author would be opposed to that as well. Just because his employer did it doesn't mean he approves of it.
Absolutely
I literally just finished watching Episode IV, the one with the CGI makeover. The extra alien CGI in Mos Eisley is awful. It doesn’t stand up at all, with the one exception of the Jaba scene which gets away with it because it is pretty fun. I wish we’d watched the original version.
Is it easy to find the original? I’d love a copy of each on my Plex server, but I have had trouble finding an original copy. I admit I may not know where or how to look; advice is welcome!
What you are looking for is this - https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/
"97% of project 4K77 is from a single, original 1977 35mm Technicolor release print, scanned at full 4K, cleaned at 4K, and rendered at 4K."
Opening scene comparison - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1b47UP6ZGI
That comparison is really cool. I was mostly paying attention to the 4K77 vs 2011 bluray, and in most cases I thought 4K77 looked better. Not sure why they felt the need to mess with the colors so drastically in the 2011 version.
Thank you!!!
The dedication of fans never ceases to amaze.
> When a film is professionally scanned in 16-bit color as DPX image files, every single frame weighs in at 100 MB.
> With upwards of 175,000 frames in each film, a complete scan requires about 21 TB of storage
> 42 TB if you want a backup copy!
> And then you need at least another 21 TB of space to work on it
> over $1,000 just in hard drives is therefore required for every film
You probably are not gonna to need 16 bit DPX for anything but high end compositing with CG
Your point still stands but a good quality cineform or something is plenty. And you can definitely get 21TB cheaper than 1000$
A tiny expense in the grand scheme of things. The original film stock probably cost an order of magnitude more.
Star Wars 4K77
A 4K fan scan of a 35mm print the was in cold storage since 1980.
It's great to see OG Star Wars looking like in did in '77, with all the optical glitches and the lower contrast with slightly green shadow bias of prints from that time. True time travel that makes the reworked releases look silly.
Another project worth a look is Harmy's fan cuts of the original trilogy, which are tastefully re-assembled from multiple sources and graded.
I’m a lot more bothered by the change to the color grading in the “after” of Alien than the minor change to the effect, and by the picture looking way shittier in the “fixed” Goodfellas shot (the first is blu ray, the second “blu ray and streaming”, so hopefully the example was taken from streaming and that’s why it looks so much worse)
Oh yeah. Totally agreed on not changing the color grading. That's as big as changing the music.
With blogs that take screenshots of 4K content though, sometimes that's using a media player with poor HDR color decoding though. Bad HDR always winds up with a green tint, that's the telltale sign. VLC is the worst with that.
But I don't think that's the case here. There are definitely a lot of rereleases with badly done color.
The color grading is a funny one. I worked on a large episodic animated series that was released in the US from a 16mm print copy of the episodes. The original transfer was done at a facility that I worked at, but only as a tape assistant to the colorists. It was transferred as SD to DigiBeta. Years later, the film was brought back out and sent to another local post house for an HD transfer. The person in charge of that made some "interesting" decisions, and the transfer was universally panned. Years later, the same prints were scanned again to HD, but with a different producer for the project. At this time, the colorist also took a lot of interest in the project and found reference film material on the exact same film the prints were on. Using that reference, the colors came out drastically different from anything ever made from these prints. Even though the original creator of the animated series was never involved in any of the post process decisions, it was later relayed that he was extremely pleased with the results of this release as it was the closest to the colors as he had envisioned them way back when the series was being made.
Sometimes, the post processes loses a lot when people make decisions. It might take a special released version for the director to actually get a version they feel they wanted the world to see. Sometimes, yes, they go too far, but others it's actually a decent result.
> VLC is the worst with that
So, what would you recommend instead? This is waaay outside my wheelhouse to judge.
The best video player is mpv.
It was taken from streaming but that’s the “new” color grade
looks like a videogame
There is some value in the mistakes and limitations of older movies, I am sure if you look it up people who can explain it far better than me can give lots of examples, I saw a video once about the growing trend of analog horror where people intentionally watch older horror movies in older storage and display formats like VHS and CRT televisions, because in many ways the high def modern tv screens and 4K mastered prints actually take away from the atmosphere of the original movie that was made keeping the limitations of the technology of the time. Wes Anderson also talks about how watching the fur pattern constantly changing on the model of King Kong in the black and white stop-motion movie due to the puppeteers touching the model to manipulate it inspired him to do the same in his Fantastic Mr Fox movie
Are they watching made-for-TV movies? Otherwise I’d think the movies would have been made for theater viewing, and watching it in 4k on a big modern TV would be a lot closer to how the creators wanted you to see it than using VHS and an old TV.
