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NY Times picks most notable R1 DVDs of 2004

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NY Times picks most notable R1 DVDs of 2004

Old 01-02-05, 01:20 AM
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NY Times picks most notable R1 DVDs of 2004

Some good titles for those of you looking for to add to your collections.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/mo...whPVczVM1iE6Ew
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December 31, 2004

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK

The Disc's Coming of Age, From Noir to Seinfeld

By DAVE KEHR

In the year 2004 the DVD came of age. No longer just a cheaper, more convenient substitute for VHS, the silver disc has brought a whole new level of technical excellence to home video. And to feed a medium that now demands sharp pictures and full sound, the studios and their independent brethren have been scouring the world's archives for the best available prints in their most complete versions, and financing elaborate restorations that would have been considered absurdly uneconomic three or four years ago. Though nothing, in the heart of a true cinephile, can ever replace the experience of seeing a film projected on a screen, DVD has made hundreds of rare and exotic movies available to folks who are not lucky enough to live within range of a major archive or museum, and our film culture is much richer as a result.

Here is a list of some of the most notable DVD's to appear in the last 12 months, somewhat arbitrarily cut off at 20, though many more could be added - and a whole lot more than that if DVD's from outside the United States market were included. In the interests of simplicity and accessibility, though, this accounting is restricted to Region 1 discs, those manufactured for release in North America.

Hitchcock to Lang

'ALFRED HITCHCOCK SIGNATURE COLLECTION' (Warner Home Video, $99.98). Bringing together nine of the Hitchcock films controlled by Time Warner, this beautifully produced set features painstaking new transfers of some familiar titles - including "The Wrong Man," "Stage Fright" and "I Confess" - as well as three films making their DVD debut: "Dial M for Murder," "Foreign Correspondent" and "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." The keystone of the collection is the double-disc edition of "Strangers on a Train," which includes, in addition to an impeccable transfer of the American release version, a rediscovered early edit that contains some additional scenes, along with several unusually informative documentaries on the film's making.

'DAWN OF THE DEAD ULTIMATE EDITION' (Anchor Bay, $49.98). A year that saw Zack Snyder's entertaining if superficial remake of George Romero's 1978 zombie classic also saw Anchor Bay's spectacular reissue of the original, in a four-disc set that includes three versions of the film: Mr. Romero's preferred American release version, a looser "director's cut" that was shown in the market at Cannes, and the European cut supervised by Dario Argento. A fourth disc features Roy Frumkes's excellent "making of" documentary, "Document of the Dead," and a mountain of marginalia, topping off what amounts to a scholarly edition of one of the most resonant and influential horror films ever made.

'FILM NOIR CLASSIC COLLECTION' (Warner Home Video, $49.92). When this five-film box set appeared from Warner Home Video in July, it announced that company's new ambition: to challenge the Criterion Collection for high-quality transfers and extensive supplementary material. Here are two of the crowning masterpieces of the genre: Joseph H. Lewis's "Gun Crazy" and Jacques Tourneur's "Out of the Past," as well as three lesser but still commanding titles ("The Asphalt Jungle," "Murder My Sweet" and "The Set-Up"), all transported to video with appropriately inky blacks and excellent shadow detail.

'FRITZ LANG EPIC COLLECTION' (Kino International, $99.95). What a year it has been for admirers of the great German-American filmmaker Fritz Lang. First Kino released this magnificent set of Lang silents ("Metropolis," "Die Nibelungen," "Spies" and "Woman in the Moon") and then Criterion upgraded its edition of Lang's first sound film, "M." All of these discs are based on the recent restorations of the films by the German film archives, which in the case of the silents are almost twice as long as the edited American release versions ("Woman in the Moon," long considered a misfire in its short form, turns out to be a major film at its full 169 minutes). And because the Germans are working from original material (camera negatives in some cases), all the films have startlingly fine pictorial qualities, heretofore obscured by generations of grime and sloppy duplication.

Comedy and Decadence

'JERRY LEWIS COLLECTION' (Paramount Home Video, $14.99 each). Is it finally time to stop with the French-love-him jokes and acknowledge that Jerry Lewis is one of the great American filmmakers? The 10 Lewis films released by Paramount this fall, all in fine transfers and with additional material drawn from Mr. Lewis's extensive archives, reveal both the fierce creativity of his comic performances and the extreme formal sophistication of his direction. The centerpiece is the 1963 "The Nutty Professor," presented in a two-disc special edition, a study in split personality that both anticipates Ingmar Bergman's 1966 "Persona" and surpasses it in psychological acuity. It's also a lot funnier.

'JOHN CASSAVETES: FIVE FILMS' (Criterion Collection, $124.95). An independent filmmaker back when that term still meant something, John Cassavetes created some of the most idiosyncratic films ever made in this country: sprawling, rough-edged stories of middle-aged Americans gripped by emotional crises, often of their own making. This box set from the standard-setting Criterion Collection offers restorations of the five features owned by the Cassavetes estate: "Shadows," "Faces," "A Woman Under the Influence," "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie" and "Opening Night," along with Charles Kiselyak's whopping 200-minute documentary on Cassavetes's life and art, "A Constant Forge."

