Lost in Criterion

We continue through the Letters from Fontainhas boxset this week. The story goes that one of the co-stars of Pedro Costa's Ossos, Vanda Duarte, invited Costa to see what her life was really like, and Costa decided to strip the artifice of film down to its essentials or something and make a "docufiction" film about Vanda and Fontainhas with just his subjects, himself, and a handheld DV camera.

We start a box set from director Pedro Costa this week. "Letters from Fontainhas" contains three of Costa's films set in the impoverished Lisbon neighborhood of Fontainhas. Ossos (1997) is our first, and the closest to a traditional film. While "closest" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, the others move from outright narrative fiction to something more accurately labeled "docufiction" or even "ethnofiction", a fictionalized ethnography. We'll talk more about that aspect in the rest of the series, but for now we have Ossos which is a beautiful film.

Last week we had a long conversation about the nature of ennui today and this week Nicholas Ray swings in with a movie from 1956 reminding us that middle class ideals lead to fascism. I love it when the Criterion Collection gives us unmarked ideological sets.

Marco Ferreri's 1969 film Dillinger is Dead takes a look out how being a victim of alienation under capitalism makes committing oppressive violence feel like liberation. Or at least I hope so, because otherwise it's a bad movie.

Make Way for Tomorrow is one of the most subtly political films we've seen, particularly from America. Leo McCarey's masterpiece tells the story of an older couple forced apart by economic forces, having lost their income and their home in a world were their children cannot financially or emotionally care for them. It stands as a beautifully made depressing drama, but it shines as an example of the state of things and the need for change as the New Deal and, particularly, Social Security were bringing a much needed safety net to Americans in similar situations.

Long time supporter of the show Jason Westhaver joins us to talk about this wonderful film.

Director Steve McQueen's feature debut, Hunger is a historical drama about the mistreatment of IRA political prisoners by the British government, particularly centered on Bobby Sands' part in the 1981 hunger strike that led to his death. McQueen and his cast all insist this movie is meant to be apolitical and show that wrong was done on both sides. If that is true, this brilliant film failed its makers' intentions.

Our fourth and currently final Max Ophuls movie in the Collection is his final film, a historic romance that takes a lot of liberties and is maybe kinda about taking liberties? Capitalist patriarchy is a circus in Lola Montes.

Götz Spielmann's 2008 film Revanche feints at being a crime drama, and has a title suggesting it's a revenge thriller, but settles into being a study on loss and grief.

After we watched Wings of Desire a few months ago we were greatly anticipating another Wim Wenders film and Paris, Texas (1984) does not disappoint. The term "modern western" is usually applied to cowboyish action films, but I think it's fitting here for a story of the southwest US that doubles as a parable on the lack of community and connection when living in places built for cars not people.

We finish up the Roberto Rossellini War Trilogy boxset with our least favorite of the bunch. Germany Year Zero (1948) is a deeply impactful film, but it also gets us thinking about the nature of Rossellini's commitment to "realism".

We continue through the Roberto Rossellini War Trilogy boxset with 1946's episodic Paisan. This week we get six separate stories with various amounts of tragic endings and the lasting reminder that Italy would like America to be its friend now.

This week we kick off Robert Rossellini's War Trilogy, a boxset of the Italian director's films from the end of World War 2 and the beginning of the Neo-realist movement. First up is Rome, Open City, a movie that codifies Rossellini's neo-realist style out of necessity instead of ideology.

This episode is a bit late because the laptop I have recorded Lost in Criterion since 2013 on died. RIP the macbook I promised myself I would keep for a full decade in order to justify the cost. You almost made it.

Steven Soderbergh's Che (2008) is surprisingly pro-Che (and unsurprisingly anti-Castro) telling the story of the revolutionary's rise in Cuba and fall in Bolivia. Most of the bonus features on the Criterion dvd though are dedicated to the fact that this epic film is shot on a RED digital camera and isn't that neat?

We finish up the Golden Age of Television boxset with two Playhouse 90 episodes both directed by John Frankenheimer, who averaged directing about one live television broadcast every other week during his early career. This week it's The Comedian, Rod Serling's stinging look at a caustic comedian, and Days of Wine and Roses, a melodramatic very special episode in association with Alcoholic's Anonymous.

We continue through The Golden Age of Television boxset with the three teleplays from disc 2: the perfectly comedic and tragic Bang the Drum Slowly, the ambitious and poignant Requiem for a Heavyweight, and the why-is-this-in-the-set A Wind from the South.

This week we start a boxset of teleplays from various 1950s live dramatic anthology series. Criterion here is releasing a PBS retrospective from the early 80s showcasing the teleplays that mostly hadn't been seen since then, and really weren't publicly available until Criterion's release.
We'll be taking this set over the course of three weeks, focusing on each separate disc in the box. Criterion front-loaded the set with three bangers straight out of the gate. Adam S. joins us to talk about Marty (written by Paddy Chayefsky), Patterns (written by Rod Serling), and No Time for Sergeants (starring Andy Griffith).

Michael Ritchie's directorial debut is one of the greatest sports films to ever come out of Hollywood, second only to Ritchie's later Bad News Bears.

A spiritual successor to the works of Francesco Rosi, in content if not style, Matteo Garrone's 2008 film Gomorrah takes a look at the modern state of organized crime in Naples. Filmed on location in the real life places the portrayed crimes take place, and with non-professional actors who would go on to serve prison time for their involvement in real life crimes, Gomorrah shows us the all-too-common story of those ground up and left behind by capitalism.

Arnaud Desplechin's 2008 A Christmas Tale wears its influences on its sleeve and meshes them into a cohesive whole, but perhaps an overly-full whole. There's a lot going on here, and clearly the version we're seeing was meant to have even more going on.

We loved the last Costa-Gavras film we saw, and we love this one. Z (1969) is a story pulled from the headlines of the director’s homeland of Greece that takes a hard look at police alignment with far-right politics and the disastrous results oh letting that power go unchecked.

Wim Wenders Wings of Desire is one of the most arthousey arthouse films we've seen since our last Jean Cocteau, but this one has Peter Falk and is thus much more accessible.

We finish up the "And Seven Short Films" included on the Monsoon Wedding release with the four fiction shorts included: The Day the Mercedes Became a Hat (1993), her section of the 11'09'01 anthology (2002), Migration (2007), and How Can it Be? (2008).
They are an interesting mix of Nair's work made under a variety of political impetuses. 

According to the cover, the title of Criterion Spine 489 is Monsoon Wedding and Seven Short Films, and we're being extra completionist by dedicating two episodes for covering the Seven Short Films. This week it's the three documentary shorts: So Far from India (1983), India Cabaret (1985), and The Laughing Club of India (2002).

Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding is a fantastic look at family at a few crossroads in an India at a few national crossroads of its own. And as if the movie itself weren’t enough, the Criterion Collection packs this release with seven other shorter pieces from Nair, which we’ll be covering in the coming weeks.

James Ivory’s adaptation o the E. M. Forster novel, Howard’s End is a star-studded, period-accurate recreation of a Britain in transition from patriarchal colonialism to kindler, gentler, female-inclusive neoliberal colonialism. It actually doesn’t deal with the colonialism all that directly, but we still see the failings of the new order in regards to class equality, how a even a little power can corrupt and how charity isn’t justice.