Customer Reviews

The Last Emperor - Director's Cut [VHS]

5 star:		(47)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

I'll make this review short and sweet. First off, the movie itself is derserving of all its Oscar wins. The acting is superb, the cinematography is breathtaking, and the story is significant if not moving. If you are a movie lover you will certainly appreciate the beauty and power of this film. So why only 3 stars? I simply can't give the DVD more than 3 stars, becuase quite frankly, this movie deserves a better film transfer and better audio on DVD. The picture is sub-par when you compare it to almost all the new DVD releases today, and the sound is a little better, but not by much. Perhaps the studio should revisit this title and clean it up with a loaded new special edition release with a squeaky clean anamorphic picture transfer with DD 5.1 and DTS sound to boast. This DVD's director's cut is also much longer than the original, which in my opinion, doesn't hurt the film at all, but it doesn't improve the film drastically either. So base your buying decision on the following fact: this is a masterpiece movie on a sub-par DVD transfer. To me, the movie was a must have DVD, which was worth the purchase price alone. Afterall, it is still better than VHS.

"The Last Emperor" is the Academy Award winning movie about China's last imperial ruler, Pu Yi (John Lone). Taken from his mother at the age of three and raised to believe in his own divinity as absolute monarch, Pu Yi?s marriage to Wan Jung (Joan Chen) is marred by her opium addiction and the tragic death of their only child and heir to the throne. Peter O?Toole appears as Reginald Johnston, English tutor to his majesty in the ways of diplomacy and the outside world. The film presents China?s Forbidden City as allegory for the pampered but caged existence of wealth and the destructive nature of absolute power. Eventually forced to flee his gated paradise, Pu Yi succumbs to the decadence of becoming a playboy, a stooge of the Japanese, and a victim of China's cultural reforms and re-education programs.

The film is a poignant, heart-breaking, tragic and sweeping saga that won, among its other award, the Oscar for best cinematography. But you'd ever guess it by looking at this DVD transfer. The 2:35:1 image has not been anamorphically enhanced and exhibits just about every digital anomaly that one can find on a poorly mastered DVD. There's edge enhancement, aliasing, fine detail shimmering, color smearing, tiling, color distortion, loss of fine details, extremely low contrast levels, disturbing halos and fading of the film?s negative. There are chips, scratches, tears and camera negative jitter. The audio is a rather dismal 2.0 mix. After viewing this travesty it is my sincere hope that whoever was responsible for mastering this DVD will never get the opportunity to be near such equipment again. There are no extras and no reason why anyone should invest in this DVD.
BOTTOM LINE: JUST DO NOT BUY THIS MOVIE! There's nothing to recommend the print used or the mastering employed to bring it to the small screen. If there was room to rate this disc as 'zero' stars I would have done just that. Unfortunately, 'one' is the lowest I could go.

While this is an excellent and engaging movie, DVD collectors should wait until another release to become available. The picture quality of this DVD is amazingly BAD, worse than VHS in some segments. Picture is dark in general, resolution low, colors bleed all over the place, and dialogs are difficult to understand. I am not sure how the disc was mastered, but the person who did it should be fired.

It was a mistake to have purchased it sight unseen. 1 star for being a good movie and the commentary.

This is a WONDERFUL movie. One of my favorites. But this is a TERRIBLE DVD.

There are no special features, although there is a text box on the back of the box supposedly enumerating the "Special Features" (including the "4:3 Widescreen" format).

The "widescreen" format is simply a scam! The original (2.35?) aspect ratio of the film has been reduced to 4:3 pan and scan, then "enlarged" for 16:9 by cutting off the top and bottom! The resolution is AWFUL. Worse than over-the-air analog broadcasts.

I was so horrified at the quality of the picture I can't speak to the value of the additional footage, or even to the sound quality. I was simply unable to watch such awful treatment of a great cinematographer's work.

Ask any director in a world not yet blessed with The Last Emperor whether it might be possible to create a film that documents, with reasonable depth and historical accuracy, the modernization of China--from imperial days through the Cultural Revolution--and that does so while managing also to capture the immeasurable gravity, ethos, and pathos of the twentieth century and all its billions, and you'd be told in so many words that such a task was absolutely, without a doubt, impossible, no matter the allotted length.

