A year's worth of Blu-ray reviews by yrs truly

During the past months of unending craziness, I haven’t been able to produce as many blog posts as I would’ve liked. I particularly hope to celebrate living icons of “high” and “low” culture, and not simply have this blog turn exclusively into a haven for deeply felt obits.

In that direction, I offer some self-promotion, consisting of links to 29 reviews I’ve written over the past year-plus. Each of them was a labor of love, in which I discussed the supplements on the DVD/Blu-ray, in addition to reviewing the film itself. All of them are located at the Disc Dish site, but I thought I’d spotlight them, as the range covered here is also the range I love to talk about on the Funhouse TV show and write about on this blog. And so...

Barbara Loden’s Wanda (below) got the Criterion treatment, and we find out in the supplements that the obnoxious leading male character was based on… her husband, Elia Kazan!

A portrait of producer Dan Curtis, Master of Dark Shadows, focused specifically on DS, because the producers had the rights to show scenes from that series.

Jackie Chan finally got the Criterion treatment with the release of Police Story and Police Story 2 in one package.

Agnes Varda’s “women’s lib” movie One Sings, The Other Doesn’t offers a look at a female friendship.

Fassbinder’s BRD Trilogy (above) contains his last masterworks, which, when watched in sequence are both great melodramas and a pungent history of the “economic miracle” that occurred in Germany in the 1950s.

Rivette’s The Nun (1965) was a major subject of controversy upon its release in France. Today, its “blasphemy” is tame indeed, but it still offers Anna Karina’s finest performance outside of her work with Godard.

And speaking of Uncle Jean, his latest feature, The Image Book (below), is a montage of sights and sounds that, as always with his work, combines the fine arts with sheer pictorial beauty.

John Waters’ “Odorama” feature, Polyester, enters the ranks of the arthouse for certain with a Criterion release.

The director’s cut of Betty Blue (below) offers more of the film’s hot-blooded sexuality and surprising tender-heartedness.

Joan The Maid is Rivette’s epic (yet down-to-earth) treatment of an oft-told story, focusing on Joan of Arc’s battles as a soldier as much as her trial and burning at the stake.

Godard’s second feature, Le Petit Soldat, was another subject of controversy, which (when it was finally released, a few years after its production) offered international viewers their first glimpses of Anna Karina.

Teorema (above) is Pasolini’s much-imitated parable about a mysterious figure (Terence Stamp) who changes the life of an haute-bourgeois Italian family forever – by fucking them all!

The Point is an entertaining cartoon that is very much a product of its era, but boasts a timeless Harry Nilsson score.

Leave Her to Heaven is one of the sole great color noirs. Gene Tierney’s stunning beauty almost registers as a special effect.

The Cremator is a cult film from the Czech New Wave that grimly follows the titular fellow as he explores Nazi philosophy and Tibetan Buddhism, while killing members of his family….

The Criterion Collection's Scorsese Shorts finally collects all of the early works by the cine-obsessed filmmakers when he was a young and raw talent.

The Ghost of Peter Sellers is a documentary charting the filming of a doomed Sellers comedy that haunted its director, Peter Medak.

Serie Noire (below) is one of the best modern evocations of a hardboiled author, bar none. Alan Corneau’s singularly quiet and undeniably brilliant adaptation of Jim Thompson stars the late, great Patrick Dewaere and is simply low-key perfect.

Buster Keaton’s last feature where he was given full rein, The Cameraman, is a wonderful episodic time capsule with location sequences show in NYC and LA.

One of the odder “angry young man” films, Morgan, A Suitable Case for Treatment (below) is one of the earlier Sixties/Seventies “the insane are the only truly sane ones” allegories.

Psychomagic, a Healing Art is the latest film from filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. It’s a documentary about his psychological (and often sex-related) healing sessions.

Those Who Deserve to Die is a serial killer drama that is a tribute to both Italian and American suspense films.

“Norman Mailer takes on the feminists” in the stunning and endlessly entertaining Pennebaker & Hegedus documentary about a debate among intellectuals (who at times behave like pro-wrestlers) titled Town Bloody Hall (below).

All I Desire is a wonderful Douglas Sirk melodrama starring Barbara Stanwyck as a touring actress who returns to visit the family she left years before.

