My Favorite Blu Rays of 2017

Well here we go again!  Despite everything-- American democracy unraveling at its seams, wildfire in California and other environmental disasters, North Korea going nuclear and most likely creating untold havoc to the peace in East Asia, sad passings of friends, admirable people and great artists, some of whom were tragically young--, and despite the killing academic schedule and deadlines, I am back here at January 13, to upload My Favorite Blu Rays of 2017.  As usual, I have already completed and uploaded the Korean-language version of it, which, also as usual has a slightly different titles for its lower ranks from this one. 

   

This year, the proportion of DVDs among the discs I have procured has for the first time declined below 20 percent.  A notable development, as DVDs are still churned out with regularity by most studios: none of them has given up on it in favor of Blu Ray. Even Netflix still stocks a large chunk of its (now admittedly half-hearted) video rental items (ah, yes, don't be surprised. They still rent out the DVDs and Blu Ray rentals like the good ol' days) as DVDs rather than Blu Rays. Yet, in 2017 it became glaringly obvious that even stockpiling a good portion of desirable Blu Rays released in a single year would be more than I could handle, financially and living-space-wise (help!).

Indeed, contrary to the world and American politics that seems to be plunging down the rabbit hole (although, to be fair, there have been some good signs: victories of liberal candidates in close state elections despite active gerrymandering by the Republican establishment, Me Too movement spurred by outrageous revelations of the misconducts by Hollywood's powerful men, and so on), the Blu Ray collector had another banner year, now tinged with perhaps a slight sense of awe, to be perfectly frank. 

In 2017, the center of my BD purchase market displayed signs of a subtle migration from the US to the United Kingdom. Whatever idiocy generated from the Brexit campaign we might have to deal with in this year, the British labels really elbowed aside their brethren across the Atlantic to declare themselves.  Who could have expected, to cite just a few examples, that Arrow Video, long a specialist in the cult genre titles, would not only successfully branch off to the stateside, but also release the nine-disc (!) Jacques Rivette collection, and the British Film Institute would come up with a beautiful Blu Ray of Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating?  Studio Canal and Network continue to make available a slew of classic Anglophone titles on Blu-- films of Cy Endfield, Joseph Losey, Val Guest, classic SF and films noirs, to number a few.  Eureka! (mostly through its Masters of Cinema imprint) has extended its reach to more recent Asian films missed out by their American competitors, such as Kawase Naomi's Mourning Forest and Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Creepy and Journey to the Shore.  It is icing on the cake that a large proportion of these discs are Region Free, but if any year gave a serious collector of world classical cinema sufficient reasons to immediately purchase a Region Free Blu Ray player (or, for that matter, an extra Region B player), it was 2017.

Hold on, but does this mean that they are moving away from the red-carpet treatment accorded to Mario Bava, Dario Argento, the '70s Italian gialli, Hammer and Amicus horrors and other genre home video staples?  You gotta be kidding, right? Arrow is still leading the fray in lavishing the care and attention of a Vatican church-fresco restoration specialist to these titles. Frankly, I am compelled to wonder if a label like Powerhouse Indicator, now graduating from releasing the spit-and-sparkle Blu Ray editions of such usual suspects as Brian De Palma and John Carpenter to lesser-known but historically and aesthetically significant '70s and '80s titles such as Hardcore, Blue Collar and The Last Detail, is operating under a profit motive at all. We can add to all this the beyond-the-call-of-duty care these labels put into designing amazing new covers, totally in the spirit of the original films, and jam-packing each title with educational supplements.

In 2017, it was even tougher to whittle down the list to 25 than it was to 20 in 2016.  It became slap-in-the-forehead evident around early December last year that there was no way that the list could be confined to just twenty items.  At one point I have contemplated shutting down the sluice at number thirty, but that just begged the question of why not at 35, or 40, and so on.  So, here we are, twenty-five of my favorite Blu Rays of 2017.

As usual, a disclaimer: the following list is not a list of "best" movies represented in BD last year, however you might define "best." Neither does it represent technically the most impressive restorations, rescue jobs and/or transfers. The included items have only one thing in common: they were astonishing titles that gave me the pleasure and shock of discovery and re-discovery or otherwise punched me in the gut, making me realize that the world of cinema has no boundaries except those defined by your imagination. The reasons for their inclusion are intensely personal, and I let my emotional responses-- a wallop in my stomach, tears flowing from my eyes, barks of disbelieving laughter inadvertently escaping from my throat-- rather than intellectual calibrations serve as my ultimate judge.  I have a zero problem admitting that Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and Tarkovsky's Stalker are world-classics and their availability via Criterion on Blu Ray is seriously gratifying: they are nonetheless not included in my list. Not to worry, these and other renowned titles are plenty popular in other year-end lists! (Check out Cine Savant's list, 100 aggregate best-of-the-year titles from DVDBeaver, and Mondo Digital's 30 significant titles)

As before, one package, regardless of the actual number of discs, is treated as one title.  Needless to say, all selections had to be released within the year 2017 to qualify.

25. Fright Night (1985, Eureka! Region All)

Talk about surprise!  I did not expect Eureka! of all labels to issue the special edition of this '80s favorite, transferred in 4K with positively jaw-dropping gradations in black levels as well as insane sharpness and packed to the gills with supplements, including a delightful footage of the 2008 reunion of director Tom Holland and the main cast and its piece de resistance, a 146 minute (!)-long making-of documentary, You're So Cool, Brewster.  The edition practically oozes with fan enthusiasm and sheer love for this clever vampire flick, surprisingly sophisticated and witty, epitomized by tongue-in-cheek yet never condescending performances of Chris Sarandon (as the lead vampire) and the late Roddy McDowall (as a Vincent Price-like old horror film star Peter Vincent).  A thoroughly delightful release.

24.  Rat Fink (1965, Retromedia, Region All)

This is the title that bubbled up to the surface from the Incredible Movies That I Have Not Even Heard of Until I Saw Them category. Rat Fink is apparently a follow-up effort of the team that had produced The Sadist (DVD collectors might remember it as one of the earliest special edition DVDs ever from a non-studio label, in this case David Kalat's All Day), headed by director James Landis and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond. The latter of course graduated to a spectacular Hollywood career, working with Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg in '70s and beyond, and is still the most recognizable name attached to this curio.  Produced to showcase its lead actor Schuyler Hayden, Rat Fink was actually released to the theaters and even received some good critical notices.  But then, Hayden, disappointed that the film had failed to give him a star-making "big break," packed luggage and relocated to Hawaii along with his family. He was persuaded to reignite his career in '70s again, only to tragically pass on due to a freak airplane crash in California. The film's negative was subsequently destroyed in a fire.  It appeared that Rat Fink was one of those lost films that show up as "entries" in a career resume but have been seen by few other than the folks involved in actually making it. 

But then again, a well-preserved 35mm release print was somehow located, and Retromedia jumped in to scan it for Blu Ray. Is Rat Fink any good?  I don't think it is a rediscovery of a lost masterpiece (to their credit Retromedia does not try to oversell the film's historical value), but nonetheless it makes for a compelling viewing.  Like The Sadist, there is something deeply disturbing about the film's matter-of-fact depiction of awful violence-- physical, sexual and of course, emotional-- despite its relative lack of explicitness (there is no real nudity, for instance), and Hayden, not un-charismatic and looking like a cross between Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, gives a maybe technically unrefined but riveting performance. He seems genuinely angry at the world, but is also highly convincing playing a sociopath who pathetically grovels at the feet of his manager once the goings get really tough.  It is enough for us to wonder what might have happened had Hayden managed to construct a solid foundation for a Hollywood career in late '60s.  The film, viciously cynical yet also suffused with what I think is a genuine sense of melancholy, fits in well with the other early '60s indie efforts such as the works of Monte Hellman, Jack Hill and Roger Corman (think of his subversiveThe Intruder).  

