With Two Brains: Recent Episodes
With Two Brains
Saying “men are trash” will get you banned on Facebook now, apparently, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent that that is the point of Rohmer’s Moral Tales. Unfortunately, while I don’t know that Pat and I quite make it to seeing that point clearly as we’re in the trenches watching them. We really want that to be the point, yes, but we’re not sold on Rohmer' wanting that to be the point.
This week we talk seducing teenagers as a goof on Lost in Criterion. Listen at LostInCriterion.com, or on iTunes, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher. While you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
It helps that these particular male leads are by far the worst of any of the films we’ll be watching. Even the protagonist of our next film, who actively pursues two different teenagers, never pimps one of them out. Of course this is also the point where we start to realize maybe we’re dealing with unreliable narrators as well, but more on that next week.
This week we talk a very bad vacation with entitled “barbarians” with La Collectionneuse on Lost in Criterion. Listen at LostInCriterion.com, or on iTunes, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher. While you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
If the universe created by Eric Rohmer's My Night at Maud's is accurate, everyone in mid-20th century France was obsessed with Pascal's Wager, a theory of religious conversion via game theory that is dumb. It's just dumb.
The movie, though, the movie is good! At least better than the two Moral Tales we’ve seen so far, and — spoiler — having watched the rest, Maud’s holds out as one of the best.
We talk bad religious philosophy on this week’s Lost in Criterion with My Night at Maud’s. Listen on LostInCriterion.com, Spotify, iTunes, or anywhere you like to get podcasts. While you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Suzanne’s Career is a bit like an expanded and slightly reworked version of The Bakery Girl, and the two are the closest to one another of any of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales. Suzanne’s Career is not just longer, it also complicates the love triangle central to the plots of the Moral Tales in a frankly surprising way considering the other movies. It also manages to give the titular character arguably more agency, so that’s great! The Criterion DVD also gives us an opportunity to talk about another of Rohmer’s shorts, Nadja in Paris, which is, actually, quite a bit better, if only because of Nadja herself.
We talk about jerks and the race toward marriage on this week’s Lost in Criterion with Suzanne’s Career. Listen on LostInCriterion.com, Spotify, iTunes, or anywhere you like to get podcasts. While you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
It’s clear that Eric Rohmer doesn’t want us to like the male narrators/leads of his Six Moral Tales, but it does seem like he wants us to feel conflicted about them, and since each of them is toxic in a unique way Pat and I can pretty easily write them and their morality off.
Still we’ve signed on to talk about the Criterion Collection in order, and the Collection has served us these six films, starting with the appetizer of The Bakery Girl of Monceau. The films get better from here, or at least more interesting. Barbet Schroeder stars as not the worst guy in the series and the film is gloriously short. I guess that makes it #5 on the ranked list at worst.
We talk about jerks and baked goods on this week’s Lost in Criterion with The Bakery Girl of Monceau. Listen on LostInCriterion.com, Spotify, iTunes, or anywhere you like to get podcasts. While you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
When we talked about The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp Pat and I quickly realized that we were not interested in the morality of Powell and Pressburger’s wartime films. If the message of Colonel Blimp was that anything the British did to its enemies in World War 2, no matter how bad, was ok because they weren't the pure evil Nazis, then the message of A Canterbury Tale seems to be that anything the British did to their own citizens during World War 2 was equally allowed. Turns out a film’s moral is deeply important to our enjoyment of it.
We talk poetic filmmaking and how film canon is still very western on this week’s Lost in Criterion with A Canterbury Tale. Listen on LostInCriterion.com, Spotify, iTunes, or anywhere you like to get podcasts. While you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
At one point during Koko: A Talking Gorilla, Barbet Schroeder calls Koko, a gorilla who has allegedly been taught rudimentary American Sign Language, the world’s first White American Protestant gorilla, and it is the most damning thing anyone can say about the project. As Pat and I discuss, that ultimately means that in a study trying to prove gorillas can “communicate” — a self-evident fact given they are social animals — what takes place is an exercise in assimilationism, a seeming belief that gorillas can only be proved intelligent if they are made to live and communicate like White Americans. There’s some racial overtones there, and we talk about the history of anthropology and psychology in that light this episode as well.
We talk anthropology and the research ethics on this week’s Lost in Criterion with Koko: A Talking Gorilla. Listen on LostInCriterion.com, Spotify, iTunes, or anywhere you like to get podcasts. While you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Corinne’s spirituality is perhaps best described as varied. She’s a former Roman Catholic who reads tarot and runs Jungian Shadow work courses. We sit down to talk about Michel Gondry’s fantastic 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind and talk about the importance of remembering and forgetting in forming relationships with films and with people, and ultimately recognizing the good and the bad and pressing on.
Listen at CinemaCredo.com or on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcatcher.
Edward Yang's Yi Yi is objectively one of the best movies we've seen except for one very small and specific artistic choice near the end that we will never understand. But that single blip does nothing to diminish the rest of the film for us. This is a thing of true beauty.
We talk poetic filmmaking and how film canon is still very western on this week’s Lost in Criterion with Yi Yi. Listen on LostInCriterion.com, Spotify, iTunes, or anywhere you like to get podcasts. While you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Coincidentally the week of the vernal equinox we’re watching a movie about a nice picnic gone awry that is further coincidentally called Equinox! Well, actually we’re watching two movies called Equinox, the original zero-budget monster throwback and the rereleased version after the idea sold and new footage was shot. The effects are amazing, even if the story isn’t at all.
We talk practical effects and bad plots on this week’s Lost in Criterion with Equinox. Listen on LostInCriterion.com, Spotify, iTunes, or anywhere you like to get podcasts. While you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
The rarest of rarities in the Criterion Collection: a coming of age tale about a sexually active teenage girl -- directed by a Frenchman no less! -- that doesn't make us feel like we need to shower. Pialat’s directing style has a bit in common with John Cassavetes, the film is largely improvised in the same way as Cassavetes’s greats. But his vision is his own, and we’re grateful for that given what such a film could be.