It's similar to how old games look so different on modern hardware: the pixel art on a current-day screen looks like high-fidelity perfectly sharp uniformly colored squares, while the "pixel art" of old games rendered on a CRT didn't look like "pixel art" at all but rather like high-fidelity art rendered on a low-fidelity screen. There's a lot of detail implied by the way CRTs render what's encoded in software as perfect squares.
Illustrative images: <https://imgur.com/gallery/SSpcDzA>
The weird rainbow effects on Sonic's waterfalls are NOT due to the properties of CRT, but a result of the Megadrive's awful composite encoder. Connect the screen through a RGB cable cable, or composite through a 32X, and the resulting image is much cleaner.
Someone created a whole subreddit a few days ago to analyze the effect and post comparison pictures: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fuckingwaterfall/
It's not that easy, in my opinion. George Lucas and James Cameron have both said that their restorations were how they would have wanted to release the movie if they had had the technology/budget.
I personally hate the reworked Star Wars trilogy compared to the original, only because that's what I saw first. If I had seen them in the opposite order, would I feel the same way? I don't know.
As with anything, there is no bright line. For example, translations of The Odyssey are constantly changing the vocabulary. And more recently we've seen changes to novels to conform to modern sensibilities (e.g., Roald Dahl novels).
For me, I guess, my preference is to allow creators to do whatever they want with their creations, but I wish they would make all versions available. Steven Spielberg did that with ET when he digitally replaced all guns with walkie-talkies.
> It's not that easy, in my opinion. George Lucas and James Cameron have both said that their restorations were how they would have wanted to release the movie if they had had the technology/budget.
I dunno about Cameron's films (I don't think I've seen an original and an unchanged from him), but for Star Wars, the constraints helped make the film good. Yes, there's some rough bits, but all of the additions subtract rather than add.
Maybe it's not what his vision was, but we liked it as it was. If you watch ROTJ, you can already see where unconstrained technology distracts Lucas and it turns into too much of a green screen affair in parts. The prequel trilogy is so much green screen and it just feels so sterile and unbelievable; none of the characters interact with the environment at all; they're not hot in the desert or even when having a light saber duel in lava fields or whatever. They don't get cold or wet, etc. In ROTJ, the speeder bike stuff is mostly gratituous, but there's interaction with the environment.
The counter argument is that once art is released into the world, it becomes a conversation with the people consuming it and no longer belongs solely to the creator.
I empathize with, and see the validity in, both sides.
> If I had seen them in the opposite order, would I feel the same way? I don't know.
This can go both ways. Sometimes you like things because you saw them that way first. Sometimes you're exposed to two versions of something and the second version is clearly an improvement on the first.
Example (A): I prefer the PC speaker soundtrack to The Secret of Monkey Island. I played it on an IBM. Without the exposure, there's no real reason to believe I'd have the same preference.
Example (B): The Swedish dub of the Moana musical number Shiny enjoys the considerable disadvantages that: (1) I heard the English version first; (2) I don't understand Swedish; (3) the English version is more authoritative, because the film was developed in English; and (4) the translation isn't especially close.† But I strongly prefer it anyway; to me the Swedish lyrics (as represented in the English subtitles I found on Youtube) give a very different feeling to the song and the character, one that greatly improves the film.
I'd lean toward taking people at their word if they seem to have a reason for the preference they express. The 2011 Blu-Ray Star Wars release pans down from outer space to a view of a planet more rapidly than the original film does. This seems like an issue where views either won't exist or will be dominated by the idea that whatever it was like before, it should stay that way.
"Han shot first", on the other hand, is a strong point of characterization, and objections to the change seem unlikely to be dominated by conservatism.
† Actually, I spent a fair amount of time listening to various dubs of Moana songs, and my favorite versions all make a significant change to the message of the song as I perceive it. I didn't care too much for the English Shiny, but this was also true of the songs that I liked in the original. My best model of why that might be is: every dub makes some more-or-less random changes to the song, and by methodically searching through a large number of them, I ended up finding the changes that appealed to me.
They have millions of dollars at stake, so it is hard for me to take them at face value.
There is also decades of years between production, so the directors are different people as well. Modern George Lucas doesnt think that Han Solo is the kind of guy who shoots first, now that hes rolling is Disney franchise money. What would 1977 Lucas think if asked?
It's debatable where the line should be drawn, and the best approach is not to draw it at all. Sure, update flicks with CG fixes, but the original theatrical version should always be made available too.
That was Lucas' mistake with the original Star Wars trilogy. He fixed mistakes, CG'd characters and sets, spliced in deleted scenes, filmed entirely new sequences, replaced music, etc.. He felt he was making the movies better, but the updated editions weren't the familiar old friends people had known since childhood. If he'd made good transfers of the original versions available in the latest home video formats in addition to his newer versions, everybody would have been happy. He didn't do that.
