Lost In Criterion podcast

40:54

Taxes, Voting, Recycling—oh my! After navigating this jungle of grown-up responsibilities together, we're taking a quick summer breather to recharge our adulting batteries. But before we temporarily hang up our responsible pants, join us for this special episode packed with our favorite kernels of wisdom from the season so far AND get an exclusive preview of the fresh adulting adventures awaiting you when Grown-Up Stuff returns in late summer! Think of this episode as your adulting victory lap—complete with confetti and zero paperwork required! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.…

Lost in Criterion explicit

maison des série•Feed

The Adam Glass and John Patrick Owatari-Dorgan attempt the sisyphean task of watching every movie in the ever-growing Criterion Collection. Want to support us? We’ll love you for it: www.Patreon.com/LostInCriterion

664 episodes

#Cinema #John Dorgan

Lost in Criterion

Lost in Criterion explicit

updated il y a environ 6 heures

maison des série•Feed

664 episodes

#Cinema #John Dorgan

All episodes

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 660: Things to Come 1:59:48

il y a 6 hours1:59:48

1:59:48

A few months ago we were surprised to learn that HG Wells, the famed 19th century science fiction writer, survived long enough to comment on film adaptations of his work. This is a silly thing for us to be surprised by, because the man was only 66 when Island of Lost Souls, the movie that he commented on, came out. Just a few years later Alexander Korda hired Wells himself to adapt Wells' futurism work into Things to Come (1936), working with a crack team of art directors and artists including William Cameron Menzies as director, Vincent Korda officially acting as art designer, and a cadre of others including a mostly cut sequence by Hungarian experimental filmmaker László Moholy-Nagy. It's a beautiful film that looks at a future that Wells imagines is not a technocratic dystopia even though that's what he portrays.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 659: Life is Sweet 1:48:00

il y a environ 7 jours1:48:00

1:48:00

To Pat, Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet (1990) feels a lot like a Very Special Episode of a 90s sitcom. Adam tries his best to rescue Pat from that particular abandoned refrigerator, and we arrive at the film as an interesting critique of capitalism in the era of Margaret Thatcher’s “There’s no such thing as society.” We also get five shorts from an unrealized television project Leigh originally shot in 1975. All six works take interesting looks at working class life.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 658: Medium Cool 2:00:11

il y a environ 14 jours2:00:11

2:00:11

Haskell Wexler was hired to make a film adaptation of Jack Couffer's The Concrete Wilderness, a 1967 novel that seems a lot like an American version of Barry Hines A Kestral for a Knave which came out the next year. Like some of our other favorite films in the Criterion Collection, Wexler nearly completely rejected the brief and took his adaptation far from the source material to make Medium Cool, a film that retains certain story elements from the book but focuses less on the child protagonist and more on the political education of his mother and the news cameraman job of her new boyfriend. If it were just that, it might be interesting, but what Wexler turns in is a film that mixes that narrative fiction with Cinema Verite documentary on the political powderkeg that is Chicago (and the whole US) in 1968, with fictional characters interacting with real-world events as they actually unfold, culminating in a breathtaking Direct Cinema-esque sequence of one character attending the Democratic National Convention as another wanders through the police riot outside.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 657: 3:10 to Yuma 1:46:44

il y a environ 21 jours1:46:44

1:46:44

The second in our pair of Delmer Daves westerns is certainly the superior movie: taut, beautifully shot, and that theme song! Like last week's film 3:10 to Yuma (1957) stars Glenn Ford, this time playing a villain who seems to have a monopoly on violence 'round these parts being taken in by a farmer (Van Heflin) with a real sense of wanting things to be normal for once. 3:10 to Yuma is also our first movie in the Collection based on the work of Elmore Leonard, a prolific writer whose work has been adapted into dozens of films of a varying quality over the years (from Burt Reynolds' Stick (1985) to Paul Schrader's Touch (1997). Despite there being some truly great films on that list, we won't see anything more from Leonard in this project for about 12 years when we reach the Ranown Westerns boxset at Spine 1186.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 656: Jubal 1:29:15

