2010: the year in DVD and BD

from top to bottom: Close-up, Metropolis, Red Desert

Just as the rise in the digital consumption of music gradually prompted a number of smart record labels to more seductively package and carefully master CDs, not to mention a most welcome resurgence in the production of vinyl—if you’re going to seek out a tactile object to contain your music, it might as well be the most beautiful, information-rich and sonically satisfying sort of object—the increase in the digital consumption of movies seems to be encouraging some home video distributors to put as much care as possible into their physical releases. Below are the three multi-title DVD and/or Blu-ray collections I consider the best of 2010. What constitutes “the best”? I guess it’s some mixture of relevance, discovery value, quality of supplements, thoughtful packaging and, most of all, curatorial verve.

from top to bottom: Ossos, In Vanda's Room, Colossal Youth

Letters From Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa (Criterion)
The other selections listed here are essentially celebrations of cinema’s past, but this feels representative of what’s most dynamic in cinema’s present, and perhaps its future. Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (00) and Colossal Youth (06), in combination with the wealth of insightful supplementary materials available in Criterion’s box, tell the story of how Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa went from making what were already cool yet compassionate, funky yet formally elegant, non-didactic yet socially conscious art films to something more akin to artisanal films, the products of countless hours spent alone with just a camera, a microphone and a reflector or two, quietly immersing himself in Lisbon’s labyrinthine ghetto of Cabo Verdean immigrants—even though the place is destroyed by the end of In Vanda’s Room. Somewhere between intimate reportage and epic fabulation, Costa’s films draw to a substantial degree upon the lives of the inhabitants of Fontainhas, who are the films’ stars, yet are equally imbued with mythical and poetic monologues and narratives—one of which was inspired by John Ford. In practice, Costa’s isn’t a model of filmmaking that many can or should follow, yet in spirit, his very personal approach sets a shining example that urges filmmakers to keep redefining what cinema is or can be.

from top to bottom: Human Desire, Nightfall

Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics II (Sony)
Film noir was the dark star of the studio era, the chiaroscuro chamber of repressed desire, and while many of its most celebrated examples burbled up from poverty row, the major studios caught on quickly and produced their own deluge of moody, twisted crime thrillers. Sony’s sophomore attempt at luring noirophiles with its 1950s, transitional Columbia Pictures noirs is, like its predecessor, not entirely consistent, or even consistently noir, but its highlights are so outstanding as to demand plaudits. They include Fritz Lang’s Human Desire (54), based on Émile Zola’s novel. It stars Glenn Ford as a Korean vet who returns home to resume his modest career as a train engineer, and Gloria Grahame as a doomed object of desire too genuinely mysterious, complex and desperate to fit the proscribed model of the femme fatale. It’s a sensuous, sinster film bathed in industrial gloom, a striking alternative to the often brightly day-lit and thus ironically titled Nightfall (57), a long-lost gem from director Jacques Tourneur, best known for his collaborations with low-budget horror producer Val Lewton. Based on a novel by David Goodis, Nightfall finds another young, physically strapping yet psychologically frail veteran on the run from the authorities and a couple of bank robbers, one of whom is a sadist very memorably embodied by Brian Keith.

from top to bottom: A Safe Place, The Last Picture Show, Easy Rider

America Lost and Found: the BBS Story (Criterion)
The titles in Criterion’s inspired box set chronicle the development of BBS, the production company that perhaps best represents the promise of the 1970s New Hollywood, the death throes of the studio era, and the American cinema’s response to the Vietnam War and the French New Wave. In Five Easy Pieces (70) and The King of Marvin Gardens (72), it offers director Bob Rafelson’s finest character studies of dissatisfied masculinity. In Henry Jaglom’s A Safe Place (71) and Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (71), it offers a pair of very, very different yet mutually tender and fascinated attempts by young, wildly ambitious male directors to investigate female dissatisfaction. In no less than six of the seven films here it offers a beat-by-beat tracking of the ascendancy to stardom of one thritysomething hyphenate named Jack Nicholson. And for all the dissatisfaction noted above, I should add that there’s a lot of fun, adventure, formal provocation and plain old audacity too. Did I forget to mention Easy Rider (69)?

