Random Acts of Cinema

The seedy, hand-to-mouth, day-to-day scramble in the life of a press agent in New York City seems an unlikely setup for a cruel and bitter piece of star-studded film noir.  But Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster are up to the challenge in director Alexander Mackendrick's take on the hustle and corruption here at the very heart of conservative America's most nostalgic tent pole. If you'd like to watch...

Randy has been selecting a lot of spooky films for use recently, and the trend continues with Masaki Kobayashi's 1965 horror anthology  Kwaidan.  We're treated to four eerie tales adapted from the collection of Japanese folklore of the same name.  Each more gorgeously photographed than the next.  Ghostly imperial courts, ice vampires, dead lovers, and mischievous teacup spirits round out the cast...

This movie is famous because of it's hilariously clunky acronym.  And you only THINK you know what it stands for.  That's just the first surprise that this old school VHS never-rent has in store for you.  The second surprise is that, for all of its reputation, C.H.U.D. kind of has its charms.  Well, there goes whatever good will this podcast managed to earn. If you'd like to watch ahead for next w...

Ein Fritz Lang Film! And its a nightmarish psychological crime thriller that was banned by the Nazis no less!  It's also, strangely, a kind of sequel to two different and previously unrelated Lang films: Mabuse the Gambler (1922) and M (1931).  In other words, this is a perfect place for us to start with this director.  A world-weary police inspector begins to investigate a series of murders trace...

We have our first sample of Jim Jarmusch with this little gift that Mike chose for Charlie's extra-special birthday episode.  Is this classic three-part anthology set in crumbling Memphis environs a perfect present or a devastating disappointment?  With tales of tourists on a rock n' roll pilgrimage, a widow beset by colorful locals during an unexpected layover, and three working stiffs caught up...

Bob Rafelson's  Head  offers an acid-dipped, musical journey through the artistic and professional frustrations of the Monkees, post TV show and struggling apologize for their existence with the verylanguage of the flower-powered, freak-out culture that had long-since rejected them.  Never quite settling on a format, the film jumps from comic vignette, to surrealist mindscape, tv show parody, conc...

This is a big one folks. We're starting our foray into the films of Ingmar Bergman with his (and maybe even the Criterion Collection's) most iconic film: The Seventh Seal. Death! The Plague! Chess! Harlequin tights! This is the podcast that will determine once and for all: does it live up to the hype? We also tackle a few easy quandaries like: does God exist? If you'd like to watch ahead for next...

Podcast Episode. If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and reviewing Bob Rafelson's Head (1968).

A rambling old English manor.  Maze-like hallways leading to shuttered, dusty rooms. Whisperings of derangement, obsession, and suicide.  Music boxes in minor keys.  Creepy, dead-eyed children who speak in words beyond their years.  Fog.  Silhouettes in windows.  Antique clown dolls seemingly moving on their own accord.  This movie might have more gothic horror tropes in it than there are gothic h...

Famed Neo-realist Roberto Rossolini cast an unlikely Ingrid Bergman as the lead in his 1950 film Stromboli . She plays Karin Bjornsen, a displaced and now stateless Lithuanian at the conclusion of World War 2, left unmoored and interred at a displaced persons camp in Italy. With no options remaining, she marries Antonio (played by Mario Vitale), a besmitten soldier who takes her home to his native...

In Made In U.S.A. , Anna Karina plays a Philip Marlowe-inspired hard-boiled-but-in-a-A-line-dress detective scouring the underbelly of Atlantic-Cité for the killer of her murdered boyfriend.  Director Jean-Luc Godard makes his first random appearance on the podcast with his French New Wave romp that spins 1940s Bogart into Go-Go Pop Art. If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will b...

We're taking a break from our normally scheduled podcast for a very special episode.  In remembrance of director Terry Jones, who passed away just before this recording, we watched his all-time comedy classic, Monty Python's Life of Brian .  And yeah, a lot of our so-called "review" is us just poorly reenacting our favorite jokes, but such is the group's legacy for dorks like us.  But we also get...

Director Steve McQueen's first feature film goes deep into the circumstances of a series of prisoner protests in Northern Ireland in 1981.  With a clinical and procedural examination of their bodies both as sites of victimization and instruments of protest, the film considers the cruelty, strategy, determination and oppression of modern incarceration.  Among the inmates, Bobby Sands (played by Mic...

