Lost in Criterion

Continuing through Pasolini's Trilogy of Life this week we have The Canterbury Tales (1972). Pasolini's adaptation of a a foundational English text includes many naked and British people, including Tom Baker. While the film's epilogue changes the book to make these tales "told only for the pleasure of telling", Pasolini's celebration of pre-consumerism sex comes with a certain growing darkness. We...

Spine 631 is a boxset of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Trilogy of Life", a collection of adaptations of collections of stories. We kick it off this week with The Decamaron, based on Giovanni Boccaccio's 14th century collection of tragic and erotic stories. Pasolini adapts these as celebrations of pre-capitalist, pre-consumerist sex, language, and dentistry. Pasolini's Decamaron is very horny, and very fu...

Roman Polanski adapts Ira Levin's 1967 novel into this 1968 film, though adapts may not be the right word. Transcribes, maybe? The original cut was a very faithful transference of the source material into the film medium, perhaps more faithful than any novel to film adaptation has ever been. Then he let someone else edit it down to a reasonable movie. Mia Farrow is great in it, perhaps because her...

John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) is a deeply personal work, presaging New Hollywood while making something neither New Hollywood or the British New Wave would dare. We meet a middle-aged doctor, Daniel, and a 30 something divorced woman, Alex, who are both dating Bob, a young artist who makes them both feel alive even if he's a self-centered jerk most of the time. Like the average no...

Joshua Marston's The Forgiveness of Blood (2011) takes a hard look at the effects of honor codes that get twisted into demanding blood penance. It's a fantastic familial drama, but also gives us a jumping off point to talk about (re)interpreting (para)religious texts to favor mercy and care, and also how both Sovietism and capitalism seek a hegemony that the state controls. That's right, Pat cross...

Jonathan Wacks' Powwow Highway (1989) takes a lot of trappings of a holiday road movie, but leaves them behind when needed as we explore the characters and relationship of two Cheyenne men struggling in to hold onto tradition in a world controlled by colonizers. This may be the first holiday film we've covered where the only person who says "Merry Christmas" is the villain. Christmas in Powwow Hig...

There are two David Fincher movies in the Criterion Collection, and The Game (1997) is the better one by a long shot, solely for not featuring the monstrous simulacrums of the human form that exist throughout The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008. Spine 476). The Game is mostly an interesting thriller that doesn't do enough with its San Francisco setting, but then in the last few minutes it ju...

Marcel Carné made Les Visiteurs du Soir (1942) during Nazi occupation of France for a Nazi-owned production company, and while one could argue that this is collaboration and one could also argue that Carné used his position to help Jewish artists keep working, that fact that this is a Nazi-produced film is somehow not the most egregious part of the production. We spend a lot of time on what the mo...

Paul Bartel directs this black comedy that's "not Lubitsch—but it’s not quite John Waters either", according to Criterion essayist David Ehrenstein. Eating Raoul (1982), is a story of America, of the normally hidden and unpunished violence of wealth accumulation. Or it's a story of America, of two prudish weirdos punishing the people they don't like. Or it's a story of America. the dream of reveng...

In 1975, the enigmatic Ken Russell adapted and directed The Who's concept album/rock opera Tommy into a memorable film. The Who, apparently, really enjoyed making movies and decided to follow it up four years later with an adaptation of Quadrophenia (1979), but this time hiring Franc Roddam who would go on to create MasterChef and is noticeably not Ken Russell. Quadrophenia is a throwback to kitch...

We get three early films from Paul Fejos all under the banner of his 1928 part-talkie Lonesome. Also on the Criterion release is the much more interesting to us Broadway (1929) and the much less interesting to us The Last Performance (1929). Each film is inventive and interesting in its own right, but Broadway just kept getting bigger, facilitated by Fejos and his team inventing a camera crane, an...

Andrew Haigh's Weekend (2011) is an exquisite character study of a Friday-Sunday fling between two pretty opposite young men, in a precarious time where homophobia is constantly bubbling in the background. It's also just one of the cutest love stories we've experienced in the Criterion Collection. Just an absolute delight of a movie.

