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Posted on 17 July 2004
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The Best DVDs of 2003
The Top Ten
L’Atalante
Jean Vigo died at the age of twenty-nine, having made only four films. And yet it is difficult to imagine the magical realism of Terrence Malick, the Brothers Quay, or Emir Kusturica existing without him (to say nothing of the French New Wave). Each in his own way owes something to Vigo’s fierce and beautiful world.
L’Atalante is Vigo’s final affirmation of life and love, a continually inventive and poetic film, sung with the director’s last breath. Creating a world of fog, water and iron, ethereal and yet deeply earthy, Vigo delights in both physical and emotional love, in all of their imperfections, whether comical or heartrending. Jean Dasté, with his implacable agility; Michel Simon’s rough, unapologetic physicality; and of course, Dita Parlo, at once voluptuous and cherubic: each betrays Vigo’s astonishing capacity for the sensual and the wondrous.
New Yorker Video (with commendable, if unusual, care) has given this film a just release on DVD. Though not a perfect transfer (is there one?), the film has nonetheless lost none of its lustrous beauty and its rare sense of romance and wonder.
by: Leo
By Brakhage
There are many who might object to a release of Brakhage’s films on DVD. There are the purists who will insist on the exacting standards (and inaccessibility) of film projection, and there are those that simply deny Brakhage his contribution to cinema, that fail to see the aesthetic value, even the point, of his painting on film.
Such objections have been effectively silenced by Criterion’s anthology of his work. Few DVDs capture so much of the range, the spirit, and the sensual beauty of their subject as this, and few companies would have the courage, the care, and the technical expertise necessary to grant these works a wider audience.
What this DVD provides is a textbook: a living record of one of the true innovators of the medium of film, whose project was an “adventure of perception,” an effort to expand the viewer’s imagination and the very possibilities of seeing. In their painstaking presentation of each frame of these twenty-six films, Criterion not only continues Brakhage’s expansion of the mind’s senses, but also stretches the capacity of the medium of video, gaining the imprimatur of the artist (who once likened video to “a pudding”) and of his longtime defender and anti-video activist, Fred Camper.
The release of this set of Brakhage’s films is at once a triumph for the avant-garde, a challenge to the supremacy of narrative cinema, and a milestone in the history of DVD production.
by: Leo
Don’t Look Now
This disc does not have a commentary. It does not have a making-of documentary. It does not have outtakes, deleted scenes, an interview with the director or stars, a special-effects featurette, or filmographies. What it does have is one of the best horror films ever made (possibly one of the best films ever made, period) in a beautiful and authentically film-like transfer.
When I read DVD reviews on the internet, I am always dismayed by complaints about visible film grain. It seems that people want their DVDs somehow to overcome the physical limitations of their filmic origin and to arrive on their television screens with crystalline sharpness. That might be fine for feature films made in the present day, but in the 1970s, directors and cinematographers ardently embraced the physical qualities of film and enthusiastically accentuated what we now think of as drawbacks. Grainy film stock, lens flares, and desaturated colors were actually desired effects of many filmmakers in the 1970s, including Nicolas Roeg, who began his career as a cinematographer for directors as diverse as Roger Corman and David Lean. Paramount’s DVD of his masterpiece presents the film with sumptuous grain so heavy it appears to dance. From the amount of dust and scratches in the print used for transfer, it is clear that Paramount did not use a single digital trick to try to clean up the image. It’s exactly the kind of transfer that would send a DVD reviewer at DVDFile into an apoplectic fit. It’s gorgeous.
