Lost in Criterion

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.

Spine 407: Mala Noche

Gus van Zant adapts an “autobiographical work” by Portland poet Walt Curtis, though also on the DVD is a documentary on Curtis by Bill Plympton which, to be honest, we’d probably rather talk about.

Spine 406: Martha Graham: Dance on Film

It’s another Criterion curveball as we get a short inside-the-studio documentary on pioneering dancer Martha Graham and then two recordings of her pieces, all produced for PBS by Nathan Kroll.

Spine 405: The Threepenny Opera

The argument of The Threepenny Opera is that under capitalism crime and legitimate business are indistinguishable in their exploitation.
As time marches on we can see that this is wrong. The system of exploitation perpetrated by “legitimate business”, protected by the police, and whose transactionary nature is thrust upon every aspect of society is the much worse crime.

Spine 404: Robinson Crusoe on Mars

I think probably the most important thing I can share with you before going into this episode is that on the Criterion dvd is a Criterion-produced music video in which one of the films co-stars sings the plot synopsis.

Spine 403: Cría Cuervos

Ana Torrent is back playing a weird little girl named Ana whose family is dealing with Francoist Spain in Carlos Saura's Cría Cuervos, a film that maybe pales in comparison to Spirit of the Beehive but also maybe stands on its own.

Spine 402: The Milky Way

This week Pat and Adam get very lost in Luis Buñuel's The Milky Way (1969), wondering mostly who Buñuel was making the film for, as its philosophical elements are so esoteric as to be off-putting. The sword fight is pretty neat, though.

Spine 401: Night on Earth

Jim Jarmusch explores humanity through the connections of taxi drivers and riders and emulating the film history of various places on "earth", which is to say New York, LA, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki.

Spine 400: Stranger than Paradise

Friend of the show and theme song composer Jonathan Hape joins us to celebrate Spine 400! Someday we may finish this!

Spine 399: House of Games

The plot of David Mamet's House of Games is right up our alleys, even if Pat thinks it would be more appropriate to a USA channel original program. But there are certainly problems here.

Spine 398: Les enfants terribles

Jean-Pierre Melville adapts a novel written by fellow French director Jean Cocteau, and Melville believes Cocteau, who was on set everyday, was trying to undermine him at every turn. Melville's all but disowned the film, which makes this possibly the first time our opinion on a Melville film matches the director's.

Spine 397: Ivan's Childhood

We've talked before about how it may be impossible to truly make an anti-war war film, but in showing the human toll on both sides of the fight Andrei Tarkovsky's entry into the seminal Soviet genre of post-WWII war films may come pretty close. 

Spine 396: Ace in the Hole

This week I feel like Pat does his best to keep me from being blackpilled about journalism and I do my best to remind Pat that everything is stupid. Let’s strike the delicate balance between trusting experts and recognizing that manufactured consent, racist underpinnings in news spin, and yellow journalism are alive and well, and even plutacratized, as anyone with enough financial backing can create the right bias-confirmed headline and get a million shares.

Unspined: 4 Short Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara

We finish up the 3 Films by Teshigahara boxset with four more films. Aside from the three collaborations with surrealist novelist Kobo Abe on the Criterion release are four shorts, three documentaries on a variety of subjects, and Teshigahara’s portion of an international anthology on the lives of teenage girls:
Hokusai (1953)
Ikebana (1956)
Tokyo 1958 (1958)
Ako (1965)