DVD Scene
Memorable movie discs of 2001
By Mike Clark
USA Today
Last year was the year that the DVD turned movie watching into a two-tiered phenomenon. While teens and young adults owned the multiplexes for, say, the first 48 weeks of the year, more seasoned viewers could start amassing copies of their favorite films for home-based collections.
I didn't see every DVD last year (who could?), but I saw several worth shipping to the proverbial desert island. In alphabetical order, here are a few that would be must-buys even if they didn't come packed with extras:
"The Bridge on the River Kwai" (1957) and "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962). You can't mention one David Lean Oscar winner without the other because Columbia TriStar brought both out this year and packed them with bonus material. "Kwai" was a special treat because all previous video renderings looked so awful. Both include miniature replications of the original souvenir book.
"Citizen Kane" (1941, Warner). You can all but see the makeup on the actors' faces in this definitive home rendering of Hollywood's most acclaimed movie. Plus: separate commentaries by Roger Ebert and Welles' longtime friend Peter Bogdanovich, and the feature-length documentary "The Battle Over Citizen Kane."
"Do the Right Thing" (1989, Criterion). The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did the wrong thing by ignoring the picture at Oscar time, but this variation on a onetime $125 laser disc is a done-right job. In addition to a fine rendering of a painstakingly visual movie, there's an excellent hourlong making-of documentary, plus a featurette in which director Spike Lee revisits the Bedford-Stuyvesant locales in Brooklyn.
"The French Connection" (1971, Fox). Two knockout documentaries (one for the BBC, one for the Fox Movie Channel) accompany the best-picture Oscar winner about a famed drug bust. Director William Friedkin is a piece of work telling how he didn't originally want either Gene Hackman or Fernando Rey (who ended up giving career-best performances) and how he "neglected" to seek permission to shoot the chase on crowded streets.
"The Godfather Box" (1972-90, Paramount). The first two Corleone sagas won deserved Academy Awards, and even the saga's controversial "Part III" got a nomination. Add to all three deleted scenes, a lengthy documentary, Francis Ford Coppola commentaries (that's right, plural) and smashing visual representations.
"The Simpsons: The First Complete Season" (1989-90, Fox). Homer moonlights as Santa Claus, Bart gets mistaken for a gifted child and Krusty the Klown gets a bum rap over a convenience-store stickup. Homer will never be father of the year, but this is by anyone's count a contender for most purely entertaining DVD of 2001.
"Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937, Disney). There are so many goodies in this two-DVD set that Disc 1 has to include a special feature (easy to use, too) that explains how to navigate through them. Heavy on heigh-ho throughout, the package merely begins with extras that were the cornerstone of 1994's laser disc box, which cost about $70 more. There are storyboards, promotional radio broadcasts and newsreels from the premiere. And Grumpy's skin tones get full Technicolor treatment.
"Spartacus" (1960, Criterion). The blockbuster that reduces "Gladiator" to pretender status duplicates the laser disc that sold for $75 more. There's a five-person marathon commentary (with a pre-stroke Kirk Douglas), newsreel shots of Douglas pressing his chin into cement at Grauman's Chinese Theater and sample pages of a tie-in comic book (presumably the only Stanley Kubrick movie that rated one).
"Untitled: Almost Famous, The Bootleg Cut" (2001, DreamWorks). What a kick it is to hear Alice Crowe, mother of writer/director Cameron, helping sustain a lively 2 1/2-hour commentary over an expanded "fan's" version of the movie, in which Frances McDormand played a character strongly based on her. The two-DVD set includes both versions of the film plus extras.
Anchor Bay's consistent excellence. The plucky distributor from Troy, Mich., deals in movies that are often hard to find on television and has released more spaghetti Westerns than I'll ever have time to see. But quality is their trademark, and they gave me a lot of pleasure this year by putting the original color tints back into some scenes in 1962's otherwise black-and-white "The Day the Earth Caught Fire" and tweaking the lurid colors just right on 1960's "Circus of Horrors."
