Reviews wanted for Deceiver & Surviving Desire?
 

any one get Deceiver by josh and jonas pate w/tim roth

or surviving desire by hal hartley w/ martin donovan ? both just came out.

i don't think any extras, but how do they look and sound?

thanks

pants

Surviving Desire
 

The disc is a straight port of the previous Fox Lorber VHS tape. All three films are presented 1:33, although that is appropriate considering that they were shot for that aspect ratio. Surviving Desire is remixed in 5.1 sound, but I didn't find it too obvious. The two shorts are listed as "extras", and the disc also has some text pages on the actors and their films.

Recommended for Hal Hartley fans, especially since Surviving Desire is a great hour-long piece.

just got it
 

yeah i just got it 2 days ago, quite happy with it since my vhs was getting pretty old and tweaked. a must have hartley fans.

if only his other films will hurry out to dvd now.

pants

I love Surviving Desire, so I was really excited about picking this up. Like bcombee said, the remixed 5.1 sound was not obvious--in fact, it sounded really weak. I watched something that had 5.1 sound right before this, and I had to turn up the volume on my set to hear the dialogue on this disc properly.

Now I don't know if my disc is defective, but at certain parts, the picture would become wavy--the sound, colors and picture is still there, but the picture is wavy. This is most obvious when Jude is talking to Sophie in the bookstore, she tells him that her manager said he had to either buy a book or leave. They keep talking anyway, and right when they duck to avoid the off-camera manager, the picture would get wavy, lasting for maybe 10-20 seconds. It's just quite distracting.

Also, right before the rock band scene, Jude is talking to Henry in a book storage, when the scene ends, maybe that's when a layer change occurred but it could also be the disc locking up, because it seemed to linger there for quite some time.

My disc had no insert/liner notes inside, but I don't know if it's supposed to. After looking at this release, it makes me think that "The Unbelievable Truth" was handled much better. I guess you get what you pay for though--the list price for Unbelievable Truth is twice as much as Surviving Desire. If you're new to Hal Hartley's films, I'd definitely pick up "The Unbelievable Truth" before this one.