Yokohama BJ Blues (1981)
ヨコハマＢＪブルース
Crime, Mystery, Drama • 1h 52m
Director: Eiichi Kudō
Cast: Yūsaku Matsuda, Mari Henmi, Keizo Kanie, Toby Kadoguchi, Haruko Mabuchi, Koji Tanaka, Tatsuo Yamada, Eri Kanuma, Rei Okamoto, Rikiya Yasuoka, Yuya Uchida, Ryudo Uzaki, Ichirō Zaitsu, Hiroshi Shimizu, Taiji Tonoyama, Michihiro Yamanishi, Toshio Tomogane, Rebun Hori, Yuji Yoshikawa, Jugatsu Toi, Mitsutaka Tachikawa, Satoshi Sadanaga, Takaharu Kasano, Osamu Shigematsu, Hiroshi Yamashita, Takashi Toomizu, Kōen Okumura, Hyōe Enoki, Yukiko Tachibana, Hiroko Nishimura, Masumi Sekiguchi, Keiko Kudo
Best English-friendly & video release · updated 4 months ago
Overview
BJ is a relatively unknown blues singer who scraps some bars in Yokohama. He does not earn much with it and to make ends meet he also acts as a private detective.
Director: Ebrahim Golestan
Director: Ebrahim Golestan
Director: Ebrahim Golestan
Director: Ivan Passer
Sources: Criterion Forum (opens in a new tab) · slow.pics (opens in a new tab) · Blu-ray.com (opens in a new tab)
Though note its different color grading from the IP-sourced but poorly compressed Fun City Editions US Blu-ray (caps)
Judging from spectrograms at https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p=23933756&postcount=57, Fun City Editions US Blu-ray appears to have marginally less filtering than Radiance 4K Blu-ray (whose padded 16-bit depth is a non-issue). There are also loudness differences, though it's unclear whether dynamic range also differs. Caveat: need to A/B both tracks to confirm, but no one has posted actual A/B impressions.
More Crime on Blu-ray
Director: Joel Coen
Director's Cut: Disappointing UK StudioCanal/US Criterion 4K Blu-ray
Theatrical Cut: LaserDisc or 2001 UK Universal DVD
Sources: Blu-ray.com (opens in a new tab)
https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?p=21782879#post21782879 - comparison. StudioCanal is a massive improvement to the Criterion but still flawed in some areas (chroma noise)
Director: Iain Softley
Sources: slow.pics (opens in a new tab)
Both 88 Films and Germany Capelight are superior to the Shout! Factory in HDR10 but their FEL layer may even things out. Objectively, the Capelight looks best as they avoided the chroma blocking that’s visible in 88’s disc but they in turn included an Atmos mix. I have the Shout! Factory, love how it looks and the 4K transfer is spectacular. https://slow.pics/c/vPmFQSAH
Shout! Factory has the exclusive The Beauty of the Baud and the You Can't Stop Us All featurettes.
Director: John Woo
Sources: Criterion Forum (opens in a new tab)
review: Disk Kino
Both have better encoding than Disk Kino, some shots are better on Shout! Factory, others on Arrow
Shout Factory still has the best video while Arrow did a questionable regrade. Arrow definitely has less grain in most shots, has a worse encode and is cm v2.9 compared to Shout’s cm v4.0.
Shout! Factory/Arrow 4K Blu-ray has the original mono
TV series
4K restoration from Original Camera Negative for all episodes
Director: Lloyd Bacon
4K restoration from Original Camera Negative
Director: Ralph Bakshi
Director: Roman Polanski
Edit history
Every recommendation follows the same method — how these calls are made.