Lost in Criterion

Statistically speaking, I think we're more likely to be watching an Ingmar Bergman film in the Criterion Collection than not, which is why it's surprising that The Magician is the first one we've seen in like 2 years. This time Bergman brings us a tale of conmen in unbelievable costumes and bad audiences that don't know how to have fun.

Terrence Malick makes spiritual humanist films. He also decided to make this war film. OK, "anti" war film. Whenever we watch an anti-war film the comment attributed to Truffaut comes up: "there's no such thing as an anti-war film". We don't entirely think that's true. We've seen spiritual and humanist anti-war films as recently as last week's episode that I would say achieve their goal. Unfortuna...

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) is positively chaste compared to the other Nagisa Oshima films we've seen, as the sex here is always boiling just below the surface. This experiment in stunt casting pays off as one of the best anti-war movies we've seen, digging into the humanity and inhumanities of a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and their Allied prisoners, and leaving us to think about who...

Our second experience with Maurice Pialat does not help us beg down the man's politics. This time we have L'enfance nue, a film that owes a lot to Truffaut, both because it's in the vein of The 400 Blows and because Truffaut produced it. A semi-documentarian look at the state of French Social Service's treatment of abandoned children, Pialat tries not to get too judgemental while showing us a syst...

Our second of the pair of Terry Zwigoff documentaries is one that initially no one wanted to touch, despite the success of Louie Bluie. Was it just that all that good will had evaporated over the course of a decade? Or was it that this time around Zwigoff turned his camera on his friends: gonzo cartoonist R. Crumb and Crumb's even more eccentric brothers. Eccentric is a good word here.

We kick off a pair of documentaries by Terry Zwigoff, starting this week with Louie Bluie, his 1985 look at musician and artist Howard Armstrong. Start to finish just an absolute delight of a documentary.

We finish up the Three Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg set this week with the best of the bunch, really, The Docks of New York (1928), a melodrama about a himbo of a steamship furnace stoker who thinks himself unlovable and absolutely refuses to believe in private property. He's the best.

Lost in Criterion is 10 years old! Does that make us the longest running Criterion podcast? Who cares. We started this podcast as an excuse to talk after Pat moved to Japan. While Pat and I were far from cinephiles, we enjoyed the conversations we'd have leaving the cinema after a movie, and wanted to continue having those talks even though we weren't going to the same cinema anymore. So we, prett...

After a series of setbacks, including changing the film we were going to do twice and rescheduling with a different slate of guests (one of whom then had to drop out because we took too long working out technical problems), we finally caught the metaphorical polka band tour van and made it home for the holidays for this year's special: the Coen brothers' fifth film, The Hudsucker Proxy. While one...

The second film of the 3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg boxset, The Last Command is a story of revenge and patriotism during the Russian revolution and, you know what, it's actually just best to ignore the story.

We kick off the 3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg boxset with Underworld (1927), a film that defined a lot of gangster movie aesthetics, and went way beyond that as well with some of the most visually striking matte work we've seen outside of Black Narcissus.

Abdellatif Kerchiche's The Secret of the Grain (2007) hits a lot of the right notes for us, but once again we encounter a director aggressively claiming their film is apolitical when their film is obviously political.

The second of our pair of Ozu films finds the director between World War II deployments bringing to screen a script he'd been working on for nearly a decade about loyalty to one's father, and by extension -- perhaps at least to the Japanese censor board that celebrated the film -- loyalty to one's emperor. This is the closest thing to a propaganda film we've seen from Ozu, but we're not convinced...

We kick off a pair of early Yasujirō Ozu sound films this week, and first up is his earliest. The Only Son (1936) comes out during a time period in Japan that we have yet to see represented in films from the country: directly pre-war as the right-wing imperialists are cementing their rule. Against that backdrop, and just months before Ozu himself would be drafted, The Only Son looks at the sacrifi...

Carol Reed helms a film that suggests screenwriters Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder only had one plot. Night Train to Munich shares a lot of bones with the pairs' previously penned film, Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, functioning as something between remake and sequel as well as being the second entry in the multimedia Charters and Caldicott Cinematic Universe. It's silly, it's fun, and the model...

Visually, aurally, and plot-wise this is a movie that is absolutely about the choking hellscape extractive capitalism forces us to live in, and the alienating spiritual sickness such a system causes. That is, unless you take the director's word on what that movie is actually about. Red Desert (1964) is Michelangelo Antonioni's ode to "progress" in which climate anxiety sounds like a you problem.

Jim Jarmusch's ode to the musical legacy of Memphis, Tennessee, Mystery Train (1989) gives us three vignettes that take place simultaneously, each telling the story of non-Americans experiencing the city over one night and showing a peak at the city's racial history.

We joke this week that Swedish dramas are the bread and butter of the Criterion Collection, but Everlasting Moments is set apart from the rest through not being directed by Ingmar Bergman. Jan Troell's biopic of his wife's great aunt shows us a unique picture of a woman's life in early 20th century Sweden and the freedom found in artistic pursuit.

Abbas Kiarostami's Close-up (1990) explores a real-life incident of celebrity impersonation in late '80s Iran through a mixture of documentary, recreation, and the director guiding the narrative as events still unfold. Because of that last element, exactly what mix of reality and fiction exists is up for debate, and in the end, much of what really happened only happened because of Kiarostami's inf...

Our experiment of walking through Stan Brakhage, An Anthology Volume Two at a reasonable pace comes to an end this week. After our rush through Volume One years ago we had liked Brakhage, and now after spending so much more time with him, well...we definitely still love his work, but here's hoping it's another few years before Criterion puts out Volume Three. This week we cover films from the last...

This week's selection of Stan Brakhage films has works from 1982, 1992, and 1994, all multi-media, mixing many of the Brakhage "genres": painted frames, manipulated photographic images, layering. We also get another with a soundtrack from Rick Corrigan, and one with probably the most on-screen (and almost legible!) text of any Brakhage film at all.

By Brakhage Volume Two Program 4 is totally dedicated to Stan Brakhage's 1989-90 four film cycle Visions in Meditation. Inspired by Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation, the films take us on a journey into a meditative state, working better as a complete work than as four individual pieces. This is the only complete cycle of Brakhage's work in the Criterion sets, despite other films drawn from c...

We continue our journey through By Brakhage, An Anthology Volume Two with a collection of works from 1972-1982 including the remix-y mashup of violence that is Murder Psalm and a few others that are less intense than that.

For By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume One many years ago we tried to do the whole set in a single episode like we were trying to get the new world record for getting through the Louvre the fastest. These are art films, so for Volume Two we're taking our time to appreciate them and dedicating an individual episode to each of the six "Programs" that Criterion breaks the set down into. This is episod...

Many years ago Criterion served us up By Brakhage: An Anthology collecting a nice cross section, or so we thought, of the works of experimental American filmmaker Stan Brakhage. We're back with Volume Two and a much wider cross section of the man's work, including styles of piece completely missing from Volume One. Back then we tried to talk about 26 Brakhage films in a single episode. It was a fo...