Lost in Criterion

Robert Altman has had a long and varied career and Pat and I have only been familiar with his commercial highlights: M.A.S.H., Popeye -- plus for some reason I've seen Gosford Park and A Prairie Home Companion. None of them in the Collection though Altman does make quite a showing. His first film that Criterion presents to us is 3 Women from 1977, a surreal and dreamlike drama of identity theft, w...

Scenes from a Marriage started life as a 6-part miniseries on Swedish television one episode per week from April 11 to May 16, 1973, and it is best experienced in that pacing: watch an episode then let each scene sink in before you move on. Six weeks may be too much time, but six nights may be just as good. Plumbing the depths of a relationship so perfectly its no surprise that an international re...

With Salvatore Giuliano (1962) Francesco Rosi strove not just to make a biopic of the famed Sicilian outlaw, but to make a neo-realist docu-drama. Pat calls it a proto-History Channel special, and there's strong comparisons, but Rosi's film goes beyond that low bar. One because the film is simply so expertly shot, but also because unlike, say, Ancient Aliens, Rosi sought to only include the facts...

It takes a special talent to piss off the liberals, the conservatives, the church, the Nazis, and the Resistance, but Henri-Georges Clouzot is a special talent. Of course, holding a mirror up to German-occupied France during the war is a pretty easy way to garner that reaction. Clouzot did just that in Le Corbeau, his 1943 proto-noir. And aside from getting everyone mad at him, he also made it wit...

Ok, so Pat doesn't like scary movies, but the Japanese horror films we've seen so far have been something else entirely. Kwaidan, for instance, was a more a collection of folk tales that happened to have ghosts involved. Similarly, Kaneto Shindo's 1964 film Onibaba isn't much of a horror film, though it's not exactly a folk tale, either. More of the story of the "true" inspiration that became the...

I knew nothing about Tunes of Glory before watching it except that Ronald Neame directed it and Alec Guinness stars as a Scotsman. Since all the Neame films we've seen so far have been delightfully fun and Guiness heavily made up is good for a laugh or a cringe, I'll be honest I was expecting this 1960 film to be a bit of a lark. It is not. It is so not. And it is wonderful.

Sam Fuller is a pulpy director, but that's not a problem when it's fun. The issue with Pickup on South Street isn't even necessarily that it isn't fun, I suppose. The problem is that his 1953 "spy" film is just poorly written with character motivation poorly defined and the characters themselves not defined much better. Fuller wrote it himself, so I can't let him off the hook here, but it's still...

The last time we heard from Barbet Schroeder was in his documentary General Idi Amin Dada about a clearly insane man which allowed us to talk about exploitation in documentaries which gets even more interesting when you can't be sure if it's the director or the subject exploiting the other more. The very next film he worked on may lead to similar concerns of exploitation if it weren't for the conc...

Going through the Criterion Collection by Spine number often leaves us with some interesting thematic pairs that are just disconnected enough to seem accidental: the earliest that comes to mind is the racist undertones of #32 Oliver Twist and #33 Nanook of the North. Likewise last week's Ikiru and this week's film both deal with men dying of stomach cancer. They take vastly different paths. Robert...

When confronted with mortality, a man decides to change his life. In the West these stories (A Christmas Carol, It's a Wonderful Life) are usually framed around Christmas for the inherent symbolism of the holiday in particular and winter in general. With Ikiru (1952) Akira Kurosawa makes the best version of this type of story without any over religion, just humanity. It's quite probably his best f...

We start this week's episode with 15 minutes about linguistics, so have fun with that. Naked Lunch is a "transgressive" and "unfilmable" novel written by William S. Burroughs in 1959. So unfilmable, in fact, that when David Cronenberg decided to make a movie in 1991 it became less of an adaptation of the specific book and more of a meta-adaptation (or, as Pat argues when we finally start talking a...

When you start to believe that Fellini is honest when he says that all his films are autobiographical you understand that this is an admission of guilt.

Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Cercle Rouge (1970) opens with a nonsensical and overwrought (and fabricated) quote from the Buddha. It sets a tone for the entire film. Nothing really makes sense, everyone makes decisions against their barely established character and motivations are at best unclear. But it does let us reflect on all the other gangster films we've watched that we loved or hated! Good ti...

It's that time of year again! The time where we gather close to loved ones and, at least in the northern hemisphere, try to stay warm through the darkness. Whatever your position on this planet, though, assuming you count time by the Gregorian calendar it's also the time of looking back at what has passed and hoping in what may come. Or hoping against what you fear may come. 2016 has been...compli...

Yasujiro Ozu's 1953 drama Tokyo Story is principally about the slow march toward the future. Things change, and the sooner you accept that, the better. That's not to say that Ozu doesn't think one should hold on to the past, but just don't be controlled by it.

Jean Renoir made one of the greatest anti-war movies ever with 1937's The Grand Illusion, a war film that is actually an anti-war film designed to showcase that all men are truly brothers, that everyone's essentially the same no matter that country they may hail from. Renoir had seen the writing on the wall and new that war was coming. Having lived through World War I, Renoir was desperate to avoi...

We've seen Roman Polanski before in a cameo in the bonkers Blood for Dracula, but this is our first encounter with him directing. Appropriate, then, that this is his first full length film. Knife in the Water was released in 1962 while Poland was still rather Communist which makes the content of the film perhaps a bit surprising. That doesn't make it good.

The Devil and Daniel Webster makes a feint at confronting something deep and true about America's past and then quickly ignores that hurtful truth for a hopeful cry of "a man shall own his own soul" and "Don't let this country go to the devil." The truth is that the US has always been in step with the Devil. Stephen Vincent Benet knew that when he wrote the story, and when he adapted it for Willia...

Laurence Olivier plays a power-hungry outsider with a distinct physical feature and speech patterns whose ascension to power allows him to imprison his political enemies and ultimately leads to war. There are no parallels. Just kidding. Olivier based his portrayal of the title character in Richard III (1955) on Hitler, as he'd done when he first played the role in this Shakespearean play on stage...

In 1963 a fresh-faced Vilgot Sjoman asked Ingmar Bergman if he could watch his process, then Sveriges Television asked Sjoman if they could tag along. Of course Bergman only half said yes. The documentary is mostly true to life, and fascinating in that regard, though it's also a bit fake, with some sequences not exactly showing what they claim and at least one interview wholly reshot after Bergman...

We finish of the Three Films by Ingmar Bergman boxset next week with a documentary by Vilgot Sjoman, but the three titular films come to an end and a head this episode as we talk The Silence from 1963. While we praised the last two films for being the most straightforward Bergman films we've experienced, the third is a bit more obtuse unless the titular Silence of God is the fact that religion jus...

The Communicants -- the actual translation of the Swedish title for Winter Light -- are what we call people who are taking the Communion, and perhaps the solid statement, calling everyone in this film Communicants, is as much a lesson as anything in the film. Of course the other definition -- someone imparting information -- brings its own interpretations. Winter Light -- the always dim but never...

1961, and specifically the film Through a Glass Darkly, marked a number of changes for Ingmar Bergman: it's the first time he starts to shoot on the island of Fårö, his first time working with the great cinematographer Sven Nykvist, and, perhaps most strikingly, a brief flirtation with making philosophically straightforward film. This film and the next -- Winter Light which we'll talk about next w...

Shohei Imamura is the only Japanese director to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes, which is probably more of an indictment against Cannes than the quality of Japanese film. Nonetheless, the award was not for The Pornographers, his first independent film made at his own production company in 1966. Imamura viewed himself as a "cultural anthropologist" and therefore wanted "to make messy films" about real...

Lola (1981) brings us to the end of the BRD Trilogy. It can be argued that Veronika Voss is a political film, but for Maria Braun and Lola the argument stands on surface observation. Rainer Werner Fassbinder had some interesting political beliefs, and we tackle probably his most controversial stance in this week's episode as well. Find out what he's wrong about by giving us a listen.