DVD: KEN TUCKER'S TOP 10 OF 2007 (cont.)
5. CRIME WAVE
Sterling Hayden chews up and spits out toothpicks and suspects as a cop in this 1954 noir: 74 minutes of abrupt violence and stark, relentless manhunts. It features some amazing cinematography by Bert Glennon — part documentary realism, part atmospheric shadows and light. Crime Wave also sports one of the year's most entertaining and informative commentary tracks, courtesy of novelist James Ellroy and historian Eddie Muller. Available as a DVD double feature with the '46 oddity Decoy or in the 10-movie Film Noir Classics Collection Vol. 4.
4. THE CHARLES BURNETT COLLECTION
Given their low budgets, limited distribution, and quietly thoughtful tone, Burnett's movies about black working-class life — 1977's moving Killer of Sheep, 1983's witty My Brother's Wedding — were rarely shown in theaters, which makes this two-disc set essential viewing. His neorealist aesthetic — both an extension of and a break from the richly detailed, semidocumentary style associated with European directors like Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti — results in films that allow for a full range of emotions from his ordinary-citizen subjects. Collection also includes Burnett's latest, Quiet As Kept, an artfully blunt short about a family displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
3. ACE IN THE HOLE
Billy Wilder's ferocious 1951 examination of media-driven frenzy, starring Kirk Douglas as a cynical reporter who pumps up a tragedy to give his career a boost. This movie never loses its timeliness, and the extras include a generous doc about Wilder, who seems incapable of not uttering something scathing, wily, or sarcastic. Ace is another of Criterion's seemingly endless scholarly yet egalitarian flow of classics, which this year included everything from a seven-disc package of Fassbinder's frowsy epic Berlin Alexanderplatz to a delightfully underrated 1946 British village murder mystery, Green for Danger.
2. POPEYE THE SAILOR: 1933–1938, VOL.1
The most important animation release of the year, these beautifully restored cartoons — an early series of 60 made by the Fleischer Studios — are marvels of visual imagination and low-down wit. Popeye's muttered jokes and inflating forearms when he sends his enemy Bluto sailing through the air are rollickingly funny. So are the bendable tubes that compose Olive Oyl's arms and legs, which stretch and wobble with the grace of a tipsy ballerina. The sailor man's adoration of this big-footed gal remains sacred here as one of the great mysteries of romance.
1. MY SO-CALLED LIFE
Nineteen episodes that changed pop culture...well, so it has sometimes seemed. Without the teen heartache and the gloomily lit thrills of Claire Danes' Angela Chase and her suburban Pennsylvania loves, pals, and neurotic parents, I doubt TV would have spawned Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The O.C., Laguna Beach, or the (so far) online-only Quarterlife. And if you see diminishing returns in that list, it only emphasizes what an original MSCL was for just one season on ABC in 1994 and 1995. The Complete Series set contains six discs in which a young girl struggles to be heard by the world, just as Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick — moving ahead artistically and backward generationally from thirtysomething — strove to bring a different mixture of realism and idealization to prime time. The duo found their muse in writer-creator Winnie Holzman, whose commentary contributions make clear just how much Angela was her adolescent alter ego: self-conscious yet joyous and hopeful about the screwed-up world. Shot with moviemakers' eyes — unusual for the small screen (both Zwick and Herskovitz had helmed feature films and would go on to produce and/or direct others) — MSCL was deep focus in every sense. Awkward angel Angela could pine for her soulful, dim-bulb cutie Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto); a brainy boy yearning for her (Devon Gummersall) could spy on her sitting in a leafy suburban tree, his hair a nimbus of frazzled nerve endings. No TV show ever made young love seem so pure, so complicated, so vexed, so fleeting. One perfect season of television on DVD, with all the trimmings — something to be thankful for.
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