What makes these Criterion discs so great exactly?
I don’t know about newer releases (Armageddon and whatnot), but Criterion does a wonderful job of restoring old films. I’m thinking specifically about Akira Kurosawa classics like Seven Samurai or Rashomon, or Bergman’s Seventh Seal. The difference between regular releases and Criterion releases, especially for these older B&W films, is like night and day.
Criterion editions are usually the best way to watch Terry Gilliam movies. They treat their versions well in any case.
If it’s a 3-disc set it takes to get the whole thing there, so be it. Not such a huge problem with Blu-Ray, though :)
If they start appearing here, it’s seriously time to consider Blu-Ray (probably my next laptop, if I get a BD+HDMI version).
Couple of things: For one, they invented the commentary track with their 1984 laserdisc issue of the original King Kong. For another, the quality of the bonus material in their DVD sets is totally fucking amazing, like including the entire hour-long film made for Italian television, A Director’s Notebook, on the bonus disc of Fellini’s 8 1/2 or the wealth of stuff they packed into the Brazil set. (My favourite bonus might be the interviews Godard did with Fritz Lang, included on the Contempt release, where Godard complains about how hard it is to make movies in France and Lang says “Yeah? Try making them in NAZI GERMANY.”)
But the real selling point of Criterion is the reference-quality transfers. When you buy a Criterion DVD, you can be assured that the film is assembled from the best prints available to them at the time, lovingly transfered. If you’re old enough to remember when you could only see these movies in crappy 16mm projections at your local art house or film studies classes, some of these discs can be a revelation. Until I watched the DVD of 8 1/2, for example, I never knew what the dialogue was in some key scenes because every print I ever saw had white titles that would disappear against anything shot on a white background.