MovieChat Forums > Ju Dou Discussion > 95 minutes or 89 minutes?

95 minutes or 89 minutes?


I just signed out a mainland Chinese "Beauty Culture" DVD of this film from my local library here in Toronto, and knowing the tendency for a LOT of films to be censored or cut for their mainland releases -- ESPECIALLY mainland films! -- the first thing I did was pop it into my laptop to find out the run time, which is 89 minutes. However, IMDB states the film should be 95 minutes, as does this review comparing two older DVDs of the film (http://www.DVDBeaver.com/film/DVDReview/judou.htm), one of which is 95 minutes (from Pioneer) the other which is 89 minutes (Razor). Based on the screencaps at DVDBeaver and the matching run times, I at first suspected the "Beauty Culture" DVD to be a direct port of the Razor disc, but closer inspection reveals that while the film's colour palette here leans TOWARD the Razor disc, the print is actually framed more OPEN like the Pioneer disc, with colour saturation falling somewhere in between the two (at least when using the DVDBeaver caps as a reference). The print itself, however, is the EXACT same one used on the Razor DVD, which I discovered by matching up freeze frames to the DVDBeaver caps and seeing the exact same scratches and dirt on the print (sadly). The saving graces with the "Beauty Culture" DVD, therefore, are the pseudo-"corrected" colour, the lack of unnecessarily tight cropping, and English subtitles that are actually a superior translation to EITHER found on the Pioneer or Razor discs. I'm still wondering, however, if the 89 minute version represents some kind of Chinese government-mandated cut-down or is just the result of PAL/NTSC "speedup" or whatever it's called. I'm certainly hoping the latter. :)

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