It has been one weird year overall, and I think I spent as much time longingly looking at my stack of films to watch as actually having time to watch them, which is something that I really want to change in 2018. Here's my ballot:
BEST RELEASE
1. Othello
2. Tampopo
3. Mildred Pierce
4. The Lodger
5. Stalker
BEST BOXED SET
The Marseille Trilogy
BEST MODERN FILM (within the last five years)
Certain Women
BEST COMMENTARY
It has to be John Waters on Multiple Maniacs
BEST "BONUS" FILM
Downhill on The Lodger
BEST BOOKLET
Rebecca, for reproducing the correspondence between Selznick and Hitchcock (with an uncredited cameo from Val Lewton!)
BEST ON-DISC NON-COMMENTARY EXTRA
The whole of the set could count, but I really liked the "After Before" piece on the Greek location filming of Before Midnight (directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari, a notable filmmaker herself, having made Attenberg and Chevalier)
BEST REISSUE
Rebecca (though Sid & Nancy ran it a very close second)
BEST UPGRADE
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Buxelles
BEST COVER
Certain Women's rough hewn painterly landscape portrait
WORST COVER
Nothing really stands out to me this year. I would generally agree on Election therefore
BEST PACKAGING
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
BEST DISCOVERY
Canoa: A Shameful Memory
MOST UNNECESSARY RELEASE
I'll second David Lynch: The Art Life, as while it is an entertaining documentary by itself it could have been even more useful attached to Fire Walk With Me, and could potentially have made the standalone release of Fire Walk With Me even more essential too. I'm currently seeing The Art Life as in a situation similar to Bergman Island, which initially had a separate spine number but eventually got bundled together with the Blu-ray edition of The Seventh Seal. Something like the way that Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach is going to come together with the upcoming release of I, Daniel Blake seems to be the best option all around!
MOST FLAWED RELEASE
There is nothing that particularly comes to mind, only my general wish for more commentaries in the future is possible. So instead of finding a flaw I want to go back to my candidate from last year - the lack of both versions of Charlie Chaplin's The Kid being presented in full - and commend the seeming trend this year towards presenting multiple versions of a film again, and of Othello in particular, which immediately put paid to decades of concerns about whether only one version of the film would ever be available.
BEST THREAD
I loved reading all of the write ups in the
pre-1920s list project this year, even though I could not meaningfully contribute anything but my thanks to those writing up reports on the films they saw!
MEMBER OF THE YEAR
I think this year I would like to vote for Minkin, just for the sterling work they are doing in collating information in various threads together, from the TV on Blu-ray thread to keeping an ongoing monthly report in the Forthcoming Speculation Thread about which newly announced Criterion releases were known about in advance or arrived as a surprise!
RICHARD CRANIUM AWARD
Only myself this year for the lack of posting!
This is more a run down of the releases I picked up this year rather than have fully been able to sit down with yet, but hopefully this list will give an overview of how the year has been for disc releases that I found most exciting. This also has the proviso that I have not yet picked up the Arrow Eric Rohmer boxset, but hope to do so in the new year:
1. The Taisho Trilogy (Arrow)
2. Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia (Arrow) - both for the film and the overwhelming amount of interview material that I'm still working through months later
3.
Wild Beasts (Severin) - a film I had long wanted to see and which surprisingly did not disappoint!
4. Right Now, Wrong Then (directed by Hong Sang-soo) and Kaili Blues (directed by Gan Bi) - two fantastic releases by Grasshopper Films
5. Pulse (Arrow) and Creepy (MoC) - two by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
6. Toshiaki Toyoda: The Early Years (Third Window) - containing Pornostar, 9 Souls and Unchain and introducing the director to the UK
7. Fires on the Plain (Third Window) - the long awaited Shinya Tsukamoto film version
8. German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (BFI)
9. My 20th Century / The Fabulous Baron Munchausen / Vampire Cuadeduc / Witchhammer / The Cremator - Second Run's releases of the year have been as wonderfully and fearlessly eclectic as ever!