We’re surprised at an actually ok presentation of teenage sexuality on this week’s Lost in Criterion with A nos amours. Listen at LostInCriterion.com, on iTunes or Spotify, or wherever you like to find podcasts. and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
On this week's Lost in Criterion Pat and I get into an argument over whether or not Richard Linklater is glorifying the story he's presenting or it the presentation itself stands as a critique of false nostalgia.
Find out why Pat is wrong as we talk Dazed and Confused! Listen at LostInCriterion.com, on iTunes or Spotify, or wherever you like to find podcasts. and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Musician Jonathan Hape, who has been on a number of episodes of Lost in Criterion and does the music for that show, sits down with me to talk about the Danny DeVito-directed, Edward Norton and Robin Williams-starring Death to Smoochy, a movie that he says is not nearly as dark and misanthropic as even the scant positive reviews painted it on its 2002 release. We talk sincerity and pressing forward, and I may become the first person to mention Smoochy and Dostoevsky in the same breath.
Check it out at CinemaCredo.com, or on iTunes, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast catchers.
Louis Malle jumps out of the gate with a wonderful piece of suspense with a bit of Luis Bunuel style stream of consciousness filmmaking in there, to boot. Oh, and we take a break from politics for the first time in awhile, but only kind of because there’s definitely a hidden Nazi in here.
We talk about the difference between American and British English in this week’s Lost in Criterion with Elevator to the Gallows. Listen at LostInCriterion.com, on iTunes or Spotify, or wherever you like to find podcasts. and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
This week we talk about Pat’s family, who are from the area just north of Harlan County. The plight of coal miners hits a bit close for Pat. Barbara Kopple’s documentary started life hoping to just examine the contentious union election, but things went a bit sideways and the documentary focused instead on a strike. A strike that may have been a lot more violent if the cameras weren’t there. They say in Harlan County there are no neutrals, and Kopple’s non-neutrality is what makes Harlan County USA a great documentary.
We talk unions, living wage, family history, and the observer effect in this week’s Lost in Criterion with Harlan County USA. Listen at LostInCriterion.com, on iTunes or Spotify, or wherever you like to find podcasts. and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
There is a certain scene in Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket that is clearly not meant to actually be happening in the narrative, but there is no indication in the film grammar to suggest that it isn’t actually happening. That, and the fact that the timeline jumps significantly with no warning, lends to some of the interpretive issues Pat and I had with the film. Fortunately, we’ve seen enough movies now that we spend the episode comparing the meaning of Fists to other (better?) movies.
We search for meaning in a world falling apart in this week’s Lost in Criterion with Fists in the Pocket. Listen at LostInCriterion.com, on iTunes or Spotify, or wherever you like to find podcasts. and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
If Luis Bunuel’s Viridiana makes one salient point about individual charity (and it does!), it is in the observation that no matter what claims of humility are made, many people enact individual charity for selfish reasons. See the billionaire philanthropists are are spending just as much as they think will keep them out of the guillotine. Or just the fact that charity like that doesn’t work so well. Still I’ve met — or have been — young people who forgo established infrastructure in order to be a personal savior. People want to be known as the person who fixed a problem much more than they want to establish social policy that would eliminate the problem. Look at the Pro-Life movement: you get a lot of political currency from Pro-Lifers for saying you’re going to outlaw abortion — whoever does it will probably be US president for life — but no one involved seems to want to enact the social policy changes that would severely truncate the cause of abortion. “People are inconsistent” is hardly news, but maybe we could at least try to be better at working together to raise every person up?
We talk charity and social change on this week’s Lost in Criterion with Luis Bunuel’s Viridiana. Listen at LostInCriterion.com, on iTunes or Spotify, or wherever you like to find podcasts. and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Episode 2 of Cinema Credo finds me sitting down with Stephen Goldmeier (@makingarecord) to talk about a film he and I have seen together many, many times as part of the Gateway Film Center’s annual marathon. While it is a movie I enjoy and have seen a lot, it holds a deeper place in Stephen’s life. Let him tell you about it on this month’s Cinema Credo at CinemaCredo.com or wherever you find your podcasts.
The first film in Ozu’s Noriko Trilogy (though the final one for us to watch) may be the earliest example of using a Coca-Cola advertisement as a shorthand critique of American consumerism. The film is as anti-occupation as a film can be without being suppressed. It helps that Ozu’s pretty subtle with the critiques of America and they don’t exist overtly in the dialogue. On the other hand, the very fact that textually this film feels very nostalgic for a pre-war Japan that maybe wasn’t so great is itself a critique of the US occupation. So there’s that.
This week on Lost in Criterion we discuss nostalgia and moving on, with Ozu’s Late Spring Listen at LostInCriterion.com, on iTunes or Spotify, or wherever you like to find podcasts. and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
The final film in our Louis Malle boxset is his masterpiece. Au revoir les enfants is the most explicitly autobiographical of the set, but at the same time is less Malle’s story than that of those around him, three Jewish boys and the Catholic priest hiding them.
As far as Father Jean (based on the real exploits of Pere Jacques, Righteous Among the Nations) is concerned, when the government is kidnapping children and you can’t be sure who around you thinks that’s ok, the proper response is to protect what children you can — and maybe preach some anti-capitalist sermons while you’re at it. May his memory be eternal.
We cry a lot on this week’s Lost in Criterion, discussing Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants. Listen at LostInCriterion.com, on iTunes or Spotify, or wherever you like to find podcasts. and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
There’s a bookshelf at my job what isn’t really a bookshelf so much as a lovely waste of garbage books. It was originally an interior design installation art piece and, well, still is: books sorted by color, shoved in vertically and horizontally in order to be a solid wall of rainbow. As the man said, “It’s pretty, but is it art?”
Anyway, I’m making it art.
In between serving tables I’m resorting the books, being careful to keep them in color-coordination, using them like refrigerator magnets to create poems. Anyone interested in reading the poems should follow @BookshelfPoetry on Instagram.
