LJG765

Well, worth the ask at least. I really feel like challenge participation overall has gone way down. Participation in threads is lower than previous years too.

Trevor

Yeah, the entire forum is becoming a ghost town. Politics is the only place with any real discussion.

I’m good with possible month swaps being done, but think that overall November is perfect for Comedy. With horror being the dominant Challenge by far, Comedy in November is a nice cool down from the scares of October. And with so many holiday films and shows being Comedy, it segues into December perfectly. In fact, with horror comedy being such a huge sub-genre, and the almost two week overlap with Holiday, it’d be hard to argue that November Comedy isn't the best two cross-Challenge possibilities of any month on the calendar.

Shack

I'm on pace for my goal, but the stack of unwatched discs doesn't seem to be getting shorter... I do want to get to more commentaries, etc. so will concentrate on those this coming week.

popcorn

I've revisited more previously watched stuff than anything. The coolest thing is my son has been watching them with me, seeing many of these films for the first time. So far his favorite first time watches were Breathless, Harold and Maude, and Raging Bull (laserdisc title, Blu-ray copy).

I still have the following to go through thoroughly this month:

• The American Friend
• The Lodger
• My Own Private Idaho
• Pygmalion
• A Special Day
• Young Mr. Lincoln
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

I like that idea to watch M with the commentary track. I got the Blu-ray in the B&N summer haul but I haven't opened it yet.

Travis McClain

Worth noting is that there are quite a few in the Criterion Collection that are also Horror, which participants in this challenge already know from "warming up" for the Horror challenge. It is true that there aren't very man Holiday movies in the Collection, but I wonder if having two weeks to vacillate between Criterion and Holiday movies might not help stave off burnout from either. In any event, I was just brainstorming. I don't think I'll bother making the proposal elsewhere.

Good luck!

That's really cool that your son has been watching them with you!

popcorn

Thanks! Tonight we're watching My Own Private Idaho, because he only knows Joaquin Phoenix. River died four year before he was even born.

shadokitty

Travis McClain

I've completed M and Brief Encounter in the last few days. I had seen both of them once apiece, several years ago, and they resonated with me enough that I snagged them during some of the Barnes & Noble sales since those viewings. I kept meaning to watch them for this challenge but never got around to either. I was again spellbound by each, though obviously for different reasons. It's easy to understand why they're still acclaimed. They're the kinds of movies that I think most of us find out about once we start exploring film beyond whatever movies that came out during our own lives to that point. Those kinds of movies can be easy to put on a watchlist but easily put off for another day. M is for the "ripped from the headlines" crime story fans, and Brief Encounter for those into doomed romances. If you're either of those types of viewers and haven't seen them, I would strongly encourage you to take advantage of the remainder of this month's challenge as an impetus for sitting down with them.

As for their respective Criterion releases, I think their commentary tracks are the best microcosm for contrast. M's features two German film scholars. They talk a lot about the symbols in the story and placing the film in its historical context. It's particularly fun because they periodically debate one another in an almost passive-aggressive way. For instance, one argued that M reflected the trauma of post-WWI Germany; the other emphasized how close it was to WWII. I wish they'd elaborated on their respective arguments more than they did, but it was thought provoking all the same. I could write an entire essay about the subject but, for the purposes of this thread, I'll just recommend listening to the track itself.

Brief Encounter, however, was an outright disappointment. Though it was recorded several years before Wikipedia came along, it has the feel of someone simply reciting various pages from it about the cast. Frustratingly little of Bruce Eder's remarks have anything to do with what's on the screen. I would have been more accepting if he had at least synthesized those bios somehow, but instead, he basically just goes from one actor's career to the next.

It's inaccurate to say every supplement is of the same quality as those commentaries, but fair to say they're mostly close. The English language version of M is horrid. The dubbing is comically bad, but it's more the editing that frustrated me. It feels intended for an impatient audience than an attentive one. Scenes still deliver most of the same information, but they're trimmed enough that they jump from one to the next rather than segue. It costs the film its tension, which seems impossible to do. Conversely, Brief Encounter does include an (almost) hour-long "Self Portrait" retrospective of David Lean's filmography through Ryan's Daughter. Lean's remarks about the films themselves are rote, but when he gets to talking about the actual work that goes into filmmaking, he's highly engaging. He doesn't just talk about directing and editing, the two things he did. He also surveys what each department does on a film, and what their actual work is. Because of the runtime, it's more of a Behind-the-Scenes 101 course, but Lean's enthusiasm and expertise compensate for the brevity.

shadokitty

Gobear

I put in my Twilight Time copy of 1984, but my Blu-Ray player couldn't read it, so I watched my old MGM DVD instead. Really frustrated that I paid $15 for a dud disc. I guess I'll have to get the Criterion in November. The movie itself is a brilliant adaptation of a difficult novel , since so much of it is long political lecture from Emmanuel Goldstein's book. Director and writer Michael Radford only included technologies that existed in 1948 when Orwell's novel was published, so we see the nightmare world of Oceania just as Orwell imagined it. The performances are all excellent, Richard Burton is terrific as Inner Party member O'Brien is a sad reminder of the roles he could have performed if Liz Taylor and the bottle hadn't wrecked him.

The Devils is coming to The Criterion Channel next month!!!

Travis McClain

Only one week left! I can still reach my goal, but it requires me to watch a disc in its entirety every day between now and then. I won't cover all of the checklist even if I do make it through. It'd be easy to just watch the movies and come back to the commentaries and supplements, but I like doing the deep dive. It feels like attending a symposium that starts with a screening of the movie followed by a series of panels. I dig that.

