Lost in Criterion

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s exploration of self The Double Life of Veronique is a subtly surreal and beautiful film, yet much of our conversation is centered around coming to terms with the essays included in the Criterion release, particularly the one written by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

We haven’t seen a lot of silent films in the Collection so far, and we have never seen a movie with a bigger left field ending than this particular film. GW Pabst’s Pandora’s Box has a lot of problems, and a just frankly amazing last 10 minutes. It’s absurd, and I love it.

Graham Greene called his thrillers “entertainments”, which sounds dismissive of his own work but really it was an accurate contrast to the more heavy Catholic novels he apparently preferred to write. Greene himself adapted two of his entertainments to film for director Carol Reed, one being The Third Man and the other (and first) being this week’s episode The Fallen Idol (1948) adapted from a shor...

Jane Campion’s Sweetie takes a fairly realistic look at mental illness in the real world. Though unlike Kerrigan’s film where the world ignores the main character until things get much worse, Sweetie’s protagonist is coddled by her loved ones…until things get much worse. Both are intense in their own ways, but Sweetie, true to its name, is a little easier to swallow. At least until the end.

The story of a corrupt businessman seeking office to better enrich himself while actively endangering the lives of others, the political party that supports him because they’ll get rich, too, and the political system so intent on absolving itself that it lets him get away with it. Happy Fourth of July, America.

Lodge Kerrigan’s Clean, Shaven is intense. It’s not entirely clear what exactly is happening within the film narrative and what is just the main characters auditory (and possibly visual) hallucinations. But one thing that is clear is that the public and the authorities do not know how to compassionately react to our main character. So quick point, however you feel about police as a group, it’s not...

Alfonso Cuarón has made some really great movies, a few masterpieces, and at least one sex romp that may be a satire of an HIV awareness campaign for encouraging monogamy. Guess which one the Criterion Collection makes us watch this week? It’s the sex romp one. Ultimately the target seems more than a little misguided, but the movie’s still pretty good.

The Japanese horror films from the 60s that the Collection has served us have been nothing if not interesting. Stylistically, though, Nobuo Nakagawa’s Jigoku (1960) blows everything else out of the water. Certainly Kwaidan is a great film, but Jigoku blows it out of the water with an acid trip through Buddhist hell. Unfortunately, the rest of the film serves to just get us to hell as quickly as po...

This week we spend too much time talking about Franco to lay a floor for discussing The Spirit of the Beehive as a political film. Of course, even without that context it’s a masterpiece of a movie, visually stunning and stylistically perfect. Also it has Frankenstein. How did we make it through this episode without making a Francostein joke? The world will never know.

Over a year ago we watched Divorce Italian Style and decided that there was ample evidence that film was an attack on Fellini, instead of the attack on Sicilian culture Germi maybe thought it was. This week it’s harder to ignore that Germi is decidedly punching down as he heaps a national issue onto a certain region. Still it’s a funny movie, so there’s that.

We last heard from Noah Baumbach as the cowriter of Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. One of our many guests on that 300th episode, Ben Jones-White, insisted that when we got around to doing Baumbach’s own feature debut he should join us, and nearly a year later we make good on that offer. Kicking and Screaming shares a lot of DNA with movies we love in and out of the Collection....

Near the top of this week’s episode Adam once again goes on a short rant about the Criterion Collection’s naming conventions as if there is a logic to any of it. There isn’t. With slight distance I think the boys would be more apt to agree that all of the moral tales of are critiques of various aspects of what we would now call toxic masculinity. In it, though, even with this last episode, we get...

This outing I think Eric Rohmer may have been trying to make a parody of Lolita by introducing a woman with a predilection for underaged men who convinces her male friend to try to seduce a couple underaged young women, but like as a goof . He gets a little too involved.

I like to believe we’ve reached the point in Six Moral Tales where it becomes clear that the Rohmer himself is condemning the behavior of the men in his movies, considering the men in this week’s film are nearly completely irredeemable. But in an interview accompanying the film Rohmer says that he understands the audience not liking the men, but then just laughs and moves on. Does he also hate thi...

In the third Moral Tale we finally meet a fully rounded female character, so round in fact that she gets a name in the title! We also get to finally deal with moral philosophy that while we don’t agree with at least gives us something to talk about in the form of Counter-Reformation Catholicism’s mirror of Calvinism and a discussion of game theory-based Christian belief. Also both of these coming...

In our second Moral Tale we find another jerk being mean to another woman, but this one has a bit more substance perhaps. It still doesn’t really work for us, but hey whatever. The Criterion releases for each Moral Tale just full of material and Suzanne’s Career also brings us an opportunity to watch and discuss Nadja in Paris (1964), a short clearly meant to encourage American high schoolers to s...

We kick off a boxset of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales with one starring Barbet Schroeder (who produces the entire series) as a jerk who mistreats a woman while his heart belongs to another. This is largely the basic plot of each of the Moral Tales, and if you find that statement reductive or dismissive then boydog are you not going to like any episode in this series. Still some of them connected b...

Powell and Pressburger make some of the best English-language films we’ve seen. But their wartime propaganda films are among the most, lets say, controversial we’ve discussed. Was Colonel Blimp a good movie? Maybe. Did it have among the worst morals we’ve seen in any film in the Collection? Almost certainly. But A Canterbury Tale combines the terribleness of The Archers’ wartime morality with a mo...

I can’t, and will not try to, speak to the nature of the Gorilla Foundation’s current model, but the one recorded in Barbet Schroeder’s 1978 documentary on Penny Patterson’s attempts to teach Koko a modified version of American Sign Language appears to lack a certain rigor that Pat and I question. Pat, having been an anthropology undergrad, has seen and critiqued the film before. While Schroeder d...

We spend a lot of time this week talking about Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, and on the one hand I feel a bit bad in seeing one Chinese language film and talking about it a lot in comparison to one of the only other Chinese language films the Collection has given us, but on the other Edward Yang’s Yi Yi came out the same year and is Love’s equal in nearly every way and Love is a masterpiece...

You all don’t know this, but this is our first recorded episode in about six weeks and I’m so glad we have Equinox to take that blow. Equinox is two films, the first made by a bunch of kids who would grow up to be the best visual effects artists in American film, the second sold to Jack Harris with additional footage shot by Jack Woods. It’s a ridiculously bad film in either cut, but one with asto...

When I first saw that our agenda with the Collection was bringing us another film about a teenage girl’s sexual discovery I was…nervous. We talk about those nerves quite a bit this week, but Molly Haskell’s essay included with the release goes a long way to qualm those fears and explain why they are, for once, perhaps unfounded. Maurice Pialat’s A nos amours (1983) could have easily been something...

Slacker was one of our favorite films we’ve done for Lost in Criterion, but Richard Linklater’s follow-up Dazed and Confused’s marketing as a stoner comedy meant we know a lot of people who love the movie whose opinions we find suspect. Though, to be fair, a lot of people we know whose opinions should be trusted also like the movie. Anyway, we have a sprawling conversation on the dangers of nostal...

After our run of later period, more biographical Louis Malle films a few weeks ago we swing back with his first feature length, which is a different sort of master work than Au Revoir les Enfants but still sticks with me. Elevator to the Gallows, or Lift to the Scaffold as the British (and Pat) demand to call it, is a noir murder with a bit of Bunuelian stream of consciousness thrown in and a leve...

Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA provides us with a lot of talking points about Pat’s family history (and Appalachian geography’s effects on politics), the Anthropology version of the observer effect (and when keeping your subjects alive means breaking cardinal documentary rules), and what exactly constitutes a living wage (when income well above the today’s Federal minimum isn’t even enough fo...