'JUDEX' (Flicker Alley, $39.95). The Surrealists loved Louis Feuillade's crime serials, spun from the pulp fiction of the turn of the century, for their bizarre and subversive qualities, including the constant suggestion that the world as we know it is only a false front hiding the true activities of capitalist rapscallions. "Judex," from 1917, is about a caped crime fighter on a mission to avenge his father, ruined by cunning bankers, and the five-and-a-half-hour film has been given an excellent two-disc treatment by the indie company Flicker Alley.

'L'ÂGE D'OR' (Kino International, $24.95). Once one of the world's most difficult films to see - thanks to generations of persecution by church and state - Luis Buñuel's Surrealist masterpiece can now be a part of every American home thanks to this excellent disc, based on a British master, from Kino. Buñuel seems to be pounding on most of the hot buttons of Western culture at once, combining unbridled lust, creative blasphemy and even some gross-out gags that wouldn't be out of place in an Adam Sandler vehicle into a discontinuous narrative centered on a pair of lovers who never quite manage to get it on.

'LA DOLCE VITA' (Koch Lorber, $34.98). Rights issues have kept this groundbreaking 1960 film by Fellini out of circulation for many years; finally cleared, it has turned up on a solid double-disc edition, featuring commentary by the film critic Richard Schickel and an introduction by the director Alexander Payne. Fellini's heavy-breathing denunciation of modern decadence - a woman strips at a party! - now seems quaint, but the film has moments of pulsating poetry unlike any other Fellini film, most memorably in the nocturnal hush of the celebrated Trevi Fountain scene.

Virgins and Porky Pig

'LEGONG - DANCE OF THE VIRGINS' (Image Entertainment, $29.99). Quite a discovery: a full-length anthropological fiction, shot in two-strip Technicolor on location in Bali and directed by a French aristocrat, Henri de la Falaise, who was the trophy husband of two Hollywood stars, Gloria Swanson and Constance Bennett. A seductive blend of serious documentary, lyrical effusion and unbridled prurience (yes, those native girls are topless), the film takes us back to a time when movies looked out at the world, rather than trying to create artificial environments. This lovingly produced disc, from the altruistic spirits at Image Entertainment, contains the year's most impressive supplementary package: two more complete anthropological features, plus a newly commissioned gamelan score for "Legong" that makes for a lovely listening experience even with the image turned off.

'THE LEOPARD' (Criterion, $49.95). Here the Criterion Collection does what the pioneering company does best: present a classic film in a definitive edition, impeccably transferred to video, and fill out the release with relevant and informative supplementary material, including a newly produced hourlong documentary on the film's making. Visconti's 1963 film is based on the novel by Lampedusa, about an aging aristocrat (Burt Lancaster) who sacrifices himself and his traditional way of life to make way for the new Italy being formed by Garibaldi. Though the film is often described as the Italian "Gone With the Wind," its regretful but clear-eyed vision of the individualism of the past slipping into the collectivism of the future is more suggestive of John Ford's "Searchers."

'LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION, VOL. 2' (Warner Home Video, $64.92). Warner Brothers continues to mine one of the studio's greatest resources, the brilliant cartoons produced for peanuts in a back-lot shack its inhabitants respectfully referred to as "Termite Terrace." With 56 cartoons on the first disc, released in 2003, and 60 more on this one, that leaves Warners with something like 880 to go, and we can only hope they'll all get the same fine treatment. With prints restored from the original theatrical versions, rather than the faded television copies that many of us grew up with, the cartoons seem brighter, crisper and funnier than ever. Volume 2 goes some way toward redressing the injustice done toward the animator Robert Clampett, underrepresented in Volume 1, by offering several of his classics, including the daring black-and-white "Porky in Wackyland."

'MARX BROTHERS SILVER SCREEN COLLECTION' (Universal Home Video, $59.98). It's heaven to have all five of the Marx Brothers' Paramount features under one roof, particularly in such well-restored prints. Even the brothers' first feature, "The Cocoanuts," from 1929, has been much upgraded, from the battered, 16-millimeter reduction prints that were for long the only source, to include a few reels of startlingly clear 35-millimeter material, and the scratchy early sound has been cleaned up enough to make the "Why a duck?" routine clearly audible for the first time in memory. Universal, which owns the rights to most of the pre-1948 Paramount films, is sitting on enough great material to produce an infinity of similar sets. How about Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch in the new year?

Monsters and Jedis

'MONSTER LEGACY COLLECTION VOL. 1' (Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man); 'VOL. 2' (the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon) (Universal Home Video, $29.98 each). It's an ill wind that blows nobody good, and in this case, the wind was Universal's greatly botched "Van Helsing," in which the studio trampled on its most precious franchises, the classic horror characters it created in the 30's and 40's. Meant to promote "Van Helsing," and featuring many annoying interventions from that film's director, Stephen Sommers, the "Monster Legacy Collection" presents the major Universal horror cycles in their completeness. Ranging from masterpieces like "The Bride of Frankenstein" (a remastering corrects Universal's sloppy original release of this title) to curiosities like Joe May's "Invisible Man Returns," the "Legacy" sets are admirably inclusive, embracing the good, the bad and the patently ridiculous.

