Now far from an underdog format, DVD has muscled VHS into oblivion. And why not? With clear presentation and room for exhaustive extras, DVDs provide the best viewing experience currently available. This is a golden age for entertainment, an era that preserves whole runs of classic TV shows in tidy boxes and puts film history at fans' fingertips. To help our readers better enjoy the moment–before another format makes all those shiny circles irrelevant–The Onion A.V. Club's DVD reviewers offer their takes on the best of the best from 2004.
Noel Murray
1. Freaks And Geeks: The Complete Series (Shout Factory!)
A decade or so from now, people may look to the one-season wonder Freaks And Geeks for the talent it attracted, like actor James Franco, creator Paul Feig, executive producer Judd Apatow, and frequent show director Jake Kasdan. But what's really miraculous is how that group understood the true hierarchy of high school, which centers not on clique clashes and tail-chasing, but on the division between the kids for whom high school is about grades, and those for whom it's a mandatory social club. Apatow, Feig and company have an ear for how teenagers sound when they're trying to squeeze the most out of the minutes of personal freedom that make the drudgery of public institutions bearable. Shout Factory!'s eight-disc set, packaged inside a lovingly assembled faux-yearbook and loaded with extras, sets a standard for fan-focused presentation that matches the series' achingly poignant, endlessly re-watchable quality.
2. Film Noir Classic Collection (Warner Bros.)
Film noir defines America by tracing its shadow, giving (as Robert Warshow wrote) audiences permission to say "no" to the culture's pervasive "yes." The genre's heroes are bastards, its villains have understandably human motives, and the stories wind continuously from slums to mansions and back again. Even noir's frequent flashbacks establish a world of mirrors: The past nips at the present, sometimes haunting characters by hovering within the same motion-picture frame. The five films in the DVD set Film Noir Classic Collection all deal indirectly with the guilt that runs beneath the American character, and the sense that someday someone might rightfully take away what we have. Freeze almost any shot of Out Of The Past, Gun Crazy, The Set-Up, The Asphalt Jungle, or Murder, My Sweet, and the composition alone tells a story. The characters are pinned and writhing, dominated by extreme shadows and forced perspectives that have the quality of a nightmare.
3. The Martin Scorsese Collection (Warner Bros.)
Warner Home Video's six-disc, five-title Martin Scorsese Collection jumps from three of Scorsese's earliest features (1967's Who's That Knocking At My Door, 1973's Mean Streets, and 1974's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore), to one from his mid-career "dark" period (1985's After Hours) and one from his renaissance (1990's Goodfellas), but the story the set tells about Scorsese's career is surprisingly coherent; it marks his development as a director and his desire to blend the naturalism of John Cassavetes with the expressionism of Max Ophüls. The DVDs come with partial commentary tracks by Scorsese and his cohorts, filled with loving tributes to friends and heroes like Brian De Palma, Kenneth Anger, and Federico Fellini, as well as the forgotten craftsmen of Hollywood B-movies and Abbott & Costello comedies. It's a miniature history of what the '70s Hollywood mavericks were all about: merging classic entertainment with counterculture righteousness.
Keith Phipps
1. The year in Altman (Various labels)
Dedicated and well-heeled fans would have to do the legwork and construct the box themselves, but an awesome box set could be assembled from the Robert Altman films released over the course of 2004. Criterion brought back the long-lost, haunting obscurity Three Women , the masterful (though truncated) cable political satire Tanner '88 , and the one-man Nixon Walpurgis Night Secret Honor , then capped the year with the sprawling L.A. dissection Short Cuts . One of the most entertaining entries of Altman's great early efforts, California Split popped up just in time to dovetail with the poker craze, while 2003's The Company proved Altman can still pull a modest masterpiece out of his back pocket. Now if only someone would teach him how to do a lively audio commentary…
2. Arrested Development: Season One (Fox)
The season-spanning box set is now part of any good-but-ratings-challenged series' stay-alive strategy, and this one removed the excuse from anyone not already watching the most ingenious TV comedy since Seinfeld. Seen in bulk, all the warm, merciless, restlessly inventive comedy confirmed that creator Mitchell Hurwitz might not have planned on making a classic, but he ended up with one anyway.
