Here's the full article since it's behind a paywall.
Quote:
Sure, It Won an Oscar. But Is It Criterion?
How the Criterion Collection became the film world’s arbiter of taste
By Joshua Hunt
Feb. 29, 2024
In October 2022, amid a flurry of media appearances promoting their film “Tàr,” the director Todd Field and the star Cate Blanchett made time to visit a cramped closet in Manhattan. This closet, which has become a sacred space for movie buffs, was once a disused bathroom at the headquarters of the Criterion Collection, a 40-year-old company dedicated to “gathering the greatest films from around the world” and making high-quality editions available to the public on DVD and Blu-ray and, more recently, through its streaming service, the Criterion Channel. Today Criterion uses the closet as its stockroom, housing films by some 600 directors from more than 50 countries — a catalog so synonymous with cinematic achievement that it has come to function as a kind of film Hall of Fame. Over four decades, through a combination of luck, obsession and good taste, this 55-person company has become the arbiter of what makes a great movie, more so than any Hollywood studio or awards ceremony.
For more than a decade, the “Criterion closet” has also served as the backdrop for a popular online video series in which actors and filmmakers — Nathan Lane, Aubrey Plaza and Ethan Hawke among them — pick out their favorite Criterion titles to take home. Like other celebrity guests in the “closet picks” series, Field and Blanchett plucked their selections from the neatly ordered shelves and used them as conduits for spontaneous bursts of evangelism. Field praised Raymond Bernard’s “Wooden Crosses” as “one of the greatest war movies ever made,” while Blanchett singled out Larisa Shepitko’s “The Ascent” as something that “has to be owned by every single human in the world.” Neither bothered to mention “Tàr,” the film they were otherwise working so hard to promote; inside the closet, even the biggest stars are reduced to a state of childlike fandom. “There’s no cynicism in the closet,” Field told me. “It’s all love. It’s all about why people do what they do and how powerful movies are for us.”
Each year, Criterion selects 50 or 60 new entrants to add to its catalog, which now includes 1,650 films. Some Hollywood directors campaign relentlessly for their films — or their favorite films from the past — to make the list. For legions of film fans, Criterion is akin to the Louvre, but with “an aura of hip,” the writer and director Josh Safdie told me in an email. When Safdie’s film “Uncut Gems,” which he directed with his brother, Benny, entered the Criterion Collection with the spine No. 1101, he said they couldn’t help feeling as if they had “snuck in” to the museum that they had admired for so long. “Being a part of the collection is something that we’re both incredibly proud of,” Safdie told me. “It may sound corny but it was more meaningful than awards.”
Criterion’s commitment to film and filmmakers has helped the company, which began in the 1980s by releasing films on VHS and LaserDisc — a precursor to DVDs with the comparatively enormous diameter of 12 inches — to stay relevant and profitable through a series of tech revolutions that have upended the industry. While studios and streaming services chase audiences by producing endless sequels and spinoffs, trying to wring fresh content from old ideas, Criterion has built a brand that audiences trust to lead them — even to the most obscure corners of the film universe. Criterion’s success in marketing beautiful, strange, complex movies is the road not taken by most of Hollywood: a steadfast belief in the value of human creativity and curation over the output of any algorithm.
One day in the spring of 1992, a year after taking over as director of Criterion, Michael Nash was sitting in his beachfront office in Santa Monica when he got an unexpected phone call. Like many people who work for years in Hollywood, Nash has a tendency to describe events as if he were reading lines from a screenplay. “You’re sitting in the office, and on the desk there’s the old-style intercom,” he told me. “The operator takes an incoming call, and then it’s like: ‘Michael Nash, David Bowie on Line 4.’”
Bowie was calling about Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” in which Bowie starred as an alien visitor who masquerades as human and succumbs to the human condition. Nash remembered seeing the movie years earlier and finding it “amazing” but difficult to understand. “I was totally confused,” he said. The reason audiences couldn’t make sense of it, Bowie explained, was that the theatrical release for “The Man Who Fell to Earth” was missing 18 minutes of film that was cut by the distributor. “It got butchered,” Nash told me. Years later, its star was hoping that Criterion might consider releasing Roeg’s original cut of the film on LaserDisc.
