hipsofjw

RIP to Tony Rayns. The greatest film critic to ever live and a man whose work changed my life. Without his countless essays, commentaries, interviews and documentaries I don't think I would have explored so much Chinese cinema as a teenager and felt comfortable moving to Beijing right out of college

Featured on @rockpapershotgun.bsky.social today, with an absolutely wonderful writeup and analysis by Nic Reuben: "I had a hard time finding a single sentence in this thing I didn't want to screenshot." ❤️ www.rockpapershotgun.com/dont-get-you...

My ballot for the NYT top 10 films of the century. At least 5 films I wanted to list were not available which is pretty lame.

88's Her Vengeance shoots to the top of essential 2025 releases. This incredible film has been so difficult to see over the years. Fan edits have done their best to piece together the original director's cut, but even those have missing footage. Huge release.

Found a new favorite goofball

DeepSeek just completely refuses to translate the subtitles for Wong Kar-Wai's Shanghai Blossoms (no English release on the horizon). I thought this would be one thing AI would be good at but apparently it's just completely useless for everything.

Finally finished syncing Arrow's restored English audio track to the beautiful French UHD of Visconti's Ludwig. Doesn't seem like any USA/UK labels are interested in releasing this so I'd like to share it, but none of my current trackers will accept this type of upload. Anyone have a suggestion?

As a teenager, I spent a lot of time hanging around my local spiritual bookstore. Gnostic gospels, UFOs, JFK conspiracies, etc. Seeing Tribulation 99 laid out for me how the framework of conspiracy theories develop thus preparing me for Loose Change and eventually our paranoid present.

In case anyone hasn't seen this. One of the greatest performances of any type captures on film/video. Now finally with a decent rip.

Plex's home page really has the only algorithmic recommendations I need.

Next up is Disk Kino's excellent A Better Tomorrow UHD. It's the same scan as the Japanese disc but has a whole new HDR grading and Dolby Vision layer. It looks much more true to source now. The only downside is the bad English subs. Here is a replacement that's been cleaned up.

Refn's Pusher Trilogy UHD set up for order for $61 + very cheap international shipping (only $7 to China). Also includes Poul Nyrup's three feature films.

First new subtitle is for The Jokers' incredible 4K release of Kurosawa's Cure. Huge upgrade over the previous Blu-Rays and is almost guaranteed to have a better encode than Umbrella's upcoming disc. The retimed .srt floating around has OCR issues so take this one instead.

Re-posting my Drive archive of subtitles for UHD discs that I've prepared for players that accept external subs. Subs for HDR discs are even tone-mapped! Lots of incredible discs from around the world without English subtitles. I will be updating it with new subs over the weekend.

The new NAS is coming along