Lost in Criterion

It's Spine 100! To celebrate the milestone Criterion threw us a bone: The Beastie Boys Video Anthology, a collection of videos from the hip-hop trios first two decades. It's also basically the only DVD in history to actually utilize that "Alternative Angle" button on your DVD remote. Yeah, it's fancy and fun.

The "death" of an "era" with Gimme Shelter, the Maysles and Zwerin's account of the Stones' '69 US tour that ended in the only way it could.

Someday I may understand what Michelangelo Antonioni was saying in 1960's L'Avventura. That day is not today.

Watching Spike Lee's 1989 film about the racial tensions of a New York neighborhood seems timely. It always seems timely. I'd like for it to not seem timely. Let's work on that.

Douglas Sirk and Rock Hudson are back this week and this time they're teaming up with Unsolved Mysteries' Robert Stack and the late Lauren Bacall for a weird tale of sexual issues and surrogate sons. 1956's Written on the Wind is, once again, a big studio melodrama that Sirk tries to indue with some sort of deeper satire, though with varying results this time around.

Douglas Sirk made big studio melodramas that audiences ate up and critics hated. Until decades later when filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Rainer Werner Fassbinder decided he was awesome and now everyone's on board. All That Heaven Allows is a 1955 venture starring Jane Wyman as a rich widow who falls in love with her Thoreau-obsessed gardner, Rock Hudson. It's a beautiful film; Sirk and cine...

A story as old as time itself! Woman wants to marry faceless rich dude, instead marries slightly less rich dude who's spent some amount of time berating her.

Black Narcissus is a feverish technicolor condemnation of British imperialism in India. Well, that's one reading at least. At it's most basic it's about nuns that go crazy. Who doesn't love a story about insane nuns?

Arthur Crabtree's 1958 gorefest is the story of what happens when you mix telepathy and atomic energy.

Steve McQueen's first starring role is this wonderfully campy 1958 indie horror film from Irvin Yeaworth, with just the best theme song.

Pat delves deep this week, seeking out Lafcadio Hearn's translations of Japanese folk ghost stories that Masaki Kobayashi's 1964 film Kwaidan are based on in order to better understand them and compare the film to its source. Pretty darn close, Pat would say if Pat were writing this.

Brian De Palma set out to make an homage to Alfred Hitchcock with 1973's Sisters and achieves something a bit better than Hitchcock's 1972 outing Frenzy. Frenzy is pretty low hanging fruit, and it's certainly not the film De Palma was meaning to emulate. Our pull quote comes from Pat: "I don't hate this film as much as I've hated some of the others we've watched."

We're combining two films this week because one of the films does not exist as it's own proper Spine number in the Criterion Collection. Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (Part I 1944 and Part II 1958) is an historical epic about Josef Stalin's favorite Czar, and an early unifier of all of Russia, or all the Russias, as the case may be. The first film I'm sure Stalin loved as it paints Ivan as...

Alexander Nevsky, one of Sergei Eisenstein's famous Soviet historical epics, is a monstrous and monstrously propagandistic film that has left all sorts of influence in its wake. Pat and I aren't really into it, even with it's massive battle sequences.

Pat and Adam watch Pygmalion and get distracted complaining about how people who actually agree with Henry Higgins still exist and shouldn't.

Ozu's 1959 comedy Good Morning is about two young brothers who go on a silence strike until their parents agree to buy a television. It's also a pretty great window into suburban life in Japan in the Sixties. That combines to stand in a pretty stark contrast to the other Japanese films we've watched so far.

I think it's safe to say that Pat and I are outside the originally intended target audience of Perry Henzell's 1972 Jamaican gangster film The Harder They Come, but then we're outside the originally intended target audience for a lot of the movies we've watched and loved through the course of this project.

We've seen Olivier's nationalistic take on Shakespeare in Henry V, now we get to watch him channel German expressionism in Hamlet.

Federico Fellini's directorial debut, though co-directed with Italian great Alberto Lattuada, 1950's Variety Lights is as entertaining as any of Fellini's later work, if not quite as crazy as some of it. Still full of the crazy characters that fill his movie universes. Bittersweet to say the least, but a great film.

A rare treat on this week's Lost in Criterion: a film Pat loves and Adam just can't get into. Lars von Trier's feature-length debut The Element of Crime (1984) is a dystopian film so noir-like that it's more like a noir reduction, boiled down until it is thick with rain and contrast. People like it! Adam is not one of them.

We get another serving of the misanthropic drunk. The Golf Specialist (Monte Brice, 1930), The Pharmacist (Arthur Ripley, 1933), The Fatal Glass of Beer (Clyde Bruckman, 1933), The Barber Shop (Arthur Ripley, 1933), The Dentist (Leslie Pearce, 1932), and the silent Pool Sharks (Edwin Middleton, 1915). While some are better and more memorable than others, I think Pat and I enjoyed each much more th...

There's only one truly good scene in The Bank Dick, but fortunately it's almost the entire last act.

This week we're watching Roger Vadim direct his then wife Brigitte Bardot in the festival of slut-shaming and misogyny that is And God Created Woman.

David Lean's 1945 adaptation of a Noel Coward play brings a great film, if you can get past the fact that it's about the emotional struggles of the bourgeois. I kid! Pat and I both loved Brief Encounter. It's a perfectly crafted story of an affair that leaves us emotionally drained and loving it.

Chasing Amy is the story of a man who falls in love with a lesbian and is a terrible person. It doesn't hold up to time, but maybe it was still important at some point.