il y a environ 28 jours1:29:15

1:29:15

Criterion hasn't shown us a lot of classic westerns; this is only our sixth western in a broad definition, and of those only our third made before 1980 (or 1960 for that matter). I don't know if there's any conclusions to be drawn, but it seems a bit weird given how popular the genre has been throughout film history. Anyway, when we do get them, Criterion seems to favor ones that are elevate melodrama to Shakespearean levels, and Delmer Daves Jubal (1956), "Othello on the Range", is firmly in that camp, with an absolutely phenomenal cast to boot.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 655: Pierre Etaix Part 3 2:01:56

il y a 5 weeks2:01:56

2:01:56

Our third and final week in the Pierre Etaix boxset brings us the final two movies Etaix directed. The narrative film Le grand amour (1969) is perhaps the most entertaining (and self-aware) director-going-through-a-divorce movie we've ever seen. The documentary Land of Milk and Honey (1971) belongs to our favorite genre of documentary: director hired to make a puff piece turns in an artistic final product that his producers despise (see also Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad (1965)). Unfortunately, it wasn't just the producers that hated Milk and Honey, and Etaix never directed again.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 655: Pierre Etaix Part 2 1:53:48

il y a 6 weeks1:53:48

1:53:48

We continue through the Pierre Etaix boxset with two more features and a short. Yo-Yo (1965) is even more of an overt homage to the history of film comedy than anything we've seen from Etaix so far. As Long As You've Got You're Health (1966) is a series of shorts aimed at different aspects of modern French society, not least of the rising car culture. And the short Feeling Good was originally released as part of As Long As... but Etaix re-edited the film in 1971 to take out Feeling Good and add the earlier shot Insomnia in its place.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 655: Pierre Etaix Part 1 1:40:11

il y a 7 weeks1:40:11

1:40:11

This week we kick off a boxset of the 1961-71 works of French clown, comedian, and filmmaker (and illustrator and gag writer for Jacques Tati). The collection contains four narrative features and three shorts all co-written (and occasionally co-directed) by Jean-Claude Carrière, who may just be the most represented screenwriter in the Criterion Collection, as well as one documentary. For this first week we cover the shorts Rupture (1961) and Happy Anniversary (1962) and the feature length The Suitor (1962). We also cover the boxset's only substantial extra: Pierre Etaix, un destin animé (2011) a documentary on Etaix by his wife Odile Etaix just before his death.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 654: Repo Man 1:54:06

il y a 8 weeks1:54:06

1:54:06

In 1984 Alex Cox burst onto the scene with Repo Man, a hilarious critique of America's (then unique?) system of credit-capitalism, embodied in the industry of repossessing past-due cars. In a world where it is now possible to not only buy a hamburger today and pay for it next month, but to do so through multiple layers of corporate exploitation that will deliver it right to your door, Repo Man has not lost any of its punch. And the soundtrack is still dang good, too.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 653: Gate of Hell 1:47:22

il y a 9 weeks1:47:22

1:47:22

Daiei Film's first color film, Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell (1953) is an absolutely beautiful film and one of those rare instances where we really wish the Criterion Collection had included any bonus features at all, maybe something on the film's restoration or on Eastmancolor film in Japan. Anything. But we still manage to find something to talk about among the film's striking colors and very Buddhist message.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 652: Monsieur Verdoux 1:45:33

il y a 10 weeks1:45:33

1:45:33

As the US government was hounding him for various "anti-American"isms, Charlie Chaplin made his first movie since before the war: a black comedy where in lieu of the lovable Tramp (or the Tramp-esque Barber) Chaplin plays a polygamist serial killer. Monsieur Verdoux (1947) isn't so much a change of form for Chaplin, though, as the movie goes through great pains (of misogyny) to make Verdoux sympathetic and gives him a third act monologue that's nearly as great as The Great Dictator's.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 651: Badlands 1:57:21