Last week Criterion introduced us to the work of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne with a phenomenal film, but this week they follow it up with something somehow even better. From it's frenetic first few minutes, Rosetta (1999) is the story of a a young woman that believes she can find freedom, or at least dignity, or at least normalcy in work. But she, and we, live in a society that doesn't actually c...

Our introduction to the films of Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, La promesse (1996) is, like last week's Le Havre, a story of African migrants in Europe. But where Aki Kaurismäki took a more magical approach, the Dardenne's hew much closer to the intense realism of, say, Ken Loach. The brothers' history in documentary perhaps make it even more intense than what Loach we've seen. It'...

Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre (2011) is a hard movie to categorize. It's the dramatic tale of solidarity and sanctuary, of a community setting aside petty differences to protect a vulnerable migrant. But it's not social realism; It's more magical than that. Some critics call it fairy tale-esque, Pat calls it a children's story, none of them to dismiss it. The moral here is one of a kids' book, but it'...

Steven Soderbergh's film adaptation of Spalding Gray's monologue about avoiding an eye surgery, Gray's Anatomy (1996) girds Gray's George Carlin-esque delivery in some dynamic visuals and inter-cuts them with stark black and white testimonials of people recounting there own terrible eye injuries. Perhaps not for the squeamish, but it's still an engaging story. I don't comment on it in the episode,...

Many documentaries are introductions to their topics, assuming the audience has limited or even no knowledge of the subject. Steven Soderbergh's 2010 documentary about his late friend monologuist Spalding Gray, And Everything is Going Fine, is not. Soderbergh himself says it's for people who are already familiar with Gray. Since this is our introduction to him, it's a bit of a rocky start. Next we...

Add Danny Boyle to the long list of British directors who claim their work is apolitical, seemingly only to distance themselves from Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. But it doesn't take the death of the author to find a political read of his brutal debut feature Shallow Grave (1994), a film about the corrupting influence of money on relationships, about how greed inherently leads to violence and even if...

In 1925 Charlie Chaplin released the highest grossing silent film of all time, The Gold Rush, a tale of desperate men fighting the harsh elements to chase the American Dream: getting rich through extractive capitalism. Chaplin is certainly capable of political film (see The Great Dictator or Modern Times) but also the Tramp is a political character, an impoverished victim of capitalism who survive...

Ingmar Bergman's Summer with Monika (1953) was very popular in the US, due in large part to distributor Kroger Babb's cutting over half an hour and adding a lot of nudity to it. Criterion doesn't give us Babb's cut, but I guess they gotta save something for the bluray upgrade. It's an interesting enough early Bergman, with the director moving through his 30s and seemingly finally figuring out what...

Our earliest Ingmar Bergman film yet, Summer Interlude (1951) is a story of young love and internalized trauma. It also may be one of the earliest films we've seen where a manipulative groomer's actions are actually shown to be bad? In any case, it's Bergman before he's really BERGMAN, but well on his way to it; taking steps to assemble the troupe on both sides of the camera that will become the r...

Abbas Kiarostami is a man who understands the intimacy of a conversation in the front seat of a car. While Taste of Cherry (1997), which we watch way back at Spine 45 is the pinnacle of that truth, Certified Copy (2010) has plenty of driving and talking before it settles into sight seeing and talking. To keep things interesting, Certified Copy is a sort of surrealist drama, with the relationship b...

Charlie Kaufman's screenwriting and Spike Jonze's directorial debuts, Being John Malkovich is a delightfully weird story of identity. Lotte (Cameron Diaz)'s storyline is particularly compelling, with Lotte experiencing gender euphoria as Malkovich, whereas our other main characters want to use Malkovich for patriarchal power, through fame or immortality. Unfortunately less compelling is the slathe...

Mario Monicelli's The Organizer's title, like De Sica's Bicycle Thieves 15 years before it, had its title senselessly singularized for English release. The original title I compagni means "The Comrades" and is a bit more indicative of the ensemble organizing that is going on here. The story of a late 19th century textile mill strike, The Organizer is a warts and all look at workers exercising thei...

In 1973 Robert M. Young made Children of the Fields, a short documentary about a family of Polo Galindo, migrant farm workers in the Southwest US including his young children living, a transient life as exploited laborers. Galindo opened Young's eyes not only to his and his family's plight, but to the struggles of an even lower rung: undocumented migrant workers. With Galindo as guide and translat...