Lost in Criterion

It's more John Woo this week on Lost in Criterion, as Pat and Adam watch the last movie he made before leaving Hong Kong for Hollywood: 1992's Hard Boiled. A word of warning: neither of us could find an official Criterion release for this -- Criterion has only released it on DVD and that DVD is out of print -- so we ended up watching an English-dubbed version on youtube. You smell that? That's the sweet scent of quasi-legality. 

This week Pat and Adam talk about the quintessential John Woo film: 1989's The Killer. It's got gun-fu, overtly Christian symbolism, Chow Yun-Fat, and doves! All the hallmarks of great Woo cinema with none of the Nicolas Cage! And Adam basically makes it the whole way without grossly mispronouncing anything! Truly we are blessed! Though his mic was really tinny this week. Hope that's ok.

In this episode of Lost in Criterion Pat and Adam discuss Roy Ward Baker's 1958 titanic epic about the Titanic A Night to Remember and wax rhapsodic about the affect the disaster had on the 20th Century.

While Adam continues to not be able to pronounce things, even in English, Pat manages to win this week's Captain Edward J. Smith Award for Great Achievements in Idiocy for deleting the first take completely instead of saving it. We need to develop safeguards against this sort of thing.

This week Pat and Adam discuss Jean Cocteau's 1946 adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, a film that clearly had a heavy visual and structural influence on later adaptations (we're looking at you, Disney) but still managed to leave us wanting. We also discuss the merits of telling your audience that they'd like your movie better if they weren't so dull.

Listen in and feel free to tell us we're dumb, especially if you're correcting Adam's established inability to say words correctly.

This week Pat and Adam talk about Francois Truffaut's intense and wonderful 1959 drama The 400 Blows. Guess if they liked it or not?

Also, Adam completely butcher's Truffaut's name, but makes up for it by mispronouncing it a different way every time he says it. I promise I'm not a complete idiot; I even went to college.

This week Pat and Adam watch Federico Fellini's more than a little ridiculous 1973 coming-of-age tale Amarcord. Adam continues to not be able to pronounce non-English names despite not being dumb. I swear.

Also we compare the film to Hudson Hawk. Just because. So there.

Personally, I think we finally start hitting our stride on this one.

In this weeks Lost in Criterion we discuss Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 comedic mystery The Lady Vanishes and we surprise ourselves with just how long we can discuss a movie that is not nearly as heavy as the first two we watched. We also write off everything Hitchcock did prior to this, which I'd like to apologize for. While his pre-1940's British period is not filled with as many classics as the rest of his career, the movies prior to The Lady Vanishes are nothing to shake a stick at, no matter how large the stick may be.

In this episode we continue to get our footing on this whole "podcast" thing as we discuss Akira Kurosawa's 1954 epic Seven Samurai which clocks in at over three hours long, but somehow avoids feeling like it. The same may not be said for our 54 minute episode, but, hey, we're not Kurosawa.

Now seems as good a time as any to point out that our theme music is by the great Jonathan Hape. Check out his other work on JonathanHape.com

Welcome to the first episode of Pat and Adam's adventure through the Criterion Collection. This was originally recorded as a test to see what would happen if we tried, so our apologies that this episode is a bit rough. They do get better. They also get shorter. After this test we decided to shoot for 45-60 minutes episodes. This one is a bit over that.

In this episode we discuss Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion, a 1937 French (anti) war film that neither of us had ever heard of let alone seen. That's going to be a common description for many of the movies to come. Listen in to see what we thought, and feel free to comment with thoughts of your own.

We here at With Two Brains are excited to be starting a new long term project! Lost in Criterion will feature Pat and Adam and the occasional guest discussing every movie in the ever-growing Criterion Collection in order of their spine numbers.

Our first proper episode will be up on Friday when we'll be discussing Jean Renoir's 1937 classic The Grand Illusion, but to kick things off we've got a special Christmas episode with a special Christmas guest!

Our old friend Andy Heney joins us for a discussion of the Christmas classic Die Hard! Listen below or on iTunes! We look forward to you joining us for our Sisyphean task in the coming weeks, months, and years.