Product: Brother [VHS]
Rating: 2.0
Do Not Buy Region 1 DVD
Sony Pictures has tampered with the colors in Brother .Colors are not to be changed, they are to be left to their original tint or brightness.Today I bought Brother at Best Buy. I was happy to find that I got the last copy from the 2 shelves thatheld them. I was surprised that it was there, so I bought it. When I got to opening it, there was somenice cover art on the disc, and no collecter's booklet like on most Sony discs. I popped the discin to my new Panasonic RP56 and set down to watch on my Phillips 16:9 HDTV. Never have I seen a filmmurdered in front of my eyes.Aniki's(main character) world is not thrilling but grim. It is somewhat gloomy. There is an occasional colorflair(rare) to hint at a character's personality. Blacks are deep and accurate. There is tons of gray. Blue ison the dark side, green is in some scenes dark and other scenes light, finally red is crimson, andsometimes darker. All of this is represented accurately on the two DVD's I have previously watched(UKand Japan) and seen in a THX certified theater. The theater I saw the movie was dead on colorwise, andthe picture quality was unbeatable.The above is thrown out the window in the Sony Pictures Classics version. Gray is subdued and no longerprevalent. Blacks are ruined. This killed quite a number of scenes. Blue is no longer dark or a little dark,it's just plain blue. Green is a neon green in some scenes and now is a bright. Red is pushed, but justenough that the color is a bit lighter.The beginning scene is tarnished by the Sony version. Takeshi Kitano is standing waiting for a cab. In thescene, Takeshi Kitano is supposed to stick out, and the background is covered with a thin gray, to makehim prevalent. Instead the Sony Pictures Classic version completely takes out the gray, and the scene isthen butchered. The scene where Kitano murders the Latino drug dealer the blacks are deep, the colorssubdued. The Sony Pictures Classic version, pushes the flesh tones until the point of absurdity. Theblacks are off, and the green door to the left of Claude Maki is now a bright neon green, whereas theother versions had the door dark green or a light pine green.There also to seems to be a fairly large quantity of edge enhancement, which is absent on the 3 othersources. Everything is made vibrant, which makes no sense considering this is a very dark movie.What doesn't help the Sony Pictures Classics version is that its edited. The movie begins with a SonyPictures Classics label pasted over the Kitano label, with the background music still there. This tells youthat, you are about to view an inferior version. There are various edits to the movie digitally. Such aspainting over brain matter on walls from gun shot's, and time and gore edits. The stark emotion of theHagakure scene is also killed by the editing.The features? Just some stupid trailers for some movies that remind me of the word... Theaudio is sub par, and with the lack of DTS, it not worth the purchase. They did fix the subtitle problem Ihad with Japan Version, but I fixed that when I traded it in for the United Kingdom version.