The Personal Criterion Collection - Page 2

Here's something I find pretty cool that Criterion's doing...

James Franco's Top 10

Diablo Cody's Top 10

EDIT: No idea how long they've been doing this feature. Apologies if it's old news.

Just to change things up a bit, here are my top five Criterion laserdiscs:

King Kong-- Most of the material here has been re-released, and in better quality, but all hail the first audio commentary ever

North By Northwest-- Full storyboards for the crop-dusting sequence, promotional materials, a fairly rare Hitchcock interview

2001: A Space Odyssey-- Exhaustive text supplements, including Clarke's original short story and personal account of the production, testimonials from contemporary scientists, set photos, even the complete Zero-Gravity Toilet instructions

Tootsie-- Phenomenal Sydney Pollack commentary, vintage one-hour making-of, photo gallery, outtake of 'Dorothy' being interviewed by Gene Shalit

The Princess Bride-- Unique commentary track in which Rob Reiner reads from the book while you watch the film (including the book's original ending), on-set footage largely different from later DVD extras, plus an excerpt from Reiner's forgotten TV show Morton and Hayes

I've heard a rumor of a Criterion boxed set release of Before Sunrise/Before Sunset in the past. Being a big fan of both of them, I would love to see this set released sometime in the near future.

The charisma between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy is great in both films. And I think it was pretty inspired for Linklater to helm a sequel to a fairly unknown film of his from 10 years prior.

Also, in this age of unnecessary sequels, it's nice to see how Before Sunset turned out. I hope we get another film every ten years following Hawke and Delpy's characters.

As an extra, I hope they could secure the rights and include the Waking Life segment of Jessie and Celine.

The Hudsucker Proxy

While certainly not forgotten, Hudsucker is rarely listed when rattling off gems from the Coen Bro's. It's not necessarily as broadly appealing as O Brother, nor is it as batshit wonderfully insane as Lebowski. Neither as darkly comedic as Fargo, or refined as No Country. Instead, Hudsucker is an expression of the Coen aesthetic that exists somewhere nearer the middle, though it's quality is still high, and their trademarks still present.

Playing around in a near-Capra universe, unusually little of the Coen cynicism creeps in. It is present, no doubt! This time around though, it's muted and a little more affectionate (kind of Lebowski-esque in that sense).

Production design takes a front seat in this film, and the Coen's work it into their visual landscape wonderfully (see the giant clock face on the outside of Newman's window), with great support from the typically brilliant Deakins.

This film deserves to be a contender among the Coen pantheon, and the loving treatment of Criterion could do wonders for it.

EDIT: Not my best defense for a film ever, but the late hour makes it tough.

I haven't read through the whole thread, so apologies if this has been brought up, but you do know VIDEODROME's already on Criterion, right?

http://www.amazon.com/Videodrome-Cri.../dp/B0002DB50E

I need to see The Iron Horse.

Curious: are you picking the new entries yourself, or are people e-mailing them in?

Experiment In Terror was a great choice!

I stand by Shampoo!!!

The Seven Samurai.

One of the greatest films ever made, Akira Kurosawa masterpiece has influenced filmmakers to this day and Criterion did a beautiful job with the DVD (actually two releases, one being a 3-disc that I don't have. This is the one I own).

MEET THE FEEBLES.

Peter Jackson's infamous puppet movie. Possibly one of the funniest films ever made, and it's interesting to see the work of fledgling designer Richard Taylor and editor Jamie Selkirk. It's fascinating to watch as a film that all the major LOTR players cut their teeth on, and it's difficult to imagine that these people would go on to make those films, but the fact is that if they hadn't made this, they probably wouldn't have made LOTR, with its use of modelwork and it's own puppetry and makeup. And taken on its own, FEEBLES is a wonderful satire of the Muppets while still showing their love for them. When you see it for the first time, it's difficult to breathe because you're laughing so hard.

