Introducing the DVD Case Pantheon

As promised earlier this week, I am starting a new feature this week, called "DVD Case Pantheon". The idea is to randomly pick from a list of my favorite movies, and write about them. All in all, the list will be about 75-80 movies (depending on multi-movie cases), all of which reside on the top two shelves of my DVD case*.

Although most of my favorite movies are in this list, that doesn't necessarily mean all of them are. Some I don't have on DVD. Others have yet to come out on DVD. A few are sitting outside the pantheon, waiting to be rediscovered and take their rightful place among the august body of movies atop the case.



As such, every fourth movie I write about will be a "Challenger" movie. I will watch it, write about it, and determine if it gets a place in the Pantheon. If it does, it can be placed anywhere in the Pantheon. While the order of the DVD's technically doesn't matter, the sure bets are much higher, while the more questionable ones are down low. I can rearrange the list at any time, but the fact remains that when a challenger is selected, the last movie in the list will be bumped out. To be fair to this bumped out movie, I will also write a post about it, provided it hasn't already been written about.

There are some other rules. TV movies count, but they have to be of the length of a typical movie released in theaters. Thus, Pirates of Silicon Valley counts, but Emmet Otter Jugband Christmas (too short) and Ken Burn's The National Parks (too long) don't. TV episode two parters, which technically are as long as a movie, don't count either. Of course, I don't own any of those on separate DVD's, so that isn't really something to worry about.

The entries are decided by case, not by disc. As such, multimovie sets, like The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars count as one. This is why Attack of the Clones** is in the pantheon, but Jurassic Park, which I only own as the part of a set with the other two in the series, is left out.

It was a tough choice, but I left out the Pixar Shorts collection, both volumes. I just felt that giving two spots to full length movies was justified, as much as I love most of these short films. As a form of compromise, I will write about these in an upcoming post that is unrelated to this feature.

After I created the list, I decided to choose the order by random. Up first is 50/50, followed by Burn After Reading and The Wrong Guy. The first challenger will be Goodnight and Goodluck.

*I originally thought of doing the whole case, but that would have encompassed my entire collection, and ruined the idea of a challengers for a long while. Instead I filled the bottom two shelves with what is effectively my TV Series pantheon. I probably won't write about that, but we'll see.
**Yes, I know you can probably dredge up something I've written where I extoll the virtues of this film, but it hasn't aged well. I'll defend Revenge of the Sith and the underrated The Phantom Menace much more fervently than this one.