We've Definitively Found Looking For Mr. Goodbar!

This is probably the most surprising "M.I.A." post I'll ever write on this blog. It's crazy that this was never, ever released on DVD, yet alone blu. Like, I'd be delighted to see one of my favorite cult labels procure the rights for a restored, special edition of Spirits of Jupiter. But I also realize that probably puts me on a very short list of cinephiles.  But Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a major studio, Academy Award-nominated film by a huge director, based on a bestselling novel, that made the career of two big Hollywood actors, and stars a couple more. And I can keep going.  It was highly critically regarded, a box office success and controversial for its time, but not so controversial that the studios would have any reason to worry about releasing it today. And it has its roots in a famous true crime story that still draws attention to this day. How is it possible there was never even a generic, full frame, MOD disc released ever, in any country?

Update 8/2/16 - 11/7/22: Is it possible there's really, truly a legit widescreen Looking for Mr. Goodbar available overseas!?  Well, "legit" is a bit shaky, but the situation has definitely at least improved since I last reported on this gem of a drama.  Viva la Update Week!

Update 1/14/25: Forget every questionable, dodgy, import, bootleg or grey market discs; we have a definitive, official release!  Vinegar Syndrome has put out a fully licensed, 4k restoration on BD and UHD, so we can finally close the ledger on Looking for Mr. Goodbar.  Though that's not to say it's 100% free of imperfections...

Update 3/10/25: Replacement discs are here!  Mine landed today.  See above so you can tell the difference.  Your disc should have the "V2" at the end of its scrawl if it's the corrected disc that will play through all the way to the end (as explained at the bottom of this page).

Diane Keaton gives really one of her strongest performances as a young, New York City school teacher who rebels against the very conservative, restrictive life built for her by her family and career. She steps into the liberated night life only to stumble across the darker side that naturally develops in a repressed society. She finds herself caught up living the double life many young women were faced with during the sexual revolution of the 1970s; and as I already mentioned this is based on a famous true crime, I don't think I'm spoiling anything by simply saying it ends in violence.

Richard Brooks (In Cold Blood, Cat On a Hot Tin Roof) focuses on creating almost morbidly sincere performances in bringing Judith Rossner's study of a character whose soul is slowly dying. You can feel that it's based on truth even if you didn't know it was based on an actual case, although admittedly, her relationship with her parents does feel like its taken from "Dover's Big Book of Overly Familiar Cliches." If you've seen Carrie's mom or The Great Santini, you know what you're in for. But fortunately she gets out of the house quickly enough and surrounds herself with more relatable, nuanced characters.

And did I say this film launched careers? Yeah, Richard Gere and Tom Berenger both launched out of this film, and neither have yet managed to make very many films to rival this one. And the cast doesn't stop there, with more additional strong turns by Tuesday Weld (who netted one of this film's Academy Award nominations), Brian Dennehy, a very dramatic William Atherton (Ghostbusters' Walter Peck), and keep your eyes open for a young Levar Burton.

And yet this has never been released on DVD until, sort of, recently. What we've been looking at here is my copy of Paramount's 1983 laserdisc release. Not '93, '83. Most people weren't even aware laserdiscs existed back then. It's so old, it doesn't even have chapters, let alone special features. But it was the best release you could get. Things got shook up a bit in recent years by the appearance of a widescreen television broadcast leaked online, allowing us to see the film in its original aspect ratio since it first played theatrically in 1977. But since I made this post comparing those two transfers, there have been some developments.  I'll describe the least interesting first.  Australian label La Entertainment released this on DVD in 2020.  It is 4x3, however, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're using the same master as the laserdisc, a la previous Australian exclusives of Paramount titles like The Keep and Ordinary People.

