Video Dispatches: Holiday Gift Edition Vol. 2

Video Dispatches is a regular column covering recent home video releases. This issue specifically highlights many options worth considering for the holiday gifting season.

Scarface (1983) – Universal

Though Brian de Palma’s gangster pictures (Untouchables, Carlito’s Way, Scarface) have never been my favorite of his filmography (and I doubt Wise Guys will change that), his 1983 portrait of the ascension of a Cuban drug lord in Miami is his finest work in the genre. And given its long-held cult status that extends well beyond the cinephile crowd, it’s no wonder Universal have given it the deluxe treatment this year.

If you choose to do so, you can buy Scarface in a package that, alongside a Blu-ray and 4K disc of the film, includes a 10” rubber “The World is Yours” statue. But the real get in this package — available in the set that doesn’t include the statue — is Howard Hawks’s 1932 original Scarface, making its HD debut here. It’s a film I hadn’t seen before and was shocked to see how expressionistic it was. The opening moments immediately recall Josef von Sternberg’s silents, specifically his own gangster film from a few years prior, Underworld.

The Hawks disc comes with a nice intro from the much-missed Robert Osborne, and the De Palma disc is loaded with supplements surrounding his film. Of most importance is the 27-minute roundtable discussion between De Palma and the stars, which was held for the film’s 35th anniversary. Some of the other features, while aren’t essential, are fun, like the one surrounding the making of the video game based on De Palma’s film.

The Wild Pear Tree (2018) – Cinema Guild

Like James Gray’s Ad Astra — another of the best films released in the US this year — Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree is about a man, deeply invested in his own work, trying to reconcile the distance between himself and his father. Both fathers have left ruin in their wake, but Ceylan’s film, unlike Gray’s, is a portrait of resentment. Sinan, the young man at the center of The Wild Pear Tree, is disgusted and distrustful of his father, who, like Sinan presently, once dreamt of a living a literary life.

This relationship isn’t the only point of frustration for Ceylan’s possible surrogate, who has come home and awaits news of his future vocation. Meanwhile, he works on his novel … or rather, works on figuring out how a writer works on a novel, whether society can host an artist and what an artist’s responsibility is in modern society.

To attempt to figure such things out, Sinan talks to former acquaintances, his family, a famous writer and more. The primary joy of The Wild Pear, alongside the rapturous beauty of Ceylan’s camera movement, is how he allows us to luxuriate in these little corners of lengthy conversations — all of which are compelling. In his accompanying booklet essay, Bilge Ebiri calls the film Ceylan’s most episodic. Ebiri’s essay does well to contextualize Ceylan’s latest film within the director’s earlier works.

Besides a lovely film, what makes Cinema Guild’s release of The Wild Pear Tree gift-worthy is the unprecedented 6.5 hour making-of feature, which gets its own disc. It’s a completely exhaustive work that aims to replicate the experience of being on set for a couple days, overhearing conversations between Ceylan and actors and crew, and bouncing between the logistics of filmmaking and how the scenes came out.

An Elephant Sitting Still (2018) – KimStim

One of the most heartbreaking stories of recent cinema history is the suicide of Hu Bo, who committed suicide at the age of 29 shortly after finishing his only feature film, An Elephant Sitting Still, a four-hour Chinese film about four citizens of Manzhouli — three youths and one old man being forced into assisted living — all of which are emotionally afflicted in one way or another. Together, as their lives connect, they make a tableau of despair and hopelessness — an affecting one that avoids the dishonesty of so much hyperlink cinema of despair of the previous decade.

KimStim have done well to memorialize Hu, giving the film a lovely package. Besides the main feature, the disc has the short film Hu made previous to An Elephant Sitting Still, called Man in the Well, which is also a vision of brokenness, but one that’s much bleeker and nastier and perhaps his view of necessity during times of the apocalypse.

Also included is a lengthy booklet, which includes a text by Hu sharing the film’s title, and interview with the film’s cinematographer, Fan Chao, and a smart essay by Aliza Ma, who folds in information about the film’s troubled production history.

The Fly Collection (1958-1989) – Scream Factory

An obvious gift idea this season for the vintage horror fan in your life is Scream Factory’s The Fly Collection, which brings together all five films — the three original films (The Fly, Return of the Fly and Curse of the Fly) and the two remakes in the 80s. The set is packaged in a neat box wrapping five separate Blu-rays — seemingly making individual releases the logical end point.

Of course, I knew David Cronenberg’s 1986 Jeff Goldblum-starring remake is a masterpiece, but previous to this set, I hadn’t taken the time to watch the rest. Therefore, I was shocked to see that Kurt Neumann’s original film was shot in lavish CinemaScope color. It’s not a great film — it takes far too long to percolate — but its effects are cool and it’s never ugly. Weirdly, the next two films, while retaining the CinemaScope presentation, are in black and white. It’s a jarring switch, and one that’s broached on a new, solid supplemental feature “Catching a Classic,” but actually might fit Return of the Fly, which devolves more into murder mystery than sci-fi.

“Catching a Classic” is one of the brighter spots on these discs, which goes through the entire series. It bests something like the Vincent Price biography piece, which is a standard bit of reportage that might be of interest to those uninitiated in the man’s work and not bothered by boring production values.

Just as Cronenberg’s film is the fillet of the series, the disc is by far the best thing here. It’s absolutely loaded with supplements, including a very engrossing feature-length making-of feature on the film. In what’s less of a complaint and more of a note to those who bought earlier discs of The Fly, this version doesn’t have Cronenberg’s own commentary track, so don’t be hasty to get rid of your older disc.

Musings Vol. 1 and 2 – OscilloScope

This entry to the column marks a slight divergence as Musings isn’t a home video product, but two volumes of film essays put out by a home video label, OscilloScope. Following the, well, dissolve of The Dissolve, the beloved film blog, OscilloScope Films hired Scott Tobias to run a blog on their site dedicated to similar film writing, called “Musings.” A few years later, the company has put together a couple volumes of collected works from the blog, in a tall, beautifully bound volumes.

As Tobias mentions in his foreword, the blog, and therefore these volumes, exist to put forward smart writing that’s composed outside of the zeitgeist’s needs. These essays highlight corners of cinema that aren’t part of the discourse-at-large, offering critical readings of important works like Michael Mann’s Blackhat or Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine, as well as fun essays on particularly histories or movements like the erotic thriller of the 80s and 90s or the Hollywood studio RKO’s important year, 1951 — two of my favorite pieces between the two volumes. Even when the essays do hedge toward contemporary works, like in Mike D’Angelo’s piece on Unfriended, the writing offers a historical perspective — in this case, a change in our idea of what a film director is and does as visual storytelling is challenged by works like the Unfriended series.

These volumes allows us to remove ourselves from the topic du jour via some of the best writers on film currently working, like Sheila O’Malley, Angelica Jade Bastien, Noel Murray and K. Austin Collins. But just on a practical note, Musings is a collection of writing that was posted on the internet, which can too often feel ephemeral or hard to catalogue.