by: Matt
The BRD Trilogy
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
At the beginning of 2003, there were exactly three DVDs available of the films of the insanely prolific director of the New German Cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Now, at the end of the year, there are 22. It still only represents a little over half of the work he completed in his short life, but these titles are an embarrassment of riches. At the top of this heap of discs is a four-disc box set of his BRD Trilogy (The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronika Voss, and Lola) released by The Criterion Collection. With the exception of Maria Braun, the films are not among his best known or most heralded, but taken as a whole with the commentaries, interviews, documentaries, bound book of essays, and incredibly sexy packaging, the set is one of the finest releases in the storied history of the label. For the novice, a better introduction to Fassbinder might be Criterion’s release of his Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, his soulful update of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows. It’s a near perfect film accompanied by just the right amount of supplementary materials including an excellent introduction by Todd Haynes, a director who recently made his own tribute to Sirk with Far From Heaven. For the adventurous, however, The BRD Trilogy is a must-have. From the epic woman-as-history fable of The Marriage of Maria Braun, to the Sunset Boulevard meets The Panic in Needle Park melodrama of Veronika Voss, to the candy-colored fantasia of Lola, the set tells the larger story of a great and gifted director working at the peak of his powers and burning, perhaps, just a little too bright. After Fassbinder completed these films, all that was left for him was the artistic and personal disappointment of his final film, Querelle and an abrupt death from an overdose of cocaine and downers.
by: Matt
The Decalogue
The Three Colors Trilogy
The Double Life of Veronique excepted, Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s final thirteen films are designed to be grouped together. 1988’s The Decalogue consists of ten one-hour films, each based perceptibly on one of the Ten Commandments. This inspiration is loosely applicable; single films will consider multiple Commandments, others are more ambiguous in their position; the whole is completely unified. The purpose is to consider each component with knowledge of the whole. This tapestry is thoroughly dense and sometimes differentiated: despite the films’ connections, Kieslowski used a different cinematographer on each, and the overall tone is varied: two episodes in particular are deeply dramatic; the final one is comedic. The Decalogue is a cinematic tenet that requires patience and intimacy for thorough inspection. Its DVD fosters, perhaps more appropriately than its rare screenings at repertory houses, such an opportunity.
Kieslowski designed his subsequent Three Colors trilogy similarly: three films (Blue, White, and Red) released in succession (1993, two in 1994) that are components of a single narrative gesture. The colors evoke the French tricolor, and each considers liberty, equality, and fraternity in creative, sometimes cynical manners. It is not until the three are seen that the completed, encompassing movement can be seen: certain actions repeat in each film and each borrows or builds upon themes introduced in its associated sequels. (Notice how White uses multiple flash-forwards and flash-backs that reference its position as a chronologically central component.)
These series are pensive, vital foreign films, and each has been neglected on DVD until this year. The Decalogue was briefly available on a previous release from Facets, and went shortly out-of-print. Its current reissue includes a remastered film source, and supplementary material. Miramax (a company that, prior to this year, was guilty of neglecting its back catalogue) debuted the Three Colors trilogy in a ridiculously affordable boxed set. Each platter includes extensive supplements, a commentary, and some of Kieslowski’s short films.
by: Rumsey
Metropolis
As with many films that wear decades of age, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has fallen victim to the public domain. With the advent of each video format Metropolis has seen multiple editions, most presumably taken from a print of sub-par quality or deteriorated condition. After literally dozens of versions Metropolis arrives this year in its superlative form courtesy Kino Video. I would even venture to say that this is Kino’s — a label renowned for their preference towards silent films — seminal release.
Foremost, this is a restored version of the landmark science fiction film, with omitted footage reinstated (missing scenes are even replaced with descriptive title cards, which do not interrupt the film). The package includes multiple featurettes and the orchestral score in 5.1.
by: Rumsey
The Mondo Cane Collection
When Blue Underground, the upstart exploitation DVD studio announced earlier in 2003 that they planned to release an 8-disc box set of the outrageous Mondo films of Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, I was ecstatic. With a list price of $150, I also thought I was going to be the only person on the planet who would buy this. Turns out I was wrong. Within a week of its release, every one of the 10,000 limited edition boxes had been shipped to stores and they were flying off the shelves. It became the must-have DVD item of the year for the cult film cognoscenti. Here were films that I thought no one cared about (just a year ago, my local indie video store was trying to sell its dusty VHS copy of Mondo Cane), and suddenly they were being treated like the lost films of Orson Welles. The lovingly produced set includes the five films Jacopetti and Prosperi made together plus a feature-length documentary on the duo. Each film was transferred to DVD from archival materials (for some from the original camera negative) under the supervision of the directors and two of the films are presented in different cuts. There are also trailers, TV spots, and amateur footage shot during the productions accompanying a number of the films. The content of the films is best left to individual discovery, but it will suffice to say that it ranges from the whimsically amusing to the morally horrific. You might think you can handle anything after watching Mondo Cane, but you had better strap yourself in tight once you get to the final film in the box, Goodbye Uncle Tom.
