Kim Jee-woon's A BITTERSWEET LIFE Due On English Subbed Blu-ray August 30th!

Kim Jee-woon's masterful noir-tinged revenge film, A Bittersweet Life, is finally coming to English friendly Blu-ray on August 30th from Korean distributor Content Zone.  The film was previously available on a relatively shoddy, by all accounts, Japanese Blu-ray disc that had no English subtitles. There have been numerous delays on this release which has been pushed back for nearly a year now.  The delays seem to concern the quality of the product, which has been problematic due to a missing DI (digital intermediate), which is the manner by which most modern films are authored onto Blu-ray disc these days.  Content Zone posted a blog which explains some of the issues in bringing A Bittersweet Life to Blu-ray:

Regarding PQ of Bittersweet Life Remaster

It's difficult to summarize in one word about PQ of recently remastered Bittersweet Life. However when one considers the intent of the director Jee-woon Kim and cinematographer Ji-yong Kim, the PQ is not reference class, but nevertheless alright. Of course, alright will vary from person to person.

The PQ from this remastered Bittersweet Life is not like those films from the late 2000s with existing DI (digital intermediate). However even if there was an usable DI for this film, the PQ would not have the same pop and clarity as Jee-woon Kim's subsequent 2 films.

As was stated (by the director) during the recent Blu-ray screening on July 9th, Bittersweet Life was filmed with noir style using muted colors and detail unlike his other films.

At the time of this film's initial release, DI was made, but that cannot be located at this time. Furthermore, since DI scan was relatively a new thing at that time, some rolls were scanned better than other rolls. For the new HD remaster, cinematographer Ji-yong Kim searched through existing sources in Korea and selected best quality MP (master positive).

However even though it was not that old, this MP had tremendous amounts of dust and scratches. It took us a long time to clean and remaster this title. It probably took twice as long to remaster compared to more modern clean film.

Of course, we can't say that we used all available technical resources in the world to restore this title, but we spared no time or effort that we could muster in Korea to remaster this title. Director, Jee-woon Kim and cinematographer, Ji-yong Kim went over almost all the frames individually. During this project, I've often wondered how much they would need to be paid if they were doing this for money.

And another blog post on the difficulty of remastering the audio,

On Sound Remastering for A Bittersweet Life

After receiving sound files for A Bittersweet Life from the production company Bom, our production team noticed unusual boominess. So, we proceeded to perform spectral analysis of the sound file.

As you can see in the attached screen capture from the spectral analysis, the sound is clipped in various locations. We thought that perhaps we had received the wrong files, so we checked previously released DVD. The result was the same, the sound was clipped.

So we checked with the company that was responsible for original sound production for A Bittersweet Life. They explained that the original sound files we received were for original theatrical sound mix. They also explained that original theatrical mix cannot be used for home media directly. Consumer media sound has to be tailored specifically for the home media use.

Our production style was to use the source provided by the movie production studios or content copyright owner, thinking that it had already gone through various QC/QA. So problem such as this was entirely new and unexpected. Working on sound remastering for A Bittersweet Life turned out to be a very helpful learning experience for us.

Thanks to xradman at the Blu-ray.com forum for the translation

The film has had a pretty spotty record on English friendly home video over the last 5 years.  It debuted as the Director's Cut on DVD in Korea, back in the days when they used to put a lot of effort into their DVD releases.  This version had English subtitles for the feature but not the extras.  The first release in an English friendly territory was Tartan's DVD of the theatrical version of ABL, which not only was obviously English subtitled but also ported over many of the extras from the Korean disc.  Following those, Tartan was preparing a 2 disc special edition of A Bittersweet Life Director's Cut for the UK market, but before it could be released, they went under and the release disappeared.  In the time since Tartan has been resurrected, but A Bittersweet Life's special edition is nowhere on the schedule.  Conspicuous by its absence is the US.  There has been no US release at all for A Bittersweet Life, a true shame.

Content Zone is releasing A Bittersweet Life in a regular edition and a "Coffee Book" digibook limited edition.  The contents of the disc will be the same, but the coffee book edition will be limited and is already selling fast, and present a digibook styled package.  The extras on these discs appear to mimic the earlier DVD editions of the film, and there are no indications that they will be subtitled, I'd be VERY surprised if they were.  The disc will also most likely be locked to Region A, like most Asian discs.