'THE OFFICE - THE COMPLETE COLLECTION' (BBC, $59.92). As American comedy becomes broader and more gag-oriented, British comedy - on television, at least - is rediscovering the pleasures of psychological realism. By design, "The Office" lasted only two short seasons, in addition to a two-hour Christmas special (all included in the BBC box set), and its dramatic structure and character development are more like a movie's than the open-ended, serial form of American sitcoms. Ricky Gervais's David Brent, the grandly annoying office manager, is a tragic figure for our times, caught between a debilitating awareness of his own mediocrity and a New Age business culture that urges him on to ever-more hideous flights of self-actualization.

'OUTSKIRTS/THE GIRL WITH THE HATBOX' (Image Entertainment, $24.99). The canonical list of great Soviet filmmakers (Eisenstein, Vertov, Dovzhenko, et al.) usually omits the name of Boris Barnet, perhaps because Barnet's rich and paradoxical sense of human nature seems an implicit rebuke to the mechanical, stimulus-response aesthetics of his more theoretical, montage-obsessed colleagues. This fine release from the restoration expert David Shepard pairs one of Barnet's masterworks, the 1933 "Outskirts," with the less inventive but still quite entertaining silent "The Girl With the Hatbox."

'SCTV VOL. 1 AND 2' (Shout Factory, $89.98 each). Between them, these two box sets present 18 programs, each 90 minutes long, from the legendary late-night comedy series first broadcast on NBC in 1981 and '82. The volume of the work is staggering by itself; that it is of consistent brilliance seems miraculous. The great cast, with the sad exception of the late John Candy, has been reassembled for extensive commentary tracks and detailed documentaries on various aspects of the show's production.

'SEINFELD: SEASONS 1 & 2, SEASON 3' (Columbia-TriStar, $49.95 each). How much do you love Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer? These two four-disc box sets, collecting 41 episodes from the show's first years on the air, are just the beginning of Columbia TriStar's DVD rollout of the vastly popular program, and both come crammed with enough supplementary material to keep an army of graduate students occupied for years to come.

'STAR WARS TRILOGY' (20th Century Fox Home Video, $69.98). George Lucas was right to keep the three crown jewels of his "Star Wars" saga - "A New Hope," "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi" - away from DVD until the format had reached technical maturity. The transfers, both of image and sound, are state of the art, and anyone looking to blow out a new home-theater system need seek no further. The films will continue to be loved by cultists and sniffed at by critics, though Mr. Lucas may have alienated part of his fan base by inserting new digital effects into the analog originals. This isn't the "Star Wars" you saw when it first came out, but a buffed, polished, idealized version of it.

'YAKUZA PAPERS' (Home Vision Entertainment, $99.95). DVD is finally allowing American viewers to catch up with many of the Japanese genre entertainments that were considered too lowbrow to be exported at the time of their making. No single director has benefited more from the fad for Japanese pulp than Kinji Fukasaku, a filmmaker whose taste for violence and social provocation suggests the American Samuel Fuller. This handsome box set unites all five, feature-length installments of Fukasaku's 1973-74 theatrical series about the gangland conflicts of postwar Hiroshima, which become a bloody metaphor for Japan's 1950's "economic miracle."

Last edited by Perkinsun Dzees; 01-02-05 at 02:15 AM.
Old 01-02-05, 01:37 AM
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Wow... it's like someone decided to make up my wishlist for the next DDD sale.

But seriously, good stuff... Man I wish I was able to pick up the Film Noir set at Costco.
Old 01-02-05, 01:54 AM
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pretty good set of titles
Old 01-02-05, 04:25 AM
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No Martin Scorsese box set on the list?
Old 01-02-05, 11:40 AM
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David Kehr in the New York Times has one of the best weekly DVD review columns out there. He always seems to eschew the week's "Catwoman" or "Day After Tomorrow" release to focus on classic and obscure films coming out on DVD. I make a point of always reading his weekly reviews and those of Randy Salas in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
Old 01-02-05, 08:55 PM
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this must be one of the rare lists to have left out ROTK & GWTW...
Old 01-02-05, 10:10 PM
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Very solid list that demonstrates what a broad spectrum of material is reaching the DVD market.
Old 01-02-05, 10:48 PM
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great list. good to see the Yakuza Papers set made that list.
Old 01-03-05, 04:01 AM
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I was set to mock, but the list is mock-proof.

Is anyone else going straight to Amazon to find out more about LEGONG - DANCE OF THE VIRGINS?
Old 01-03-05, 11:33 AM
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No Freaks and Geeks Yearbook Edition = NO SALE!

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