Just a quick reminder that the majority of us are perfectly capable of aligning with evil, oppressive powers and realizing that fact is the first step in not aligning with evil, oppressive powers.
Movie two in our Louis Malle boxset, Lacombe, Lucien is the story of a directionless young man who joins up with Nazi collaborators. He has a “complicated” (read: abusive) relationship with a Jewish woman literally named France because sometimes metaphor isn’t direct enough. As Renoir taught us, “Everyone has their reasons”, and as history has taught us mostly those reasons are self-interested retainment of power, be it small amounts of personal power, or large societal rule.
So empathize with Lucien because many of us could easily become him, perhaps not even noticing it, and many of us wanting some semblance of control, may be him already.
We talk about empathizing with evil in order to avoid being evil ourselves with Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien. Listen via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Louis Malle is very clear that Murmur of the Heart is only partially autobiographical. But he’s also clear that the — ahem — climax of the film felt like the only logical conclusion to the relationship he was building between his main characters, including the character who is supposed to be him as a young teen. It’s…uh….complicated.
Pat and I had issues with Murmur, but those issues are immediately overcome as we move through the rest of the Malle boxset Criterion has presented us with. Rarely have we gone from disliking a director so much to loving them so quickly. But for now, there’s this.
We talk about the a movie that is clearly not for us with Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart. Listen via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
As with years past, I sat down with every record I bought this year and listened through, then largely ignored any new discoveries to rank them based on how often I’d listened to them since purchasing. It’s time for an arbitrary list!
- The Welcome Wagon -- Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices
I find it hard to relate to modern Christian music. I want to believe that people are sincere, but there’s just so much money involved, and so little art. Maybe I’m being too harsh. Generally the Christian music -- or Christian-adjacent music -- I like involves struggle. In that regard, there is something inherently appealing to me about mid-century gospel music, the sort of albums you find in thrift stores and “weird album covers” lists.
The Welcome Wagon is a throwback to that era, a Presbyterian minister and his wife making earnest Christian worship music. But at the same time, this is a band produced by Sufjan Stevens. It’s not necessarily challenging or thought provoking, but it is interesting
- The B-52’s -- the B-52’s (1979, 2018)
Speaking of kitschy throwback. In lieu of saying anything that would fall short of properly praising this seminal album I’m going to tell you about the first time I consciously heard the first track, Planet Claire. I was in 8th or 9th grade and my friend Jonathan’s dad picked us up from some school function and started this album just as we got into the car. Now I’m certain I had heard Love Shack before then, but if I’d ever heard any other B-52s song I can’t say, and Planet Claire is no Love Shack, which I mean in the best ways. It was dark, I was quite probably sitting in a fold out seat in the back of the cab of a tiny pickup truck, and I was engulfed in what I was hearing. There’s a very good chance they’d dropped me off before the tape got to Rock Lobster, which there’s a small chance I may have recognized. Instead, when I asked what I was hearing, Jonathan’s dad told me they were called “The Planet Claire People” and while I don’t think I believed that, I’m certain that I didn’t know the actually answer for years. Thanks, Jeff Hape! You lovable weirdo!
- They Might Be Giants -- Lincoln (1988, 2018)
Has there ever been a band as densely clever as TMBG? And have they themselves ever released an album as densely clever as Lincoln? I mean, like besides most of their other albums? It seems this was my year to buy reissues of albums I wished I could have gotten lucky enough to stumble across in a thrift store, or at least a used record shop. Thanks, resurgence of the vinyl industry!
- Durand Jones and the Indications -- s/t (2017)
Apparently this album was recorded for under $500 and using an “American Idol” branded toy microphone and I cannot believe that. Just utterly brilliant throwback soul music.
- OHMME -- s/t (2017)
Formerly known as HOMME, the Chicago multi-instrumentalist duo of Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham formed in 2004 and has since toured with Jeff Tweedy and played with Chance the Rapper. I was lucky enough to catch them playing a small bar in Columbus when my friends in Room and Board opened for them. The full-length follow-up Parts (2018) is already my first purchase of 2019, so please look forward to hearing me write about that in a year.
- Listener -- Being Empty: Being Filled (2018)
There was a time when Listener were two guys and washing machine -- and indeed a time before that with a different format as well -- and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss that. Now listener is a band with three people and no appliances, but still some of the most literary lyrics about regret and hope around. Each track on Being Empty: Being Filled is inspired by a different inventor/creator, some more in dedication to, some exploring motivations, and some lamenting. While the lamentful “There’s Money in the Walls” deals with Diesel’s unfulfilled dreams -- “When you don't go on, your song lives on” -- it’s the double whammy of the final two songs that pushes this record beyond, with tales of best intentions getting away from their inventors, either through hubris (the Oppenheimer inspired Manhattan Projects above) or oppression (Plague Doctor, about the inventors of Kevlar and gas masks, both invented for purely civilian purposes).
- The Avalanches -- Since I Left You (2000, 2017)
For a very long time after I first encountered the video for Frontier Psychiatrist, I labored under the impression that it was illegal to sell this album in the US because of the copyright issues putting out an album that is almost entirely layered samples. Expertly layered samples. It’s among the best sample-based musical ventures to ever be produced. I’m pretty sure I was wrong about the legality since there was a 2001 US CD release, but last year it finally made it to vinyl here and I picked it up at one of the best record shops in the country, Vertigo in Grand Rapids, MI.
- The Aquabats -- The Fury of The Aquabats (1997, 2018)
I think I’ve been clear in the past that I’m easily swayed by certain strains of nostalgia, but let’s be clear, The Aquabats weren’t just my favorite band in high school, they’re my favorite band now, too. I saw them for the dozenth or so time earlier this year with my longtime best friend Jonathan Hape and I can only imagine the dumb smile I had on my face the entire night. Favorite band, favorite album, new vinyl release that sounds just phenomenal. Yeah it’s a favorite for the year. Gonna have to be a pretty danged good album to beat out the joyous nostalgia kick of this one. Good thing two did.