Bigger Than Life

Of the many excellent single-film releases I was able to catch up with in 2010, in particular, those not previously easy to find on DVD or Blu-ray, the most noteworthy included Kino’s Complete Metropolis (27), Criterion’s Paris, Texas (84), Red Desert (64), Close-Up (90), Vivre sa vie (62), House (77), The Thin Red Line (98) and Bigger Than Life (56), and a whole bunch of forgotten titles and cult classics now available in no-frills, special order-only packages from the Warner Archive Collection, among them Brainstorm (65), a wonderfully bizarre study in genius and madness directed by veteran character actor William Conrad!

Brainstorm

Spare a little change: Junebug, coming home, and the eerie effects of the parental gaze

So I’m sitting by the window in this café and the proprietor who I’m friendly with sits besides me and starts telling me about this guy across the street who used to date his sister in high school and was always talking and talking, and there he is now, across the street, 20 years later, and still he’s just talking and talking at someone as though not a moment’s gone by. “If there’s one thing I know about life,” the proprietor announces with absolute conviction, “it’s that people never change.” I ask him why he feels so strongly. He tells me he’s got three kids and that no matter what they do or say as they grow up he saw it all in them from the day they were born. I ask him if perhaps the reason they’ll always seem to the same to him isn’t that they never change but rather that, being his children, he’ll never be able to see them any differently. The proprietor considers this for a good moment and then, quite graciously, concedes that I might have a point.

I told this story to my colleague David Berry and he confessed that he more or less agreed with the café proprietor. People change in little ways, David said, but our essential selves stay the same. But I wonder how many little things need to change to constitute essential change; how much about who we were needs to change before something has changed right down there in that indefinable essence?

When I first left home at 18 and moved to another city, every time I returned felt this involuntary regression. I’m back in the house where I was raised, trying to feel at ease with my family and their habits, yet within minutes we all slip into precisely the same dynamic we’ve always had, the same presumptions and alliances, the same grievances and useless responses. I truly believed that I’d changed, significantly, yet once I entered that house it was as though everything was frozen in time and only physical escape could break the curse of stasis. It took me some years to shake off the frustration that accompanied these reunions. With the holidays here and many of us returning to our families, perhaps for uncomfortably long visits, it got me to thinking about movies that illustrate this scenario.

I thought of The Godfather (1972), how Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone comes back home a war hero, college educated and well-spoken, so different from his siblings, all of whom seem to be easing into their assigned roles within the family’s ethnic tribalism and business of organized crime, and yet by the time the story closes Michael has assumed the position his father once held, as though fate, as it did with Oedipus, were simply meandering on its way to delivering his proscribed sentence. I thought too about Five Easy Pieces (70), which I wrote about last week, how Jack Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea pathologically seeks to reinvent himself as someone from not only a different sort of family but a different class, how he winds up just as unhappy playing the role of a California roughneck as that of a gifted Oregon concert pianist, and how after returning home to find no resolution has no other choice but to keep on running from everything in order to stave off his incessant sense of vacancy. I thought about Brand Upon the Brain! (06) and Guy Maddin’s hero returning to the lighthouse orphanage of his childhood to somnambulistically paint its walls, and about My Own Private Idaho (91), where Keanu Reeves’ male hustler embodies the role of Prince Hal. I also thought about Dogtooth (09) and what happens when the children never leave home. Literally. But that's another story.

The movie that finally struck me as being most emblematic of the experience that had been on my mind was Junebug (05), the debut of director Phil Morrison and writer Angus MacLachlan. After years away, living in Chicago, George (Alessandro Nivola) returns to his rural North Carolina home with Madeline (Embeth Davidtz), his new wife. What’s especially interesting about this homecoming is how George initially recedes from the central storyline upon arriving home. While Madeline awkwardly attempts to ingratiate herself to her in-laws, George seems to be constantly passing out on the sofa, exploring empty rooms or going out. It’s only when he’s called upon by the local pastor to sing a hymn that George breaks the spell and instantly seems to change before Madeline’s eyes into the homey, family-loving Christian his parents raised him to be. “Ye who are weary… Jesus is calling, o sinner, come home,” George sings in a voice so pure it could’ve come from a boy.

Morrison subtly emphasizes the role home and place play in George’s transformation through still, often unpopulated, almost painterly shots of houses, rooms, vast lawns, and churches with immense parking lots. Madeline is a diplomat’s daughter, born in Japan and raised between South Africa and DC—a person without roots, as far as George’s mother’s concerned—and no matter how hard she tries she’ll always stick out everywhere she goes in George’s town, while George, after only a short time there, virtually disappears—from Madeline’s view—right into the town’s tapestry. Then a crisis emerges, George helps his sister-in-law through the crisis, and when he emerges from the event he’s suddenly anxious to leave. In what is perhaps the movie’s boldest move, George and Madeline depart and the story ends with George callously expressing his relief at getting out of that place.