23. Parents (1988, Lionsgate, Region A)

One of the news that brought joy to the hearts of the fans of '80s horror, SF and fantasy cinema was Lionsgate's acquisition of the titles released through the old VHS company, Vestron. They even named it Vestron Video Collector's Series.  Along with the more familiar titles such as the Warlock trilogy (the first one with Richard E. Grant and Julian Sands is an underrated gem, the rest, ur, serviceable), the Wishmaster films (I am a big fan of Andrew Divoff. Somebody give him a meaty role, where he actually gets to use his multilingual talent! The movies themselves… ah well), Waxwork and its sequel, Chopping Mall and Blood Diner, the series contains some surprising entries, including a charming SFX showcase The Gate, Ken Russell's Gothic and Lair of the White Worm, and this remarkable meditation on the hypocritical underside of the early postwar suburban America, a la David Lynch's Blue Velvet.  Directed by the noted character actor Bob Balaban from a screenplay by Christopher Hawthorne, apparently a specialist in children's TV, Parents had left me an indelible impression in its combination of boldly surrealistic touches-- sometimes going overboard, as in a memorable scene in which the protagonist boy is drowned in a pool of blood that suddenly surge out of his bed-- and compellingly observed, almost repellent details of an American suburban life.

The Blu Ray comes with Balaban and producer Bonnie Palef's audio commentary and other key cast and crew interviews: a wonderful nostalgic trip to the hair-raising heydays of '80s American genre cinema hybrids.

22. The House That Screamed/ La Residencia (1970, Scream Factory, Region A)

The Spainish horror great Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's La Residencia, trimmed by 10 minutes and hawked by its American distributor, American International, as a lurid erotic horror, has been one of the titles that I have avoided as a greymarket VHS version and opted to wait for a properly transferred HD iteration. It took some time, but finally Shout! Factory's horror imprint Scream Factory has taken up the mantle in 2017, and the result does not disappoint.  We can finally appreciate the film for what it really is, a tight and unnerving psychological horror directly in the lineage of Psycho and Peeping Tom, and an indictment of religious-sexual repression that distorts and eventually destroys young minds. 

21. The Man Between (1953, BFI/Studio Canal, Region B)

The British Film Institute has been restoring major and minor classics of British cinema and releasing them on Blu Ray via Studio Canal, whose copyright library seems to be truly vast, and following their release of the impeccably produced The Fallen Idol (reviewed in this blog) is this lesser-known Carol Reed film. The Man Between has not been as well received as The Third Man, also set in the postwar Berlin, reviewers and critics no doubt pointing to the absence of Graham Greene's screenplay and its somewhat clichéd Cold War plot machinations as reasons for its weakness.  However, I found the film powerful and riveting, peppered with the time-capsule moments of the early '50s Berlin, marked by grotesque, gargantuan rubbles of the bombed buildings that look like a dystopian alien landscape covered in white snow.  James Mason is the star, an archetypal "Divided Nation" character, and as usual charismatic, if somewhat iffy with the German accent, but the movie's true guiding presence is a young British schoolteacher visiting her military brother played by Claire Bloom, practically debuting with this film.  Bloom is positively radiant as another in the series of Reed's female characters who are beautiful, spiritual but also not afraid to take charge, even in the matters of life and death. 

Considering how enchanting her presence is in this film, it is somewhat distressing to hear her talk about Reed's less than gentlemanly behavior towards her (according to her recollection) in her brand-new interview. The Blu Ray also includes a long-form documentary Carol Reed: A Gentle Eye that makes an excellent case for reevaluating the significance of this filmmaker in charting the evolution of the interwar and immediate postwar Anglophone cinema.

20. Suddenly in the Dark 깊은 밤 갑자기 (1981, Mondo Macabro, Region All)

We Korean fans of classic genre cinema, plus fans of Korean classic genre cinema (Oh well, I am realistic: even if we combine these two constituencies, I know their numbers may not be large enough to fill the parking lots of a local Walmart store) collectively turned our heads, when Mondo Macabro, the leading purveyor of the global bizarre cinema, whose reach is seriously international, from Ukraine and Greece to Indonesia and the Philippines, announced that they will be bringing one of the local cult favorites, Suddenly in the Dark, to Blu Ray. 

Scanned from the best surviving elements stored in the Korean Film Archive, the long-vilified film, a staple in the VHS market and late-night TV screenings during which it permanently warped the minds of many pimply teenagers, now twists and turns like a dervish under the eye-popping multi-colored Bava-esque lighting, ready to sear itself into the brain tissues of many non-Korean genre aficionados!  A truly bizarre film for which that adjective is not a hyperbole, it belongs to any adventurerous classic horror fan's shelf.  Kudos to Mondo Macabro for making this release into a reality: can I dream about them one day releasing to BD seriously obscure Korean genre titles such as Insayeomu (1975), a Korean-Filipino taekwondo-action-snake-woman's curse-horror-softcore-erotica mash-up?  

19. The New Centurions (1972, Powerhouse Indicator, Region All)

The British label Indicator's big surprise BD release of 2017 was this Joseph Wambaugh adaptation, an important Merkmal in the evolution of one of America's most prolific cinematic and TV genres, "realistic" cop shows that attempt to capture the moral and political complexities of the police work.  Richard Fleischer, who, based on the sheer number of great BD titles directed by him in recent years, is due for a major re-evaluation as one of the masters of '60s and '70s American cinema, directs from Stirling Silliphant's screenplay, but the movie's core strengths lie in the lead performances of Stacy Keach (who delightfully shows up in a cast interview, thoughtful and judicious as ever), George C. Scott, Jane Alexander as well as of a host of actors in supporting roles (including a surprisingly effective pre-CHIPS Erik Estrada).

18. Hammer House of Horror: The Complete Series (1980, iTV Studios/Network, Region B)

Network, which has become one of my favorite labels since 2015, is now remastering the key genre TV series in their catalogue into Blu Rays.  Classic TV in Blu Ray is a mind-bending conundrum for an anti-revisionist like myself, as HD transfers of the 35mm film materials for certain TV shows allow us, in the 21st century, to watch them in the kind of quality never actually seen by the contemporary, intended viewers. No matter how excellent one's broadcast service and hardware might have been, it still could not have appeared as sharp and detailed as their HD remastered incarnations look to us, Blu Ray collectors, today.  So far Space 1999 (which I have always preferred to Star Trek-- granted, the writing in the former show was sometimes less than stellar, but I've always found Star Trek talky and overbearingly American, to be honest), The Prisoner (a cult TV series if there ever was one), Quatermass, The Persuaders and UFO (the latter two almost gluttonous in terms of the supplementary information Network managed into jam into the multidisc collector's boxes) have been released, but my choice for 2017's Network Blu Ray is this scrappy, short-lived (just thirteen episodes, which in a sense is a perfect number) TV series from Hammer Studios in its twilight days (of the classic period, I should add).  

Considered grungy and perhaps predictably exploitative at the time of its debut, the Hammer House of Horrors enjoys an improved reputation today, as the youngsters exposed to the show in syndication (it certainly played in Korea via AFKN, almost completely uncensored, too, with most of the nudity and violence intact) have matured and come to appreciate its unbridled commitment to the red-meat horror content. Indeed, some episodes of the series-- including "Rude Awakening," featuring the great Denholm Elliott, "Guardian of the Abyss," a terrific demonic possession tale presented in the boxset in an alternative version masked at 1.78:1 theatrical ratio (it looks fabulous!) and "The Silent Scream" starring Peter Cushing and young Brian Cox in top form-- handily beat the studio's later-phase theatrical films in terms of their sheer quality of acting, direction and atmosphere. 

17.  OSS 117 Five Film Collection (1963-1968, Kino Lorber, Region A)

As this list would presumably make it abundantly clear, 2017 was the year that Kino Lorber went berserk with the kind of completely unexpected titles more appropriate for a European label.  I had heard of OSS 117 films, a series of spy adventure novels adapted into the movies starring an American agent with the amazing name of Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath (!). My memory of these films is generally associated with the dismissive reviews blocking them into a jumble with countless other rip-offs of the James Bond franchise.  It turns out that neither the novels by Jean Bruce (continued on by his wife Josette Bruce and eventually by their children into 1990s) nor the movie adaptations are really pastiches of the more famous British secret service agent and his exploits: they are, for one, extremely French, a quality that would have been lost to an extent if watched in English dubbing, and in the versions edited by American importers to emphasize action sequences. 