- mewithoutYou -- [untitled] and [untitled] E.P. (2018)
Ok, technically two releases but they have the same title and came out at the same time, so whatever. mewithoutYou has long been a source of inspiration for me, and I’m always joyful for new music from them. While lyricist and lead singer Aaron Weiss and I have followed rather different (though not too different) religious paths, his acknowledgement that such a journey is useless if you don’t keep moving is deeply affecting -- always be trying to bring your ideals in line with your actions, and always be reaching for greater ideals. In that way the band is also an inspiration for CinemaCredo.com, my new podcast where I’ll be talking to people about the film that had the greatest religious significance to them, however they define religious significance.
As for Untitled, while the first single (above) is a beautifully killer track, it’s the opener of the EP. “Bethlehem, WV”, that really hit me the hardest, perhaps because of the times I’ve yelled at God myself just over the border in Virginia. Epiphanies come in the most surprising places.
- Janelle Monae -- Dirty Computer (2018)
So I pre-ordered the vinyl release of Dirty Computer, certifiably the best album I bought this year because it’s the best album released this year period. Just fantastic.
Anyway, so I preordered it through the label, Warner, in June and they immediately put a pending charge on my card. That’s not a problem. Honestly, I’d be fine just paying up front for a pre-order. Anyway, the charge fell off the next day. Then it showed up the next week. And gone again. Every week until mid September, two weeks before the album was scheduled to come out. I got an email explaining that Warner was “required by law” to attempt to charge me every week, and that the charge had been rejected that week, and therefore my pre-order was cancelled forever.
Anyway, I bought it from my favorite local record shop, Spoonful, like I always should have. Let that be a lesson to you.
The entire album is a celebration of living your true self, no matter the adversity. I’m particularly a fan of the closing track Americans, which features a spoken word portion by the Rev. Dr. Sean McMillian that I think dovetails well with some ideas we’ve shared before:
Let me help you in here
Until women can get equal pay for equal work
This is not my America
Until same-gender loving people can be who they are
This is not my America
Until black people can come home from a police stop without being shot in the head
This is not my America, huh!
Until poor whites can get a shot at being successful
This is not my America
I can't hear nobody talkin' to me
Freedom to a young rich man in the ruling class means something different than freedom to other people. Characters in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan talk a lot about 18th century utopias, an ideal of freedom to their class forefathers, where men could practice free love and women were free to commit suicide. Alright, the plans probably looked better on paper. Stillman indues his characters with a sense of nostalgia for a loss of power, but the power being lost is power no man should have. “So many things which were better in the past have been abandoned for supposed convenience,” one character laments. Of course he’s talking about removable collars. Stillman himself, isn’t exactly nostalgic for the same things his characters are. I hope.
We talk about the not quite disappearing bourgeoisie with Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan. Listen via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Throughout six years of watching Criterion films with Pat I've often thought about starting a sister podcast in with a much more overtly religious/philosophical tinge. Religious movies fascinate me, not only from main stream directors -- the works of Dreyer, Scorsese's religious work, things like mother! or First Reformed -- but also the often much less artistic films from more overtly religious sources, like, say, Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas or God's Not Dead. I didn't want to make a bad movie podcast, though, nor one that only talked about prestige film as much of that would just rehash Lost in Criterion conversations.
So I've settled on Cinema Credo, a podcast where I invite anyone willing to talk to me about the film with the deepest religious meaning to them, however it is that they interpret "religion" or "meaning"
For Episode 1 I’m talking to Christian monk Br. Thomas Stama about The Last Temptation of Christ, Long time Lost In Criterion listeners may recognize that I shared some of Tom’s incite in our own episode on that film in 2014. He’s an old friend, and I’m grateful to have him for this first episode.
Since I'm letting my guests define the tone of the conversation, this may be the most explicitly Christian episode we'll have. Already on the recording docket are conversations on Groundhog Day, Death to Smoochy, and the 2012 Will Ferrel/Zach Galifianakis political comedy The Campaign. It's going to be an interesting ride.
Check out CInemaCredo.com or iTunes, Spotify, etc. for the continuing saga. I hope to put out episodes monthly.
Kind Hearts and Coronets is the story of the son of woman disowned by her aristocratic family who decides to murder his way to the dukedom, most by killing Alec Guinness in varying amounts of makeup over and over (and a few more times). Revenge! Murder! Critique of the upper class! Good times all around.
We murder a bunch of rich people on this week’s Lost in Criterion episode Kind Hearts and Coronets. Listen via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
We end our sixth year of Lost in Criterion with a bit of a change. Since our inaugural episode, Lost in Criterion’s end of year non-Criterion special has been a Christmas-adjacent movie, an action film that incidentally takes place at Christmas. With only one exception, the holiday has little effect on the themes of the films we’d talked about. We’ve talked previously about how there aren’t a lot of non-Christmas end of year holidays represented as so normal they can exist in the background without comment in an action film.
So we searched a for a film that treats any other non-Christmas (and non-New Years) holiday with the same passivity. That sort of representation of non-Christian culture is a rarity in Hollywood films. But Don Bluth’s animated classic An American Tail is rare. The film starts on one night of Hanukah that gets interrupted by violence, and though it relies on some stereotypes of other European immigrant groups coming to America, it portrays a very true to life, very specific late 19th century Russian Jewish immigrant story. And it is realistically dark.
The immigrant experience in the US is not easy. Many come to our country under the impression that “there are no cats in America” — that the powers that oppress them at home, that they are fleeing, don’t exist here. But those powers exist everywhere; that particular Devil has been with America since its beginning. If there are to be no cats in America, it must come from the cats of America choosing to give up their feline status. If the lion’s going to lay down with the lamb, it’s the lion whose nature has to change.
