Not another awards show!! - Godfather Blu-ray Accolades

‘Godfather’ Rules High-Def Awards

By John Latchem | Posted: 11 Nov 2008
jlatchem@questex.com

LOS ANGELES — Despite joining the Blu-ray Disc camp just after the end of the format war this year, Paramount Home Entertainment scored huge wins at the second High-Def Disc Awards.

The studio’s new The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration Collection Blu-ray boxed set won for best of show and best catalog title.

2008 High-Def Award Winners:

Best of Show: The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration Collection, Paramount Home Entertainment

Best Theatrical Blu-ray: Iron Man, Paramount Home Entertainment

Best Catalog Blu-ray: The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration Collection, Paramount Home Entertainment

Pakistani Film Kala Pul (Black Bridge) at ZAP

We are helping Bay Area indy filmmaker Saqib Mausoof (he's originally from Karachi, Pakistan) with post production on his new short film Kala Pul. It premiers this Thursday at the San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival.

According to the film fest program: Kala Pul is named after a bridge in Karachi, which connects, and simultaneously separates, the affluent parts of the city and the lower income areas. Our protagonist, Arsalan, returns from the Middle East to this segregated world to investigate the violent death of his younger brother, blamed on fundamentalists. He finds himself estranged from his family, which is divided in opinion between his anglicized father and his devoutly militant younger brother. Now Arsalan must navigate these diverging and conflicting paths to discover his dead brother’s past and Karachi's future.

Apocalypse Now and the Holy Grail

The Guardian (UK) had an article in their film section recently describing the joys of viewing a boot-legged video copy of the legendary "5-hour cut" of Apocalypse Now. Ever since we prepared the special 2-disc "Apocalypse Now - The Complete Dossier" version a few years ago in which we included more than 26 minutes of "deleted scenes" (which really meant scenes that had not been in the final cut of either version of the film: 1979 or 2001) I thought that the mythic status of the 5.5 hour long Betamax video assembly would have faded into oblivion. Not so. Below is Gordon Coates October 17th article. It is followed by my letter to the editor in which I tried to correct some inaccuracies. It was published last weekend.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/oct/17/1

Coppola's slow boat on the Nung

Gordon Coates on the five-hour Apocalypse Now

• Gordon Coates The Guardian, Friday October 17 2008

The long and the short of it ... Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

The work print is the holy grail of film collecting. These are the vastly long, rough versions of a picture, containing much of the movie-making fat that is trimmed out by the editing process. For years, film collectors tap their keyboards until their fingers bleed in attempts to track down the bum-numbing versions of movies such as Dune and This Is Spinal Tap for the unseen gems they may or may not hold.

Of all the legendary work prints out there, the most persistently tantalising prospect is seeing the rumoured 289-minute version of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. The theatrical release print runs a mere 153 minutes, and the Redux reissue 202 minutes, so the work print offers almost an hour and a half of unseen footage. To a serious film geek, the prospect is unthinkably exciting - surely it couldn't be true?

Despite a lack of tangible proof that it even existed - including denials from the film's producers - the most dedicated collectors spent years searching for it, until something supposed to be this grail-like object found its way into the public domain. After exhaustive negotiations with an American film collector who had tracked down a copy, I found myself signing for an airmail package, booking the day off work and settling down for some serious viewing.

The first thing to point out is that to call this five-hour work print a "rough cut" is a mistake. It's an "everything-and-the-kitchen-sink" cut, which takes almost all the material from the 238-day shoot and tapes it together in a linear form. The work print moves at a snail's pace, with unfeasibly long scenes. The Ride of the Valkyries helicopter episode alone accounts for well over 30 minutes of footage. Scenes that, with expert editing, would become tense and compelling simply drift along aimlessly, interesting only to anoraks for the extra line of dialogue here and there.

There are, however, gems amid the mass of footage, which leave the viewer wondering how Coppola could have taken the scissors to them. Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz has three extra scenes, which more than quadruple the size of his part. In one, Brando reads from Time magazine to an imprisoned Martin Sheen. In another he delivers a monologue to Sheen about the "master liars" in Washington who "want to win, but can't stand to be thought of as cruel". In a third, he reads TS Eliot's The Hollow Men, while Dennis Hopper gets excited and says "man" a lot.

One of the things removed from the film for the cinematic release, along with the extra footage, is its political conscience. Scenes in which the characters question and criticise the US involvement in Vietnam and the conduct of American government are cut. Themes of politics give way to an exploration of the human nature and psychology.

Of all the cuts, the unkindest are dealt to Scott Glenn's character, Colby, Willard's predecessor, who was charged with killing Kurtz, but instead falls under his spell. In the work print, Colby is revealed to be a significant character who taunts an imprisoned Willard and, more importantly, shoots Hopper's character before being killed himself. Likewise, the character of Lance (played by Sam Bottoms) gets extra scenes designed to show his instability. In one, he inexplicably machine-guns a water buffalo, while screaming: "I control the destiny of every living thing which passes before my sights."

