God of Gamblers!

God of Gamblers! By turns silly and melodramatic, action-packed and suspenseful, this movie exemplifies Wong Jing's directorial style, as well as a substantial subset of Hong Kong cinema in general. It's one of the roles that brought Chow Yun-Fat to prominence in Hong Kong movies.

Up to this point, the only DVD of it that I had was the old Mei Ah Laser Disc Co. Region 0 Hong Kong version—which was pan and scan with burned-in bilingual subtitles (which were often sacrificed to overscan on most normal TV sets). Which is nothing short of a tragedy.

But then recently I learned there's a R2 release of it, which is a little bit less butchered. Instead of being chopped down to 1.33:1 from 1.85:1, it's chopped down to 1.78:1. Which still ends up losing some picture, but not as much as one might fear. I ordered it from an amazon.co.uk reseller for 8 pounds including shipping, and it only took a week to get here. Not bad at all.

I've put a pair of comparison screencaps that I took at the top of this post. (Click to see full-size versions.) Looking at them, you can see that the new version (at right) loses less from the sides, but oddly enough it does lose a little bit from the top, too. Wonder why that is.

The screencaps don't quite tell the whole story, though: since the R2 release is PAL, it actually has 25% more vertical resolution than the R0 NTSC one. If I hadn't resized the screencap for comparison, it would have been taller and wider. Of course, you see the benefit of this only if you watch it on a PAL TV, HDTV, or a computer monitor. If you pipe it through conversion to an ordinary NTSC set, it will be shown at normal NTSC resolution.

And the subtitles on the R2 version are DVD overlay subtitles, not burned-in ones. Although I do note they didn't seem to do anything about the subtitles' gloriously-fractured English. Perhaps they consider it part of the film's charm.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to watching this one again. Now if I can just find someone with whom to watch it…