Lost in Criterion

Spine 432: Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

Paul Schrader makes a visually lovely movie about a man we do not care about whose politics we find abhorrent, and who Schrader seems to have far more empathy for than we can muster.

Spine 431: The Thief of Bagdad

Alex Korda leads a cadre of directors in this tour du force of visual effects and casual racism. Come for the children's adventure film, stay for the killer six-armed sexbot.

Spine 430: The Fire Within

Louis Malle takes his turn at the classic genre of alcoholic and suicidal writer wanders around a large city for a day or so, and really just knocks it out of the park by remembering the key to these tales that so many creators forget: the protagonist is a narcissistic jerk who surrounds himself with narcissistic jerks.

Spine 429: The Lovers

We return to the well of Louis Malle’s films with one that was famously banned in Ohio, so much so that it led to a landmark US Supreme Court case. I think the last movie we saw that led to trials in Ohio was Salo. The Lovers is very much not Salo.

Spine 428: Blast of Silence

As we enter a holiday season of increased isolation -- please, please let it be a holiday season of increased isolation -- we take a look at a film about a man who spends Christmas failing to connect with old friends, and failing to make new ones who he's not trying to kill or aren't trying to kill him.

Spine 427: Death of a Cyclist

We love when we get to watch an unapologetically leftist film, and even better when it's just a very well-crafted movie. Juan Antonio Bardem's Death of a Cyclist swings at the upper class in Franco's Spain with a wildly creative use of cuts and transitions showcasing a nation of dichotomies, and a college professor caught in the middle.

Spine 426: The Ice Storm

Ang Lee's story of two families trying to make sense of life during the Nixon impeachment came out on the cusp of the Clinton impeachment and maybe this week just has impeachment on my mind because the movie doesn't really have that much to do with either of them.

Spine 425: Antonio Gaudi

Hiroshi Teshigahara went on a trip to Spain with his dad and made a short, silent vacation movie during it. Years later, after his father’s death, Teshigahara essentially reshot it, elongated it, and focused it on the Barcelona-area works of architect Antonio Gaudi. It is, arguably, unlike any other movie we’ve seen in the Collection in good and bad ways.

Spine 424: Mafioso

Alberto Lattuada’s Mafioso is a black comedy about a dumb man who makes a bad promise while in the background his wife has a very sweet fish out of water story. It’s also about the people who progress leaves behind, and perhaps continues to leave behind. We also spend a little time talking about bridges, in particular the nearly inscrutable comparison image on the wikipedia page for the Akashi Kaikyō Bridge in Japan. Check it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akashi_Kaiky%C5%8D_Bridge

Spine 423: Walker

Alex Cox went to Sandinista Nicaragua to film a biography of an 18th century American colonialist while the US was pretending to take the Iran-Contra scandal seriously. No wonder American critics hated the movie.

Spine 422: The Last Emperor

Despite my false belief that Last Tango in Paris is in the Criterion Collection, The Last Emperor proves to be our last Bernardo Bertolucci movie for the foreseeable future. The tale of Puyi, crowned emperor of China at the age of 3, just before a half century of political revolution, and eventually dying of old age while working as a gardener at the Beijing Botanical Gardens. Bertolucci and the Chinese government may have different views of what that life trajectory means.

Spine 421: Pierrot le Fou

Over the years it's become rather apparent that a lot of folks do not appreciate our opinions on Godard. Like Fellini we will not let our awareness of the issue lead us to change.

Unspined: 4 by Varda: The Shorts

We finish off the Agnès Varda boxset with a talk on the short films packaged as bonus features: L'opéra-mouffe (1958), Du côté de la côte (1958), and the short narrative film contained within Cleo from 5 to 7, Les fiancés du pont Mac Donald.

Spine 420: Le Bonheur

We couldn't be happier than to have guest Adam Spieckermann bring his insight to our discussion of Agnès Varda's Le Bonheur, a brightly colored relationship horror film.

Spine 419: La Pointe Courte

We start the 4 by Agnès Varda boxset in medias res, or at the beginning after seeing the middle? This week we’re talking about La Pointe Courte, Varda’s first film but the third in the boxset. Why not talk about the first two? Because we have. This boxset contains two films, Vagabond and Cleo from 5 to 7, which we watched in much earlier episodes of Lost in Criterion in the times we don’t talk about except in apologetic tones of shame.

Spine 417: This Sporting Life

Some of the best tragedy narratives indict a whole society for creating the system and the path that keep the tragic character imprisoned in his journey toward loss. There's a bit of that in This Sporting Life but the tragedy is focused on the main character's inability to court the woman he can't stop harassing, herself an even starker victim of the local political and economic system.

Spine 416: Miss Julie

What Alf Slöberg’s 1951 film adaptation adds to August Strindberg’s 1888 play makes the film both more interesting and quite probably more infuriating. How fun.

Spine 415: The Naked Prey

Who amongst us hasn't decided to solve a problem maybe without talking to anyone actually affected by the problem or even understanding what the problem is, so you just ended up doing something that adds to the problem in a different way?
The Naked Prey wants to solve racism. It does not.

Spine 414: Two-Lane Blacktop

An experiment in what constitutes a movie finds James Taylor and Dennis Wilson partnered in a cross country race that resolves (or doesn't) sometime after the last reel burns up.

Spine 413: Drunken Angel

Frequent guest Donovan H. joins us again, and he's maybe become more of an accelerationist than the last time he was on. We're talking Kurosawa's Drunken Angel, the famed director's first work with Toshiro Mifune.

Spine 412: Sawdust and Tinsel

The earliest Bergman we've seen yet is the story of circus performers humiliated at every turn, and apparently something about the battle of the sexes.

Spine 411: Berlin Alexanderplatz

Another week, another adaptation of a stream-of-consciousness novel about a perpetually drunk man, this time Fassbinder’s epic mini-series adaptation of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Taking place (and originally written) in Germany between the wars, it’s got some lessons for us.

Spine 410: Under the Volcano

I finally actually counted and figured out this is episode 400. Too bad it's the story of a drunk white guy.

Spine 409: Days of Heaven

We get our first taste of Terrence Malick in the collection with his tenuously Biblically-inspired period story of poor farm workers and a series of cons that don't really make sense.

Spine 408: Breathless

I promise you there are Godard films we actually like.