These arrived today The Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy
It seems that Warner messed it up again.Some of the included Audio Tracks (esp. German) seem to be far sub-standard.Prepare for an exchange program.Amazon Germany is currently refunding the purchase price of the boxes even with opened shrink-wrap.Update: Amazon.de stopped shipping the boxset and gave Warner 2 days to solve the problem. New "release" date July 1st.
Quote from: Jon on June 28, 2011, 10:57:01 PMDave, whereabouts in the UK are you? I saw this advertised in Sight And Sound and thought of you:http://www.barbican.org.uk/film/series.asp?id=1006If you're anywhere near it might be nice to see some of them on the big screen, especially that one with Helen McCarthy. I remember her from years ago when I used to follow Anime more closely and I'm sure I have one of her books.Thanks for this Jon .I'm in Herts, inside the M25 so sort of North West London, which makes this easily doable. Not too sure about the FFC ones though as they state that unaccompanied adults are not allowed and Arrietty is one of the FFC titles and although I have the Blu on order from Japan it would be nice to see it on the big screen. I met Helen McCarthy a couple of times, at various anime/manga things ages ago, and she is a lovely knowledgeable person.
Dave, whereabouts in the UK are you? I saw this advertised in Sight And Sound and thought of you:http://www.barbican.org.uk/film/series.asp?id=1006If you're anywhere near it might be nice to see some of them on the big screen, especially that one with Helen McCarthy. I remember her from years ago when I used to follow Anime more closely and I'm sure I have one of her books.
According to blu-ray.com it seems to be just the German editions of Return of the King linkish
There are lots of extras listed for the third film and. It includes both the restored and theatrical versions.
Theatrical Cut vs. Restored VersionOnce Upon a Time in the West, like many of director Sergio Leone’s works, was heavily cut to cater for ADD audiences in the States, abbreviated by about half an hour minutes to remove a fair number of dialogue scenes, and ‘slow bits’. International audiences received much longer versions, but even the longest of these were still missing a few minutes of footage from the original 175 minute Italian ‘Director’s Cut’. And the edition presented here on this release is basically the longest International Cut available, dubbed here the ‘Restored Version’. It’s the most complete (166 minute) English-language version available – I don’t think that there are any longer prints available which include anything other than the Italian audio.Now, the confusing thing is that there is the option to play two versions on this disc – the ‘Theatrical Version’ and the aforementioned ‘Restored Version’. Fans would be forgiven for assuming that ‘restored’ meant that they finally had access to the 175 minute version, and that the theatrical cut was the one we’d all been used to. Instead, both of the versions included on this release are nearly identical in runtime. There’s only about 40 seconds’ difference between the two – both represent the longest English-language cut, but, at the time, there were a couple of brief shots which included an actor who was blacklisted in Hollywood at the time – and so they had to be removed. He’s a non-entity, an insignificant character who has just a couple of minor lines, but, for the restored version, they’ve seamlessly re-integrated the shots.It’s a shame because, not only do we not get the longest version available (justifiably because of language restrictions, but it is still a shame that we don’t have the technology to create new audio for these scenes), but we also don’t get any of the previously available shorter cuts for comparison (the Special Collector’s Edition SD-DVD sported an even shorter 159-minute cut). I would think that it’s fairly universally accepted that the 140 minute US cut is completely redundant, so there’s no love lost in not including that in this package, but some fans might argue that it would have been nice to have the alternative 159-minute International Cut included here for a truer comparison (which, most notably, did not include the moment where Harmonica gets up after being shot, and which therefore implied some kind of otherworldly power in his appearance later on - a nice touch which Leone was begged to change because the studios feared that audiences would walk out after seeing Bronson get shot, and not get up). Honestly, I don’t really mind as we do technically still get the definitive English-language edition, but to offer a so-called ‘restored’ and ‘theatrical’ version, only for fans to find out that the two are almost indiscernibly different, is just a big tease. They should have just released it as one version – or given us a completely different alternative.