il y a 11 weeks1:57:21

1:57:21

Terrence Malick's debut film is a story of America, of wanton violence driving across the great plains. Badlands (1973) isn't just Manifest Destiny marching over the continent; the film's from 1973, it's Vietnam, it's a murderous young man saying "Not that I deserve a medal." Malick hits the ground running with the spiritual lyricism he's known for, and kudos to the Criterion Collection for showing us our new favorite Malick right after showing us our new favorite Bresson.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 650: A Man Escaped 1:55:40

il y a 12 weeks1:55:40

1:55:40

Robert Bresson makes a prison escape film is the sort of premise that we cannot help but fall for, particularly as A Man Escaped (1956) is also our favorite sub-genre of crime film: the criminal procedural. While we really fell in love (sort of) with the "full Bresson" of Au hasard Balthazar or Mouchette, both a decade later, A Man Escaped takes Bresson's style into a genre we weren't expecting, and it is perfect.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 649: Ministry of Fear 1:42:04

il y a 13 weeks1:42:04

1:42:04

Our hopes were so high for Ministry of Fear (1944). Sure, Carol Reed is the best at adapting Graham Greene novels, but Fritz Lang? He's just one of the best European directors there is. Lang adapting Greene? Making a movie called Ministry of Fear in 1944? We didn't think anything could go wrong. Enter Seton I. Miller, executive producer and screenwriter, a dangerous combination in normal circumstances, but when dealing with a director who famously had little regard for the script, the end result is...not great?…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 648: Chronicle of a Summer 2:02:33

il y a 14 weeks2:02:33

2:02:33

Sociologist Edgar Morin and anthropological filmmaker Jean Rouch join forces for the Québécois filmmaker Michel Brault to turn their ethnographic lens on the empirical core and create the foundational text of cinéma vérité. It may be that this is the most truthful a French (or any) documentary had been up to this point, but the film's subjects often seem to be holding back, with many speaking in abstractions about the current political situations. The lack of honesty is further underscored by Criterion including Un été + 50 (2001), a 50-years-later followup where everyone can be a lot more upfront about their political associations, associations that probably would have landed them in jail or worse if mentioned in the original film. And while perfectly understandable -- we also would not like to be in French prison -- it still leaves us wanting for much of the film.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 630: Rosemary's Baby 1:55:27

il y a 30 weeks1:55:27

1:55:27

Roman Polanski adapts Ira Levin's 1967 novel into this 1968 film, though adapts may not be the right word. Transcribes, maybe? The original cut was a very faithful transference of the source material into the film medium, perhaps more faithful than any novel to film adaptation has ever been. Then he let someone else edit it down to a reasonable movie. Mia Farrow is great in it, perhaps because her personal life married to Frank Sinatra was pretty close to Rosemary's story. John Cassavetes is great in it despite Polanski's best efforts to reign him in. And I know have a least favorite cinematic satan to add to the list.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 629: Sunday Bloody Sunday 1:46:55

il y a 31 weeks1:46:55

1:46:55

John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) is a deeply personal work, presaging New Hollywood while making something neither New Hollywood or the British New Wave would dare. We meet a middle-aged doctor, Daniel, and a 30 something divorced woman, Alex, who are both dating Bob, a young artist who makes them both feel alive even if he's a self-centered jerk most of the time. Like the average non-Lubitsch film about polyamory, this relationship is obviously doomed, but the exploration of Daniel and Alex's emotional journey in their final week with Bob is exquisite. Plus, we get to meet some of the most wonderfully precocious we've ever seen in a Criterion picture.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 628: The Forgivenes of Blood 1:50:50

il y a 32 weeks1:50:50

1:50:50

Joshua Marston's The Forgiveness of Blood (2011) takes a hard look at the effects of honor codes that get twisted into demanding blood penance. It's a fantastic familial drama, but also gives us a jumping off point to talk about (re)interpreting (para)religious texts to favor mercy and care, and also how both Sovietism and capitalism seek a hegemony that the state controls. That's right, Pat crosses to Adam's side and flirts with anarchism this week on Lost in Criterion…