It took Coppola and his editors more than 700 days to turn a million feet of celluloid into a watchable film. What the work print makes clear are the choices editors are forced to make when faced with almost unlimited footage. Scenes that drove the crew to the brink of madness and Coppola to the edge of financial ruin were dropped without sentiment - simply because they didn't improve the story.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/nov/01/apocalypse-now-holy-grail-letters

• The Guardian, Saturday November 1 2008

Letter: Apocalypse Now and the holy grail

Gordon Coates (Coppola's slow boat on the Nung, Film & Music, October 17) referred to the "holy grail" of film collecting as a "rumoured 289-minute version of Francis Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now", adding that the film's producers denied the existence of this long version. In reality, it comes down to semantics. When the film-makers returned from their 238-day shoot, the editors put together a rough assembly that ran to nearly five hours, and contained all the scenes that had been shot. So when one heard "there is no five-hour version", the producers were not being evasive. It is not a version of a film, it is a catalogue of everything, which then had to be edited into a coherent narrative.

In 1999 Coppola decided to revisit the raw material to create a new version that would be more faithful to his original vision. Apocalypse Now Redux was screened at Cannes in May 2001 and had a theatrical release later that year.

In that long first assembly is the scene in which Kurtz is reading from Time magazine. It was restored, recut and included in the Redux version, along with several other scenes. Brando's reading of Eliot's The Hollow Men can be seen in its entirety as a special feature in the special two-DVD release, Apocalypse Now (Steelbook Edition).

Many significant scenes that were neither in the original nor the Redux version are in the Steelbook version. They include scenes with Willard's special ops predecessor Colby, and the death of the foreign correspondent played by Dennis Hopper. It also includes audio commentaries by the director in which he addresses the editing decisions he faced in the 70s and again in 2000-01.

Kim Aubry
Co-producer of Apocalypse Now Redux

This article appeared in the Guardian on Saturday November 01 2008 on p39 of the Editorials & reply section. It was last updated at 00.06 on November 01 2008.

Tarkovsky takes Brazil

Our good friend Dmitry Trakovsky won a special mention jury award at the 2008 Mostra film festival in São Paulo, Brazil last week. Congratulations to you Dima!
Here are some links to Brazilian festival coverage and reviews.

http://www.mostra.org/32/exib_jornal.php?jornalId=608&language=en

Jornal da mostra

• 
• 32ª Mostra > 23/10/2008

Edition: Renata de Almeida and Leon Cakoff

Dmitry Trakovsky

Poetic Identification, The Means to Enjoy Tarkovsky

Son of Russian poet Arseniy Tarkovsky and one of the most important filmmakers in Russia since Sergei Eisenstein, Andrei Tarkovsky is often admired by those that identify with the poetic rhythm of his films, since without this identification his work can at times be seen as slow and difficult. That is what Dmitry Trakovsky, the director of Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky, said in an interview to journalist Rubens Ewald Filho in the Clube da Mostra on Tuesday, October 21st.

In spite of their similar last names, Dmitry explained that he is not related to Tarkovsky. Born in Russia, the young filmmaker lives in the US and, even though he does not often visit his native country, he still maintains strong spiritual ties with his motherland. He could not pinpoint an exclusive reason why he identifies with Tarkovsky´s work, but he did emphasize that he likes the rhythm and the language of his films.

Dmitry, who once studied to become a doctor, explained that American universities offer students the possibility to take courses in parallel to their majors. This system led him to study Buddhism. After completing a short film on the subject, his professor encouraged him to apply for a grant to further pursue filmmaking. This funding laid the foundation of the documentary, Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky.

Dmitry said that Tarkovsky preferred to use long takes because he believed that time is the fundamental fabric of cinema. Mirror, from 1975, is Tarkovsky´s film that Dmitry admires the most, as he believes this to be the director’s most personal and poetic work. Conversely, Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Tarkovsky’s first film, is Dmitry’s least favorite because, as Tarkovsky would admit himself, it did not yet completely reflect the poetic language developed later on in his work.

The young filmmaker took three years to complete the documentary, and tried to investigate the idea, proclaimed by Tarkovsky, that death does not exist. Dmitry’s next project is to make fiction, maybe in a short film.

http://cinema.uol.com.br/ultnot/2008/10/21/ult6887u19.jhtm

21/10/2008 - 15h14

Documentário investiga a permanência do cineasta Andrei Tarkovsky

NEUSA BARBOSA
Especial para o UOL

Dmitry Trakovsky faz sua estréia como cineasta com o documentário "Conhecendo Andrei Tarkovsky"

O plano do estudante Dmitry Trakovsky, russo emigrado para aos EUA aos 2 anos, com seus pais, era estudar Medicina. Na própria universidade, na Califórnia, porém, o cinema desviou-o desse caminho. Ele acabou estreando como cineasta com o documentário "Conhecendo Andrei Tarkovsky", que tem sua première mundial na 32ª. Mostra Internacional de Cinema.