That still might've been rather newsworthy if they hadn't been beaten to the punch in Spain.  They released it as a 16x9 widescreen (and yes, Region free) DVD.  Is it official?  Well, it's got a UPC listed in many databases and is being carried by a lot of mainstream outlets, but Spain is known for some shady grey-market discs.  It's at least a pressed disc and less of a bootleg than those that've been passed around for years, but, well, you know.  We can write that one off now, too, thanks to Vinegar Syndrome's fancy 4k restoration on both BD and UHD.

1) 1983 laserdisc; 2) widescreen TV rip; 3) 2018 DVD;
4) 2024 BD; 5) 2024 UHD.

Now, there's no reason to delve deep into the comparison between the laserdisc and the downloaded rip - presumably from Italian television, since it has Italian audio as its primary track - as it's not even a secondary purchase option. It's soft and murky, far from an impressive HD transfer. But it tells us about the framing. Vertically, the 1.77:1 rip is a perfect match to the 1.33:1 transfer we've all lived with for decades, so we don't have an open matte transfer here. All the fullscreen version did is the very old school move of chopping off the sides. It just made you pine that much more for how great an official Paramount release would be. Because what we've got is such a low contrast, washed out mess. Even the laserdisc cover is soft and blurry!

And the Spanish disc isn't heaps better.  But it is a way to buy the widescreen version.  And the DVD is a little bit more of an upgrade.  The very slightly windowboxed framing is now 1.78:1 instead of 1.77, gaining a few extra pixels of info along all four edges.  This tells us, though, that they didn't just take the old online rip and slap it onto a disc.  You can't uncover extra picture doing that, no matter how slight.  Also the PQ, while still rather low quality, is another tiny step forward.  It's sharper and restores a bit more detail.  Unfortunately, it also restores compression noise... one thing about the old online rip: it was so compressed it acted as a sort of DNR.  But if you actually zoom in, the image is genuinely sharper and renders a little bit more actual picture info as well.

gamma raised by 500% to clarify my point

But thankfully, we'll never have reason to zoom into those old releases again, because VS has blown them out of the water - their UHD is a whopping 96GB!  They've framed the film at a proper 1.85:1, not my matting the image any, but by unveiling more picture along the sides.  Compression noise and other issues are replaced by the first appearance of actual film grain, which is immaculately captured on the UHD, and nearly as well on the BD.  Colors are stronger, and a bit warmer compared to the Spanish disc, making imagery more distinct onscreen without betraying its often muted, subtle scheme.  And information that was crushed out of existence in all the earlier versions (like, for example, Atherton's top button from the second set of shots, as highlighted above) is now visible, even on the blu.

the scene in question

Besides the original mono track on the laserdisc, rip and 2018 DVD, the Spanish disc also includes a Spanish dub and optional/ unforced Spanish subtitles.  The VS releases bump the audio up to DTS-HD and add optional English subtitles (and forgo the Spanish, naturally), but here's the bit that may get controversial.  There's been a music swap in the audio track (which tells us, yes, the music rights were probably the problem all along).  Roughly half an hour into the film, a lengthy scene is set to "All Of Me" by Frank Sinatra.  Interestingly, that song was never listed with the others in the credits.  Anyway, past releases have it, including the Spanish DVD (on both the English and Spanish tracks), but VS has a more generic, old timey song, which, based on the lyrics, might be titled "say hello?"  It's not as good, but the song was always mixed down under the dialogue, so it's not a huge upset, but it's a bit of a bummer.  DIY fans might want to get both the Spanish and VS releases and mux a composited, ideal audio track; but otherwise, we're just going to have to settle and pick a version to watch on disc.

