Mike's DVD Haul

I have the mind of a collector. When I start collecting something I don't operate in half measures. I must have the best. It started as a kid with stuffed animals, went from grade 8 into high school with CDs and now has become totally focused on DVDs. Maybe that's why Adaptation is one of my favourite movies and The Orchid Thief one of my favourite books: I understand John Laroche and his passion to go great lengths to collect rare, beautiful orchids. I will go into any store, no matter shape or size and browse through every corner of it in hopes of finding that one hidden treasure or that one great deal. I spend hours on websites, comparing prices, seeing where the best deals are and so on. And I must admit: my DVD collection is pretty sweet. It's only got around a thousand titles which, to an avid collector, may seem like not very many but if it lacks in quantity it makes up for ten times over in quality. So confidant in my DVD collection am I that I even wrote a post about it back before anyone was even reading.

So anyway, to come to my point, a while back Travis at The Movie Encyclopedia started doing regular posts on DVD Hauls. He'd go out, buy some DVDs, come back and share his booty with us. I loved it. It was pure vanity and offered really no use to anyone and yet, as a collector, I loved seeing what he was buying, admiring things I wanted, and questioning his taste on others. It was a lot of fun and even though he hasn't done one in a while, I hope to see them come back.

During the course of my one year of going back to school I didn't buy many DVDs. When I got a job, the first thing I wanted to do was blow some money and remember what it felt like to buy mass amounts of DVDs, of getting them home, unwrapping them, looking at the inserts, etc. So that's what I did. A lot of them I ordered from Barns and Noble whose annual Criterion Collection sale is a blessing. All of them, regardless of what outlet they came from are great, classic film from master directors and, because I'm vain too when it comes to my DVDs, I thought I'd share with you what I picked up over the last couple weeks.

Au Revior Les Enfants was Louis Malle's first French feature back after immigrating to America with mixed results. Many of his fellow Frenchmen never forgive him for leaving but this did not detract him from producing what is maybe his most personal film. More straightforward than his early French New Wave films, Enfants is apparently based on Malle`s own life in which a French schoolboy in occupied France accidentally gives up the identity of his Jewish friend and the pain he must live with as a result of that.

Spirits of the Dead is an anthology film based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe. It features three shorts: one by Louis Malle, one by Roger Vadim and one by (and this is the reason I own it) Ferderico Fellini. Other than that I haven`t seen it.

When thinking about great British filmmakers there are really only two names to consider (and, sorry to say, neither of them are Christopher Nolan). One is Ken Loach and the other is Mike Leigh. There are two varieties of Mike Leigh films: the predominantly comic and the predominately bleak (and I say predominately because none of them exist in one way or another without both elements). Naked is one of the bleakest. It also started the career of David Thewlis, now best know as Remus Lupin from the Harry Potter movies.

Jean-Pierre Melville is often considered the Godfather of the French New Wave because his Bob le Flambeur (remade in America as The Good Thief) more or less kick started the whole movement with it`s quick, cool, ultra-hip love of American crime films. Like early Godard and even maybe Tarantino, Mellville was the king of super cool genre films (although he also made other, powerful dramas like Army of Shadows) that were both exciting and funny. These films are any movie lover`s delight.

Jean-Luc Godard, love him or hate him, is the mad cinema anarchist that cannot be ignored. His Breathless was the most important film debut since Citizen Kane and helped to define an entire new generation of films while also breaking down conventions, creating new techniques and generally just changing the way we understood movies and pushing the limits of how they could be made. Of course Godard would later go off the tracks, making films so dense and complex that they are nearly unwatchable but one thing about Godard is he`s never boring. Neither Masculin Femanin or Tout va Bien are major Godard works but they are still highly interesting political statements like none anyone but Godard could make.

No DVD Haul is complete with some Ingmar Bergman and these three films were the last ones I needed to own everything Bergman has available in North America. I once said that no one should trust a critic who didn`t know that Last House on the Left was a remake of Bergman`s Virgin Spring, a masterpiece from Bergman`s early career before his later, more challenging works. The Magic Flute, an adaptation of Mozart`s opera is an interesting film because of how uncharacteristic it is for a Bergman film. Maybe his lightest, most joyous film, it`s a strange vanity project that doesn`t naturally fit anywhere in the progression of Bergman`s career but it is still a lovely rendering of a classic opera. I haven`t seen Autumn Sonata but it is characterized as being the one collaboration between fellow countrymen Ingmar Bergman and Hollywood bombshell Ingrid Bergman (no relation).

The Remake/Sequel/Reboot Debate

Because Kid in the Front Row always seems to do it first and best (no wonder he doesn't like remakes) he's started a one day blogathon in which bloggers were invited to weigh in with their thoughts on remakes, sequels and reboots. Of course, never wanting to miss the chance to chime in and always happy to have content given to me, here's my take.

It's easy these days to throw Hollywood under the bus and call them creatively bankrupt because it seems that they will remake, reboot and make a sequel to just about anything they can get their hands on. That's the current state of mainstream cinema. We've seen it all summer and it extends out into the peripherals of the entire year as well. However, because this is the current state of cinema, it's what we are left to deal with. We could sit here and argue all day that Hollywood needs to turn it around, find original content, and so on. That is, of course, ideal but to do so is to think about what we want as opposed to deal with what we have. You end up missing a lot of good movies that way.

Personally I am fine with remakes/sequels/reboots. I am fine with it not because I want to see other versions of films I've already seen but because: a good film by any other name...as Shakespeare once wrote. If a sequel is well made, than who cares what source it was derived? We spend so much time these days concerned with everything surrounding a movie from it's origins, the tabloid exploits of its players, how much money it made or lost, how good the original was, how this should never have been remade, how stupid Hollywood is, etc., that we almost forget that the film is what is most important: story, characters, acting, direction, editing, lighting, cinematography and how all of these things collide into one another to make magic. That's what's important, everything else is secondary.

And sequels/remakes/reboots also serve a very specific purpose. Godard once said that the best way to criticise a film is to make another. So why not remake a bad movie, or take a different approach, start again from scratch, whatever? The reality of it is that, depending on the circumstances it will either work or it won't. But that's the same for original films as well. Godard's Breathless was remade in Hollywood and didn't work. You can't take a film that defined a generation with it's originality and invention and make it into a standard Hollywood drama. However, when Sergio Leone used Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, almost shot-for-shot, as the inspiration for his Fistfull of Dollars, a whole new genre was born. The difference was that Breathless took the story and simply put it back on film. Leone on the other hand, took Yojimbo and made it his own. That's the success of a remake. That's the success of any film, no matter the source.

And really, what defines an original film? Even original films are rarely ever true originals, and when they are, we sometimes never even hear of them. But just look at some of the past year's original works: Crazy Heart was The Wrestler meets Tender Mercies; Up in the Air was La Dolche Vita through and through; Avatar was every classic American western and even Inception was just made up of pieces of ever previous Christopher Nolan film, The Prestige in particular. The definition of an original film is that it wasn't adapted from any existing source, but the idea or true originality usually stops there. History is destined to repeat itself. Hollywood just gets around to it faster than most.

So, do I want to see great films remade? No, but hey, if someone needs to take a little from Hidden Fortress to make a Star Wars, I'm okay with that. And if it takes three movies to get to the best Jason Bourne one, I'm okay with that too. Ideally Hollywood would only remake or reboot bad movies with the intention of making them better. But again, we're speaking in ideals and missing the point: if the the remake is good, what other point is there to be made?