As coincidências foram muitas até chegar ao filme, a começar pelo sobrenome do jovem cineasta, quase igual ao de seu ídolo, Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986), prestigiado diretor de "Solaris" (72), "Stalker" (79) e "O Sacrifício" (86).

http://www.mostra.org/32/exib_jornal.php?jornalId=626&language=en

and a blog entry in Portuguese
http://andreavelloso.blogspot.com/2008/10/meeting-andrei-tarkovsky.html

More Godfather Attention

Sponsored By

The New Mob Boss

The latest 'Godfather' sequel—this one on Blu-ray—is going to make a killing.

Malcolm Jones

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Oct 27, 2008

How many times does Paramount think it can make us an offer we can't refuse? Fans of Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather" trilogy have bought the VHS version, the laser disc version and, most recently, the 2001 DVD edition with new commentary tracks by Coppola that set a hard-to-beat standard for frankness, intelligence and wit. Now we're confronted with yet another version, the "Coppola Restoration," in both standard DVD and Blu-ray editions. The latest set has been struck from newly restored film of the originals, and bless the restorationists, who give us crisper images and better color without any of that shrink-wrapped slickness that digitization often produces—the DVD versions of these movies still look like movies. And don't think for a second that you're being suckered into buying something that you already own. These films haven't looked this good since the first week they played in theaters.

Most stories about film restoration sound the same. Again and again, we hear about neglect, deteriorating film stock and faulty printing. Even great films ("Lawrence of Arabia," "Vertigo") suffered these indignities. Still, the news that Coppola's first two "Godfather" movies direly required repair comes as a shock. It is hard to imagine two films viewed more often, or more cherished, by more people. Ironically, the first two "Godfathers" have suffered because of their popularity (the third installment, made in 1990, has suffered hardly at all). If you saw part one when it was briefly rereleased in theaters a few years ago, you had to wonder if all the original hoopla over Gordon Willis's photography was unquestioned hype, since a lot of what appeared on screen looked muddy and depthless. But that's what happens when duplicates are made from duplicates and no one bothers to compare the fifth-generation copy with the original print.

Will the new versions radically revise our opinions of these films? Obviously people have been watching and rewatching these classics without undue trouble for years (the most hilarious bonus feature included in the new set shows actors—and hard-core Godfatherites—Richard Belzer and Seth Isler lobbing lines from the script at each other like two tennis pros). But few films were ever more dependent on the way they looked than the "Godfather" movies. In scene after scene, it's the Rembrandt-like palette—orange, umber, red and a dozen shades of black—that defines the various moods of the movie. Destroy that look, and you sap a lot of the film's power. Restore it, and you get what the latest editions of these classics offer: freshly minted masterpieces.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/164501

© 2008

Revisiting 'Godfather' trilogy

Mick LaSalle

San Francisco Chronicle Datebook - Sunday, October 19, 2008

Any excuse to rewatch all three "Godfather" movies is welcome, but the new boxed set of "The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration" is one of the better reasons to come along in years. It features digitally restored versions of the films, plus all the outtakes and features from previous releases, plus brand-new documentaries about the trilogy from director Kim Aubry. (I'm in two of those documentaries, as a talking head.) On consecutive nights, I revisited these movies for the first time in about 10 years. Watching them, I had some new impressions, in some cases contrary to previous things I've written. For what it's worth, here are some random "Godfather" thoughts, fresh and unfiltered.

The Godfather: This film and "Casablanca," which also had a tortured production history, are the two most irresistible films in the American cinema, a succession of winning scenes, with no dip in audience interest, no time out for regrouping, just one great moment followed by another. We remember a movie for its best moments, but with "The Godfather" that means remembering virtually the whole thing. Its appeal is astonishing.

This time, I found myself marveling at the casting of James Caan and Marlon Brando. Francis Ford Coppola is an Italian American, right? So he knows as well as I do that these guys don't really act like Italian Americans. (Look at the difference between the two of them and Al Pacino and John Cazale.) Yet their performances have about them something truer than literal accuracy. They're like Kabuki Italians. They have a detailed internal life, but they also seem to be observing consciously what they're doing externally; that is, acting Italian. And somehow their approach is in dignified harmony with the tone and tenor of what Coppola was after. What I can't figure out is this: How did Coppola intuit that they would be right? It's one thing to aim for authenticity, and quite another thing to preimagine a theatricality that's truer than authenticity and picture it within a whole design. That's extraordinary.

Also, this time out I very much enjoyed Pacino's trajectory, not only the change Michael Corleone undergoes but also the hints of latent power and authority within him that are present early in the film. There was a moment I'd never noticed before: You know when Michael stands with a guy outside the hospital and they pretend to be armed Mafia soldiers in order to scare away a car full of assassins? At the end of that scene, the other guy goes to light a cigarette, but he's so terrified that his hands are shaking wildly. So Michael takes out a lighter and lights it for him, and then - this is what I'd never noticed before - there's a split second in which Michael looks down and takes in the fact that his own hands are not shaking. It's as if he's confronting tangible proof that he is different from other people - that, in a sense, he has the talent to make it in crime.

