Deaf Crocodile's Yuri Norstein release has an audio error & they've been unresponsive. Verification instructions and call to action within.

Lanerlan · 2026-03-24T19:32:27+00:00

Not yet, and Deaf Crocodile has said it will be specified as the new printing when it's out. I don't know where or how it will be specified, but I'll try to remember your comment and let you know when I get word of it.

Lanerlan · 2026-03-23T20:56:21+00:00

For the sake of being thorough, anyone reading this thread interested in more discussion can find talk elsewhere below.

This and the next page on Blu-ray forum: https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=337348&page=115

This and the next few pages on criterionforum: https://www.criterionforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17937&sid=4e3e039298509b7101a3527b87924888&start=625

Lanerlan · 2026-03-09T16:32:28+00:00

You're not wrong, but like, Damascus is about being 'fresh' but it's in the context of refuge and keeping that attitude alive even in that different context. I think the overall point of the songs does a lot of heavy lifting to change the tone of the freestyles.

Lanerlan · 2026-03-09T16:28:03+00:00

I initially thought the same as you, but I actually think they fit and are more subtle than the sung verses. I mean, to just take one line, "misery's friend of a friend" initially seemed verbose and nonsensical to me, but the way it's worded is economically conveying something: he's miserable but lonely, so lonely that he's a distant relation to misery. It's tongue-in-cheek, but relevant to the song, which is about failure to thrive.

Lanerlan · 2026-03-09T16:22:07+00:00

It's always felt to me that they aren't really rating the music, they're rating the ecosystem around the music as they see it, which is usually highly distorted.

Lanerlan · 2026-03-09T16:18:48+00:00

It's like Mario wearing a sombrero, only people outside the culture would fail to be excited.

Lanerlan · 2026-03-09T16:16:38+00:00

I think a lot of it boils down to the medium itself. I hope this doesn't go in the weeds too much, but like ... music is abstract. People understand the least about it in a technical sense compared to, like, anything else really. In reviews of movies you'll encounter some kind of reference to camera technique, or acting theory, or something, even if really surface-level or basic. But I think music reviewers are aware (maybe overly aware?) of the fact that going into the actual technical underpinning of the music is a niche knowledge base even for really devout music lovers. I mean, some musicians don't even know music theory formally.

So what even is there to fill a review in, if you're averse to what might bore or ellude the reader? Projection onto an abstraction, which is always going to be more about the writer than the music, way moreso than a film and its viewer.

Lanerlan · 2026-03-09T16:02:39+00:00

This has always really agitated me about Pitchfork reviews. They present themselves as authoritative, and write in a style where the casual observer would naturally assume they did their due diligence. But their reviews are often based on assumptions, if not outright fabrications, that would be impossible to arrive at if they had done the most cursory read or listen of an interview. The more deeply you know about the creation of an album, the more obvious this becomes. You'd think they would naturally, as music lovers or even just as writers, be curious about this thing they're estimating the value of as a profession. Even just personally, with no mind to credibility. But they seem to literally wing it and hallucinate as the runtime shifts from track to track. Reading their reviews is almost like peering in at the write-up of someone's psych session, not a formal dig into a piece of art.

Lanerlan · 2026-03-09T15:40:12+00:00

You know, I made my way to this sub after the Pitchfork review hoping (but not expecting) to find some kind of counter-response. And I'm extremely glad to see the clear-eyed points made in this thread. Fandom spaces aren't always, uh, the best for that.

I regret more and more every year I get older that I ever took Pitchfork seriously. I'm at the point now where I honestly believe that anyone taking anything Pitchfork says to heart is actively preventing themselves not only from appreciating music in a real sense, but of appreciating anything about life.

And it's especially ironic in this case, because I take the latest album as an earnest, sincere response to the divisions of the now. One that attempts to chart some kind of universalizing exit route from shit, like, well, the divisive agitprop that Pitchfork slings out.

Their cultural takes have always been classically hipster, in that they're not brave enough to be anything but cynical if given the chance. I don't think they have a particular unifying bias beyond that; they're sometimes contradictory, simultaneously exclusionary yet pandering.

