Lost in Criterion

Laurence Olivier's 1944 propagandist (at the behest of Churchill himself) adaptation of Henry V is not only Olivier's first film directorial, it's also the first time in film history that an adaptation of one of Shakespeare's plays actually made money. It was nominated for four Academy Awards but only managed to garner Olivier an Honorary Oscar for "for his outstanding achievement as actor, producer and director in bringing Henry V to the screen." Honorary Oscars are, as you know, even more masturbatory than real Oscars, though that doesn't lessen Olivier's feat here. It's a fine production with a lot of smart choices behind it. If only Pat and Adam could make it through a Shakespearean History without losing focus.

It's the episode you've all been waiting for. Since we made it through Pasolin's Salo this was the next film of dread albeit for (thankfully) different reasons. But still dread nevertheless.

Armageddon is Michael Bay's 1998 sophomore work that challenges our understanding of what The Criterion Collection is actually collecting. We come up some good justifications with this week's special guest Stephen Goldmeier. We also complain a lot. Because there is so much to complain about. So very much.

Bewilderingly Armageddon was nominated for four Academy Awards and won two Saturn Awards (including tying for Dark City for Best Sci-Fi Film). Less bewilderingly it was nominated for seven Razzies, though only won one. 

Seijun Suzuki's 1966 film Tokyo Drifter is more comprehensible than Branded to Kill -- it does actually have a discernible plot for most of the film --  but barely -- there's an extended fight scene that plays like a Merry Melodies short. The studio didn't like this one either. While Tokyo Drifter didn't lead directly to Suzuki's firing, it did get his color film privileges revoked, which is why the later Branded to Kill is in black and white while Tokyo Drifter has, quite honestly, a really excellent integration of color and non-color footage.

Seijun Suzuki's Branded to Kill (as well as next week's film, Tokyo Drifter) is a B movie Yakuza film from a guy who could make a B movie Yakuza film in his sleep who wanted to do something different. Released in 1967 Branded to Kill led directly to Suzuki being fired for turning in a completely "incomprehensible" film. Considering that Suzuki is a director who doesn't believe there's even such a thing as "film grammar", on it's surface the studio's criticism may have a point. After viewing Branded to Kill it's obvious that they do. It's also obvious why this film is cited as influential by John Woo, Quentin Tarantino, Park Jan-wook, and Jim Jarmusch.

It's a mess.

But it's a fun mess.

Terry Gilliam's 1981 fantasy film Time Bandits is a polarizing film, it seems. If you experience it at a time when you can relate to the main character, a put-upon boy with a Roald Dahl-ian family life, it may be your favorite movie of all time. Elsewise, well, you may not like it at all. It's a movie that is successfully written (and often physically shot) from the point of view of its young protagonist, running on child-logic and attacking some pretty big questions as best a child can -- Kevin asks the Supreme Being why evil exists and is told "I think it has something to do with free will." Of course it's also a Terry Gilliam film, so maybe that's why some people just don't like it.

Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (1953), only serves to hammer home the fact that he had a better hand for suspense than Hitchcock. The Wages of Fear manages to be one of the most suspenseful films in history without being anything close to a murder mystery or spy thriller or horror film. Take the explosive threat that drives the suspense in the opening scene of Touch of Evil and expand to two hours, keeping it the background terror of a deep character study on the various ways fear takes its toll on man. As Bosley Crowther said in his New York Times review on the movies initial release: "You sit there waiting for the theater to explode."

Henri-Georges Clouzot has been called the French Alfred Hitchcock, which is really just a Anglo-centric way of saying that if Clouzot had been working in English he'd be more popular (in general? or more than Hitchcock? Yes). We've got two of his best movies in a row starting this week with Diabolique (1955) based on a novel by Pierre Boileau. It's said that Clouzot bought the rights to the novel mere hours before Hitchcock arrived for the same. As a consolation, Hitchcock bought another Boileau novel about a former detective with a fear of heights and his investigation of a woman who should be dead. Vertigo, masterwork that it is, and Psycho, which borrows a bit from Diabolique, don't quite achieve what Clouzot does here.

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.