Shout Factory
Shout Factory is another great Blu-ray/DVD label, and they also have Scream Factory that centers on cool horror films. This year, Shout did a great cinephile service by re-releasing many of the deeper cut horror/sci-fi and genre titles of the great John Carpenter (they’ve re-released many of his classics) including “In The Mouth of Madness,” and “Memoirs of an Invisible Man.” There’s tons of vintage horror they re-released this year including “Candyman,”— just in time for the Jordan Peele-made sequel—”Dracula: Prince Of Darkness,” “Exorcist II: The Heretic,” Joe Dante’s spectacularly underrated “The ‘Burbs” with Tom Hanks, “Brainscan,” “Critters,” “Creepshow,” Tobe Hooper‘s “Life Force,” a box set for the “It’s Alive” trilogy and more. Outside of horror Shout re-released David Lynch‘s genre fairytale insane road trip classic “Wild At Heart” and soon, coming in 2019, Brian De Palma’s excellent and underseen “Obsession.”
READ MORE: The Essentials: The Films Of John Carpenter [Full Retrospective]
Major Studio Releases
We’re not total snobs. A lot of the major studios released boxsets for the holidays as well, and right up there is Paramount who released a new “Indiana Jones” box set, an updated “The Godfather” Omerta 45th anniversary trilogy box, a new special edition of “Planes, Trains & Automobiles” for the holidays and a massive six-disc set for the ever-expanding, ever-improving “Mission Impossible” series. 20th Century Fox has a lot of stuff for genre fans too including two “Deadpool” boxsets (not sure why you need two for two films, but sure!), the “Die Hard” Holiday Gift set, an “X-Men” Trilogy 4K box set, and a “Predator” four-film 4K collection. Universal’s “The Big Lebowski” 20th Anniversary Gift Set box is probably something you want for the die-hard Coen Brothers fan too.
Olive Films
“Films are aesthetic expressions of human experiences,” i.e., Olive Films genuinely cares about what you’re watching. Another little guy fighting to be noticed as much as, say, Criterion, Olive Films still has tons of terrific movies in their collection. This year they re-released the Wachowski’s excellent thriller “Bound,” 1970s seminal anti-counter-culture film “Joe,” with Peter Boyle, John Frankenheimer‘s Oscar-nominated 1962 drama”Birdman of Alcatraz” with Burt Lancaster, and two early Penelope Cruz international classics from 1992: “Belle Epoque” and “Jamon Jamon” starring the man who would become her husband some twenty-odd-years-later, Javier Bardem. By the looks of their YouTube page, they’ll also eventually be releasing Hal Hartley‘s gestating “The Long Island Trilogy Boxed-Set” which should hopefully come out next year and give that underrated 1990s director a second act.
Books
Yes, reading is still good and cool because facts, information, stories, and knowledge are something still worth embracing despite what agent orange and Fox will tell you.
We recommend “It’s Okay With Me: Hollywood, The 1970s, and the Return of the Private Eye” by one of our own contributors, Jason Bailey, who has the superhuman ability to pump out a book once a year, while still writing daily pieces and film criticism all over without ever suffering one dip in quality. We honestly hate him; he’s sooo good which is why you should read, ‘It’s OK With Me,’ which as the title spells out focuses in on the private detective genre that resurfaced in the 1970s with classics like Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” and Arthur Penn’s “Night Moves” to name just a few.
Now that Paul Schrader’s had a big comeback with “First Reformed,” see where the obsession with spiritualism and formalism started in “Transcendental Style in Film by Paul Schrader” which was recently re-released with a new forward by the director and the University of California Press. Regarded as a seminal text, now more relevant than ever thanks to “First Reformed” (excellent, btw), ‘Transcendental Style’ centers on the silent, austere minimalism and spirituality found in the films of Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Dreyer. Schrader is a fascinating writer (he penned “Taxi Driver,” and “Raging Bull” for Scorsese), so if you love and know these films already, you’re likely going to be fully engaged regardless. And chances are if you take ‘Style’ for a spin, you’re going to try out some incredible cinematic masterworks by the aforementioned filmmakers.
Getting inside director David Lynch‘s head is always tricky outside of the vivid experiences his films give us. The filmmaker is notoriously tight-lipped about any meaning—that’s up to you, bub, but in “Room to Dream” by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna (Random House), a unique hybrid of biography and memoir, the taciturn and oblique filmmaker opens up for the first time about a life lived in pursuit of his singular vision, and the many heartaches and struggles he’s faced to bring his unorthodox projects to the screen. It’s intimate too, based on more than one hundred new interviews with surprisingly candid ex-wives, family members, actors, agents, musicians, and colleagues in various fields who all have their own takes on what happened (Lynch’s personal life has been a bit of a shit show at the expense of his art). Want to find out what makes Lynch tick? This might be a close as you’ll get.
Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, it is not at all hard to argue that the sci-fi monument, ‘2001‘ is one of the greatest movies of all time, if not the greatest movie of all time, so “Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece” by Michael Benson (Simon and Schuster) feels a lot like required reading for anyone who wants to know even the slightest bit about a lodestone totem of art. Kubrick, ‘2001,’ behind the scenes of the making of a masterpiece. What else do you need to know? The very existence of this book sells itself.
There’s dozens of other stocking stuffers you’ll want to add to your must-read list (anyone reading, I want these too), including Karina Longworth’s “Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood” which is thematically a kind of launching pad riff on her excellent “You Must Remember This” podcast which always dives back into classic stories of Hollywood dramas, excess and forgotten legends. Fans of the dude and more will be happy with “The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together” by Adam Nayman, a king-sized guide to the filmmaker’s offbeat oeuvre combining critical text, biography, close film analysis, and enlightening interviews with key Coen collaborators all in one big package.
Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Nashawaty dives into an ’80s classic and beloved comedy with “Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story.” The author goes behind the scenes of the iconic laffer, chronicling the rise of comedy’s greatest deranged minds as they form The National Lampoon, turn the entertainment industry on its head, and ultimately blow up both a golf course and popular culture as we know it. Lastly, and lord, please send this to me, Synecdoche in France has released yet another interview tome from Jordan Mintzer. Mintzer and Synecdoche released the fabulous “Conversations With James Gray” a few years back—an essential book with not only incredible access (interviews with stars like Mark Wahlberg, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tim Roth, James Caan and more), but fabulous designs, photos and behind the scenes pictures. It’s one of my most treasured books. They’ve teamed up once again for “Conversations with Darius Khondji,” one of the world’s most renowned and sought-after cinematographers. The book contains interviews with Woody Allen, the late Bernardo Bertolucci, Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and of course James Gray. The ‘Conversations’ books are unique publications in function and form, with a meticulously innovative design that enhances both the text and its accompanying images. I can’t wait.
That’s it. Buy something for someone you love and enjoy the holidays getting geeky with your cinephilia.