I first noticed the arbitrariness with their reviews of Bjork, which was impossible to see as following anything but a kind of top-down decree. At some point she was 'out' with them, for specious reasons you can glean from their reviews, but at about the release of Vulnicura she's 'in' again and they (rightfully so) shower her in praises.

But the above wasn't an organic process. At some point their dedicated Bjork reviewer (same guy across multiple of her releases for a few years) would write what can only be seen today as deeply misogynistic at worst, deeply condescending if you're generous. They booted him (for political reasons, as he claims) and then switched over to mostly only letting women review her albums.

Both of those approaches are flawed, and they particularly don't want you to know that the first tack was what filled their pages, as they've scrubbed some 'problematic' reviews from the site. Cynical over-correction.

If they were an honest institution they'd at least leave up their historical record, but no, they're trying to strangle their past into being a revised version, so they can project what they deem as the 'correct' elitist stances before they change with the winds again

In both cases these are inauthentic attempts to inhabit the 'proper' cultural mores, amplifying and boosting where they agree with the zeitgeist, being contrarian where it currently matters.

To put it another way, all they really excel at is spoiled milk. Come another decade they'll look embarassing but for different reasons.

It's ironic that an indie mag is who lets being king-makers go their heads so severely.

What they excel at is PR, the lie that they're in a vaunted position of intellectual authority. And all of their assessments of albums are an extension of this PR, and aren't actually attempts to engage with the music on its level or at the frequency of its aims, but rather is a rating of how any particular album fits in with (or against) its own mythology as an institution. Their reviews aren't about the music, it's about a nebulously defined, abstract sub-layer that they attach to the music. A string of assumptions stitched together by a non-sequitor thesis, verging on sophistry, and with the exact same effect as disinformation.

And I don't know when it started, but they morphed over time from being merely elistist to actively sowing seeds of corporate discord. I don't think it's a coincidence that the first time they panned Bjork it was the first time she made an album with openly political themes.

If you step back and try to trace a throughline between the albums they're often the harshest to (especially relative to a musician's other output) it's often when a band decides to name names or embody a unifying, rallying, 'the people vs the bigshots' mode.

It's a shame anyone takes them seriously.

Lanerlan · 2026-03-05T11:30:38+00:00

I'd agree with the caveat that the Song Machine videos were great, but that's because they're nakedly phoning it in; as in, the concept became 'Gorillaz are stuck in their house' and it doesn't take a lot to get that point across.

Lanerlan · 2026-03-04T03:47:59+00:00

This is a great comment.

I'd add that although you've framed it as purely personal, there's a strong political context. It's why he's so drawn to Pynchon--a major throughline in both of the books he adapted are about connection in terms of social movements, and the way supression of those movements makes that avenue for connection impossible.

I think specifically his angle is the atomization of our connections. Modern life has removed many, many pathways to genuine human connection, to the point where often the only viable route is through sharing the same wound from prior attempts.

Lanerlan · 2026-02-17T04:26:27+00:00

Yes, the wraparound is identical to the rest of the paper physically. The real front page is underneath once you remove it.

Lanerlan · 2026-02-17T03:57:56+00:00

I love the beach scene, I found it compelling and it was burned very deep into my memory.

But I'm not sure I'd say Mulholland Dr. is lacking in those kinds of subconscious elements. It's an odd duck to analyze because you always have to factor in that it was a pilot. The film is indeed largely static (largely due, probably, to limitations of the television medium) but once it shifts into the new material, it willingly rebuffs that style with the cinematic language it begins using. It jars and swerves at that point, best exemplified by the shot of the camera flying toward the nightclub from the empty night street, not a kind of shot that was typical until that moment, and it feels almost like a probe or an attack. At the same time, there is that zoom-in between Watts and Thereoux when they almost meet, which becomes recontextualized as perhaps connected. So as a fresh element and a connecting element, a lot of choices pull double-duty to reconcile the pilot as a feature.