There are of course no extras, not even a trailer, on any previous edition.  But VS has come up with a bunch, including the trailer.  There's also an excellent audio commentary by aspiring filmmaker Gillian Wallace Horvat, which is impressively informative, bringing in details from the novel, an early draft of the script, the true crime the story's based on, the director's notes, articles and critical reviews.  Then there's an expert interview with Douglass K. Daniel, who wrote a book on Richard Brooks, a 30-minute audiobook reading about an obscenity trial that came about when this film was released in Utah, a couple radio spots, and perhaps best of all, an audio-only vintage interview with Judith Rossner.  All together, that's a pretty dry collection of mostly audio-only features by experts, but it's hardly a fair expectation for Vinegar Syndrome to have pulled Diane Keaton and Richard Gere down to their offices to record a commentary.  They made an effort and did their best, and Horvat's commentary really is strong and well worth the listen.  VS's release also includes reversible artwork and, If you ordered their limited edition, a 40-page booklet with essays by Marya E. Gates, Marc Edward Heuck, Elizabeth Purchell & Jourdain Searles, with a side-loading slipcase and a slipcover that fits over the amary case but inside the outer case.

Oh, and just as an aside, there was a made-for-TV sequel in 1983 called Trackdown: Finding the Goodbar Killer. Of course, without Diane Keaton's character, who was entirely what the original film was about, there's not a lot to return to.So instead, this is largely a police procedural, with George Segal as a detective going through a divorce as he investigates the murder from the first film, cross cut with Tom Berenger's character, now played by Shannon Presby, going on the lam. Shelley Hack plays one of Keaton's fellow school teachers who Segal takes to nightclubs to help spot the killer. And Joe Spinell has a feature role as Keaton's former doorman, who's questioned by the cops and pressured into picking somebody out of a line-up.

It's pretty boring. Segal's sappy drama with his wife and daughter, who's leaving for college, almost winds up getting more focus than the case of the Goodbar killer. I think the idea is that Segal's worried his daughter is on the verge of entering the same kind of scary, radical feminist life Keaton led; but the film never manages to quite get there. There's just lots of pedantic dialogue scenes that tend not to connect with each other. Segal has scenes with his wife, trying to hold his marriage together, and we never find out if he does or not. He keeps going back to Hack, who was never needed to catch the killer. And there's a bunch of other cops pursuing other suspects, who aren't even red herrings because we know who did it from the very start. Ultimately, it's really just flat, Segal's lead holds absolutely zero of the fascination Keaton's did, and it's far less surprising that this flick never made it to DVD.

Anyway.  Goodbye, M.I.A. tag!  The Spanish DVD was an alright placeholder, but now we've got a proper release.  Is there room for improvement?  Possibly, if somebody managed to release this 4k transfer in another region that could get away with the Sinatra track, and maybe even rope Keaton or somebody into an interview.  But I wouldn't hold my breath, and this is an extremely satisfying release in the meantime, like a ginormous upgrade.

Finally, I have to mention that there's a playback issue with the UHD, where watching it with Dolby Vision on causes it to stop mid-movie.  You can turn off the HDR to watch it in the meantime, but obviously that's not a satisfying solution and VS has already announced a replacement disc program.  If you ordered the film directly from VS, you're already on their list to receive it.  Everyone else just has to contact them with proof of purchase.

Red's 25th, 27th and 40th Anniversary Editions

Warren Beatty's Reds is one of those rare films that really lives up to its legacy. It really deserves all of its Academy Awards. Everything was just done so right, and beyond what you'd expect, from the writing to the fantastic cast. When you see movies like Dick Tracy or Bulworth, you wonder what happened to that early Warren Beatty who made such a masterpiece? But Reds is also a bitch to get on blu-ray. Paramount made an excellent 25th Anniversary edition, and a separate DVD release, including a terrific little documentary on the film, when blu-rays were just coming out back in 2006, and most people hadn't yet adopted. In fact, there was an HD-DVD for this, too, because we were just in the beginning of the format wars at the time. They did reissue it in 2008 (which is why most online release dates show the 25th Anniversary disc coming out on the film's 27th anniversary), but even that's long out of print. The cheapest unused copy on Amazon is $74 as of this writing, and it was higher last time I looked, so you might want to jump on it. Or try to find an import that doesn't cost even more once you factor in the shipping.

Update 5/5/15 - 12/27/21: Six and a half years later, and Reds is finally back in print.  What's more, it's a new 4k restoration as part of the Paramount Presents line.  Woot!