The Godfather: Part II: Years ago, I used to say that I thought "Part II was better than Part I, but having seen both back to back, I would say that Part I is superior. But Part II has lots of great things in it, and it's an exceptional movie.

However, one thing bothers me. Watching the movie, it's still not clear to me why Michael kills Fredo, or even when he decides to do it. There are conflicting interpretations, which we'll look at. But first, let's lay out the known facts, chronologically:

1) There's an attempt on Michael's life.

2) Johnny Ola (Dominic Chianese), who works for Jewish mobster Hyman Roth, calls Fredo in the middle of the night. And from their conversation we derive that a) The Roth mob was behind the attempted hit; b) Fredo was the one who set Michael up; and c) Fredo didn't realize that he was setting his brother up to be killed. (I say that he didn't know because he seems horrified at what Johnny and Roth have tried to do. However, he has not - and does not - go back to Michael and tell him that the Roth mob is out to kill him. And that's bad.)

3) Michael finds out that Fredo betrayed him and is devastated. (It's the one time anything really gets to him in the whole movie.)

4) He goes over to Fredo and kisses him, as though giving him the kiss of death, and tells him that he broke his heart. But it doesn't seem, at this point, that Michael intends to kill Fredo.

5) Later, Michael has a conversation with Fredo in which Fredo, explaining himself, gives way to anger and resentment. He announces, "I'm smott! I'm smott!" by which he means that he's intelligent, and further says that he got involved with Ola and Roth because he was tired of being a flunky and wanted something that was his own. At this point, Michael hardens and disowns him. And immediately after that, he tells his assistant that he wants nothing to happen to Fredo while his mother is alive, implying that Fredo is to be killed when his mother is dead. The order is still in effect after he ostensibly reconciles with Fredo, who is killed not long after their mother's funeral.

Those are the facts. Here is the question: Why does Michael decide to kill Fredo, and when does he decide to do it? I see three possibilities, or rather multiple possibilities within the following broad categories:

Possibility 1: The least interesting possibility has Michael deciding to kill Fredo when he kisses him. This is possible, but it drains the subsequent conversation scene of its dramatic consequence and makes Fredo's blunder (saying that he resented Michael) of no importance. In this scenario, Michael kills Fredo because he assumes Fredo was in on the conspiracy (not true) or because he thinks Fredo is too dangerous to let live (a debatable point). But to believe this is to believe that, halfway into the movie, Michael's moral descent is all but complete.

Possibility 2: This second possibility, the one I believe most people assume to be accurate, is that Michael decides to kill Fredo in the course of their conversation because something in Fredo's words reveals to him, with certainty, that Fredo was in on the plot to kill him. The idea is that Michael realizes that Fredo either knew or pretended not to know what the Roth gang was up to. The problem with this, though, is that there's nothing in what Fredo says that reveals his complicity with any certainty. Also, we were privy to Fredo's conversation with Johnny Ola, which seemed to exonerate him. Yes, there's still the possibility of Fredo's unconscious or semiconscious complicity, but it's a slender reed on which to justify fratricide.

Possibility 3: As in the second possibility, this scenario has Michael deciding to kill Fredo during their conversation because of something Fredo says. But in this version, Michael is wrong. That is, Michael assumes Fredo was in on the conspiracy, but Fredo, in fact, was not. To me, this is the best possibility, because it preserves the drama of the conversation scene, partly justifies the issue's ambiguity and presents a genuinely tragic misunderstanding. Michael, who seems able to read everybody he meets, has one fatal error in perception, and it's about his own brother. He assumes something about Fredo that isn't quite true and dooms both of them. This interpretation also supports the idea that Michael - instead of becoming an ideal don - is becoming more and more paranoid and twisted. (Or, rather, that in order to be an ideal don, becoming paranoid and twisted is inevitable.) Still, I've seen this movie half a dozen times and can't say I'm sure on this score.

The Godfather: Part III: Set in 1979 and 1980, this is an entertaining movie, very watchable, very enjoyable, but inferior to the previous entries. The movie has some big problems, but Sofia Coppola, who took the rap at the time of the film's release, really isn't one of them. I think all the story elements were there for a great movie, but as presently constituted and arranged, they're a little out of balance. The main problem is that the Michael Corleone of Part III is not like the Michael Corleone of Parts I and II. He doesn't seem to be the same person. The Michael of the first two movies was a my-way-or-the-highway sort of guy, driven by an intense fear of being controlled and an overwhelming sense of responsibility toward those in his charge. The Michael of Part III is a guy who has always been driven by a desire to do the right thing, one who has come to realize that his judgment has led him astray. Yes, people change. But generally, when people go off the existential edge, they repress their guilt and behave in even worse ways. Stalin didn't become a nice guy when he was 60. But Michael is a nice guy, and from the beginning of the movie. As the movie opens, he longs to go legit and wants to assuage his guilt. These are two separate desires that could and should have been more closely linked.