Criterion was founded nearly a decade earlier by the CD-ROM pioneer Bob Stein, along with his wife, Aleen Stein, and a former Warner Brothers executive named Roger Smith, to explore the technological possibilities of the LaserDisc, then a novel format that could accommodate multiple audio tracks and allowed viewers to stop on any frame of a film with no image distortion. Criterion would track down the original negative or best-surviving preprint version, then hire technicians to scan the film, remove blemishes when possible and correct colors that may have faded or turned pink over time. “The vision,” says Rebekah Audic, who worked as head of design at Criterion from 1991 to 1994, “was getting people access to all these great films.”
Before the emergence of the home-video market in the late 1970s, Hollywood studios had little use for films whose theatrical runs had concluded. They ceased to be commodities and were often destroyed or transferred to public archives where they remained vulnerable to fire, deterioration and discoloration; nonprofits led the nascent movement to preserve and restore motion pictures until Criterion helped create a market for them. The company’s first release was a LaserDisc edition of “Citizen Kane” that included supplementary materials like a video essay and extensive liner notes on the provenance of the negative from which the restoration was made. Next came “King Kong,” which featured the first ever audio-commentary track, inspired, as an afterthought, by the stories that the film scholar Ronald Haver told while supervising the tedious process of transferring the film from celluloid. The novelty of the LaserDisc meant licensing fees cost virtually nothing compared with the dominant VHS tape format. Acquiring the rights to “Citizen Kane” and “King Kong” from RKO Pictures cost Criterion around $10,000.
Securing the best surviving print of a film often required assiduous detective work. “The original negative for ‘Dr. Strangelove’ was lost,” says Morgan Holly, who served as an in-house producer for the Criterion LaserDisc of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Cold War satire. “There was one print that was struck from the original negative that was somewhere in the world.” One of Criterion’s editors, Maria Palazzola, tracked it down only to learn that on its journey to the United States, it took a detour through Japan, where strict anti-pornography laws prompted customs officials to order a test screening that would almost certainly have degraded or destroyed Kubrick’s sole personal print of the film. “It was this battle,” Holly told me, but in the end, they persuaded the Japanese authorities to send the print on its way unscreened and unscathed.
Criterion sought to restore films not only to pristine condition but also with the intent of the filmmaker in mind. The company popularized the practice of letterboxing, or presenting a film in its original aspect ratio by adding black bars at the top and bottom of the screen rather than cropping the image to fit a standard television display. Director’s commentary tracks were another Criterion innovation. Some of the earliest were recorded by Martin Scorsese for the “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull” LaserDiscs, which helped cement his influence on an entire generation of young directors. “I knew from Scorsese, from those commentaries, sometimes, how they were accomplishing those shots,” the filmmaker Wes Anderson told me. “And I think I got a sense of his approach with actors of trying to get a sort of documentary feeling to certain aspects of those movies.”
Criterion’s respect for creators was what caught Bowie’s attention. On the phone with Nash, he offered to record an audio commentary for the Criterion edition of “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” which was released on LaserDisc in March 1993 and quickly became a cult classic. “The thing about ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’ and so many of the other projects is you’ve got films whose greatness was squelched somewhat by the process of taking them to market, where the people who had the projects didn’t understand them and would recut them for commercial release,” Nash told me. His priority was to help make Criterion “an enterprise that would restore the director’s vision and get the film right for posterity.”
When Terry Gilliam’s dystopian classic “Brazil” entered the collection as a “special edition” box set, in 1996, the director told me that he seized the opportunity to invite viewers to take sides on his well-publicized feud with the head of Universal Pictures, Sidney Sheinberg. “They had cut almost all the fantasy sequences out,” Gilliam said. “They were making a different film. They were making Sid’s film,” which was ultimately missing 20 minutes of footage. Gilliam told me he insisted that Criterion include both his own cut and Sheinberg’s version in its release “so people could decide for themselves: Was I the idiot? Or was the studio?”
