Lost in Criterion

Written by Colin Higgins and directed by Hal Ashby, scored by Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), Harold and Maude is a wonderful piece of counter-culture from early New Hollywood, and honestly, a better ode to freedom than most of what came out of the "America Lost and Found: The BBS Story" boxset of foundational New Hollywood works we watched a few months ago.

We finish up A Hollis Frampton Odyssey this week, covering work from his Magellan cycle, a massive project Frampton was working on when he died. While previously discussed works like (nostalgia) show Frampton's ironic detachment, Magellan melds the history of film and Frampton's life story in a way that feels sentimental. These works also often seem to be in conversation with Stan Brakhage in a wa...

We continue through A Hollis Frampton Odyssey and it feels a bit like being lost at sea this week. We cover 3 films from his Hapax Legomena series: (nostalgia), Poetic Justice, and Critical Mass. Each originally released in 1972, the three shorts are perhaps more conceptually interesting to us than they are in execution. Well, not Critical Mass, which is conceptually bad but perhaps executed in an...

Criterion once again brings us a boxset of avant-garde film, this time from American filmmaker Hollis Frampton. A Hollis Frampton Odyssey contains 20 or so shorts of varying length, adding up to 266 minutes of material that we'll be covering over the next three weeks. In this week's episode we cover what Criterion deems Frampton's "Early Films", all made between 1966 and 1970. Included here are so...

Ronald Neames says that after This Happy Breed he and the rest of Cineguild were tired of making war-time films, and were pretty sure audiences were tired of propaganda. But they weren't tired of working with Noel Coward, despite the fact that with each movie in Criterion's David Lean Directs Noel Coward boxset we get new stories of Coward disagreeing with their choices in filming his work. Blithe...

The second film in the David Lean Directs Noel Coward boxset, This Happy Breed is the story of a British Middle Class TM family between the wars. Acting as a sort of "remember when" for British of a certain class, it's also an examination of the rigid structure and code of ethics of this particular pocket of social class which while not the Upper Crust still seems to considers itself above the wor...

This "story of a ship" kicks off the David Lean Directs Noel Coward boxset. Lean was an in-demand film editor (and had previously done some uncredited co-direction), and Noel Coward wanted to make a war propaganda film based on his friend Lord Mountbatten's naval exploits. Thus we get In Which We Serve (1942), a biography of the crew of a doomed destroyer told in flashback after the ship sinks in...

Every time we watch a documentary, we end up talking a lot about the nature of documentary. With Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker's The War Room (1993), much of that end of the conversation is focused on how Direct Cinema is not a journalistic endeavor, and how the material covered - Bill Clinton's 1992 US Presidential campaign - could have used a journalistic approach. Instead what we get is a c...

Mikhail Kalatozov makes some beautiful films, particularly in his work with Sergey Urusevsky, who may just be our favorite cinematographer. Many, many years ago (Spine 146!) we watched their film The Cranes are Flying (1957), and images from that film still grace my dreams. Many, many years from now (Spine 1214!) we will watch I am Cuba (1964), their final collaboration, and we can't wait. But tha...

Otto Preminger's ripped-from-the-headlines courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959) stars a delightful mix of young and old Hollywood, is a big middle finger to the Production Code, and is an ode to manipulating the US legal system. And if that weren't enough, we've got a soundtrack by Duke Ellington and titles by Saul Bass.

Louis Malle reunites with the stars of My Dinner with Andre, Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, for a production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in a an abandoned theater just off Time Square. Not just a delightful production of Uncle Vanya, but also a look at theater for the sake of theater, squatting and otherwise unmoored from financial obligations.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's only sci-fi work, World on a Wire asks the important questions: what if we asked an AI to simulate the Matrix as a 1970s German television miniseries, and then scrapped that garbage and just had a great screenwriter, fantastic cinematographer, and masterful director make it instead. While dealing with the same questions of humanity and existentialism that many tales of v...