Lost in Criterion

1
Holiday Special 2024: Powwow Highway (1989) 1:57:27

il y a 33 weeks1:57:27

1:57:27

Jonathan Wacks' Powwow Highway (1989) takes a lot of trappings of a holiday road movie, but leaves them behind when needed as we explore the characters and relationship of two Cheyenne men struggling in to hold onto tradition in a world controlled by colonizers. This may be the first holiday film we've covered where the only person who says "Merry Christmas" is the villain. Christmas in Powwow Highway exists as a colonizers' holiday, but perhaps one held in tension as well. Our dear friend Stephen G. joins us for as we celebrate another year in the books!…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 627: The Game 1:50:06

il y a 34 weeks1:50:06

1:50:06

There are two David Fincher movies in the Criterion Collection, and The Game (1997) is the better one by a long shot, solely for not featuring the monstrous simulacrums of the human form that exist throughout The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008. Spine 476). The Game is mostly an interesting thriller that doesn't do enough with its San Francisco setting, but then in the last few minutes it jumps of a building and utterly fails to stick the landing.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 626: Les Visiteurs du Soir 1:28:04

il y a 35 weeks1:28:04

1:28:04

Marcel Carné made Les Visiteurs du Soir (1942) during Nazi occupation of France for a Nazi-owned production company, and while one could argue that this is collaboration and one could also argue that Carné used his position to help Jewish artists keep working, that fact that this is a Nazi-produced film is somehow not the most egregious part of the production. We spend a lot of time on what the most egregious part actually was in this week's episode, actually. Carné was clearly a man in conflict during production, but it's still mostly a delightful film and another data point for my list of cinematic Satans.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 625: Eating Raoul 1:43:14

il y a 36 weeks1:43:14

1:43:14

Paul Bartel directs this black comedy that's "not Lubitsch—but it’s not quite John Waters either", according to Criterion essayist David Ehrenstein. Eating Raoul (1982), is a story of America, of the normally hidden and unpunished violence of wealth accumulation. Or it's a story of America, of two prudish weirdos punishing the people they don't like. Or it's a story of America. the dream of revenge against the managerial class. Or it's none of these things completely, as we get into a discussion this week about just how strong the metaphor in Eating Raoul is. But hey, it's still a pretty fun movie.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 624: Quadrophenia 1:57:29

il y a 37 weeks1:57:29

1:57:29

In 1975, the enigmatic Ken Russell adapted and directed The Who's concept album/rock opera Tommy into a memorable film. The Who, apparently, really enjoyed making movies and decided to follow it up four years later with an adaptation of Quadrophenia (1979), but this time hiring Franc Roddam who would go on to create MasterChef and is noticeably not Ken Russell. Quadrophenia is a throwback to kitchen sink dramas, angry young men disillusioned with a society they will be joining within a few months, but mostly just fighting each other and being sexist and racist while their at it. For a film about some of the most stylish subcultures of 20th century Britain, the film itself lacks style and flair, but maybe we just wanted Ken Russell back. It's a bit like Stephen King movies after The Shining.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 623: Lonesome 1:49:45

il y a 38 weeks1:49:45

1:49:45

We get three early films from Paul Fejos all under the banner of his 1928 part-talkie Lonesome. Also on the Criterion release is the much more interesting to us Broadway (1929) and the much less interesting to us The Last Performance (1929). Each film is inventive and interesting in its own right, but Broadway just kept getting bigger, facilitated by Fejos and his team inventing a camera crane, and then needing to build a sound stage that could accommodate their camera crane, and then needing to make a movie to justify it all. The additional features on the Criterion release also give us plenty to talk about with biographical information on Fejos' later-career shift to anthropology and ethnography, a topic we are always willing to jump in on, though Criterion doesn't provide any examples of this aspect of his work.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 622: Weekend (2011) 1:47:46