Always in awe of auteurs but never in their thrall, Criterion producers have never been afraid to look beyond the biggest and most marketable names. When Criterion released “Peeping Tom,” a ’60s psychosexual thriller by the English director Michael Powell, the company chose not to ask Scorsese to record the audio commentary, though he would have been the obvious candidate, having done them for other Criterion editions of Powell films. The job instead went to a feminist scholar, Laura Mulvey, the author of the influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which brought forward the concept of “the male gaze.” Over the years, such decisions added up to an editorial voice that became influential, even authoritative, transforming a mere distributor of films into a creator of film culture.
As time passed and its catalog grew, so, too, did a sense among Criterion leaders that the collection could become more than a mere archive — that it should have something to say about contemporary cinema, too. During his brief stint at the helm of the company, Nash focused on acquiring newer movies that he found both “commercially interesting and culturally important,” like “Short Cuts,” by Robert Altman, and Katsuhiro Otomo’s dystopian anime masterpiece “Akira.” He also made Criterion an early proponent of the new wave of African American cinema by releasing LaserDisc editions of films by young directors like John Singleton (“Boyz N the Hood”) and the Hughes brothers (“Menace II Society”). The year after Nash left the company, it released a LaserDisc for “Do the Right Thing,” the first of three Spike Lee films to join the collection.
Criterion’s staff was fewer than 50 employees, each with different interests and tastes, and they were soon forced to confront a question that film buffs argue about to this day: What makes a film worthy of inclusion in the Criterion Collection? In 1989, the company’s most controversial choice was “Ghostbusters,” a comedy starring Bill Murray that grossed more than $200 million at the box office. “It was important, but in a different way than the other films in the collection were — you know, the Bergman films and the Kurosawa films,” Holly told me. “It was an important film because a lot of people watched it.” Some of Holly’s colleagues nevertheless disagreed vehemently with the decision. “There was one producer, I won’t name his name, but he wrote this 10-page internal memo about why we should not do ‘Ghostbusters,’” he told me.
That was one of many attempts Criterion made to curb its stuffy image, among them “The Rock” and “Armageddon,” by Michael Bay. “Those are frequently cited as outliers in the collection,” a former Criterion producer, Issa Clubb, told me. And yet, he said, they serve as examples of what was once “a very important genre” of Hollywood blockbusters built around big budgets and big movie stars, which has been supplanted by franchise properties — a shift Bay played a prominent role in as the director of the first five films in the “Transformers” franchise.
In September, when I called Michael Bay at his home in Miami, he seemed blissfully unaware that many cinephiles don’t think his films belong in the collection. He was also unaware of Criterion’s continued existence, but told me quite earnestly how “cool” it was that they were still around. His enthusiasm for its LaserDiscs was palpable as he described washing cars for the cash to buy them, just as he did to afford the best stereo equipment. “I just remember it being the pinnacle,” Bay said of the brand. Bay also gamely entertained my questions about the most infamous feature of Criterion’s commentary track for “Armageddon,” in which the movie’s star, Ben Affleck, mentions an on-set spat with Bay over the plot: Why, Affleck wondered, would it be easier to prepare oil-rig workers for outer-space travel than to train NASA astronauts how to drill into and then destroy an asteroid on a collision course with earth? “I told him to shut the [expletive] up,” Bay said. “Ben has a wry personality, so you just have to come back at him with that same type of personality.”
In the late ’90s, as Criterion shifted to DVD, the company had a tried-and-true template but also a desire to keep growing. They started to “push the boundaries,” Peter Becker, Criterion’s president, told me. They released films like a collection of music videos by the Beastie Boys and the experimental films of Stan Brakhage. The brand’s cultural cachet had grown to such an extent that being selected for inclusion in the collection could boost a young filmmaker’s sales as well as reputation. Kelly Reichardt, whose films “Certain Women” and “Old Joy” did not enter the collection until much later, explained that, at the time, the Criterion imprimatur meant getting the equivalent of dedicated shelf space in video stores alongside big-name male directors. “Back in the video-store days, it was really hard to get a shelf if you were a woman,” Reichardt told me. “They have all the dudes” stocked by director, with their entire catalog in one place, “and my stuff would be all spread throughout the store.”