by: Matt
Once Upon a Time in the West
Jean Baudrillard called Sergio Leone the first postmodern filmmaker, and indeed, Once Upon a Time in the West is Leone’s grand questioning of the Western narrative. The film is pastiche, appropriating John Ford’s actors, locations, and archetypes. But Leone transforms this landscape, deconstructing the West even as the railroad has begun to pave it over. And with his bold, even cynical casting, Leone transforms Henry Fonda, stalwart Western hero, into a heartless murderer and his young Mexican victim into a victor.
Paramount’s presentation is as spectacular as the film itself: a perfect transfer of Tonino Delli Colli’s expansive compositions of Monument Valley, a crisp surround-sound remix of the Ennio Morricone score (complete with keening harmonica), and as many frivolous extras as would fit on the discs. These features include interviews with Delli Colli and Claudia Cardinale (as well as much commentary from celebrity fans and historians), a documentary on the expansion of the railroad, and a set of then-and-now photographs of the films locations to illustrate how the West was really lost.
But most importantly, the violent force of Leone’s revisionist conception of the West is to be found in every pore or bead of sweat on the actors’ faces, and in the broad, rusty vistas of the American West.
by: Leo
Style Wars
2003 marked the debut releases of Plexifilm. Thus far, if there is a unifying feature of their twelve releases, it is music: their slate includes Wilco’s I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, They Might Be Giants’ Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns), Sun Ra’s Space is the Place, and their best title so far, an obscure, brief documentary from 1983 entitled Style Wars.
The title refers to an irresolute conflict between New York administration (mayor Ed Koch, the police, and New York Transit Authority) and street artists circa the late Seventies and early Eighties. Subway cars emerge from tunnels covered in elaborate graffiti. For restless politicians it is public defacement; for the artists, it is a declaration of identity (most of these spray-paintings include the artist’s pseudonym). This activity is underscored by a thumping soundtrack (delivered in crisp 5.1) and breakdancing competitions — which, in their accomplishment and idiosyncratic skill, warrant purchase of this film alone. A second example to tempt purchase: there is a priceless scene in which street art is exhibited at a gallery show followed by the inarticulate thoughts of an art critic.
This may not all cohere strictly, but that’s the very concern of the film. Style Wars is dressed with the awkward, nameless ephemera of a culture, one that has today become customarily marketed and popular. The film denotes a strife for personal legitimacy, a voice and identity — something that today would be called a shout-out. Style Wars has captured the birth of hip-hop
by: Rumsey
Sunrise
In 2003, Fox made available to consumers who purchased three DVDs from their new Fox Studio Classics line a free DVD. Normally, this type of deal rarely makes it worth buying the required DVDs. In this case, the deal was more than worth it. The prize was F. W. Murnau’s exquisite 1927 silent film, Sunrise. For this DVD, Fox put together a package with a Criterion-like attention to detail. It is surprising not only that a major studio would devote this much attention to a silent film, but that they should do so for a disc that is essentially being given away for free. This is a disc for which I would have paid a lot and for which Criterion or Kino would have charged a lot of money. The film itself is no slouch. Murnau successfully married the unmatched technical proficiency and deep pockets of the Hollywood studio system with the distillation of particularly German strains of artistic and poetic Romanticism and Expressionism to make an unparalleled classic. The status of Sunrise as the finest silent film ever made is threatened perhaps only by Murnau’s own The Last Laugh. It is expected that Fox will make Sunrise available as a stand-alone retail item sometime in 2004, but, with beautiful special editions of All About Eve, How Green Was My Valley currently available in the Fox Studio Classics series, and the release of My Darling Clementine just around the corner, why wait?
