Michael AtkinsonJohn Waters once famously suggested that if you go home with someone and they don’t own any books, you shouldn’t fuck them. I’d go one step further: Shun the hook-up who owns no films on home video. (If they have one or two but they’re Disney cartoons, never stop shunnin’.) It’s not au courant to say so, but the fetishized popularity of the Criterion Closet proves to this Son of Sarris that cinema is still worth owning in physical forms you can hold, shelve, and collect, dammit, and therefore worth giving as gifts. I mean, the average streaming service offers fewer options than a mom-and-pop VHS rental joint did in 1988, and precious little of that is from the entirety of the 20th century, never mind silent and black-and-white movies. Companies are already starting to charge us for movie rentals — on top of the monthly fee we already pay.
And we lie down like sheep. But it’s also an inherently unstable situation, ripe for tech-czar whimsy — who knows when Elon Musk will buy Netflix and cut its pathetic roster to his favorite eight movies, or when Amazon’s algorithm will decide black-and-white movies aren’t profitable enough, or when somebody’s licensing runs out, or when someone just kicks a plug and the movies you were hoping to watch or rewatch just vanish?
We have sacrificed a great deal for the evil of convenience over these past decades, but what’s more convenient than ownership? If you own a movie, or get one for Festivus, it’s fucking yours — good luck, Jeff Bezos, trying to take it away or charge you to watch it. Likewise, giving a gift of discs is a way of saying, Eat shit robot overlords, Jean-Luc Godard will never die. So here’re suggestions of giveable sets this quarter — and fer Chrissake, don’t order them on Amazon.
CC40 (Criterion)
Feeding a rabid fanbase while other distributors struggle to break even, boasting its own labeled shelving island in chain bookstores, Criterion is still the gold standard; if a film gets Criterionized, it need not seek out further embellishment or restoration for the foreseeable future. This monster 49-disc Blu-ray set, celebrating the company’s ruby anniversary, is zanily organized in a fit of self-congratulation: The 40 back-catalogue films included are not the bestsellers or mega-award-winners out of the company’s roster of over 1,200 films, but the titles most often selected by the celebrities when they go to the Closet and fill up their bag. Which means, everyone will disagree with a few of the choices, because busy/famous filmmakers and actors are not film critics. But so? As a splashy gift opportunity for the fresh-out-of-the-gate cinephile in your tribe, the greenhorn who despises Rotten Tomatoes and owns a T-shirt with HERZOG printed in the Danzig font, it could hardly be beat. It’s a film school in a box: you get the nastiest Godard (Weekend), the headiest Bergman (Persona), the densest Fellini (8½), the best neo-realist (Bicycle Thieves), the most beloved Wong (In the Mood for Love), the most experimental Tarkovsky (Mirror), the funniest Sturges (Sullivan’s Travels), the most affecting Ozu (Tokyo Story), the weirdest Altman (3 Women), and so on and on.
The nastiest, headiest, densest, most beloved, most experimental, funniest … you get the picture.
Plus, a rarefied cartload of unexpected hand grenades, like Lucrecia Martel’s La Cienaga (2001), Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991), Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000), Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984), John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), and 25 others, in a tasteful crate that weighs almost nine pounds. Of course, Criterion being Criterion, the supplements take up hundreds of hours, from docs to shorts to interviews to outtakes to trailers to audio commentaries, plus a fat book that attributes each choice to a Closet-scouring celeb (Barry Jenkins picked 1999’s Ratcatcher, by Lynne Ramsay) and reprints each of the films’ original essays, by honest-to-God film critics and scholars.
All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror Vol. 2 (Severin)
More like a normal Blu-ray gift set, organized by subgenre, but hardly normal at all, this mini-library of international folk horror pulp comes on the heels of Severin’s first 20-film set, in 2022 (which is where you’ll find Konstantin Yershov’s Gogol-based witch freakout, Viy, and Brunello Rondi’s riveting feminist dirge, El Demonio, among others), and frames up 24 movies mucking about, in one way or another, within the creepy-moldy realm of folk legend. The primeval-throwback paradigm is not exactly a new vibe (the oldest film here, the fascinating Finnish-Sami pagan tale The White Reindeer, hails from 1952), but it is enjoying a generational moment now for some reason. For Millennial Zoomers, it seems, the older and earthier the occult return, the better.
Not your normal horror.
