Lost in Criterion

After years we finally get another Luchino Visconti film and it does not disappoint. Like The Leopard, Senso is set against the backdrop of the struggles of Italian unification, an idea that Visconti seems to have seen as analogous to the struggle to implement communism in his own time. Unlike The Leopard, Visconti takes a melodramatic love story and just shoves all that political stuff in there until it's about to burst.

It's a beautiful film, thanks in no small part to the film's 3rd cinematographer, promoted cameraman Giuseppe Rotunno kicking off his illustrious career.

Every so often the Criterion Collection shows us exactly one movie from a director and will apparently never show us another. With very few exceptions we've loved these one-and-dones, and Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Succcess is no outlier.

It's very dark, it's very entertaining, and we'll never see anything from Mackendrick again.

Hirokazu Kore-eda's 2008 drama looks at a day in the life of a Japanese family, a day that just so happens to be the anniversary of the eldest son's death by drowning. It's a little bit Ozu, it's a little bit Naruse, and it's a wonderful exploration of the ways trauma and grief linger in family relationships.

Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank is, refreshingly, a "this is how the poor people live" movie from someone who actually grew up in similarly impoverished situations to the protagonists of their film. Criterion also provides us with 3 of Arnold's short films, each dealing with a similar theme to those that show up in the main film: young womanhood, single motherhood, and grief.

First a note: Sorry to have missed last week, but Adam was in the hospital after a bicycle accident left him with a fractured elbow. He's on the mend, and we should be back to the regular schedule.

This week we're talking James L. Brooks office rom-com set against the changing background of 1980's newsrooms. 1987's Broadcast News is a fun movie, indicative in many ways of Brooks' decades writing cutting edge sitcoms. Unfortunately, he doesn't take the opportunity of a larger story to punch any harder.

Guillermo del Toro's first film, Cronos (1993), is flat out just a really great vampire flick, with an eye toward how the machinations of adults effect the children in their lives, like many of his best films. But that bit of family-focus isn't the only way Cronos rises above simple genre film, as del Toro uses the vampire to tell a story of capitalism and colonialism, and the particular evil that is created when Christianity unites with those powers and principalities.

We finish up the America Lost and Found: The BBS Story boxset with one more film from producer, director, and one of the B's in BBS Bob Rafelson. The King of Marvin Gardens may have our favorite Jack Nicholson role of the bunch, and is a strong finish in a boxset that really ebbed and flowed for us. "It's Monopoly out there" is going to enter my lexicon.

America Lost and Found: The BBS Story has been really up and down for us, but Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971) is definitely toward the top. Stylistically and homage to John Ford (and, to a lesser extent, Howard Hawks), this coming of age story is set in the 50s but still manages to engage in the politics of the early 70s better than a lot of the other movies we've watched this last month.

The BBS films we've been watching are culturally important for telling new types of stories within major studio-released films, but for the most part, outside of Head, the form of the stories hasn't been that different. The sex is more explicit, the drug use is forefront, but the actual structure of the film is more familiar, I think. Maybe that's just because we're 50 years on and it's less new.

Head was out there structurally, of course, and second to Head comes Henry Jaglom's A Safe Place, a film I cannot believe Columbia put out. It's structure has more in common with Chris Marker's Le Jetee (1962) than Easy Rider, and it feels more daring than anything we've seen in weeks of the BBS set. Jaglom is trying to chase Cassevetes, but unfortunately lacks Cassevetes' abilities. But at least he's got Orson Welles in his picture.

For us, this is honestly the nadir of the BBS boxset. Drive, He Said is a movie that can't even take it's own political moment seriously, hamstringing the "revolutionary" at the center of the film into a lone man driven insane by "free love" with no reference even to the draft, even as the very campus Jack Nicholson was shooting on was literally being set on fire in organized anti-war protests possibly DURING production. And the filmmakers even made the ultimate revolutionary act in the film much, much less revolutionary than their source material had it, so they have no excuse as far as we're concerned.

But maybe as Ohio boys we're just mad that Drive, He Said is set in Ohio but not filmed there.

It's well acted though! Despite the poorly drawn character, Michael Margotta is fantastic as Gabriel, and Karen Black's performances continue to be the highlights of these films.

What Easy Rider does for hippie-adjacent drug dealers, Five Easy Pieces (1970) does for upper class piano prodigies? It's becoming increasingly clear that the ideas the BBS guys and their associates have about "freedom" are very much at odds with Lost in Criterion's ideas about liberation.

We think Carole Eastman's script was probably a lot more interesting than Bob Rafelson's movie, but who can say.

The second movie in the America Lost and Found: The BBS Story boxset is the one that artistically put them on the map. It was the Monkees' money that got the movies made, but it was Easy Rider (1969) that got them legitimacy.

Dennis Hopper directs this classic tale of...freedom? People tell me this movie is about freedom. I'll be honest, given the cultural hold this film seems to have I was surprised at how bleak it is.

This week we kick off one of our longest boxsets yet, America Lost and Found: The BBS Story. In it we'll see some of the most well known early New Hollywood films of the late 60s and early 70s produced by Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, and Stephen Blauner.