Yet we’re not meant to take this as a simplistic finale, nor as disrespect for George's family on the part of the filmmakers. I think we’re to intuit that George’s family will go on with their lives and George will go on with his and both paths involve some irreducible mixture of free will and stubborn changelessness. It’s only when returning home for a few hours, a few days, maybe a few weeks (!), we are all, or at least most of us, susceptible to this eerie magic that renders us a child once more, unable to assert our individuality and wondering how we ever made it out of the driveway on our own. Until of course we do make it out, and repeat the experience all over.

A safe place for cinematic risk taking (and lots and lots of Jack Nicholson): America Lost and Found: The BBS Story

The initials stood for Bert, Bob and Steve, but however cavalier, cutthroat or chaotic BBS Productions may have been during it’s short but tremendously influential run during the late ’60s and early ’70s, this was the home of an extended family of multi-talented movie artists head-deep in collaboration. The name could just as easily have been LKJ, for László, Karen and Jack, as in cinematographer Kovács, actress Black, and writer, director, producer and, of course, actor Nicholson, each of whom could seemingly always be found working in some capacity on some movie somewhere within the BBS boutique. Seven such movies, a couple of them produced before the inauguration of the BBS brand, can be found in America Lost and Found: The BBS Story, a new box set elegantly curated by the Criterion Collection, released last month on Blu-ray, last week on DVD. A cinematic roadmap of post-studio era, pre-Star Wars Hollywood, it’s easily one of the most remarkable thematic assemblages currently available on home video.

Producer Bert Schneider and director Bob Rafelson, their partnership initially dubbed Raybert, made a splash with The Monkees on TV in 1966. Neither the eponymous band nor their show could be regarded as an auspicious foundation for creative daring, but Head (1968), ostensibly the Prefab Four’s own Hard Day’s Night (64), took the Monkees’ image in an audacious direction, openly confirming the critique that had been accurately leveled against them from the start: the band was manufactured from market research. “The money’s in/We’re made of tin/We’re here to give you more,” goes the chipper chant that launches this free-associative satire on antiquated genres and politics. Written by Rafelson and Nicholson in offices, closets and Harry Dean Stanton’s basement while under the influence of LSD, drunk on Brecht by way of Godard, brimming with bizarre cameos by the likes of Frank Zappa, Annette Funicello and Victor Mature, Head responded to the needs of a youth movement who didn’t identify with what movies had been, an audience grooving instead to Bonnie and Clyde (67) and 2001 (68). Truthfully, unlike everything else in Criterion’s box, Head, its satirical targets as broad as its humour, feels at best like a time capsule.

Everything changes, for Raybert as well as the entire industry, with Easy Rider (69), bad-boy actor Dennis Hopper’s directorial debut, which took the aggressive, drug-addled provocations inherit in the exploitation cheapies helmed by Roger Corman—the producer who gave many BBS associates their first breaks—and elevated them into the realm of personal statement. A story of hippy bikers touring a country with whom they share a sense of mutual alienation, their restless journey unfolding to a soundtrack of Dylan, Hendrix, the Band and Steppenwolf, Easy Rider meant a great deal to me when I discovered it, as people generally do, in my teens. If it means slightly less now it’s partly because Hopper’s career only became more strange and fascinating from here on, partly because its most enduring innovations have their roots in richer European predecessors. Easy Rider made buckets of money. Shocked studios scrambled to mimic it. The biggest feather yet in Schneider’s cap, it gave birth to BBS, Rafelson’s first serious narrative film, and a peculiar star by the name of Jack Nicholson.

Five Easy Pieces (70), scripted by Nicholson's friend Carol Eastman from Rafelson's own story, remains Rafelson’s most fully realized work. If it tells us a lot about the ’60s, it does so strictly through the lens of a textured character study that’s got nothing to do with flower power. When we meet Bobby Dupea (Nicholson) he’s working oil rigs outside Bakersfield, going bowling, drinking beer, and living with Rayette (Karen Black) who dreams of becoming the next Tammy Wynette and is frequently found perched on the bathroom sink like a giant witchy kitten. We gradually learn that Bobby comes from a very different class, region, and skill set, that Bobby has seemingly condemned himself to a life of constantly frustrated escape attempts. Discovering that his father’s ill, Bobby ditches drives north to visit his family. He’s at home nowhere and perhaps for that reason seems most in his element on the road, where he can let his mind wander while hitchhikers babble on about Alaska or memorably tell off cold-blooded waitresses. With Five Easy Pieces Nicholson finally found himself on-screen, capitalizing on that callous confidence that masks a fathomless despair. Bobby Dupea is mostly an asshole, but his fascination with other people and how they live their lives outweighs his contempt.