il y a 39 weeks1:47:46

1:47:46

Andrew Haigh's Weekend (2011) is an exquisite character study of a Friday-Sunday fling between two pretty opposite young men, in a precarious time where homophobia is constantly bubbling in the background. It's also just one of the cutest love stories we've experienced in the Criterion Collection. Just an absolute delight of a movie.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 621: Rosetta 1:29:36

il y a 40 weeks1:29:36

1:29:36

Last week Criterion introduced us to the work of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne with a phenomenal film, but this week they follow it up with something somehow even better. From it's frenetic first few minutes, Rosetta (1999) is the story of a a young woman that believes she can find freedom, or at least dignity, or at least normalcy in work. But she, and we, live in a society that doesn't actually care about freedom or dignity or even, really, normalcy, at least not for the lower rungs of the economic ladder Rosetta lives in. It's sort of an answer to and modernization of Bresson's Mouchette (1967), but the Dardenne are much more interested in social realism than Bresson ever was. Like last week's film, and many social realist films we've seen, Rosetta doesn't end on a hopeful not, but perhaps on the hope for hope and the promise of freedom and dignity that comes from community and care. We need that now.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 620: La promesse 1:28:28

il y a 41 weeks1:28:28

1:28:28

Our introduction to the films of Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, La promesse (1996) is, like last week's Le Havre, a story of African migrants in Europe. But where Aki Kaurismäki took a more magical approach, the Dardenne's hew much closer to the intense realism of, say, Ken Loach. The brothers' history in documentary perhaps make it even more intense than what Loach we've seen. It's a story of rejecting what you've been told is the order the world must work in, and finding the community and care that your heart cries out for. A better world may be illegal, but it remains possible.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 619: Le Havre 1:17:06

il y a 41 weeks1:17:06

1:17:06

Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre (2011) is a hard movie to categorize. It's the dramatic tale of solidarity and sanctuary, of a community setting aside petty differences to protect a vulnerable migrant. But it's not social realism; It's more magical than that. Some critics call it fairy tale-esque, Pat calls it a children's story, none of them to dismiss it. The moral here is one of a kids' book, but it's a child's morality that needs to lead us: Community brings life. And that's not a miracle; it's a fact.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 618: Gray's Anatomy 1:21:38

il y a 43 weeks1:21:38

1:21:38

Steven Soderbergh's film adaptation of Spalding Gray's monologue about avoiding an eye surgery, Gray's Anatomy (1996) girds Gray's George Carlin-esque delivery in some dynamic visuals and inter-cuts them with stark black and white testimonials of people recounting there own terrible eye injuries. Perhaps not for the squeamish, but it's still an engaging story. I don't comment on it in the episode, but Gray gives a shout out to Columbus, Ohio, hotdog institution Phillips Coney Island, which closed in 2022 after 110 year of slinging wieners and probably causing some eye injuries of their own doing that.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 617: And Everything is Going Fine 1:42:49

il y a 44 weeks1:42:49

1:42:49

Many documentaries are introductions to their topics, assuming the audience has limited or even no knowledge of the subject. Steven Soderbergh's 2010 documentary about his late friend monologuist Spalding Gray, And Everything is Going Fine, is not. Soderbergh himself says it's for people who are already familiar with Gray. Since this is our introduction to him, it's a bit of a rocky start. Next week we'll talk about Gray's Anatomy (1996), Soderbergh's film of one of Gray's monologues, but this week it's all context for a body of work we know nothing about. That doesn't mean we aren't engrossed in it though. Well, at least one of us.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 647: On the Waterfront 1:56:44