Looking back, we’ve seen some very good films this years, films I’d call timely, though in growing as a person I’ve realized that the messages I’m calling timely are always timely. We started early with a film that encouraged us to ask the right questions about revolution which also contained my one of my favorite sequences we’ve seen in any movie, one where everything has been commoditized and commercialized to such an extent that even Communism is being sold — at 15% off. We spent some powerful time in Poland dealing with Nazis and other authoritarians. And we saw films that act as propaganda for Authoritarians of a different set. We escaped with some Lubitsch and Donovan H. joined us to deconstruct Samurai films. Speaking of escape, we confronted hope and hopelessness in ways we haven’t yet with one of the best documentaries ever made, and attacked fakery and false authority in one of the best pseudo-documentaries ever made. There are lessons to be learned, positive and negative, all around us. But one felt particularly important in a world that seems mired in hatred.
Listen to this year's Lost in Criterion non-Criterion special end of year episode An American Tail via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Here they come! Clickety clack down the track it's Jean and Jean and trains!
Jean Gabin wrote a movie solely so he could drive a train in a movie and hired a director who told him that maybe he should just adapt a train-oriented Emile Zola novel instead. Gabin agreed, fired that director, and hired Jean Renoir who adapted the novel which he hadn't read in possibly 20 years.
And it works! Probably! But not as well as it could have considering Renoir and Gabin’s other collaborations at the time!
We talk trains and bad psychology on Lost in Criterion this week with La Bete Humaine. Listen at LostInCriterion.com or on iTunes, where you could maybe drop a review of us? While you're at it, maybe like us on Facebook? Or consider supporting us through Patreon. We'd appreciate it.
Vittorio De Sica would like to remind 1944’s Italy that they have kids, and kids learn from adults. Now he’s working in fascist Italy and if he says anything too drastic he’s going to get silenced, so he can’t say anuthing so overt that the fascists might pick up on it. So De Sica crafts a film that offers three pieces of advice while putting the lie to the “Italian family values” of the fascist party:
- Don’t cheat on your spouse.
- Don’t maybe commit suicide because your spouse cheated on you
- 3 Don’t be a fascist or fascist sympathizer.
Ok, maybe the third one is subtle enough that the fascists didn’t pick up on it not because they’re dumb but because the just assumed no one would say that. Still it’s pretty clear.
We talk fascism and family values on Lost in Criterion this week as we cover The Children Are Watching Us. Listen at LostInCriterion.com or on iTunes, where you could maybe drop a review of us? While you're at it, maybe like us on Facebook? Or consider supporting us through Patreon. We'd appreciate it.
Christmas is supposed to be a time of joy, love, peace; a time to set aside differences and celebrate together. But what do we do with that hope of peace in a time that seems so utterly broken, when hate is so strong, and the powers of oppression and racism are on the march. What does Christmas even mean in a time like this?
In 1973 against the backdrop of Vietnam, the Yom Kippur War, Pinochet and the Troubles Madeleine L’Engle wondered the same thing. “This is no time for a child to be born/ With the earth betrayed by war & hate” she wrote that Christmas in “The Risk of Birth”.
A hundred years earlier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wondered as well, in the poem that would become the carol “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”. His wife had died two years prior, and his son had been grievously injured in the American Civil War. What good was Christmas two years to the day after South Carolina left the Union in order to protect chattel enslavement of Black Americans. How can you celebrate when “hate is strong and mocks the song of ‘Peace on Earth, Good will to men’?”
You hold on to hope. You recognize that the incarnation of Jesus — God becoming man — that Christians celebrate at Christmas, is a protest against the status quo of humanity. Longfellow reminds himself that “God is not dead, nor does he sleep.” L’Engle reminds herself that while “The inn is full on the planet earth”, “Love still takes the risk of birth.”
A few decades before Longfellow, Adolphe Adam put Placide Cappeau’s Christmas poem (and Christian socialist anthem) to music. Reworked into English, we know it as O Holy Night:
Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother;
And in His name all oppression shall cease.
Hear the Angel’s voices: the joy of Christmas is a call to arms. It is a rejection of everything the powerful hold dear, everything that separates.
The century before that John Wesley wrote in Hark! The Herald Angels Sing! that Jesus was “Born that man may no more die.” A rejection of the status quo so great that it stands to turn the entire cosmic order on its head.
Christmas is good news to the poor, and bad news to those who oppress those poor. And that sentiment goes back to the very first Christmas song: The Magnificat, Mary’s Song, as recorded in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke just after the Angel told her not to be afraid. She wasn’t:
He has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.
No wonder in his 1968 musical adaptation of the passage Fred Kaan named his tune Sing we a Song of High Revolt.
Keep the Christ in Christmas:
x out oppression
x out out fear
x out death itself.
While F for Fake is certainly Orson Welles at his Wellesiest, Arkadin and it’s backstory are a close second. It’s a spiritual prequel to The Third Man that would be the backstory for Harry Lime if he could have used that name, though that did not stop him from recycling radio scripts that had actually been prequels to The Third Man. It’s also a sort of criminality-minded remake of Citizen Kane. The Criterion boxset further mixes things up by containing 3 versions of the film, the 3 radio episodes that the film borrows liberally from, and the novelization that Welles may or may not have written depending on when you ask him.
We talk Orson Welles and multiple cuts on this week’s Lost in Criterion with The Complete Mr. Arkadin. Listen at LostInCriterion.com or on iTunes, where you could maybe drop a review of us? While you're at it, maybe like us on Facebook? Or consider supporting us through Patreon. We'd appreciate it.
The main theme of The Virgin Spring is a conflict between Christianization and Swedish traditional religion. What Pat takes issue with in this week’s episode is that that is a pretty weird argument when Odin is literally a character in your movie and Jesus isn’t. The Virgin Spring is Bergman’s Rashomon, but not the story structure that that normally implies. Instead it’s a medieval tale of rape, murder, revenge, and more murder. And maybe some sort of redemption? Hard to say without Odin coming back at the end.
We talk comparative religion on this week’s Lost in Criterion with The Virgin Spring. Listen at LostInCriterion.com or on iTunes, where you could maybe drop a review of us? While you're at it, maybe like us on Facebook? Or consider supporting us through Patreon. We'd appreciate it.