Saaraba (1988), Amadou Saalum Seck

This is Seck's only film and it is absolutely beautiful. I watched it while taking an African Cinema class in college and there are few films I have ever seen that left me stunned the way Saaraba did. It was Seck's college senior thesis film and I remember just sitting in the classroom and feeling absolutely worthless. This is the plot synopsis from IMDB.

My nomination: Bob Roberts

A brilliant, perceptive and (sadly) prophetic film starring Tim Robbins (who also wrote and directed), Alan Rickman, Susan Sarandon, Fred Ward, and a lot of other great actors. (Special mention to Jack Black as a shinny Skinhead!)

Bob Roberts is a right wing proto-fascist politician-Folk Singer (!) who subverts the anti-Establishment trappings of the 1960's to put himself in power. The film follows his campaign through the eyes of a British documentary.

This film offers a penetrating analysis of US Politics and culture. There is already a good DVD out with commentary by Tim Robbins. But I'd love to see a solid (i.e Blu Ray) version with additional commentaries by Oliver Stone, political historians, and maybe even a round table discussion comparing Bob Roberts to the current crop of Conservative spokesmen

I'd also like to see John Carpenter's The Thing and maybe Escape from New York in Criterion releases. Besides being two great films (one a horror and one a B movie classic) a large percentage of people working in the industry today in SF and horror reference these films.

I'd also nominate The Wire..all 5 seasons...for Criterion treatment. This series presents a Dickens like overview of the various layers of society within large cities, and the ways they interact with each other. Season 3, with it's proactive portrayal of the probable affects of legalizing drugs, merits special treatment alone.

I'll nominate THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS

The beginning of Orson Welles's fall from Hollywood. A terrific, if flawed, movie in its own right with a behind the scenes story that's even better. The whole debate over what it could have been is worthy of a disc unto itself and there are many directions you could go.

Also, it's never had a DVD release.

This is sort of a placeholder, but upon learning that Joe Dante's Matinee is out of print, I think that you could do a phenomenal Criterion edition of that film. Especially if you combine it with some Forry Ackerman/William Castle docus.

More later.

I agree with this. MANT!

I'll bite hard on this:

Blow Out
One of the most masterful thrillers of the classics "paranoid" era and also one of the quintessential "films about making films" (or "art about making art", since De Palma's focus seems to move beyond mere cinema, despite Travolta's techie credentials).Without a shadow of a doubt (Hitchcock allusion intended) De Palma's elegantly tragic thriller is one of my most favourite pictures (see the side bar to your right). An exploitation heart pumps the chilled blood round its celluloid story of John Travolta’s skilled b-movie soundman, Jack Terry, who toils away his days, and more often his nights, creating sounds and screams to supplant the obtuse effect of derivative visuals and vapid starlets in a host of terrible slasher films with titles like "Co-ed Frenzy”. During a routine sound scout, he witnesses what appears to be a tragic car accident. But after rescuing the sole survivor of the crash, Sally (Nancy Allen), he’s drawn into the incidents aftermath and it appears much more is afoot than mere misfortune. His inquisitive (and, it’s revealed, somewhat self-destructive) sensibilities pull Jack and his new ward Sally further into the sinister and murderous affair involving corrupt senators, sleazy snitches and a maniacal killer played with admirable salaciousness by John Lithgow.

Aside from being a rollickingly tense thriller, Blow Out is simply an unsung masterpiece of films about film. It’s a perfect distillation of every film nut's fear that eventually, as sure as day follows night, their obsession will consume their every waking thought, action and emotion. It's a portrait of the filmmaker's purgatory, deliciously grandiose, operatically tragic and hysterically funny all at the same time.

