Time & Tide
Cowboy Bebop Vol. 1-6
Ben Folds Five: The Complete Sessions At West 54th
Although I just bought a copy of The Duellists that looks beautiful compared to the faded prints you usually saw on TV or VHS. So it may work it’s way into my favorites list.
IIRC, I saw a great many copies of it in the $5 DVD bin at Wal*Mart the other day…where I picked up $5 copies of The Man With Two Brains and My Blue Heaven. Sure they’re extraless and in revolting “standard” format (why is full-screen “standard” for features orginally resleased in widescreen? makes no sense…).
Most of my favorites have been mentioned already: LoTR: FoTR EE, Monty Python & The Holy Grail…
I do treasure my bare-bones Hudsucker Proxy disc, though…
I second this; I own The Gore Gore Girls and Wizard of Gore, both of which came from Something Weird, and they are fantastic.
Another one you can’t go wrong with are Troma DVDs. They load them with, literally, hours and hours of extra scenes, quizzes, interviews, virtual tours of their headquarters, previews, easter eggs, etc. etc. Probably my favourite is Terror Firmer, which actually has 2 disks.
And the DVD for Memento is fantastic. Not only do you have to take various psychological exams to get to watch the movie, but you have the option of watching the movie in chronological order, which is a completely different experience than watching it as it was originally released. You notice a whole lot of things you never noticed before. Plus, I mean: Guy Pearce. Often shirtless. Nuff said.
Re-Animator – the 2-disk “Millenium Edition” version in the Luminol-green case. One of the best [cast] commentary tracks ever. (Plus, the movie kicks ass.)
Damn submit button… I meant to mention the Big Trouble in Little China special-edition. Two DVDs packed chock full of neon and 80’s cheese. The John Carpenter music video is a very nice addition.
Terror Firmer is certainly one hell of a package. 3 commentary tracks, deleted scenes, alternate footage, film-to-comic comparisions, music videos, trailers, and tons of cool Easter Eggs (I especially like the code for the R-rated version, which gives you a minute of the first scene and then goes right to the end credits )
The Farts Of Darkness documentary is awesome as well. It’s refreshing to see a fly-on-the-wall docu (complete with drunken actors, incredible production scheduling snafus, and the esteemed director acting like a vicious screaming asshole) instead of those boring fluff pieces that come with every DVD…you know, where the actors loved working with each other, and everybody loved the director, and everyone loved the finished film, etc., ad nausem.
Troma claims they’ve outdone themselves for the upcoming 2-disc DVD of *Toxic Avenger 4. * I can’t wait.
I agree. Some of the industry magazines are saying that it is the best quality video transfer done to date for DVD. They decided to use two disks to hold the movie, and then put all the extras onto two additional disks. That meant that they did not need to digitally compress the movie anywhere near as much as if they were going to squeeze it all on to one or two disks. The result is a phenomenal image – sparkling, spectacular, beautiful. So, from a technical standpoint one of the best ever.
From a movie standpoint, the extended version includes extensions to over half of the scenes in the movie, plus 3 or 4 entirely new scenes. These additions really help bring the movie together; it’s a better movie than the theatrical release. The most important additions, IMHO, are (1) at the beginning – a new scene called “Concerning Hobbits”, where Bilbo is writing his memoirs, which brings you into the life of the Shire less abrubtly than in the original, and (2) the extended and additional scenes in the elven forest (Lorien?) – the additional portrayals of Galadriel (sp?) make her much more sympathetic (in the original, the main impression was of the evil ice queen).