Lost in Criterion

This week we're joined by Adam Spieckermann to talk the stunt work, beautiful setting, and class politics of John Ford's Stagecoach (1939), the star-making role for John Wayne.

Somehow The Fugitive Kind (1960) is our first Sidney Lumet film for the proper podcast despite having done three Sidney Lumet films for our Patreon bonus episodes. Based on a Tennessee Williams play (in turn based on the Orpheus myth), we spend most of this episode trying to put our fingers on what doesn't quite work about it.

I don't know if we ultimately got what Ang Lee wanted us to get out of Ride with the Devil (1999) but we still got something. An interesting, though perhaps too neo-liberal, look at how young men turn to (and from) extremism in extreme times. Still, it's a pretty movie with Jeffrey Wright and Jewel turning in phenomenal performances.

Olivier Assayas' look at what we inherit from our parents was sponsored by the Paris Musee D'orsay for their 20th anniversary and from that partnership came a movie with a satisfyingly over-ambitious art direction in any modern film we've seen.

Like much of the early work of Jean-Luc Godard (and the rest of the young directors of the French New Wave), Vivre sa Vie (1962) wears its American influences on its sleeves. Perhaps better than our experiences with other pre-1968 Godard work, we can see the seeds of the more explicitly Marxist ideology that will bubble up in his work later in the decade. And that's probably not the only way this...

This week we finish up the Pedro Costa boxset Letters from Fontainhas with Colossal Youth which is a beautiful and affecting piece of art, despite the fact that we are still left a bit suspicious of Costa's politics.

We continue through the Letters from Fontainhas boxset this week. The story goes that one of the co-stars of Pedro Costa's Ossos, Vanda Duarte, invited Costa to see what her life was really like, and Costa decided to strip the artifice of film down to its essentials or something and make a "docufiction" film about Vanda and Fontainhas with just his subjects, himself, and a handheld DV camera.

We start a box set from director Pedro Costa this week. "Letters from Fontainhas" contains three of Costa's films set in the impoverished Lisbon neighborhood of Fontainhas. Ossos (1997) is our first, and the closest to a traditional film. While "closest" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, the others move from outright narrative fiction to something more accurately labeled "docufiction" or ev...

Last week we had a long conversation about the nature of ennui today and this week Nicholas Ray swings in with a movie from 1956 reminding us that middle class ideals lead to fascism. I love it when the Criterion Collection gives us unmarked ideological sets.

Marco Ferreri's 1969 film Dillinger is Dead takes a look out how being a victim of alienation under capitalism makes committing oppressive violence feel like liberation. Or at least I hope so, because otherwise it's a bad movie.

Make Way for Tomorrow is one of the most subtly political films we've seen, particularly from America. Leo McCarey's masterpiece tells the story of an older couple forced apart by economic forces, having lost their income and their home in a world were their children cannot financially or emotionally care for them. It stands as a beautifully made depressing drama, but it shines as an example of th...

Director Steve McQueen's feature debut, Hunger is a historical drama about the mistreatment of IRA political prisoners by the British government, particularly centered on Bobby Sands' part in the 1981 hunger strike that led to his death. McQueen and his cast all insist this movie is meant to be apolitical and show that wrong was done on both sides. If that is true, this brilliant film failed its m...

Our fourth and currently final Max Ophuls movie in the Collection is his final film, a historic romance that takes a lot of liberties and is maybe kinda about taking liberties? Capitalist patriarchy is a circus in Lola Montes.

Götz Spielmann's 2008 film Revanche feints at being a crime drama, and has a title suggesting it's a revenge thriller, but settles into being a study on loss and grief.

After we watched Wings of Desire a few months ago we were greatly anticipating another Wim Wenders film and Paris, Texas (1984) does not disappoint. The term "modern western" is usually applied to cowboyish action films, but I think it's fitting here for a story of the southwest US that doubles as a parable on the lack of community and connection when living in places built for cars not people.

We finish up the Roberto Rossellini War Trilogy boxset with our least favorite of the bunch. Germany Year Zero (1948) is a deeply impactful film, but it also gets us thinking about the nature of Rossellini's commitment to "realism".

We continue through the Roberto Rossellini War Trilogy boxset with 1946's episodic Paisan. This week we get six separate stories with various amounts of tragic endings and the lasting reminder that Italy would like America to be its friend now.

This week we kick off Robert Rossellini's War Trilogy, a boxset of the Italian director's films from the end of World War 2 and the beginning of the Neo-realist movement. First up is Rome, Open City, a movie that codifies Rossellini's neo-realist style out of necessity instead of ideology. This episode is a bit late because the laptop I have recorded Lost in Criterion since 2013 on died. RIP the m...

Steven Soderbergh's Che (2008) is surprisingly pro-Che (and unsurprisingly anti-Castro) telling the story of the revolutionary's rise in Cuba and fall in Bolivia. Most of the bonus features on the Criterion dvd though are dedicated to the fact that this epic film is shot on a RED digital camera and isn't that neat?

We finish up the Golden Age of Television boxset with two Playhouse 90 episodes both directed by John Frankenheimer, who averaged directing about one live television broadcast every other week during his early career. This week it's The Comedian, Rod Serling's stinging look at a caustic comedian, and Days of Wine and Roses, a melodramatic very special episode in association with Alcoholic's Anonym...

We continue through The Golden Age of Television boxset with the three teleplays from disc 2: the perfectly comedic and tragic Bang the Drum Slowly, the ambitious and poignant Requiem for a Heavyweight, and the why-is-this-in-the-set A Wind from the South.

This week we start a boxset of teleplays from various 1950s live dramatic anthology series. Criterion here is releasing a PBS retrospective from the early 80s showcasing the teleplays that mostly hadn't been seen since then, and really weren't publicly available until Criterion's release. We'll be taking this set over the course of three weeks, focusing on each separate disc in the box. Criterion...

Michael Ritchie's directorial debut is one of the greatest sports films to ever come out of Hollywood, second only to Ritchie's later Bad News Bears.

A spiritual successor to the works of Francesco Rosi, in content if not style, Matteo Garrone's 2008 film Gomorrah takes a look at the modern state of organized crime in Naples. Filmed on location in the real life places the portrayed crimes take place, and with non-professional actors who would go on to serve prison time for their involvement in real life crimes, Gomorrah shows us the all-too-com...

Arnaud Desplechin's 2008 A Christmas Tale wears its influences on its sleeve and meshes them into a cohesive whole, but perhaps an overly-full whole. There's a lot going on here, and clearly the version we're seeing was meant to have even more going on.