The Film: Putney Swope (1969), now available via The Criterion Collection's Up All Night With Robert Downey Sr. box set
Why It’s an Inessential Essential: Filmmaker Robert Downey Sr. is probably more famous for being the father of Iron Man's megastar than he is for his scathing and surreal comedies. As part of the New York underground scene of avant garde filmmakers, Downey’s films, like the 1979 absurdist acid western Greaser’s Palace, are probably more linear and narrative-driven than most of his peers’ films. So it’s fitting that the stand-out title in the Criterion Collection’s new box set is both his most popular film and also his straight-est comedy.
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Good news for anyone who couldn't get enough of Kenneth Lonergan's flawed, fearless, possibly cursed epic Margaret: The forthcoming DVD will feature a 186-minute cut — 36 minutes longer than the version all but buried last year by Fox Searchlight before a cadre of critical supporters rallied on its behalf. The not-so-good news, if high-definition transfers of talky moral dramas are of particular importance to you: The 150-minute version will reportedly be the only one available on Blu-ray when it goes on sale July 10. But hey. We take what we can get in this world. [Amazon]
The Film: Being John Malkovich (1999), available today on Blu-ray and DVD via The Criterion Collection
Why It’s an Inessential Essential: It’s strange to think that a film with John Malkovich’s name in its title isn’t really considered to be “a John Malkovich movie.” Instead, Being John Malkovich is understandably normally associated with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze, both of whom really broke out thanks to BJM’s success. While Jonze reveals on The Criterion Collection’s new audio commentary track that he and Kaufman were dead-set on getting Malkovich for the film, Being John Malkovich could really be about any celebrity. At the same time, that’s one of the many things that’s funny about Being John Malkovich: It’s a metaphysical black comedy about what people projecting things onto celebrities that don’t necessarily have anything to do with those celebrities.
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The film: Jeremiah Johnson (1972), newly available on Blu-ray via Warner Home Video.
Why it's an Inessential Essential: The audio commentary on the new Blu-ray of Jeremiah Johnson suggests that director Sydney Pollack's time helming the serio-comic 1972 Western mirrored his inexperienced protagonist's uphill struggle to survive in pioneer America. Before making Jeremiah Johnson, Pollack directed episodes of such western tv shows as Frontier Circus and The Tall Man and even a feature-length western called The Scalphunters (1968). Still, Pollack is not normally associated with Westerns. And after hearing him talk about some of the travails he had filming Jeremiah Johnson, it's easy to see why the film was the late filmmaker's only Western.
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The film: Strange Fruit: The Beatles’ Apple Records (2012), available on DVD via Chrome Dreams
Why It’s an Inessential Essential: Clocking in at a mammoth 162 minutes, Strange Fruit: The Beatles’ Apple Records is an exhaustive new documentary about the short-lived record and film label that the Beatles used to release such artists as Badfinger and James Taylor. And while the absence of Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney and the lack of archival interview footage of the Beatles is striking (John Lennon only chimes in around the 135-minute mark), that’s also sort of liberating: The film takes a semi-critical look at why Apple, a label that was meant to have established artists promote new artists, never really took off.
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Dazed and Confused often gets lumped in with pot comedies and is celebrated on 4/20, but Richard Linklater’s first studio film transcends mere pot comedy and is still one of the most realistic teen movies ever made. It arrived at a time (1993) when teen movies were out of vogue, and it dared to take a trip down memory lane to a time remembered more with cringes than smiles. It’s arguably the most anti-nostalgia period movie ever, as acknowledged by Linklater himself. Digging in to the Criterion Collection extras (a Blu-ray Criterion release came out in October), here are some bits of evidence of that, tied to some of the movie’s most memorable lines.
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The Film: Night Call Nurses (1972), available on DVD in the new set Roger Corman's Cult Classics: The Nurses Collection via Shout! Factory.
