Good God! I Need To Change My Panties

This is so dork-tastically awesome. I've got a film geek's hard-on for the Criterion Collection, but a cheapskate's abhorrence of the often $40+ price tags. (For the record, if anybody out there has a love for me that is priceless & would like to prove it, they can buy me this & I will worship them forever. For those whose love is budgeted, the recently released 50-title Essential Art House - 50 years of Janus Films collection will get you blind adoration for at least a decade.) So news of their Eclipse sublabel makes me quiver all over.

The Eclipse collection is dedicated to releasing series of noteworthy films from noteworthy directors that don't quite conform to the Criterion mission of "gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplements", but are nonetheless essential viewing for serious fans & have heretofore been unavailable outside the big city art-house circuit, unless you could get yer mitts on a crappy VHS copy.

In fact, one of the only times I have truly regretted not living in New York City was during last fall's Kenji Mizoguchi retrospective - I mean, I had had the good fortune to see all six of those titles previously in 16mm prints, but that was years ago, & there's simply no such thing as too much Guch & no such thing as Guch DVD, 'cept Crit's recent release of Ugetsu (a spectacular work whose richness inspired probably the best piece of theory I've ever written, regarding Noh theater's influence on the film). So to read that Eclipse intends to correct this grievous error & at some point release a Mizoguchi series, well, it provides the inspiration for this post's title.

While one could quibble for days about Criterion's choices (for instance, I would argue that Ozu's Late Spring & Early Autumn are surely worthy of the luxe treatment), the point is that these films are finally going to be available on DVD, at prices averaging about $15 per title.

And that's something that every cheap-ass film fuck should get happy about. Hot damn!