Over time, Becker told me, there was a creeping awareness that “little by little, somewhat accidentally, we had supported and propped up a canon that was largely white and male.” In August 2020, after The New York Times published the article “How the Criterion Collection Crops Out African-American Directors,” Becker took responsibility for what he called his “blind spots.” Subsequently, and in response to the murder of George Floyd, he said, the company set out to correct course. Since then it has released additional films by Steve McQueen and Ousmane Sembène and added, among others, Marlon Riggs and Cheryl Dunye, whose 1996 romantic comedy “The Watermelon Woman” is a landmark of the ’90s indie renaissance and of queer Black cinema. It’s a film that is “so genuine and connects with audiences so beautifully,” Becker told me. Adding it to the collection was “a no-brainer once the rights became available.” Dunye told me that she was proud of its inclusion and happy to have made something that “enriches the global storytelling that Criterion represents.”
Securing the rights to films remains a defining factor in determining what ends up in the collection. Licensing often starts with a wish list submitted to various Hollywood studios. What goes on that list is often a result of conversations and meetings among technical staff, producers and editors and, of course, Becker and the chief executive of Criterion, Jonathan Turell. “I’ve seen more movies than a lot of my friends,” Becker said. “I certainly haven’t seen more movies than all of my colleagues put together.” Occasionally, high-powered interlopers have their say by lobbying Becker. “For a few years, I kept asking him about this film by Dino Risi, ‘Il Sorpasso,’” says Jim Jarmusch, director of “Down by Law,” “Ghost Dog” and other Criterion titles. “and he says, ‘Damn it, Jim, it’s you and Marty Scorsese, you guys are calling me every month or so about this damn film.’” Becker didn’t remember those calls — he said Antonio Monda, an Italian writer and filmmaker, was its major champion — but one way or another “Il Sorpasso” entered the collection in 2014.
Criterion has shaped generations of filmmakers who grew up under its influence. Josh Safdie told me that he watched countless Criterion releases in high school, starting with Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” and Fritz Lang’s “M.” He got his first glimpse of the directing process from a behind-the-scenes documentary included with the Criterion DVD for Wes Anderson’s film “Rushmore.” Among the supplementary features for the Criterion DVD of Francois Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows,” he recalled seeing his first glimpse of an actor’s audition tape. “Back then, you were lucky to get a theatrical trailer as an extra on a DVD,” he said. “Getting a look into Truffaut’s process was really special, which in turn made the disc a really special object.”
The extra touches that made them special objects also meant they were more expensive than standard DVD releases, so Safdie and his brother Benny would make illicit copies of the Criterion discs they rented by mail through Netflix. “Benny would make his own Criterion DVD inserts,” Safdie said. He would do this by mimicking the unifying aesthetic features of each Criterion DVD: a catalog number on the spine designating its place in the collection and drawn across the top of its cover a thin line, above which distinctive text with extra wide kerning spelled out “The Criterion Collection.” ’ Criterion’s distinctive visual language began to emerge in the early ’90s when Audic, the former head of design, started building up its art staff with an aim “to really show the power of these films through the cover designs,” she told me. To do that it was sometimes necessary to go through every frame of film in search of the perfect image. Other times, images alone were not enough. “For the cover of ‘RoboCop,’ we had an actual aluminum-cast letterpress plate made and then photographed the plate with a 4-by-5 camera,” Audic says. It took days, she told me, but “using a physical piece of metal gave it a feeling of aesthetic truth.”
When Wes Anderson started working with Criterion on DVD releases of his films, the cover designers incorporated illustrations that his brother Eric Chase Anderson had made as part of the preproduction process. Anderson, who asked that verbal tics like “uh” and “um” not be excised from his quotes, told me that he had always admired how Criterion covers tended to be “more adventurous than, uh, what a movie studio would be inclined to go with.” The work being done by its art department, he said, was on par creatively with the famously impressionistic movie-poster designers of Soviet-era Poland. “They invent their own, uh, their own posters,” he said. “Their own imagery to go with the movie.”