by: Matt
Matt’s Picks
Un Chant d’amour
Jean Genet’s 1950 short film Un Chant d’amour has never been available (legally) on video in any country and has never even received a proper theatrical release. Like quasi-pornographic films of the mid-twentieth century, it circulated among a select few through underground channels. It is a shame that it has been so rarely seen; in addition to being a genuine rarity, it is a genuine masterpiece. Luckily, the British Film Institute has ignored the late Genet’s wishes that the film never be made publicly available and has released a beautiful Region 2 DVD edition of the film. For someone who had never made a film or even assisted in the making of a film, Genet had a great command of the vocabulary of film style. Fetishistic close-ups of hairy chests, armpits, feet, crotches, and necks might seem a little outré and verging on the pornographic to some, but in Genet’s hands they become visual stanzas of an intensely erotic poem. It might not be for all to enjoy, but its newfound availability heralds the beginning of a global rediscovery of a heretofore widely-discussed, rarely-seen milestone of cinema.
I’m Alan Partridge
There is no easy way to describe Alan Partridge. Imagine if Regis Philbin hosted his morning talk show on his own. Now imagine that if he were slightly more out of touch and emotionally disturbed than he already is. And British. Now imagine him trying to host this show in the middle of an acrimonious divorce and a rapidly declining career. Are you still with me? Now imagine that this show was so funny that it made you nearly piss your pants with laughter. If you have successfully imagined this hilarious train wreck of a show, you’ve got a good idea of what’s in store watching Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge, a 1995 BBC series starring the fictional character of Alan Partridge created and impersonated by Steve Coogan (24 Hour Party People). Watch Alan start off his own television chat show (“enter the chatosphere!”) with promise as he awaits special guest Roger Moore (who is delayed in traffic), continue through six stunningly yet hilariously awful episodes of Alan’s show, and finish up by witnessing Alan lose his shit, accidentally shoot a man on live TV, and fire his staff. Needless to say, Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge (the real or the fake version) did not have a second season.
What we get instead is a more traditional sitcom built around Alan’s life as he tries to gather the shards of his career and his dignity. I’m Alan Partridge, the first season of which was released on DVD in the UK in 2002, sees Alan living in a motel and hosting a late-night radio show for a small regional station while unsuccessfully angling for a second series on the BBC. The second season of I’m Alan Partridge, released on DVD in the UK in November 2003, takes place a few years later. Alan has been “bouncing back” (it’s the title of his remaindered memoirs), living in a trailer, romancing a 33-year-old Ukrainian woman named Sonja who is obsessed with teddy bears in Royal Guard Uniforms, and holding down the third best slot on Radio Norwich. In the intervening years, Alan had a nervous breakdown and drove across the UK while gorging himself on Toblerone. Back of the net!
While just having these shows on DVD would make any Partridge fan ecstatic, Coogan and his colleagues have blessed fans with 2-discs sets full of outtakes, deleted scenes, footage from Alan’s appearances on other shows, and cast and crew commentaries. The discs are coded for Regions 2 and 4, so you will need that all-region player, but are essential for any fan of British comedy. You’ve had AbFab, The Office, and Bottom, now watch the really funny stuff. A-HA!
