So the new Holiday Guide presents a special new feature! Best Of. That’s right. I got some folks together and asked them to contribute a list of their top ten movies and top ten books. Along with an intro and some pimping of their stuff when I can, we’ll be doing one a day when I have one. I had nothing to do with these lists except soliciting them. The descriptions are the authors’ as are the picks. Remember, I do not write these. The people listed to.

Robyn has opinions. You will listen to them. Or else.

If you don’t have anyone on your list who likes any of this stuff, you should shun everyone you know. The world would be shinier and less stupid if everyone owned these twenty items.

Digital Versatile Discs: We’re mostly going for sets or box sets here.

(1) Chappelle’s Show - The Series Collection - The Boondocks is filling the void somewhat, but damn, do we need him back. If you don’t have these individually, here’s the whole shebang, including the kinda-sorta Season 3 that I didn’t care for all that much.

(2) The Ed Wood Box - The master at his best: Glen or Glenda, Jail Bait, Bride of the Monster, Night of the Ghouls, and the immortal Plan 9 from Outer Space. Plus a documentary about Eddie. It’s preferable to thePassport compilation because these discs have extras, including a documentary about Plan 9 that’s longer than the film itself….though the Passport box does include the hilarious Wood-written The Violent Years, which I highly recommend.

(3) Excel Saga - Complete Collection - Fucking insane and hilarious anime. A little dog named Menchi sings the closing-credits song: ‘If you’re going to eat me, please do it quickly/So that my flesh won’t become too tough.’ Yeah. Also recommended: Colorful, an anime all about dorky guys drooling over women’s panties.

(4) The Coen Brothers Collection - Five of the boys’ greatest early flicks. Excluding The Hudsucker Proxy (which Fox owns, and which I love), it’s basically their first ten years in the game.

(5) St. Elsewhere - Season 1 - The greatest series that has ever appeared on network television. If you disagree, YOU’RE WRONG.

(6) If…, O Lucky Man!, and Britannia Hospital - The Mick Travis trilogy, finally all available on DVD, directed by Lindsay Anderson and starring Malcolm McDowell. If you only know Malcolm from Clockwork Orange, Star Trek Generations, and the Halloween remake, you have some very pleasurable homework here. Or, um, the McDowell fan on your list.

(7) The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky - Fucked-up shit, yo. The cult classics El Topo and The Holy Mountain, plus
Jodorowsky’s early effort Fando y Lis, only available in this set.

(8) Martin Scorsese Collection - There are two Scorsese boxes. This one from Warner Home Video has After Hours, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, GoodFellas, Mean Streets, and his debut Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, a sort of dry run for Mean Streets. Then there’s the MGM box The Martin Scorsese Film Collection, which offers Boxcar Bertha, The Last Waltz, Raging Bull, and New York, New York (which just came out in a new 30th anniversary edition). Either one is a fine Scorsese 101, a crash course in perhaps America’s greatest living director.

(9) Blade Runner (Five-Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition) - Well, yeah. The Murnkay has already pimped this out the wazoo. But if we’re talking DVD sets that make perfect gifts? It’d be completely special-needs not to mention this one.

(10) Apocalypse Now - The Complete Dossier and Hearts of Darkness - A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse - First watch two versions of Coppola’s one-of-a-kind Vietnam epic. Then watch what he went through to make it. There are worse ways to spend a cold winter Sunday.

Thick Paper Things with Words:

(1) Naked Lunch: The Restored Text by William Seward Burroughs II. Essential hallucinogenic reading. A must for any home library or nuclear bomb shelter.

(2) H. P. Lovecraft: Tales (Library of America) by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The Library of America finally got around to giving a black-covered shout-out to Cthulhu Guy, with 22 stories handpicked by Peter Straub. If you want a good hardcover collection of HPL without having to pay through the urethra for an Arkham House edition, this is your best bet. Also recommended: Library of America’s equally surprising and welcome Philip K. Dick omnibus.

(3) Essential Howard The Duck by Steve Gerber and various artists. Yeah, the movie sucked. The comic was awesome. This compiles pretty much all the issues that matter, albeit in black and white. (There’s a hardcover color omnibus coming in March.)

(4) The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the American ’80s by Paul Slansky. If you’re a freak for all things ’80s, this breezy satirical book is a must-have. It focuses on the eight years under Reagan and all the political doofiness thereof, but also keeps an eye on pop culture through the years. Judd Nelson is dissed in a special sidebar.

(5) The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film by Michael J. Weldon. You can bet Quentin Tarantino read his copy until it fell apart. I did, too. You open it, you’re not likely to close it for a few hours.

(6) Danse Macabre by Stephen Edwin King. The Tall Man from Maine at his loosest. It’s basically him sitting across a table from you over beers (this was years before he needed to stop having beers) talking about horror fiction, horror movies, horror TV, and even horror radio. It stops in 1980, and I’ve always wished for a sequel so he could talk up the many major figures to emerge in the various horror media in the past 27 years.

(7) Roasting in Hell’s Kitchen: Temper Tantrums, F Words, and the Pursuit of Perfection by Gordon Ramsay. You enjoy the foulmouthed chef on Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares? This book sounds just like him, and it tells the inspirational story of a boy who grew up in chaos and near-poverty, decided to be a football star, got injured, decided to become a chef, kicked ass at it, and the rest is history.

(8) Owly by Andy Runton - The most inventive (and adorable) wordless comic book around. That link goes to the first volume, and there’s also Just a Little Blue, Flying Lessons, and A Time to Be Brave. If you have a young’un on your list and you want to get ‘em hooked on comics, this is the perfect gateway drug. In no time they’ll be reading Transmetropolitan and snorting crystal meth off a photo of William Gibson.

(9) H₂O by Howard Schatz. Famous for his underwater portraits. Absolutely stunning stuff.

(10) Can’t Get NoCan’t Get No by Rick Veitch. This guy has never stopped evolving as a comics writer/artist throughout his decades working in the medium, and this book is his oddest and most moving experiment yet.

Robyn would also like you to go buy First Person Feminist: Video Games and the Future. So go buy it! She says to. Duh?