We are joined by podcast alums Shelley and Max for a viewing of celebrated and idiosyncratic auteur - hey, we're 90s kids - Kevin Smith's first foray into a larger world of ambition, exposure, and budget, examine the love triangle between New Jersey natives and comic book creators Holden (played by charismatic star-on-the-rise and future academy award winner Ben Affleck), Banky (played by future M...

This is a documentary about celebrated Danish director Carl Theodore Dreyer that was released in the Criterion Collection in tandem with a collection of his celebrated films.  So, it's time to learn!  And maybe review the quality of the documentary from a cinematic perspective.  Does that even make sense for this podcast?  Doesn't matter.  A random number generator told us to watch it, so we're wa...

Luis Bunuel joins illustrious list of directors to be featured on our podcast.  What an honor!  And in classic, Random-Acts-of-Cinema-fashion, we're going to start with a later film in a filmmaker's oeuvre that doesn't quite fit the mold.   Diary of a Chambermaid tells the 1920s-set story of Celestine, a beautiful and confident femme du chambre who takes employment at a large country estate filled...

Reflections, prisms, the dance of car lights across a rain sprinkled window to a Parisian cafe.  It sure looks like we're reviewing some 1990s art house cinema this week.  And we are are doing exactly that, with the ur- Trois Coleurs trilogy entrant, Krzysztof Kieslowski's  The Double Life of Veronique .  This film follows a period in the life of the titular character, played by Irene Jacob, and o...

Now we're talking.  This is some serious Criterion Collection viewing right here.  Pedro Costa's docufiction is a snail's-paced meditation on the lives of the largely Cape Verde immigrants living in the Fontainhas neighborhood of Lisbon, Portugal.  This movie is not concerned with entertaining you.  This movie is not concerned with delighting you.  The rose-colored glasses of studio cinema are now...

Ah, if only we could go back to the bohemian nexus of the American folk scene in 1960s Greenwich village.  To be among the beatnicks and intellectuals, musical anthropologists and legendary performers.  Drinking coffee and arguing over varyingly intense leftist ideas.  Living, loving, and just soaking in the timeless music so lionized during this romantic and vibrant time and place.  Or we could j...

A plucky trio of young contributors to the Allied war effort find themselves caught up in a dastardly plot to poor glue in girls' hair in a small English town. But mostly they all just come to learn about how the shared heritage of America and England is a noble culture worth celebrating. Basically, this is a government-sponsored bit of war-time propaganda, but it is directed by Powell and Pressbu...

We've gone from a man-on-the-run crime drama made in 1979 Japan, to another only made in 1960 Italy and France.  Claude Sautet's  Classe Tous Risques  offers us a classic crime film full of desperate men, daring robberies, breathless car chases, the pathos of children living on the margins, and - because it's a 1960 french crime movie - Jean-Paul Belmondo swaggering about with a wry grin.  What a...

Shohei Imamura's study of a killer on the run and the family members and victims that he leaves in his wake is presented as a fact-based accounting of dates, names, and crimes.  At least, that's what it seems to be at first glance.  Really the film sutures together a largely non-chronological sequence of flashbacks, obliquely phrased conversations, and both random and coldly-calculated murders tha...

One evening in 1954, Marylin Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, and Senator Joseph McCarthy gathered in Albert Einstein's New York City hotel room to excitedly monologue at one another about subjects like fame, sex, motherhood, baseball, communism, and the precise shape of the universe.  Or at least that's what happens in Nicolas Roeg's 1985  Insignificance .  It's basically the film adaptation of a stage play...

To celebrate the Collection's 1000th spine number, we're reviewing the film that started the kaiju-craze of the 20th century: Ishiro Honda's 1954 masterpiece Godzilla . Because we're SOOO clever, we get into the film as a response to fears in the atomic age, but mostly we try to contend with the surprising fact that the movie is genuinely very very good.  If you'd like to watch ahead for next week...

With our first random foray into the silent era, Harold Loyld's comic romance The Kid Brother - officially helmed by director Ted Wilde - has a plot. It's fine. Charming enough. But really it's platform to string together a series of brilliant physical comedy set pieces that the lead actor stumbles, flails, and seemingly improvises his way through. Farm hijinks, pranks on bullies, a chase/fight fo...