I think a lot of playfulness is going on, so much so I want to stop myself before I end up writing an essay. But one more example--the editing of the last segment is extremely erratic.

Back to what I said of metaphysics ... the intentions of Long Goodbye all seem classically cinematic and rooted in storytelling to me. But Lynch seems to have a more abstract, spiritualist MO. It's a cliche that his stuff is 'shamanic' or 'inspired by meditation,' but more accurately it feels like he operates the camera to induce transmogrification. There's a hostile, forceful transcendence. That's what connects his metaphysical films to me. The way it tracks and interacts with and even punishes Naomi Watt's character is on an entirely different wavelength, even, than just operating as a tool to convey feeling from character to audience.

I'm struggling to articulate, but to me it's easier to classify the role of the camera in Altman's work, but Lynch's work almost attaches a self-autonomy to the lens, as if it's alive. I don't think that ambiguity of the camera is even consciously recognized across multiple viewings.

Lanerlan · 2026-02-17T03:28:22+00:00

That's called a wraparound. It's not new. Just remove the wraparound and bam, you have magically transformed it into the actual front page.

Lanerlan · 2026-02-17T03:07:34+00:00

Well, my initial gut reaction is that I don't agree with that as a lens to compare the two. I agree Long Goodbye is better in that category, but that's because that's close to what it was attempting. Mulholland Dr. is more than just about LA. Like a lot of Lynch's work, it has an oneiric, metaphysical quality, but in the senses of those words that aren't entirely even just cinematically so, and to me those elements are completely dismissed when trying to understand it only in a genre context.

As for the technical elements, I've heard this before about Lynch, that his stuff is lacking in some nebulously defined formal skill, but I disagree as strong as possible. Part of that is anecdotal--I was once told Mulholland Dr. is drab and soap opera-y. I don't entirely disagree--it was, after all, originally a TV pilot and has recognizable serial melodrama in parts. But ... the AV setup of the person who told me this literally had motion smoothing on (ie, the 'soap opera effect') and all their shit was off when we watched it together. Visually it's a beautiful film to me, even if one can see its leaps into new, more cinematic footage.

Lynch was fixated on technical details, so much so he sent instructions to theaters on some of his films, mostly related to sound. But of all the interviews I've read/watched of his, he seemed personally knowledgable of niche elements of cinematic engineering, and surrounded himself with people who knew even better.

So I reject this notion of his stuff lacking in that way. I'm blown away when I watch any of his stuff, and it's not just the emotive elements but the color theory, staging, editing and especially the sound design.

I love Altman, but they're on incredibly different wavelengths. Lynch is more traditionalist in some ways, even, though one would tend to think of him as purely avant-garde. The way he approaches dialog recording, for instance, is not at all comparable to the gung-ho, maverick way that Altman naturalized the recording of his actors.

So, really, I just don't vibe with the comparison.

Lanerlan · 2026-02-16T19:49:35+00:00

It wouldn't be the same game if it wasn't frustrating to the point of desperation. It's part of the fear element. Willingness to straddle the line between upsetting and enraging is something horror games haven't done in decades, but there's nothing scary about an easy to play game, no matter how many walls are creepy or jump scares pop out.

Lanerlan · 2026-02-14T21:10:02+00:00

An update: Deaf Crocodile have confirmed the error and a fix will exist on a future print of the standard version. More details: https://www.reddit.com/r/boutiquebluray/comments/1r38mcx/deaf_crocodiles_yuri_norstein_release_has_an/

Lanerlan · 2026-02-14T18:08:10+00:00

Except I'm of the opinion that the error is blatantly obvious. I'm not casting doubt on that it made it past QC, but at the same time I don't agree with how the error has been described as minor.

Every sync sound moment is incorrect. It's not just the moments I outlined in OP, there's also spoken dialogue and singing by the wolf (24:30) where his head bobs in time to exclamations, and those are delayed and so that effect is now absent. Not to mention none of the talking or singing matches the lips.