Some people want the original versions and some want updated versions. Given that the first step to producing new spruced up versions is to restore the original, it makes sense to make both available.
> It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel,
I was surprised to learn that this is a thing and has been for a long time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_Bible
The trouble with spelling errors is they drop me out of the immersion in the story. I recall reading one that averaged 2 spelling errors per page. The story and writing was fine, but reading it was like driving on a beautiful country road and hitting a pothole every hundred yards. I finally just gave up on the book.
Spelling errors also are sometimes not introduced by the author, but by the typesetter or publisher. In a preface to the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien complains about how many revisions it took to get typesetters to type the book correctly, especially with the words that he had made up or created new conventions for (elves vs. elfs, for example).
I suppose Tolkien’s work would be an exception, especially at the time. Typesetter seeing a made up word would correct it - and for most books it would have been the right choice.
Art is subjective, and thus the decision to "fix" mistakes is also subjective. I generally will side with whatever the filmmaker wants me to see now.
What's important is that the original is preserved, accessible, and we know the changes. This rarely happens.
I don’t really follow film, though I do watch the odd movie.
Do films still occasionally have different cuts, is that still a thing with DVD releases?
There’s at least two films I never liked the theatrical release of, but the directors cuts were entirely likeable.
> They weren’t done with intent.
“A Litany in a Time of Plague” contains a famous line: “brightness falls from the air.” Many scholars believe it’s a printing error, that the original line was “brightness falls from the hair.” But with apologies to Jay McInerney (who made this point better than I) the former is so much more beautiful. Sometimes art isn’t intentional.
Why oh why did the music for Rocky & Bullwinkle change for the dvd release? It's horrible. The R&B on VHS have the original music.
They didn't have the license and actually got sued for the VHS release.
https://old.reddit.com/r/FrostbiteFalls/comments/1flr8ue/fra...
Thank you, at last I have an explanation!
As for the people responsible: You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
Its almost always a rights issue with changes to movie and TV soundtracks.
And video games too. GTA 4 has had that issue, and digital copies of the game have had music (which Rockstar no longer has the rights to) patched out.
If you have wide taste in film and TV, at some point you have to turn to piracy (and/or fan edits) to get the “real thing”. Impossible or impractical to get it any other way.
> at some point you have to turn to piracy
Cory Doctorow's young-adults novel "Pirate Cinema" develops around this idea.
Because of expired licenses to use the original music. You can see the same thing happening with later releases of media. As an example, DVD releases of Scrubs were known to have switched out many songs in the entire show.
This happens in the streaming days too. I believe Arrested Development was one where when it came to streaming they had to change the music.
The CD release of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio program notes that it's mostly the original recordings, except for the music. They didn't have the rights to release the music on CD, so they substituted in different music. If you want the same program that was broadcast over the radio, you need to buy it on cassette, where apparently they do have the rights to the music.
Something has obviously gone badly wrong in the world of IP licensing. Somehow I imagine that movies don't license different parts of their soundtrack differently to make sure they can never be rereleased.
Yeah, I knew there must be a debate about this in the comments the moment I saw it.
Honestly, I personally disagree with the sentiment on all levels. Meaning, I agree with your observation that there are degrees to "restoration", and fixing a mistake is just not the same as changing music.
But then, I also have no sympathy to your objection of changing music or replacing a puppet with CG. I mean, I may like the old take better, but whatever, I'm not the one who made the movie. The people who made this particular cut for this particular release made it (duh). And these may or may be not the same directors and producers that made the cut you consider "the original one". It's their vision. Surely, it may seem surprising to a naïve viewer that it's not the director the movie is attributed to who "made it" in its entirety, but this is just never the case and obviously any cinema enthusiast knows it all too well anyway.
(But then I should probably mention that my fundamental disagreement with the sentiment spreads way farther than that, and I myself consider it kinda extreme. I often would be fine with the kind of "restoration" that essentially destroys the original thing. This would be off-topic to explain it here, because it wouldn't be about the movies anymore, but I just think that too much respect for the great things of the past often leads to losing sight of why these things were made in the first place. They were meant to be great at the time, not to be respected as a very old pile of rubbish a couple of thousands years later.)
The only thing I am kinda objecting to is when changes made reflect the current political agenda in one way or another (i.e. censorship, be it taboo on display of tits on TV, cutting out statements that seem "politically incorrect" at the time and place of the release, removing some persona non-grata who made a very minor cameo appearance in the original movie or anything else like that). But, again, I don't really object to that because "they don't have the right to do it", but because it's just irritatingly stupid and makes me roll my eyes. It doesn't necessarily make the movie worse or even substantially different (I might not even notice), but unlike with remastering of the original movie, the intent clearly isn't to make it "better" (in their opinion), but just acting out of fear to cause trouble by displaying today something that was fine yesterday as is.
