Last week in my Indies on DVD post, I mentioned a new Stanley Kubrick box set (from Warner Home Video) and Criterion's release of Terence Malick's Days of Heaven. Both releases had raised pre-release questions. Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere sounded the alarm back in August that Criterion's upcoming re-issue of the Days of Heaven on DVD would look "really different" than the previous version from Paramount Home Video. He based his concerns on comments by Criterion's Lee Kline. Now that Wells has seen the new DVD, he writes: "I saw Days of Heaven in 70 mm on the day it opened -- 9.13.78 -- at the Cinema 1 on Third Avenue, and the Criterion DVD took me right back to that transporting experience. This is how it looked back then, and should have always looked. " Good to hear.

The Kubrick set raised eyebrows when it was announced that three of the films (The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Eyes Wide Shut) would be presented in a different home video format than Kubrick had insisted upon when he was alive. Film critic Dave Kehr noted: "Kubrick apparently had his reasons, as mysterious as they may be, for releasing them to video the way he did." The new, reformatted aspect ratio, Kehr says, "would be closer to the way the films were originally seen in theaters." Kehr then quotes a statement from Jan Harlan (the present keeper of the Kubrick estate) and questions the historical sense of Harlan's statement before concluding: "I'm really not well informed enough to have a solid opinion. And without Kubrick around to consult, I don't see how we'll ever know for sure." He recommends hanging onto the older DVD versions as reference points, if nothing else. So if you've been waiting for the definitive edition of these films (others in the set are 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, in addition to the doc A Life in Pictures), you'll need to weigh out the positive and not so positive.

A dreamy fairy tale about a psychotic killer and his teenage girlfriend, Badlands features two fine performances (Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek) and a compelling story. Spacek's matter-of-fact narration and Sheen's modest charm draw you into a drama that appears to unfold spontaneously. Writer/director Terence Malick made a radical departure into more visual storytelling with his next feature, Days of Heaven. Because Days of Heaven is so dependent upon those visual components, Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere has sounded the alarm that Criterion's upcoming re-issue of the film on DVD will look "really different" than the previous version.

Wells pointed to a blog entry by Criterion's Lee Kline in which Kline described the process involved. A new film interpositive was needed for the transfer; Malick initially wanted Kline to "simply match the existing transfer because he'd always liked it," but finally agreed to be present for the color-correction process. Once there, he "made it clear that the new transfer needed to feel natural and not too 'postcardlike.' ... The natural beauty of the land needed to be represented, since that was what they were going for when shooting. ... I told Terry that people were really going to be pretty surprised by this new transfer, since it was such a radical departure from before, but he said it was perfect."

Wells relates that he saw the film in 70mm in 1978 and "no viewings since have ever come close in terms of basic visual grandeur." In response to a reader's comment, he writes that Kline's alarm "was almost certainly due to Malick naturalizing the look by making sure the visual values were in no way heightened or warmed-up or made to look 'too pretty.' ... The Criterion Days of Heaven may be perfectly fine, but something tells me it's going to look much better on high-def with a perfect plasma screen than on, say, my Sony flat-screen or other tube screens owned by Regular Joes."