Lost in Criterion

Henri-Georges Clouzot has been called the French Alfred Hitchcock, which is really just a Anglo-centric way of saying that if Clouzot had been working in English he'd be more popular (in general? or more than Hitchcock? Yes). We've got two of his best movies in a row starting this week with Diabolique (1955) based on a novel by Pierre Boileau. It's said that Clouzot bought the rights to the novel...

Andrei Tarkovsky's 1966 almost-a-biopic film about the artist Andrei Rublev was suppressed almost before it came out, but many things with any merit were in Soviet Russia so it's not that surprising. Eventually Martin Scorsese found a copy of the film and brought it out of Russia, and that copy is where the Criterion Collection edition comes from. The film is quite the trip, and a long one, but th...

Oh man, if  Oliver Twist  was problematic then Robert J. Flaherty's 1922 "documentary" is the pure problem to which problematic things aspire. It's not just staged, it's purposefully primitivized, Falherty taking away an modernity his Inuit subjects had allowed into their lives, from guns to to jeans to houses. Still as the world's first full-length documentary, it proved that such a thing was pos...

There's a lot of good in David Lean's 1948 adaptation of another Dickens classic. Oliver Twist has all the artful design and framing of Great Expectations, and once again Lean manages to trim down the story into a movie people will actually sit through. And Alec Guinness is back! Well, those last two aren't wholly good. Particularly Guinness's Fagin. Oh there is so much wrong with Guinness's Fagin...

This week marks the second David Lean film we've talked about and next week will be a third, which is a good indication that, like the British Film Institute, Criterion considers Lean a pretty important director. This week it's the first of his adaptations of the work of another British great Charles Dickens and one of the best book to movie adaptations I've ever seen: 1946's Great Expectations. D...

Fritz Lang's M (1931) is the German directors first film with sound and star Peter Lorre's first film and first villainous role. Technology and star are both put to excellent use. M is also a film that the Nazi's tried to suppress before they were even in power. I can't think of a more glowing recommendation, but I will say that has always been one of my favorite films since I first saw it many, m...

Peter Weir's 1975 adaptation of Joan Lindsay's equivocally "true" novel is a trip, and not just because it's a mystery with no resolution. Sure it's success was based almost entirely on people thinking the story was real, but there's also a reason it won the BAFTA and Saturn awards for it's cinematography. It's a lovely movie, even if the answer to its central mystery remains unsolved and the answ...

The story is that while filming  Flesh for Frankenstein  Paul Morrissey and crew discovered they were quite ahead of schedule and under budget, so they decided to make a second movie. Released the following year, Blood for Dracula, which shares Frankenstein's critique of sexual promiscuity, was partially improvised and for some reason has a cameo from Roman Polanski. It's also a much more entertai...

Paul Morrissey's 1973 horror-comedy was originally titled Andy Warhol's Frankenstein despite the fact that Andy Warhol had virtually nothing to do with it. Udo Kier (whose name is amazing) stars as the good doctor in this bizarrely sexualized telling of Mary Shelley's classic that doubles as a critique of Free Love. In 3D! (Where available.) It was originally rated X for all the sex and gore, almo...

John Mackenzie's 1980 British gangster film was the break out role for Bob Hoskins who will still forever be Mario whenever I think of him. Or possible Smee. Helen Mirren's in it, too, and they're both great actors. An incredibly young Pierce Bronson has no lines. BFI puts it at number 21 of the top 100 British films of the 20th century, because it is obviously very British. And explodey. As the l...

In 1965 Jean-Luc Godard took an established film-noir detective character and shoved him into a dystopian future city ruled by an authoritarian computer that runs everything on cold logic while quoting Borges' poetry about the nature of myth and maintaining the most inefficient public execution system in history. Alphaville is weird. It's disjointed. It's baffling.

As our resident Kurosawa obsessive Donovan Hill joins us again to talk about the director's 1963 crime drama High and Low. The first hour is a morality play taking place in a shoe company executive's living room. The next one and a half are a police procedural that feels like Law and Order. I'm not selling this right. Great and interesting movie. Fun conversation. Always glad to have Donovan aroun...

