LITTLE ROCK — Believe it or not, I know people who spend more time in movie theaters than I do. I have friends who seem compelled to see nearly every new release in a theater, usually on the opening weekend. They are dedicated moviegoers, people for whom the cinematic experience usually includes a crowd and popcorn.
Myself, I’m more interested in the content of the movies than the context of their experience. I believe the best way to see a film is in a state-of-the-art theater, sitting in the dark with expectant strangers.
But the second-best option might be watching the movie at home on DVD on a Blu-ray player. Home video is an increasingly significant part of our culture, and even if you suspect the days of the DVD are numbered, the practice of watching video across an array of platforms in your home or while traveling is likely to become even more important. Even if we eventually abandon public theaters, there will still be a market for movies (or movie like content).
I love DVDs - hundreds pass through my player every year and by the TV there’s always a stack of 20 or so to be gotten through. But I love them not for their technical qualities or their bonus features - which, honestly I seldom investigate - but simply as convenient take home carriers for movies. While I understand many people are interested in the specs, I’m content to have a bright-enough picture and good sound.
It’s in this spirit that I present my personal list of the best DVDs of 2009. You might want to check these titles out.
1. Private Century ($39.95, Facets) is one of the most fascinating films I’ve seen all year, a nearly eight-hour miniseries from the Czech Republic composed entirely of home-movie footage from the 1920s through the 1960s, narrated by descendants of the principals and supplemented with music and (at least in one instance) sound effects. The result is a soft focused, dreamlike rendering of 20th-century Czech history refracted through the memories of survivors. It’s a mesmerizing epic you’re likely to devour in a couple of sittings rather than one prescribed 52-minute episode at a time.
While some episodes of Private Century hang together more coherently than others (some of the people who shot these movies were professionals), the project is uniformly poignant as it chronicles the crumbling conventions of old Europe and the advance of suffocating Czech communism. Director Jan Sikl’s accomplishment here is massive, as the research effort invisibly melts into the background, leaving behind a seamless, quietly powerful narrative.
Private Century is not the kind of movie that gets a lot of publicity - it’s long, subtitled and in black and white. It’s a serious, important but above all lovely movie. And the nonprofit Facets Video - facets.org - is a worthy cause.
2. The Exiles (Milestone, $29.99), by Kent Mackenzie, is a neorealist portrait of a nearly invisible community - American Indians living in the Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles in the late 1950s. Mackenzie employed nonprofessional actors and filmed them in the places they lived and frequented. The script consisted largely of re-enactments of episodes drawn from their lives. Each of the three main characters wrote their interior monologues, which they read in voice over, commenting on the action and driving the loose narrative. The result is an evocative, poetic meditation that’s as remarkable for its black-and-white cinematography and revealing scenes of nighttime Los Angeles asits portrait of these young, urban Indians and their nuanced sadness.
3. Herb and Dorothy ($29.95, New Video Group) is the heart warmingly charming true story of the Vogels, a retired postal clerk and his librarian wife who managed to amass one of the world’s most important private art collections (and store it in their one bedroom, rent controlled New York apartment). Herb says it was possible because they trusted their own taste: “Whatever I did, I did without the rules of other people. I did it because I wanted to do it.” It was one of the highlights of the 2009 Little Rock Film Festival.
4. Dominick Dunne: After the Party ($24.95, IndiePix Films) is a discursive and entertaining portrait of the middling artist as social gadfly and crusader for justice that achieved additional poignancy with Dunne’s death in August.
5. The Hangover (Unrated, Blu-ray edition) ($35.99, Warner Home Video) was one of those movies I missed in theaters (thanks, Warner Bros.), and to be honest I didn’t mind so much at the time. Unlike some, Todd (Old School) Phillips’ body of work wasn’t enough to convince me that this was a promising film. And in a way, I’m not sure I would have appreciated it as much had I seen and reviewed it on its theatrical release. I hope I would have caught on to its anarchic rhythms and randomness.
6. Zabriskie Point ($19.98, Warner Home Video) was one of those movies I went around thinking I’d seen - until I finally saw it on DVD and realized my mistake. It’s not exactly entertaining, at least not in a conventional way - the flat performances of lead actors Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin seem kind of precious and misguided, a relic of a time when people weren’t so media-wise as they are now. Frechette and Halprin had no previous acting experience, and they exhibit no aptitude during the movie, which was probably precisely what director Michelangelo Antonioni wanted from them.
There’s not much to the story - a campus radical (Frechette) seems to kill a policeman during a student uprising at UCLA and flees in a stolen plane. He encounters a hippie chick/secretary (Halprin) on her way to Phoenix in a ’51 Buick to meet her boss (Rod Taylor), who might also be her lover or her father. They wander around Death Valley, trading philosophical insights and making love near the titular landmark (turns out the orgy scene is just an erotic hallucination). She wants to run away with him, but he insists on flying the plane back to Los Angeles while she goes on to Phoenix - and each of their stories is punctuated by violence.
Though it can’t be regarded as any kind of conventional success, the cinematography is stunning, and it’s a necessary chapter (and not quite the low point) in Antonioni’s remarkable career.
7. The Mel Brooks Collection ($139.99, 20th Century Fox Blu-ray) is the perfect post-Christmas gift to yourself.While you might not need Blu-ray versions of Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein, this set is indispensable for the spruced-up version of the underrated Spaceballs and the overlooked The Twelve Chairs.
8. From the East ($29.99, Icarus) is Chantal Akerman’s haunting 1993 travelogue through the collapsed Soviet bloc “before it was too late.” A haunting and poetic film built from evocative images and elegiac ambient sound.
9. AK 100: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa, ($399, Criterion), isn’t a part of my DVD collection, but in a less recessionary climate it might be. I’ve looked at one in the showroom. It’s a beautiful package.
10. The Samuel Fuller Film Collection ($79.95, Sony) is a smart collection of the seven films Fuller directed or co-wrote for Columbia, including the astute interracial romance Crimson Kimono (1959) and the Douglas Sirk directed Shockproof (1949).
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Style, Pages 31 on 12/29/2009