Lost in Criterion

Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981) is a political thriller for the dawn of the Reagan Era which is, not coincidentally, a political thriller for the Trump Era, which is, really, a political thriller for any USA age post the assassinations of the MLK, Malcolm X, and, primarily to Blow Out, the Kennedies. Like the Trinity Test, JFK's assassination was a genie released, and while high-profile USA polit...

Ken Loach's 1969 film Kes is like a British 400 Blows, but Loach takes seriously the political reality of the working class characters he portrays in a way I just don't find in Truffaut. Maybe I'm being less than gracious to the French New Wave pioneer, but maybe also Loach just knocks it out of the park in such a way that it sets a new standard. Since it's an additional feature on the Criterion r...

Our first Claire Denis film (well, unless you count all the work she did for Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch), 2009's White Material is the story of a white French coffee farmer trying to hold on to normalcy as the African country she lives in decolonizes. The crux of the problem of course being that while "normal" may mean "I can harvest and sell my coffee" it also means "the French army maintains a...

Victor Schertzinger's 1939 adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado is the first film adaptation of a Gilbert and Sullivan work, the only one to include members of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, and the first Technicolor picture put out by Universal. But let's face it, it's only in the Collection because of Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy. Should have been a bonus feature, though I suppose if it...

Before this I'd only ever seen one film by Mike Leigh, Spine 307: Naked (1993) which we watched like five years ago. I remember it being fairly dour. So when I found out we were watching a Mike Leigh musical period biopic about Gilbert and Sullivan writing an orientalist light opera, I was concerned and confused. Gilbert and Sullivan is not for me. Topsy-Turvy is for me. A story about art and capi...

Rob Epstein's The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) is a poignant look at the assassination of the San Francisco Supervisor, his assassin, and his organizing paradigm. Not just fighting for gay rights, but helping to build a coalition for liberation, Milk's life as shown in the movie is an important lesson on movement building. Even if it were just that, I would recommend it to everyone. But beyond the...

After years we finally get another Luchino Visconti film and it does not disappoint. Like The Leopard, Senso is set against the backdrop of the struggles of Italian unification, an idea that Visconti seems to have seen as analogous to the struggle to implement communism in his own time. Unlike The Leopard, Visconti takes a melodramatic love story and just shoves all that political stuff in there u...

Every so often the Criterion Collection shows us exactly one movie from a director and will apparently never show us another. With very few exceptions we've loved these one-and-dones, and Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Succcess is no outlier. It's very dark, it's very entertaining, and we'll never see anything from Mackendrick again.

Hirokazu Kore-eda's 2008 drama looks at a day in the life of a Japanese family, a day that just so happens to be the anniversary of the eldest son's death by drowning. It's a little bit Ozu, it's a little bit Naruse, and it's a wonderful exploration of the ways trauma and grief linger in family relationships.

Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank is, refreshingly, a "this is how the poor people live" movie from someone who actually grew up in similarly impoverished situations to the protagonists of their film. Criterion also provides us with 3 of Arnold's short films, each dealing with a similar theme to those that show up in the main film: young womanhood, single motherhood, and grief.

First a note: Sorry to have missed last week, but Adam was in the hospital after a bicycle accident left him with a fractured elbow. He's on the mend, and we should be back to the regular schedule. This week we're talking James L. Brooks office rom-com set against the changing background of 1980's newsrooms. 1987's Broadcast News is a fun movie, indicative in many ways of Brooks' decades writing c...

Guillermo del Toro's first film, Cronos (1993), is flat out just a really great vampire flick, with an eye toward how the machinations of adults effect the children in their lives, like many of his best films. But that bit of family-focus isn't the only way Cronos rises above simple genre film, as del Toro uses the vampire to tell a story of capitalism and colonialism, and the particular evil that...

We finish up the America Lost and Found: The BBS Story boxset with one more film from producer, director, and one of the B's in BBS Bob Rafelson. The King of Marvin Gardens may have our favorite Jack Nicholson role of the bunch, and is a strong finish in a boxset that really ebbed and flowed for us. "It's Monopoly out there" is going to enter my lexicon.

America Lost and Found: The BBS Story has been really up and down for us, but Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971) is definitely toward the top. Stylistically and homage to John Ford (and, to a lesser extent, Howard Hawks), this coming of age story is set in the 50s but still manages to engage in the politics of the early 70s better than a lot of the other movies we've watched this las...

The BBS films we've been watching are culturally important for telling new types of stories within major studio-released films, but for the most part, outside of Head, the form of the stories hasn't been that different. The sex is more explicit, the drug use is forefront, but the actual structure of the film is more familiar, I think. Maybe that's just because we're 50 years on and it's less new....

For us, this is honestly the nadir of the BBS boxset. Drive, He Said is a movie that can't even take it's own political moment seriously, hamstringing the "revolutionary" at the center of the film into a lone man driven insane by "free love" with no reference even to the draft, even as the very campus Jack Nicholson was shooting on was literally being set on fire in organized anti-war protests pos...

What Easy Rider does for hippie-adjacent drug dealers, Five Easy Pieces (1970) does for upper class piano prodigies? It's becoming increasingly clear that the ideas the BBS guys and their associates have about "freedom" are very much at odds with Lost in Criterion's ideas about liberation. We think Carole Eastman's script was probably a lot more interesting than Bob Rafelson's movie, but who can s...

The second movie in the America Lost and Found: The BBS Story boxset is the one that artistically put them on the map. It was the Monkees' money that got the movies made, but it was Easy Rider (1969) that got them legitimacy. Dennis Hopper directs this classic tale of...freedom? People tell me this movie is about freedom. I'll be honest, given the cultural hold this film seems to have I was surpri...

This week we kick off one of our longest boxsets yet, America Lost and Found: The BBS Story. In it we'll see some of the most well known early New Hollywood films of the late 60s and early 70s produced by Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, and Stephen Blauner. We start off with perhaps the most out there of the set. Rafelson and Schneider are the creators of the Monkees, and much of BBS's success can b...

Modern Times is our first proper Charlie Chaplin film in the Criterion Collection - though The Immigrant (1917) was a bonus feature on Spine 330, Louis Malle's Au revoir les enfants (1987). Modern Times is just such a classic film, and a perfect fit for us as it's Chaplin's first excursion into what could be considered political film. We'll get more of that from Charlie in a few months with The Gr...

Since we first encountered Lars von Trier with The Element of Crime way back at Spine 80, he is a director who we - Pat especially - look forward to as the Criterion Collection trickles out his work. Antichrist, however, was a film we were both cautious about, knowing what little we did about it. Ultimately, the film is sort of a mix between Salo and Haxan, and like Salo it is a film that I am gla...

Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter has been so vindicated in the decades after its release that it really is quite a shame that the man not only never made another movie but died before he got his due respect.

The Darjeeling Limited is possibly Wes Anderson at his most self-aware, but sometimes its still difficult to tell the difference between deeper symbolism and the director's stream-of-consciousness aesthetic styling, particularly when it comes to the religious elements. Speaking of religious elements, a note: this episode we spend some time talking about the [Anglo] Latin Catholic influence in Indi...

Nobuhiko Obayashi's sole film in the Criterion Collection (so far!) is the 1978 avant garde horror comedy House, a movie co-written by his 8 year old daughter.

After nearly nine years we finally get a second Stanley Kubrick film from the Collection with Paths of Glory (1960), his first collaboration with Kirk Douglas made just before Spartacus. This is our third "anti-war" film in the last month or so, and the second American one. With Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line we discussed whether or not an American film made after WW2 could truly be "anti-war...