3. Dawn Of The Dead: Ultimate Edition (Anchor Bay)
A four-disc set with three different cuts of Dawn Of The Dead, multiple documentaries, and audio commentaries that seem to include everyone who watched the film, much less participated in it, may seem like overkill—and it probably is. But after years of conflicting releases, it's a zombie fan's dream to have all the versions of George Romero's scathing '70s satire back in print and in one place, even though its collected greatness puts 2004's Dawn Of The Dead to shame. (At least, apart from the remake's incongruously great opening 10 minutes.)
Nathan Rabin
1. Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume Two (Warner Bros.)
The fast, furious, kinetic cartoons Warner made during its golden age are an auteurist's delight. Each glorious explosion of anarchic energy bears the unmistakable imprint of its director, especially the cartoons of Tex Avery and Bob Clampett, which tended to be wilder, weirder, and more ingeniously deranged than anyone else's. Both directors got short shrift in the otherwise stellar first Looney Tunes Golden Collection, which focused heavily on the work of Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng. This second installment helps correct that injustice by extensively showcasing Clampett's madcap work, though Avery is still underrepresented and director Frank Tashlin—who went on to have an auspicious live-action career—is once again inexplicably missing in action. Hopefully, those oversights will be corrected in Volume Three.
2. Da Ali G Show: Da Compleet First Seazon (HBO)
In many ways, the rise of DVD technology has rendered cable obsolete. After all, anything worth watching on pay cable is bound to be available on DVD sooner or later. Case in point: the gut-bustingly hilarious first season of Da Ali G Show, which gave the culture-clash hijinks of Sacha Baron Cohen's ambush-comedy interview sensation an extra shot of adrenaline by moving the action from its native Great Britain to the U.S. The first season of the wanna-b-boy's interviews with oblivious straight men like C. Everett Koop and Buzz Aldrin runs a mere six episodes, but it packs enough irreverent, audacious laughs for an entire extended run.
3. SCTV Volumes 1 & 2 (Shout Factory!)
For years, SCTV seemed to exist largely as a legend, a sketch-comedy pioneer that changed length and networks repeatedly over the course of its illustrious career before essentially falling victim to convoluted song-rights boondoggles that kept it from ever receiving a proper video release. Shout Factory's expensive, unwieldy, but invaluable box sets rescued the show from the pop-culture dustbin, allowing old-time fans and students of comedy alike to experience the genius of one of TV's most brilliant ensembles (John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Rick Moranis, Catherine O'Hara, and Dave Thomas) operating at peak form.
Scott Tobias
1. The Battle Of Algiers (Criterion)
With the War On Terror raging without an end in sight, Gillo Pontecorvo's masterpiece remains the most urgent and relevant movie of the day, and it was made nearly four decades ago. Criterion's three-disc reissue restores the film's newsreel verisimilitude without sacrificing its texture, and the special features not only provide historical context on the struggle between French occupiers and Algerian terrorists, but also bring its lessons up to date. To that end, former counterterrorism expert Richard A. Clarke, who recently played a central role in the 9/11 hearings, participates in a fascinating roundtable on the connections between Pontecorvo's film and Gulf War II.
2. Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Complete Sixth Season (Fox)
Buffy fans generally feel the show peaked with seasons two and three, but its sixth season plays like one long, dark night of the soul, connecting the supernatural with the human more poignantly than ever. The "Big Bad" has never been less threatening—it's just a few geeks gone wild, really—but the battle-weary Scooby Gang, mired in a never-ending fight against evil, manifest their angst through black witchcraft, desultory sex, and an overwhelming sense of doom. The candy-colored musical episode ("Once More, With Feeling") is an obvious high point, but even that ends in what may be the series' saddest revelation.
3. The Rules Of The Game (Criterion)
Though now considered a classic, second only to Citizen Kane on most "best of" polls, Jean Renoir's stinging class critique was released to scandal in 1939, causing such an uproar that one man tried to light the theater on fire. Renoir was forced to cut the film from 94 to 81 minutes after opening day, and the film wasn't reconstructed to its current 106-minute form for another 20 years. Vive la différence: The two-disc DVD includes a revelatory side-by-side comparison between the shortened 1939 release and its 1959 restoration. What emerges is the film's poetry and underlying humanity, which was crudely frittered away in the editing room.