>>A few weeks ago there was a thread about the 10 best movies, part of an apparent fireworks finale of 10 best lists <g>. One of those I recommended in my not-quite-in-this-game comments in the thread was "The Friends of Eddie Coyle", a 1973 release that was recently reissued in a Criterion edition and which I was fortunate enough to rewatch over the holiday weekend.
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>>If you are unfamiliar with the Criterion Collection, this post is at least as much in praise of Criterion as of the movie. As always, it's a close call with their releases. IMO they have peerless taste in movies, they have plenty of budget to restore and reinvigorate the classics. those generally acknowledged and otherwise, and they operate in a cinematic world without borders. If you want to marinate in French New Wave movies for a summer, as I did a few summers ago, Criterion has you covered. Italian movies? Check. Japanese, English, Russian, Swedish (lots of Bergman), German, some Hong Kong like Wong Kar-Wei ("Chungking Express", "In the Mood for Love"), on and on. Even some underappreciated American releases like "The Ice Storm" and "Paris, Texas." The Criterion treatment also includes pristinely restored prints and extensive extras and liner notes / essays which enhance your appreciation of the movie. You pay more but the money is well spent IMO. Few of them are what one would describe as hard to get through -- film is, after all, a visual medium -- but they are not mindless blather to zone out watching for a couple of hours, either.
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>>So, this movie. It has always had its adherents but in its time not too many people placed it in the movie pantheon. Which in fact they still aren't, but it's a very good movie. Such movies were common in the golden age of American movies, the 1970s and 1980s, when the old shackles had been thrown off and creativity bloomed. "Eddie Coyle" was exactly the kind of movie that was overshadowed in its time and benefits from a delayed spotlight. Robert Mitchum may never have been better. It is very specific to time and place in that nail you to the spot way so much great fiction has. Top rate dialogue, much of it lifted directly from the source novel by George V. Higgins. For a couple of hours you are IN Boston in the early 1970s, and not the nicest parts or the nicest people, either.
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>>You can get it from Amazon for a good price considering what you are getting. No reason IMO not to buy from one of the resellers of new copies (descendants of Eddie Coyle, possibly) and save a few bucks. My understanding is Amazon does a reasonable amount of monitoring its resellers. I have bought that way many times, including a number of Criterions, without incident.
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>>Check out the customer comments about Mitchum and the movie.
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http://www.amazon.com/Friends-Eddie-Coyle-Robert-Mitchum/dp/B001TIQT6G/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1291081559&sr=8-1>>
>>More general info about Criterion titles ---
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http://www.criterion.com/library/dvd>>
>>Any ardent movie fan will debate the inclusion of some of them. But isn't that part of the point of loving the movies? <g>
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>Completely agree with everything here. As a big fan of the Criterion Collection and The Friends of Eddie Coyle (both book and movie) , and French New Wave I'd also suggest that if you have a good library system you may find all this stuff available there. Certainly is here in the Cuyahoga County library system where I can usually order them on line and get them faster even than from Netflix.
I had not thought of looking for Criterion editions at the local libraries but will make a point of it. They have taken a hit, like about everyone else, in the economic malaise and recently had to give up one of their best features. There was a cooperative (for lack of a better word) of local libraries, most of them small ones with limited space. You could reserve books online and if it wasn't stocked by your nearest library it would be transferred there from another library in the group that did have it in stock. Nice system. Unfortunately it is defunct, at least for now, due to the disappearance of funding. If your local libe doesn't have it you are back in the free enterprise system.
Please don't get me started about Netflix. I am steamed at them. I was an early adopter, probably one of the very first, and have ponied up my money every month practically since they hung out their shingle. You probably heard about their repositioning last week, trying to switch customers from DVDs to streaming videos. They jacked up the price of DVD subscriptions from $16.99/month to $19.99/month for 3 DVDs out at a time, and introduced an unlimited streaming video plan for $7.99/month. They claimed at the same time that their library of streaming videos has expanded greatly. This strategic move was no surprise to anyone. As CEO Reed Hastings has said many times, we named our company Netflix, not DVDs By Mail. And now they feel technology has caught up to their vision.
I did some due diligence. The same day I received the notification from Netflix I received an email from Redbox about this week's new offerings. (New from them, anyway. I am sure you know they have an agreement with the studios to delay renting new releases for a month or so, in order not to encroach upon DVD sales and higher priced rentals). I checked out the top four or five new rentals from Redbox on Netflix and all were available for streaming. So I switched. Which, BTW, is an irrevocable step -- you can go back to the new, higher priced, DVD rental plan but you can't go back to the plan you were on.
Buyer's remorse came a couple of days later. I had printed out my DVD queue of new and upcoming releases and attempted to add them to my new streaming queue. Oh oh. There were 13 DVDs in the queue and only one of them is available for download. Apparently my taste of obscure, artsy fartsy, and foreign flicks are not in the forefront of streaming titles. If you want to watch a mainstream Hollywood movie the Netflix streaming plan will probably work for you. It isn't working for me. What's worse is I feel a bit misled and herded. Not absolving myself -- obviously I should have done more due diligence -- but this is my first buyer's remorse with Netflix.
