Lost in Criterion

Spine 570: Zazie dans le Metro

With the Louis Malle films we've seen so far it was clear the man was willing to reinvent his style, but I had sort of assumed he had eras at least. This week we start off a pair of his more out there films, one from very early in his career and one from the height of his career in the 80s.

This week it's Zazie dans le Metro, an adaptation of a popular French book that borders on Finnegans Wake-level nonsense made into a live action cartoon that borders on Playtime-level nonsense. It's a real curveball as Malle's third film, coming after The Lovers and Elevator to the Gallows which are both certainly not this. It's also probably the funniest movie about a little girl running away from a child molester that you'd ever watch. It's a weird one.

Spine 569: People on Sunday

In 1930 a group that would soon be the who's who of young German filmmakers, including the Siodmak brothers and Billy Wilder, released People on Sunday, a semi-narrative semi-documentary look at how to spend a weekend in late-Weimar Republic Berlin. Also on the Criterion release is Eugen Schüfftan's Ins Blaue hinein (1931), a narrative short about hustling during the Depression. Both offer a fascinating look at these soon-to-be-greats' early careers and at everyday life in Germany before Hitler's rise.

Spine 568: Kiss Me Deadly

What happens when a writer and a director who despise the best-selling reactionary violence of private detective Mike Hammer decide to make a Mike Hammer movie? And then the government tells them it's too violent so they cut out the entire mafia plot and replace it with a radioactive macguffin (that screams and melts your face)? Well, you get Robert Aldrich's highly influential Kiss Me Deadly (1955).

Spine 567: The Makioka Sisters

Kon Ichikawa's 1985 adaptation of the Jun'ichiro Tanizaki novel (serialized from 1943-48) is seemingly a new leaf for our experience with Ichiwaka's work. We've had his avant-garde sports documentary. We've had his strong anti-war films - perhaps the best anti-war films in the Criterion Collection. And now we get a pre-War tale of four sisters in a merchant family, a family epic shot on a television budget. It's also a topic that Pat has interest in and insight into since his day job is, in part, teaching Japanese history. Well, I'm glad one of us was engaged by it.

Spine 566: Insignificance

Insignificance, Nicholas Roeg's 1985 adaptation of Terry Johnson's play of the same name, is a study of fame and guilt, womanhood and the bomb. If the concept of "Barbieheimer" were a single film, it may look something like this.

Spine 565: The Great Dictator

In 1940, Charlie Chaplin determined that the only way he had to stop the fascists march around the world was to use his voice, literally, and produce his first true sound film with The Great Dictator. Inarguably, this film did not stop the war, but it did give us one of the most enduring calls to humanism ever put to celluloid.

Returning guest Adam S. joins us to talk about this marvelous movie that mocks fascists, which is always a worthwhile cause.

Spine 564: Pale Flower

If Pale Flower were just composer Toru Takemitsu's Musique concrète score and sound design it would be worth talking about.

If Pale Flower were just director Masahiro Shinoda's avant garde deconstruction of a Shintaro Ishihara story and yakuza films in general, a New York Noir but Japanese, it would be worth talking about.

But Pale Flower (1964) is both, and more for the sum of it's parts.

Spine 563: Something Wild

Jonathan Demme's Something Wild (1986) is a fun, sexy, if a little weird Manic Pixie Dream Girl road movie. That is until about the halfway point, when the music and lighting suddenly both get darker, and Ray Liotta walks in to change this movie into something like an action thriller. In less steady hands, this could have felt more like two separate movies, but Demme and screenwriter E. Max Frye stick to their guns and stick the landing.

Spine 562: Blow Out

Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981) is a political thriller for the dawn of the Reagan Era which is, not coincidentally, a political thriller for the Trump Era, which is, really, a political thriller for any USA age post the assassinations of the MLK, Malcolm X, and, primarily to Blow Out, the Kennedies. Like the Trinity Test, JFK's assassination was a genie released, and while high-profile USA political assassinations have fallen off in recent years, I think we can all agree they don't seem that far away.

Spine 561: Kes

Ken Loach's 1969 film Kes is like a British 400 Blows, but Loach takes seriously the political reality of the working class characters he portrays in a way I just don't find in Truffaut. Maybe I'm being less than gracious to the French New Wave pioneer, but maybe also Loach just knocks it out of the park in such a way that it sets a new standard.

Since it's an additional feature on the Criterion release, we also get to talk about Loach's 1966 teleplay Cathy Come Home, which is positively Godardian in style, though politically harder-hitting than Godard would get outside his work with Jean-Pierre Gorin.

In both films Loach appears to intuitively understand that the critique of traditional forms of art that the French New Wave was doing is an inherently political exercise, and Loach embraces its political nature without sacrificing the artistic form.

Spine 560: White Material

Our first Claire Denis film (well, unless you count all the work she did for Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch), 2009's White Material is the story of a white French coffee farmer trying to hold on to normalcy as the African country she lives in decolonizes. The crux of the problem of course being that while "normal" may mean "I can harvest and sell my coffee" it also means "the French army maintains an oppressive stranglehold over an entire nation." While colonialist forces wring every resource possible out of the country on their way out the door, unfortunately for Maria the coffee farmer, that doesn't include her coffee.

Spine 559: The Mikado

Victor Schertzinger's 1939 adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado is the first film adaptation of a Gilbert and Sullivan work, the only one to include members of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, and the first Technicolor picture put out by Universal.

But let's face it, it's only in the Collection because of Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy. Should have been a bonus feature, though I suppose if it had the Topsy-Turvy release would have been bloated. Instead we get a standalone episode dedicated to this piece of 19th century British Orientalism. Great.

