Lost in Criterion

Spine 480: The Human Condition Part 3 - A Soldier‘s Prayer

We finish up Masaki Koboyashi's The Human Condition and need some extra time to talk about both the third movie and the work as a whole. After nearly 2 hours talking it out we're left unconvinced that this is an anti-war movie let alone the best Japanese anti-war movie, unless you thinly define "anti-war" as "anti-the WW2 Japanese war machine". How disheartening.

Spine 480: The Human Condition Part 2 - Road to Eternity

In part two of Masaki Koboyashi's epic The Human Condition our main character for some reason decides that being a good soldier who sticks to the word of the regulations will somehow make things better for him in a war he claims he fundamentally disagrees with. That's right, the politics get even murkier in Road to Eternity.

Spine 480: The Human Condition Part 1 - No Greater Love

We start into Masaki Koboyashi's epically faithful adaptation of Junpei Gomikawa's six volume examination of Japan in World War 2 through the lens of a man who generally opposes war, or at least militarism, played by the great Tatsuya Nakadai.

The Human Condition is, in total, just shy of 10 hours long. But it's helpfully broken up into three films (each containing two sections) released between January 1959 and January 1961. We'll be similarly breaking down Spine 480 into three episodes.

Spine 479: My Dinner with Andre

We've seen a lot of great Louis Malle films in the Collection, and now we get one more. A very long conversation about art or something, and while it is itself quite good, we're very interested in the peripherals film about class.

Spine 478: Last Year at Marienbad

Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad is an obviously influential movie that's nearly impossible to describe. Adam thinks it's a ghost story. Pat thinks it's an examination of the epistemological crisis. Both or neither are probably true. Truth is a game, and the game is rigged against you.

Spine 477: Bergman Island

First released in 2004 as a series of television episodes, then recut into a feature length film for 2006, Marie Nyreröd’s Bergman Island is an intimate portrait of director Ingmar Bergman looking back on his life just after his final retirement from film making, and just a few years before his death.

Spine 476: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

It's our first David Fincher film in the Collection and what a choice. A tour du force of special effects that do not hold up, Benjamin Button updates and elongates the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story into whatever this is.

Spine 475:The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Nothing like a gangster movie to get us talking about the alienation and the lack of community under capitalism. But beside (and because of) that, this is just such a fantastically bleak movie. Peter Yates directs Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973).

Spine 474: Intentions of Murder

We close out the "Pigs, Pimps, and Prostitutes" boxset of Shohei Imamura films with Intentions of Murder, a tale in which Imamura apparently wants us to laugh an abused woman because she's fat. Hilarious! This is our last Imamura film in the Collection right now, and we're not mad about that.

Spine 473: The Insect Woman

We continue through the Imamura "Pigs, Pimps, and Prostitutes" boxset and continue to take issue with Imamura calling himself an anthropologist.  When we started this Criterion journey nearly a decade ago I had no idea it would lead to me ponder the question: can breastfeeding be an incestual act?

Spine 472: Pigs and Battleships

This week we kick off a boxset called "Pigs, Pimps, and Prostitutes" and ain't that something. It's three films by Shohei Imamura, the last three he made before leaving Nikkatsu for his own studio. The whole set really exemplifies Imamura's goal of making "messy films" with a self-described "cultural anthropologist" lens.
We start off with Pigs and Battleships from 1962, a story of bad criminals, American imperialism, and feminism I guess?

Spine 470: Wise Blood

Seemingly always up to adapt a challenging text, John Huston directs this adaptation of a Flannery O'Connor novel. While Huston and O'Connor have dramatically opposite views on religion, but Huston himself has begrudgingly said that "Jesus wins" in the end of his movie. We're not so sure that's accurate.

Spine 469: The Hit

Stephen Frears 1984 film The Hit combines a British gangster film with a road movie and honestly it's nice to just have a movie we enjoy and don't have to think too much about after the string we've been on.

Spine 468: Science is Fiction - 23 Films by Jean Painlevé

Jean Painlevé (1902-1989) was not the first person to make scientific documentaries for a general audience, but he was certainly very influential on nature documentarians real and otherwise from Attenborough to Zissou. Criterion serves us a collection of many, though not quite all, of his 5-30 minute films which fuse underwater and microscopic filmography with an eye toward surrealist humor and, if you can read it right, a mind toward social change.

Spine 467: Empire of Passion

Nagisa Ōshima's follow-up to last week's In the Realm of the Senses is less sexually explicit and harder to pin down politically than that work, but Empire of Passion is still an interesting tale of greed and ghosts.