Why it's an Inessential Essential: The respectability gap between director Jonathan Kaplan's recent and early-career work is pretty striking. Today, Kaplan works primarily in TV: He served as a co-executive producer for both E.R. and Without a Trace, and has also directed eight episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, two episodes of Brothers and Sisters and 40 episodes of E.R. But when Kaplan started his filmmaking career, he made sleazy but surprisingly sturdy exploitation pics like Truck Turner (1974), in which Isaac Hayes plays a bounty hunter that is very attached to beer and his cat, and The Slams (1973), a prison flick starring Jim Brown. Now Night Call Nurses, Kaplan's 1972 directorial debut, has just been reissued in a new collection highlighting four nursesploitation pics produced by schlockmeister Roger Corman. Kaplan's film is easily the best one in the set — and also a good indicator of Kaplan's then-nascent talent.
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The film: "Dogville" (2003)
Why it's an Inessential Essential: It's admittedly a little strange to think of this fairly well-known film as needing endorsement of any kind. However, Lionsgate recently released a new Nicole Kidman box set, packaging the first film in Lars von Trier's acerbic but still incomplete "America Trilogy" in the same collection as more high-profile and easy-to-swallow Kidman roles like Cold Mountain, Rabbit Hole and The Others. The juxtaposition is striking, and as the clear odd film out in the four-disc set, Dogville emerges as perhaps Kidman's most inessential essential.
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The film: The Broken Tower (2011), available on DVD via Focus World
Why it's an Inessential Essential: Straight out of New York University's Tisch School for the Arts, actor-turned-aspiring filmmaker James Franco helmed, starred in and adapted The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane, Paul Mariani's biography of the titular turn-of-the-century poet. Franco's moving film — his first feature as a director to be commercially released — depicts Crane (played by Franco, of course) as a frustrated artist striving for an avant-garde artistic ideal that he would never fully realize.
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Did you all have a good April Fool's Day? Either way, chances are it wasn't nearly as satisfying as that of the Criterion Collection, which turned its customary April 1 brio on the perfect target: Kindergarten Cop.
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What’s the Film: Citizen Ruth (1996), available on DVD and Hulu
Why it's an Inessential Essential: The premise — one woman’s attempt to have an abortion turns into a national debate and bidding war — was a bold choice out of the gate for writer-director Alexander Payne. Citizen Ruth is his first feature film, and like his subsequent work, it has a biting wit, absurdities from every corner, and deeply flawed characters.
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What's the Film: The Sitter (2011), new on DVD and Blu-ray via 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
Why it's an Inessential Essential: Director David Gordon Green’s transition from being an American indie darling to a reviled slacker-comedy pumper-outter is kind of astonishing. One minute, he’s being praised for being the Terrence Malick-inspired director of such films as George Washington and All The Real Girls; the next he’s being put down for making lazy pot comedies like Your Highness and The Sitter. But the thing of it is: Green’s comedies don’t deserve to be compared to good movies.
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With both an Oscars appearance and a No. 1 movie within the last month, Jonah Hill's 2012 is on pace to exceed even his stellar 2011. And the folks behind The Sitter know it, dropping the David Gordon Green-directed comedy on DVD and Blu-ray this week for prime placement amid Jonahmania. But they also know, as Green mentioned in interviews last year, that the 81-minute movie yielded a trove of deleted scenes — one of which Movieline is debuting right here and now.
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Movieline is pleased to introduce Inessential Essentials, a regular feature about some of the most intriguing — if not necessarily most obvious — new home-viewing options on the market. We begin today with a film practically doomed by controversy a quarter-century ago, resurrected for DVD and finally given the treatment it truly deserves this week on Blu-ray. — Ed.
What's the Film: The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), new on Blu-ray via Criterion Collection
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Of course, everyone remembers the 2009 blockbuster Terror at Blood Fart Lake, which cost roughly $20 to make and drew such accolades as "You can watch the 'trailer' [...] but I sincerely recommend that you don’t" and "It looks like a few goth boys and girls made it while they were drunk and high." Pretty spellbinding, to be sure — thus the sequel Return to Blood Fart Lake, new today on DVD. Who's pumped?
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