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

The Walken mind: Brainstorm on DVD

Christopher Walken’s brain got worked over an awful lot in the late 70s and early 80s. He was the guy from the industrial heartland who became severely traumatized as a prisoner-of-war, wound up a sort of gladiator in high stakes Russian roulette in Saigon, and won an Oscar for it. He later survived a car crash, woke from a coma after several years to find his girl had moved on, developed telepathic abilities that seemed to be draining his spirit, inching him closer to death with every use, and helped to fuse the seemingly irreconcilable sensibilities of Stephen King and David Cronenberg. It would not be long before he became an alien abductee.

What made that brain so captivating when in peril? His head did seem to weigh a lot, an effect accentuated by hair that, as years passed, seemed to want to leap off his head. The head, and those pale eyes, made him always appear off-balance, and vulnerable. He went by names as familiar as Nick, Mike and Johnny, yet he never quite registered as a recognizably normal person—admittedly, not an unusual trait amongst the new stars back then. Yet, whether breaking down or lashing out, Walken could convey a woundedness that, as with his flights of nervous charisma, could catch you off guard and become tremendously moving.

In Brainstorm (1983), newly available on DVD, he was again breaking barriers of mental communication, again testing comfortable proximities to death. But in this case he was eager to do it, in the name of science and glory. He was Dr. Michael Brace, a hyperactive, maverick scientific genius of the post-hippie variety, like William Hurt in Altered States (80). And Brainstorm was a movie that, like Altered States, spoke to a new post-hippie caveat on the psychic fallout of excess experimentation on the more nebulous zones of the mind. Along with Dr. Lillian (Louise Fletcher), Dr. Mike develops a technology that records a person’s sensory experience so that others can share it by wearing a sort of headset and pressing replay.

Of course the nefarious US military doesn’t skip a beat, already exploiting the device before it’s even finished, salivating over possibilities running the gamut from flight simulation to torture. And Mike’s coworkers, too, dig in to sample the Pandora’s box of psychedelic chocolates, with one of them finally collapsing from the equivalent of an Internet porn binge. So this is in essence a story about the price of dreaming in the Promethean sense.

Directed by Douglas Trumbull, who made Silent Running (72) and worked effects for 2001 (68), and taken from a story by Bruce Joel Rubin, who’d later script Ghost (90) and Jacob’s Ladder (90), Brainstorm becomes self-consciously trippy and intellectually flabby. It probably seemed too hokey in its time, but reading it with the benefit of hindsight, one of the ways in which it’s aged surprisingly well is in its relationship with numerous movies spawned in its wake. Its promise of artificially reconstructed experience, a virtual reality into which an individual’s memories and other sprays of subjective psychic foam can infiltrate, looks forward to the technologically-enhanced nostalgia of Strange Days (95), the virtual reality addicts in eXistenZ (99), the memory control as romantic catalyst in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (04), and the pseudo-schizophrenic epidemic of A Scanner Darkly (05). We can trace in such films a dialogue on perception whose resonance with our ongoing plunge into electronic everything is so acute it hardly needs stating.

But I got us into this talking about Walken, and the pleasing array of nuance he brings to Brainstorm is surely one of the best reasons to see it. He’s an actor whose little choices intrigue. At one point he blows a fuse and rants while suddenly gobbling from a bag of Ruffles. And I find it extremely interesting that the filmmakers chose to imbue Mike with a very complicated romantic life. Perhaps this man obsessed with the cataloguing of experience has a thing for older women because they simply have more of it then he does. At the movie’s outset, he’s breaking up with Karen (Natalie Wood), his wife and the mother of his child. He seems to be romantically entangled with Lillian. Fletcher would have been pushing 50 at the time of filming, while Wood was 43. True, Walken was already in his late 30s, but he looks strikingly younger than both women on screen, and given that this is a Hollywood movie the difference makes a hell of an impression. Mike’s relationship to these women, and Walken’s different ways of expressing affection and admiration for both, deepens our sense of the character’s conflicting desires, his ruthless drive toward success and his undeniable attraction to woman of intelligence and integrity.

And, yes, Wood was beautiful. Those dark eyes stop Walken in his tracks. The finale has Wood urging Walken back from the brink of death through the sheer intensity of her love, and the scene is made poignant by extra-filmic circumstances. In November of 1981, near the end of principal photography, Wood died when she fell overboard of the yacht she shared with her husband, the actor Robert Wagner. Wagner and Walken were both on board at the time. The yacht was named Splendour.