What I think is kinda lacking is very clear and non-ambiguous versioning of movies. I am not that much of a movie enthusiast myself, but some people obviously care if you can see the original number-plate falling off the car, and it would be nice if these people could easily refer to that particular edit they like better. They kinda always do it anyway, but that only happens if they need to specifically mention this number plate falling off, and normally they try to pretend that 10 edits made for 10 releases on different media in different countries are all the same movie, which (almost by definition) is not the case. I mean, for books we have versions and ISBNs, and it's normal to reference specifically that, not just one of the authors and the title. Should be standard practice for movies too.
agree to disagree
Ok
> It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel, or a wrong chord in sheet music.
Your analogies don't pass a simple self-check-- they are vastly different in scope.
At worst a spelling error will create a single alternative spelling in history. Wrong chords, however, typically create entire branches of full pieces of music that include allusions to and variations upon the wrong chord. For example-- there's no way to "correct" the C major chord in Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme by Chopin. What are you going to do, change every single variation in Rachmaninoff's piece to reflect the correct chord (C minor) from Chopin's prelude?
It gets even more complicated in jazz where chord substitutions are not only expected but often supersede the original chords. Even more to the point-- a lot of the die-hard Charlie Parker fans not only love the recording he made while obviously drunk, they love it in spite of Parker's wishes for nobody to ever hear it it (much less repeatedly play it and talk about it).
That's all to say a) correcting an entrenched wrong chord is no simplistic task, and b) in any case it's wrong to assume that the artist's intentions are always the chief concern.
The analogy was fine, you're just stretching it too far.
Of course there are times when it's better to leave a "wrong" chord in music, but it's incredibly common for sheet music to have unintentional errors, especially in an ensemble setting. If trumpets are playing a unison part but 1 and 2 have a Bb and trumpet 3 has a B natural nobody thinks twice about fixing the trumpet 3 part. That's the analogy, not jazz and Rachmaninoff
I'm sure most people know the story. In the Twin Peaks pilot, a mirror reflection of a set dresser was briefly caught by the camera. Instead of editing this out of reshooting, David Lynch gave him a role in the show.
Anyway, movies can have revisions. A movie is as much a commercial product as it is art. I don't see why people need to get all righteous about it, especially in cases where directors, actors, etc., don't care.
Novels get revisions. Even fine art prints may have editions with differences between them. Old wood blocks by a famous artist may even be restruck decades later by a different person. They're still recognized as the piece.
> David Lynch gave him a role in the show
Not just "a" role - he became "the" key role in the series, the evil spirit that moves the entire plot. Which was both absolute genius (turning a mistake into the first, menacing appearance of a key character) and absolute madness (how do you hand a key character of your expensive production to a random set-dresser with almost no acting career?!?). David Lynch in a nutshell.
Would that be worse than hiring a set carpenter for a key role in billion dollar franchise?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Ford
It's Hollywood, every busboy and valet is a role deficit actor in waiting.
There’s a really funny duality to mistakes in recorded art that is vastly different when viewed as a fan and the creator.
As a music fan, I really love little mistakes in incredible albums. They’re humanizing, they show that the recording was made by people and it makes the highs feel so much higher.
As an artist, I loathe mistakes in my own work and I will spend a basically limitless amount of time fixing annoying performance quirks in software — I’m talking things that I can do but didn’t get quite right — so I can listen to it without distraction or regrets. I know that nobody will notice these except me and the type of listener who does catch them will either not mind or appreciate it the way I would. But when it’s my own work, it’s different. I’m sure it’s the same for filmmakers so I understand the impulse to fix it later.
>As a music fan, I really love little mistakes in incredible albums.
Me too. For me as a Genesis fan since I was a teenager, the worst example of a change has been the 'remastered' version of Supper's ready. There's a 'mistake' in the bass part right at the end, which to me is absolutely beautiful. It's about 22:46 in, right at the fade, and he plays the wrong bass note, a tone (I think) above what should be there, and then resolves down to the root note of the chord. Always loved this, it sounds lyrical and works really well.
And in the remastered version, it's not there, he goes straight to the root note.
And for me, it ruins 20+ minutes of buildup. I never listen to the remastered version and I'm glad I ripped my CDs back in the day so I have a record of the original (and for me, far better) bass part. Yes, it's only one note, but it's a great note!
I'm sure if artists didn't obsess over the work like you do, it wouldn't be nearly as fun to find them as a fan.
I hate editing mistakes more. The Aviator has quite a few of these where for example in cut A two characters talk by walking side by side, in cut B they stop and turn towards each other (still talking), and in cut C they continue the talking but you can see cut A and C are the continuation of each other and cut B was inserted in the middle https://files.catbox.moe/dljiiw.mp4
And that's just one example that film is full of those. Here is another jarring one https://files.catbox.moe/9m3gjq.mp4
Despite that it won the Academy Award for Best Editing...