Spine 466: In the Realm of the Sense

There was a moment in Nagisa Ōshima's obscenity trial for the printed script edition of In the Realm of the Sense where the director apologizes to the judges and police, saying, essentially, "I showed the script to all my colleagues and none of them found it titillating, so I'm sorry you guys got turned on." And I don't think he's just having a laugh at their expense. The film is certainly full, nearly wall to wall, of sex, unsimulated even, but being full of sex and being sexy are different things, and Ōshima has a different goal.

Spine 465: Dodes'ka-den

Apparently considered one of Akira Kurosawa's worst films, Dodes'ka-den started life as a joint project between the top four directors in Japan calling themselves the Four Horsemen but ended up being one of the lowest points of Kurosawa's life. We explore a theory on why Japan didn't connect with the subject matter as we talk class and caste in Japanese history and a depressing and visually stunning movie.

Spine 464: Danton

Andrzej Wajda's Danton explores the French revolution through the Polish director's own experience under Soviet rule, a rule he saw as anti-worker and therefore anti-progress. Using the titular Danton and Robespierre, the film presents the tension of revolution, or perhaps violent revolution, if Wajda makes such a distinction, and particularly a revolution that seeks only to rotate who is in power instead of upturning power hierarchies.

Revolutions that promise equality without upheaving power structures aren't revolutions. Equality must always broaden.

Spine: 463: Il Generale Della Rovere

Vittorio De Sica stars in Roberto Rossellini's Il Generale Della Rovere, the story of a conman coerced into impersonating an Italian resistance general, but really it's two stories: the first half is De Sica's character's everyday life promising to rescue people's family members from Nazi imprisonment if they can raise the money and his arrest and trial for doing that, then the second half is a war prison film of the same man on the inside doing his new con job. A fascinating and great movie, but like many others, would have been better if more people making it were communists instead of just nationalists.

Spine 462: The Last Metro

A very different François Truffaut film to any we've seen before, The Last Metro draws on the director's memories of a childhood during Occupation to craft a story that is not autobiographical by any means, but instead tells the story of the community around a theater and the various ways people persevered.

Spine 461: Hobson's Choice

David Lean's adaptation of Hobson's Choice brings the atmospheric panache that made his Great Expectations so amazing but putting it into a comedy about a guy who doesn't want his adult daughters to get married in a situation that seems like a dark parody of an Ozu plot. Ultimately, though, it's a pretty light story about a woman who exercises her own self-determination by forcing a man to be more assertive.

Spine 460: Simon of the Desert

Our second of back-to-back Luis Buñuel films brings us more of the director's critique of organized religion and Christianity in particular. In particular with Simon of the Desert Buñuel takes aim at performative deprecation, the inherent arrogance of claiming to be the lowest of the low (particularly when you're also literally putting yourself on a pedestal). This is maybe the most Pat has enjoyed Buñuel's religious work, but also it's just hard not to be delighted by Silvia Pinal's portrayal of the devil.

Spine 459: The Exterminating Angel

Luis Buñuel was a man who absolutely loved a metaphorical dinner party. I believe The Exterminating Angel is our fourth encounter with one in one of the man's films, and it may be one of my favorites, though they are all amazing in their own right. This week Criterion also provides us with some bonus biographical material on Buñuel that includes a story about ruining a Christmas dinner at Charlie Chaplins house and calling it "praxis".

This week is also the first of a one-two punch of Buñuel's final Mexican films. While this week focuses on the aristocracy (and a little on religion), next week swings hard at organized Christianity and I can't wait to share that episode with you as well.

Spine 458: El Norte

Gregory Nava's El Norte is a gut-wrenching tale of indigenous teen siblings escaping violence in Guatemala. It tells a story that really hadn't been told before, centering characters whose stories often go ignored even today.
But Nava seems reluctant to tell the whole story, to show where the blame lies, to make the connections between the violence Enrique and Rosa are fleeing and the history of colonialism and US foreign policy that put and kept those perpetrating the violence in power. Roger Ebert praised the film for not being political. Ebert is wrong. The film is inherently political, and even if it means to only show the story through the eyes of the siblings experiencing it, those siblings have a political life -- they are fleeing because their father was beheaded for being a labor organizer! -- meaning that Nava's apolitical approach removes a dimension of not just the story, but the people.

Spine 457: Magnificent Obsession

For Douglas Sirk's adaptation of Lloyd C. Douglas's "liberal Christianity x pop psychology" novel the director makes the right choice to instead just remake the earlier 1935 John M. Stahl directed adaptation, which Criterion helpfully provides as a bonus feature on this release. While the 1935 version tries to show the absurdity of the melodrama with a slapstick-y comedy style, Sirk just ratchets up the melodrama to even more absurd levels.