il y a 15 weeks1:56:44

1:56:44

Probably the best acted, best scored, best directed, most beautiful, self-serving justification of being a traitorous jerk ever put to film, Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) could have been better if it was more true to the real life events that inspired it and less a justification for naming names to the House Unamerican Activities Committtee. Thank the unions and enjoy your May Day weekend by watching the best movie with the worst politics, or watch Salt of the Earth instead, a film that came out the same year but from people who were named instead of the people doing the naming of names. But we already talked about Salt of the Earth on our Patreon, so now we gotta talk about On the Waterfront.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Soine 646: The Kid with a Bike 1:40:32

il y a 16 weeks1:40:32

1:40:32

Similar to the ways that Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Rosetta (1999) reminded us of a modern day version of Breson's Mouchette, their film The Kid with a Bike (2011) feels like an updated The 400 Blows. Of course, the Dardenne's bring their unique style to the story of Cyril and Samantha, once again ending not with an established community, but a shaky hope of one, if we want it.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 645: The Ballad of Narayama 1:46:57

il y a 17 weeks1:46:57

1:46:57

Keisuke Kinoshita's The Ballad of Narayama is a film about enforced austerity, about capitulating to the fascist power structures, about how we can be conditioned into killing ourselves even without a boot directly on our neck because that's the status quo. It's about what we do to others and to ourselves not because we have to but because we've been conditioned to think we have to. "Its power seems inescapable." Also it's an atmospheric fairy tale telling of a of a folkloric practice, a forced abandonment of our most vulnerable, even when they're not really that vulnerable.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 644: Pina 1:56:13

il y a 18 weeks1:56:13

1:56:13

Wim Wenders had planned for years with German Neo-expressionist choreographer Pina Bausch to make a film of her work, but Wenders didn't know how he could do it justice. Then he saw U2 3D (2008) and knew that digital 3D was the technology he needed. Unfortunately, as technology caught up to Wenders' vision, Bausch passed away, and Pina (2011) morphed from just a document of her work into a tribute from Wenders and Bausch's dance troupe. What they create together is an overwhelming piece of art.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 643: The Man Who Knew Too Much 1:58:44

il y a 19 weeks1:58:44

1:58:44

In the first 140 Spines of the Criterion Collection there were five Alfred Hitchcock films, leading us to believe we'd be seeing a lot more from him over the years, but it turns out The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) is the first Hitchcock we've watched for the podcast in just shy of a decade. This is the original The Man Who Knew Too Much, one of Alfred's first big breaks before moving to Hollywood and the movie that introduced Peter Lorre to English speaking audiences. It's a tight little thriller that may also involve a dog turning into a man and getting arrested.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 642: Naqoyqatsi 2:05:36

il y a 20 weeks2:05:36

2:05:36

While the first two films in Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy were built on filming in particularly locations, in Naqoyqatsi, the image itself becomes the location as editor and "digital cinematographer" Jon Kane takes us into the simulation that is modern life. Unfortunately, like the early unused setpiece footage from Koyaanisqatsi, the tech here has not aged well, though this time Reggio doesn't seem to realize its cheesiness. Sadly, we lost take one of this conversation and Jonathan Hape was not able to join us for the re-recording. He added a lot to our discussion of the first two Qatsi films, and we wish it could have worked out. You should still go to https://www.jonathan-hape.com/ and check out his music.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 641: Powaqqatsi 1:47:28

il y a 21 weeks1:47:28

1:47:28

We continue through Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy with 1988's Powaqqatsi. Reggio works with Phillip Glass again but they lost Ron Fricke for this one and his absence is felt, particularly in the editing. While the first film looked at what US industrialization has done to its own people, Powaqqatsi travels around the world to look at the effects of industrialization on postcolonial peoples. Jonathan Hape joins us again for this journey, and along the way we talk about Reggio's Christian Anarchist and anarcho-primitivist influences, the 1990 Time Warner Earth Day Special, and Roger Ebert missing the point.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 640: Koyaanisqatsi 1:52:33