These five films, starring Kerwin Matthews (yes, Sinbad himself!), Frederick Stafford (later cast in Hitchcock's Topaz) and John Gavin (considered for the role of James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever) all come with the original French language soundtracks.  In many ways dated, yet also beautifully photographed, surprisingly effective (as in Matthew's terrific karate bout with an assassin in his hotel room, for instance) and full of unexpected fun for European genre film fans (none other than George Eastman shows up as the uproariously fey supervillain Curt Jurgens's premier henchman in OSS 117: Double Agent!), I am very glad I decided not to pass by this title on the account of its rather hideous cover design (ur, this is one area for which Kino could secure some extra budget…).

   

16.  Drunken Master 醉拳 (1978, Eureka! Masters of Cinema, Region All)

As I pointed out above, I really appreciate Eureka!'s conscious inclusion of post-'60s Asian films in their repertoire, but even considering that this was a pleasant surprise.  I know there is a possibly unbridgeable perception gap between a North American and an East Asian filmgoer  grown up in '70s and '80s regarding the stardom of Jackie Chan. I don’t think anyone who was not there in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Japan or Singapore could really appreciate just how big Chan was… and has consistently been so, throughout the last four decades.

I recently read a review of The Foreigner, whose author seems to characterize Jackie as an aging martial arts star who had failed to break it into the Anglophone mainstream: someone with the comparable cinematic stature of, say, Jean Claude Van Damme.  Bless the Belgian's heart, but seriously, guy, Chan is not Van Damme.  He is the biggest movie star on this side of the globe, and again, has been so for 40 years.  Someone with the stature of Clint Eastwood might be an acceptable comparison, maybe, but Jackie as a "local" Oriental star struggling to gain acceptance of the North American public?  A positively insulting characterization, not to mention vastly ignorant about the reality of the world: from such depths of ignorance erupt the dark forces of a Trump presidency and the Brexit campaign… sigh. 

The Masters of Cinema presentation does full justice to this ultra-low-budget, borderline-primitive yet historically momentous martial arts comedy, restoring its theatrical Cantonese soundtrack allegedly not heard since its 1978 debut, equipping it with multiple English-language subtitles (a la Criterion's ploy with Kurosawa) and a slew of commentaries and essays by the likes of Tony Rayns, Jeff Yang and the film director Gareth Evans.

15.  Liquid Sky (1982, Vinegar Syndrome, Region All)

One of the oddest cult films to emerge from '80s, which is truly saying somethin', Liquid Sky is a fluorescent, narcotics-induced pleasure dream/nightmare that also has a strangely endearing quality to it, starting with the premise of extraterrestrial(s) ensconced in a dinner-plate sized flying saucer acting as the plot's catalytic agent. I don't know whether you could call Anne Carlisle's performance "good," but she is certainly unforgettable in the dual role as a heroine-addicted poser Jimmy and an emotionally needy androgynous model Margaret. And no doubt some of you wish you could forget-- and cannot-- Paula E. Sheppard's (also in the cult film Alice, Sweet Alice: where is she now?), ur, oral performance of "Me and My Rhythm Box."

A brainchild of Russian émigré director Slava Tsukerman and a perfect film to acid-dissolve your cinephile friend's lofty idea of what an "arthouse" motion picture is supposed to be, Vinegar Syndrome presents the film, some portions of which bear the imprint of guerrilla filmmaking and less-than-optimal conditions for special effects work, in a 4K HD scan from camera negatives, complete with piles and piles of special features, some of which also look appropriately, hmm, grungy. 

And yes, I saw Liquid Sky in a movie theater. So now you know why I am like this.

14. The Day of the Jackal (1973, Arrow Video, Region B)

I fully understand the criticisms labeled at High Noon for its political stance, but I still think it is one of the greatest Westerns I have seen.  Perhaps it speaks to me because of my own outlook in life, who knows.  Fred Zinnemann, whatever his ideological proclivities might have been, cannot be questioned about his mastery of filmmaking craft. His later films in particular have the cutting precision of an unsmiling genius chess player. The Day of the Jackal is a taut political thriller with a total concentration on the procedure-- Jackal, portrayed with suave steeliness by Edward Fox, is matched by the dedicated civil servant Deputy Commissioner Lebel (Moonraker's Michel Lonsdale)-- that effortlessly paints circles around most of the contemporary thrillers depicting similar situations (Bourne films, the Mission Impossible series, with Tom Cruise always mugging the camera with his "earnest" looks, and so on). 

The only thing in the movie that strikes me as awkward is the way in which Jackal dispatches human obstacles to his project with his bare hands: at one point he strangles a person, and the poor victim simply drops dead in about thirty seconds.  Oh well, nobody's perfect.

   

13. The Last Witness 최후의 증인 (1980, Korean Film Archive/Blue Kino, Region All)

Along with A Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf, this director Lee Doo-yong's magnum opus is one of the Korean films from which we can palpably feel the underground energy of the oppressed peoples, who had just about had enough, about to erupt and topple the military dictatorships of '70s and early '80s. Based on a popular mystery novel by Kim Seong-jong, Lee's feature is an epic meditation, under the guise of an ostensibly anti-Communist crime procedural, on the sufferings visited on the good and the decent by the cruelties of modern Korean history. Korean Film Archive about a decade ago restored this film to its uncensored length of two hours and 34 minutes, leaving those lucky enough to catch it during revival screenings reeling from shock. 

In 2017, the agency issued it as a special edition Blu Ray, meticulously reconstructed with each frame cleaned and color-timed to the specifications of the director and cinematographer Jeong Seong-il, one of the masters of classic Korean cinema, complete with enthusiastic and admiring commentaries by such notables such as The Handmaidens director Park Chan-wook and critic Kim Young-jin.  

12. The Sea Wolf (1941, Warner Archive Collection, Region A)

Talking about restorations of lost classics, of course, we must not forget Warner Archive Collection, by now seemingly committed to releasing three or more Blu Ray titles per month. The last year's astonishing BD title from WAC was this cinematic adaptation of Jack London's novel, reconstructed to its original 1941 premier length of 100 minutes (previously, the 86 minute-long re-release print cut in 1947 has been the only available one) from original 35mm nitrate elements.  With Edward G. Robinson at his most incredibly diabolic, John Garfield, Ida Lupino and Alexander Knox as the intellectual narrator-scribe, The Sea Wolf is an overwhelmingly intense seafaring adventure cum film noir.  Robinson's Captain Wolf Larsen is a frighteningly crafty, cannily evil dictator of the pirate ship The Ghost, and yet the viewers are unable to unconditionally condemn him-- he is much too a familiar figure, not really the exotic and distant Enemy but, in truth, One of Us.  

A stunning artistic achievement by the sometimes underappreciated director Michael Curtiz, The Sea Wolf leads the fray in the bountiful WAC releases of 2017 including other classical titles such as Hell on Frisco Bay, Seven Days in May, Wait until Dark, Bad Day at Black Rock and Ride the High Country, among others.

11. Funeral Parade of Roses 薔薇の葬列 (1969, Cinelicious Pics, Region A)

In 2016, Cinelicious Pics flabbergasted fans of classic Japanese animation with their astonishing reconstruction and release of Tezuka Osamu production's Belladonna of Sadness. In the last year, they reached out to one of the quintessential signposts in the international queer cinema, Funeral Parade of Roses, a daringly avant-garde yet surprisingly emotional take on Oedipus Rex, interspersed with the interview segments of the young "gay boys."  The fans of Japanese SF cinema and Kurosawa Akira might be stunned to recognize the very familiar face of Tsuchiya Yoshio, the Human Vapor himself and a veteran of numerous Toho Godzilla films, in a steamy love scene with the transgender actor-singer-TV personality Peter, who memorably played Kyoami, the court jester character in Kurosawa's Ran (inexplicably looking at least a decade younger in the latter film, released in 1985!).

