Most critics simultaneously look forward to and dread awards season. We get to see slightly higher quality films, and the studios begin to act a lot nicer towards us -- no more horror remakes that are not screened for the press. But on the downside, a lot of prestige pictures can get tiring. The worst part of all is the extreme length that most films get away with this time of year. Quite a few films this year get close to the three-hour mark, and most of them run longer than two hours. If you look at the history of the Oscar winners, length has always been an important factor. But this does not have to be the case; many award-worthy films have used their time wisely and succinctly.

1. Duck Soup (1933)
Judd Apatow, please take note. While I enjoyed Knocked Up and Superbad as much as anyone, it just won't do to continue making comedies over two hours long. I found many great comedies that run less than 80 minutes, including several from Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, W.C. Fields, and even one each from Jerry Lewis (The Bellboy) and Woody Allen (Zelig). But this Marx Brothers classic tops my list for its uncanny speed and anarchy. It's like watching a crazy lawnmower ripping all over the yard, but at the end of the run, everything falls exactly into place.

2. Following (1998)
Before he became the king of summer blockbusters (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight) and before he made one of my favorite movies (Memento), Christopher Nolan scraped together this equally impressive crime thriller in black-and-white, running just 69 minutes. It jumbles the three acts together over a fractured timeline but very cleverly leaves clues that tie them all back together. Jeremy Theobald plays a man who enjoys following people, but gets himself into deep and unexpected trouble. See also Shane Carruth's exceptional, low-budget time travel head-scratcher Primer (2004).

What goes around comes around. Back when the wonderful laserdisc was just beginning to find its stride, and the serious movie buff could actually find most of the titles he or she was longing to see, the DVD came along and all but wiped out this entire format, this entire subculture. Now, at the dawn of 2008, it looks as if the war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD may be coming to a close. Will one or the other format catch on? Will the regular DVD become extinct? No one can say. But when it comes to movies I'd like to see, none of this matters. 2007 brought us some amazing DVDs and DVD box sets, and the following is my wish list for titles I'd like to see produced in 2008.

(Note: I deliberately left off titles that are already available on import DVDs, such as Satantango, Celine and Julie Go Boating, Man of the West, Johnny Guitar, Lost Highway, Napoleon, The Dead, the Jean Vigo collection, and many more.)

1. Othello: 3-Disc Special Edition
In 1992, Orson Welles' daughter Beatrice authorized a "restored" version of the film that played in theaters. But purists claimed that her film deviated from what her father originally intended, and so the Criterion Collection released a laserdisc edition of Welles' original cut, the one that played at Cannes in 1952. Beatrice apparently blocked this earlier version, and so now only the 1992 cut is on DVD (and out of print besides). My fantasy DVD would be a three-disc box set (from Criterion, of course), collecting both the 1952 and 1992 cuts, as well as Orson's impossible-to-find documentary Filming Othello (1978), which is the last of his completed films I have yet to see. (There are clips of it on the Criterion Othello laserdisc.) On a side note, of Welles' thirteen completed films, seven are available on U.S. DVDs and four others are available overseas. That leaves only Othello and Filming Othello. Let's get on it!

I've often wondered why there are still films not yet available on DVD. After ten years, we should be able to watch anything on our TV that we once watched in the theater. Digital, widescreen, browse-able. DVDs are supposedly soon to be replaced and I still can't rent some of my favorite recent films (Toto the Hero; Saint Clara) on the decade-old format. Even The Garbage Pail Kids Movie is available on DVD from MGM Home Video, but Robert Bresson's Les Anges du Péché, which was also theatrically released by MGM in the U.S., has no American DVD. Every film made by a cinema legend like Bresson should be out there for us to curiously study, if not also enjoy.

Fortunately there is a new DVD of Les Anges du Péché, the filmmaker's first feature film, out from the French company Gallimard. No worries for us Americans, either; the DVD is region-free and includes English subtitles. I guess you have to order it from a French site, but as I don't understand a bit of the language, I have no idea how to navigate any of them (Robert-Bresson.com lists Chapitre.com and Cine-memento.fr). According to this new review, the film, about a woman released from prison who joins a convent, wasn't even close to being Bresson's favorite. And looking back, some critics have thought of it as a lesser work from the director, but it is certainly worth seeing for any film enthusiast, especially fans of Bresson's more well-known works (Au Hasard Balthazar; Pickpocket; L' Argent). The DVD features a digital restoration by the Centre Nationale de la Cinématographie and a few bonus features that are only in French with no subtitles.

This fall, the British Film Institute will present a full retrospective of Bresson's films. Hopefully some place in America, maybe NYC's Film Forum, can do the same soon with the restored version of Les Anges du Péché. Typically once a film is shown with a new print, it isn't long before it gets an American DVD release, too. We can do just fine with Gallimard's for now, but I'd like to see Criterion or another company put the thing out with subtitled supplements and maybe a commentary from a film historian or critic.

[via GreenCine Daily]