You might be interested to know that in terms of editing skill, physical matching/continuity is the least important thing to get right:
https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/walter-murch-rule-of-six/
Anybody can edit a scene so that there are no inconsistencies. The art of editing comes from maximizing emotional impact, then the story, then rhythm. When editors sacrifice matching for those, it's not a mistake -- it's intentional.
The fact is, editors work with the footage they're given -- reshoots happen when new scenes are needed or footage is unusable, but not for continuity errors. If the most emotionally impactful combination of shots has a continuity error, the worse for continuity.
Thelma Schoonmaker is well known for favoring impact over the tradional ideal of seamless editing. You might not like her style, but it is deliberate choices rather than “editing mistakes”. This wasn’t even her first oscar, she got one for Raging Bull and won again for The Departed
I’ve managed to make myself so sensitive to this that I get all tense when there’s a multi-camera setup for a conversation, waiting for the moment when they cut from A to B and someone’s hands or head have teleported to a slightly (and sometimes not slightly!) different position.
Very few such sequences complete without my noticing some spot where shots don’t match up.
Another one is key lights reflected in eyeballs. Nearly ruins Jackson’s LOTR trilogy for me, it’s in basically every damn scene. In several shots you can practically diagram out their whole lighting rig from a the reflections on an actor’s eye, so many lights are plainly and distinctly visible. You see it some in lots of movies but OMG it’s bad in those.
I have always considered it an actors job to ensure their hands or cigarette or whatever are in the same position when they hit the same word during multiple takes.
It's never going to be perfect or identical. Actors' #1 job is to give an emotionally believable, powerful performance. A thousand little details are different in every take, and your movements will change to reflect what is authentic in the moment. In fact, editors want emotional variety so that they have more options in assembling the scene.
Yes, things are blocked ahead of time. You'll stand up at the same moment, you'll stop walking at a particular mark. But there are limits, especially with things like hands and cigarettes. If you look for continuity errors around those, you'll find them everywhere. Actors, directors and editors have more important things to worry about.
The first time I noticed one of these errors I was pretty shocked to have spotted a clear error while casually watching a show. Now that I know to look for these types of inconsistencies though I see them all the freaking time. It's surprising how often an actor's positioning bounces back and forth between shot angles, to the point that now it distracts me from what I'm watching at times.
Oh, I have a similar pet peeve but for watching live sports. Sometimes they’ll cut from the ‘main’ camera angle to a different one mid-action but it will be slightly out of sync and noticeable. For whatever reason this is super noticeable to me and bugs me to no end.
Another infamous example is that they accidentally left a Starbucks cup on the table in the final season of Game Of Thrones: https://i.imgur.com/5tlRhti.png
Taking into account the already-negative reception of the final season, it became symbolic of the show's decline in quality. The cup was edited out in later releases.
Family Guy also did a quick cutaway gag of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGIpZk4SKTI
Seeing the original live action footage reminds how challenging these productions must have been for the actors. There's nothing around you but green screen and a stunt rigger. The dialog sucks and you're little more than a puppet in these action sequences, week after week of shoots.
Lucas wanted to push the digital envelope, but the contemporary Harry Potter films also by ILM have aged much better because they relied on physical sets and practical effects as much as possible. You can tell the actors are actually within a world.
The only one I've ever noticed on my own in a long life of watching movies is the compressed air tank to overturn a chariot in Gladiator (2000).
I was told about the pole that causes the truck to flip in Raiders of the Lost Ark and now I can't unsee it.
—Warning to those who enjoy 2001 A Space Odyssey with their blinders on...—
2001 made a big impression on me as a kid and I've seen it many times. There was a point when watching for the Nth time in middle age that I first noticed that all the anti-gravity shots show the actors bodies carrying their own weight. Especially in the aisle scene with the floating pen, which itself is rotating about the center of the sheet of clear plastic it's attached to rather than its center of mass. Later in the same sequence, food trays are brought to the bridge after the long scenes of a flight attendant, who picks up trays as they slide downs from a dispenser, and as she hands the trays to the crew, one of them instinctively puts his hand out under the tray to helpfully catch its weight. In the next scene an officer joins other crew by coming up from behind them, leaning over and resting his arms on their chair backs as the scene cuts to details of anti-gravity meal consumption. Finally Floyd stands in front of a toilet reading a 1000 word hard-printed list of instructions after the viewer has been shown electronic displays used everywhere else. The self-consciousness of that clip provides a lovely relief from all the previous cognitive dissonance. I'm not able to unsee any of this now and it detracts from the spectacle. But at the same time, it makes the orchestration and ideas of the movie seem all the more artistic, so nothing lost except innocence. There are many other oddities to find in the movie working on different planes of awareness, including proprioceptive assumptions about reality, intelligence, progress, and spirituality.