It's inconceivable that De Palma wouldn't have at least talked this idea over with Paul Schrader at some point, given he and Schrader’s collaboration on the similarly fraught tale, Obsession. In a perverse way, it’s perhaps fortuitous then that Schrader didn't lend is scripting abilities to this project because his tautly puritanical, Protestant leanings might have stripped the ripe hyperactive emotion with which De Palma's achingly Catholic guilt imbues his own screenplay. Horror is often emotional truth disguised as fantasy. Here, that truth, as played by Travolta, is laid bare with a raw honesty and genuine compassion quite unexpected in an essentially glossy skid row conspiracy thriller. The dazzlingly controlled camera work and cutting by Vilmos Zsigmond and Paul Hirsch respectively parries with a score by Pino Donnagio that’s laced with romantic catastrophe the picture rolls, reels and eddies its way toward a punch line as mesmerising, audacious and devastating as anything in Oldboy. In the picture's final seconds, a simple grimly ironic sound gag encapsulates one man's spiritual destruction and despair at a modern world full of bastards and liars. You’ll never think of scream queens in quite the same way again.



Johnnie To's The Mission
The first (I think) of To's excursions into more purely Melvillian/Bressonian austerity (moving away from the traditional frenetic Hong Kong pizzazz like Heroic Trio), this is the usually orgiastic Hong Kong gangster film stripped of almost all but the orgasmic release of a gunfight's final flourish. Instead, it's all foreplay and seduction, an exquisite dance: part character study; part dick-flick; part hard-boiled action thriller (in that order). It's as delicate as it is brutal and telling of To's genuine dramatic skillz that you come out remembering the devastating hang-dog expression on a betrayed gang member's face with greater clarity than you do the individual bullet hits of the giddily choreographed shopping mall shoot out.



Curse Of The Demon
Auspicious monster appearance aside, this combines palm-dampening dread, fiendish plotting and a raft of superb character acting to produce a British picture every bit as chilling as The Wicker Man with the same gothic panache Jacques Tourneur effortlessly elicited for his Val Lewton pictures.



The Fly
The best remake of all time. This has the upper hand on The Thing purely by virtue of it superb realisation as a tragically dramatic chamber piece as well as a stark horror film. The most perfect distillation of Cronenberg's passionate cause for the parasite and body politic to date.


Don't Look Now
One of the saddest picture ever made. It oozes tragic fatalism and tremulous unease throughout every lovingly shot frame, from the wrenching opening through the emotionally charged love scenes and menacing, always enclosing Venice streets to the truly shocking climax.


Battle Royale
It's almost totally on face value that this picture works, and on the ironies which that face value throws up and the conflicts it creates that means it pulsates with subtext and emotion. The heartfelt plea by the father "You can do it" isn't cheesy. It's an aching plea for optimism in a child from an adult to save himself (in the classroom; in the game should he be picked; in life). It's aching. And the 'secret to the smile' at the end -- Fukasaku pulled Douglas Sirk into the ring with Verhoeven and created magic.

It contains all this and it's a genre film. That's grandness, right there.

Anhedonia

Devin explains why here.

Laugh all that you want, but I'm gonna submit it anyways:

'Wu Du/Five Deadly Venoms' (1978)

Yes, it's a Shaw Brothers Kung Fu movie; get over it.

5 martial artists specialize in different fighting styles:
- The Centipede and the Snake are 'bad guys' and know each other.
- The Lizard and the Toad are 'good guys' and know each other.
- The Scorpion is unknown...

The master who taught the 5 martial artists sends his current student (who knows a little of all 5 styles) to check on the other 5. From there, a pretty interesting story (with a few surprises) unfolds. Indeed, one of the venoms has a particularly sad ending that is NOT the norm for a Kung Fu movie.

The actors are pretty much the cream of the crop for this genre. Indeed, this film catapulted many of them to 'stardom' within the realm of Kung Fu films and beyond.

The production values are MUCH higher than the norm, and the fight scenes are exceptionally well choreographed. It's a thoroughly entertaining and rewatchable movie that deserves a top notch DVD release. I'd also like to think that Criterion could dig up a ton of interesting supplemental material for this release.

Flame away.

You won't get any argument from me; I love THE FIVE DEADLY VENOMS. Actually, I didn't think this list would be complete without a Shaw Bros. title, and considered writing a review of THE 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN.

