The Asian Aviator

A while back I ordered a few Warner Brothers Blu-ray discs on a two-for-twenty dollars special from EzyDVD. They came in yesterday.

One of them was The Aviator, a fine movie. But when I was doing my indexing for my database purposes, I found something odd: the disc defaults to Chinese text. It opens with what I take to be some kind of copyright notice, followed by a main menu with Chinese text. When you start the movie, it has Chinese subtitles on by default.

That was in PowerDVD on the computer. I fiddled with its default languages to see if that made a difference,  to no avail. So I dropped it into the Oppo BDP-83 and the up came the Chinese stuff again. How about a Panasonic player? Same thing.

All the equipment was set with ‘Menu Language’ to ‘English’.

The disc comes with two audio tracks and two subtitle tracks for the movie: English and Chinese. It came in a proper Australian-looking Blu-ray box, but this says that the audio languages are English, French and Spanish, while the subtitle languages are English , French, Spanish and Portuguese.

My guess is that Warner Bros Australia has inadvertently purchased a batch of discs intended for the Chinese market and released them here.

I shall inquire.

Meanwhile, I have another copy of Law Abiding Citizen, which I have just reviewed for Sound and Image. I didn’t realise it until the last moment, but it turns out that this is a two disc release, with the theatrical and director’s cuts on different discs. Roadshow, the distributor, had sent me only the theatrical version. Two of them, in fact. I gave the other one away a while back.

Anyway, Roadshow urgently sent me the proper two disc version, saving my bacon for the purposes of the review. And so I have the theatrical version available. A test disc, no box and no slick, it works fine. No extras (they’re all on the other disc), this is a rather good, and very intriguing, mystery thriller. It will go to the first to ask for it in comments (Australian postage only thanks – and it is Region B locked).

Audio is Dolby TrueHD 24/48 5.1 @ 3214kbps with 640kbps Dolby Digital embedded. Picture is 1080p24, MPEG4 AVC @ 27.96Mbps.