Lost in Criterion

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.

Spine 545: Easy Rider

The second movie in the America Lost and Found: The BBS Story boxset is the one that artistically put them on the map. It was the Monkees' money that got the movies made, but it was Easy Rider (1969) that got them legitimacy.

Dennis Hopper directs this classic tale of...freedom? People tell me this movie is about freedom. I'll be honest, given the cultural hold this film seems to have I was surprised at how bleak it is.

Spine 544: Head

This week we kick off one of our longest boxsets yet, America Lost and Found: The BBS Story. In it we'll see some of the most well known early New Hollywood films of the late 60s and early 70s produced by Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, and Stephen Blauner.

We start off with perhaps the most out there of the set. Rafelson and Schneider are the creators of the Monkees, and much of BBS's success can be attributed to the just tons of money they made from that show. Our first film, directed by Rafelson, is Head (1968), the psychedelic swan song for the prefab four.

Our good friend Jonathan Hape, a long-time Monkees fan who'd never seen Head before, joins us for a rollicking conversation about the film and the band.

Spine 543: Modern Times

Modern Times is our first proper Charlie Chaplin film in the Criterion Collection - though The Immigrant (1917) was a bonus feature on Spine 330, Louis Malle's Au revoir les enfants (1987).

Modern Times is just such a classic film, and a perfect fit for us as it's Chaplin's first excursion into what could be considered political film. We'll get more of that from Charlie in a few months with The Great Dictator, and really cannot wait for that! For now his heart is in the right place even if he's doing a lot that Rene Clair already did in A Nous la Liberte with a better political message but no Chaplin set pieces so it's really hard to rank them against each other. Clair's production company actually sued over Modern Times, but settled out of court and Clair himself was horrified that they sued his friend Chaplin. In the end, we get two great films about the hellish nature of technology in the hands of capital.

Spine 542: Antichrist

Since we first encountered Lars von Trier with The Element of Crime way back at Spine 80, he is a director who we - Pat especially - look forward to as the Criterion Collection trickles out his work. Antichrist, however, was a film we were both cautious about, knowing what little we did about it.

Ultimately, the film is sort of a mix between Salo and Haxan, and like Salo it is a film that I am glad I watched but will never recommend to anyone. Like Salo, Antichrist is steeped in sexual and gender-based violence, some of it graphically self-inflicted. You should not watch the film without knowing that is coming.

But still, it is a fascinating look at depression and grief. And this is one of my favorite episodes as of late, and we've watched a lot of good movies lately.

Spine 541: The Night of the Hunter

Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter has been so vindicated in the decades after its release that it really is quite a shame that the man not only never made another movie but died before he got his due respect.

Spine 540: The Darjeeling Limited

The Darjeeling Limited is possibly Wes Anderson at his most self-aware, but sometimes its still difficult to tell the difference between deeper symbolism and the director's stream-of-consciousness aesthetic styling, particularly when it comes to the religious elements.

Speaking of religious elements, a note: this episode we spend some time talking about the [Anglo] Latin Catholic influence in India since that is the Christianity we see in the movie (and it gives us a chance to reference Black Narcissus). While the colonialism of more modern waves of Christianity into India cannot be sidestepped, we should point out that Christianity has a 2000 year history in parts of India, particularly the south, and it’s not all the rather austere Latin Catholicism that we see in the movie and talk about in this episode.

Casey Hape joins us once again as the person we know who has been into Anderson the longest, and we got her husband Jonathan to sit in as well.

Spine 539: House

Nobuhiko Obayashi's sole film in the Criterion Collection (so far!) is the 1978 avant garde horror comedy House, a movie co-written by his 8 year old daughter.

Spine 538: Paths of Glory

After nearly nine years we finally get a second Stanley Kubrick film from the Collection with Paths of Glory (1960), his first collaboration with Kirk Douglas made just before Spartacus. This is our third "anti-war" film in the last month or so, and the second American one. With Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line we discussed whether or not an American film made after WW2 could truly be "anti-war", but I think Paths of Glory comes closer than any other we've seen.