Modern America has an unnuanced view of Lincoln. So did 1930's America. So did 1860's America. Many people in the mid-19th century saw Lincoln as Jesus -- unhelped by the fact that he was assassinated on Good Friday -- but the truth is Lincoln wasn't even Lincoln. The Great Emancipator had only decided that some Black men -- the "very intelligent" and soldiers -- should get citizenship rights three days before his death.
Anyway, John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln is more myth than even a normal Lincoln biopic, since it's a work of pure fiction, but even it makes a slight acknowledgement that Lincoln was only anti-slavery because he knew it hurt poorer White workers. America!
We talk American myth — and some surprisingly true American history — on this week’s episode of Lost in Criterion Young Mr. Lincoln. Listen at LostInCriterion.com or on iTunes, where you could maybe drop a review of us? While you're at it, maybe like us on Facebook? Or consider supporting us through Patreon. We'd appreciate it.
We have some fun with Google’s automatic translation of webpages this week as Donovan joins us once again to talk about an Akira Kurosawa film. This time it’s a possible Shakespearean-adaptation with The Bad Sleep Well — possible, because one it’s not clear if the parallels are intentional, but also because understanding it to be a Shakespeare adaptation undermines the film itself.
We talk corrupt public officials on this week’s Lost in Criterion with The Bad Sleep Well. Listen at LostInCriterion.com or on iTunes, where you could maybe drop a review of us? While you're at it, maybe like us on Facebook? Or consider supporting us through Patreon. We'd appreciate it.
Rene Clement’s Forbidden Games follows two young children attempting to find calm in a time of deep trauma, and the inability of the state of mid-century western religion, particularly spiritualism and organized Christianity, to help. Which is not to say that the particular parish priest in the film doesn’t try his best. The symbols, the ornaments, the gold adorning the altar, do little to relieve the very real pain of life. But they are also just a cursory understanding of religion anyway. Ceremony is useless without compassion. “A resounding gong” the Christi an Scriptures call it. The symbol of the Cross must be accompanied by the love of neighbor and enemy that the Cross symbolizes.
We talk religion on this week’s Lost in Criterion with Forbidden Games. Listen at LostInCriterion.com or on iTunes, where you could maybe drop a review of us? While you're at it, maybe like us on Facebook? Or consider supporting us through Patreon. We'd appreciate it.
After the runaway delirium of their ballet film The Red Shoes, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger followed up with an opera. The Tales of Hoffmann is based on the personal mythology of German author E.T.A. Hoffmann, by way of the French who adapted the anthology of tall tales into an opera. The film is a new English translation, and crazy.
We dive into The Tales of Hoffmann on this week’s Lost in Criterion. Listen at LostInCriterion.com or on iTunes, where you could maybe drop a review of us? While you're at it, maybe like us on Facebook? Or consider supporting us through Patreon. We'd appreciate it.
Akira Kurosawa spent a decade dreaming about making Ran and it shows. It’s well crafted and deliberate (mostly), but also vivid and delirious — something that had become an obsession. It’s beautiful. It’s brutal. And it’s accidentally Shakespeare. Apparently, Kurosawa was not thinking about King Lear when he wrote this, but someone pointed out the similarities and Kurosawa leaned into it. Great job!
Donovan H. joins us on this week’s Lost in Criterion as we talk Ran. Listen at LostInCriterion.com or on iTunes, where you could maybe drop a review of us? While you're at it, maybe like us on Facebook? Or consider supporting us through Patreon. We'd appreciate it.
Francois Truffaut said that his plan with Shoot the PIano Player “was to make a film without a subject, to express all I wanted to say about glory, success, downfall, failure, women and love by means of a detective story” which betrays the fact that he has little idea what the word “subject” means. His debut The 400 Blows was “very French,” and French critics loved it. So of course Truffaut decided to follow it up with something “American” that they would hate, so he made a gangster comedy.
We talk about “frenchness’ and “americaness” as we discuss Shoot the Piano Player on this week’s Lost in Criterion. Listen at LostInCriterion.com or on iTunes, where you could maybe drop a review of us? While you're at it, maybe like us on Facebook? Or consider supporting us through Patreon. We'd appreciate it.
Roger Ebert posits that Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket is an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, though in all honesty if that were the intention the stakes here are low enough that it feels like a parody. I present a half-cooked Marxist interpretation (which I let simmer a bit more for the post at the main site). And Pat gets hung up about the clear sexual deviancy aspects. All in all it’s a lively conversation on the best film where the main character thinks he’s so much better than everyone that he deserves to steal their stuff.
We talk multiple interpretations with Bresson’s Pickpocket on this week’s Lost in Criterion. Listen at LostInCriterion.com or on iTunes, where you could maybe drop a review of us? While you're at it, maybe like us on Facebook? Or consider supporting us through Patreon. We'd appreciate it.
As the final piece of the Rebel Samurai boxset, Criterion delivers us a parody of the films we’ve just watched and a few other classics. Kihachi Okamoto’s Kill! sends up Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, and Sanjuro, Okamoto’s own Sword of Doom, and others while still having time to put a man in a dress. Donovan H. closes out the boxset with us, but have no fear, we’ll see him again soon.
This week we talk Kill! Listen to it on LostInCriterion.com or iTunes! While you're at it, maybe like us on Facebook? Or consider supporting us through Patreon. We'd appreciate it.
Donovan H. is our guest this month because of his lifetime obsession with samurai media, but that is not his only passion. He’s also a huge fan of the espionage fiction of John le Carre. So we are extra grateful to have him talk with us about a movie that is in many ways a Le Carre spy story dressed up in Samurai clothes. Masahiro Shinoda plays with his material in a similar manner —though by certainly different means — to what he did with Double Suicide.
This week we talk cold war intrigue and best friend ex machina as we explore Samurai Spy. Listen to it on LostInCriterion.com or iTunes! While you're at it, maybe like us on Facebook? Or consider supporting us through Patreon. We'd appreciate it.
