Customer Reviews

Paris Je T'Aime (Steelbook)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is THE WORST Blu-Ray transfer I have seen yet, merely because there are only Subtitles for The Hard Of Hearing, which destroy the film.

The most glaring offense is the mime scene, which has subtitles!

Simply beautiful movie - simply ruined.

A collection of 18 shorts, all based in Paris and loosely based around the various stages of relationships - starting, flourishing, crumbling. Some hit home more than others, and I think that will be different for everyone. But that's okay - if you don't like one segment, it'll be over in 5 minutes, and you can move on to the next! The obvious correlation is a book of short stories, but it actually reminded me more of walking through a museum with cityscapes on the wall, and your mind imagines what the backstory is on each set of characters and locations. This is like having a mini-glimpse into each painting. One thing I did notice is that love stories are often tragic - there are very few laughs in this movie (although the Coen Brothers segment with Steve Buscemi is freakin' hilarious!). I'm not going to review all the segments, but I will say that my favorite one is also one of the simplest, where a young mother leaves her baby at a nursery, then travels by bus and train across the city, just to act as nanny for someone else's baby. Simple, yet incredibly moving, and says more in three minutes than most movies say in two hours

DO NOT BUY THIS UNLESS YOU REQUIRE SDH(Subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing.

Apparently the production crew never bothered to include regular subtitles for those of us that actually can hear but can't understand French. They have managed to turn a wonderful film into an exercise in frustration; well done, Einsteins...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001CITQW2/ref=cm_cr_rev_prod_title

The english subtitles are for the hearing impaired, so you get subtitles for all sorts of sounds in the movie: [knock on door] [clock ringing] [horn sounds] You get the idea. The subtitles are very distracting and destroy the beauty of the movie. I feel ripped off by this shoddy presentation. Even english conversations have subtitles. What a rip off. Shame on the idiots who thought this was a good idea.

This film is 20 different five minute short films. Each five minute film takes on a different setting in Paris and each is written & shot by a different director. The interweaving theme for each film is love. There's not much more I can add to the already numerous reviews. I will say this a beautiful film on Blu-Ray, but the extras/supplements are almost non-existent (one 20 min. documentary). For the price and technology available at least some commentaries would've been nice. But alas, it is not meant to be. I picked the Blu-Ray up on amazon for $14.99. The lack of extras and CGI don't necessarily make this a "must own" on Blu-Ray, so if you can find the DVD cheaper and are not a huge cinephile, I say snag this one up on DVD or wait for thr Blu-Ray to come around $10 to get your money's worth.

If you love Paris, then you will love this eclectic collection of 5-minute short films, directed by many famous directors, all themed on neighborhoods in Paris. Enjoy!

Those with large-screen HDTVs have something of a dilemma here. The Blu-ray version is sharper and more beautiful to look at than the DVD, but it is marred by excessively large and intrusive subtitling for the hearing-impaired. Subtitling is a necessary evil for those of us who do not have a fluent understanding of French, but those of us with hearing do not need to have every sound effect explicated, nor English subtitles for those bits of this film that are spoken in English. Although the subtitling is larger than it needs to be, I would still recommend the Blu-ray version for those who are not bothered by what amounts to closed-captioning rather than standard subtitling. You're also in luck if you can read Spanish, for which standard subtitles are available.

My aggravation with the Blu-ray subtitling led me to do some research, including the reviews here at Amazon; and I found contradictory and ambiguous remarks regarding the subtitling available on the DVD, which is entirely understandable because the DVD itself is confusing in this regard. To resolve the matter, I rented a copy of the DVD; and the following are my findings, which I hope will clear this up for customers:

If you simply play the movie on DVD without going through subtitle setup, you will see normal English subtitles; however, if you go through setup, you will see only a choice between Spanish and English SDH (or "Off"); and if you choose English SDH, you are stuck with the extraneous and distracting information on screen. The main reason that I am writing this footnote of a review is to say that, in spite of the labeling on the package, and in spite of the explicit choices on the Setup Menu, there are--on the DVD only--*four* subtitle options; to access them you simply have to use the subtitle button on your remote control while the disc is playing. There you will find that you can choose "English," "Spanish," "English," or "Off." That's right: there are two labeled "English" without differentiation, except for one being numbered (on my player, anyway) #1, and the other #3. On my player #1 was English SDH; and #3 was standard English subtitles.

Please understand that I have nothing against providing English for the Hearing Impaired, and the DVD shows that this can be done without rattling the rest of us; I do not know what the constraints were on the Blu-ray that prevented this sensible approach, nor why First Look Pictures chose to hide the standard-English option on the DVD.

One of the things that was unclear to me in going through the reviews was whether or not one needed to buy the special 2-disc edition in order to get the standard English subtitles. Based upon the fact that my rental disc does not say Disc 1 on it, I assume that it is not from the 2-disc set; furthermore, some of the reviews here and elsewhere have indicated that Disc 1 of the 2-disc set is identical to the single-disc edition. I cannot speak for the Steelbook edition, but I would be surprised if the standard-English-subtitle feature had been removed, which I assume would have been extra effort for Steelbook. Thus, I believe that only the Blu-ray edition suffers from this particular flaw, leaving prospective buyers with the choice of a clearer but more cluttered image on Blu-ray, or a fuzzier but less distracting image on the DVD.

Oh, yes, the movie: I found this collection of short films charming, often whimsical, and sometimes wise; and the Paris scenery ain't bad, either. If I were reviewing the DVD, I would give it four stars, but have docked the Blu-ray a star for its clumsy production.

A very significant cultural overview of the paritian life and people. The visual images make you fill that you are really walking on the streets and neiborhoods of Paris.

The individual segments vary from ho-hum to exquisite but taken as a whole the film is stunning. It's rather like looking at the same scene from twenty different angles. And the producers fulfilled their promise to order the segments in a way that created something greater than the sum of its parts. Mission definitely accomplished. As a film it deserves better than 4 out of 5.
Now for the problems. The smaller issue is the omission of the material on the second disc of the DVD release. A wonderful series of "making of" mini docs for every segment. But that mistake pales by comparison with . . . . . Some moron signed off on the issue of this Blu-Ray disc with subtitles in English only for the hard of hearing. No choice. That or nothing. Result? Unless your French is pretty good, you're stuck with inane subtitles that indicate things like when there is music playing, or which off-screen character is speaking. Horrible and jarring. What makes it particularly unforgivable is that the same mistake was made on the DVD release and generated a lot of complaints. Apparently nobody cared enough to fix it in the Blu-Ray. If you don't think this could be a problem, try it. You'll wish you hadn't spent the $20 or so to learn the lesson!

The only english subtitle track is for the deaf, and includes subtitles for the english as well as the french. Oh, and for the sound effects. Really? They didn't want to spring for one extra subtitle track for, oh, I don't know, 90% of the people who buy the film? Highly professional. No, all that extra crap cluttering up the screen isn't distracting at all, thanks. Bottom line, DO NOT BUY.