Wednesday, May 21, 2008
HD Tee-Vee / God's Puzzle Makes Haruki Kadokawa Cry
I'm not a big TV watcher but since picking up a Sony Bravia a few months ago it's hard to ignore the spectacular HD picture quality the five major networks broadcast, known colloquially as chi-deji 「地デジ」, short for chijô digital television hôsô「地上デジタルテレビジョン放送」-- Digital Terrestial Television. Digital broadcasts became available across all areas of Japan by Dec. 2006 while all analog broadcasting is slated to cease by July 24, 2011.
The content itself is another issue, but programming such as the countless HD documentaries NHK has produced around the world in recent years are often stunning (if following that same strict formula), while close-ups of your favourite tarento are so clear you can see the layers of foundation covering zits and blemishes in devastating detail.
And even the best DVDs just don't look that hot on HD sets over 30 inches. Looking forward to buying some Criterion titles on their recently announced Blue-ray line.
The other thing I like is the data mode where you can browse news, weather and program specific content. NTV (pictured above) offers the day's entertainment news stories while TBS features synopses and other info on the latest cinema releases. The story running along the bottom of the screen is about the premiere of Miike's God's Puzzle held yesterday.
Singer Asuka joined producer Kadokawa Haruki and star Ichihara Hayato on stage. Earlier in the day, Ichihara went on a zero-gravity flight to shoot some "floating in space" visuals for the event, puking three times during filming. And three was the number of times Kadokawa cried after seeing the finished film, he said. He also got more mileage out of the story about reading Kimoto's original novel while in the clink.
Update: Don Ryuganji translates a bizarre interview with Kadokawa published in Cyzo magazine. I thought mushrooms were outlawed a few years back?
5 comments:
i've seen some more pics of that premiere - two me, one plain, some altitude, lots of giant jigsaw pieces and.... no gravity.
now that's publicity.
apparently.
anyway, wondering what bravia set you have. i've one in the bedroom (720p - where i watch most films, as it happens, ladies) and my brother's got one in his lounge (top of the range, 1080p - plus BR player) and i love the HD broadcasts, the effect of the BR too... videogames (yes, yes - i know, you don't play them - brother does though) look superb these days. films, well, i've seen 'sukiyaki western' like this, and it didn't improve it one jot. lovely detail though.
as for criterion (and don't forget, MoC too - starting with Mad Detective in october) still have officially (it seems) announced future releases for a slew of imamura, several gosha films, and kobayashi's human condition trilogy. i'm hoping 2009 is the year we can begin to buy japanese films with some regularity in 1080p like this.
as for now, i'm getting 'jesse james' soon - brothers birthday - and perhaps you should choose to have your eye on that lovely infernal affairs set in HK :
$70 for all three films, all-region discs too.
oh. that's "two men, one plane".
it's early.
I don't know the overseas equivalent but it's the KDL-32J5000 which is 32", 720p WXGA (1366x768) with "Motion Flow" option, broadband connection and a bunch of other things I haven't had time to play with. It's last year's model so I was able to get it new for an even grand. Will get a blue-ray deck later -- glad I never bought thousands of regular DVDs. I can't see the blue-ray format being usurped for a long time. How much clearer can you get before it's imperceptible?
that's one of those things. there's still a sense it's hard to convey to people that there's issues like an upper limit to the quality that can be conveyed, as well as there being issues with how much quality people can expect to find in films that may never have had huge production values in the first place.
it must also be the case with any country that prints get damaged, restoration doesn't look an attractive prospect, the faults look slightly more obvious as time passes, sounds in mono no 6.1... the list must go on, surely? nobody's been faultless and managing their legacy, either at the time they're creating it or at the time it's hopefully resuscitated during a future generation, so why be so determined that it's such a fundamental issue?
i still get confused by all these things, to be honest, but i've found it interesting how people will watch a DVD presentation of a miike film (as one example, but lower budgeted film in general) and not quite get that it was primed for v-cinema or a different studio system, with different public expectations, and therefore made comparatively cheaply, maybe shot on DV or with cheap film stock, and generally (in a sense) more disposable, or simply with many aspects that can be adjudged to determine value when looking at a release on a format sold in terms of it's perfection as a latest tactic to get people to repurchase what they've paid out for perhaps numerous times before. problem is, the majority of the dominant and obvious english language news, reviews and opinions, influence, on foreign films licensed for non-japanese markets comes from a market with different values and people accessing the work from that distance won't adjust their expectations of how it should fit within the latest format without also being able to easily raise their expectations regularly in terms of what's within the film.
reviews that use star systems to grade the picture quality seem applicable to film made on mega-budgets and often taken to largely be about the various individual aspects of the production values that can be polished with a few million dollars driven directly at them, over and above the narrative, cinematography, imagination and all those "film things" that should be possible to produce with incredibly limited money. they don't really cope with getting across a sense that these things aren't, can't, or needn't always be there. but, those that write in detail about the stuff coming from japan or any other non-american system all too often fall into the trap of sensing or stating that people should expect DVD to compensate for differences or that other countries should be making stuff that fits into the ideals or results turned out by their own more familiar market that can't fairly be compared when you sit a $3m film against even a cheap film from a market that promotes film in terms that state the topline star was paid X amount more than that, let alone pushing that the budgets exponentially increase - potentially quite a sinister request or requirement, i think, as i'd rather see more of a sense of responsibility towards letting each country be what it is and for outsiders simply to argue for better access to it.
i feel some kind of advantage, in some respects, from having been through the appearance and bargain bin days of VHS. i knew from the start it always had to be a case of buying what i would otherwise not get to see, rather than the obsessive-compulsive sense that is out there - that DVD had been treated similarly to a lot of cultural happenings in the hands of younger generations, as the pinnacle rather than the latest incarnation. so, i keep picking away at films, and as the stuff i'm interested in appears simultaneously in the newer format, i switch across and watch the films... the picture quality - and everything else we hope goes with it - will remain a bonus rather than a fundamental issue. that said, decent work only on those newer discs this time around, please - cynicism from companies can be a bit too blatant at times.
I think some of this is the reason the majority of Americans didn't "get" the intentional imperfections built into Grindhouse. Tarantino/Rodriguez missed their audience by about 15 years.
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