mike | 25 Oct 2011 | 498 Views | 1 Likes | 0 Dislikes

The DVD/Blu Ray Shed: October 25

Criterion's a cool company - a video distributor that strikes deals with studios to publish special editions of "seminal" or "important" works of cinema. They clean up the print and the audio as best they can, and stuff the discs full of really well-done supplementary content, and charge a pretty penny for their product. They're so well-regarded by cinephile-type-people that their selections are seen as reliable indicators of taste... so when they reach their mighty grey fist down into film history and pluck out a title that you've long thought was secretly great, it can feel like a little bit of movie-dude validation. Such is the case with one of this week's DVD BLU RAY Shed releases:

Dazed and Confused: Criterion Collection
Dir. Richard Linklater

Included alongside a director (and DOP) approved digital transfer of Richard Linklater's seminal (and for me top 50 of all time) and fond look back at suburban teenage stonerhood in '70s America is a full-length commentary from the man himself and a whole slew of other extras, including a 70-something page high school yearbook-esque booklet of photos and doodles. Linklater's move from the weird hyper-indie experimentation of Slacker to this slight-seeming, warm-hearted ensemble comedy threw a lot of people at the time, but its charm and the quality of the writing, sense of period and an absolutely perfect soundtrack are absolutely top-notch. Fun bonus game: watch how many times Wiley Wiggins as young Mitch pinches his nose and shakes his head.

Captain America: The First Avenger
Dir. Joe Johnston

A bright (if only relatively) spot in another dull summer of big, empty action hero movies, veteran Joe Johnston's (Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Jumanji) take on the squarest Marvel hero ever succeeded by going whole-hog on the nostalgia kick-train. You're welcome for that incredible sentence, by the way. Eschewing the massively sparkly super-explosion high-tech glitz thing that's become de rigeur in other Super Hero movies, Johnston instead went the period action-film route, and put together a pretty earnest and entertaining super-powered war/adventure film that wasn't even that annoying.

Attack the Block
Dir. Joe Cornish

Still in my top three for the year, Attack the Block was and is the little British coucil-estate-hoodlums versus the cool interstellar monster invasion movie that could. It showed up this summer with little fanfare and proceeded to eat the lunch of every single other action-adventure film out there by choosing creative, cheap solutions to staging and creature design. And by having a hell of a cast, and a script that hews close to and respects the importance of and the important bits in the kids-versus-monsters genre. Braaaap. Believe

Island of Lost Souls: Criterion Collection
Dir. Erie C. Kenton

If you're a discerning sort looking for a properly sophisticated horror flick to watch this Halloween, you could do worse than Erie C. Kenton's take on H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr Moreau (the first adaptation, definitely not outdone by the one with Johnny Depp and Marlon Brando where Brando wore metal hats filled with ice to keep him cool while being fat as hell in the jungle). Coincidentally also banned for years in the UK, it inspired all kinds of horror folks, as well as the band Devo, who cribbed a lot of their "Are we not men?" and "What is the law?" samples from Bela Lugosi's dialogue in this film. I know that because I just read it on wikipedia. As a Criterion flick, it's got all kinds of extras, including a convo between effects masters Rick Baker and John Landis (the folks behind An American Werewolf in London and others).

Zombie
Dir. Lucio Fulci

Fulci had a long career as a screenwriter and director of giallo films (giallo meaning "yellow" in Italy, meaning erotic/crime/pulp type stuff so named after the yellow covers of cheap genre paperbacks) such as Don't Torture a Duckling and A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, but it was Zombie that in 1979 turned him into a horror icon. The film (cheekily - or criminally - titled Zombi 2 in Europe to imply that it was a sequel to Romero's Night of the Living Dead, itself titled Zombi in Europe) was massively successful at the box office, and banned in several countries (such as the UK, where it remained so until 2005) due to the crazy gore levels. This is the movie where a zombie fights a real shark, by the way, and it rules.

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