Lost in Criterion

Probably the best acted, best scored, best directed, most beautiful, self-serving justification of being a traitorous jerk ever put to film, Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) could have been better if it was more true to the real life events that inspired it and less a justification for naming names to the House Unamerican Activities Committtee. Thank the unions and enjoy your May Day weekend...

Similar to the ways that Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Rosetta (1999) reminded us of a modern day version of Breson's Mouchette, their film The Kid with a Bike (2011) feels like an updated The 400 Blows. Of course, the Dardenne's bring their unique style to the story of Cyril and Samantha, once again ending not with an established community, but a shaky hope of one, if we want it.

Keisuke Kinoshita's The Ballad of Narayama is a film about enforced austerity, about capitulating to the fascist power structures, about how we can be conditioned into killing ourselves even without a boot directly on our neck because that's the status quo. It's about what we do to others and to ourselves not because we have to but because we've been conditioned to think we have to. "Its power see...

Wim Wenders had planned for years with German Neo-expressionist choreographer Pina Bausch to make a film of her work, but Wenders didn't know how he could do it justice. Then he saw U2 3D (2008) and knew that digital 3D was the technology he needed. Unfortunately, as technology caught up to Wenders' vision, Bausch passed away, and Pina (2011) morphed from just a document of her work into a tribute...

In the first 140 Spines of the Criterion Collection there were five Alfred Hitchcock films, leading us to believe we'd be seeing a lot more from him over the years, but it turns out The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) is the first Hitchcock we've watched for the podcast in just shy of a decade. This is the original The Man Who Knew Too Much, one of Alfred's first big breaks before moving to Hollywood...

While the first two films in Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy were built on filming in particularly locations, in Naqoyqatsi, the image itself becomes the location as editor and "digital cinematographer" Jon Kane takes us into the simulation that is modern life. Unfortunately, like the early unused setpiece footage from Koyaanisqatsi, the tech here has not aged well, though this time Reggio doesn't...

We continue through Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy with 1988's Powaqqatsi. Reggio works with Phillip Glass again but they lost Ron Fricke for this one and his absence is felt, particularly in the editing. While the first film looked at what US industrialization has done to its own people, Powaqqatsi travels around the world to look at the effects of industrialization on postcolonial peoples. Jonat...

We start into Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy this week with what many consider the strongest of the three films, mostly because Ron Fricke's cinematography and editing is masterful in it. Built from scenes of natural beauty and alienating industry with a phenomenal sountrack by Philip Glass, Koyaanisqatsi is a deeply effecting visual poem. Our dear friend Jonathan Hape ( https://www.jonathan-hape....

Christopher Nolan's first feature, Following (1998) is a neo-noir with an achronological story structure. The man loves a neo-noir with an achronological story structure. Nolan describes the film as the pinnacle of what he could achieve in a low budget and just working with his friends. which is damning if true because it's just not very interesting.

René Clément's 1960 adaptation of the 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, Purple Noon is seems to find the director and screenwriter Paul Gégauff trying to drain the homoeroticism out of the source material. Fortunately, cinematographer Henri Decaë and star Alain Delon (in his breakout role) knew how to add it back in through both Delon's fantastic facial acting and some of the most erotic shots o...

After Micheal Cimino's The Deer Hunter won five Oscars, United Artists gave him carte blanche for his next film and he really went to town. As in he built and rebuilt at least one whole town, on stilts in a National Park so as not to damage the landscape. If only he'd waited 45 years he could have just bought Glacier National Park outright and really become his film's villains. Anyway, the film wa...

Jean-Luc Godard's goodbye to cinema, at least for a time, Weekend (1967) is not just a condemnation of bourgeois values, but a stunning attack on automobile culture. Sure the messaging is scattershot at best, but there's little in the film that isn't memorable. And it's gotta be hands down the film with the largest salvaged car budget.

The last of Pasolini's Arabian Nights betrays a director who is steadily on his way to making Salò, and he would begin work on that magnum opus just after he finished Arabian Nights. Like the previous two films in this trilogy, Arabian Nights adapts a well known collection of stories with a heavy focus on the most erotic ones. Pat argues that unlike the others Arabian Nights feels more dour, less...