il y a 22 weeks1:52:33

1:52:33

We start into Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy this week with what many consider the strongest of the three films, mostly because Ron Fricke's cinematography and editing is masterful in it. Built from scenes of natural beauty and alienating industry with a phenomenal sountrack by Philip Glass, Koyaanisqatsi is a deeply effecting visual poem. Our dear friend Jonathan Hape ( https://www.jonathan-hape.com/ ) joins us for the entire trilogy (probably).…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 638: Following 1:46:43

il y a 23 weeks1:46:43

1:46:43

Christopher Nolan's first feature, Following (1998) is a neo-noir with an achronological story structure. The man loves a neo-noir with an achronological story structure. Nolan describes the film as the pinnacle of what he could achieve in a low budget and just working with his friends. which is damning if true because it's just not very interesting.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 637: Purple Noon 1:48:27

il y a 24 weeks1:48:27

1:48:27

René Clément's 1960 adaptation of the 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, Purple Noon is seems to find the director and screenwriter Paul Gégauff trying to drain the homoeroticism out of the source material. Fortunately, cinematographer Henri Decaë and star Alain Delon (in his breakout role) knew how to add it back in through both Delon's fantastic facial acting and some of the most erotic shots of a shirtless man ever to be put to film.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 636: Heaven's Gate 1:56:00

il y a 25 weeks1:56:00

1:56:00

After Micheal Cimino's The Deer Hunter won five Oscars, United Artists gave him carte blanche for his next film and he really went to town. As in he built and rebuilt at least one whole town, on stilts in a National Park so as not to damage the landscape. If only he'd waited 45 years he could have just bought Glacier National Park outright and really become his film's villains. Anyway, the film was hemorrhaging money is what I'm saying, and is all the better for it. A slight fictionalization of the historical Johnson County War, Heaven's Gate (1980) is a beautifully shot epic western where Cimino sought to just tell the stories of real people and forgot that talking about real people in their historical context is what historical materialism is. Cimino's seemingly accidental Marxism was not lost on star Kris Kristofferson, and Cimino even changed some details to ratchet up the class conflict that was, historically, already at a fever pitch. And, hey, it's not often that the historical villains we see in our Criterion films are still around and even have a website that glosses over their government-approved extrajudicial mass murders. "Guardians of Wyoming's Cow Country since 1872" and still shaping society 150 years later, because that's what happens when you don't stop greedy men from seizing absolute power.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 635: Weekend (1967) 1:59:41

il y a 26 weeks1:59:41

1:59:41

Jean-Luc Godard's goodbye to cinema, at least for a time, Weekend (1967) is not just a condemnation of bourgeois values, but a stunning attack on automobile culture. Sure the messaging is scattershot at best, but there's little in the film that isn't memorable. And it's gotta be hands down the film with the largest salvaged car budget.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 634: Arabian Nights 2:00:25

il y a 27 weeks2:00:25

2:00:25

The last of Pasolini's Arabian Nights betrays a director who is steadily on his way to making Salò, and he would begin work on that magnum opus just after he finished Arabian Nights. Like the previous two films in this trilogy, Arabian Nights adapts a well known collection of stories with a heavy focus on the most erotic ones. Pat argues that unlike the others Arabian Nights feels more dour, less fun. Adam's not so sure. But in either case Arabian Nights is filled with memorable and provocative images, like the dildo arrow.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 633: The Canterbury Tales 1:48:59

il y a 28 weeks1:48:59

1:48:59

Continuing through Pasolini's Trilogy of Life this week we have The Canterbury Tales (1972). Pasolini's adaptation of a a foundational English text includes many naked and British people, including Tom Baker. While the film's epilogue changes the book to make these tales "told only for the pleasure of telling", Pasolini's celebration of pre-consumerism sex comes with a certain growing darkness. We'll talk more on that next week, but for now let's enjoy medieval Charlie Chaplin.…

Lost in Criterion

1
Spine 632: The Decamaron 1:51:35

il y a 29 weeks1:51:35