The Meatrack / Sticks and Stones
Something Weird Video is not a company known for the artistic merit or historical importance of the films they put on DVD. Where Criterion will release The Rules of the Game, Something Weird will release Wanda, the Sadistic Hypnotist. Where Kino will offer a restored edition Metropolis, Something Weird will counter with Doris Wishman’s Nude on the Moon. Yet to many people, myself included, Something Weird specializes in releasing on DVD what amounts to an alternative history of cinema. With examples like the above, it’s clear that the established version of film history and its attendant canon will never be shaken by the likes of David F. Friedman and Bob Cresse, but what happens when Something Weird releases two films on a disc that constitute an upheaval of the received history of film? Well, that is exactly what happened on December 12, 2003, when they unleashed a double feature of The Meatrack and Sticks and Stones on DVD. Both filmed in 1969, the films, each vastly different from the other, offer clear evidence that homosexuality was being dealt with in a realistic and thoughtful manner in narrative cinema long before William Friedkin’s queers first struck up the music in The Boys in the Band. The Meatrack, the story of a confused and morally ambiguous male hustler, is an exploitation film with pretensions to art. Sticks and Stones, a fly-on-the-wall account of the dissolution of a gay relationship set against the backdrop of a riotous Fourth of July part on Fire Island, is an art film with pretensions to exploitation. Each is presented in an excellent transfer (a hallmark of Something Weird releases) and is accompanied by a series of short films that were probably at one time illegal to own or at the very least available via underground avenues. Those looking for prurient thrills might want to save their money for the newest Falcon release, but those looking for an eye-opening pair of independently produced, shoestring budget films dealing with the subject of homosexuality in a forthright and direct manner will find this landmark release from Something Weird Video a worthy addition to their collections.
The Shaw Brothers Library
Anyone who has seen Kill Bill probably knows of the Shaw Brothers or, at the very least, is familiar with their logo which opens the picture. The Shaw Brothers, Run Run and Runme, started making pictures in China before World War II, but really hit it big when they began to make martial arts films in the 1960s. A massive studio with a star system rivaling the biggest American studios during Hollywood’s Golden Age, the brothers Shaw churned out hundreds upon hundreds of films of all kinds, ranging from the truly ridiculous to the absolutely sublime.
While the Shaw Brothers are most fondly known for producing chopsocky epics directed by Chang Cheh, King Hu, Sun Chung, Liu Chia Liang (a.k.a. Lau Kar-Leung), and my personal favorite Chor Yuen (a.k.a. Chu Yuan), their catalog actually includes wildly colorful and vivacious musicals, well-appointed wartime melodramas, action-packed gangster flicks, Huangmei Operas, and everything else you would expect from a major studio.
Once only seen in poorly dubbed and terribly scratched prints in grindhouses and cropped and cut on late-night local television, the films of the legendary Shaw Brothers studio can finally be seen on DVD in pristine transfers from restored prints with new subtitle translations, often with significant extras, provided you have an all-region DVD player and a trustworthy importer of discs from Hong Kong or Taiwan. Celestial Pictures, an Asian multi-media corporation, picked up the distribution rights to 760 Shaw Brothers titles near the end of 2002 and has embarked on a massive and ambitious project to restore all of the films and bring them to DVD over the next few years. Already, they have released close to 200 titles, but only in Region 3 countries. Miramax is expected to release some of the titles in the United States, but if you want your Shaw Brothers uncut and undubbed, better invest in a region-free player.
For the uninitiated, facing the prospect of choosing from hundreds of titles is practically terrifying, but do not let the plentiful options scare you away. If you saw Kill Bill and would like to see more of the kind of nutty squirting blood and hacking off of limbs, look no further than Chang Cheh’s Duel of Fists. Sadly, his The New One-Armed Swordsman, The Five Deadly Venoms, and Crippled Avengers are not yet available, but keep an eye out for them. If you prefer more stately and composed ass-kicking, along the lines of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, pick up King Hu’s Come Drink With Me. If you just want to see the craziest, most beautiful cross-dressing, lesborotic, severed-limb throwing film you’ve ever seen, I beg you to purchase Chor Yuen’s Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan or Clans of Intrigue. Either one will have you picking your jaw up off your lap by the end.
Leo’s Picks
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
Monty Python’s last film is by far their most offensive. Maintaining the cutthroat satirical tone of their previous film, Life of Brian (which effectively portrays religion as mass stupidity), the group here attacks every ideology, class, and race to hand. The upper class fares no better than the lower; Big Business, the Church, the Military, and the Schools are all unmasked as insidious, repressive institutions; and Americans get treated rather badly.