Continuing through Pasolini's Trilogy of Life this week we have The Canterbury Tales (1972). Pasolini's adaptation of a a foundational English text includes many naked and British people, including Tom Baker. While the film's epilogue changes the book to make these tales "told only for the pleasure of telling", Pasolini's celebration of pre-consumerism sex comes with a certain growing darkness. We...

Spine 631 is a boxset of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Trilogy of Life", a collection of adaptations of collections of stories. We kick it off this week with The Decamaron, based on Giovanni Boccaccio's 14th century collection of tragic and erotic stories. Pasolini adapts these as celebrations of pre-capitalist, pre-consumerist sex, language, and dentistry. Pasolini's Decamaron is very horny, and very fu...

Roman Polanski adapts Ira Levin's 1967 novel into this 1968 film, though adapts may not be the right word. Transcribes, maybe? The original cut was a very faithful transference of the source material into the film medium, perhaps more faithful than any novel to film adaptation has ever been. Then he let someone else edit it down to a reasonable movie. Mia Farrow is great in it, perhaps because her...

John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) is a deeply personal work, presaging New Hollywood while making something neither New Hollywood or the British New Wave would dare. We meet a middle-aged doctor, Daniel, and a 30 something divorced woman, Alex, who are both dating Bob, a young artist who makes them both feel alive even if he's a self-centered jerk most of the time. Like the average no...

Joshua Marston's The Forgiveness of Blood (2011) takes a hard look at the effects of honor codes that get twisted into demanding blood penance. It's a fantastic familial drama, but also gives us a jumping off point to talk about (re)interpreting (para)religious texts to favor mercy and care, and also how both Sovietism and capitalism seek a hegemony that the state controls. That's right, Pat cross...

Jonathan Wacks' Powwow Highway (1989) takes a lot of trappings of a holiday road movie, but leaves them behind when needed as we explore the characters and relationship of two Cheyenne men struggling in to hold onto tradition in a world controlled by colonizers. This may be the first holiday film we've covered where the only person who says "Merry Christmas" is the villain. Christmas in Powwow Hig...

There are two David Fincher movies in the Criterion Collection, and The Game (1997) is the better one by a long shot, solely for not featuring the monstrous simulacrums of the human form that exist throughout The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008. Spine 476). The Game is mostly an interesting thriller that doesn't do enough with its San Francisco setting, but then in the last few minutes it ju...

Marcel Carné made Les Visiteurs du Soir (1942) during Nazi occupation of France for a Nazi-owned production company, and while one could argue that this is collaboration and one could also argue that Carné used his position to help Jewish artists keep working, that fact that this is a Nazi-produced film is somehow not the most egregious part of the production. We spend a lot of time on what the mo...

Paul Bartel directs this black comedy that's "not Lubitsch—but it’s not quite John Waters either", according to Criterion essayist David Ehrenstein. Eating Raoul (1982), is a story of America, of the normally hidden and unpunished violence of wealth accumulation. Or it's a story of America, of two prudish weirdos punishing the people they don't like. Or it's a story of America. the dream of reveng...

In 1975, the enigmatic Ken Russell adapted and directed The Who's concept album/rock opera Tommy into a memorable film. The Who, apparently, really enjoyed making movies and decided to follow it up four years later with an adaptation of Quadrophenia (1979), but this time hiring Franc Roddam who would go on to create MasterChef and is noticeably not Ken Russell. Quadrophenia is a throwback to kitch...

We get three early films from Paul Fejos all under the banner of his 1928 part-talkie Lonesome. Also on the Criterion release is the much more interesting to us Broadway (1929) and the much less interesting to us The Last Performance (1929). Each film is inventive and interesting in its own right, but Broadway just kept getting bigger, facilitated by Fejos and his team inventing a camera crane, an...

Andrew Haigh's Weekend (2011) is an exquisite character study of a Friday-Sunday fling between two pretty opposite young men, in a precarious time where homophobia is constantly bubbling in the background. It's also just one of the cutest love stories we've experienced in the Criterion Collection. Just an absolute delight of a movie.