But Bertolucci does it here in a single DVD's length, without offending the historian's peculiar sensibilities, abusing the casual filmgoer's expectations, or descending into vulgar and sledgehammer-like metaphor and simile for the sake of efficiency. This film draws one's attention to the matter at hand, not to itself, its director, or any present flaws (to my eye, there are few or none).

Indeed, The Last Emperor may be one of the small handful of Perfect Films yet created in the history of film, able and willing to showcase all that is good and all that is necessary about the arts and their ability to drive our own will to identification.

I won't bother with plot or synopses here. Suffice it to say that this film is the twentieth century encapsulated, in every best and worst way that one might imagine, somehow made at once informative and accessible. It is the sort of film from which no-one can turn, both pedagogical and affecting, the sort of film that makes grown men cry and cynics pray, even if they're not sure to whom their prayer is addressed.

As a final aside: though there are many poor reviews of the DVD media here, the situation is somewhat more mixed than many of them let on. The DVD is indeed of a poorer resolution than most anamorphic widescreen DVDs. However, viewers who don't happen to own 16:9 HDTV sets won't be able to see the difference, since the resolution of the film on this DVD still exceeds what a "standard" television set can display.

what's the point of releasing a marvelous film on DVD if you do such a bad job? the dvd has no subtitles. Compared to the original theatre release, the picture quality on the DVD is terrible, colors and contrast level are all ruined. It's a shame the film makers actually let this happen to a masterpiece. I wouldn't purchase this DVD even if the manufacturer gave me money.

I was very much looking forward to see the director's cut of "The Last Emperor". Unfortunately the quality of the DVD is so bad that it's not worth watching. After 15 minutes I shut it off because I could not stand it anymore. Hopefully someone will make a decent transfer of this movie to DVD, otherwise keep your fingers off if you own a projector or a decent widescreen TV.

Since I saw Bernardo Bertolucci's epic, The Last Emperor in the theater when it was released, I have been a fan of this wonderful movie. I was thrilled when it was released on DVD and rushed to get my hands on a copy. I had never seen the director's cut which comes in at a whopping 3 hours and 38 minutes. Don't worry, the film is extremely long, but holds your interest captive the whole time.

To my horror, the video transfer on this DVD was one of the worst I had ever seen! I'm sure the VHS version is far superior to this transfer. Why would anyone cram such a long film with beautiful Oscar winning cinemetography onto one side of a single layered disc? The digital artifacts and shimmering are so bad that it's nearly impossible to enjoy the film. I have yet to see the director's cut of this movie because I had to stop watching. This is the only DVD I have ever returned due to poor quality. I still eagerly await a DVD transfer of this great movie that does it the justice it deserves.

Sadly, I heartily do NOT recommend this DVD due to dismal video quality although this is one of my favorite films.

I'm not a big fan of director's cuts, they tend to be long and plodding. But for a historical biography like that of Pu-Yi, you really need the extra time to covers a man's entire life at an appropriate pace. This is a wonderful story well told.

That said, this is simply the worst looking DVD I have ever seen - skies have a grainy, bitmapped quality, images have nasty sawtoothed edges, noticeable even on my low resolution TV set. The reason for this poor quality is simple: they tried to squeeze a 3 hour and 38 minute film, plus a theatrical trailer, onto a single DVD disc, even while similarly long films like Lawrence of Arabia, The Ten Commandments, Cleopatra, Godfather II, are routinely spread over two discs precisely to avoid such problems.

The folks at Artisan should hide their heads in shame for defacing this masterpeace, which looks worse on DVD than on VHS, and look only a bit better (pun intended) than a video downloaded off the Internet. I had assumed that the February 2002 release date listed meant that other complaints about DVD quality referred to problems on a previous release that had now been corrected. I was sorely mistaken.

The company should be accused for savage atrocity in spoiling the masterpiece in the visaul aspect. They must reissue correcting the visual quality. It's a terror to the customer who buy it in good faith... They should apologize or recall it!