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The King of MasksRating:
Release Date: 07 March, 2000 Retail Price: $27.95 OUR Price: $24.99 You SAVE: $2.96! Cast: |
The King of Masks Reviews
I'm with Verity on this one.
This is a wonderful film, but the cropping in the Sony version is god-awful. It takes some nerve to cut up a film that carelessly. I would recommend, instead, the Mei-Ah version from Hong Kong. While it has a few problems -- it's hardly a pristine transfer, it has a decidedly greenish color cast throughout, and the English subtitles are piled under subtitles in Chinese characters, all of which takes up a distracting amount of screen real estate -- but it preserves the correct aspect ratio, and for that alone it's worth having. See the dvdbeaver review for a comparison.
The good news is that the Mei-Ah disc is sometimes available on Amazon -- check with the seller first, as there are several Asian releases of this film! -- and when it is, it's always considerably less expensive than the Sony version.
Three stars for the Sony, based on the slice-n-dice, four for the Mei-Ah, based on the relatively poor transfer and distracting subtitling. At some point there's going to have to be a release of this that's as worthy of five stars as the film itself is, and that'll be a welcome disc indeed.
Great Movie, Poor DVD
The story is wonderful as other reviewers attest to. Its a shame that the audio and video quality is subpar by American standards. Much is also lost by cutting the film to fullscreen (4:3 ratio). Older Chinese films don't seem to get the same quality or quantity of releases as the newer ones.
Techinical purists may gag, but this may be the only chance to own this great film, even if it is in its lesser glory.
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