Reds is the true story of journalist/poet/political activist John Reed, who wound up playing a huge role in the Bolshevik Revolution. It starts out with, and continually returns to, documentary interviews with real people from Jack's life, recounting their memories of him, but the bulk of the film is played out by a fantastic cast including Beatty, of course, along with Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson (as Eugene O'Neill), Maureen Stapleton, Paul Sorvino and Gene Hackman. The tagline for the film was, "Not since Gone With The Wind has there been a great romantic epic like it," and I daresay this film fully lives up to that hyperbolic claim. And perhaps unlike Gone With the Wind, Reds is just as powerful and moving today as it was the year of its release. Everything from the complex politics to the tragic romance flourish in this lavish production, with a very memorable score by Stephen Sondheim and a directorial style that actually feels reminiscent of classic Woody Allen, but on a grander scale.

So it sucked that you couldn't find a copy for a reasonable price for so long. I've still got copies of both US blu-ray editions here, as well as the original DVD release (surprisingly, the 25th Anniversary was also the film's DVD debut). But hopefully we can forget about all that and just pick up the new 40th Anniversary edition.  All it needs to be is affordable - check! - and definitive...  Check?

1) 2006 DVD; 2) 2006 BD; 3) 2008 BD; 4) 2021 BD.

The short scoop on the 2006 and 2008 blu-rays is, apart from the tackier artwork, the two editions are identical. Same transfer, same menus, everything. They did stick different labels on the discs themselves, but that's it. A small thing to note is that, regardless of which edition you're looking at, apart from the 40th, they did leave little bits of black and odds and ends in the overscan area, leaving the AR at about 1.77:1 throughout. It's really, really on the fringe, varies from shot to shot, and most viewers probably won't see it because they haven't reset their scan for proper 100% 16x9 anyway; but it is there. I guess in 2006, they figured no one would ever see outside the TV safe zone. The new blu, however, is properly matted to 1.85:1, while still revealing more image around the edges than ever before.  The framing has definitely been improved.

See those black edges? That's the overscan stuff I was talking about.

Apart from that, it's always been a pretty nice transfer, especially for such early blus. And seeing as they were concurrent releases, it only makes sense that the DVD has the same transfer as the first two BDs, in terms of framing, colors, etc. But of course, one is in HD and the other SD, so the DVD is naturally softer, more compressed and doesn't hold up as well on large monitors, as we can see when we get in close. The lines of Sorvino's features get pretty mushy on the DVD, above, which even the old blu-ray fixes up rather nicely.  But the new blu is an improvement in this regard, too.  Even though this isn't in HDR (being a standard BD and not a UHD), we can still see the benefits of the greater color range in the scans.  Look at the reflections in Sorvino's glasses, for instance, which are blocky and blown out on the old blu and more naturally faded on the new.  The grain is also softer than it would be on UHD, but it's much more filmic and better encoded this latest time around.  The color timing's different, too, something that really stands out comparing the now warmer interview segments.  I guess you could say they raised the reds.  Nyuk, nyuk

It's a nice little upgrade in the audio department, too, though still a bit disappointing.  The DVD and blu both gave us the option between the original mono and a modestly rejiggered 5.1 (plus a French dub on the DVD and French and Spanish on the BD).  Unfortunately, the old BD audio was as lossy as the DVD.  And this new version?  Well, the 5.1 is now lossless DTS-HD, but unfortunately the mono is still lossy.  Oh well.  At least it's a step in the right direction.

All three discs also offer optional English subtitles, with the 25/27th BDs also offering French and Spanish, and the 40th giving us both standard and HoH English subs.

Extras-wise, all editions are the same.  They're all mixed together into one, feature-length (about 75 minutes) documentary, which is a very satisfying, all-you-need-to-know look back at the film, primarily based on a very substantive interview with Beatty himself.  But it also involves interviews with Nicholson, Sorvino, Paramount execs... basically everybody except Keaton.  It's great.  There's also a "DVD trailer" (yes, even on the 40th edition), which is a newly made trailer that's actually pretty corny.  It's a small thing, but one can't help wondering what happened to the original theatrical trailer?

