Last year, I was lucky enough to interview actress Carrie Coon while she was promoting Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. During the interviews, she mentioned how she and her husband, the famous playwright/ character actor Tracy Letts, were avid physical media collectors. Letts, who wrote Killer Joe and has acted in many movies and TV series, including Homeland, Ford v Ferrari, and the upcoming Kathryn Bigelow movie House of Dynamite, has always been an outspoken advocate of owning your favourite movies on disc. As such, when Letts became the latest celebrity invited to the viral Criterion Closet, he became the first to admit that he owns every disc in the closet. Check it out:
Even still, Letts picked a bunch of movies to recommend. His titles were a cool mix, with him leading things off with the Japanese horror anthology classic Kwaidan. His next title was Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, which he named as the best movie of the eighties, although, unlike Quentin Tarantino, who says the eighties were the worst decade for film, Letts says the decade as a whole is very underrated (he’s 100% right). His next choice was Steve James’ classic documentary Hoop Dreams, which he calls the greatest sports movie ever made and the best movie of the nineties. Then he chose Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, which is fifteen hours long. On the length, he said, “If you want to be a movie person, you turn off the streaming, put this on, put on some pants, sit down on the couch and take your dissonance like a man!”
He also picked Anthony Mann’s classic western Winchester’73 (which, unlike Fassbinder’s movie only runs 81 minutes. He also chose the Renown collection of Randolph Scott westerns, which are really worth checking out (The Criterion Channel ran them one month, and I devoured them), as well as Red River, the Alan Rudolph film Choose Me, Love Jones, and a few others.
On another note, I actually interviewed Letts for A House of Dynamite – those interviews go up this week, but while we were chatting, he gave Arrow Video’s recent restoration of A Fistful of Dollars high marks.
Does anyone reading this also own the entire Criterion Collection? Let us know in the comments!
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