We start off with perhaps the most out there of the set. Rafelson and Schneider are the creators of the Monkees, and much of BBS's success can be attributed to the just tons of money they made from that show. Our first film, directed by Rafelson, is Head (1968), the psychedelic swan song for the prefab four.

Our good friend Jonathan Hape, a long-time Monkees fan who'd never seen Head before, joins us for a rollicking conversation about the film and the band.

Modern Times is our first proper Charlie Chaplin film in the Criterion Collection - though The Immigrant (1917) was a bonus feature on Spine 330, Louis Malle's Au revoir les enfants (1987).

Modern Times is just such a classic film, and a perfect fit for us as it's Chaplin's first excursion into what could be considered political film. We'll get more of that from Charlie in a few months with The Great Dictator, and really cannot wait for that! For now his heart is in the right place even if he's doing a lot that Rene Clair already did in A Nous la Liberte with a better political message but no Chaplin set pieces so it's really hard to rank them against each other. Clair's production company actually sued over Modern Times, but settled out of court and Clair himself was horrified that they sued his friend Chaplin. In the end, we get two great films about the hellish nature of technology in the hands of capital.

Since we first encountered Lars von Trier with The Element of Crime way back at Spine 80, he is a director who we - Pat especially - look forward to as the Criterion Collection trickles out his work. Antichrist, however, was a film we were both cautious about, knowing what little we did about it.

Ultimately, the film is sort of a mix between Salo and Haxan, and like Salo it is a film that I am glad I watched but will never recommend to anyone. Like Salo, Antichrist is steeped in sexual and gender-based violence, some of it graphically self-inflicted. You should not watch the film without knowing that is coming.

But still, it is a fascinating look at depression and grief. And this is one of my favorite episodes as of late, and we've watched a lot of good movies lately.

Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter has been so vindicated in the decades after its release that it really is quite a shame that the man not only never made another movie but died before he got his due respect.

The Darjeeling Limited is possibly Wes Anderson at his most self-aware, but sometimes its still difficult to tell the difference between deeper symbolism and the director's stream-of-consciousness aesthetic styling, particularly when it comes to the religious elements.

Speaking of religious elements, a note: this episode we spend some time talking about the [Anglo] Latin Catholic influence in India since that is the Christianity we see in the movie (and it gives us a chance to reference Black Narcissus). While the colonialism of more modern waves of Christianity into India cannot be sidestepped, we should point out that Christianity has a 2000 year history in parts of India, particularly the south, and it’s not all the rather austere Latin Catholicism that we see in the movie and talk about in this episode.

Casey Hape joins us once again as the person we know who has been into Anderson the longest, and we got her husband Jonathan to sit in as well.

Nobuhiko Obayashi's sole film in the Criterion Collection (so far!) is the 1978 avant garde horror comedy House, a movie co-written by his 8 year old daughter.

After nearly nine years we finally get a second Stanley Kubrick film from the Collection with Paths of Glory (1960), his first collaboration with Kirk Douglas made just before Spartacus. This is our third "anti-war" film in the last month or so, and the second American one. With Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line we discussed whether or not an American film made after WW2 could truly be "anti-war", but I think Paths of Glory comes closer than any other we've seen.

Big thanks to Adam S. for joining us, because it's always nice to have someone who may actually know what they're talking about on the podcast.

Statistically speaking, I think we're more likely to be watching an Ingmar Bergman film in the Criterion Collection than not, which is why it's surprising that The Magician is the first one we've seen in like 2 years. This time Bergman brings us a tale of conmen in unbelievable costumes and bad audiences that don't know how to have fun.

Terrence Malick makes spiritual humanist films. He also decided to make this war film.

OK, "anti" war film. Whenever we watch an anti-war film the comment attributed to Truffaut comes up: "there's no such thing as an anti-war film". We don't entirely think that's true. We've seen spiritual and humanist anti-war films as recently as last week's episode that I would say achieve their goal. Unfortunately, as we discuss this week, American culture, particularly post WW2, may be so steeped in war that an American cannot make an anti-war film.

Still, Malick tries, and if the production stories are to be believed, it took quite a toll on him.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) is positively chaste compared to the other Nagisa Oshima films we've seen, as the sex here is always boiling just below the surface. This experiment in stunt casting pays off as one of the best anti-war movies we've seen, digging into the humanity and inhumanities of a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and their Allied prisoners, and leaving us to think about who gets punished and why.

Our second experience with Maurice Pialat does not help us beg down the man's politics. This time we have L'enfance nue, a film that owes a lot to Truffaut, both because it's in the vein of The 400 Blows and because Truffaut produced it.A semi-documentarian look at the state of French Social Service's treatment of abandoned children, Pialat tries not to get too judgemental while showing us a system that is patently broken and clearly failing the children it's meant to "protect".

Our second of the pair of Terry Zwigoff documentaries is one that initially no one wanted to touch, despite the success of Louie Bluie. Was it just that all that good will had evaporated over the course of a decade? Or was it that this time around Zwigoff turned his camera on his friends: gonzo cartoonist R. Crumb and Crumb's even more eccentric brothers. Eccentric is a good word here.

We kick off a pair of documentaries by Terry Zwigoff, starting this week with Louie Bluie, his 1985 look at musician and artist Howard Armstrong. Start to finish just an absolute delight of a documentary.