Christ Stopped at Eboli is Francesco Rosi’s blissfully location-shot recreation of the true story of a Marxist writer who was “imprisoned” by the fascists in a small North Italian town.

A showcase for its lead trio of actors, The Hit is one of those superb crime films that includes elements from another genre (in this case, the road movie) and reinvigorates the standard tale of the hitman at the end of the line.

An utterly sublime commentary on teen life and consumerism in the Sixties (among many other things), Lord Love a Duck is one of the films that will make you love Tuesday Weld (right).

And speaking of mixed-genre works, Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai is a terrific “urban samurai” film that blends hitman movie plot elements with a hiphop and jazz soundtrack and an overlay of martial arts morality and ethics.

A “dream film” from Cronenberg, Crash offers a meditation on the fusion between man and machine. Sex and car crash scenes alternate, as we travel through a world of crash-fetishists and bent-but-not-broken individuals.

Farewell, ‘Annus Horribilis’

San Francisco, 1918:
A cop warns a citizen to
wear a mask.

We thought it would never end. Wildly hailed as a year that was so shitty its effects were unheard of since the last world war, 2020 and its attendant virus has decimated all in its path. We will happily all say goodbye to it, still knowing that future nightmares lay in store (’cause that’s the way tragedies come, in clusters).

From the start of the spread it was noted that the countries that were handling the pandemic best were those who activated their authoritarian side (as with the country where it all began) and locked everyone down for good, legally demanding they all stay in their houses. But the *real* boon to people around the world were the “first world” governments that recognized how people going about their regular work would excite the spread even more, so they provided financial support to their citizenry. Not the U.S., not by a longshot.

So, the notion of “herding cats” in terms of getting Americans to follow rules was spoken about. Then there was the administration in place, run by a game show host who never wanted to be president, just hold rallies and campaign against whomever was the pres. He did a stunningly awful job with the pandemic — but, true to America’s two-parties/one-mind set-up, the solution for the Dem party was to put up as an “alternative” in the 2020 election their most right-wing candidate (save billionaire-for-hire Bloomberg), who was the counter to Trump in term of Tweeting and loudness but is uncommonly like him in terms of hard-line, helps-no-common-citizen policy (and of course is still — they are our only salvation, sayeth the pundits [unless they are socialist] — an Old White Man).

So, the next four years will be a continuation of the policies held by the last 40 years of presidents from both parties. In the meantime, the pandemic continues unabated, and there will most surely be other health crises, for which the government response will again be “Pick yerself up by your own bootstraps, suckers!”

The year-end rallying of two of 100  senators — one Republican, one Independent (Bernie as a senator is an Independent; his alliance with the DNC has been his biggest mistake all along) — to get even a second, one-time-only $600 stimulus check to average people tells you all you need to know about America in a single sentence.

Insert among the future disorder occasional outbursts of civil unrest (because the cops can’t be hemmed in by things such as actual laws — they can do what they want, when they want), which will in turn create curfews in major cities. That part of 2020 was the most amazingly oppressive — a world in which governments would rather let riots take place (the big-box companies all have insurance...  and police riots are "legal") than listen to peaceful protesters. The solution for riots (and pandemics): Stay in your house.

The height of
pandemic fashion.

And so far the effects of the pandemic have been reflected in both infection numbers and a death toll, plus a DEEP level of depression among people all around the world that, again, resembles events in the first half of the last century for any kind of comparison.

The toll of things “missing” included missing people, missing experiences, missing pleasures, missing addictions, and the key to all, missing communication and in-person encounters with physical interaction, even if it is only looking the other person in the eyes. (The Zoom call is not a phone call; a phone call is not a meeting. Text messages and direct-messages in social media are similar to writing email or print letters, but they are merely “bites” of communication that preserve the distance while supposedly bridging the gap.)

Thus, we can only say farewell to this year with hope for the future — and the realization that more health emergencies, psychological disasters, financial collapses (personal and institutional), and failures of the U.S. government to help the populace in any important way are set to come. The only solution: let’s dance!

And since X were being lyrically polite in their heave-ho to this annus horribilis, let us jump over to the goodbye wishes offered by the very funny folks in Little Big, a Russian dance/pop/rock/demented music group.

2021. Just imagine what comes next!