Lost in Criterion

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...

In 1971 Nicolas Roeg made a rather weird movie called Walkabout. Mostly it seemed like an excuse to ogle his under-aged female lead, but only slightly less than that it was a rather good film. Lost in Criterion discusses it this week and talk about how there are so many butts in it. How many butts, you ask? You want me to say a butt load, but I won't. 

It's more John Woo this week on Lost in Criterion, as Pat and Adam watch the last movie he made before leaving Hong Kong for Hollywood: 1992's Hard Boiled. A word of warning: neither of us could find an official Criterion release for this -- Criterion has only released it on DVD and that DVD is out of print -- so we ended up watching an English-dubbed version on  youtube . You smell that? That's t...

This week Pat and Adam talk about the quintessential John Woo film: 1989's The Killer. It's got gun-fu, overtly Christian symbolism, Chow Yun-Fat, and doves! All the hallmarks of great Woo cinema with none of the Nicolas Cage! And Adam basically makes it the whole way without grossly mispronouncing anything! Truly we are blessed! Though his mic was really tinny this week. Hope that's ok.

In this episode of Lost in Criterion Pat and Adam discuss Roy Ward Baker's 1958 titanic epic about the Titanic A Night to Remember and wax rhapsodic about the affect the disaster had on the 20th Century. While Adam continues to not be able to pronounce things, even in English, Pat manages to win this week's Captain Edward J. Smith Award for Great Achievements in Idiocy for deleting the first take...

This week Pat and Adam discuss Jean Cocteau's 1946 adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, a film that clearly had a heavy visual and structural influence on later adaptations (we're looking at you, Disney) but still managed to leave us wanting. We also discuss the merits of telling your audience that they'd like your movie better if they weren't so dull. Listen in and feel free to tell us we're dumb,...

This week Pat and Adam talk about Francois Truffaut's intense and wonderful 1959 drama The 400 Blows. Guess if they liked it or not? Also, Adam completely butcher's Truffaut's name, but makes up for it by mispronouncing it a different way every time he says it. I promise I'm not a complete idiot; I even went to college.

This week Pat and Adam watch Federico Fellini's more than a little ridiculous 1973 coming-of-age tale Amarcord. Adam continues to not be able to pronounce non-English names despite not being dumb. I swear. Also we compare the film to Hudson Hawk. Just because. So there.

Personally, I think we finally start hitting our stride on this one. In this weeks Lost in Criterion we discuss Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 comedic mystery The Lady Vanishes and we surprise ourselves with just how long we can discuss a movie that is not nearly as heavy as the first two we watched. We also write off everything Hitchcock did prior to this, which I'd like to apologize for. While his pre-...

In this episode we continue to get our footing on this whole "podcast" thing as we discuss Akira Kurosawa's 1954 epic Seven Samurai which clocks in at over three hours long, but somehow avoids feeling like it. The same may not be said for our 54 minute episode, but, hey, we're not Kurosawa. Now seems as good a time as any to point out that our theme music is by the great Jonathan Hape. Check out h...

Welcome to the first episode of Pat and Adam's adventure through the Criterion Collection. This was originally recorded as a test to see what would happen if we tried, so our apologies that this episode is a bit rough. They do get better. They also get shorter. After this test we decided to shoot for 45-60 minutes episodes. This one is a bit over that. In this episode we discuss Jean Renoir's La G...

We here at With Two Brains are excited to be starting a new long term project! Lost in Criterion will feature Pat and Adam and the occasional guest discussing every movie in the ever-growing  Criterion Collection  in order of their spine numbers. Our first proper episode will be up on Friday when we'll be discussing Jean Renoir's 1937 classic The Grand Illusion, but to kick things off we've got a...