> Later in the same sequence, food trays are brought to the bridge after the long scenes of a flight attendant, who picks up trays as they slide downs from a dispenser, and as she hands the trays to the crew, one of them instinctively puts his hand out under the tray to helpfully catch its weight.
Is this one clearly wrong? As you say, it's essentially an instinctive motion, so one can easily imagine the reflex taking over even if the scene were genuinely in zero gravity.
I too have seen 2001 countless times, and I missed some of these! One you missed is when food is sucked from the tube, the food flows back down into the container.
We had very little experience with zero g at the time, and surely Kubrick and his crew had zero. They did a remarkable job despite that.
Ah good call! I noticed that too, but didn't mention it because I want to believe the packaging would be designed tend to keep the food in... But yes, this too because the packages wouldn't use an open-ended straw?
At the time of that movie, my world didn't contain much of the materials and designs portrayed, so the whole production was mesmerizing with design elements that distracted from more practical details: like ZOMG what kind of plastic is that tray made out of? Look how spacey that furniture is!
The video phone Floyd uses seems ridiculous with its $5 charge for a call. But pay phones worked on dimes. On his call to his daughter, she is seen next to a totem with a touchtone keypad for dialing. ATT advertised that as a concept product at that time, and touchtone phones were still novel (as were Tang and ballpoint pens that could write upside down).
When LED pocket calculators arrived in early 70s the color red of those LEDs was unlike anything else you would see; it seemed amazing.
And at the time real tech design was often awkward and cheesy, especial goofy arrangements of car interiors, which smelled funny and had plastic that fell apart after a few years of exposure to the sunlight and heat.
In 60s it was typical for TV remotes to have just a button for channel change and that's all. And the channel change worked by an electric motor rotating the channel dial. A big feature was a second button to change down instead of up,
In the 70s when cable TV arrived the converter box added remote functions to old TVs, which was a big part of the appeal, and in 1981 MTV was in stereo if you hooked up the cable to your hi-fi FM receiver and tuned the simulcast station. You could write to MTV and there'd send you a sticker for your tuner.
So the sets in 2001 seemed like astounding fashion design for many people, and that was still so when Star Wars arrived in '77.
I remember TV remotes in the 60's that had tuning forks embedded in them. Pressing the TV remote button struck a tuning fork, and the TV picked up the sound. Wild!
The sound feedback from the machines is still ahead of our time.
I dearly love the hotel room at the end. It's so creepy. I wondered why for a long time, and finally realized it was because it was lit from the floor rather than the ceiling. If I owned a hotel, one of the rooms would be like that! Haha!
Looking at the green screen shots of that Mustafar fight in Episode III: If that was the actual lighting of the in-camera scene, then it's not a mystery at all that everything in that movie looked so fake.
I want to believe they've improved the process by a lot since then, including getting the lighting right. Although I'm sure most of that is done in post-processing.
The making of The Mandalorian is interesting though, by using a projected screen as the set rendered in realtime, they can get the environmental lighting on the actors correct as well without much post-processing.
The Volume is pretty cool. A practical version of this that's often overlooked is Oblivion (probably because the plot is naff). The "sky tower" set is physical with 270 degrees of front projection to handle the sky. It would have been a lot harder to convincingly re-create all the optical effects and not worry about what light would look like scattered off glass or other occluding objects.
https://www.fdtimes.com/2013/03/29/claudio-miranda-asc-on-ob...
Another example is the motion simulator/projector setup from First Man, which makes the cockpit and landing sequences look so good. They won best VFX.
https://youtu.be/sw57ORTgGG4?si=NjRNt551HJhL_l9k&t=193 (relevant footage starts around 3:13)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UChwuyWVzsI
Yes, but using LED walls like that has a drawback: The scene is baked in. Although it generally looks better than greenscreen, you can't change it afterward.
By Episode II, Lucas had decided to make damn near everything green screen. They weren’t even building chairs and benches the actors sat on. Green boxes in many cases.
It looked like complete shit even by the standards of the time, and of course hasn’t aged well.
I watched a “film edits” fan edit of the Clone Wars CG cartoon, and one of the odder things about the experience was the end, where the editor cut together the final arc of that show, another shorter 2D cartoon, and the live action (well… mostly also just CG) Revenge of the Sith in roughly chronological order (including some nifty simultaneous action bits).
What was so odd was how very much worse and less-real-feeling the “live action” film was than the wholly CG cartoon. The writing, the line delivery, the sets, the action, the editing—it was all worse and came off as far more fake than a literal cartoon.