I understand the problem that confronted Coppola and his screenwriting collaborator, Mario Puzo. As Coppola says in one of the special features documentaries, by the end of Part II Michael was a "zombie." You can't make a movie about a human blank who is hardened against all human feeling. But what if, in Part III, he started out as that kind of guy? And what if he then experienced a health crisis that left him unable to suppress his guilt? What I'm saying is, in "The Godfather: Part III" Michael's guilt over Fredo is like a chronic illness, but in dramatic terms it might have been better if the guilt were sudden and acute. Then you'd have a movie about a guy suddenly and all at once having to face crimes and emotions that he's repressed for years. Truly, then it would have been about a guy cracking up, which is what I think the movie wanted to be but isn't quite.

I also have never figured out why the movie takes place in 1979 and 1980, even as it depicts the real-life events of 1978 - the death of Pope Paul VI followed by the death of Pope John Paul I a month later. Anyway, Part III is still a good movie. Pacino has a great confession scene. Andy Garcia (as Vincent) is lots of fun throughout, and the picture has provided the world with a handful of taglines, which is always a mark of cinematic vividness. I love saying, for example, that "on this day, I have been treated with no respect." Or "There's a stone in my shoe." And, of course, it's hard to imagine a world without "Just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in." Vincent Corleone's midlife crisis is 10 years overdue. Bring on Part IV.

E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/19/PK3H13BSNI.DTL

The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration Blu-ray Review

http://www.dailygame.net/news/archives/008369.php
10/02/08

The Godfather and its 1974 sequel are revered by many as two of the best films ever made, and their influence continue to affect our culture nearly 40 years after their release. Unfortunately, the series "re-releases" on VHS, Laserdisc and a DVD box set have had poor picture and sound quality. Paramount had nowhere to go but up with The Godfather Trilogy's release on Blu-ray, and someone clearly needed to save the Corleones.

That someone ended up being Steven Spielberg, who, acting on behalf of Francis Ford Coppola, asked Paramount to clean The Godfather's prints. Film, of course, not finger.... Scanned at 4k resolution and digitally cleaned one frame at a time, the restored and (in the case of Part III) re-mastered prints have been assembled for release in a deluxe four-disc Blu-ray edition called The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration. The results are fantastic.

When it comes to the bonus material, Coppola and Paramount have assembled a terrific collection. Not only are all of the bonus materials that bestowed the 2001 DVD set here, we also get approximately an hour and a half of new supplements which are all presented in either 1080p or 1080i.

Clocking in at approximately 30 minutes, The Masterpiece That Almost Wasn't examines the origin, production, reaction and impact of the 1972 original. Roughly sixteen people are interviewed, a mix of individuals involved with the production in one capacity or another (Coppola, George Lucas, Peter Bart, Robert Evans and Walter Murch) as well as actors and filmmakers offering their own personal reflections on the impact the film made on them. This includes Sopranos creator David Chase, actors Alec Baldwin and John Turturro and directors Steven Spielberg, Guillermo Del Torro and William Friedkin. If you already know the history of the film's production, a majority of this material may ring familiar. But the doc is still well worth your time, if only to hear Spielberg admit the film was so well made it seriously shattered his confidence in his own storytelling abilities.

Emulsional Rescue: Revealing The Godfather (19:02) -- This is the most fascinating of the new supplements as it covers the restoration process of the first two films. Coppola begins the short explaining how Spielberg got the ball rolling on the project. Willis and Daviau discuss Willis' shooting style for the film, while Robert A. Harris and Paramount VP of feature post-production Martin Cohen go into detail on the lengthy process on the efforts to restore the movies as closely as possible to the way they originally intended to look.

When the Shooting Stopped(14:00) -- Looks at the post production of the series and features interviews with Walter Murch and Richard Marks, who worked on the editing of the second film. The importance of having a good editor on a film is driven home by Murch's story of how his reworking of Nino Rota's music cues during the infamous Horse's Head scene saved the Italian Composer's score from being discarded altogether by Paramount.

Godfather World (11:20) -- A quick look at the film's long-lasting impact on our culture via interviews with South Park co-creator Trey Parker, David Chase and actor Joe Mantegna (aka The Simpsons Mafioso Fat Tony). All offer up anecdotes and tidbits on how these films have influenced their own work over the years.

Score: 9

It's The Godfather Trilogy, so you know it rocks, and the Blu-ray transfer is fantastic. This is a must-buy for all Blu-ray owners. Seriously.