Paul Verhoeven's first American film is a violently subtle attack on corporatism. The 1987 film also looks forward to a hypothetical dystopian Detroit that looks like it might be better off than current actual Detroit.  In a movie about excess Kurtwood Smith still manages to steal the show as the over-the-top villain. It's a really fun movie and I'm happy to report that Donovan Hill is joining us...

David Lean's 1955 tale of summer love was called Summer Madness in Britain, which might give you an idea of how well Kathrine Hepburn's attempts at a relationship in Venice go. Or the madness of the title may be the production's insistence that Kathrine Hepburn's accent is that of an elementary school secretary from Akron, Ohio.

David Cronenberg's 1988 psychological drama is a lot like most of what Cronenberg was doing in the 80's: weird. What The Fly does for physical horror, Dead Ringers does for mental horror (with quite a bit of the physical left in). Jeremy Irons is amazing as twin gynecologists who share enough screen time that I'm beginning to think that Cronenberg modified the machine from The Fly to just make two...

Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungeon are two horrible people who are horribly perfect for one another. That about sums up the plot of Alex Cox's 1986 biopic of the ill-fated couple. We had, shall we say, mixed feelings on it. Episode 20 though! Is that a milestone? Nearly half a year already. We've seen some real greats so far, and some real stinkers, and Salo. Trudging right along though. Only 700 or s...

This week we're watching Shock Corridor, Sam Fuller's 1963 tale of a so-so journalist's ill-advised plan to get a Pulitzer.  It's not as good a movie as his next one, The Naked Kiss, which we watched last week, mostly due to Constance Towers being featured less prominently and in a much more subdued (in a lot of senses) way. We posit that The Naked Kiss is an apology for how she gets treated in th...

Ever pressing on, we recover from Salo and move on to Sam Fuller's 1964 neo-noir The Naked Kiss, kicking off a duo of back to back Fuller. It's lively and pulpy and fun, due mostly to Constance Towers being a far better actress and Fuller a far better director than this script probably deserves, though Fuller did write it himself. So hopefully our joy in The Naked Kiss isn't just a direct result o...

Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote and directed this 1975 film that almost made me vomit. I stopped it four times to keep from doing so. This film is the reason we decided to do the podcast in order of Criterion's Spine numbers, because it forced us to have a system which meant we wouldn't just watch the ones we wanted to watch first and never ever ever watch Salo. I almost regret that. I watched this befo...

Well, Donovan Hill finishes off Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy with us as we discuss the 1956 end to the saga: Duel at Ganryu Island. It's not quite as action oriented as the other two films, but it does a lot to tie up loose ends and put a cap on the story. Hopefully Donovan will be back, it was pretty fun having him on. But I don't think we'll convince him or anyone else to join us next week....

Donovan Hill joins us again as we continue our discussion on Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy, this time focusing on the second film in the series which came out in 1955 to quite a deal less acclaim internationally. But Mifune's still in it, so it can't be that bad, right? 

This week marks a string of episodes where we have a special guest to help us discuss Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy, a historic biopic of Japanese legend Musashi Miyamoto. Please welcome to the show Donovan Hill, an old friend whose father first tossed him into the river of Samurai culture at an inappropriately young age, but we'll let Donovan tell you all about that in this weeks episode. We'...

This week Lost in Criterion talks about Jonathan Demme's 1991 Oscar-winning thriller Silence of the Lambs. Pat's not a fan of psychological thrillers, but he didn't let that keep him from watching this one. And he certainly didn't let it keep him from delivering an incredibly well-reasoned argument on why this movie sucks. Personally, I still like it, even if he makes some fair points. This is pro...

The first American film in our journey arrives with Rob Reiner's 1984 mockumentary This is Spinal Tap, a comedy classic that leads Pat and Adam to a rumination on the nature of good comedy. And Adam tells some stories about his work in the hospitality industry, which (strictly speaking) he isn't supposed to do. Well if this gets him fired it was probably worth it. Also, it's so good to have one we...

I feel like I need to apologize for this one. I don't like to do that -- it makes it feel like I somehow don't believe in our work -- but this episode has some issues I'd like to lay out. Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal is an amazing and complex classic, incredibly heavy and heady. Pat and I recorded this at the height of last August, the heat doing nothing to assuage our fatigue, and none of it...