In addition to the impeccably HD-transferred main feature (previously only available via SD bare-bones edition via Masters of Cinema series), this Blu Ray edition collects eight short films of director Matsumoto Toshio as supplements, providing an amazing glimpse into the '60s experimental cinema that attempted to consciously break down boundaries between fictional and documentary films.  

10. Deluge (1933, Kino Lorber, Region A)

A pre-code apocalyptic disaster film, Deluge is primarily known for its climactic destruction of New York City by the huge tsunami generated by the drastic climate change (whoa, something guaranteed not to happen in real life! Fake news!), which is darn impressive in its own light, but the film is giddily entertaining as well as thought-provoking in other ways.  It is brutally honest in its appraisal of the deterioration of the American society (circa 1930s) at the face of large-scale economic disaster (especially in graphic depictions of women's vulenrability) and features a genuinely attractive heroine in Peggy Shannon, who falls in love with a upstanding survivor unaware that his wife and child had also survived the disaster and is willing to start a new life with her. 

Tough-minded but never cynical, Deluge is another pre-Production Code American classic that, when seen in a great presentation, fully measures up to its unrealistic-sounding reputation. 

9. Othello (1952/1955, Criterion Collection, Region A)

Criterion's painstaking reconstruction of Orson Welles's Shakespearian adaptations hit its zenith with the 2016 release of Chimes at Midnight.  Here we have a slightly more problematic case, a flagrantly cinematic Othello fraught with production difficulties (continuous short-changing of the budget, which led to some amazingly creative touches such as setting a key dramatic scene in the Turkish bath, where characters jaunt about clad only in towels: Welles was unhappy with the leading lady Suzanne Cloutier, whose voice ended up being dubbed in the 1955 version: and so on) and almost flaunting its dancing-at-the-edge-of-the-sword filmmaking hutzpah.  It leaves little doubt as to Welle's mastery of cinema as an aesthetic medium, but his interpretation of Othello as an actor is strangely passive, almost rigid, as if he had abandoned any effort to resist the fate's cruel scenario.  In the insert essay, Geoffrey O'Brien makes the case that his performance is a meta-cinematic reflection on his own precarious and doubt-wracked position as the creator of this project: well, maybe.  Or perhaps Welles was genuinely uncertain about how to play this role: a powerful foreigner admired, feared and respected yet never truly accepted as one of their own by the "Europeans" he is called upon to protect and serve. 

In any case, Criterion's rehabilitation of Orson Welle's films on the home video-- Mr. Arkadin, F for Fake, Chimes at Midnight, The Immortal Story, and now Othello-- has to count as one of the most amazing feats of cinematic reevaluation in recent years. This is indeed a title that reminds us why Criterion Collection remains Criterion Collection in the eyes of its devotees…

8. Caltiki The Immortal Monster/Caltiki il monstro immortale (1959, Arrow Video, Region A)

…yet, I wouldn't be surprised if Arrow Video surpasses Criterion Collection in a few years, in its care and passion in shepherding the classic titles either of academic importance or cult reputation.  We would have been glad that a title like Caltiki il monstro immortale, a minor Italian horror film ripping off the ingenuous premise of The Blob, a cheapskate but effective monster in the form of a jelly-like amorphous, amoebic creature that simply absorbs and dissolves its prey, was merely made available in a watchable form with readable English subtitles.  Only two decades ago, a film like this would have merited little more than a curious footnote in the career overview of Mario Bava, responsible for Calitiki's special effects design and wrangling as well as much of its direction. 

Today, you can trust Arrow Video to not only locate the intact elements and provide a unrealistically sparkling 2K scan of them but also to jam-pack their release with practically endless supplementary materials, beginning with two separate audio commentaries by Tim Lucas and Troy Howarth and an alternative, 1.33:1 full-frame presentation of the film, solely intended to have the widest coverage of the Bava-directed special effects. 

7. Suspiria 40th Anniversary 4K Restoration Edition (1977, Synapse Films, Region A)

Oh what can I do? I have stated elsewhere that the biggest beneficiary among the filmmakers of the optic media disc revolution has not been Jean-Luc Godard, not Bernardo Bertolucci, not Stanley Kubrick, but Dario Argento.  And here is yet another proof of that statement. 

Suspiria is not even my favorite horror film, but as a collector of classic cinema on physical media, I do not know how I could have avoided honoring this 4k restoration special edition, under the supervision of Don May, head of Synpase Films, that had allegedly taken more than three years of painstaking cleansing and recalibration frame by frame.  The result is perhaps even more stunning in terms of sound than the famously candy-colored visuals, especially in the new DTS-HD mastered English soundtrack, supposedly never heard outside the theatrical premier in 1977. 

6. Fritz Lang Silent Film Collection (1919-1929, Kino Lorber, Region A)

Perhaps not necessarily a must-have title for those who have been collecting individual discs of Fritz Lang's silent films, majority of which-- Metropolis, Die Nibelungen, Spies, Dr. Mabuse The Gambler, Destiny, The Spiders, even Woman in the Moon, a hard-to-see title not long ago-- have been out as individual BD releases from Masters of Cinema and Kino Lorber, this collection-- which includes Four Around the Woman, Harakiri, The Wandering Shadow and Lang-scripted adaption of Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of Red Death, a big surprise, and for some of us, worth the price of the package in and of itself-- is still a keeper for me.

I freely admit that the sturdiness and heft of the hardcover book-style slipcase set that houses ten BD discs (technically twelve films in all) is one of the reasons that I find it so attractive. 2017 turned out to be a banner year for Kino Lorber all in all, and in the new year, too, its relationship with F. W. Murnau Stiftung will hopefully bring many great European BD titles to our attention.

5. T-Men (1947, Classic Flix, Region A)

Classic Flix, the hardcore classic movie rental service refusing to consider any film more recent than 1967 (now that it is 2018, perhaps they are willing to down-adjust the cutoff date to 1968?) as a part of their repertoire, has evolved into a Blu Ray-DVD producer, naturally devoted to making it available hard-to-find classic American cinema, especially films noirs. So far their slate includes Crime of Passion, You Only Live Once, The Killer is Loose, and this Anthony Mann-John Alton collaboration, an astoundingly violent (although neither explicit nor gory: not surprising since it was made in 1947!) and vicious gut-puncher. 

Classic Flix's remaster is positively glorious which puts proper blacks back into black &  white, as it were, and the disc comes with participation of noted critics and film scholars Todd McCarthy, Julie Kirgo, Courtney Joyner and others.  We are sure to see more from Classic Flix in the new year, and if we are lucky enough, for many years to come.

4. The Pulse 回路 (2001, Arrow Video, Region A)

Kurosawa Kiyoshi's modern ghost story and apocalyptic fable The Pulse is my choice for the best J-horror film of all time: more ambitious and thoughtful than equally frightening Ring and Audition, and ultimately articulating best the millennial anxieties facing the rapidly aging Japan, a nation in search of a purpose.  Arrow Video tackles the task of bringing this foreboding masterpiece-- that in a public showing unfailingly squeezes groans and moans of fear and shock out of the audience-- with passionate commitment.  

            

3. The Sorrow and the Pity/ Le chagrin et la pitie (1969, Arrow Academy, Region B)

One of the most remarkable instances in which cinematic art directly and significantly impacted the perception of controversial historical events must be the French filmmaker's reckoning of the Nazi occupation of France: Jean Pierre-Melville (who had fought in the resistance), Louis Malles, Claude Chabrol, Bertrand Tavernier, among others, have tackled this issue with forthrightness, courage and compassion, whether we, the viewers, could sympathize or resonate with the behaviors of the characters depicted in their films-- such as the young Nazi collaborator Lucien who also falls in love with a bourgeois Jewish girl in Malle's Lacombe, Lucien-- or the perspectives of the filmmakers themselves.  And of course, it was Marcel Ophuls, the great director Max's son, born in Germany yet educated in the United States, and a naturalized French citizen having spent a terrifying year in exile under the Vichy regime in 1941 at the age 14, who has crafted a massive four-hour-long documentary on the Nazi occupation of France, a multi-dimensional reconstruction of the one of the most vexing and difficult-to-confront periods of French national history.  It is one of a handful of movies that captures or even surpasses the overwhelming gravity and details of a truly great work of historical scholarship.  