Big thanks to Adam S. for joining us, because it's always nice to have someone who may actually know what they're talking about on the podcast.

Spine 537: The Magician

Statistically speaking, I think we're more likely to be watching an Ingmar Bergman film in the Criterion Collection than not, which is why it's surprising that The Magician is the first one we've seen in like 2 years. This time Bergman brings us a tale of conmen in unbelievable costumes and bad audiences that don't know how to have fun.

Spine 536: The Thin Red Line

Terrence Malick makes spiritual humanist films. He also decided to make this war film.

OK, "anti" war film. Whenever we watch an anti-war film the comment attributed to Truffaut comes up: "there's no such thing as an anti-war film". We don't entirely think that's true. We've seen spiritual and humanist anti-war films as recently as last week's episode that I would say achieve their goal. Unfortunately, as we discuss this week, American culture, particularly post WW2, may be so steeped in war that an American cannot make an anti-war film.

Still, Malick tries, and if the production stories are to be believed, it took quite a toll on him.

Spine 535: Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) is positively chaste compared to the other Nagisa Oshima films we've seen, as the sex here is always boiling just below the surface. This experiment in stunt casting pays off as one of the best anti-war movies we've seen, digging into the humanity and inhumanities of a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and their Allied prisoners, and leaving us to think about who gets punished and why.

Spine 534: L’enfance nue

Our second experience with Maurice Pialat does not help us beg down the man's politics. This time we have L'enfance nue, a film that owes a lot to Truffaut, both because it's in the vein of The 400 Blows and because Truffaut produced it.A semi-documentarian look at the state of French Social Service's treatment of abandoned children, Pialat tries not to get too judgemental while showing us a system that is patently broken and clearly failing the children it's meant to "protect".

Spine 533: Crumb

Our second of the pair of Terry Zwigoff documentaries is one that initially no one wanted to touch, despite the success of Louie Bluie. Was it just that all that good will had evaporated over the course of a decade? Or was it that this time around Zwigoff turned his camera on his friends: gonzo cartoonist R. Crumb and Crumb's even more eccentric brothers. Eccentric is a good word here.

Spine 532: Louie Bluie

We kick off a pair of documentaries by Terry Zwigoff, starting this week with Louie Bluie, his 1985 look at musician and artist Howard Armstrong. Start to finish just an absolute delight of a documentary.

Spine 531: The Docks of New York

We finish up the Three Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg set this week with the best of the bunch, really, The Docks of New York (1928), a melodrama about a himbo of a steamship furnace stoker who thinks himself unlovable and absolutely refuses to believe in private property. He's the best.

10th Anniversary: Revisiting Spine 34: Andrei Rublev

Lost in Criterion is 10 years old! Does that make us the longest running Criterion podcast? Who cares.

We started this podcast as an excuse to talk after Pat moved to Japan. While Pat and I were far from cinephiles, we enjoyed the conversations we'd have leaving the cinema after a movie, and wanted to continue having those talks even though we weren't going to the same cinema anymore. So we, pretty arbitrarily to be honest, picked a list of movies to talk about, and happened to pick one that now grows faster than we release episodes. We will never be done! So look forward to more decade anniversaries in the future!

To celebrate this anniversary, we decided to revisit one of the first 100 films we talked about. This is a redemption thing. While we moved to podbean so that our entire catalogue of episodes would be more easily available, we do not recommend the first 100 (or more!). They're rough. They're evidence of two idiots getting film education by fire. I like to think we've gotten better over the years, but our iTunes reviews disagree.

So Pat and I made a list of films we particularly wanted to revisit from those first 100 Criterion Spines. Over the last few weeks, our Patreon supporters have voted on which film they'd like to hear us re-examine. The winner is a movie I loved, but was only going to watch again if I was forced to because it is so long.