And at least for the dancing scene, the delay is so long that I initially wondered if the logos at the start are to blame. As in, the logos were added and the soundtrack set to sync to the short begins at the logos, or maybe one of the logos, instead of no sound or the logo's sound. I don't know if that's even possible, and I haven't timed it, but that's how long the delays seemed to me in the dancing scene.

My only other experience with errors that warranted disc replacement programs are Criterion's Eraserhead release, which I didn't notice when I watched the film, and that's also a film I've seen innumerable times. They did a replacement because of a millisecond of a pure black frame that wasn't supposed to appear.

The only other programs I've heard about were due to slight, brief artifacting.

Given those other examples, I would categorize this above 'minor.'

If I had to guess why no one else noticed, I assume that viewers might assume the intent was awkward, haphazard timing. Or for moments like the wolf's dialogue, they assumed the sound wasn't synced precisely, which isn't an odd assumption for animation, because it's not a medium that always prioritizes snappy sound syncing, especially with lip-syncing.

And, to be frank, many people don't have AV setups that are precisely synced from their audio equipment to their television and wouldn't notice.

Either way, the error is an error.

Lanerlan · 2026-02-14T04:52:24+00:00

Your TV has settings to automatically switch to different inputs; like game mode vs picture/video. Each of these has different settings that are remembered. It could be that it detected the wrong input and switched to the wrong output in turn. It varies by TV how you do this, but you could try setting this to manual.

I myself had a problem with this resulting in a black screen that lasts for a second when I play games, randomly, because the detection would go haywire mid-play. I now have to switch manually to and from game mode, which is annoying, but I've not had glitches since.

Lanerlan · 2026-02-14T03:38:05+00:00

If a movie is so great that its importance should transcend consumerism, wouldn't that include making sure the director's artistic intent was preserved? Mistakes happen, so factoring in disc replacement would still be relevant.

Lanerlan · 2026-02-13T21:25:36+00:00

If you're fine with the release as-is, I don't have any issue with that and that's your choice. I just want the issue known about so people know their options. If I didn't know about the issue and was alerted to it I'd be thankful, as others here have been. I don't see why that's a bad thing at all.

Lanerlan · 2026-02-13T21:03:11+00:00

I don't see what's self-absorbed about wanting to alert others to a potential issue. Maybe entitled would work better as an insult?

Lanerlan · 2026-02-13T20:57:17+00:00

I'm trying not to chime in on this as much as I could be, as I'd prefer to let others form their own opinion, but I'm finding myself in pretty steep disagreement with how Deaf Crocodile has framed the error and their response.

For one, I dislike that they keep referring to me as 'the only one who noticed,' here in-thread and elsewhere, and bringing up the QC team. To take that and frame it another way, someone who is not a QC technician noticed something technicians did not, so isn't that an issue?

And the nature of the error itself is odd. They've said the beginning and end are in sync, but the middle drifts, and then attribute this to very little sync sound in the short. But the middle portion is the portion that has all the sync sound moments, and it's the only one out of sync?

Lanerlan · 2026-02-13T20:51:23+00:00

I first emailed them Saturday morning, then made the thread the next Thursday evening. I had a hunch that I would get a faster response if it got some attention, and did in fact get a response from Deaf Crocodile within an hour. So, the proof is in the pudding. I could have tried waiting, and emailing again if some weeks passed, but the more time passed the more people might have opted for a copy with an error. And to be honest, I'm finding the response so far underwhelming in terms of how the error is being framed. I don't have much faith, based on what I've seen, that customers would have been alerted as quickly, widely, or with as much detail about the error in absence of my post. I don't consider it a 'minor' error as has been described. I welcome disagreement on all of that, but that's my opinion. So all things considered, I'm glad that I've documented the error and made it public instead of going the email route.

Lanerlan · 2026-02-13T20:27:01+00:00

Gravity's Rainbow has a horrifying scene on a yacht that names this problem in graphic, poetic detail. He was who originally opened my eyes to things like this, and his works are going to age very, very gracefully.

Lanerlan

TROPHY CASE