Best of 2010 in Blu-ray and DVD

By Christopher P. Jacobs
Staff Writer

For film buffs with HDTV and Blu-ray players, 2010 has been a very good year indeed. The technology dropped enough in price in the latter part of 2009 so that 2010 saw many more people embracing the format and a vastly wider range of choices in available titles.

While most Blu-ray releases (especially those that show up on local store shelves) are the latest boxoffice hits, the larger market this year (despite the troubled economy) has helped spur a substantial increase of classic, foreign, independent, and cult films getting the Blu-ray treatment, including an impressive number of box set editions.

Year-end Blu-ray ten-best lists from reviewers are featuring films like “Saving Private Ryan,” “Apocalypse Now,” Battleship Potemkin,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “Se7en,” “The Sound of Music,” the newest restoration of “Metropolis,” and Chaplin’s “Modern Times,” among others, besides the obvious recent fan favorites like “Zombieland,” “Toy Story 3,” the “Back to the Future: 25th Anniversary Trilogy,” the “Alien Anthology,” the “Avatar: Extended Collector’s Edition,” and the like. All of those choices (except maybe “Avatar”) are worthy contenders for a 10 best of 2010 on Blu-ray, but my final 10 are as follows:

#1 - “Sherlock, Jr.” (1924) / “Three Ages” (1923) - Comedian Buster Keaton gets the top place for the second year in a row with this double-feature of silent classics from Kino International. “Sherlock, Jr.” is nearly the perfect film: a brilliantly innovative comedy-mystery-romance that pushes the boundaries of surrealistic metafiction decades before self-referential cinema became fashionable. Kino’s HD transfer, likewise, is excellent, with a choice of three music scores and other bonuses. The co-feature is amusing if less subtle in its humor, a fun parody of D. W. Griffith’s “Intolerance.” The physical film has survived in less-pristine shape, however, and the HD transfer is a bit softer on top of it, though still a strong step up from the old DVD edition. Keaton’s entertaining and sometimes spectacular “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” (1928), also appeared in a beautiful Blu-ray version from Kino this year.

#2 - “Yojimbo” (1961) / ”Sanjuro” (1962) - These two Akira Kurosawa samurai films starring Toshiro Mifune as an enigmatic anti-hero were inspired by American Westerns and gangster films. “Yojimbo,” in turn inspired Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns (starting with “A Fistful of Dollars”) and the Bruce Willis gangster film “Last Man Standing.” The Criterion Collection created fine new HD transfers for this double-feature, now with their Perspecta Stereo soundtracks restored for the first time and a nice selection of bonus features. Kurosawa’s epic masterpiece “Seven Samurai” (1954) also made it to Blu-ray from Criterion this year.

#3 - “The Twilight Zone - The Original TV Series, seasons 1 & 2” (1959-1961) - Image Entertainment has released absolutely superb HD transfers from the original 35mm film negatives and magnetic sound recordings, and has included commentaries and radio adaptations of many of them. For budget reasons, Several episodes of season 2 were, unfortunately, shot only on video, but most of Rod Serling’s groundbreaking fantasy/sci-fi series actually looks as good as a newly-shot film instead of a typical TV show. Season 3 is due in February.

#4 - “America Lost and Found: The BBS Story” (1968-1972) - This Criterion box set of seven films from the short-lived but highly influential Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, and Steve Blauner production company (along with friends Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper) includes seven complete features. There are a few true classics and several interesting experiments, along with numerous bonus items that illustrate the period when traditional Hollywood movies gave way to more independent director visions. The movies are “Head” (1968), “Easy Rider” (1969), “Five Easy Pieces” (1970), “Drive, He Said” (1970), “A Safe Place” (1971), “The Last Picture Show” (1971), and “The King of Marvin Gardens” (1972).

#5 - “The Night of the Hunter” (1955) - Charles Laughton’s only film as a director is a masterful and intensely moody suspense thriller starring Robert Mitchum, Lillian Gish, and Shelley Winters. Criterion’s beautiful HD transfer is accompanied by numerous bonus features and a separate disc of two-and-a-half hours worth of fascinating outtakes where we can hear Laughton directing from off-camera.

#6 - “City Girl” (1929) - This never-released silent masterpiece made by German director F. W. Murnau for Fox Pictures came out on an excellent Blu-ray as part of the Eureka Masters of Cinema series in Britain (joining his more famous “Sunrise” (1927), which came out last year), but is region-free and can easily be ordered from England online. The story concerns a Minnesota farm boy whose hasty marriage to a Chicago waitress while selling the family crop creates tension back home.

#7 - “Stagecoach” (1939) - John Ford’s archetypal and Oscar-winning Western almost single-handedly revived the genre for major studios and made John Wayne a star. It has a very nice HD edition from Criterion, and includes a hugely enjoyable but substantially lesser-quality copy of Ford’s rare 1917 silent western comedy, “Bucking Broadway.”

#8 - TIE: “Walkabout” (1971) and “Psycho” (1960) - Nicolas Roeg’s stunning allegory of two children lost in the Australian outback is a memorably-edited blend of striking images and sounds. The Blu-ray is a lovely HD transfer from Criterion, along with some interesting bonus features. Alfred Hitchcock’s 50-year-old classic revolutionized the horror thriller and gets a beautiful HD edition from Universal, along with a good commentary and other worthwhile bonus features.

#9 - “King Kong” (1933) - The original version of the giant gorilla movie got a good Blu-ray Digibook release from Warner Brothers, restoring scenes that had been cut after the Production Code found them too disturbing, as well as the four-minute musical overture. Besides a good commentary, there are some great bonus documentaries (in standard-def) plus a hi-def recreation of a lost sequence done by Peter Jackson when he was working on his remake.

#10 - TIE: “The Black Pirate” (1926) and “The Fairy Queen” (2009) - Kino has done a new HD transfer of the early Technicolor Douglas Fairbanks silent swashbuckling forerunner of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films, with the same extras as their old DVD plus an additional music score and an alternate narrated sound re-issue. The HD video recording of Jonathan Kent’s inventively off-beat production for the Glyndebourne opera house of Henry Purcell’s baroque opera inspired by Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” blends sublime music with bawdy and downright bizarre comedy in Britain’s proud tradition of Benny Hill. The Blu-ray from Opus Arte includes a few interesting interviews that help explain the interpretation.

Although Blu-ray has gained ground steadily on the DVD format, there were still some notable DVD-only releases during 2010. Major releases for film buffs this year included Flicker Alley’s amazing collection, “Chaplin at Keystone,” with every one of the star’s surviving films from 1914 restored to drastically higher-quality copies than usually seen. Flicker Alley also came out with a beautiful edition of the original 1927 version of “Chicago,” the best of that cynical Broadway play’s three screen adaptations.

Criterion’s set of “Three Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg” includes the style-oriented director’s “Underworld” (1927), “The Last Command” (1928), and “The Docks of New York” (1928). All three are visual feasts of lighting and composition, with some interesting stories and characterizations as well, and Criterion has provided two alternate music scores for each film and a few other extras.

Finally, Kino released a DVD set of five early silent French features from 1913-14 by Louis Feuillade in his “Fantomas” series. All were influential on later action-adventure and crime films.

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