How do you avenge a murder? With another murder is the normal answer in fiction (and often enough in reality). Of course it’s hard to say Sword of the Beast is exactly about the vortex that is mounting vendettas, considering our hero takes his revenge in a way that proves to the people seeking revenge against him that revenge is bad. But at least someone learns an important lesson.
Donovan H. joins Lost in Criterion as we continue the Rebel Samurai boxset this week with Hideo Gosha’s Sword of the Beast. Listen to it on LostInCriterion.com or iTunes! While you're at it, maybe like us on Facebook? Or consider supporting us through Patreon. We'd appreciate it.
It’s time for rebellion.
The samurai mythos is a cultural myth that like similar myths in the west — The Wild West, The Noble Savage — has specific use in service of consolidated state power. We talked extensively about deconstructing those national myths with out last Kobayashi film, Harakiri, but for the next month Criterion is serving us up the Rebel Samurai boxset, four films from the 1960’s that take different paths in tearing down the idols of the past. Donovan H. joins us for the entire month, starting with Samurai Rebellion.
We get rebellious with Samurai Rebellion in this week's Lost in Criterion. Listen to it on LostInCriterion.com or iTunes! While you're at it, maybe like us on Facebook? Or consider supporting us through Patreon. We'd appreciate it.
It's no secret that we here at Lost in Criterion like anti-war films, and there were quite a lot of great anti-war films coming out of Japan after World War II. While much of horror in the ending of the war can be fairly placed at the feet of the United State, Japanese filmmakers rightly explore the Japanese cultural ideals that led to the war in the first place. Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu is haunting, and not just because it's a ghost story.
We talk about personal and societal regret as we discuss Ugetsu in this week's Lost in Criterion. Listen to it on LostInCriterion.com or iTunes! While you're at it, maybe like us on Facebook? Or consider supporting us through Patreon. We'd appreciate it.
Jean-Luc Godard wanted to take a sociological look at French youth, wanted to take the youth themselves seriously. Yet he seems unable to himself take his female stars seriously as people. In the film teen boys are into philosophy and social sciences, while teen girls are into pop music and makeup. It's...not great. But it's also about the conflict of a left leaning movement among young people who are also brand conscious. Eventually Godard would team up with Jean-Pierre Gorin and make movies that tackle this a bit better, Tout va Bien among them.
We talk about consumerism, leftism, and bad anthropology as we discuss Godard's Masculin Feminin in this week's Lost in Criterion. Listen to it on LostInCriterion.com or iTunes! While you're at it, maybe like us on Facebook? Or consider supporting us through Patreon. We'd appreciate it.
As I said at the end of last week's episode, reportedly Mike Leigh's favorite film is Boudu Saved from Drowning, which is probably no surprise if you've watched his 1993 film Naked. David Thewlis's breakout role is a Sisyphean Odyssey throw a dark underbelly of people waiting for the trickle down to hit them, hopefully before the apocalypse.
We talk Naked on this week's Lost in Criterion. Listen to it at LostInCriterion.com or via iTunes. While you're at it, maybe like us on Facebook? Or consider supporting us through Patreon. We'd appreciate it.
Jean-Pierre Melville doesn't care about accuracy. Or perhaps it is a choice for his character not to understand the bushido code he swears he lives his life by. Or, perhaps, the inconsistencies are a meta-commentary on the fact that "bushido" as we know it is largely made up after the period of time samurais were supposed to be living by the code. Honestly, I kinda jut think Melville liked the Seven Samurai and just decided to fudge it for an audience that didn't really care either. Not that it matters, as even if Pat has a hard time getting past Melville's orientalism, the film is a pretty great gangster film. Except for maybe the ending, which itself is the flagship of all the fake bushido code problems of the rest of the film.
We talk about pseudo-samurai gangsters and the worlds craziest police line-up on this week's episode of Lost in Criterion: Le Samourai. Listen via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
I just got back from seeing a double feature of Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light and boydog am I depressed. Of course I've seen them before, but that doesn't mean they're any less impactful. And by "impactful" I reiterate that I mean "depressing." I need a root beer. Or three.
III Dachshunds Root Beer
III Dachshunds Beer Co., Cudahy, Wisconsin
Stone Cellar Brewery, Appleton, Wisconsin
3dachshundsbeer.com
And also somehow WIT Beverage Company
Probably named for 3 literal dogs, but there's only one on the label so who knows, III Dachshunds makes beer inspired by wiener dogs. And a root beer that tastes more like a brown birch beer. As a root beer it's not that great! But as a birch beer, it's pretty dang good! A little cola-y but smooth wintergreen and a hint of vanilla. Delicious!
Rating: 4/5
Iron Horse Root Beer
Iron Horse Rootbeer, Minneapolis, Minnesota
DrinkIronHorse.com
The history of Iron Horse Root Beer, according to their website, is...well nothing. The "Our History" section mostly just talks about the transcontinental railroad. There's really not much info on the company. The root beer though is a fairly light. Birch on the nose. Anise and birch in the taste, but along with being lighter in color it is also lighter in flavor.
Rating: 2.5/5
Saranac Root Beer
FX Matt Brewery, Utica, New York
Saranac.com
The Matt family has been making beer since the 19th century, even making an IPA in 1914. Like a lot of old breweries they pivoted to soda during Prohibition. It's dark in color and smells like a draft root beer with caramel and vanilla. But it tastes more like anise and cough syrup than vanilla.
Rating: 3.5/5
Michel Simon was a bit of a libertine and libertarian and maybe just a jerk, but Jean Renoir liked him and essentially Boudu Saved from Drowning is Simon's worldview, at least according to Renoir. I suspect that no matter how misanthropic Simon could get he never spit in Balzac. Or maybe he did. I don't know the man.
This week we talk about burning down the bourgeoisie and replacing their values with...none values, as we talk about Boudu Saved from Drowning, listen via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Time to kick off season 2 of The Adam Glass's Root Beer Round-Up with a blind reach into my ever-growing box of roots beer. By look of the draw we picked three that have been on my shelf for too long, and that aren't really all that great.
