Lost in Criterion

David Lean's 1945 adaptation of a Noel Coward play brings a great film, if you can get past the fact that it's about the emotional struggles of the bourgeois. I kid! Pat and I both loved Brief Encounter. It's a perfectly crafted story of an affair that leaves us emotionally drained and loving it.

Chasing Amy is the story of a man who falls in love with a lesbian and is a terrible person. It doesn't hold up to time, but maybe it was still important at some point.

Pat and I actually understand Agnes Varda this week.

In this episode Pat gets annoyed by the main character's angst, and I spend as much energy as I can trying to get him to care. We have more Agnes Varda coming up in the Collection, including next week's Vagabond, and well deserved, too, considering she pretty much started the French New Wave. Hopefully Pat can get into the others.

In this week's episode we watch a French musical comedy and discuss the metaphorical value of Pat's underwear. Le Million (1931) is director Rene Clair's second sound film, a medium he at first regarded as "an unnatural creation" apparently believing that sound would do nothing but diminish the quality of story telling on the big screen, an opinion that I can not imagine anyone actually having ever.

Ingmar Bergman's 1975 adaptation of the classic Mozart comedic opera is, as Pat repeatedly says in these week's episode, "wonderful!"

This is a highly controversial film to say the least, and still one that doesn't come up positively in conversation's about Jesus films in conservative circles. A Christianity Today article on the top 10 Jesus films even lists Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew - a film in which Jesus is a brooding, angry revolutionary made by a Marxist, atheist – while only making a passive negative comment about the “heresy” that is The Last Temptation.

We hit up our last Jean Cocteau film this week to finish off his trilogy of artistic non-statements with the 1959 swan song Testament of Orpheus. Pat and I are so done with Cocteau and his insistence that nothing he does has meaning even while he forces metaphor and symbolism into every nook and cranny of his work. This one features Cocteau himself as protagonist being berated by supernatural beings for asking "Why?"

We finally find a Cocteau film we can sit through.

Jean Cocteau's exploration of art leaves Lost in Criterion with feelings.

We're joined by a myriad of guests, old and new, to talk about our first (but certainly not last) excursion into the world(s?) of Wes Anderson: Rushmore.

I owned this movie for a long time. I could watch this movie every day and not grow tired of it. And yet still, viewing it to talk about this week brought fresh eyes and new observations: things I'd never noticed; things I feel kind of stupid for never noticing. Which I suppose is the sign of a true classic. Always something new to discover.

Herk Harvey made educational films. Herk Harvey made an indie horror film in 1962. Herk Harvey had an uneven skillset.

Carl Theo. Dreyer's direction, and Maria Falconetti's performance combine for one of the greatest cinematic experiences in history.

Lost in Criterion gets lost in religious controversy (and it won't be the last time) with Monty Python's Life of Brian

Ingmar Bergman directs Ingrid Bergman in a heart-wrenching character study about a bad mother.

I mean, at least Salo had a point I could grasp.

Peeping Tom is a dark thriller about a young man with daddy-issues. It came out 6 months before Psycho. Everyone hated it. We don't.

"The best Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock never made" according to unciteable sources.

Hands down the best film with an autogyro. Well, except for The Rocketeer.

"Unfilmable" novels still get filmed. Unfilmable novels are still unfilmable. Lost in Criterion explores The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Al Reinert's 1989 documentary made of NASA's own footage of the Apollo missions is raw and exciting and wonderful.

Donovan and Mifune and Kurosawa back one more time.

Donovan's back to talk about Kurosawa's Yojimbo with us. It's a fun conversation as always.

Donovan, Stephen, Andrew Tobias, and Wrion Bowling gather around our hearts and hearths to talk Die Harder.