I do have issues with Straxboy's picks, particularly BLOW OUT. But the man explained his position - and well - so there we are.

RE: Malmordo - I actually prefer 'The Kid with the Golden Arm' to 'Five Deadly Venoms' (it even features the exact same cast), but 5DV had much better production values and pretty much set the bar by which all other Kung Fu films are measured.

'The 36th Chamber of Shaolin' (or 'Shaolin Master Killer') would be a fantastic entry as well. Gordon Liu's character has an interesting story arc, and the fight scenes are fantastic. I would definitely support it/buy it as a Criterion DVD as well.

If you go Kung Fu way, you go with this one. Venoms is also great.

Colour me genuinely surprised at any issues with these bona fide masterworks. How is The Mission not as worthy as the best Wong Kar Wai?

For a more fluffy take on Blow Out, substitute Jonathan Demme's The Last Embrace -- the best Hitchcock pastiche De Plama never made.

As far as kung fu goes, no argument from me on a Venoms picture. Isn't Come Drink With Me a more viable entry into such a prestige label? If we went Golden Harvest to match alternate eras, I'd submit The Prodigal Son.


Oh, almost forgot: Come and See: Director Elem Klimov's picture is not very well known outside of arthouse circles yet anyone who's seen a modern war picture from Saving Private Ryan to Tae Guk Gi(Brotherhood Of War) will have seen the inspirational cinematic techniques pioneered by Klimov on a fraction the budget. It's a harrowing journey of one Russian youth's excursion into hell (and adulthood) via a descent into the ferocity of WWII

Thanks for the backup. In truth, both films merit a Criterion release. Can you imagine how incredible either of these films would look if given the proper treatment?

David Mamet's HOMICIDE (1991)

Perhaps not his best film, but for me his most interesting. Mamet's protagonist here, Bobby Gold (the great Joe Mantegna), is a homicide detective whose reluctant investigation into the murder of a local Jewish store owner stirs a long-dormant identification with his own heritage. He
gains a self-awareness that is unique among Mamet characters in its ambiguity. Uneven and unusually asymmetrical for a Mamet film, the film teases the sincerity of Gold's beliefs by funneling it through Mamet's favorite sociological prism, the con.

It doesn't always work, but it's altogether fascinating, and never less than compelling. And it never hurts when William H. Macy is playing a racist cop.

I'd love to hear Mamet's take on the material, to know why he wanted to use such a plot device to subsume the underlying psychological themes. In the end it felt grafted on from the body of some other movie.

In any event, the film needs a decent U.S. release NOW.

I think we just have a different approach. I've been contributing some titles that to my mind are overlooked, minor cult oddities to the public but genre efforts transcending the form, OOP or unavailable on DVD or in need of remastering. I'm imagining a list such as this:

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/fe...ntialfilms.asp

The problem I have with something like THE FLY is that I feel it's already been talked and analyzed to death. I don't even find it Cronenberg's best effort.

BLOW OUT is another story. I think it's crap, really. BODY DOUBLE has more to offer me in De Palma's meta-thriller comedy oeuvre, like Craig Wasson's claustrophobic breakdown hilariously putting the brakes on Act III while De Palma stand-in Dennis Franz orders our hero to "act"! One of the director's ballsiest and funniest moves, and I don't remember anything in BLOW OUT that measures up.

But this is not my list, of course. Anyone can drop in and Anderson has final word. Different approaches are nice, anyway, to shake things up a bit.

Night and day. To's action/gangster pics I would liken to Tarantino's postmodern fantasies, fun for an evening but derivative and so wrapped up in the emotions of other movies as to be little more than soulless pastiche. I'm sure I would've been more engrossed in the drama of EXILED had I no idea of the existence of THE WILD BUNCH, EXTREME PREJUDICE and BULLET IN THE HEAD.