Arrow Academy's special edition of this film is as respectful and serious as any Criterion or Masters of Cinema release.    

2.  They Shoot Horses, Don't They?  (1969, Kino Lorber, Region A)

One of the best films of '60s American cinema, and also one of the most searing indictments of the hideous collusion of mass media, entertainment industry and exploitation of the underprivileged in its quintessentially American form-- here represented by a seedy Californian beachfront club-house-sponsored dance marathon, a ghastly hybrid of human demolition derby, Reality TV, and gladiator's arena-- They Shoot Horses, Don't They? also features great performances of Jane Fonda, Michael Sarrazin, Red Buttons, Suzanna York, Bonnie Bedelia and especially Gig Young, shouting "Yowza yowza yow~za!" and belting inane pep talks at the half-dead, zombified dance contestants.  Sidney Pollack-- yes, the helmer of Tootsie-- directs with a brutally cutting, yet ultimately compassionate eye.  He also contributes a great audio commentary, along with an alternative track with participation from Fonda, Sarrazin and other cast and crew members.

I don’t think I will ever be able to forget Sarrazin's absolutely terrified face in a scene where he accidentally tears Fonda's silk stocking, and Fonda's subsequent wailing, that literally sounds like she is being torn into pieces.  And, again was the case with Gilda in 2016, this relatively unsung if not entirely ignored American classic, not accorded the stature equal to, say, Bonnie and Clyde, Midnight Cowboy, The Graduate or Five Easy Pieces, would have taken the position of the top Blu Ray of 2017, except for…

1. Hell Drivers (1957, iTV Studios/Network, Region B)

… this totally unexpected discovery, a brutal, progressive yet sinfully entertaining working-class actioner from the team of star Stanley Baker and director Cy Endfield (credited as C. Raker Endfield).    

I hope I will be given a chance to talk about this film in detail later, with the positively amazing cast consisting of Baker, Herbert Lom, Sean Connery, Peggy Cummins (absolutely brilliant and stunning as the main female protagonist, who is nobody's squeeze), Gordon Jackson, David McCallum, Jill Ireland, William Harnell, and most astonishing of all, The Prisoner's Patrick McGoohan as an almost animal-like villain, snarling and snickering with abandon.

Well, it is done.  God almighty, I was pretty sure that I won't be able to complete a My Favorite 2017 Blu Ray list but somehow I managed to do it again!  Here's hope that 2018 will see more developments toward sanity and rationality (I am not legitimately expecting anything like real social justice or international peace: my bar has been lowered so much it has long since crashed through the floor), perhaps even some real changes occasioned by Me Too Movement and other courageous efforts by women and minorities to buckle the powers-that-be, but regardless of what happens in the "real" world, I can predict with absolute certainty that there will be a surfeit of desirable Blu Rays and DVDs (and even 4K Ultra HD Blu Rays as well?) in 2018.  

Thank you for visiting this site, Happy New Year of the Dog, and Happy Movie Hunting! 

The Old Alien-Fighter Never Dies, Just Fades Away- Nigel Kneale's QUATERMASS (1978) Blu Ray Review

QUATERMASS a.k.a THE QUATERMASS CONCLUSION. A Euston Films/Thames Television Co-Production, broadcast through ITV. 1978. Four Chapters Miniseries, Aspect Ratio 1.33:1, Monaural. 216 minutes. Theatrical Version, Aspect Ratio 1.78:1, Monaural, 106 minutes [uncompressed from PAL transfer]. Director: Piers Haggard, Executive Producer: Verity Lambert, Screenplay: Nigel Kneale, Producer: Ted Childs, Music: Marc Wilkinson, Nic Rowley.  

CAST: John Mills (Quatermass), Simon MacCorkindale (Joe Kapp), Barbara Kellermann (Clare Kapp), Margaret Tyzack (Annie Morgan), Ralph Arliss (Kickalong), David Yip (Chen), Paul Rosebury (Caraway), Brewster Mason (Gurov), Bruce Purchase (Roach), Rebecca Saire (Hettie, Quatermass's granddaughter), Joanna Joseph (Debbie Kapp), Sophie Kind (Sarah Kapp).

Bernard Quatermass, Nigel Kneale's pioneering scientist-hero of the British science fiction TV and cinema, returns for the last mission of his life, in the manner of Hercules Poirot in Agatha Christie's Curtains (1975). Having missed the mini-series's (a format extremely popular in late '70s and '80s, as I recall) stateside broadcast, I have only known it in its theatrical release format, The Quatermass Conclusion, until the new century. With the advent of the DVD, A&E managed to release the original miniseries in 2005, bringing both editions together into one handy collection. However, despite A&E's then-exemplary presentation, the series, like many classic British television shows, benefits tremendously in visual terms from a new HD transfer, as attested by Network's new Blu Ray presentation.  

Quatermass, played by different actors every time he was called in to battle the alien menace (six in all, not including the youthful Jason Flemyng in the rather pointless BBC remake of Quatermass and the Pit [2005]), is a unique SF protagonist in the annals of TV science fiction, with the direct, personal connection to the early postwar space program but also sharing some qualities with Lovecraftian protagonists like Charles Dexter Ward, lifters of the veil, so to speak, who gets to observe, as a vanguard of the mankind, the true horrors lurking behind the glittering stars in the night sky. In Hammer Film's superb early film versions, shot through with a terrific feeling of cosmic dread and paranoia-- The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and Quatermass 2 (1957)-- he was played by the American actor Brian Donlevy, whose hard-boiled and irascible, almost ruthless, interpretation of the character brought an intriguing film noir inflection to the proceedings, something probably never intended by Kneale. In Quatermass and the Pit (1967), Andrew Keir was a much warmer and approachable Quatermass, but that film's real hero was actually his idealistic colleague Dr. Roney (memorably essayed by James Donald), consigning the nominal hero into the role of an observer/narrator of the fantastic events rather than a man of action.  

This mini-series cast the great star of early postwar British cinema John Mills (winner of the supporting Oscar for Ryan's Daughter [1968] but best known for such mid-century mainstream UK hits as The Colditz Story, The Great Expectations and I Was Monty's Double) as Quatermass, and he brings sophisticated shadings of tragic alienation and compassionate intelligence to the battle-scarred scientist.  Appropriate for a pop culture diagnosis of the global '70s-'80s transition, Quatermass puts the eponymous scientist right in the middle of a global apocalypse, a nightmare of '60s style social liberalism and '70s OPEC-era political pessimism run amuck. The streets are overrun by hideously color-coordinated gangs armed with sub-machine guns and grenades. Hippies calling themselves "Planet People" inarticulately chant about traveling to the outer space and gather together at the local prehistoric stone circles to summon the alien guidance. Quatermass's own granddaughter, the only surviving family member of his, has joined the Planet People cult. Their aggressive antics are in turn confronted by a thuggish police force with no qualms about using brutish tactics.

The deteriorating social order and degeneration of culture are displayed for the viewers through a rather ironic device of imbecilic TV programs produced by a BBC-like station that invites Quatermass to confer about the US-Soviet joint space station venture. When the space station is spectacularly destroyed live on satellite broadcast, our heroes become aware of an extraterrestrial threat. The old Dr. Q, despairing to the point of abandoning all hope for the mankind, manages to connect with the younger astrophysicist Joe Kapp (Simon MacCorkindale) whose pronounced Jewish heritage and devotion to his wife and daughters serve as an entry point to Neale's somewhat heavy-handed illustration of the global Zeitgeist slipping back into a form of collective mindlessness.

