Notcoming.com. Best DVDs.

Yes, you're probably tiring of best-of-04 lists by now (and to think that awards season is just getting underway), but Notcoming.com's got a sharp one that's also - and this is no small thing, after all - a pleasure to look at as well. Four, actually. "The Best DVDs of 2004" kicks off with a Criterion-heavy top ten, annotated smartly and then supplemented with extra picks from three contributing editors. A few snippets:

• Matt Bailey on one of his, a six-disc set from Home Vision Entertainment, Kinji Fukasaku's The Yakuza Papers: "I have never experienced works so visceral, so shocking in their violence (and I consider myself fairly unshockable), so unexpectedly humorous, so grimly pessimistic yet at the same time so full of vigorous power and force, and so eminently watchable."

• Leo Goldsmith: "The authenticity and authority of the object - its 'aura' in Benjamin's terminology - is lost with the process of mechanical reproduction. Bill Morrison's film, Decasia, is a kind of reification of the aura in film, treating the film-strip itself as a unique, material object in which time has inscribed itself."

• Rumsey Taylor lauds Anchor Bay for treating its Dawn of the Dead: The Ultimate Edition package "in the same manner as a contemporary blockbuster, although its cost would not likely cover the catering expenses of [a] more famous trilogy."

Posted by dwhudson at January 13, 2005 7:36 AM