Gobear

Fail-Safe is being added to the collection.

davidh777

Gobear

Salo, because I can't imagine any other outfit releasing it.

mrcellophane

The Seventh Seal is my pick. The Criterion Collection introduced me to Ingmar Bergman, and they are the primary distributors of his movies in the U.S.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty much done with the challenge unless I can fit in one more movie tonight or on Monday evening. I'm going out-of-town this weekend to visit friends and see a production of Macbeth. I've had a very satisfying month and managed to get through a lot of things!

shadokitty

Travis McClain

I first heard of Criterion when my friend bought their release of The Royal Tenenbaums, still one of his favorites today. I didn't ask anything about what Criterion was at the time, though, and I don't know that he would have known then, anyway. Then The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou came out. It looked fun and I wanted to see it, but didn't get out to catch it during its brief theatrical run. By this point, I was splurging on movies regularly, including blind buys. I found a used Criterion DVD of Life Aquatic for sale at Gamestop and snagged it. That was when I started to find out what Criterion was.

For me, Criterion is first and foremost those essential foreign/art house films. Belle de Jour, M, Rashomon, The Seventh Seal, 8½ are the ones that first come to my mind. They're emblematic of the kinds of movies I'd heard of, but had no idea how to actually see in those pre-Netflix days. Finding out there was a disc distributor that had brought together those and so many other films of their ilk made them immediately accessible to me. Of course, I was also greatly intimidated by the Criterion brand and didn't actually begin exploring it until I gave in and dabbled with this DVD Talk challenge in 2010. I worried I wasn't bright enough to understand the movies, and the supplements would make me feel even worse. Most commentary tracks I had seen listed on discs featured the director, maybe joined by an actor or two; Criterion's featured "film historian"s and "film scholar"s! I'm forever grateful to DVD Talk for getting me to finally explore such films.

Travis McClain

In the last few days, I've completed The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Wild Strawberries. Not exactly the most upbeat duo I could have gone with, but I picked them in part because they seemed to be kind of light on bonus content. Spy has a few listed supplements and only a scene-select commentary. The joke was on me, though, 'cause most of those supplements were long enough that I ended up spending three hours on them! They were thankfully, overall, of high quality. What stood out to me most about Spy was just how absolutely gorgeous it is on Blu-ray. I was mesmerized by the textures of clothes and even the wood paneling of a doorway in one shot.

The Wild Strawberries presentation isn't quite as revelatory on a visual level, but it's certainly as rich as I'd hoped. The behind-the-scenes footage was well worth watching if only because some of it is in color!

Both movies are still just as engaging as I remembered them being, and I was glad to revisit them.

Trevor

Best viewing of the month for me has been the Wim Wenders documentary Pina. I probably wrote whenever I first watched it (last year?) but it’s amazing. I’ve never been at all interested in dance, and didn’t expect much from this film. To be honest, I only bought it to have a 3D film in my Criterion collection and let me check that box on my monthly checklist each September. But this film is powerfully moving, and I enjoyed even more this year.

Travis McClain

I found a used copy of Chasing Amy for a buck recently and took a chance on it, really just figuring it might plug a hole in my checklist somewhere. I'd never seen it, and have only seen a little of the View Askewniverse. I don't know how I might have responded to it at the time of its release, but it's certainly an interesting one to see for the first time in 2019, as someone who was in his late teens at the time the movie was originally made and released. It's a mixed bag. Kevin Smith's narrative point is probably just as relevant now as then, but the execution of making that point is... frequently hard to watch in large part because the whole thing is supposed to be a teaching lesson for the Ben Affleck character that the Jason Lee character doesn't learn and is taught at the expense of the Joey Lauren Adams character. It feels like a laudable storytelling objective but in the hands of the entirely wrong storyteller. It's frustrating.

And yet, I have to also acknowledge that whether anyone cares to admit it or not, Smith's depiction of how young adult Gen X'ers viewed the world and talked about it at that time is highly accurate. The most perfect illustration of this is when Affleck tells Lee he should knock off the casual homophobic slurs. Rather than agree, Lee turns it around: Affleck is the bad guy, for being Adams's PC police enforcer. I'm not wrong for doing something wrong; you're wrong for holding me accountable for doing something wrong. It would be going too far to suggest that Chasing Amy is some kind of historically significant work of cinema capturing the zeitgeist of a social era, but it is relevant at least insofar as it shows that those Gen X'ers today who insist on continuing to act as the Jason Lee character did were told 20+ years ago to knock it off.

On an unrelated note: Smith points out that Affleck had taken the time to come in to record the commentary track while filming Armageddon. I almost want to stop my challenge here, just because I started with the Criterion Armageddon DVD and this would be a fun bookend. However, I have enough time left that I think I can get through at least one more disc in its entirety, maybe two.

davidh777

Travis McClain

It seemed appropriate, during this last weekend of the regular baseball season, to revisit Bull Durham. There aren't many baseball movies that are actually good movies, so it's understandable that Criterion should enshrine one. I think I've seen it half a dozen times over the years, not including with commentary tracks. I've never been in love with the final act, after Nuke's call-up. I can't quite put my finger on why, but I feel a drop off in energy. Regardless, I still love the movie itself.

The Criterion presentation is, I'm afraid, disappointing. The only thing new is an 18 minute one-on-one with Ron Shelton in which he largely repeats things he said in the previously recorded materials. This sense of Criterion phoning it in extends to the packaging. The booklet features a reprint of a 1989 New Yorker essay by Roger Angell rather than anything newly commissioned. Even the insert under the clear plastic of the case is just a solid generic red. This is not to say that those preexisting materials aren't worthwhile; the commentary tracks and the essay all are. But it's hard to point to any part of this release and say that Bull Durham truly got the Criterion treatment.

Gobear

This is the first year that I've completed the checklist even though I didn't see everything I wanted to watch this month.

shadokitty

davidh777