Lost in Criterion

Every year we break out of the normal Criterion Collection journey for a special end of year episode watching a non-Criterion film that takes place at Christmas for no discernible reason. As always we're joined by dear friends -- that's important this time of year -- and this time around frequent guest Stephen Goldmeier and award-winning journalist Andrew Tobias join us in watching Christmas-fetishist Shane Black's 2005 directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

Apparently Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune did not end their relationship on the best of terms, but if they had to part ways fighting, they still managed one heck of a film, but then could either ever make a bad film? Red Beard, from 1965, is not only the two greats' final collaboration, but also Kurosawa's finally black and white film. That probably makes it special, too, right?

If everyone where just open and honest with one another there would be no film.

White people love Wes Anderson, so a few white people join us to talk about his films. Joined by Jonathan and Casey Hape.

I don’t often talk about our recording schedule, but this week’s episode is already terribly dated for terrible reasons. Pat and I watched Hearts and Minds, Peter Davis’s 1974 documentary on the Vietnam War, way back in September. I actually watched it on the 11th, because I don’t want to be happy. The world has changed a lot, even in the last eight weeks. On the one hand, we recorded this so long ago because Pat took paternity leave for the birth of his second child. On the other, the concerns of continued militarization of Japan Pat expresses in the episode have come to fruition, and it’s a bitter fruit. I rhetorically ask what it will take to forget the lessons we learned from the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, like we forgot the lessons of Vietnam -- naively suggesting that those wars are over and that we actually learned a lesson -- and it seems we may now have an answer.

Kon Icihikawa' documentary of the 1964 Olympics is brilliant, hilarious, agonizing, and very human. No wonder the Japanese Olympic Committee hated it?

Alec Guinness first tried to read Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth during World War II, but couldn't bear its stream-of-consciousness narrative. Sometime later his wife impressed upon him to give it another shot and he went on to adapt it into a screenplay. Ronald Neame was brought into direct the resulting film, released in 1958, with Guinness staring as the eccentric artist Gulley Jimson. It's often called his funniest film, which is a pretty tough crowd to beat out. Personally, I'd lean toward Murder by Death or Kind Hearts and Coronets for that honor, but The Horse's Mouth is right up there, and quite a bit more poignant even as a comedy.

Barbet Schroeder "directs" Uganda's Idi Amin in what the dictator hopes will be his "Triumph of the Will". Hilarity and death ensue.

From the guy who would later bring you Pineapple Express comes a much more depressing, much more amazing film.

Stephen Soderbergh not only directed his 2000 drug drama Traffic, but stepped behind the camera as well in order "to get as close to the movie" as possible. That is a weird metaphysical way of describing it, but sure. The film itself, based in part on the Channel 4 series Traffik, paints a sprawling portrait of the US drug trade as it stood -- and in many ways still stands -- at the turn of the century. Other films may do better to condemn the failure of the War on Drugs, but Soderbergh manages to drive home that the current angle just doesn't work.

Jean-Pierre Melville is called Melville because he really liked Moby Dick and apparently the French Resistance just let you pick your own codename because anti-fascism. His 1956 film Bob le Flambeur is a French gangster film that is often called a precursor to the French New Wave, but Pat and I aren't buying it.

After The Cranes are Flying a few weeks ago we may have set our hopes too high for our next foray into Soviet "Thaw" era films about World War 2. It's not that Grigori Chukrai's Ballad of a Soldier isn't good, but that bar was really high. Released in 1959, two years after Cranes, Ballad of a Soldier feels like a throwback, more influenced Eisenstein than, well, anyone other than Eisenstein. And Eisenstein is great! But Ballad's exploration of (rather chaste) love in many forms just doesn't land with us.

Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love. Such a beautiful and poetic film. Released in 2000, a scant three years after the British returned rule to China, a time of many questions and possibilities, the film tells the store of a love parallelogram that for better, or usually worse, can't quite come together. There's little to say here except watch it? And give us a listen.

Kalatozov's The Cranes are Flying takes a critical look at what World War II did to the average person's psyche. Well, a lot more critical than almost anything released west of the Iron Curtain.

Milos Forman claimed he didn't mean for The Fireman's Ball to be a condemnation of the Czech government. Maybe it was just a happy accident?

We're headed back to Czechoslovakia this week for a few rounds with prolific Czech director Milos Forman. First up is Loves of a Blonde, Forman's 1965 comedy about a working class girl in need of...distraction. It's possibly the best known film of the Czech New Wave, and for good reason.

In his 1977 film The Last Wave Peter Weir sought to show what it would be like if a pragmatic person started to have visions. Of course, a pragmatic person who starts to have visions would ignore them, so the premise is flawed in any attempt to make a film longer than thirty seconds. Instead what Weir makes is the classic tale of a white man trying to find meaning in traditional spiritualism after becoming disillusioned with modernity, unfortunately with all the problems such a premise usually comes with. That is not to say this is a racist or even bad film, but it certainly doesn't handle its story nearly as well as Peter Weir probably thinks it does. And yet, it remains interesting and engaging.

Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise (1945) has been called the French Gone With the Wind because it is also long and racist? At least Children of Paradise keeps its racism contained to a few background characters in terrible blackface. Also, unlike Gone With the Wind, which features a war, Children of Paradise went the extra mile by being filmed during and just after the Nazi occupation of France, taking a bit of a break for D-Day. That's right, the French undermined Nazi authority to make a movie about a mime that doubled as a day job for a good chunk of the Resistance.

Federico Fellini's 1963 navel-gazing comedy-drama 8 1/2 -- named for how many films he'd reckoned he'd made at the time -- may prove that Fellini is self-aware but it also prove that knowing and acknowledging your problems doesn't automatically absolve you of them. Still, Fellini's acknowledgement that he -- or at least his stand-in character Guido -- is really not very good at life is pretty entertaining.

Ingmar Bergman had a busy 1957, releasing The Seventh Seal in February and then running along to make a television film and Wild Strawberries. Inspired but his own memories of childhood -- and with a name meaning "an underrated place" -- Wild Strawberries is the story of a grumpy old man who takes a trip back in time as he travels to his hometown to be honored by his Alma Mater, though his actual mater isn't quite that alma. But hey, he learns an important lesson.

Donovan Hill adds a third point of view that probably isn't "truth" as he joins us to talk about Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950). The film invented an oft-poorly-imitated film convention and introduced Kurosawa to the West. Pat says modern Japan sees it as one of Kurosawa's "classics." You know, like the rest of his films.

In 1946 Alfred Hitchcock was still under contract to David O. Selznick and they still hated one another. But Selznick realized a scheme to make a little more money out of the star director: instead of producing Notorious himself, he sold it off to RKO just before shooting started. Of course he still tried to exert a bit of control, attempting to get Joseph Cotten in the lead instead of Cary Grant. Oh that David O. Selznick! This is the last in our short run of Hitchcock/Selznick pictures, and the best of the bunch.

The second of Alfred Hitchcock's films made directly under David O. Selznick, 1945's Spellbound is markedly more Hitchcockian than Rebecca, though honestly not as Hitchcockian as Sluizer's The Vanishing. It also seems to be out to prove Haxan right about the contemporary state of psychology. But there is a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali which is a total treat.