Neale's teleplay is intelligent if cynical and manages to generate an impressive amount of suspense with little time wasted. He does not need voiceover narrations or long expository dialogues to explain how the world civilization had rapidly gone to seed. His ideological position here is not conservative in the usual Tory sense of the term (and he is hardly the only British writer of the last century to assume that the "civilized world" in essence contains only white people… with the membership for the enlightened extended to Jews and maybe some Russians. Oh, David Yip [View to a Kill] is a lone Asian scientist in Kapp's astronomy lab team, I shan't forget to mention!), but it is clear that he carries a lot of distaste for the promiscuous and superficial aspects of '60s British culture (not that surprising, considering that he is the mastermind behind the aptly prophetic The Year of the Sex Olympics [1968]). Sometimes Quatermass evokes the sense of a curmudgeonly disapproval from an old man who has seen better times, especially during the chapter in which Quatermass is rescued and helped by a community of elderly squatters. When the young people are uniformly portrayed as stupid and savage, whilst the old people gentle and reasonable, I wonder whether there is any way to call such a view other than "conservative."

Thankfully, Kneale, or perhaps director Piers Haggard (responsible for the cult horror film The Blood on Satan's Claw [1971]), restrains the urge to deliver position speeches and keeps the core appeal of the series alive, that is, its cosmic SF monsters that properly "puts the mankind in its place" in the great food chain of the universe. Quatermass demonstrates that, to the inscrutable Lovecraftian alien beings, we earthlings are no more than livestock with exotic flavors, not even worthy of being directly manhandled by them, but only fit to be anonymously mass slaughtered via a column of energy beam that reduces human bodies into clumps of white ash (another possible reference to the Holocaust, the idea also picked up by Steven Spielberg in his masterly War of the Worlds). This depiction of the "harvesting" of earthlings is downright chilling despite its minimalist special effects. MacCorkindale, at other times blustery and overacting, is quite effective here as a decent man of science who becomes nearly as unhinged as his adversaries due to the personal devastation visited on him. Indeed, Quatermass is infused with an unusually somber mood, almost a tone of bereavement, which might in turn lead some viewers to conclude that the series is too dour to be truly compelling.

Nonetheless, as a work of "hard" science fiction with sharply honed dystopian edges, the series maintains its integrity and dignity. Yes, its "Planet People" sequences are sometimes borderline ridiculous, especially now that we all know what subsequently transpired under the Thatcher/Reagan '80s, but I can at least respect its point of view articulating the apocalyptic anxieties that had gripped the older-generation Euro-American intelligentsia in late '70s.  

Blu Ray Presentation:

Network/Fremantle Media International. Region B. Video: Full frame ratio 1.33:1/Widescreen ratio 1.78:1, 1080p. Audio: Mono/Dolby Digital 5.1. English (HOH) Subtitles. Supplements: Music-only tracks for 4 episodes, Episode recaps, Textless titles, Image Gallery, insert book essay by Andrew Pixley. Street date: July 27, 2015. List Price: £15.42

Networks's packaging of Quatermass Blu Ray puts all four episodes in the first disc and The Quatermass Conclusion in the second. The theatrical release version is not simply a truncated version of the mini-series, and puts a slightly different spin on characters and events, with interesting results. To cite an example, the character arc of the lone survivor of the Ringstone Round (a smaller-scale Stonehenge of sorts) "contact," Isabel (Annabelle Lanyon), is notably different in two versions. In the mini-series, she stumbles out from behind the rock on her own, but in the movie version she is discovered by Quatermass while lying supine and dazed. Her final fate takes place somewhat anticlimactically in the mini-series, but in the movie version it is one of the more shocking moments directly witnessed by the rocket scientist (in the mini-series he never gets reconnected to the Isabel thread again, except presumably in the form of an off-screen after-the-fact report). Likewise, an entire section in Chapter 3, in which Quatermass is nursed back to health by a group of elderly squatters, is excised from the theatrical version. In the latter, he simply does not get separated from Anne Morgan.  

As I have mentioned above, I have watched The Quatermass Conclusion many years before I had a chance to lay my eyes on the mini-series, so that is the version that I am used to seeing. The video presentations also slightly favor the widescreen format, although the HD encoding greatly improves the experience of watching the mini-series as well. As Kneale himself noted with approval, Euston and Thames TV production, unlike BBC (think of Dr. Who), eschewed studio-bound sets and filmed as much action in outdoor locations as they could, and with 35mm film elements, which allowed for it to become a major beneficiary of a new HD scan. Overall, the color scheme appears to me slightly redder and the contrast darker in the theatrical version, but no huge divergences are noticed.  

From THE QUATERMASS CONCLUSION

 From QUATERMASS Mini-series

This Blu Ray package does not contain one of the DVD extras from the A&E package, a documentary on the Stonehenge, but it is not missed. As is usual with Network, the insert booklet essay by a Dr. Who specialist Andrew Pixley is an exhaustively researched, archival piece with tons of quotes from Nigel Kneale.  It mostly details production history, why it had taken the good chunk of '70s for the project to actually get made, how Hammer Films almost got hold of it before losing out to Euston and Thames TV, how much it cost (about £300,000 per episode, quite high-end for the time), Kneale's subsequent unhappiness with the production, especially its casting choices, as he found Mills too soft and grandfatherly, MacCorkindale too unintelligent-looking, and so on (it is understandable but unfortunate that Kneale is like a lot of "hard" SF writers in insisting that his scientist hero remain a sort of Platonic superman, as if academic intelligence is panacea for all problems confronted by a literary character), and other nuggets of information. One interesting critique Kneale advanced and quoted by Pixely is that his original conceptualization of the Planet People was not successfully translated onscreen: apparently his take was a lot more dangerous and futuristic, a "sort of cross between super-punks and whirling dervishes." Perhaps his original version, while still firmly rooted in the anti-'60s mentality, did look forward to the cyberpunk trend just coming up in the horizon.

The venerable creator's less-than enthusiastic evaluation aside, having re-visited the Bernard Quatermass in the superlative Blu Ray format, I found both mini-series and the film thoughtful, thrilling and even a little moving: living up to the mantle of a quality hard science fiction, unflinchingly taking the unpopular (again, Lovecraftian) view that God out there cares naught about us except as resources to be exploited. We are the little silkworms of the dark universe, who get boiled to death as we surrender our cocoons, from which the harvesters pick out threads of beautiful silk. Given our own propensity for indifference and exploitation toward other species on our planet, could we truly expect anything better from the advanced species out there?  

The Network Blu Ray of Quatermass is highly recommended to the fans of British Cinema and hard science fiction, despite its admittedly misanthropic tone.

Vioent Cop (1989)- Q Branch Academia Blu Ray Review

VIOLENT COP その男, 凶暴につき.  A Shochiku-Fuji/Bandai Media Co-Production, 1989. 1 hour 43 minutes, Aspect Ratio 1.85:1, Eastman Color 35mm, Stereo Sound System. Director: Kitano Takeshi 北野武. Screenplay: Nozawa Hisashi. 野沢尚 Cinematography: Sasakibara Yasushi. 佐々木原保志 Producer: Okuyama Kazuyoshi. 奥山和由 Production Design: Mochizuki Masateru. 望月正照 Music: Kume Daisaku 久米大作   CAST: Kitano "Beat" Takeshi (Azuma), Kishibe Ittoku岸辺一徳 (Nito), Hakuryu白竜 (Kiyohara), Ashikawa Makoto 芦川誠 (Kikuchi), Kawakami Maiko 川上麻衣子(Akari), Terajima Susumu 寺島進 (Orida), Ozawa Kazuyoshi 小沢一義 (Ueda), Sakuma Tetsu 佐久間哲 (Katahira), Sano Shiro 佐野史郎 (New District Chief), Kawakami Ei 川上泳 (Hashizume), Hayami Kei 速水渓 (Nito's Secretary) 

Violent Cop is "Beat" Kitano Takeshi's debut feature film. Kitano, who has turned seventy this year (2017), has been a hugely successful comedian, best known for politically incorrect, some might say actively offensive, stand-up acts (or more precisely the Japanese version of it, manzai, similar to Abbott and Costello in the sense that the format requires two performers, a straight one [tsukkomi] and a dopey one [boke]). His comedian's moniker "Beat" Takeshi derives from the manzai duo's name "Two Beats," a partnership with "Beat" Kiyoshi a.k.a. Kaneko Jiro, which Kitano claims has never been officially dissolved. In December 1986, fed up with the scandal mag Friday's relentless pursuit of his extra-marital affairs, Takeshi, leading a group of his comedy pupils known as his "troops (gundan)," attacked journalists working for the mag, physically threatening them and trashing their office. Even though he was thought to have received a fatal blow to his career, Takeshi rebounded. He has also been working steadily as a film and TV actor, taking non-comedic roles, some of which highly acclaimed-- most notably, as a Korean-Japanese murderer Kim Hiro in a TV docudrama Kim's War [Kimu no sensoキムの戦争, 1992], a brutish yet sensitive Imperial Army sergeant in Oshima Nagisa's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) and a vicious gay assassin in Ishii Takashi's GONIN (1995), among others-- since at least 1980 (barring his youthful works as movie extras). 