10. Discovering Sunao Katabuchi's work with the release of Mai Mai Miracle (All The Anime, which was originally a Kickstarted release) and In This Corner of the World (Manga) - apparently Princess Arete is upcoming in the new year
11. Record of Lodoss War Complete Collection including the OVA (on Blu-ray) and TV series (on DVD only) (though I also want to mention the release of the complete Tenchi Muyo! and Martian Successor Nadesico series on Bu-ray this year. Plus the release of the much more recent series
Gangsta. (which turns out to be something quite different from its boisterous opening titles: sure it is
kind of about girls, bondage and drugs, but in a different way!), and of the
very recent UK Blu-ray edition of the 2014 Studio Ghibli TV series Ronja, The Robber's Daughter)
12. Seven Beauties and Swept Away, both by Lina Wertmuller (Kino)
13. Eight Hours Don't Make A Day (Arrow) - reminded by swo17's post below!
14. The Legend of the Holy Drinker (Arrow)
15. Suddenly In The Dark (Mondo Macabro)
16. Long Shot and The Orchard End Murder (BFI) - I'd love more Flipside films next year (hint, hint!)
17. All The Colours of the Dark / Torso - two films by 70s giallo director Sergio Martino (Shameless Films)
18. The Black Society Trilogy / Dead or Alive Trilogy (Arrow) - two essential formative trilogies by Takashi Miike
19. Ludwig (Arrow) / The Death of Louis XIV (Cinema Guild)
20. Cops Vs Thugs and Doberman Cop - two 70s Kinji Fukasaku films from Arrow
21. Hardcore (Indicator) (and I picked up Paul Schrader's recent film Dog Eat Dog at the same time!)
22. The Survivor (Severin) / Tag (Eureka)
23. Four Film Noir Classics (Arrow) - I was particularly excited to see Force of Evil getting much deserved attention paid to it!
24. The Saga of Anatahan and The Mourning Forest (MoC)
25. Afterimage (Film Movement)
26. Trailer Trauma Volume 1-4 (Garagehouse Pictures) as well as Kung Fu Trailers of Fury/Return of Kung Fu Trailers of Fury (Severin)
27. Ghosts of Mars / Vampires (Indicator)
And that's without finding room to be thankful that series 3 of Black Mirror has just got a physical disc release in the UK (I was worried for a while that I would never see it outside of Netflix!), Twin Peaks Series 3, O.J. : Made In America, the release of
Happy Hour, I Am Not Madame Bovary, all of the Indicator boxsets dedicated to Ray Harryhausen and Hammer, Ed LoRusso's ongoing Kickstarter projects of neglected silent films, Shout! Factory's wonderful special editions of Poltergeist II: The Other Side and Poltergeist III (not to mention Species and Species II! And RoboCop 2 and RoboCop 3!), too many more Arrow titles to count (New Battles Without Honour or Humanity, The Suspicious Death of a Minor, The Voices of the Moon, Between Night and Dawn, The Slayer, Story of Sin, Future Shock, The Untamed, Aquarius...), or Warner Brothers dipping their toe back into the Looney Tunes well with Porky Pig 101.
Though of course Mill Creek's release of the 1988 'killer electricity' film
Pulse was the Blu-ray that I was most grateful for this year! (that 'slow motion slipping onto the water soaked, electrified kitchen floor' montage sequence is still one of the best edited moments in horror films of that decade!) It is also featureless but I also want to put in a word for Shout! Factory's Blu-ray release of the wonderfully strange and dark
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea (I can only find a re-scored edit of the film on YouTube, but it should give a feel of the look of the film at least!), based on the Yukio Mishima novel.
And I cannot let the releases of Assassin's Creed, Alien: Covenant and Trespass Against Us pass without a comment that this could probably form part of a Michael Fassbender 'hoodie anti-hero trilogy'!
(EDIT: And
here's Sight & Sound's round of of their contributor's discs of the year.)
