Berlin Alexanderplatz (Criterion Collection): It’s a landmark day for uber-cineastes as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s legendary 15-hour epic, originally filmed for German television, gets a lavish and anticipated Criterion edition treatment. No longer will film geeks have to shuttle around shabby VHS copies a friend of their uncle’s college roommate taped off The Z Channel back in ’81; the ambitious between-world-wars saga of one man’s downfall to the vices of the city arrives completely restored and, if you can believe it, a half-hour longer thanks to the PAL to NTSC frame rate conversion. Still, if you are up for devoting an entire waking day to one film, this is the way to do it. Extras on the seven-disc set include several documentaries and a 1931 adaptation of the novel that runs a paltry 90 minutes.
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Help!: Special Edition

Let’s cut right to the chase, shall we? – Help! gets a bad rap. Sure, upon its arrival in 1965, it may not have seemed as groundbreaking, as fresh and revolutionary as Richard Lester’s first collaboration with The Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night. And no, it doesn’t capture quite the same pure distillation of the Fab Four’s charm as was crystallized in the earlier black-and-white, “fictionalized documentary” which received a lavish restoration and DVD treatment from Miramax five years ago. Still, sophomore status and lack of interventions from the Weinsteins notwithstanding, Help! is a thoroughly enjoyable romp with an equally impressive soundtrack that should never have taken this long to make it to disc.
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My So Called Life: The Complete Series

It arrived – unbeknownst to much of the viewing public, after over a year on the shelf – as a breath of fresh air, a serious series about teens with minimal flair and predilection for high hairdos and jokey teenspeak. As per their standard for groundbreaking shows at the time, ABC – who between Max Headroom, Twin Peaks and this, were champions of killing off quality shows too soon before having that title aggressively wrestled from them by Fox – didn’t quite know how to market a series to an audience which wasn’t made up of thirtysomethings who watched… er, thirtysomething. Ironic, considering My So Called Life came from the same exec producers, Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick; twenty years later, DVD releases of it are heralded events while thirtysomething has yet to see the light of disc.
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Warner Directors’ Series: Stanley Kubrick

Back in 1999 when Warner Bros. released the first DVD set of Stanley Kubrick’s legendary film canon, there was a definite buzz amongst the film geek crowd of covetous delight. My buddy Mark, fresh out of film school, was one of the first to run out and snap up the set; me, I was surprisingly indifferent. “You’re gonna regret it later,” Mark would taunt, “You know you want it!” Of course I wanted it! – who wouldn’t want a petite library of movie history, of one of cinema’s true masters? But even then the possibility of the medium meant there were superior examples of discs with commentaries, hours of bonus footage… none of which appeared on that first Kubrick box. Though the bare-bones package was tempting, and later went out of print, I resisted… and I get the last laugh.
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Planet Terror

I’ve previously made my thoughts clear on the Siamese-twin-separation of Planet Terror from its Grindhouse sister, Death Proof, in a previous pick, so I’ll spare you the bitch-rant this time. Truth be told, both films are enough fun to recommend outside their original intended context… Robert Rodriguez’s no-holds-barred zombie bloodbath perhaps even more than Tarantino’s slasher pic. While the latter adheres to then upends the conventions of its chosen genre, Planet Terror dives straight into the night-in-hell apocalypse of your horror-loving dreams and delivers a nonstop thrill ride.
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