Two years after the scandal and in the midst of the rebound, Kitano was cast in a lead role, as the title character of Dirty Harry-like Detective Azuma, in the present project, originally to be directed by Fukasaku Kinji (1930-2003, Graveyard of Honor 仁義の墓場, Battle Royale). However, producer Okuyama Kazuyoshi apparently did not favor Fukasaku's approach, which, judging from the first draft written for him by screenwriter Nozawa Hisashi (Sleepless Town 不夜城 [1998], The Frame 破線のマリス [1999]), was very much in the social realist-exposé mode. After Fukasaku left the project citing a schedule conflict, Okuyama offered the director's chair to Kitano, who completely rewrote the screenplay as one of the conditions for accepting the responsibility. The situation, in retrospect, was an intriguing one, as if Clint Eastwood was asked to direct Dirty Harry after Don Siegel dropped out, and he proceeded to make a moody, psychological thriller in the mold of Play Misty for Me, entirely undercutting Harry Callahan's sense of control and (frankly) fascistic tendencies (We could talk some other time about the parallel between Kitano and Eastwood, two iconoclastically right-wing superstars, who nonetheless had directed some brazenly "artistic" films that seem to undermine their own beloved public personas).

Even though Violent Cop certainly lives up to its English and Japanese (the literal translation of the Japanese title is something like "The Man, Known to be Violent" in the manner of a warning sign) titles, it is not entirely the film that North American viewers might expect, based on its reputation. The film opens with a horrifying sequence in which a homeless man is senselessly beaten to death by a group of bicycle-riding teenagers. The protagonist, Detective Azuma, drops in one of the teenager's comfy home, passes by the boy's befuddled mother, and goes up to the latter's room. He then proceeds to mercilessly beat up the boy, who begins to wail like a little child. Later, a peaceful barge boat passing beneath a bridge is pelted by empty soda cans, thrown by a bunch of foul-mouthed pre-schoolers. This is not the polite, circumspect Japan, all right, but a society seething with ugly hostility toward one another. Yet, we soon find out that Azuma, as played and directed by Kitano Takeshi, is no Dirty Harry. He is a much more enigmatic creature.

Indeed, one of the most disturbing yet intriguing things about Violent Cop is that Kitano continuously sabotages any inkling on the part of the viewer to rally toward, sympathize with or even connect emotionally to its troubled protagonist. The patented "Beat Takeshi" look, a poker-faced non-expression (which is apparently a product of his extreme shyness) is cannily deployed by his directorial self to essentially prevent the viewers from second-guessing Azuma's internal psychology. One of the effects of this strategy is that the film is completely devoid of the kind of sentimental, macho bullcrap that often stands for the "rage against the system" in standard Asian crime films (for instance, in contemporary South Korean cinema). Often, Azuma appears completely indistinguishable from a sociopathic thug. He is ostensibly a good buddy to the corrupt cop Iwaki and at least attempts to care for his mentally ill sister, but as played by Kitano, the viewers cannot help but be suspicious about his true motives: when Iwaki shows up as a corpse hanging from a bridge, we are momentarily not sure if it was Azuma who actually killed him, not because of the story logic, but because the taciturn detective was the last person to see him on-screen (we never find out what the content of their conversation was, either). He seems entirely capable of committing a heinous crime himself, and displays no particular "personal code of honor." What he does possess, though, is a bucketful of charisma. Azuma definitely looks dangerous without the aid of Eastwood-like macho growls, and the fact that we cannot "read" his face or body language generates an odd kind of suspense. We are never sure what crazy stunt he will pull off next.

While the movie is no liberal indictment of a corrupt police system, it likewise fails to meet expectations of the conservative viewers who have come to see a movie in which a righteous cop doles out sadistic punishment to the criminal scum. When Azuma mercilessly pounds on suspects, his sister's boyfriends, or even hapless colleagues, the viewers are invited to either laugh at the utter absurdity of the violence that is never organically generated from the situational logic, or cringe at its sheer, dehumanizing randomness. An excellent example is the villain's-- reptilian drug dealer Kiyohiro, a frightening performance by the Korean-Japanese singer Hakuryu-- sudden attack on Azuma outside a movie-house. Kiyohiro, on the ground from the latter's fierce resistance, pulls out a gun. Azuma swiftly kicks his nemesis's wrist, and the bullet flies off hitting a wrong target, a young female bystander whose brain matter is graphically splashed all over the marquee. The scene is shocking, never failing to elicit shouts of surprise and disbelief among the viewers, but its emotional impact is ambivalent: it is like watching a horrific traffic accident rather than a life-and-death struggle between Good and Evil.

Director Kitano, however, never allows the film to degenerate into wallowing in meaningless and purposeless displays of violence. Through excellent but never show-offy filmmaking (except one or two passages in which slow motion is employed with a bit too much irony), he compels us to follow the story, and to coolly examine, rather than easily identify with, the character dynamics. He introduces his Zen-like "spaced" style, which in later films like Sonatine and Hana-Bi would invite comparisons with Robert Bresson and Ozu Yasujiro, dismantling the typical rhythm of a conventional thriller, showing his characters doing nothing or staring into empty space, or extending scenes (for instance, of Azuma walking around in that funny, vaguely ducky gait) beyond their dramatic necessity. In some cases, the effect does remind one of Stanley Kubrick's early works (especially Clockwork Orange, a film much admired by Kitano). Yet this method of cool, dry "zoological observation" stops, in my view, short of completely alienating the viewers.

Take one of Violent Cop's most notorioius and talked-about scenes, wherein the drug dealer Hashizume (Kawakami Ei) is viciously slapped at least a dozen times by the irate Azuma, who wants to know the source of the dope traffic, in an uncut, single take. The sequence is exceedingly uncomfortable to watch, as the viewers begin to identify with the ordeals suffered by the actor Kawakami rather than the diegetic character Hashizume. It is "real" and at the same time deliberately meta-diegetic, as the slapping looks so brutal that we begin to worry about the performer's safety ("Jeez, is Takeshi really slapping that poor guy?"). The effect is that, when Hashizume finally confesses in a raging outburst, he seems to be responding to the denigration of his being/character/role, momentarily conjoined, in the hands of Azuma/director Kitano, rather than to the pain. The affective outcome is unusual, far removed from the conventional "sympathy" we are supposed to feel toward either Hashizume or Azuma, but is definitely not indifference, either. This makes an interesting contrast to the scene of physical violence in Dirty Harry wherein Scorpio pays a black pugilist to beat him up so that he can claim that Harry Callahan physically abused him, which enlists the shock of violence to underlie deeply manipulative, evil character of the villain.  I don't want to make a big theoretical deal out of it, but what Violent Cop does is to draw the viewer's attention to the violence itself perpetrated on the human bodies, rather than "rationalizing" such violence in the name of plot advancement, or ideological satisfaction. 

The irony about everyday preponderance of violence is clearly underscored by Kume Daisaku's music, based on jazzy arrangements of Erik Satie. Key chase sequence in the middle of the movie is punctuated by this droll, playful music, heightening the ridiculousness of the very notion of an "action sequence." The film also makes excellent uses of back alleys and other non-glamorous locations throughout Tokyo. It entirely dispenses with the (good) countryside- (evil) city dichotomy.

