Lost in Criterion

One of the last Hollywood films before the Hays Code went into effect, Josef von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress seems to see the coming crackdown and gave it the double deuce. The story of how Catherine the Great ended up as Empress of Russia - one of apparently two films on the subject to come out in 1934 for some reason - The Scarlet Empress claims historical accuracy by being based on Catherine's own journals. This is a...tenuous claim.

Every year we take a break from the hustle and bustle of getting Lost in Criterion and settle in by the fire for a non-Criterion Christmas classic. This year it's Lethal Weapon and our dear friend Sam Martin of the band 99 Spitits.

The film that made it into the Criterion Collection because Armageddon is already in there so why not? Donovan Hill joins us to talk about Michael Bay's debut directorial, a movie that may actually be a video game?

There's a lot to be said about Spartacus. It's famously one of the only films Stanley Kubrick directed in which he didn't have complete creative control. It's one of the biggest contributing factors to the end of blacklisting in Hollywood. It's possibly the greatest movie ever made out of pure spite.

In 1969 Masahiro Shinoda adapted a 1721 bunraku puppetry play into Double Suicide, a highly stylistic interpretation that, while live action, holds firmly to many of the theatrical elements of the style, and perhaps other styles of Japanese theatre as well. It's hard to describe a story of a murder suicide pact between a man and his mistress as fun, but Shinoda clearly took a playful attitude toward his interpretation.

In Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve (1941) Henry Fonda plays a rich boy scientist with either a really specific case of face-blindness or the intelligence of Buster Bluth, while Barbara Stanwyck plays a con-woman who can't seem to not fall in love with him. It's a classic romantic comedy, and in that the plot doesn't make a lick of sense upon any amount of scrutiny. It's got some funny bits though!

Luis Bunuel's 1972 tale of five upperclass twits trying to have dinner but being interrupted by a series of surreal or otherwise highly unusual events is one of the most ridiculous and wonderfully funny films we've seen

After the delightful non sequitur of last week's film, Criterion throws us back into things with an emotional Bergman that Pat just can't connect with. The surprisingly vivid - for what we're used to from a Bergman film - Cries and Whispers (1972) won a well-deserved Oscar for it's cinematography while playing with themes of faith and redemption and femininity that Ingmar liked so much.

It's Spine 100! To celebrate the milestone Criterion threw us a bone: The Beastie Boys Video Anthology, a collection of videos from the hip-hop trios first two decades. It's also basically the only DVD in history to actually utilize that "Alternative Angle" button on your DVD remote. Yeah, it's fancy and fun.

The "death" of an "era" with Gimme Shelter, the Maysles and Zwerin's account of the Stones' '69 US tour that ended in the only way it could.

Someday I may understand what Michelangelo Antonioni was saying in 1960's L'Avventura. That day is not today.

Watching Spike Lee's 1989 film about the racial tensions of a New York neighborhood seems timely. It always seems timely. I'd like for it to not seem timely. Let's work on that.

Douglas Sirk and Rock Hudson are back this week and this time they're teaming up with Unsolved Mysteries' Robert Stack and the late Lauren Bacall for a weird tale of sexual issues and surrogate sons. 1956's Written on the Wind is, once again, a big studio melodrama that Sirk tries to indue with some sort of deeper satire, though with varying results this time around.

Douglas Sirk made big studio melodramas that audiences ate up and critics hated. Until decades later when filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Rainer Werner Fassbinder decided he was awesome and now everyone's on board. All That Heaven Allows is a 1955 venture starring Jane Wyman as a rich widow who falls in love with her Thoreau-obsessed gardner, Rock Hudson. It's a beautiful film; Sirk and cinematographer Russell Metty craft perfect frames that tell the story better than the actual plot.

A story as old as time itself! Woman wants to marry faceless rich dude, instead marries slightly less rich dude who's spent some amount of time berating her.

Black Narcissus is a feverish technicolor condemnation of British imperialism in India. Well, that's one reading at least. At it's most basic it's about nuns that go crazy. Who doesn't love a story about insane nuns?

Arthur Crabtree's 1958 gorefest is the story of what happens when you mix telepathy and atomic energy.

Steve McQueen's first starring role is this wonderfully campy 1958 indie horror film from Irvin Yeaworth, with just the best theme song.

Pat delves deep this week, seeking out Lafcadio Hearn's translations of Japanese folk ghost stories that Masaki Kobayashi's 1964 film Kwaidan are based on in order to better understand them and compare the film to its source. Pretty darn close, Pat would say if Pat were writing this.

Alexander Nevsky, one of Sergei Eisenstein's famous Soviet historical epics, is a monstrous and monstrously propagandistic film that has left all sorts of influence in its wake. Pat and I aren't really into it, even with it's massive battle sequences.

Pat and Adam watch Pygmalion and get distracted complaining about how people who actually agree with Henry Higgins still exist and shouldn't.