-- Shawn Fitzgerald

NOT FADE AWAY: DVD is Dead - Long Live DVD

I wanted to re-publish a page from a now extinct web site. This eulogy is around 13 months late. But with the advent of Blu-ray Disc...no, not advent, but product re-launch as the winner of the HD disc format war, I find myself wondering how long this platform will last. Will it make serious inroads into home entertainment.

DVD in 1998 was a BIG LEAP for consumers. The discs were cheap to produce, they could be viewed in portable players and laptops, and the improvement in picture and quality from VHS tapes was immense. Initially, the purists and videophiles decried the new format...the image would look too "compressed" and "digital" compared to their beloved Laserdiscs. (remember them?).

The Zoetrope DVD lab mastered our first DVDs in 1999. Our first title was a not widely known cult film called Fando y Lis by the Mexican director Alejandro Jodorowski followed quickly by Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Tucker, The Man and His Dream and The Conversation.

By 2001, there were dozens of DVD review websites, fan sites...everyone writing on those sites was now an expert in image quality, sound quality, and the true "director's intention." Wine-tasting like adjectives began to proliferate in these earnest reviews "...the new transfer features rich burgundy reds...full enveloping Dolby sound with an edgy bite..." (I am not kidding.)

By 2002, $199 DVD no-name DVD players were available. And as the consumer economy continued to thrive despite the dot com bust, everyone was upgrading their aging 25" glass CRT televisions to 42" flat Plasmas or LCDs or even digital projectors.

Early HD adopters were trying out all kinds of early-adopter stuff: JVC had an HD "D-VHS format," and in the Summer of 2003, Cablevision launched their ill-fated VOOM HD satellite service which survived for less than 2 years, but programmed a vast range of films and other HD content to the few thousand subscribers that had signed up.

Meanwhile, a fierce ego-driven battle of titans kept a viable HD Disc from consumers: Sony and Pansonic were behind the eventual "winner" the Blu-ray Disc. Toshiba backed the loser, the HD-DVD. The movie studios changed alliances so many times it became impossible for consumers to choose one.

But in that interval, most consumers who had just spent $700 to $2,000 for their new large HD-capable screens found that by hooking them up to their plain old DVD players, movies looked pretty darn good. Without something to compare it to, their library of standard definition DVDs when presented on big wide-screen flat panels with scalers essentially LOOKED LIKE HD.

Back to where I started: here is a reprint of the last web issue of The DVD Journal from August of 2007:

Wednesday, 29 Aug. 2007
www.dvdjournal.com

Dimming the lights: On August 26, 1997, Digital Video Disc made its unofficial debut, with Warner Home Video placing 61 titles in nationwide release after a six-month trial period in test markets. Sony's flagship DVD player at the time, the DVD-s7000, cost $1,000; entry-level models reached the marketplace several months later with price-tags around half that, which still wasn't cheap. The nascent format faced several challenges — not all Hollywood studios were on board with the new digital media, while video-rental chains would not clear out a portion of their VHS shelf-space for the shiny new discs. However, thanks to a passionate group of early adopters, home-video divisions at Warner and Sony, the release of movies on DVD without the traditional "rental window" applied to VHS, and retailers stocking discs at affordable prices, consumers began crossing the digital divide. Since then, DVD has changed not just the way we watch movies, but how we think about them.

It's hard to understate the impact that DVD has had on our movie-consuming culture. Just as a lot of us will someday (even today) explain to young people what the world was like before personal computers or the Internet, we have to make an effort to scan back to the mid-1990s, when the idea of feature-length movies on CD-sized discs was a holy grail of film collectors. Prior to 1997, the condition of feature films on home video was sorry indeed. VHS tapes offered poor transfers compared to today's viewing standards, while film collectors hoarded hard-to-find movies captured from rare, late-night TV screenings. At the time, Laserdisc was the cineaste's choice, although the format was expensive, unwieldy, and sometimes subject to degradation thanks to the infamous "laser rot" that plagued more than a few collections. Folks who didn't have Laserdisc players and deep pockets could purchase some movies on VHS with widescreen transfers, but they came at a premium price. And then there was videotape itself — bulky, non-indexed, and liable to warp, break, and degrade, it simply was not durable enough to satisfy film collectors.

Looking back, we see there simply is no comparison between 1997 and 2007. Today, it's not only possible, but affordable for the average consumer to own an excellent personal film collection and home-theater equipment. It can even be done "on a budget," as it were. Compared to the pre-home-video era (basically, at any time before mass-market VCRs), the transformation is nothing less than astonishing, and it's worth thinking about. It was not that long ago that only the very wealthy could afford home theaters and actual prints of films for private screenings. It would require not only a large room, but a separate, muffled projection room as well, and somebody to run the projector (recall that famous scene in Sunset Boulevard, for example). You couldn't have a setup like that and, say, live in an apartment. DVD has made movies accessible to everyone, not just reclusive movie stars. This is one time when the movies may have gotten smaller, but they also got better.