The cast is uniformly good. Other than Kitano and Hakuryu, who had unfortunately been typecase in gangster roles after this pic, the former musician Kishibe Ittoku (best known for Oguri Kohei's Sting of Death 死の棘 [1995]) cuts a lanky, nonchalantly ruthless figure as Nito, the wealthy boss of the drug ring. He is seen to be presiding over the opening of a fancy restaurant, and treats Azuma's threats with well-practiced aplomb. Yet Nito is not above making a punching bag out of the face of his recalcitrant underling, carefully wiping off unseemly blood from the latter's face afterwards. A Kitano regular Ashikawa Makoto plays a rookie, haplessly caught between Azuma's insane antics and the police regulations, but the denouement surprises us by giving him a role that again subverts the convention of the genre. The only character that receives short shrift, not surprisingly, is Azuma's sister, Akari. It is clear that Kitano cut out a large chunk of background exposition concerning the brother-sister relationship, in order to prevent the viewer's emotional investment in Azuma. All the same, her character is used like a prop, as an object of gang rape by the villains to get back at Azuma: at least Kitano does not stoop to exploiting her mental condition.

Since Violent Cop, Kitano Takeshi has achieved an international fame and dabbled in many genres, but the movie has not lost much of its power to shock and disturb. It does require delicate handling before being unspooled in front of an unsuspecting audience, but it manages to put a kind of coldly hypnotic cinematic spell on most of them. Few can doubt the director's firm control of its elements, nor, when it comes right down to it, his artistic integrity, even if a sizable number of the viewers may not be able to "enjoy" the film in the usual sense.   

Blu Ray Presentation:  
Film Movement Classics. Region A. Video: widescreen 1.85:1, 1080p. Audio: Japanese Stereo. English (HOH) Subtitles. Supplements: Theatrical and U.S. trailers, an insert essay by Tom Vick. Street date: October 11, 2016. List price: $39.95.

Film Movement has released Violent Cop as a Blu Ray in a no-frills edition stateside. The presentation is good, if not spectacular, with fine sheets of grain over nighttime scenes and appropriately subdued contrast levels. Sometimes the camera shows prominent lens flares but that is not the problem with transfer. Color scheme is also somewhat pale, but again this is probably by design. Tom Vick contributes a nice, concise insert essay that introduces the essentials of production history and the unprecedented nature of the film as a Japanese genre film (He does quote from Aaron Gerow's authoritative study of Kitano's cinematic oeuvre, discussed below).  

Given the current international status of Kitano (even taking into consideration the opinion that he has been wildly overrated as a filmmaker), it would have been more appropriate if more substantial supplements were included. It would have been fascinating to get the lowdown on the circumstances of Kitano's taking over of the project, or on the filmmaking process seen from the POV of the supporting players, some of whom have subsequently gone on to productive careers (Bandai Visual's Japan-produced Blu Ray is also barebones, priced around $45, but surprisingly comes with English subtitles). 

By the way, the present Blu Ray edition has been subject to some unexpected online criticisms, due to its distinctive cover illustration in the mold of an underground American comic. It is perhaps understandable given the starkly minimalist poster for the movie (in Japan, a threatening glare from Beat Takeshi was quite sufficient to draw curious viewers into the theater), and the illustration does capture the hardcore film noir ambience of the film to a certain degree, but the main problem is the figures depicted simply do not resemble any of the characters. The green thug with a knife on the left does vaguely look like Kiyohiro, but who the heck is the guy in the middle with a cigarette butt in his mouth? No one remotely like him appears in the movie. I am willing to take a radical, off-off-Broadway visual concept for a Blu Ray cover, but wouldn't it have to indicate at least some connections with the personages in the film?  

Can we use it in class? Obviously the undergraduates need to be forewarned about the dry and shocking nature of the violence in the film. I wouldn't recommend using the film as a source of sociological or anthropological insight into the pre-Burst Bubble Japanese lives, other than as a corrective to the hoary myth of Japan as an eternally peaceful, communal nation. Which is not to say that Violent Cop is particularly unrealistic in terms of depicting the late '80s Japanese society. The "yakuza" that, according to some movies at least, seems to be the dominant political force in Japan (yes, this is meant to be a snarky dis), is conspicuously absent in this film. Neither do the cops here behave as if drug addiction is a unique American problem.

The film should be a lot more significant as a resource for a Cinema Studies course. The best text to assign along with the film is a section on it from Aaron Gerow's Kitano Takeshi (London: British Film Institute, 2007), a concise and knowledgeable interpretation of all of Kitano's films up to his remake of Zatoichi (2003). Professor Gerow presents a highly readable, cogent analysis of the film's radically minimalist approach, explaining to the potential viewers of the film how its "off-putting" qualities are in fact an outcome of directorial intentions. He discusses in detail (pp. 69-76) a relatively unimportant scene in which Azuma is asked to resign by the District Chief, and persuasively illustrates how the way Kitano cuts and arranges shots deconstructs drama and genre conventions (and, I might add, a sense of righteousness on both character's parts). 

In the end, though, Gerow's interpretation is auteurist, reading Violent Cop predominantly as a text both distances the viewers from "Beat" Takeshi the comedian, and creates an entirely new leading man for the cineaste Kitano Takeshi. This part may not be so easy to comprehend for those who are not privy to Kitano's amazing and unequalled run as a mega-entertainer in Japan. I highly recommend Professor Gerow's study to any student of cinema seriously interested in Kitano Takeshi. 

Launching Q Branch Academia Reviews

My day job still does not allow me enough time to properly do this, but I know that I will never get around to getting the present blog up and running again if I kept waiting for "enough time." One of my original ideas for the revived Q Branch was to set it up as a critical database cum personal notations for the audio-visual materials that to be used for my classes. Well, as it turns out, my students at UCD are less and less interested in watching motion pictures in class, and the equipment for media presentation are no longer well taken care of. My showings of The Epitaph and The Host during my Korean History class last year were met with student enthusiasm, but unfortunately the DVD player went dead in the middle of showing the latter, to my acute embarrassment. Sigh…

Honestly, given the crappy situation with humanities curriculum in a university in today's world, I don't know if I will get around before my retirement a course totally devoted to Asian movies. But for now, I am going to operate under the assumption that, if I write about those Asian (Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Southeast Asian) films, not just about the films themselves but regarding the accessibility and quality of the vehicles in which they are presented (to wit, Blu Rays and DVDs) and, most importantly, about how they could be deployed as instructional resources, somebody out there might find such jottings useful. Of course this public service orientation needs not be taken too seriously by anyone who reads my entries. I am doing this mostly for my own pleasure, partly to show off my collection, and partly to opinionate about other people's artistic achievements (which, wouldn't you know it, is always a great fun!). But a part of me, believe it or not, genuinely cares about what the motion pictures, animated features, Korean TV dramas and other media products could really teach the young 'uns about not just the Asian societies, cultures, histories, but the human condition as we know it. 

So here is what I will do: in addition to my usual analysis and opinionating, I will incorporate into the reviews of these select films/animated features/whatnot my musings about their potentials as classroom teaching resources. Can we ("instructors") actually show hyper-violent, disturbing thrillers such as Violent Cop or Battle Royale in classroom settings, and if we do, what could students be able to "learn" from them? Can we assign any cinematic version of Chushingura in an early modern Japanese history course as a legitimate interpretation of the changing ethos of the 18th century Japan? These and other questions might be addressed, to the best of my ability, in these entries devoted to the Asian media products. 

Oh, and I decided to classify these reviews under the "Q Branch Academia" rubric, inspired by the Arrow Video's "Academy" line of classic titles. Pretentious, I know, but what can I say? Pretentiousness is a sine qua non for most of my "productive" activities. So onward I march!

The first title to be covered under this new "Q Branch Academia" category isViolent Cop, Kitano "Beat" Takeshi's feature-film directorial debut. Don't tell me you expected a Miyazaki Hayao title, eh? (Not to worry, a Studio Gibhli Blu Ray may yet be covered in these pages sooner than later, after all)