DVDs, 12/13.

Tim Lucas posts more Video Watchdog "Favorite DVDs of 2007" - from associate editor John Charles, who's got an alphabetical list of eight releases; contributor, filmmaker and educator Bill Cooke, who tops his list with Witchfinder General; and contributor and filmmaker Sheldon Inkol, who puts the Twin Peaks Definitive Gold Box Edition in the #1 slot.

"Perhaps the most important DVD release of the year is Jean-Luc Godard's 1959 Breathless (Criterion)," suggests Armond White in the New York Press. "It is the best way to start a DVD exploration of film history, Movies 101." A handful of further recommendations follow.

Quite a gift guide in this week's Austin Chronicle:

• Josh Rosenblatt on the Essential Directors Series: Jean-Luc Godard: "It's a remarkable thing when a piece of art that was once considered the height of aesthetic insolence and rebellion develops into a cultural given, but one look at Jean Seberg in her New York Herald Tribune T-shirt or the defiantly cocked angle of Jean-Paul Belmondo's fedora, and it's clear that Breathless is a film that exists free of time and context."

• Also, The Wire "represents the high-water mark of the medium, so far beyond the intellectual and artistic scope of almost every other TV show that came before it as to constitute its own category of entertainment."

• "Riding its customary wave of controversy, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's epic 15-hour adaptation of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz arrives, at long last (and longer), in a Criterion Collection box to end all Criterion boxes," writes Spencer Parsons.

• For Raoul Hernandez, the highlight of Eclipse's First Films of Samuel Fuller is The Steel Helmut: "Fuller's Korean War Heart of Darkness beats not one misstep in its brutal existentialism and progressively clear-eyed politics, his necessary economy of style setting the stage for later American masterworks such as the Criterion issue of 1953's gleaming Pickup on South Street."

• Kimberley Jones on Pride and Prejudice: 10th Anniversary Limited Collector's Edition: "1995 was a banner year for Jane Austen adaptations, with Ang Lee's Oscar-winning Sense and Sensibility, Amy Heckerling's Beverly Hills revisionist Clueless, and this, the BBC miniseries that set women worldwide swooning for some Mr Darcy."

• "To celebrate Star Trek's 40th anniversary, Paramount, custodians of the venerable franchise, decided to give the 23rd century a face lift," writes Rick Klaw.

• "Twenty years on, The Princess Bride comes off less as a sweet children's movie and more as a savvy precursor to Adaptation," writes Joe O'Connell.

• "[W]ith upward of 40 films (among them newsreels, animation, and educationals) making for more than 12 hours of viewing, the deeper you dig into [Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900 - 1934], the greater the reward," writes Shawn Badgley. "Like its predecessors, this anthology is extraordinary."

Another fine guide: Robert Abele in the LA Weekly on box sets to watch once "new episodes of your favorite TV series run out, and they will, even if the studios and striking writers settle their differences soon."

More recommendations? Turn to Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper.

"If Americans were indeed gripped by the postwar driving obsession I've read about, surely we may credit The Big Sleep for starting them in that direction." But of course, there's more to John McElwee's terrific entry at Greenbriar Picture Shows on this most compelling of nonsensical noirs.

"The last half hour of Dames features some of [Busby] Berkeley's most dazzling numbers," writes Kevin Lee, who's also got an accompanying video essay.

"[M]any of the things that make [Drunken Angel] more than just a taut, well-made populist film are its playful insertions of incidental moments most other directors would likely cut out, such as when the doctor makes repeated attempts to do nothing more than prop open a door, or when the restless gangster ostentatiously wiggles his ass to a rousing song (with lyrics by Kurosawa!) performed in a dance hall," writes Josef Braun in Vue Weekly.

At ScreenGrab, Leonard Pierce and Phil Nugent discuss Fargo.

Posted by dwhudson at December 13, 2007 2:25 PM