Office | DVD (Bayview Films)
RELEASE DATE: April 27, 2021
On April 27, 2021, Bayview Films will be releasing the DVD for Office (read our review), a 2015 film directed by noted Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To (Three, The Mission).
The film stars Chow Yun-fat (City War), Sylvia Chang (Slaughter in San Francisco), Eason Chan (12 Nights), Tang Wei (A Long Day’s Journey Into Night) and Wang Ziyi (Shock Wave).
Based on the hit play Design for Living by star and producer Sylvia Chang, Johnnie To’s Office is a movie musical spectacular revolving around corporate maneuvering and romantic intrigue. Hong Kong legend Johnnie To delivers a biting takedown of capitalism, detailing the financial crisis following the Lehman Brothers collapse and what one company has to do to fight to stay alive — all in a lavishly detailed, wholly original musical production.
There are currently no details on special features or technical specs.
Pre-order from Amazon.com today!
DVD? What year is it? People barely buy blu rays anymore… Also Mr. To, I’m still waiting for The Mission aka your best movie on blu ray!
When I first read this I assumed an archived post from 2015 had been bumped to the top of the page in error…until I saw the 2021 release date. I guess there’ll be a VCD released at the same time?
I’m midway through watching this right now. It’s clear that no one at Bayview actually QA’d this disc, or even watched through it a single time. It’s pretty bad.
The subtitles are broken. Most of the subs are super delayed, and don’t appear until 1 or 2 seconds after the line of dialog is already spoken. A few of the subs flash by so quickly that you can’t read them, and in some rare instances, dialog is missed altogether.
Some of the subtitles show literal text encoding errors too, which is just egregiously flippant. Special characters like hyphens, exclamation points, etc, etc. don’t display correctly and instead just display as a string of broken text. It’s a telltale sign that the text got converted from one format to another (maybe from ANSI to UTF-8, for example), and some non-alphanumeric characters were lost in the process.
That’s not even the worst part. If you ignore the bad subtitles – and you ignore that the video compression is relatively poor, even by DVD standards (lots of macroblocking) – the most egregious sin that wraps this shit-sandwich together is that the movie was encoded at the WRONG FRAMERATE.
Yes, it is a 30fps encode of a movie that was (presumably) shot at 23fps. The entire movie has a bad “stutter” to it, or a bad telecine effect that makes the motion appear less smooth than it should be. I had to pop the disc into my computer just to confirm this. Sure enough, they encoded the movie at 29.970fps. Yikes.
What a shame. Although DVDs are far from ideal, I bought this out of principle because I want to see more Johnnie To films released in the US. I think he’s a unique and varied director with some fascinating movies under his belt, and his work deserves to be seen.
As for the movie “Office” itself, I actually really like it. It’s darkly funny, some of the music is pretty good, and the set design is dazzling. Makes me wish I would’ve just imported the HK blu-ray.
The movie is good, but this DVD release is most certainly not. It’s clear that this was a complete rush job and no one at Bayview actually cared to release the movie properly.
Looks like DDDhouse has the HK blu-ray for only $17 USD. That’s cheap enough for me to pull the trigger and watch the movie the way it was meant to be viewed.
Meanwhile, this Bayview DVD is on its way back to walmart for a refund.
That’s insane. This is why companies like Well Go USA, Shout Factory, 88 Films and Eureka succeed. There’s at least a passion there – some good quality control – as opposed to just pumping out a product for a quick buck. Thanks for sharing that info.