I originally ended this post asking Paramount for an updated 35th Anniversary edition next year. Beatty was making his big comeback film, his first film since 1998, so I said the two projects could surely drum up some glowing publicity and sales for each other. Well, maybe Paramount did the right thing by waiting. But ultimately they've done the right thing, putting this masterpiece back into print, and making it a superior edition to boot.  Hey, they even took my suggestion of putting the film on one BD50 instead of two BD25s (the 40th is still a 2-disc set, but now that second disc is just the extras), sparing us the hassle of switching discs mid-film.  I'm a little bummed about the lossy mono mix, but overall, this is better than I was expecting.  Maybe for the 50th, we can get a UHD with lossless mono and an interview with Diane Keaton?  Then we'd really be set and could focus back on the important work of raising the masses out of their accustomed lethargy and the subterranean fires that continue to smoulder.

Replacing Annie Hall (DVD/ Blu-ray Comparison)

Ah, one of the true DVD classics, I can still remember first seeing it in stores the day it was released: 2000's The Woody Allen Collection boxed set #1 from MGM. Pretty much all of his best and most famous in one big box. And every disc is a top of the line, anamorphic transfer presented with the kind of faultless, top of the line quality only a truly major studio could provide. Except one. For whatever reason, Annie Hall, perhaps Woody Allen's most beloved and best known film, is given a tiny, non-anamorphic transfer. It didn't strike me so much when I first bought the set, because I still had a 4:3 TV back then. 2000 was early for DVDs, but anamorphic enhancement had definitely come into vogue by that stage... as evidenced by every other disc is this box. I'd managed to forget about it for a long while, but received my last unpleasant reminder when I went to get a screenshot for my piece on The Sorrow and the Pity. No more! It was time to upgrade.

Update 2/8/16 - 1/2/20:  I'm not going to wade into the whole Allen/ Farrow mess again right now, but Dylan's restated allegations in 2018 have had another side effect, besides the more obvious ones.  The market's dried up on his physical media catalog, and I've been able to get Arrow's fancy Woody Allen Collection Volumes 1-3 boxed sets imported with shipping for $36 a pop.  Seriously, if you've got any of Woody Allen DVDs you've been meaning to upgrade, now is the time.  And anyway, yeah, that means I've got the latest Annie Hall blu-ray as part of Volume 1, Six Films: 1971-1978, so we can give this page a proper updating.

So Woody Allen's Annie Hall is a pretty good film, maybe you've heard of it. Won best picture in 1977 ...not that we should allow the Academy Awards to determine our greatest films for us. But it's hard to deny this classic's many qualities. It's full of Allen's great comedy we'd all grown used to, we even get a bit of him doing his stand-up; but he surprised us all on this one by growing beyond straight forward comedies to a mature, well-rounded film with heart and intelligent character study. It's also full of little innovative touches, from an introduction spoken directly to the audience to animation harkening back to his old comic strips. You never knew what was coming next - characters could talk across split screen or subtitles might suddenly appear, showing us peoples' unspoken subtext. Of course, Allen doubled down on surprising us by getting serious with his next film; but I think most of the film-going world agrees that Annie Hall had hit the sweet spot of art and comedy. Allen's made an incredible amount of great films, dancing all over and around this mark, some highly received, some seriously under-appreciated. But it looks like Annie Hall will go down as his masterpiece. And why shouldn't it? Any filmmaker should be blessed to make one film half as great as this one.

