Media Party

Taxi Driver (Blu-ray)

(Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 4.5.2011)

Thirty-five years after its original release, what remains most unusual about Taxi Driver is the degree to which it invaded the culture, in spite of Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese's wildly uncompromising filmmaking strategies. Not only is their treatment of race, gender, violence and sexuality far more provocative than anything you'd see in a Hollywood film today, but the film has a fractured, open-ended narrative that hints at all kinds of elusive thematic schema (most famously, The Searchers-referencing cowboy/Indian/girl triangle of Travis, Sport and Iris) in support of a nihilistic, borderline misanthropic vision of contemporary America. Box office poison by any standard -- except the standard of 1976.

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Polanski Meets Fellini

As a followup to last week's item on the first audio commentary ever recorded, I have another treat for all you latent laserdisc enthusiasts. The Criterion Collection's 3-disc laserdisc box set of Fellini Satyricon included a fascinating, hour-long documentary (Ciao, Federico!) about the making of this notorious 1969 epic. In addition to showing Fellini in countless awkward flirtations -- sometimes with his wife, the great Giulietta Masina, just out of earshot -- this doc also offers a rare glimpse of Roman Polanski hanging out with Sharon Tate, only months before her death. The brief chat with Fellini is your standard getting-stoned-and-going-to-Disneyland movie set banter, but it's also a rare on camera meeting of two towering cinematic giants... and one iconic murder victim. Bittersweet to say the least. -- JD

The First Audio Commentary

Even in its mid-nineties heyday, collecting laserdiscs was always something of a niche activity. Today, it seems downright irrational. After all, just about every film ever released on laserdisc is now available, in upgraded form, on DVD or Blu-ray (there are exceptions, but most can be streamed or downloaded). However, the widespread dismissal of the laserdisc ignores an important piece of the puzzle: the great breakthrough of the format wasn't just high quality transfers of movies, it was extras. If you weren't around for the laserdisc revolution, you might mistakenly believe that DVD spawned the audio commentary, but it actually pre-dates the DVD by more than a decade.

GATEFOLDING, Vol. 32

Darling (Laserdisc)
The Criterion Collection

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GATEFOLDING, Vol. 21

The Player (Laserdisc)
The Criterion Collection

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Blaxploitation Marathon

by Jonathan Doyle and Neil Karassik
(with special guest Sarah Duda)

It's been almost three years since our last DVD Marathon, but this weekend we're bringing the tradition back! In honor of recent blaxploitation gem Black Dynamite and its impending DVD/Blu-ray release (expect a review from Neil Karassik in a few days), we're watching/re-watching some blaxploitation classics this weekend. It's Black Film History Month, suckas!

So keep checking this space. We just opened some forties (seriously) and we're kicking-things-off with Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song -- on Criterion laserdisc!

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The Wave of the Future