Lena Dunham has a tendency to say dumb things, and she's garnered quite a backlash during her short career. Because of that the inclusion of her 2010 film Tiny Furniture in the Criterion Collection appears to be often mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Bay's Armageddon and Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: that is, with Criterion aficionados asking "why is this here?" But Lo...

Our friend and samurai-film-fiend Donovan joins us to talk about Hideo Gosha's Three Outlaw Samurai (1964). This origin story for a long-running tv show that seems like it was Gosha's version of the A-Team plays like a more cynical version of a Kurosawa tale. It's also got some fantastic camera work thanks to Tadashi Sakai.

Following the festival successes but domestic box office failures of Salvatore Giuliano (1962) and Hands over the City (1963), Francesco Rosi decided an international picture would fix his money problem, and decided to make a documentary on the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain. He didn't end up making exactly that, as The Moment of Truth (1965) is a narrative film with a neo-realist bent,...

We've got sympathy for the Godzilla as guest Jason W. returns to talk with us about the Ishiro Honda's original Godzilla and the American recut of it, Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, the original film's anti-war metaphor (and what gets lost in the Americanization), as well as the media inspired by the film. We've got a lot to cover so save this one for long evening walk.

We here at Lost in Criterion love Luis Buñuel, and (currently) this is the last one we have in the Criterion Collection. Belle de Jour (1967) is the story of a middle class woman, wife of a surgeon, who becomes a sex worker in the afternoons. Or it's about a middle class woman who imagines that she's become a sex worker in the afternoons. Buñuel takes a lot of liberties with the source material an...

Noel Coward's Design for Living premiered in Cleveland, Ohio -- apparently the world's bastion of progressive and transgressive theater at the time -- on January 2, 1933. By the end of the month it would be on Broadway, by the end of the year Ernst Lubitsch and Ben Hecht would adapt it into the sexiest film of 1933. Meanwhile, Coward wouldn't stage the play in his native England for nearly another...

Somehow Sidney Lumet is our most watched director on our Patreon bonus episodes, but the actual Criterion Collection has a distinct lack. We get one of his best this week with 12 Angry Men (1957), a film adaptation of a teleplay from the Golden Age of Television (though not from Spine 495: The Golden Age of Television boxset). Our friend Stephen G. joins us to talk about how this is a great movie...

The final film in Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy, and the final film of the director's life, is the capstone to the set and, perhaps, a capstone to his entire career. A story of connection, coupled with the others in the trilogy, we're reminded that without Fraternity - the guiding theme of this film - life is hell. You gotta care. You deserve to be cared about.

D.H. Lawrence once said "Never trust the teller, trust the tale" and we fully embrace that as we struggle to step around the obvious political metaphor of a rocky relationship between a French woman and a Polish man in Krzysztof Kieślowski's anti-romantic comedy "Equality" movie Three Colors: White. Kieślowski is rather insistent that these are not political movies, though his collaborator and co-...

This week we kick off Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy with Blue. Each of the three colors, drawn from the colors of the French flag, are also used in the films to represent one of the ideals of the French Revolution: Blue is associated with Liberty, White with Equality, and Red with Fraternity. Ultimately, as we'll discuss in the coming weeks, the films make an argument that without Fr...

Erle C. Kenton's The Island of Lost Souls is a pre-code adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, and the Criterion release contains quite possibly the most seemingly erratic and certainly esoteric collection of bonus features to ever be put on one of their discs. The movie itself is a wonder of early make-up effects, but among other things the additional materials bring us commentary fr...

Listen, we don't get Michelangelo Antonioni. We admit it. Maybe someday we'll watch Blow-Up and kinda like it, but for now we're not there yet. This week we get Identification of a Woman (1982), Antonioni's entry into one of our most hated genres: male film director directs a movie about a male film director's search for a new lover/star/muse. This one is even arguably - and we do! - more self-awa...

Years after watching the fantastic Onibaba, we once again get an atmospheric horror film from Kaneto Shindo with Kuroneko (1968). Shindo continues to impress with this tale of feline and feminine justice. I just wish we didn't have to wait so long for his next film in the collection.