Spine 558: Topsy-Turvy

Before this I'd only ever seen one film by Mike Leigh, Spine 307: Naked (1993) which we watched like five years ago. I remember it being fairly dour. So when I found out we were watching a Mike Leigh musical period biopic about Gilbert and Sullivan writing an orientalist light opera, I was concerned and confused.

Gilbert and Sullivan is not for me. Topsy-Turvy is for me. A story about art and capital, authenticity and caricature.

Spine 557: The Times of Harvey Milk

Rob Epstein's The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) is a poignant look at the assassination of the San Francisco Supervisor, his assassin, and his organizing paradigm. Not just fighting for gay rights, but helping to build a coalition for liberation, Milk's life as shown in the movie is an important lesson on movement building. Even if it were just that, I would recommend it to everyone. But beyond the 90 minute film, the Criterion release provides 3 hours of additional materials diving deeper into Milk's impact and legacy, making this release absolutely indispensable.

Spine 556: Senso

After years we finally get another Luchino Visconti film and it does not disappoint. Like The Leopard, Senso is set against the backdrop of the struggles of Italian unification, an idea that Visconti seems to have seen as analogous to the struggle to implement communism in his own time. Unlike The Leopard, Visconti takes a melodramatic love story and just shoves all that political stuff in there until it's about to burst.

It's a beautiful film, thanks in no small part to the film's 3rd cinematographer, promoted cameraman Giuseppe Rotunno kicking off his illustrious career.

Spine 555: Sweet Smell of Success

Every so often the Criterion Collection shows us exactly one movie from a director and will apparently never show us another. With very few exceptions we've loved these one-and-dones, and Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Succcess is no outlier.

It's very dark, it's very entertaining, and we'll never see anything from Mackendrick again.

Spine 554: Still Walking

Hirokazu Kore-eda's 2008 drama looks at a day in the life of a Japanese family, a day that just so happens to be the anniversary of the eldest son's death by drowning. It's a little bit Ozu, it's a little bit Naruse, and it's a wonderful exploration of the ways trauma and grief linger in family relationships.

Spine 553: Fish Tank

Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank is, refreshingly, a "this is how the poor people live" movie from someone who actually grew up in similarly impoverished situations to the protagonists of their film. Criterion also provides us with 3 of Arnold's short films, each dealing with a similar theme to those that show up in the main film: young womanhood, single motherhood, and grief.

Spine 552: Broadcast News

First a note: Sorry to have missed last week, but Adam was in the hospital after a bicycle accident left him with a fractured elbow. He's on the mend, and we should be back to the regular schedule.

This week we're talking James L. Brooks office rom-com set against the changing background of 1980's newsrooms. 1987's Broadcast News is a fun movie, indicative in many ways of Brooks' decades writing cutting edge sitcoms. Unfortunately, he doesn't take the opportunity of a larger story to punch any harder.

Spine 551: Cronos

Guillermo del Toro's first film, Cronos (1993), is flat out just a really great vampire flick, with an eye toward how the machinations of adults effect the children in their lives, like many of his best films. But that bit of family-focus isn't the only way Cronos rises above simple genre film, as del Toro uses the vampire to tell a story of capitalism and colonialism, and the particular evil that is created when Christianity unites with those powers and principalities.

Spine 550: The King of Marvin Gardens

We finish up the America Lost and Found: The BBS Story boxset with one more film from producer, director, and one of the B's in BBS Bob Rafelson. The King of Marvin Gardens may have our favorite Jack Nicholson role of the bunch, and is a strong finish in a boxset that really ebbed and flowed for us. "It's Monopoly out there" is going to enter my lexicon.

Spine 549: The Last Picture Show

America Lost and Found: The BBS Story has been really up and down for us, but Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971) is definitely toward the top. Stylistically and homage to John Ford (and, to a lesser extent, Howard Hawks), this coming of age story is set in the 50s but still manages to engage in the politics of the early 70s better than a lot of the other movies we've watched this last month.

Spine 548: A Safe Place

The BBS films we've been watching are culturally important for telling new types of stories within major studio-released films, but for the most part, outside of Head, the form of the stories hasn't been that different. The sex is more explicit, the drug use is forefront, but the actual structure of the film is more familiar, I think. Maybe that's just because we're 50 years on and it's less new.

Head was out there structurally, of course, and second to Head comes Henry Jaglom's A Safe Place, a film I cannot believe Columbia put out. It's structure has more in common with Chris Marker's Le Jetee (1962) than Easy Rider, and it feels more daring than anything we've seen in weeks of the BBS set. Jaglom is trying to chase Cassevetes, but unfortunately lacks Cassevetes' abilities. But at least he's got Orson Welles in his picture.

Spine 547: Drive, He Said

For us, this is honestly the nadir of the BBS boxset. Drive, He Said is a movie that can't even take it's own political moment seriously, hamstringing the "revolutionary" at the center of the film into a lone man driven insane by "free love" with no reference even to the draft, even as the very campus Jack Nicholson was shooting on was literally being set on fire in organized anti-war protests possibly DURING production. And the filmmakers even made the ultimate revolutionary act in the film much, much less revolutionary than their source material had it, so they have no excuse as far as we're concerned.

But maybe as Ohio boys we're just mad that Drive, He Said is set in Ohio but not filmed there.

It's well acted though! Despite the poorly drawn character, Michael Margotta is fantastic as Gabriel, and Karen Black's performances continue to be the highlights of these films.

Spine 546: Five Easy Pieces

What Easy Rider does for hippie-adjacent drug dealers, Five Easy Pieces (1970) does for upper class piano prodigies? It's becoming increasingly clear that the ideas the BBS guys and their associates have about "freedom" are very much at odds with Lost in Criterion's ideas about liberation.

We think Carole Eastman's script was probably a lot more interesting than Bob Rafelson's movie, but who can say.