But it’s the collection’s cultural catholicity that makes it irresistible. Like a seminar on the subject, you get immersions in the ancient folklore of Poland, Wales, Korea, Thailand, Argentina, northwest Canadian Indigenous peoples (the Haida, in 2018’s Edge of the Knife), Saudi Arabia, Estonia (Reiner Sarnet’s berserk medieval fable November, from 2017, one of the most beautiful digitally shot black-and-white films ever made), Islamic Turkey, the Philippines, etc., in addition to default trips through the secretive forests of England proper and the hills of 19th-century Appalachia. Favorites that don’t even fit into those slots include Christiane Cegavske’s addictively warped puppet animation, Blood Tea and Red String (2006), and a childhood obsession, John Llewellyn Moxey’s The City of the Dead (1960), known on American TV as Horror Hotel and possibly the creepiest, foggiest, most lost-feeling low-budget British witch-pulp item of the postwar decades. The films are all accompanied by more than 60 additional docs, introductions, audio commentaries, and new interviews, plus piles of associated shorts, stretching from the present fad back to 1913. And of course, a book: a hardbound illustrated anthology of new folk horror fiction by Ramsey Campbell, Kim Newman, Eric Schaller, Cassandra Khaw, and a slew of rising stars in the subculture.
The Films of Sarah Jacobson: Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore and I Was a Teenage Serial Killer (American Genre Films Archive)
Another blast from a very different past, Sarah Jacobson was a brief and defiant comet in the postpunk ragefest that was the riot grrrl movement in the early-’90s Pacific Northwest. Coming out of film school and mentorship under George Kuchar, she was quickly a pissed-off queen star of downtowns and alt-festivals everywhere, first with her 16mm student short I Was a Teenage Serial Killer (1993), which is so deliberately crude and maddened with guy-hate it feels like the grab-a-Bolex moviemaking equivalent of Kathleen Hanna crotch-taunting a heckler. Jacobson’s only feature, the bristling, if more nuanced, gender battle Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore (1996), dallies around a boozy alt-movie theater that never seems to show movies and is otherwise subsumed by its bitchy employees plotting romantic/sexual espionage on each other, shot in an offhand, spotlit style that’s almost nostalgic for 1979.
Blasts from a very different past.
Ever DIY, Jacobson even sold her films herself, on tape through the mail, 13 bucks each. Her flare was tragically short: After a few more shorts and the burnout of the riot grrrl surge, Jacobson died in 2004 of endometrial cancer, at 32. She and her films are iconic figures in that now historical proto-grunge cityscape, and this set, a reissuing of a limited 2019 release, packs all of it onto one Blu-ray disc and one DVD, along with a booklet of texts and reminiscences by, among others, Sarah contemporary Allison Anders.
Hard Wood: The Adult Features of Ed Wood (Severin)
You are probably already thinking of someone in your bubble for whom this dark-horse disc set will be the year-end gift to remember. There are perhaps no anti-Woodians among us (who on earth dislikes this unselfconscious all-American outsider freak-creep, or finds him uninteresting?), only Woodians-to-be. I don’t much buy into the arguments made for him as an actual ironic-bizarro auteur of some kind, but there’s no denying that his spectacular filmmaking ineptitude and deranged attempts at prose coupled with his massive alcohol intake and uninhibited devotion to his own sexual compulsions give him an outsized aura, as a clueless yet diehard outcast of the middle century at whom it is, almost uniquely, still appropriate to laugh. Wood exists in his own frozen diorama: Oblivious to anything remotely akin to the real counterculture movements during the ’50s and ’60s, he inhabited an edge-America beyond them, one of his own delirious devising, built out of Los Angeles chintz, monster-matinee memories, and the tension between middle-class repression and free sex. (Even so, no sidestream cultural community has taken him as their mascot; he is simultaneously everyone’s weird clown-uncle and no one’s intimate.)
For those who find that “Plan 9 From Outer Space” is just not weird or inept enough.
The culture that has grown around Wood is extraordinary in its appetite for effluvia — you wonder how many similar grinding hacks in the postwar years have been utterly forgotten because they weren’t as strangely entertaining. So, we have this “restored” Blu-ray set, which features four late Wood-directed- and/or -written pornos, two of which, Necromania (1971) and The Young Marrieds (1972), are featured in both hardcore and softcore versions. The other two, Shotgun Wedding (1962) and The Only House in Town (1971), are merely softcore and/or dripping with Woodian perverseness. As porn and quasi-porn, these films make Wood’s early, more famous movies look like works of professional polish, but never fear, amid the perfectly dull sex sequences shot like crime scenes, you get helpings of irradiated thought salad as only the man could toss it, like this chunk of narration about a sexually frustrated husband, from The Young Marrieds: “He has a hollow feeling that needs to be filled — his conscious world turns inward to seek the dream world of thought that compensates for his lack of security in the real world.” As you’d predict, the supplements are ample, hours of Wood-dissecting interviews (including with Bobcat Goldthwait), docs, vintage stag loops (with Wood-scripted subtitles!), audio commentaries, and more. Skol!