Anderson was equally eager to work with specialists like the mastering supervisor Lee Kline, who inherited from his mentor Maria Palazzola a rigorous approach to editing that begins with preserving the intent of the filmmaker rather than the results they achieved; if some technical limitation had made the film look a certain way, Kline might try, within reason, to help them get closer to their vision than they had the first time around. Across three decades at the company, Kline told me, his actual duties on any given project have varied wildly depending on the filmmaker and the source material. Michael Mann, for example, wants the digital copies of his films to be faithful to the 35-millimeter print; John Waters makes the most of Kline’s ability to improve the look of films that were originally shot for very little money. “He’s a guy who wants to make the movies look as good as they can, and everyone always thinks he would probably want to make them look as bad as they can,” Kline said of the “Pink Flamingos” director. “It’s just the opposite. He wants them to look like Bergman films.”
Kline sometimes works for years on a restoration project, as in the case of Satyajit Ray’s “Pather Panchali,” “Aparajito” and “Apur Sansar,” three films from the second half of the 1950s that are collectively known as the Apu Trilogy. The late Indian filmmaker was beloved by other great masters of cinema — Scorsese saw “Pather Panchali” as a young boy, and Kurosawa once compared never seeing a Ray film to never having seen the sun or the moon — but he was not very well known even among cinephiles. Changing that through the release of a Criterion box set required the restoration of sections of the films from the trilogy that had been badly damaged in a fire by the time Kline started working on them. Kline repaired what he could, found other sources to replace what he couldn’t and digitally married them in such a way that they matched. The undertaking was a source of great pressure, he told me. “You feel the cinematic weight of the world on your shoulders when you’re dealing with those classics,” he said. One wrong move and the print might be damaged irreparably, another great film lost to history.
In 2019, after the sudden demise of its popular streaming partnership with TCM, called FilmStruck, Criterion started its stand-alone subscription-based streaming service, which features a broader range of films than just those in the collection. Getting the Criterion Channel off the ground was “hugely energizing,” Jason Altman, a producer at Criterion, said, “because it was ours, we weren’t partnering with anybody.” The abrupt shuttering of FilmStruck was the work of Warner Brothers bosses, several Criterion staff members told me, and there was a sense of relief to be free of such relationships. “It was a tremendous opportunity, I think, from an aesthetic standpoint, a content standpoint, for Criterion to have our own space and our own place in this kind of new streaming world,” Altman said.
Criterion made a conscious decision, Becker told me, to use the architecture of streaming technology differently from the way others have. Instead of an algorithm, viewers are guided to what they might want to watch through careful human curation: video essays, interviews with filmmakers and programming blocks resembling those once common at independent movie theaters throughout America — some as straightforward as retrospectives celebrating specific filmmakers, others as niche as collections dedicated to obscure genres like “gaslight noir” and “gothic noir,” between which, Becker assures me, there is a difference. “They’re not algorithmic by nature,” Becker said of the major streaming services. “They’re algorithmic by intention.”
The workload associated with keeping the service going, however, can be immense. The strain was particularly acute after Criterion laid off 20 percent of its staff near the end of 2022 — a “reorganization,” as Becker called it, from which many staff members have since been brought back to the company as its financial situation improved. Altman, who was among those temporarily laid off and brought back on a freelance basis, nevertheless felt that doing things the hard way was still the correct path forward for the Criterion Channel, just as it had been for the brand’s LaserDiscs and DVDs. “You know all those streaming channels, it’s all the ‘content war,’ right?” Altman said. “I mean, it’s like, Who has the most content? It’s not necessarily the best content. That’s the challenge for Criterion.”
The benefit of this curation, Kelly Reichardt told me, was that “you don’t feel like you’ve entered a mall and you’re going to exhaust yourself.” With some other streaming services, she told me, she often gives up before settling on anything to watch. When we spoke, she was preparing for a talk she was invited to give in Tokyo on what would have been the director Yasujiro Ozu’s 120th birthday, by watching as many of the 40 or so films of his that are available on the Criterion Channel. For weeks afterward, I did the same, often stopping between daylong Ozu matinees to reflect on what Todd Field had called “the messiness of our own narrative,” which is to say the process by which friends, lovers and strangers guide us toward movies that end up changing our lives. Field told me a story about waiting tables at a Manhattan restaurant in 1984 and being “shoved” across the street to see a film festival at Lincoln Center; he saw films by Victor Nuñez, Jim Jarmusch, the Coen brothers and Wim Wenders, he said, “but that’s just because somebody pushed me across the street.” For Field, that’s what Criterion represents: not an “algorithm saying ‘this will turn you on,’” but the gift of being shoved toward great cinema.