For this reason, the film’s humor is so savage as to be almost humorless; the satirical assault alternates between a sharp, witty stab and a crude, blunt instrument. But this is not to place the film (as John Cleese apparently does) at the bottom of the pile of Python material. Rather, it reveals the true roots of the group’s comedy. While many prefer the rather cozy irrationality of The Holy Grail or “The Lumberjack Song,” Python’s sense of the absurd is most effective as a weapon against conformity and reason, sending up sexual repression, class discrepancies, or the ideology of Empire. In this way, the film is somewhat closer in spirit to Gilliam’s Brazil than The Holy Grail, setting a deliriously ironic tone that never shies away from the grimmest observations of the world.
And true to the other editions of the Pythons’ films, this DVD is packed with material: lost scenes, commentary from the directors, interviews, and even newly produced sketches that reveal the troupe as absurd, witty, and offensive as it ever was.
Throne of Blood
Many critics rank this film among the very best of Shakespearean film adaptations, though it contains not one word of the original Macbeth. The reasons for this are apparent in every scene of the film, in which Kurosawa has tightened Shakespeare’s most concise of plays. And far from the many fusty stage-to-screen adaptations, Kumonosu-jo perfectly translates the nightmarish metaphors of the Scottish play into stunning visual analogues. What better way to illustrate all of Macbeth’s “to-morrows,” creeping in their petty pace from day to day, than to portray Toshiro Mifune, riding in circles through the Spider’s Web Forest, as the witch spins her wheel of silk? How better to explore Shakespeare’s patterning of masks and illusion in the theatre than with the style of the Noh play, which makes Mifune’s very face a mask and the film’s settings flattened, minimal backdrops? All of the original play’s sense of time and nature out of joint find expression in Kurosawa’s film, and yet Throne of Blood surpasses the original (and even Polanski’s version) in pessimism, concluding with a depth of fatalism that even Shakespeare could not reach.
The DVD itself is no Rashomon, boasting only a handful of extras: two subtitle options to enrich one’s understanding of Kurosawa’s language (if not Shakespeare’s), a handful of essays (including an excellent exposition by Stephen Prince), and Michael Jeck’s typical sportscaster’s play-by-play. But the film is handsomely presented, with all the foreboding depth of Kurosawa’s black and grey world richly transferred, and an appropriately blood-soaked package.
The Trilogy of Faith
Tartan Bergman Titles
The films of Ingmar Bergman have been blessed with unusual good fortune. Without the problems of lost material, butchered studio cuts, or deteriorated prints among his forty-odd films, it comes as no surprise that his films continue to be released in near-flawless editions by Tartan Video and Criterion.
This year saw the release of some of Bergman’s most important work with just this kind of loving attention. The Trilogy of Faith marks a turning point in Bergman’s career, a decisive shift from a vocal, almost allegorical discourse on the nature of God and the soul to a quiet, anxious introspection, where (as The Silence suggests) a final acknowledgement of God’s taciturnity yields a nihilism that is at once liberating and burdensome.
This nihilism forces a crisis of language in Bergman’s Persona, which is surely among the most challenging and expressionistic films in narrative cinema. Liv Ullmann’s mute actress and Bibi Andersson’s chatty, unstable nurse vie for power and identity in a world isolated from both the Divine Order and from the false securities of civilization. This struggle for a definition beyond personæ, beyond language, climaxes in a frightening, unnatural image of resolution that only the cinema can express.
Scenes from a Marriage depicts yet another shift for Bergman, away from his nihilistic despair of the sixties, and toward a new, albeit unsettled reconciliation. It finds him finally accepting the possibility that love and humanity can endure, if only “in an earthly and imperfect way.”
Rumsey’s Picks
Eraserhead
For so long Eraserhead has been a barometer of mine to determine the quality of a video store. Long out of print (in one of those Columbia Pictures boxes with the red border), those that saw Eraserhead had to seek it (keep in mind I come from a place where Blockbusters flourish and independent video stores are the size of a modest master bedroom); finding it, from my experiences, was a task.
In 2000 David Lynch launched his website, and with it came mention that he would release Eraserhead, personally, on DVD. After a delay that lasted over a year, the DVD arrived on my doorstep in a davidlynch.com shoebox, the film inside it in a squarish, only slightly smaller box.
