Ride With The Devil (Director’s Cut) (Criterion) is Ang Lee and James Schamus’ reconstruction of their preferred cut of their 1999 Civil War drama, which they cut to under two hours and fifteen minutes to meet their contractually obligated running time for its theatrical release. This newly-prepared cut runs about 14 minutes longer. I hadn’t seen the film since its theatrical release so I can’t pass judgment on a preferred version (let alone explicate the differences), but I was gripped by the film in this reviewing in ways I did not expect. Based on the novel Woe to Live On by Daniel Woodrell and adapted by longtime Lee collaborator and producer James Schamus, the film is set in the divided state of Missouri, where neighbor really did fight neighbor and sides were chosen more out of social identity than political allegiance. Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire) and Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich) consider themselves Southern men and, when the “war of Northern aggression” hits the Jack Bull farm and becomes personal, they join the Bushwhackers and joins a brutal guerilla war between private militias conducting a war of terrorism, a fight that, in this film, culminates with the Lawrence Massacre, one of the great atrocities of the Civil War.

Riding with Jewel and Skeet Ulrich

Bucolic scenes of men at rest in beautiful wild landscapes and families gathered over meals in manors and homesteads are shattered by battles fought with a brutality driven by something close to vengeance: it becomes personal to every man with a family touched by the war. There’s no romanticizing the fight or the values on the line here, and even those men who proclaim that it’s not about slavery but states rights aren’t about to let those damned abolitionists tell them that they can’t have slaves. But behind the rallying cries is a portrait of young men in war facing the reality of battle and seeing the brutality of their kind of war, fought outside the bounds of the army and driven by various levels of anger, vengeance or (in the case of the sneering son of the South played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers) pure sadism. At the risk of sounding as if I’m reducing the complex portrait to a cliché, it is a coming of age film of sorts, but for Jake it’s not just becoming a man, a husband and a father. It’s about bonding with freed slave Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright) and, trusting him with his life in ways he could never have predicted, seeing him as a human being with everything at stake in the war. That Daniel fights on the side of the South is one of the great contradictions that complicates and enriches the portrait. Identity and loyalty are ultimately defined by personal connections rather than social assumptions, political belief or even national status, and personal experience is the forge that shapes the evolution of Jake’s identity through the war.

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Dillinger Is Dead (Criterion)

Italian auteur Marco Ferreri’s films profile a modern consumer culture that is not simply empty but diseased, deadening emotions and driving people (specifically men) to acts of excess. The epitome is La Grande Bouffe, his grotesque 1973 men so bored life they decide to end it all in one final orgy, a food-and-sex blow-out, but you can find the seeds of that in the 1969 Dillinger in Dead, recently restored and rereleased in a revival run and now on DVD from Criterion.

Michel Piccoli plays with his new toy

It’s not a gangster film but an eerie character study of an industrial engineer (Michel Piccoli) over a long night where boredom and ennui and alienation (he’s in the middle of designing a gas mask) take their toll. Set almost entirely within the walls of a cluttered modern apartment filled with cultural detritus, Piccoli’s character plays like a spirited kid in a life-size toy box while his gorgeous but emotionally disconnected wife (Anita Pallenberg) medicates herself to sleep. He watches (and then interacts with) home movies, cooks up a snack, grabs a quickie with the maid (Annie Girardot), but the toy that fascinates him most is a handgun (which he cleans in olive oil) that may have belonged to Dillinger (or is simply wrapped up in the gangster’s mystic, which becomes both as his tool of liberation and of his ultimate act of arrogance and human contempt.

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Just in this week on the Criterion website: Criterion is losing the rights a number of titles in their collection in March. (See the original post on Criterion Currents here.)