It's interesting that they said Criterion was able to hire back most of the people they had to let go. I wonder what the back story was? Expense of setting up the Criterion Channel? Physical media market lost to streaming that may have rebounded (a little) at least among cinephiles? I know Zaslav got me back into collecting physical media.
They put a brave face on losing FilmStruck, but that really was the cat's pyjamas, combining the best of TCM and CC. They still seem to have some under-the-radar collaboration going on, a lot of the same films showing up on TCM and CC seasons, and a lot of TCM prints start with the Criterion logo.
The article serves as a decent summary of the company's history, but I can't say it really offers any great new insight, or even really answer the question it posed in its title. The article doesn't even mention the word Oscar a single time, so yet another example of clickbait there.
The article serves as a decent summary of the company's history, but I can't say it really offers any great new insight, or even really answer the question it posed in its title. The article doesn't even mention the word Oscar a single time, so yet another example of clickbait there.
It certainly got people though, that article has been posted 4 times here. The direct link twice and the non paywalled link twice. So the people took the bait.
The article serves as a decent summary of the company's history, but I can't say it really offers any great new insight, or even really answer the question it posed in its title. The article doesn't even mention the word Oscar a single time, so yet another example of clickbait there.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say a 4 thousand word article about boutique physical media is not something the NYT considers to be clickbait.
We, thankfully, live in our own physical media bubble, but the vast majority of NYT readers would be shocked to learn that DVDs still exist. I say thankfully, because the majority of people I know give me weird looks when I mention that I own a bluray player. It is only in the these forums that I feel like a loser for my paltry 200 disc collection.
As to the headline, that was likely the work of a desperate headline writer trying to generate a handful of clicks due to the proximity to Oscar season.
It's a new encode of Jeanne Dielman, but it's still sourced from the same master, and the review you linked to does say there's no discernible difference.
No discernible difference to the eyes of the person doing that review. You're telling me new + same = same for everyone.
Received my flash sale order over the weekend and watched Targets for the first time last night. How did this one elude me for all these years? Boris Karloff's "Appointment in Samarra" monologue is impeccable.
Does anyone know if Criterion has a current, active deal with Paramount?
They had an old deal, notable titles included Rosemary’s Baby, Nashville, and Harold And Maude, but that deal has most likely ended.
1. Has the deal that included Rosemary’s Baby etc in fact ended?
2. If the deal hasn’t ended, was it extended at the last minute, or did it never end in the first place?
3. If the deal has ended, has a new deal been made between Criterion and Paramount?
I know I’ve asked this repeatedly, but I’ve never gotten an answer. I thought about sending Criterion/Mulvaney an email, but Mulvaney/whoever answers those emails doesn’t like to discuss office politics, making it very unlikely that they’d answer me.
They still deal with Paramount (the recent Trainspotting and rumored Bound are both licensed from Paramount.) The initial deal with those titles you mention has expired and Paramount declined to renew them at the time, but they subsequently have re-licensed Don't Look Now and Days of Heaven to Criterion, so maybe the other will return. Who knows and any label will decline to comment on such things before they happen.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MifuneFan
The article serves as a decent summary of the company's history, but I can't say it really offers any great new insight, or even really answer the question it posed in its title. The article doesn't even mention the word Oscar a single time, so yet another example of clickbait there.
I actually like the title of the article because it introduces the dichotomy of canonization. In the more mainstream world, people view awards like the Oscars as important in establishing a canon of important film literature. We as physical media collectors understand the cachet that being included in the Criterion Collection holds (justifiably or otherwise).
