Lost in Criterion

Andrei Tarkovsky's 1966 almost-a-biopic film about the artist Andrei Rublev was suppressed almost before it came out, but many things with any merit were in Soviet Russia so it's not that surprising. Eventually Martin Scorsese found a copy of the film and brought it out of Russia, and that copy is where the Criterion Collection edition comes from. The film is quite the trip, and a long one, but thought-provoking nonetheless.

Oh man, if Oliver Twist was problematic then Robert J. Flaherty's 1922 "documentary" is the pure problem to which problematic things aspire. It's not just staged, it's purposefully primitivized, Falherty taking away an modernity his Inuit subjects had allowed into their lives, from guns to to jeans to houses. Still as the world's first full-length documentary, it proved that such a thing was possible and marketable, so it sits on its throne of lies.

There's a lot of good in David Lean's 1948 adaptation of another Dickens classic. Oliver Twist has all the artful design and framing of Great Expectations, and once again Lean manages to trim down the story into a movie people will actually sit through. And Alec Guinness is back! Well, those last two aren't wholly good. Particularly Guinness's Fagin. Oh there is so much wrong with Guinness's Fagin.

This week marks the second David Lean film we've talked about and next week will be a third, which is a good indication that, like the British Film Institute, Criterion considers Lean a pretty important director.

This week it's the first of his adaptations of the work of another British great Charles Dickens and one of the best book to movie adaptations I've ever seen: 1946's Great Expectations. Dickens is verbose, which is a polite way of saying that he was paid by the word, and Lean and his co-adapters masterfully trim the fatty bits down to a, well, lean little sirloin.

Fritz Lang's M (1931) is the German directors first film with sound and star Peter Lorre's first film and first villainous role. Technology and star are both put to excellent use. M is also a film that the Nazi's tried to suppress before they were even in power. I can't think of a more glowing recommendation, but I will say that has always been one of my favorite films since I first saw it many, many years ago.

Peter Weir's 1975 adaptation of Joan Lindsay's equivocally "true" novel is a trip, and not just because it's a mystery with no resolution. Sure it's success was based almost entirely on people thinking the story was real, but there's also a reason it won the BAFTA and Saturn awards for it's cinematography. It's a lovely movie, even if the answer to its central mystery remains unsolved and the answer Joan Lindsay came up with involves some sort of magic portal. It's probably best that Weir left that part out.

The story is that while filming Flesh for Frankenstein Paul Morrissey and crew discovered they were quite ahead of schedule and under budget, so they decided to make a second movie. Released the following year, Blood for Dracula, which shares Frankenstein's critique of sexual promiscuity, was partially improvised and for some reason has a cameo from Roman Polanski. It's also a much more entertaining movie no matter what the Rotten Tomato ratings suggest, despite Joe Dallesandro's character being much more overbearing and hard to handle.

Paul Morrissey's 1973 horror-comedy was originally titled Andy Warhol's Frankenstein despite the fact that Andy Warhol had virtually nothing to do with it. Udo Kier (whose name is amazing) stars as the good doctor in this bizarrely sexualized telling of Mary Shelley's classic that doubles as a critique of Free Love. In 3D! (Where available.) It was originally rated X for all the sex and gore, almost rivaling Salo on that front, though playing it for comedy makes it quite a bit more palatable. Also, as if anything could even come close to rivaling Salo on that front.

John Mackenzie's 1980 British gangster film was the break out role for Bob Hoskins who will still forever be Mario whenever I think of him. Or possible Smee. Helen Mirren's in it, too, and they're both great actors. An incredibly young Pierce Bronson has no lines. BFI puts it at number 21 of the top 100 British films of the 20th century, because it is obviously very British. And explodey.

As the last episode in June this marks six full months of Lost in Criterion. Thanks for listening! We've got a long road ahead of us.

In 1965 Jean-Luc Godard took an established film-noir detective character and shoved him into a dystopian future city ruled by an authoritarian computer that runs everything on cold logic while quoting Borges' poetry about the nature of myth and maintaining the most inefficient public execution system in history. Alphaville is weird. It's disjointed. It's baffling.

As our resident Kurosawa obsessive Donovan Hill joins us again to talk about the director's 1963 crime drama High and Low. The first hour is a morality play taking place in a shoe company executive's living room. The next one and a half are a police procedural that feels like Law and Order. I'm not selling this right.

Great and interesting movie. Fun conversation. Always glad to have Donovan around. If you'd like to join us for any conversations talk to us on at www.facebook.com/lostincriterion

Paul Verhoeven's first American film is a violently subtle attack on corporatism. The 1987 film also looks forward to a hypothetical dystopian Detroit that looks like it might be better off than current actual Detroit.  In a movie about excess Kurtwood Smith still manages to steal the show as the over-the-top villain. It's a really fun movie and I'm happy to report that Donovan Hill is joining us again to discuss it.