I will attempt to agree by disagreeing:
Ep I, II, III are bad in so many ways that they may end up aging the best. It's impossible to take any of it seriously, from the infidelity of the world of the first trilogy, to the ludicrous characters and situations, to the radically morphing production values, to the utter incoherence of the plotting. For an adaptation of a beloved franchise to be mishandled so badly by its original creator... it has to be something very special. I predict it will require a bit more time to become appreciated, and its substance will be regarded as having been totally misunderstood and overlooked at its inception.
Or it is meaningless tripe beyond all reckoning.
The cool thing is that everything is being coded and sequestered to history no matter how bad it is, so the future of history looks absurd and dire: everything will be recallable, but the work of reviewing it all must overwhelm its value. The act of remembering will become an ultimate adventure.
We really couldn't get the name of the person whose face has been accidentally in a movie that's part of one of the great pieces of pop culture on modern history? Was really more interested to know who it was, what exactly he was doing, and what he thinks about it.
I noticed watching the recent 4K release of The Terminator that the garage attendant in the final scene has a piece of paper in his top pocket with "There's a storm coming“ written upside down on it.
Did you notice the Terminator counts his kills in floating-point numbers? I'd hate to see the studio correct these things.
"Casualties", not kills. Perhaps using floating point is for working with another Terminator, or the decimal value being calculated based on the wound inflicted, with a whole number being a kill.
Or really, just to Look Cool And Technical And Shit.
To nobody's surprise, Skynet is a strict utilitarian who has rationally concluded that plucking one billion eyelashes is equivalent to one murder.
There's a lot of camera-eye real estate for zeros!
So T800 is indeed coded in Javascript, I knew it! What else to expect of devs in 2029
It’s because JavaScript has the most example code in the LLM’s training data that writes the Terminator source code.
Of course not! As is well known, T800 is coded in COBOL ([1]).
[1]: https://www.theterminatorfans.com/the-terminator-vision-hud-...
By this guy: https://x.com/ThrillScience/status/1249742678532620293
And that his vision readout is Motorola 6502 machine code, including comments for peeks and pokes.
It was a simpler time.
Maybe it is fixed point though
> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong. What's in the movie is in the movie, and altering the movie to this extent is a form of revisionist history.
How many times has Lord of the Rings been revised? Dune? <Insert other long-lived actively managed novel>. Is the active management of these novels "wrong"? Is fixing grammar, spelling, or clarifying story beats "wrong"?
I personally don't think so, and I'd rather read something which has been corrected, especially if done for story clarity.
All of those are absolutely wrong.
In the vast majority of cases it’s “fixing” the original in this sense;
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/18/painting-match...
Also, it’s important to be able to see these works as originally published. Otherwise, you are passing off a forgery as the original.
I’m not necessarily opposed to all fixes like this, but in film most of these strike me as totally unnecessary and making the movie strictly worse.
Normal viewers almost never notice these things, and movie nerds like little glimpses behind the curtain. So it’s doing almost nothing for one sort of viewer, and making it worse for another.
That’s absurd. The incident with the fresco was an outrage because it ruined the original. If the well-meaning vandal had merely defaced a copy, nobody would have cared.
If you want to see works as originally published, get a copy of the original publishing. Buying a re-issue and expecting it to be identical in every way is silly.
Is it? I can install every version of Minecraft all the way back to Alpha if I want. I can roll Factorio back to any version until 0.12. I can pick exactly which of thirty seven thousand OpenSSL commits to install. Many arcade ports of games targeted at enthusiasts come with every revision on disc and let the user decide. My copy of Blade Runner came with three different versions in one box. We have had the technology to preserve every version of every significant work for decades. If the re-issue doesn’t preserve the option to experience the original, it’s entirely because the publishers chose to not make it available.
You’re making my point for me. The original is still available. Issuing a new version does not destroy the original the way that person destroyed that fresco.
In most cases, the original is not available. I was listing exceptions showing that it was possible. People don’t reprint if there’s still lots of copies sitting on store shelves. Even going to eBay and dealing with scammers, fakes, damaged discs, and scalpers, the new thing and the old thing have the same title, so finding listings for a specific printing isn’t always possible, and information about what’s changed isn’t readily available. And of course, if you’re ‘buying’ digitally, the new version does often destroy the original, even if the original was what you paid for.
Listen to yourself. You’re equating the destruction of an original piece of art to the horrors of buying something from eBay. It’s utterly pathetic. The world isn’t obligated to cater to your desires. “But there are scammers!” Sometimes getting what you want takes a bit of effort. Requiring you to spend more than thirty seconds obtaining the original is not equivalent to destroying it.
How are they wrong? Which ones are wrong? Which spelling correction, grammar correction, story clarity is wrong?
Is the Blade Runner Director's Cut wrong?
