Lost in Criterion

Spine 25: Alphaville

In 1965 Jean-Luc Godard took an established film-noir detective character and shoved him into a dystopian future city ruled by an authoritarian computer that runs everything on cold logic while quoting Borges' poetry about the nature of myth and maintaining the most inefficient public execution system in history. Alphaville is weird. It's disjointed. It's baffling.

Spine 24: High and Low

As our resident Kurosawa obsessive Donovan Hill joins us again to talk about the director's 1963 crime drama High and Low. The first hour is a morality play taking place in a shoe company executive's living room. The next one and a half are a police procedural that feels like Law and Order. I'm not selling this right.

Great and interesting movie. Fun conversation. Always glad to have Donovan around. If you'd like to join us for any conversations talk to us on at www.facebook.com/lostincriterion

Spine 23: Robocop

Paul Verhoeven's first American film is a violently subtle attack on corporatism. The 1987 film also looks forward to a hypothetical dystopian Detroit that looks like it might be better off than current actual Detroit.  In a movie about excess Kurtwood Smith still manages to steal the show as the over-the-top villain. It's a really fun movie and I'm happy to report that Donovan Hill is joining us again to discuss it.

Spine 22: Summertime

David Lean's 1955 tale of summer love was called Summer Madness in Britain, which might give you an idea of how well Kathrine Hepburn's attempts at a relationship in Venice go. Or the madness of the title may be the production's insistence that Kathrine Hepburn's accent is that of an elementary school secretary from Akron, Ohio.

Spine 21: Dead Ringers

David Cronenberg's 1988 psychological drama is a lot like most of what Cronenberg was doing in the 80's: weird. What The Fly does for physical horror, Dead Ringers does for mental horror (with quite a bit of the physical left in). Jeremy Irons is amazing as twin gynecologists who share enough screen time that I'm beginning to think that Cronenberg modified the machine from The Fly to just make two Ironses. 

Spine 20: Sid & Nancy

Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungeon are two horrible people who are horribly perfect for one another. That about sums up the plot of Alex Cox's 1986 biopic of the ill-fated couple. We had, shall we say, mixed feelings on it.

Episode 20 though! Is that a milestone? Nearly half a year already. We've seen some real greats so far, and some real stinkers, and Salo. Trudging right along though. Only 700 or so more to watch! 

Spine 19: Shock Corridor

This week we're watching Shock Corridor, Sam Fuller's 1963 tale of a so-so journalist's ill-advised plan to get a Pulitzer.  It's not as good a movie as his next one, The Naked Kiss, which we watched last week, mostly due to Constance Towers being featured less prominently and in a much more subdued (in a lot of senses) way. We posit that The Naked Kiss is an apology for how she gets treated in this movie. 

Anyway, still enjoyable pulpy goodness. 

Spine 18: The Naked Kiss

Ever pressing on, we recover from Salo and move on to Sam Fuller's 1964 neo-noir The Naked Kiss, kicking off a duo of back to back Fuller. It's lively and pulpy and fun, due mostly to Constance Towers being a far better actress and Fuller a far better director than this script probably deserves, though Fuller did write it himself. So hopefully our joy in The Naked Kiss isn't just a direct result of having watched Salo directly before.

Spine 17: Salo, or the 180 Days of Sodom

Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote and directed this 1975 film that almost made me vomit. I stopped it four times to keep from doing so.

This film is the reason we decided to do the podcast in order of Criterion's Spine numbers, because it forced us to have a system which meant we wouldn't just watch the ones we wanted to watch first and never ever ever watch Salo. I almost regret that. I watched this before Pat did and sent him an email apologizing for ever having the idea to watch the Criterion Collection and considered putting an end to it. 

I endured.  Pat endured. We chatted about it for an hour.

From now on whenever I am faced with a seemingly impossible task I will remember: I watched all of Salo; I can do anything. 

Spine 16: Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island

Well, Donovan Hill finishes off Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy with us as we discuss the 1956 end to the saga: Duel at Ganryu Island. It's not quite as action oriented as the other two films, but it does a lot to tie up loose ends and put a cap on the story.

Hopefully Donovan will be back, it was pretty fun having him on.

But I don't think we'll convince him or anyone else to join us next week. 

Spine 15: Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple

Donovan Hill joins us again as we continue our discussion on Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy, this time focusing on the second film in the series which came out in 1955 to quite a deal less acclaim internationally. But Mifune's still in it, so it can't be that bad, right? 

Spine 14: Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto

This week marks a string of episodes where we have a special guest to help us discuss Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy, a historic biopic of Japanese legend Musashi Miyamoto. Please welcome to the show Donovan Hill, an old friend whose father first tossed him into the river of Samurai culture at an inappropriately young age, but we'll let Donovan tell you all about that in this weeks episode. We're always happy to have guests, and if you'd like to join us, please feel free to ask in the comments section.

The Trilogy stars Toshiro Mifune, who was also in Seventh Samurai (a film Donovan probably would have loved to discuss with us as well), whose birthday was just this past Monday. How coincidental.

Spine 13: The Silence of the Lambs

This week Lost in Criterion talks about Jonathan Demme's 1991 Oscar-winning thriller Silence of the Lambs. Pat's not a fan of psychological thrillers, but he didn't let that keep him from watching this one. And he certainly didn't let it keep him from delivering an incredibly well-reasoned argument on why this movie sucks. Personally, I still like it, even if he makes some fair points. This is probably the best conversation we've had so far, and I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed having it.