David Lean's 1955 tale of summer love was called Summer Madness in Britain, which might give you an idea of how well Kathrine Hepburn's attempts at a relationship in Venice go. Or the madness of the title may be the production's insistence that Kathrine Hepburn's accent is that of an elementary school secretary from Akron, Ohio.

David Cronenberg's 1988 psychological drama is a lot like most of what Cronenberg was doing in the 80's: weird. What The Fly does for physical horror, Dead Ringers does for mental horror (with quite a bit of the physical left in). Jeremy Irons is amazing as twin gynecologists who share enough screen time that I'm beginning to think that Cronenberg modified the machine from The Fly to just make two Ironses. 

Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungeon are two horrible people who are horribly perfect for one another. That about sums up the plot of Alex Cox's 1986 biopic of the ill-fated couple. We had, shall we say, mixed feelings on it.

Episode 20 though! Is that a milestone? Nearly half a year already. We've seen some real greats so far, and some real stinkers, and Salo. Trudging right along though. Only 700 or so more to watch! 

This week we're watching Shock Corridor, Sam Fuller's 1963 tale of a so-so journalist's ill-advised plan to get a Pulitzer.  It's not as good a movie as his next one, The Naked Kiss, which we watched last week, mostly due to Constance Towers being featured less prominently and in a much more subdued (in a lot of senses) way. We posit that The Naked Kiss is an apology for how she gets treated in this movie. 

Anyway, still enjoyable pulpy goodness. 

Ever pressing on, we recover from Salo and move on to Sam Fuller's 1964 neo-noir The Naked Kiss, kicking off a duo of back to back Fuller. It's lively and pulpy and fun, due mostly to Constance Towers being a far better actress and Fuller a far better director than this script probably deserves, though Fuller did write it himself. So hopefully our joy in The Naked Kiss isn't just a direct result of having watched Salo directly before.

Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote and directed this 1975 film that almost made me vomit. I stopped it four times to keep from doing so.

This film is the reason we decided to do the podcast in order of Criterion's Spine numbers, because it forced us to have a system which meant we wouldn't just watch the ones we wanted to watch first and never ever ever watch Salo. I almost regret that. I watched this before Pat did and sent him an email apologizing for ever having the idea to watch the Criterion Collection and considered putting an end to it. 

I endured.  Pat endured. We chatted about it for an hour.

From now on whenever I am faced with a seemingly impossible task I will remember: I watched all of Salo; I can do anything. 

Well, Donovan Hill finishes off Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy with us as we discuss the 1956 end to the saga: Duel at Ganryu Island. It's not quite as action oriented as the other two films, but it does a lot to tie up loose ends and put a cap on the story.

Hopefully Donovan will be back, it was pretty fun having him on.

But I don't think we'll convince him or anyone else to join us next week. 

Donovan Hill joins us again as we continue our discussion on Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy, this time focusing on the second film in the series which came out in 1955 to quite a deal less acclaim internationally. But Mifune's still in it, so it can't be that bad, right? 

This week marks a string of episodes where we have a special guest to help us discuss Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy, a historic biopic of Japanese legend Musashi Miyamoto. Please welcome to the show Donovan Hill, an old friend whose father first tossed him into the river of Samurai culture at an inappropriately young age, but we'll let Donovan tell you all about that in this weeks episode. We're always happy to have guests, and if you'd like to join us, please feel free to ask in the comments section.

The Trilogy stars Toshiro Mifune, who was also in Seventh Samurai (a film Donovan probably would have loved to discuss with us as well), whose birthday was just this past Monday. How coincidental.

This week Lost in Criterion talks about Jonathan Demme's 1991 Oscar-winning thriller Silence of the Lambs. Pat's not a fan of psychological thrillers, but he didn't let that keep him from watching this one. And he certainly didn't let it keep him from delivering an incredibly well-reasoned argument on why this movie sucks. Personally, I still like it, even if he makes some fair points. This is probably the best conversation we've had so far, and I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed having it.

The first American film in our journey arrives with Rob Reiner's 1984 mockumentary This is Spinal Tap, a comedy classic that leads Pat and Adam to a rumination on the nature of good comedy. And Adam tells some stories about his work in the hospitality industry, which (strictly speaking) he isn't supposed to do. Well if this gets him fired it was probably worth it.

Also, it's so good to have one week where we don't have to look like fools unable to pronounce foreign words. Pat makes up for it by spending two minutes trying to say a perfectly English one. 

In 1971 Nicolas Roeg made a rather weird movie called Walkabout. Mostly it seemed like an excuse to ogle his under-aged female lead, but only slightly less than that it was a rather good film. Lost in Criterion discusses it this week and talk about how there are so many butts in it. How many butts, you ask? You want me to say a butt load, but I won't.