Andrei Rublev (1966) is the first Andrei Tarkovsky film Pat and I saw and we were not prepared. The original episode finds Pat calling everything but the bell making sequence "boring" and "confusing" and me finding the film hard to defend because I liked it on vibes alone. Have our opinions changed? Well, they'd have to have, but you'll have to listen to this episode to be sure.

Thanks to everyone who voted! Thanks to everyone who's listened to and supported us over the years! Maybe someday we'll be done!

Holiday Special 2022: The Hudsucker Proxy

After a series of setbacks, including changing the film we were going to do twice and rescheduling with a different slate of guests (one of whom then had to drop out because we took too long working out technical problems), we finally caught the metaphorical polka band tour van and made it home for the holidays for this year's special: the Coen brothers' fifth film, The Hudsucker Proxy.

While one end of year holiday - New Year's - is symbolically important to the film's time motif, every gift-giving holiday of the winter season takes place uncommented on in the background of this movie that is explicitly about a best-selling toy. And that's not the silliest aspect of this silly film!

The last week notwithstanding, we had a good year this year! We kicked off 2022 with Jeanne Dielman, a film that by the end of the year was declared the best movie ever or something. Well, it's certainly up there. We were introduced to the wonderful works of Mira Nair this year, and took a way too long working through the second By Brakhage Anthology, sorry! We talked Z and Hunger and Che and we sure do love it when Criterion gives us a political film to sink our teeth into, even when the director claims their obviously political film isn't political at all (looking at you Pedro Costa and Josef von Sternberg!) Oh, and we got to watch another Antonioni film we didn't like, but at least we enjoyed talking about it this time!

Hope your year's been as good as ours! We've been doing this podcast for a full decade now! Wow. Next week we're going to have a special retrospective episode, looking back at a film from the first 100 Spines of the Criterion Collection that our Patreon supporters voted for us to revisit. Can't wait to share that with you!

For now though, happy all the holidays!

Spine 530: The Last Command

The second film of the 3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg boxset, The Last Command is a story of revenge and patriotism during the Russian revolution and, you know what, it's actually just best to ignore the story.

Spine 529: Underworld

We kick off the 3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg boxset with Underworld (1927), a film that defined a lot of gangster movie aesthetics, and went way beyond that as well with some of the most visually striking matte work we've seen outside of Black Narcissus.

Spine 527: The Secret of the Grain

Abdellatif Kerchiche's The Secret of the Grain (2007) hits a lot of the right notes for us, but once again we encounter a director aggressively claiming their film is apolitical when their film is obviously political.

Spine 526: There Was a Father

The second of our pair of Ozu films finds the director between World War II deployments bringing to screen a script he'd been working on for nearly a decade about loyalty to one's father, and by extension -- perhaps at least to the Japanese censor board that celebrated the film -- loyalty to one's emperor. This is the closest thing to a propaganda film we've seen from Ozu, but we're not convinced that was Ozu's intention.

Spine 525: The Only Son

We kick off a pair of early Yasujirō Ozu sound films this week, and first up is his earliest. The Only Son (1936) comes out during a time period in Japan that we have yet to see represented in films from the country: directly pre-war as the right-wing imperialists are cementing their rule. Against that backdrop, and just months before Ozu himself would be drafted, The Only Son looks at the sacrifices of made by women for the promise of success for their sons and brothers in the modernizing Japan, success that remained out of grasp for many as the Great Depression reached its height.

Spine 523: Night Train to Munich

Carol Reed helms a film that suggests screenwriters Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder only had one plot. Night Train to Munich shares a lot of bones with the pairs' previously penned film, Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, functioning as something between remake and sequel as well as being the second entry in the multimedia Charters and Caldicott Cinematic Universe. It's silly, it's fun, and the models are endearingly terrible.

Spine 522: Red Desert

Visually, aurally, and plot-wise this is a movie that is absolutely about the choking hellscape extractive capitalism forces us to live in, and the alienating spiritual sickness such a system causes. That is, unless you take the director's word on what that movie is actually about. Red Desert (1964) is Michelangelo Antonioni's ode to "progress" in which climate anxiety sounds like a you problem.