Lost in Criterion

We're digging into a Carl Th Dreyer boxset this week and starting things off with Day of Wrath from 1943. Dreyer made one feature film per decade after The Passion of Joan of Arc -- well, two in the 40's if you count Two People, which Dreyer didn't so maybe we won't either -- and every one of them is a masterpiece that's going to sit with me for a long time.

Filmmaker Wrion Bowling joins us today for this documentary about two out of touch and out of mind ex-socialites, which leads to a discussion on whether the Maysles Brothers are exploiting the Beales, whether or not the Maysles Brothers think they're exploiting the Beales, and various multiverse versions of the film that obviously exist because quantum theory.

Out to make a "nonfiction feature film" Albert and David Maysles went back to their roots in Boston and their former jobs as door-to-door salesmen. Salesman (1968) follows a group of men trying to sell illuminated Bibles to middle class Catholics with varying degrees of success. It's compelling on multiple levels -- from being a simple character study to an expose on the commercialization of Ameri...

Billy Liar is a lot like Rushmore, if Rushmore ended with no one learning anything.

Another Bruce Robinson film this week, and another Richard E. Grant starring role. 1989's How to Get Ahead in Advertising is a biting satire of consumerist culture as Grant's advertising exec has a bad case of a sentient boil. Or just a weird psychotic breakdown.

Written and directed by Bruce Robinson, Withnail and I (1987) is a semi-autobiographical tale of alcohol-soaked desperation at the dying end of the 1960's. It's immensely quotable. Do yourself a favor and watch it.

With Sullivan's Travels (1942) Preston Sturges makes a very preachy movie against making preachy movies. This could be a deep irony. Or he could be dumb. We report, you decide.

Luis Bunuel's 1964 Diary of a Chambermaid, his first collaboration with Jean-Claude Carriere (the two would later work together on The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), is actually the second adaptation of Octave Mirbeau's novel. The other was made by Jean Renoir in Hollywood in 1946, and while I've not seen it I'm betting it's quite a different film.

The Hidden Fortress is Kurosawa's first cinescope film, his first major hit, and the film George Lucas stole the most from.

A crime procedural with virtually no police. Hope you're taking notes, cause I've got one more job for us.

The quintessential screwball comedy, La Cava's My Man Godfrey is wonderful.

Mario Monicelli's spoofy 1958 heist film Big Deal on Madonna Street stands up even if you're not familiar with the films it's referencing, and Pat and I won't be for another two weeks as it's mostly taking the piss out of Rififi which Lost in Criterion will talk about two weeks from now. Maybe we should have waited? That seems like the professional thing to do. That's not in our bag.

Every Jacques Tati film we watch is my new favorite Jacques Tati film. This week it's his third M. Hulot film PlayTime (1967). Playing on the same anti-modernism themes of his earlier work, PlayTime is, well, even more playful. Massive, repetitive, dehumanizing sets, delightfully subtle comedic moments.

In our second M. Hulot film, Tati really turns the social satire up to 11.

Jacques Tati's M. Hulot is the comedic character we've been missing all our lives, filling a hole we didn't even know existed to be filled.

One of the last Hollywood films before the Hays Code went into effect, Josef von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress seems to see the coming crackdown and gave it the double deuce. The story of how Catherine the Great ended up as Empress of Russia - one of apparently two films on the subject to come out in 1934 for some reason - The Scarlet Empress claims historical accuracy by being based on Catherin...

Every year we take a break from the hustle and bustle of getting Lost in Criterion and settle in by the fire for a non-Criterion Christmas classic. This year it's Lethal Weapon and our dear friend Sam Martin of the band 99 Spitits.

The film that made it into the Criterion Collection because Armageddon is already in there so why not? Donovan Hill joins us to talk about Michael Bay's debut directorial, a movie that may actually be a video game?

This week Pat and I spend five minutes joking about Sting stemming from our mistaken belief that he was in Genesis. Sorry, Phil Collins, but all bald British musicians are the same. Genesis only comes up because they have a prominent opening credit listing in this week's movie Neil Jordan's great neo-noir Mona Lisa from 1986. This is Bob Hoskins's third outing in the Criterion Collection so far, a...

Bertrand Tavernier's noirish Coup de Torchon transports Jim Thompson's 1964 novel Pop. 1280 from racist rural Texas to racist French West Africa. It works out. The story of an ineffectual local sheriff who decides to use his public image for private evil, Coup de Torchon is probably the jauntiest, brightest, jazziest nihilism we've ever experienced here at Lost in Criterion.  

There's a lot to be said about Spartacus. It's famously one of the only films Stanley Kubrick directed in which he didn't have complete creative control. It's one of the biggest contributing factors to the end of blacklisting in Hollywood. It's possibly the greatest movie ever made out of pure spite.

In 1969 Masahiro Shinoda adapted a 1721 bunraku puppetry play into Double Suicide, a highly stylistic interpretation that, while live action, holds firmly to many of the theatrical elements of the style, and perhaps other styles of Japanese theatre as well. It's hard to describe a story of a murder suicide pact between a man and his mistress as fun, but Shinoda clearly took a playful attitude towa...

In Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve (1941) Henry Fonda plays a rich boy scientist with either a really specific case of face-blindness or the intelligence of Buster Bluth, while Barbara Stanwyck plays a con-woman who can't seem to not fall in love with him. It's a classic romantic comedy, and in that the plot doesn't make a lick of sense upon any amount of scrutiny. It's got some funny bits though!

Luis Bunuel's 1972 tale of five upperclass twits trying to have dinner but being interrupted by a series of surreal or otherwise highly unusual events is one of the most ridiculous and wonderfully funny films we've seen

After the delightful non sequitur of last week's film, Criterion throws us back into things with an emotional Bergman that Pat just can't connect with. The surprisingly vivid - for what we're used to from a Bergman film - Cries and Whispers (1972) won a well-deserved Oscar for it's cinematography while playing with themes of faith and redemption and femininity that Ingmar liked so much.