With Drive, He Said (71), based on Jeremy Larner’s novel, Nicholson proved to also possess directorial chops, using the contrast between a libidinous college basketball star and his prankster/activist friend as an opportunity to swing between classical and fragmented, sensation-oriented storytelling. For all its interest in student demonstrations it’s not as politically engaged as it might want to be, but the film is lively, unpredictable and sometimes hilarious, very playful with form and music, and very concerned with male potency and its multiple shortcomings. And Nicholson clearly loves the court—I can’t think of another basketball movie that captures the same nimble fluidity.

Having long been familiar with the more celebrated titles in America Lost and Found, my single most exciting personal discovery arrived in the shape of the hypnotic, haunting, at times hallucinatory A Safe Place (71), the debut of writer/director Henry Jaglom, whose constant shuffling of images from different points in time recalls Alain Resnais’ Muriel (63), and who, not surprisingly, helped cut the stroboscopic transitions in Easy Rider. It’s based on, of all things, a play, which Jaglom wrote for Karen Black, though the film’s lead is Tuesday Weld. Slipping between various Manhattan apartments and rooftops and stretches of Central Park, the film deliberately dissembles chronology in favour of rippling, disorienting psychological portraiture. The story as such is simple enough, concerning a love triangle between Susan (Weld), Fred (Philip Proctor) and Mitch (Nicholson), yet one of the most arresting sequences features a monologue spoken by a secondary character played by Gwen Welles, and one of the most memorable characters is a magician played by Orson Welles (no relation), intent on making someone or something disappear. Disappearance is indeed a goal for Susan, whose life, fraught with emotional turmoil, has become so unmoored and dreamlike that she almost seems to be disintegrating from the start. Though it’s initially shocking to see Nicholson in this supporting role (!), I dare say he gives one of the greatest performances of his career, at once seductive and sad, heartbroken and horny, encircling Weld, eating a sandwich, showing up in the middle of the night, desperate for companionship, yet almost palpably uneasy with cuckolding Proctor. I don’t know that he ever registered such genuine surprise on-screen again.

Okay, there’s still more praise for Nicholson to come, but in the meantime let’s remember that once upon a time Hollywood raconteur—that’s French for shameless name-dropper—Peter Bogdanovich made truly wonderful movies. Based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show (71) seems at first the antithesis of a hip BBS production: a period film, shot in black and white, rife with homage to the great American studio era directors Howard Hawks and John Ford. But this is a story about aimless youth, pointless war—swap Vietnam for Korea—and most of all sex, a force which rules, changes and never quite ruins lives in a small Texas town in the mid-’50s, where everyone knows everyone’s business and the local disc jockey never runs out of Hank Williams records to play. Bogdanovich’s bittersweet erotic web includes an achingly young Cybil Shepherd, Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges, and the not-so-young, but quite possibly aching, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman and Ellen Burstyn. The town’s most respected bachelor dies, the kids go off to fight or get an education, and the beloved movie house closes down. Everything is ending in The Last Picture Show, yet life is stubbornly just beginning for its soft-spoken, irresponsible, uncertain hero.

When The King of Marvin Gardens (72) begins David (Nicholson) speaks in darkened space, his face in close-up, telling a story about the everyday terror of family suppers. Turns out David’s a late-night talk radio storyteller. He’s timid, wears owlish spectacles and ties, is resigned to solitude—in other words the opposite of Jack Nicholson. Yet Nicholson’s superb here, as is Bruce Dern, who plays Jason, the lively younger brother hell-bent on convincing David that they’re about to hit the big time by building a casino on a private island in Hawaii, though the bulk of the story takes place in a wintry Atlantic City. Rafelson, collaborating with László Kovács, who previously shot Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, never moves the camera, preferring to let these mismatched brothers face-off against bleak land- and seascapes that feel frozen in time. Of course Jason’s a con-man, and everything goes bad, but there’s a muted vitality to The King of Marvin Gardens that makes it a perfect note to finish America Lost and Found on. There would only be one more BBS production, the documentary masterpiece Hearts and Minds (74), which Criterion has already put out.