As of this morning, The DVD Journal is ceasing publication. DVD first reached store shelves ten years ago this week, and this website went online with its very first DVD reviews nearly a year after that. Since then, we've posted almost 4,000 DVD reviews, watched the retail sheets for the best upcoming DVDs, and hopefully steered a few folks into renting or purchasing movies they otherwise might have overlooked.

Compared to many websites, very few writers have contributed to the Journal over the years, with a core group of around ten based in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. The editor would like to thank all of them — it has been a privilege to be their first reader every week, and to be associated with a talented group of film critics who also happen to be good friends. Our own world has changed in the past decade as well, with marriages, children, new homes, career changes, and various other things that happen to sensible people when the subtle business of adulthood creeps up on them unawares.

The writers would like to extend thanks to everyone in the home-video industry we have had contact with over the past decade, from the hard-working publicists who do their best to get products out in advance of street-dates, to the miracle-worker technicians who have done the most challenging, and most important, job of all — restoring classic films to the best condition possible, allowing us to enjoy them at home, and forever. For many, this was the one true promise of DVD, and we rarely have been disappointed. We would also like to extend a special thanks to the good folks at The Criterion Collection, who have always set the highest bar for others in the industry to watch, and who got into this business back when Laserdiscs were a niche, and thus made the transition to the mass market with the greatest care, and as little fuss as possible.

For now, we will leave this website online, and while we won't be posting any regular features, all are welcome to return and get a look at a decade's worth of DVD, in review.

Finally, we thank our readers, for we too have been a niche of sorts, happily reviewing movies and posting release news without the need to fling around pop-up ads or hawk particular products to cover our bottom line, or worry about our own "growth" for the sake of raw traffic numbers. We're glad you made the time to drop by. We had fun. We hope you did, too.

—The Editor

The Godfather Redux - Out Today

Here are more excerpts from press reviews of The Godfather - The Coppola Restoration out today on Blu-ray Disc and DVD.

'The Godfather,' at Its Greatest

By JEN CHANEY
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2008

Stop what you're doing and clear a space on that crowded home entertainment center shelf. Room must be made for "The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration," ($69.99) the box set that releases today and delivers one of the most influential series in cinema history, looking better than it ever has before.

A team of technicians spent more than a year meticulously restoring the three "Godfather" films, which also make their debut today on Blu-ray disc ($124.99). The results? A sun that shines even brighter on Connie Corleone's wedding day in "The Godfather"; blacker-than-midnight shadows in Michael Corleone's study in "The Godfather Part II"; and blood that pops with crisper crimson color during the Atlantic City shoot-out in "The Godfather Part III." In short, anyone who loves the movies simply must experience filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola's classics -- or at least the first two, since, let's face it, the third one most of us could take or leave -- through these DVDs, which capitalize on modern technology in a way that only enhances Coppola's and cinematographer Gordon Willis's original vision.

For those whose adoration of The Godfather" borders on religious fervor -- you know these people, they're the ones who can never resist a "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli" joke -- this collection is the definitive one to own. Everything that came with the 2001 box set, including several featurettes, 34 deleted scenes and three solid commentary tracks by Coppola, is here. But so is another disc with an all new slate of excellent extras, including one that explains every detail behind the restoration of the movies in more technical terms than some fans may have ever thought they needed.

Another smart addition: "Godfather World," a featurette that has great fun digging up homages to the mafia saga in everything from "The Simpsons" to "The Sopranos" to a recent Audi commercial. A wide range of admirers -- "Sopranos" creator David Chase, "South Park" mastermind Trey Parker, Coppola pal Steven Spielberg -- also appear in the interviews to explain why these movies have so widely influenced pop culture. (As actor Joe Mantegna puts it, "The Godfather" is "the Italian 'Star Wars.'")

Given the intense popularity and acclaim earned by this trilogy, some viewers may be surprised to realize how perilously close "The Godfather" came to never happening at all. The half-hour documentary "The Masterpiece That Almost Wasn't" delves into all that ugly behind-the-scenes history. For Corleone family scholars, many of the details -- about the shake-ups at Paramount in the late '60s and early '70s, the studio's desire to remove Coppola from the production and Al Pacino's near failure to be cast as Michael -- will sound very familiar. But for those just discovering these epics, the documentary does a fine, concise job of explaining this Oscar-winning enterprise's place in cinema history.

Most Oddly Comforting Bonus Point: With the economy on shaky ground, many Americans may find themselves living in fear of getting fired. Maybe some of them will feel better to know that, as "The Masterpiece That Almost Wasn't" and Coppola's commentary explain, the director lived with that same fear. And this guy is one of his generation's finest filmmakers. "It's a good reminder of what a delicate thing it is to create a really fine work of art, in any discipline," notes San Francisco Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle. "And how dangerous it is to interfere with that."

/entertainment

The battle over 'The Godfather'

At one point, Coppola was almost fired. Tempers were short. Arguments were constant.

And then, on March 15, 1972, "The Godfather" premiered, and the world changed.

