Oh, little cockeyed C...my typographical lust-object....

So lemme tell y'all how yendi ruined my life. Well, okay, with the help of a little capital C.

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this here before—gods know I go on about it at length with anyone I meet in realspace who doesn't mace me fast enough—but it's possible that I might have a wee teensy smidgen of an obsession with the Criterion Collection. For those unfamiliar, Criterion is a series of DVDs (and BluRay discs and even laserdiscs back in the day) consisting mainly classic, art house, independent and foreign films from over the decades, with occasional forays into things like TV and concert releases and why-is-this-sitting-on-a-shelf-with-Akira-Kurosawa stuff like Armageddon and The Rock. The Criterion Collection is, to put it mildly, total film snob candy. The films they put out are very carefully selected, with only a few titles being added to their rosters each month, leaning heavily toward the critically acclaimed, the influential, the hard-to-find and the controversial. Once a movie has been chosen for the collection, it gets the full spa treatment: loving and painstaking restoration, the best digital transfer obsession can buy, and so many extras crammed into the clamshell you can practically smell the commentary tracks leaking through the plastic—and all of this done with the help of the film's director, if s/he is still alive. Then all of this is wrapped in some of the most gorgeous graphic design you'll ever see, and affixed with the capital C Criterion logo and a spine number, unique to that title forever more.

I don't know what it is about these damned things, but I practically drool on my turtleneck every time I come into contact with a Criterion release. I'm up to 17 titles, and I protect the ones I own like a brooding hen, making sure they're tucked away on their shelves and sleeping peacefully. Meanwhile, I'm plotting ways to get my sweaty little mitts on the one's I don't own, occasionally contemplating outright criminal activity to raise the dough (these suckers ain't cheap). It's so bad that i get this way over the ones I know for a fact I'll never ever watch—I have a weak constitution with a low horror and gore tolerance, which means stuff like Saló and Antichrist and Sweet Movie would send me shrieking from the room, and yet I still find myself in Barnes and Nobles with them in my hands cooing, "Waaaaant…WAAAAANT…"

And when a true favorite of mine comes out on Criterion, it's game over, people. For instance, Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street is consistently on my personal top 20 list, but it's been out of print for ages. When I found out that it'll be out at the end of this month, I gasped loudly enough that figmentj thought I'd burst a blood vessel somewhere serious. Ditto Harold and Maude, due in April. Anatomy of a Murder is in there somewhere, too. I'm unemployed and broke, and still willing to skip eating for a few days if it'll mean getting these things onto my shelves.

I have a problem, folks.

Oh, and yendi? He posted several years ago about his own impressive DVD question, and by way of audience participation ended his post with, "So how many Criterion DVDs do you own?" I had to stare at my shoes and stutter, "Um…none…," shamefaced. That would change. Hoo boy, did it change.

(By the way, for the both of you who care about such things, my Criterion holdings are listed behind the cut.)

( Gods, please, don't encourage the film snob. You'll only get pedantry on your shirt. )