I realize I've pretty much done away with Tuesday DVD recommendations, but great googly moogly there's a lot of great stuff out today.
Upgraded issues of Battleship Potempkin, Breathless, and Days Of Heaven; a Burt Lancaster boxed set that's a bit of a mixed bag, but which features the hugely enjoyable swashbucklers The Flame And The Arrow and His Majesty O'Keefe; the long-awaited DVD debuts of O Lucky Man!, Our Hitler and Under The Volcano; and a second boxed set dedicated to the great Italian fantasist Mario bava.
The big news ought to be spiffed-up, digital remasters of a bunch of Stanley Kubrick pictures, including the first high-def issues of 2001 and A Clockwork Orange. Curiously, I've read much promo material for these releases online, and plenty of breathless recitation of specs and extras, but I've not read anything to tell me how the films themselves look in this format.
2001 in high-def would almost certainly reveal things we were not meant to see--wires on floating objects, thick matte lines. Unless, of course, the remastering included digital removal of wires, tweaking of effects shots, that sort of thing.
Either way, however, it wouldn't be the film that Kubrick, the most obsessively perfectionist of directors, intended us to see. He was notorious for his devotion to detail, not just in the shooting, editing, even the processing of his films, but for how they were exhibited. He wanted his work to be seen by us as he saw it himself.
In his lifetime, Kubrick was rather indifferent to how his films looked on home video, because that was not his chosen medium. He wanted his work shown on the big screen, or possibly not shown at all. Hard to know what he would have made of the brave new digital world, in which theatrical exhibition is barely a stop on a film's journey to public consciousness--he might have embraced it, condemned it, ignored it. We'll never know.
I would not want to live in a world in which I couldn't see 2001, a film which probably had as profound an impact on my life as...well, anything, ever. Still, there's a part of me that would rather not see it at all than see this new edition. It's simply passed through too many hands on its way to the digital realm to quite be considered Kubrick's 2001, or mine.