The one thing I can say about To that sets him apart from Tarantino is his willingness to work in different genres and adjust style accordingly. Have you seen any of those romantic comedies with Sammi Cheng? They're awful, but I give To points for the attempt.

No fan of LAST EMBRACE, but would get behind a long-overdue DVD release. I think it's a good pick for that reason alone.

I get more and more confused. Are we supposed to be nominating DVDs that actually exist, or just movies that deserve high-quality releases?

Come on, The Mission is nothing like Exiled really. It's The Asphalt Jungle next to The List Adrian Messenger. Sammi Cheung's an acquired taste I guess, but Needing You has the best Moment Of Romance pastiche I've seen, put it that way. Also, please try and see Sparrow. It makes any comparison above moot and regains To's unfairly tainted honour wholesale. Those Lunar New Year pictures are so culturally specific to China, it's a little unfair to patronise To points for attempting them -- I mean I don't hold Looking For Mr Perfect against Ringo Lam any more than I praise him for Full Contact. Context, you know.

The trouble is, that Slant list, in its own way is so very predictable as well: mostly slightly under-the-mainstream-radar offerings from dependable cinephile staples. It's almost a paradigm of the cultured internet film geek list. Great pictures, but not much on their that would make for an idiosyncratic or unexpected addition to the collection.

Blow Out is a near perfect thriller, if you see that De Palma, for all his self-evasion and cynicism, is a die hard, if hard-edged romantic and dreamer: the Travolta's flashback; the 'good scream'; Lithgow's cover-up; the Anonioni 360 degree pan around Travolta's unfurling life. All more iconic than camp Wassan with claustrophobia. Because they have genuine dramatic weight to them.

I'll defer on The Fly, if only because David Prior has already done a Criterion worthy job. Let me substitute The Last Boy Scout.

Also, one that does really stand out on that Slant list: Possession: the horror film Stanley Kubrick should have made after The Shining. It's Haneke, Kubrick, Wenders, Breillat and few others all smashed into one heady, bloody whole. Incredible.

The Last Detail (1973)

Serving as sort of a quintessential comedy of the auteur era, The Last Detail reflects the nation's attitude toward the military following Vietnam, one of mocking dismissal of its arbitrary rules and institutions . It's also one of the best examples of male platonic relationships put to film, and its unhappy ending makes one nostalgic for a time when Hollywood had the balls not to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Swing Shift:Jonathan Demme's Director's Cut (1984)-hailed as a masterpiece, and one of the best films of the decade by those who've seen it; this examination of life on the American home front during WWII is smart, funny, romantic and achingly bittersweet.

Taken away by star/ producer Goldie Hawn; a textbook example of how just a little tampering can ruin the impact and integrity of a film. (Sad because her cut damagingly undercuts not only perhaps her best ever performance, but Kurt Russell's as well)

Cisco Pike-raw, post-Easy Rider drug/counter-culture film; As a film it captures the melancholy of the shattered 60's dream; great performances abound; Kristofferson magnificent and magnetic in his debut(just one of the most honest screen presences of all time); Hackman, a pathetic, brutal small-time (proto?) Popeye Doyle and the always awesome Harry Dean Stanton!

Freebie & the Bean-funny, politicaly incorrect buddy (cop) picture; the chemistry bewtween Arkin & Caan is the show

I fully endorse this.

I dummied these up for another board-- might as well stick them in here:

Did you get an explanation for Bobby Fischer? Because that's a great choice, and I'll totally talk about why if nobody else did.

All right, I've got some time this week so I'll write up that and Matinee before the next entry.

Agreed x100 about 36TH CHAMBER, though THE FIVE VENOMS is much more iconic than it is actually good IMHO. The concept is far better than the film wound up being. 36TH CHAMBER, though, is just an outstanding film that isn't overrated in the slightest. I'd substitute the innovative, death-free HEROES OF THE EAST for VENOMS, and for a Chang Cheh film I'd propose ONE ARMED SWORDSMAN or his epic version of THE WATER MARGIN instead of THE FIVE VENOMS.