George Lucas had an especially hostile stand against the unaltered versions though.
In the referenced video, there's a clip from the movie Glory where a fair-skinned hand with a digital watch is in the frame. I like to think this must be a glib reference to Blake Edward's' The Party (1968) in which Peter Sellers dresses in dark face to play Hrundi V. Bakshi, who is introduced as a hapless Hollywood extra on the set of an Alamo-style Western. After a cut, the director asks Bakshi what time it is and Bakshi looks at his huge underwater wristwatch to tell him the time, then sheepishly realizes his mistake as the director goes apoplectic.
My bad re Party reference...
From imdb trivia:
//The sequence in which Peter Sellers's character plays his bugle to rouse his troops is a satire of Gunga Din (1939).//
some folks here might be interested in the Despecialized Editions of the Star Wars films
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy%27s_Despecialized_Editio...
Great writeup, though a bit confusing to first refer to Anakin as Darth Vader when the scene takes place prior to that development in the Star Wars arc.
Technically the emperor dubs Anakin as Vader just after the showdown where Anakin betrays Mace Windu. The battle with Obi-Wan happens after that.
I’m not normally this pedantic, but on the topic of Star Wars it somehow feels appropriate.
How is this different than say a literary author who was let know of an error after publication and fixed it with a re-release of a book?
I watched Aliens at least half a dozen times (still one of my all time favourites), and only noticed it when a friend pointed it out to us as it was playing at New Year’s party.
Does that Civil War movie have a modern electrical box in the background? Because that's what it looks like to me - totally distracted me from the watch.
Finally! I’ve only been casually following this over the years, so this is a great write up!!
I have to agree with the article's author that what he calls "overzealous" removal of movie mistakes seems wrong. It wouldn't matter so much if the original movie was still readily available, but it's often the case that only the latest "fixed" version remains available.
With Star Wars in particular, Lucas' incessant meddling has long have gone far past the point of diminishing returns, and frequently making the movies worse.
More in general, I like watching the original movie, warts and all. I often disagree with the corrections, especially when they restore scenes that were left out for a reason, make color correction choices I disagree with (e.g. Blade Runner's "green tint" is inferior to its original bluish tint), etc.
Agree 100%. In addition to fixing mistakes and changing the color palette, I also object to the use of DNR and similar techniques to remove the film grain from older movies, in order to make them look more "modern", like films shot on digital. Unfortunately Cameron's recent 4k remasters of his classic films all suffer from this problem.
It's a travesty. I was sourcing video for an Alien/Aliens watch party (for a couple of adolescents who had never seen either) and I had to hunt down a copy of the older HD Bluray of Aliens because the 4k remaster looked so awful.
(By contrast, the 4k of Alien looks fantastic.)
I get it though, it’s crazy that I know so many people who now say “I don’t like old movies” or “I don’t want to watch this movie, it looks old” when what they see and are really saying without realizing it is , it was shot on film.
It’s especially worse since the hit rate of actually good, creative movies is so much lower in the digital era.
My big pet peeve now is these “ew, this movie looks old” attitude.
I was watching Sum of All Fears the other day and my partner had this attitude. Funny though as soon as people in tuxedos showed up on the screen she changed her mind and started watching. Tuxedos are one of those movie magic things.
Weird how what we grow up with influences our tastes. To me the look of films shot on old school film signals “high quality” and overly digitally edited movies signals “cheap” in the sense of being shot on a green screen lot to save on shooting on location.
I think people who start to get into the craft of film-making (even academically, not making their own films) even a little tend to open up a lot to older films.
It’s so much more impressive when they had to actually arrange for the thing you’re seeing to exist, at least in some sense, in real life, so light could bounce off it and hit the film. That is a real landscape that the actors and crew had to travel to! They really made horses jump off that train car! They really had two thousand extras for this shot! That kind of thing. If there was a set at least they had to build it, and even if the results look a little janky it’s usually interesting and the craft impressive.
They shot with environmental lighting? They had to rig their other lights just so and maybe just work with what was available to get a good shot. The light is the light. The constraints on their options often seem to improve, rather than harm, the final product.
Now it’s like oh they couldn’t even be bothered to film on a real damn street. Ugh. All the location shooting is just getting backgrounds to composite in later. The light on the actors didn’t even exist when and where the background was shot. It sucks and is boring.
Learning how to light my home office/ zoom background really made me pay 10000x more attention to lighting design in movies.
I agree with you. I can't stand any of these modern superhero movies because they are all hyper digital / green screen. For all I know they might have amazing acting and storylines etc, but I'll never know because they are basically unwatchable to me.
This is why archiving is such a worthwhile endeavor. We could end up losing the original movies otherwise!
It’s the artistic equivalent of Stalin erasing disfavored figures from Soviet photographs.
Toasty!