Spine 12: This is Spinal Tap

The first American film in our journey arrives with Rob Reiner's 1984 mockumentary This is Spinal Tap, a comedy classic that leads Pat and Adam to a rumination on the nature of good comedy. And Adam tells some stories about his work in the hospitality industry, which (strictly speaking) he isn't supposed to do. Well if this gets him fired it was probably worth it.

Also, it's so good to have one week where we don't have to look like fools unable to pronounce foreign words. Pat makes up for it by spending two minutes trying to say a perfectly English one. 

Spine 11: The Seventh Seal

I feel like I need to apologize for this one. I don't like to do that -- it makes it feel like I somehow don't believe in our work -- but this episode has some issues I'd like to lay out.

Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal is an amazing and complex classic, incredibly heavy and heady. Pat and I recorded this at the height of last August, the heat doing nothing to assuage our fatigue, and none of it helped by my being a bit sick. All in all, we actually do pretty well, but neither of us are firing on all cylinders and it shows. I hope you enjoy listening to it anyway. I know I did.

Spine 10: Wakabout

In 1971 Nicolas Roeg made a rather weird movie called Walkabout. Mostly it seemed like an excuse to ogle his under-aged female lead, but only slightly less than that it was a rather good film. Lost in Criterion discusses it this week and talk about how there are so many butts in it. How many butts, you ask? You want me to say a butt load, but I won't. 

Spine 9: Hard Boiled

It's more John Woo this week on Lost in Criterion, as Pat and Adam watch the last movie he made before leaving Hong Kong for Hollywood: 1992's Hard Boiled. A word of warning: neither of us could find an official Criterion release for this -- Criterion has only released it on DVD and that DVD is out of print -- so we ended up watching an English-dubbed version on youtube. You smell that? That's the sweet scent of quasi-legality. 

Spine 8: The Killer

This week Pat and Adam talk about the quintessential John Woo film: 1989's The Killer. It's got gun-fu, overtly Christian symbolism, Chow Yun-Fat, and doves! All the hallmarks of great Woo cinema with none of the Nicolas Cage! And Adam basically makes it the whole way without grossly mispronouncing anything! Truly we are blessed! Though his mic was really tinny this week. Hope that's ok.

Spine 7: A Night to Remember

In this episode of Lost in Criterion Pat and Adam discuss Roy Ward Baker's 1958 titanic epic about the Titanic A Night to Remember and wax rhapsodic about the affect the disaster had on the 20th Century.

While Adam continues to not be able to pronounce things, even in English, Pat manages to win this week's Captain Edward J. Smith Award for Great Achievements in Idiocy for deleting the first take completely instead of saving it. We need to develop safeguards against this sort of thing.

Spine 6: Beauty and the Beast

This week Pat and Adam discuss Jean Cocteau's 1946 adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, a film that clearly had a heavy visual and structural influence on later adaptations (we're looking at you, Disney) but still managed to leave us wanting. We also discuss the merits of telling your audience that they'd like your movie better if they weren't so dull.

Listen in and feel free to tell us we're dumb, especially if you're correcting Adam's established inability to say words correctly.

Spine 5: The 400 Blows

This week Pat and Adam talk about Francois Truffaut's intense and wonderful 1959 drama The 400 Blows. Guess if they liked it or not?

Also, Adam completely butcher's Truffaut's name, but makes up for it by mispronouncing it a different way every time he says it. I promise I'm not a complete idiot; I even went to college.

Spine 4: Amarcord

This week Pat and Adam watch Federico Fellini's more than a little ridiculous 1973 coming-of-age tale Amarcord. Adam continues to not be able to pronounce non-English names despite not being dumb. I swear.

Also we compare the film to Hudson Hawk. Just because. So there.

Spine 3: The Lady Vanishes

Personally, I think we finally start hitting our stride on this one.

In this weeks Lost in Criterion we discuss Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 comedic mystery The Lady Vanishes and we surprise ourselves with just how long we can discuss a movie that is not nearly as heavy as the first two we watched. We also write off everything Hitchcock did prior to this, which I'd like to apologize for. While his pre-1940's British period is not filled with as many classics as the rest of his career, the movies prior to The Lady Vanishes are nothing to shake a stick at, no matter how large the stick may be.

Spine 2: Seven Samurai

In this episode we continue to get our footing on this whole "podcast" thing as we discuss Akira Kurosawa's 1954 epic Seven Samurai which clocks in at over three hours long, but somehow avoids feeling like it. The same may not be said for our 54 minute episode, but, hey, we're not Kurosawa.

Now seems as good a time as any to point out that our theme music is by the great Jonathan Hape. Check out his other work on JonathanHape.com

Spine 1: The Grand Illusion

Welcome to the first episode of Pat and Adam's adventure through the Criterion Collection. This was originally recorded as a test to see what would happen if we tried, so our apologies that this episode is a bit rough. They do get better. They also get shorter. After this test we decided to shoot for 45-60 minutes episodes. This one is a bit over that.

In this episode we discuss Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion, a 1937 French (anti) war film that neither of us had ever heard of let alone seen. That's going to be a common description for many of the movies to come. Listen in to see what we thought, and feel free to comment with thoughts of your own.