Well, okay, so we've got to upgrade the old 2000 DVD. But for a long time, we didn't have many other options here in the USA. Even if you bought one of those insane United Artists Prestige boxed sets with 90 DVDs for hundreds of dollars that came out in 2007, they still didn't have Annie Hall in anamorphic widescreen. On the other hand, MGM released it anamorphically in every other country but ours, including the 2001 UK DVD and pretty much everywhere else.  Then, in 2011, they re-released it in the US... and it was still the old, non-anamorphic flipper disc!  You don't believe me, right? You shouldn't believe me; I wouldn't believe me. In 2011, MGM releasing something this old and out of date, especially when they've been releasing an updated all around the world for a decade?  But the case is undeniable:

It's the same old transfer as the original disc, same menu layouts and everything, just with a new cover.  But thankfully, today, we can thankfully skip right to HD.  MGM gave us a proper blu-ray in 2012. And in 2016, Arrow released their own blu-ray in the UK as part of their Woody Allen Collection Volume 1, Six Films: 1971-1978 boxed set.

1) 2000 MGM DVD wide; 2) 2000 MGM full; 3) 2011 MGM DVD wide;
4) 2011 MGM DVD full; 5) 2012 MGM BD; 6) 2016 Arrow BD.

Actually, apart from being non-anamorphic, the DVD isn't too bad. If you're still somehow using an old 4:3 TV, maybe you could hold off on double-dipping. But for the majority of us, it's got to go; and this new blu is a nice upgrade. Framing-wise, the blu-rays are just slightly letterboxed to 1.85:1, which is the ratio of the windowboxed DVD, too; but things have shifted. The blus have more on the bottom and the left, while the DVD has more on the top.  Of course, the DVDs also have the novelty of a full-screen side.  That does open the mattes up vertically, giving you some more image on the top and bottom; but it's pan & scanned, constantly losing picture on one side or the other.  A bit of clean-up has also gone on, as you can see on in the first set of comparisons, with the spot over his right (our left) shoulder (you may need to click to enlarge to really see it) only appearing on the DVD versions. Colors and brightness are also more natural and less contrasty, especially noticeable on the wall behind Diane Keaton there. So yeah, the blus don't come away with a ton more detail, but they score good points in just about every other round of competition.

And if you're wondering what's up with me referring to the blus interchangeably, that's because they essentially are.  Arrow's book tells us that all six of the HD masters used in their box "were made available from MGM via Hollywood Classics."  But that's especially true of Annie Hall, because the other five films are at least Arrow discs.  But the Annie Hall included in Arrow's set is an exact duplicate of the BD MGM put out on their own in the UK in 2013.  It doesn't even start with the Arrow logo or anything.  Right down to the outer labels, these are the same old MGM discs stuck in Arrow packaging.  So if you were hoping Arrow had fired up some new and improved scans or something for their versions, nope, sorry.

That's a poster for Ingmar Bergman's Face To Face behind them.

Anyway, all of the releases feature the original mono track (in DTS-HD on the blus), with optional English subtitles.  And as always, MGM is excellent in terms of foreign language options, and all of these discs also include an array of dubs and subtitle options.

The only extras any of the discs have is the trailer. Interestingly, on the blu-rays, it's HD but in 4:3.  The DVDs actually have the widescreen trailer, albeit as non-anamorphic as the main feature. At least it gives blu-ray owners who don't have the old DVD a taste of the full-screen Annie Hall, I guess; but it's disappointing MGM didn't use the widescreen trailer for their blus since we know they've got it. Oh, and original DVDs do also have a nice 2-page insert with film notes and trivia, just like all the other Woody Allen Collection discs, which are always a quick, fun read.  And Arrow, of course, has their impressive hard cover book with interviews with Allen about each film, and an original essay for each film (in Annie Hall's case, it's by Hannah Hamad).

So yeah, it really doesn't matter which way you go, since you'll be getting essentially the same, or exactly the same, discs no matter which edition you get.  The blus are solid upgrades over the DVDs, so it is worth upgrading.  They're not quite 4k remasters, but these aren't weak blus that were desperate for that in the first place.  And the Arrow boxes are neat and easy ways to fill up a large chunk of your Woody Allen collection in one go.