It’s by now common knowledge that writers cannot be trusted with their own work, not even—or perhaps especially—highly celebrated ones, but by the ’30s Shaw had already been awarded a Nobel prize, and with screenwriting still in its skittish infancy it seemed both logical and preferable to recruit the Irishman to helm scenario and dialog on his own films. Yet to watch Anthony Asquith’s sleeper hit Pygmalion—Pascal’s first essay at big-screen Shaw and Criterion spine number 85—as well as the three films collected in Eclipse Series 20, George Bernard Shaw on Film, is to in many ways observe paramount cinematic clumsiness, the work of a chained band of monstrous filmic talent buttressing a collection of incurably stagey ideas. Admittedly, Pygmalion, the most enduring and financially successful of all non-musical Shaw adaptations, benefits the most from its creator’s cluelessly procrustean tinkering, as the play’s third act was indelibly enhanced with a crucial embassy ball scene intricately unpacking the hypocrisy of upper-crust interaction. Elsewhere, however, Shaw’s input (or simply recalcitrant dedication to preserving the entirety of his own exchanges), along with Pascal’s aesthetic ignorance, reduces even ace cameramen Ronald Neame and Jack Cardiff to eye-level receptacles without intimacy or regard, like bored theater patrons.

Although the extent to which the iconically dark-shaded and silver-streaked Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) can truly be accepted as a Fellini surrogate is a source of endlessly inconsequential debate, we tend to take the lightly fictive director at his word when he dismally claims that he had planned to make a truly honest and direct film this time around. 8½ represents the most unceremonious and abrupt transition in the development of Fellini’s cinema from putatively neorealist ideologies to unabashedly oneiric claptraps about the onus of an overly imaginative but waning masculinity—and it is, for all its Freudian bitchery and post-libidinous angst, one of the few personal statements in film utterly unhindered by stretches for social or cosmic relevance. There are some aphoristic generalizations related to living the creative life, most of them articulated by Guidio’s lean script advisor and logos personification Daumier (Jean Rougeul)—”Destroying is better than creating when we’re not creating those few, truly necessary things”—but unlike the allegorical potency of La Dolce Vita, which rendered Rome with Olympian hedonism and Dante-esque judgment, the symbolism of 8½ maroons us in the faux-comic salt flats of Guido’s muddily incommunicable psyche without an archetypal compass.

I was asked to represent Slant Magazine in DVD Beaver’s annual show-stopping poll…my results are below, and if you follow the above link you can see the whole whopping outcome. Definitely worth reading over lunch/dinner/dessert.

Jon Lanthier and Slant Staff

Top 10 SD-DVD Releases OF 2009

1. Gaumont Treasures: 1897-1913 (Various) Kino; R1

2. Walden: Diaries, Notes & Sketches (Jonas Mekas, 1970) Microcinema; R1

3. The State: The Complete Series (Various, 5 Discs) Paramount/MTV; R1

4. The Samuel Fuller Film Collection (Samuel Fuller, et al. 7 discs) Sony; R1

5. It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (Various, 17 Discs) Shout Factory; R1

6. Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965), Criterion; R1

7. The Last Days of Disco (Whit Stillman, 1998) Criterion; R1

8. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Peter Yates, 1973) Criterion; R1

9. Alexander Korda’s Private Lives (Alexander Korda, 4 Films) Eclipse; R1

10. Science Is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé (3 Discs) Criterion; R1

Comments: Was 2009 the “year of cult” as far as DVD was concerned? It seemed like more long lost (and never-quite-found) favorites were being issued than ever before, making each month’s adjusted release schedule a veritable Pandora’s Box of memories, cinema-related or otherwise. Most of the above DVDs would be welcome releases in ANY quality, but Criterion, Kino, and Shout Factory all stepped up to the proverbial plate with aplomb—The Last Days of Disco was already one of my favorite films before its DVD debut and yet to screen the digital master was to rediscover its coruscating wit all over again.

Top Blu-ray Releases

1. In the Realm of the Senses (Nagisa Oshima, 1976) Criterion; A

2. Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927) Masters Of Cinema; ALL

3. The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957) Criterion; A

4. Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965) Criterion; A

5. Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967) Criterion; A

6. The General (Clyde Bruckman & Buster Keaton, 1927) Kino; ALL

7. Wings Of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987) Criterion; A

8. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008) Criterion; A

9. The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1987) Criterion; A

10. Wallace and Gromit: The Complete Collection (Nick Park, 1 Disc) Lionsgate; A

Comments: It’s still difficult to determine what one is supposed to look for in a blu ray that cannot be had from an upconverted standard definition disc – the difference to me has never quite been night and day so much as a choice between two distinct filmic textures (one always pays a cost for clarity). Which is what made Criterion’s release of In the Realm of the Senses such a shock – with a transfer glabrous, flattened and fluid, the film seems less pornographic and yet more assaulting than ever, and as such it’s one of the best arguments for 1080p on the market. The sharpness is as exhausting to observe as the perpetual copulation.