Lost in Criterion

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...