The curtain is soon to fall on the lavish DVD of Powell and Pressberger's "The Tales of Hoffman"

The home video rights to a number of films from the StudioCanal library will go to Lionsgate at the end of March. The Criterion editions will go out of print (or on moratorium, as they say in the video industry) and will be unavailable commercially on the U.S. until Lionsgate puts out their own editions. These aren’t the first Criterion DVDs to go out of print (from John Woo’s The Killer to Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs to Carol Reed’s The Third Man, and too many titles in between) and or even the first StudioCanal titles they’ve lost at the end of the contract, but it’s the biggest batch to go in a single swoop that I’ve seen and I appreciate Criterion giving us a heads up. Sure, it’s in their interest to do so, but in this their best interests intersect quite nicely with our interests.

As you may know, Criterion has direct access to the Janus film library, a tremendous collection of international classics that makes up the majority of its releases, but they also license many films from other studios and collections. Those contracts last for a period of time and then are up for renewal, and in this case StudioCanal did not renew with Criterion. It’s likely nothing personal, just business, as they say, and perhaps not even something they have a choice over. Lionsgate has been releasing a lot of StudioCanal films (coming up later this month are Blu-ray editions of Kurosawa’s Ran and Godard’s Contempt, both once available from Criterion in excellent DVD editions, and the Ealing Studios classic The Ladykillers) and this just may be a contractual part of their relationship. (This is, mind you, merely supposition on my part and not based on any inside information.)

Regardless, a number of Criterion titles (including a couple of box sets) will be unavailable by the end of March (see list below) so Criterion is offering a deal through their website: an extra $5 off each of these titles while supplies last. You can also continue to purchase them through Amazon and other traditional merchants until the end of March (or until the current stocks are depleted, whichever comes first).

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Criterion's debut release: "Citizen Kane" on laserdisc

Criterion’s name is synonymous with the gold standard when it comes to presenting the definitive editions of classic and foreign cinema on home video. The company began in the laserdisc era and essentially defined the “special edition” presentation as we know it with releases like Citizen Kane (their first laserdisc release ever) and the follow-up 3-disc DVD (which expanded the supplements) and the “director approved” collaborations with Martin Scorsese (whose commentary on Taxi Driver and Raging Bull) set the bar for director commentary tracks and inspired many aspiring filmmakers). They’ve carried their loving care for classic and contemporary movies to DVD, finding vintage supplements for classic films and contributing to the critical record with their efforts. What gives the Criterion stamp meaning is not that they create the “best” DVD editions around, but that that they lavish their efforts on films that don’t get that kind of attention from the studios.

Thus, the announcement earlier this year that Criterion was going to start producing Blu-ray discs was considered evidence that the new format was indeed something that serious film folk should consider. It’s not just for The Matrix and Transformers and The Dark Knight, but for The Godfather (Paramount), Casablanca (Warner) and No Country For Old Men (Miramax).

The smeared world of "Chungking Express"

The four titles that Criterion adds to the Blu-ray format limn the span of the gamut of their interests: The Third Man (classics from the canon), Chungking Express (contemporary international), The Man Who Fell to Earth (cult favorites) and Bottle Rocket (American indie). All the supplements from their definitive DVD editions are carried over to the Blu-ray disc, with the notable exception of the booklets (which are represented by smaller, thinner booklets with only some of the essays and interviews of the original DVD offerings), and the films are newly remastered for the 1080p high definition standard. What you get is a sharper, stronger image that is also more sensitive to preserving the textures of the chemical process of film. Yes, I’m talking about film grain, that reality of celluloid that modern films have been so effectively been scrubbing away in the new film-to-digital-and-back post-production process. It dances across the sc screen of The Third Man with such clarity you think something must be wrong. It’s startling, because we’ve seen so little of it on DVD, but the presence also warms the image, makes it a little more organic. Criterion isn’t the first to do this – The Godfather and Casablanca embrace the grain also – but it really jumped out at me in The Third Man and started me reevaluating what constitutes a proper restoration and mastering standard for classic cinema. It’s not quite so obvious in Chungking Express, but then that film, with its smeared colors and stuttery motion and images pushed and pulled to the extremes of film registration, is all about the texture. Criterion’s Blu-ray preserves that texture so well you can’t imagine seeing it without that kind of clarity.

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