I think that they felt pressure to have this one done so the next one could be done as well––at that time people were clamoring for a more eminently watchable version of Days of Being Wild, especially, and that restoration was meant to come afterwards, I think. That never came to pass, but I think it was still on board as a merchandising hook when they began trying to restore Ashes of Time. The box that the restored Happy Together DVD came in was meant to house DVDs of later restorations, I believe.
There was also a time issue––as Bordwell mentions, the previously restored Happy Together was meant to be the first of a series of retrospective restorations of Wong's films undertaken by Jet Tone. I also at one point had heard that the color shifts in the redux were in some cases masking significant color alteration of the original negative that they couldn't clean up, for one reason or another.
I can't recall where but I heard something similar about the Redux version: that the "restoration" part of the process was done very poorly, and that the result was, I believe less that full hi-def. This has more or less killed the prospect of one of my favorite concert films, Pink Floyd: Live At Pompeii, ever getting a good high-def presentation, as the negative and 548 cans of trims were burned to make space without the director knowing, and the next best sources are several generations away from the negatives. I wish that it wasn't an industry standard to just junk trims, or even complete negatives. There was even some sort of April Fool's joke about it, some 15 years later. That's disturbing, though I did some research on Kung Fu Cult Master, and from what I can ascertain, Part 2 was simply never shot. And it seems like a kind of torture to have to wade through director's cuts of BvS: DOJ or Suicide Squad. Some of them, like the director's cut of Donnie Darko, actually ruin the film, to my eyes. So few of these alternate cuts of movies are proving to be really significantly different films. But I wonder if the day of the director's cut special edition is waning a little. Didn't they discard part 2 of Kung Fu Cult Master in its entirety, or was that just a legend of sorts? I would imagine Warner Bros keeps absolutely everything. It's too bad, really.įeihong wrote:Well in Hong Kong they do throw out the trims, I believe.
A lot of people haven't seen it, or been able to see it. But irregardless, that original cut of the film, available only on VHS, Laserdisc and a non-anamorphic, very out-of-print Mei Ah DVD (the quality of which is terrible, by the way), is really far out of circulation at this point.
And yet, I loved the movie when I first saw it, knowing next to nothing about it. Still, I suppose this is the least accessible of Wong's films for audience cultures outside of China––not knowing anything about Jin Yong's writing stands in the way of enjoying the film fully. Whereas the abrupt, jarring editing of the original version made the material come alive. But you can see the film itself being made "classy" in the Redux in terms of editing. A huge part of the difference was the score, which was tarted up with "class" for the Redux in the absolute worst way possible. The Redux is an absolute misery as far as I'm concerned, while the original cut was a really exciting movie. But I think the original Ashes of Time is gone, to a large extent, and nobody knows the difference. His used to be one of the simplest filmographies to be a completist on. Growing up in film with the emergence of Wong Kar-Wai, it never occurred to me that there would be people who didn't go through that same experience, who didn't know which films he made and what they were like. Shrew wrote: I fear a lot of repertories (or interns filling in program details off imdb) just aren't aware of the differences.