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DVD Spine # 349

Beginning with the release of Citizen Kane on laserdisc in 1984 - and along the way pioneering the advent of widescreen formats, scene-specific and feature-length commentary, and the idea of a "special edition" release of a film for the home video market - The Criterion Collection has released somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand films over the last four decades. This output covers everything from the excess of ‘90s Bruckheimer-produced American blockbusters (Armageddon) to the pioneering efforts of the French New Wave (The 400 Blows) and from the existentialism of ‘70s car culture films (Two Lane Blacktop) to insightful and in-depth omnibus collections of films by directors ranging from Fassbinder to Merchant Ivory to Akerman to Rohmer. From the profane (Flesh for Frankenstein, The Night Porter) to the sacred (The Passion of Joan of Arc) to the sacredly profane (Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom), these films are as good a place as any in this culturally fragmented world to gain some initial exposure to the gamut of styles, nationalities, genres, and epochs that have defined the first century plus of filmmaking.

Considering that I have only seen a small fraction of these films to begin with, and most of those on the commercial/accessible side of things, I hope to use this new column to be as much of a learning experience for myself as anyone else who would care to follow along. By plunging into films I know next to nothing about, I hope to create fresh ideas and thoughts in my mind, and then couple that with some background information and context. It’s exhilarating, but also a little scary. Before I go jumping into structuralist feminist classics (Jeanne Dielman) or uncategorizable American avant garde (Schizopolis), I will take some baby steps with my initial columns, focusing on a pair of films by the writing team of 2004’s clever sea jaunty The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and 2009’s delightful animated romp Fantastic Mr. Fox (not a Criterion but much recommended).

In 1995, Noah Baumbach released his debut film as a writer/director - Kicking and Screaming. It came and went with at least a little fanfare, opening at the New York Film Festival and thrusting the 20-something neophyte in to the spotlight. But it received only very limited release, playing in barely 25 screens and earning not quite a million dollars. I have big and small picture takes on how the film, through no fault of its own, got swallowed up and misunderstood in its time, and why it has taken 15-odd years and Baumbach’s subsequent films to put it into perspective, for the minor, but pitch-perfect modern classic that it is.

Arriving on the heels of Tarantino’s rise to movie geek godhead status with Pulp Fiction (which, like Kicking and Screaming, features Eric Stoltz in a key supporting role) and coming not long after Whit Stillman’s droll “Americans abroad” tale Barcelona (which also features actor Chris Eigeman), Baumbach was conveniently categorized as some sort of cross between the two auteurs, albeit with about 99% less violence. While his characters are as in love with repartee, banter, and a clever putdown as the other two filmmakers, Baumbach is less concerned with highly detailed plot logistics, and more in tune with a story that meanders or drifts aimlessly, a fitting approach for a film about the various paralyses (emotional, psychic, romantic) facing a quartet of recently commenced undergraduates. In its marketing, poster art, etc. not much effort was expanded by distributor Trimark Pictures to make it look much different from other mid-'90s Generation X indie romantic comedies also featuring Stoltz, or Eigeman, or the ubiquitous Parker Posey. Thus, it was cursed with appearing to be both a trend jumper and fairly indistinguishable from others of its ilk.

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