Pity that the current-era Criterion regime HATES non-Japanese Asian cinema. And by "pity" I mean "goddamn tragedy". Criterion apologists will hold up Edward Yang and Wong Kar-Wai as examples of how they don't... but while both are certainly worthy of inclusion, one is dead and the other is amply represented on DVD already. This is woefully inadequate.

Where's Pang Ho-Cheung? Where's Fruit Chan? His masterful independently produced trilogy chronicling the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China is tailor-made for Criterion, and only one of the films (THE LONGEST SUMMER) has ever been available on a decent English subtitled DVD - and it's only decent compared to the other two films, MADE IN HONG KONG and LITTLE CHEUNG, which have DVDs that didn't even warrant an upgrade from VCD.

I won't even get into the number of Korean and Thai films on Criterion, for fear of crashing CHUD with a "divide by zero" error. The days when they'd entertain the notion of releasing something like THE KILLER or SUPERCOP (both former Criterion titles) died with LaserDisc.

Agreed. And though Zhang Yimou's work is well represented on DVD, I think it would make a lot of people happy if some company - preferably Criterion - slapped English subtitles onto KEEP COOL and got that out. The film's already over a decade old.

Anderson: I'm disappointed that neither 'Five Deadly Venoms' nor '36th Chamber of Shaolin' made your list for this week. Is this an oversight, or do you disagree with their merits? Just curious.

My submission for this week.

ROME, OPEN CITY

Simply put, one of the most important post-WWII films in European history. Sure, you can debate whether it's truly the first of the Italian Neo-Realism movement or not, ultimately it doesn't matter. It's still utterly influential and it's still a masterpiece. It's one of the cornerstones of Italian cinema.

Contrast the brutality and rawness of OPEN CITY with the romantic glamour of CASABLANCA made just a few years prior and you'll understand the gulf in war experiences between people in Hollywood and people in Europe during the period. Anna Magnani's heartbreaking exit from the film and the random senselessness of that, stands in sharp contrast to the Hollywood speech to get Ingrid Bergman on that plane. This isn't a film about choice, it's about the random viciousness of war and the moral grays that envelope all.

Made in the waning days of WWII, this is an instant piece of cultural history. The immediacy of events informs every frame of film. It's a minor miracle that it could even been made in the wake of the devastation around Italy.

Comrades, Almost a Love Story

Directed by Peter Chan Ho-Sun, Comrades, Almost a Love Story (1996) is probably one of the best Hong Kong films of the 1990s, and it's a real shame that the English-subtitled DVD is out of print. To my knowledge, the only DVD currently available is a Region 2 Japanese DVD sans subtitles. Somebody needs to put out a Special Edition of this film, and it would seem Criterion would be the logical choice.

The film, which tells the story of two Mainlanders (Maggie Cheung and Leon Lai) in search of a better life in Hong Kong, cleaned up at the 16th Annual Hong Kong Film Awards, garnering honors for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and, well, just about every other award it received a nomination for that year. Although In the Mood for Love tends to get all the attention, I would argue that Comrades, Almost a Love Story features Maggie Cheung's best performance.

Its story spans years and nations, exemplifying hopes for "a better tomorrow" (so to speak) and anxieties about the 1997 Handover. It's also extremely funny, touching, and romantic. The film has become pretty much a cultural touchstone thanks in no small part to the Teresa Teng music and the iconic bicycle riding scene (the latter of which was partially immortalized at Madame Taussauds in Hong Kong).

The film of this caliber definitely deserves a remastered transfer, as the picture on the old Mei Ah DVD was pretty terrible by today's standards. The film would also lend itself pretty well to special features -- just to see Leon Lai, Maggie Cheung, Peter Chan, and Eric Tsang reminisce about this film would be a wonderful bonus indeed.

So, if Criterion really wanted to rectify its lack of non-Japanese Asian films, Comrades, Almost A Love Story would be, in my humble estimation, a great starting point.