I had seen the film so many times on bootleg VHS (the former prize of my adolescent collection) that the softened, low-contrast image became characteristic. The DVD is stark in its vivid clarity. The package, additionally, boasts an uncompressed PCM 2.0 stereo soundtrack. Eraserhead has an invaluable component in its sound design — its deliberate aural construction is unrivaled on any previous release of the film outside of a midnight screening. There are two supplements: a trailer, and an hour-long matter-of-fact documentary of Lynch recounting virtually every anecdote of Eraserhead’s making. This is, in short, the superior manner in which a film can be released on video: from the discriminating hands of its very maker.
I Am Curious
The Seventies marked the abandonment of sexual inhibition in commercial cinema. It is the decade in which clever metaphors (think: the final shot of North by Northwest) were tossed in favor of money shots.
If there is one film responsible for this sexual revolution, it is Vilgot Sjöman’s I Am Curious – Yellow. Immediately upon its delivery to this country the film was confiscated by US customs — an act that would only assure interest to such contraband. Lawsuits followed, and the case tempted many to the film’s defense: film critics Stanley Kauffmann and John Simon, author Norman Mailer, a psychiatry professor and a church minister. Interest in the film waxed, and this esoteric, black and white film from Sweden became a commercial success. Nudity for the sake of art was mainstreamed, and the responsibility of film was challenged.
I Am Curious – Yellow’s significance is more faceted than this. To some extent, foreign films in the Seventies flourished; many retained their original languages and displayed subtitles as false features of quality. The Emmanuelle series, for one, clearly emulates this principle. I think that I Am Curious – Yellow created a stereotype for foreign film, to the extent that subtitles became synonymous with reactionary politics and sex in the Seventies. It is not the decade’s most estimable trend (contrarily, most of the titles in this party are dismissed), but the magnitude of titles in this category support the revolution and significance of Sjöman’s breakthrough effort.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Naked Lunch
There are three tying similarities between David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch and Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: 1) they are notorious, presumably drug-induced cult texts written by authors with the middle initial “S.,” which have been described as “unfilmable”; 2) both carefully rendered films were commercial failures; and 3) The Criterion Collection has released both this year in extensive, two-disc editions.
My reaction to both films was of disappointment (although I follow both directors avidly). Fear and Loathing, specifically, I saw in theaters, considered it the nadir of an otherwise remarkable directorial career, and never expected to see it again. (I was only slightly more enthusiastic over Naked Lunch.) These DVDs recognize the films’ initial failures, and are prepared to defend their respective merits. Fear and Loathing includes the formidable contribution of author Hunter S. Thompson in the form of a commentary — it is the only endorsement the film needs. Naked Lunch includes a commentary and documentaries in which Cronenberg admits and defends the liberties he took with William S. Burroughs’ source.
Despite my initial responses, both films are highly imaginative, and these DVDs do well to establish redemptive interest in each.
The Right Stuff
The ironic conceit of Philip Kauffman’s The Right Stuff is that the film’s central astronauts may be replaced by a boy band and the film is essentially the same. The film isolates the selection and preparation for the initial Mercury missions, the incessant race to launch a man — an American! — into space. It is sheer competition and promotion for which purpose and science are second service.
The Right Stuff has the symptoms of a bloated, dramatized historical epic, but its main concern is to exploit the purpose of the “Space Race” (ostensibly, it is depicted as a direct offshoot of the Cold War). This issue is timeless, and delivered in the film with a necessary, commentative jab. Sympathetically, the film also depicts Chuck Yeager as the real pioneer of the era, a hero with the required bravery and risk and without the spotlight.
Overall, The Right Stuff is varied in its exploitative intentions and sympathy. It is disserved by genre classification (you’ll probably find it in Drama), though in few films is the overused term “epic” as appropriate as it is in this case. Finally, this package’s most laudable feature is an active 5.1 soundtrack.
Leo Goldsmith, Matt Bailey, Rumsey Taylor | © 2004 notcoming.com