I dunno if "start off unpleasant and end up downright icky" is quite the way I'd put it. 2's rape scene, especially the uncut version, puts it right up there with the most disgusting and exploitative films ever made. Seriously, that scene should have gotten the director committed. 3, 4 and 5 (even 3 with its…

Somehow I'm guessing he was born well before 1990.

The review on blu-ray.com is from a guy that has a history of doing that with controversial Criterion releases. Reviews on virtually every other site mention the problem, and as you said, it's immediately obvious in the screen shots that accompany it.

La Jetee is a masterpiece, IMO. The Fifth Element is kind of annoying, but I can't see how you could dismiss La Jetee, unless you tend to just hate anything too far outside the ordinary from that period.

Wow. Thinking back on that commercial is giving me existential dread now, too. Thanks!!

There is a very long thread on the blu-ray.com forums in which people who are intimately familiar with the film post a ton of things like contemporary promo artwork, magazine scans from the time, posters, etc, all of which have the much more earthy color tone of all of the earlier transfers. The new transfer is the…

Yeah, Charade is definitely worth buying the Criterion blu-ray of, it's a great-looking movie. I had one of those public domain DVDs for a while too. It was a revelation seeing it look how it was supposed to.

They had chicken wire in front of the screen to block all the flying beer bottles.

Duel is absolutely better and more tense than Jurassic Park, by a huge amount. I don't agree with him about Jaws, but Jurassic Park is definitely B-tier Spielberg and Duel is an incredible debut.

Be aware that the company that did the new transfer for this is infamous for turning everything blue, and this is one of their worst jobs yet. Criterion was stuck with what they gave them. Several scenes have been tinted blue so badly that they now look like day-for-night shots, and the color scheme has been crushed…

The Criterion has some extras, but the Eureka UK release has more, and doesn't have this new, botched blue transfer.

This new criterion is already infamous for being a terrible botch-job. The new transfer has a hideous cyan tint over much of the film - some sequences in particular have all the color drained out of them and look like they've been changed to day for night. You can see screen capture comparisons on a variety of…

Beautiful Garbage has a few songs on it that I love utterly and have listened to hundreds of times (Breaking Up the Girl and Parade in particular), but it's not like Version 2.0 where I want to listen to the entire album every time I hear a song on it. Stuff like Androgyny and Shut Your Mouth realllllly did not do it…

Even as a huge horror fan, I dislike these movies. I still remember my first viewing of the first film, which I flat-out hated. It's so smug, ugly, and bland. I remember being completely perplexed by all the reviews talking about how intelligent and meta it was, while it felt like extremely uninteresting mainstream…

I thought the message wasn't that "anyone can cook," it was that "a great cook can come from anywhere," aka more of an objectivist thing where only the limited few can be great. I did see it when I was at the height of being annoyed by the college objectivist club, though!

My love for the guy has really blossomed in recent years, as I've uncovered his championing of various smaller cult films. For example, I love that he wrote the intro to the wonderful "All the Colors of the Dark," a tremendous labor-of-love book about Mario Bava. The guy loves movies of all kinds and most definitely…

Yep. It's just going to make the republican establishment back away from him even further than they did with his judge comments. There are plenty of idiots out there that think he's making a great point, but not enough for him to come anywhere close to winning the election.

I don't think we're in a swing toward ignorance. I think in the last few years with EVERYONE getting on facebook and the internet, we're seeing the same small minority of hateful idiots now have a very visible public platform which makes them seem to have a much larger presence than they actually do. I doubt they…

"Marcia Clark and Chris Darden are the worst lawyers of all time and are soooo stupid and are totally banging each other" might have been funny back in about 1998, but at this point when most people have finally realized Marcia Clark suffered some of the most horrific concentrated public sexism of the last 20 years,…

Fair enough! I sorta lost patience with 30 Rock after a couple seasons for seeming like nothing more than a "jokefest" so we just clearly are looking for different things. And by "terrible in comparison to S2" I just mean S2 was one of my favorite things ever and at some point a few episodes in I was blown away by…