Lost in Criterion

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...

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.