"I was pulverized by the story and the effect the film had on me," Steven Spielberg says in documentary material accompanying the new, digitally cleaned and remastered "The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration." The new DVD edition of the "Godfather" trilogy is out Tuesday.

"I also felt that I should quit, that there was no reason I should continue directing because I would never achieve that level of confidence or the ability to tell a story [as well as Coppola did in 'The Godfather']," he added. "In a way, it shattered my confidence."

Behind the scenes, things weren't going as well. Besides casting, Coppola and studio executives battled over music (the studio didn't like Nino Rota's score) cinematography (Gordon Willis' compositions were considered too dark), locations (Coppola wanted New York; the studio suggested cheaper St. Louis) and even era (Coppola wanted a period piece, the studio wanted the present day).

"There were people on the crew trying to take over the production," Coppola protégé George Lucas recalls in the documentary material.

Oscar-winning sound editor Walter Murch, a longtime Coppola friend, recalls the director being saved by the Italian restaurant scene in which Michael kills two opponents. "The feeling up to that time was, 'What is this movie? It's not turning out the way we thought it would' -- whatever that was," he says in the DVD.

The bickering continued practically up to the release date, with Coppola overshooting the two-hour, 10-minute running time the studio desired and the studio -- though pleased with the final two-hour, 55-minute cut -- uncertain how to please exhibitors who longed for more showings. Paramount came up with two solutions: eliminate an intermission -- de rigueur for long movies -- and open it in many theaters at once.

What emerged was a phenomenon.

"The Godfather" opened wider than any film before, changing Hollywood economics, and became the most successful film in history up to its time. ("Jaws," its successor as box office king, would codify the wide opening once and for all.) The film won best picture, gave the language such lines as "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse," and spawned two sequels, a video game, more Puzo underworld novels and -- essentially -- every gangster work to follow.

"When we started 'The Sopranos,' [referencing 'The Godfather'] was one of the original conceits," says "Sopranos" creator David Chase in the DVD set. Indeed, "Sopranos" characters are forever quoting from the films, thinking of them as a model for the mob experience.

"The Godfather Part II," which came out in 1974, did what no sequel has done before or since: win best picture. With its more intricate structure, many critics consider it the best film of the three. The third film, "The Godfather Part III" (1990), though the least successful, still contains some fine work; as a character on "The Sopranos" said, "A lot of people didn't like it, but I think it was just misunderstood."

The American Film Institute ranks the first film as the second-best of all time, after "Citizen Kane"; Internet Movie Database denizens have ranked it as No. 1 or No. 2 for years. It's been more than 35 years now, and the films still have a hold on the American psyche.

Just ask Joe Mantegna, who starred in "Godfather III" and plays Fat Tony on "The Simpsons" -- a character that owes an obvious debt to "The Godfather."

" 'The Godfather' was the Italian 'Star Wars,' " he says in the DVD.

New DVDs: ‘The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration’

By DAVE KEHR The New York Times

‘THE GODFATHER: THE COPPOLA RESTORATION’

Many of Francis Ford Coppola’s films, including the recent “Youth Without Youth,” have been haunted by the passing of time and an acute awareness of its destructive handiwork — the sense that once a treasured moment has been lost, nothing can be done to recover it.

But now a piece of Mr. Coppola’s own youth, which also happens to be one of the greatest works in American film, has been recovered, and spectacularly so. On Tuesday Paramount Home Entertainment is issuing the three films that make up Mr. Coppola’s “Godfather” saga, miraculously rejuvenated by a team of digital restoration experts under the supervision of the film preservationist Robert A. Harris. Offered both in high-definition Blu-ray and standard DVD editions, Mr. Coppola’s three films seem to have reclaimed the golden glow of their original theatrical screenings — a glow that has been dimmed and all but extinguished over the years through a series of disappointing home video editions.

Most of Mr. Harris’s work has gone into the first (1972) and second (1974) films in the trilogy. The later and less well-received third installment (1990) did not need as much effort, having been shot on a newer generation of film stock and never subjected to the abuse that nearly destroyed Parts I and II. By all accounts, the original negatives of the first two films were so torn up and dirty that they could no longer be run through standard film laboratory printing equipment, and so the only option became a digital, rather than a photochemical, restoration.

The final product, which the studio is calling “The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration,” combines bits and pieces of film recovered from innumerable sources, scanned at high resolution and then retouched frame by frame to remove dirt and scratches. The color was brought back to its original values by comparing it with first-generation release prints and by extensive consultation with Gordon Willis, who shot all three films, and Allen Daviau, a cinematographer (“E.T.”) who is also a leading historian of photographic technology.

The tight grain of the image, so important a component of Mr. Willis’s original low-light photography, has returned to particularly spectacular effect in the four-disc Blu-ray edition. The effect is not unlike that of a pristine 35-millimeter print projected in perfect focus — a rare enough phenomenon in a movie theater and, until quite recently, inconceivable in the living room.