Full disclosure, I'm quite sensitive to the idea of clickbait because part of my job involves creating headlines and I take that task and responsibility quite seriously. It's harder than you realize to come up with tactful and faithful headlines that avoid the solipsism of the author. You might understand what your headline means because you're the one who wrote the article but it's difficult to detach yourself from that and understand how a reader coming into it fresh is going to view the same topic.
For my part when I saw the headline I wasn't expecting a lengthy comparison and contrast with the Oscars. I'd assumed the subject would be about the perceived prestige of being included in the Criterion Collection by posing the question in the headline in such a way that being in the Criterion Collection holds greater weight than winning an Oscar. An Oscar is an achievement of the moment. A Criterion Collection edition is an immortalization. In theory anyway.
I feel like they might still have some kind of deal with Paramount. Since those titles in particular went OOP, we still had La Dolce Vita through the Essential Fellini Boxset and also new 4K UHDs for Days of Heaven and Don't Look Now (And they were also re-released with standard edition Blu-rays by Paramount sometime between the OOP date and the UHD re-release). We definitely won't be getting Rosemary's Baby since they just released the 4K UHD last year and Harold and Maude can still happen.
Other Paramount titles I know of that are still in print from Criterion:
The Friends of Eddie Coyle Medium Cool Seconds The Parallax View
I actually like the title of the article because it introduces the dichotomy of canonization. In the more mainstream world, people view awards like the Oscars as important in establishing a canon of important film literature. We as physical media collectors understand the cachet that being included in the Criterion Collection holds (justifiably or otherwise).
Full disclosure, I'm quite sensitive to the idea of clickbait because part of my job involves creating headlines and I take that task and responsibility quite seriously. It's harder than you realize to come up with tactful and faithful headlines that avoid the solipsism of the author. You might understand what your headline means because you're the one who wrote the article but it's difficult to detach yourself from that and understand how a reader coming into it fresh is going to view the same topic.
For my part when I saw the headline I wasn't expecting a lengthy comparison and contrast with the Oscars. I'd assumed the subject would be about the perceived prestige of being included in the Criterion Collection by posing the question in the headline in such a way that being in the Criterion Collection holds greater weight than winning an Oscar. An Oscar is an achievement of the moment. A Criterion Collection edition is an immortalization. In theory anyway.
Well said, and pretty much what I thought. Title isn't really clickbait, just a way to frame the story. And I think this story isn't really for us, enthusiasts who post on message boards, but more for average readers and movie fans who don't know the ins and outs of the company.
Sorry to refer back to an old release, but can anyone confirm that the Godzilla Showa Era set is Region A and B (even though it just says Region A on the back)?
Gary Tooze over at DVDBeaver is convinced it is, but he’s the only person who has stated this.
I ask because the UK Criterion release is long out of print.
Cheers!
Kev W
Last edited by ZombieTwin2; 03-04-2024 at 09:29 PM.
I just got a recent Flash sale shipment in. I was shocked that 11 of my 14 titles had poorly inserted cover art (really crooked) within the clear cases. I mean really bad. As I took them out of the "Made in Mexico" cellophane to straighten them all into more acceptable standard spine positions, I couldn't help but think, is this a "Made in Mexico" quality control issue? For the amount of effort Criterion puts into cover art and packaging, I think they would be disheartened to know their product is now showing up far from its best presentation. At least none of discs were loose.
Also what's going on with the Trainspotting digipak? This is quite out of the ordinary. I didn't look to see if there are packaging variants, but would have opted for anything over this oddly over dimensioned pak.
I just got a recent Flash sale shipment in. I was shocked that 11 of my 14 titles had poorly inserted cover art (really crooked) within the clear cases. I mean really bad. As I took them out of the "Made in Mexico" cellophane to straighten them all into more acceptable standard spine positions, I couldn't help but think, is this a "Made in Mexico" quality control issue? For the amount of effort Criterion puts into cover art and packaging, I think they would be disheartened to know their product is now showing up far from its best presentation. At least none of discs were loose.
Also what's going on with the Trainspotting digipak? This is quite out of the ordinary. I didn't look to see if there are packaging variants, but would have opted for anything over this oddly over dimensioned pak.
I think mine finally arrived today, I have to go pick it up. TBD whether I will keep it or not…
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