An incredibly strong year for Criterion, easily their best to date (and it certainly helps that so few other companies are able to take risks these days).
Best Release (top 5 plus 5)
Top 5:
By Brakhage: An Anthology 1 & 2 – Frankly, the upgrade of Volume 1 to BluRay would have been the release of the year in most other years, but Criterion really upped their game in 2010, with a number of gutsy releases. This set will be a benchmark release for the medium for years to come.
Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties – Film for film, this is conceivably the strongest box set Criterion has ever released. Sure, it would have been nice to get these in HD with copious extras, but the films themselves trump the rest of that stuff every time.
The Night of the Hunter - Exemplary edition of one of the greatest American films. What “the Criterion Treatment” is all about.
Close-Up – This BluRay showed just how great a visually modest film could look in a sympathetic transfer, and
Traveller is probably the greatest film ever relegated to the status of a ‘bonus feature.’
Letters from Fontainhas – Just getting these films out was a coup, but the amount of effort that went into contextualising them was phenomenal. Ultimately, I consider only
Colossal Youth a masterpiece, and
Ossos is rather problematic, but the evolution charted by these three features is a fascinating and important one, and this set is the definitive documentation of it.
Top 5 in any other year:
3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg – Simple, flawless execution, from the basic but useful extras to the classy design, of some long-overdue classics. In most years this would be unambiguously the release of the year.
Summer Hours – A great film, powerfully enhanced by the excellent extras. Assayas is as uncommonly perceptive about his own work, and this film’s position within his career, as he is about that of other filmmakers.
Two Films by Yasujiro Ozu – The shine was slightly taken off this release by BFI’s trumping of
The Only Son, but the vastly improved
There Was a Father more than compensates, and I heartily approve of this twofer format. I’d love to see more films get this more-than-Eclipse / less-than-fullblown-Criterion treatment in future.
Stagecoach and
The Thin Red Line – Two co-options of readily available films where the appropriate response is “but of course” rather than “so what?”
Best Eclipse
Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties – Major works in their best-ever home video presentation. I actually found the rest of the year on Eclipse underwhelming, personally. The Shaw set was weak; the Kurosawa for completists only; the Akerman was a downgraded version of something that had already been out for years. I’d been highly anticipating Guitry for years, but found the actual films middling. Which only leaves this and the fine Allan King set.
Best Reissue
The Red Shoes, I guess, simply for the stunning restoration, but none of this year’s reissues brought a lot more to the party in terms of new extras.
Best Rescue
In terms of the importance of the film, the quality of the package and the quality of the previously available R1 version, I don’t see how this could possibly be anything other than
Close-Up. The only slight niggle I’d have about that was Soda’s fine recent DVD, but that was R2, and domino specified R1.
Best Commentary
Still plenty I haven’t listened to, but the best so far is
Close-Up. The conversation format is a really sensible idea that I wish more commentaries would follow (listen no further than the superb Kalat / Rosenbaum discussion on MoC’s
Metropolis for more evidence).
Best Supplement
No contest, even in such a great year.
Traveller on the
Close Up disc. Since a bare bones release of this film would have been a contender for release of the year for me, this was a foregone conclusion.
Best Cover
The Magician, though
Close-Up was mighty fine too.
Worst Cover
The Red Shoes. This looked ugly and lazy when it was announced, but I was hoping it would be better in execution. However, the execution, with that awful too-low-res screen grab, made it even worse.
Black Narcissus had similar problems, but the image and design was much stronger to start with.
Best Packaging
Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy - Excellent, counterintuitive concept followed through brilliantly in execution, and with every component (images, fonts, booklets) adding to the impact. Actually, Criterion excelled with all of their box sets this year:
America Lost and Found is one of the smartest and loveliest designs they’ve ever produced, as were the von Sternberg and Ozu packages.
Best (Re)Discovery
Ride with the Devil – Mainly because my expectations were so low and it turned out to be a decent film. Which is sort of the opposite of
Dillinger Is Dead, which had been built up as some kind of life-changing masterpiece and turned out to be. . . a decent film.
Most Disappointing Release
The Fugitive Kind – I’m not a great fan of Tennessee Williams or of 50s / 60s Serious Hollywood Drama, but I took a punt on this nevertheless, and found it thoroughly mediocre. Not even the commentators in the extras – not even the director! – seemed able to work up much enthusiasm for the film, so it really seemed like a box-ticking exercise for Criterion (and if the box they were ticking was the Brando one, why not include
Meet Marlon Brando, which they’ve been sitting on forever?)
Zedz’s White Elephant in the Room Award
America Lost and Found: The BBS Story – This has been getting some press as the Release of the Year, but, crikey, surely only if you go by weight, or total running time or something. The films range from good to godawful, and the tautological inherited extras that have been reported are an object lesson in why Criterion is so much better at contextualizing their films than the majors. It’s an important slab of American film history, beautifully packaged and nice to have all in one place, so I can’t really put it up for the worst of the year, but it’s just going to be gathering dust on my shelf.
Member of the Year
I generally weasel out of naming individuals (and didn’t that memo say it was swo17’s turn this year anyway?) and I intend to do so again by giving a collective bouquet (one petal apiece) to all those forum members who insist on making substantial and intelligent posts, against all the odds. Too many to name, but among others I’ve really enjoyed Cold Bishop’s
noir advocacy, Tommaso, Sloper and Myrnaloyisdope’s dogged excavation of the 1920s and colinr wherever he pops up. And how about that civil and informative historical discussion (History Prof, MichaelB et al) in the
Night Train to Munich thread?
On a completely self-serving note, I’d also like to thank all those forum members who have made me aware of great bargains from all over the world. I think perkizitore deserves the biggest, sloppiest kiss for that amazing misprice on the Joris Ivens box set. I still haven’t got all the way through it: the best 12 euros I’ve ever spent.
Richard Cranium Award
A collective award for the forum’s sad serial homophobes. The exit door’s that way, losers. The revolving thing is a design fault.
(Of course, that was before we found out that the
real forum conspiracy was the
Oklahomos)
Other Releases
I Love Taipei! Box set – for
The Terrorizer, finally looking good, and the concurrent
Dust in the Wind BluRay.
Frantisek Vlacil Box Set (Second Run) – Gets in on the strength of a good transfer of
Valley of the Bees alone, with
Adelheid and that meh documentary as extra icing. So many great things from Second Run, especially
Morgiana and the Isaacs collection (and was
Gaea Girls 2010 too?)
Profound Desires of the Gods (MoC) – It cost an arm and a leg to go region-free on Blu, but this single release made it a small price to pay. And
City Girl is still a benchmark release on the format. Simply beautiful work from MoC this year.
Lisandro Alonso box set (Potemkine) - Nifty DVD box sets are becoming scarcer and scarcer internationally. This and Potemkine’s Jacques Rozier set were mixed in terms of transfers, but so valuable for their content.
Koji Wakamatsu Volume 2 (Blaq Out) – I don’t rate these films anywhere near as high as Yoshida’s or Oshima’s or many other New wave practitioners, but they’re a crucial piece of the jigsaw puzzle and, for once, a French box set of Japanese New Wave films included English subs, so that alone warrants inclusion
Honourable Mention:
My
Shadows of Progress set is still in transit, but I can’t imagine it wouldn’t have made this list, and unless that Raul Ruiz
Raridades collection doesn’t actually contain the films it says it does, I can’t imagine it wouldn’t have topped it, but alas I have yet to order it.
how else can i vote? and i gotta vote, just gotta