Deadworld Zombie Soda Root Beer
Blue Sun Soda, Minnesota
I'm told that the Deadworld comic is the best comic books series about zombies that there is, and I don't know nearly enough about zombie comic book series to disagree. But Michgan-based indie publisher Caliber Comics has licensed their Zombies to Blue Sun Soda (the RocketFizz of Minnesota) and I do now a bit about root beer. This is a decidedly ok root beer. It is not terrible. It is perfectly middle of the road. A little tuttifrutti flavor in with a cough-syrupy backend, this dark root beer is like the average haunted house: ok in the moment but I'm not going to recommend it.
Rating: 2.5/5
The Pop Shoppe Root Beer
The Pop Shoppe
Originally: London, Ontario, Canada
The Pop Shoppe province-, then nation-, then continent-wide soda retailer that sold soda to the masses from 1969 to 1987. Reestablished as an internet brand in 2004, it was recently bought by BeverageWorld.ca. The root beer itself is pretty classical stuff, and I doubt the recipe changed much from the 1969 version. It's dark, with a nice head, and reminded me of Faygo if I'm perfectly honest.
Rating: 2.5/5
Stubborn Soda Classic Root Beer
Stubborn Soda
PepsiCo threw their hats into the craft soda ring with the Stubborn brand in 2015 and I hate everything about this sentence. It's ok. It's not great, but I've had root beer for this project that made me actively want to vomit and this isn't one of them. They're not trying anything special; they're trying to make a solid middle of the road root beer and they mostly succeed.
Rating: 2/5
I first saw The Man Who Fell to Earth in the middle of the night as part of Ohio's 24 Hour Sci-Fi Movie Marathon and I stand by my review then: Nicholas Roeg believes that Howard Hughes was an alien being.
Pat and I get a little more in depth than that this week, and I welcome a chance to watch the film while awake, even if Roeg's been less than impressive in the past.
This week's Lost in Criterion is The Man Who Fell to Earth , listen via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
A lot can be said -- and long time listeners know we've said a lot -- on the changing of mores and morals and works being "products of their time." Mostly we here at Lost in Criterion come down on the fact that some things are nakedly and objectively immoral -- rape, slavery -- and anyone of any age defending them (or failing to attack them) is wrong, especially since there have always been voices in each age that are not "products of their time" but exceptions to what we, in the current day, believe "their time" to have been like. What I mean is, the "products of their time" excuse says more about us and how we view history than about the people living in that period.
Anyway, Bad Timing spends it's entire run time suggesting that the defining act of the film is not an act of rape despite the impossibility of consent. That the movie even suggests, let alone spends 2 hours maintaining, that Art Garfunkel's character has not committed rape is wrong. We are supposed to sympathize with him.
We cannot.
This week's Lost in Criterion is Bad Timing , listen via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
The western and the samurai film genres are fraternal twins. They embody the national myths of their respective nations of origin. It is no coincidence that some straightforward masterpieces in the genres steal from one another (Seventh Samurai vs The Magnificent Seven, for instance). It is also no coincidence that some of the early deconstructions of each genre borrowed from one another (Yojimbo/Sanjuro and Sergio Leone's Man With No Name series).
While not our first example of Samurai film deconstruction -- and certainly not our last -- Masaki Kobayashi's Harakiri is a hard hitting take on Japanese society and societal mythology, tearing the veil away from traditions
Donovan Hill joins us to deconstruct some national mythology as we talk Harakiri on this week's Lost in Criterion, listen via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
A doctor walks up to Janet Frame in the institution she's remanded to. She expects he is there to perform the lobotomy that very smart people have decided is the only hope she has. Instead he informs her that she's won the New Zealand national book prize.
There will be no lobotomy, but she will spend years more institutionalized.
Jane Campion's adaptation of Frame's later autobiographies tells the tale of a woman who was disregarded until she seemed useful, all in the name, I'm sure, of loving her. "Life in hell," Frame wrote, "but there are prizes." But the thing is, life doesn't have to be hell. Humans make it hell for other humans.
We talk about one woman's fight against patriarchal normality on this week's Lost in Criterion with An Angel at My Table , listen via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
We've been Lost in Criterion for a while, but thankfully we always have some friends to help us along the way. This week we're joined by longtime friends of the show Jonathan Hape, Stephen Goldmeier, Ben Jones-White, Donovan Hill, and Andrew Tobias making his non-Christmas episode debut, as we talk about Wes Anderson's 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
We get Lost on and below the high seas in this weeks Lost in Criterion episode The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, listen via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Among the directors we've been introduced to through the Collection Seijun Suzuki is probably the most surprising. He quickly became a hero, and like any hero who isn't Mr. Rogers he's gone and milkshake ducked himself..
Think of it in terms of, say, Uncle Tom's Cabin. A thing can be very progressive in its time and yet feel dated and as if it doesn't push enough. This is particularly egregious to Pat and me in Story of a Prostitute in that we view the uncommented on bit -- that "Comfort Women" were largely forced sex slaves -- as so nakedly evil that we can't understand the acceptance of it, particularly because Seijun is pushing back against mainstream Japanese cultural myths of masculinity and militarism but fails to push against the idea that these women were all willing volunteers.
We get disappointed by a hero on this week's Lost in Criterion with Story of a Prostitute, listen via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
It's our second to last Suzuki film which means after next week's Story of a Prostitute even if the Criterion Collection adds another we've got at least 700 episodes before we see it.
Gate of Flesh tells the story of some women who try to control their own lives in post-war Tokyo and the desperation they find themselves trapped in.
Life is hard, but war makes it worse on this week's Lost in Criterion with Gate of Flesh, listen via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
With each Robert Bresson film the Criterion Collection serves up to us I think we are getting more and more into Bresson's Bressonness. Though I imagine that au hasard Balthazar has got to be peak Bresson if for no other reason than because it's "inspired by" a couple of paragraphs in Dostoevsky's The Idiot. Though he'll probably prove me wrong.
We cry over a donkey on this week's Lost in Criterion with au hasard Balthazar, listen via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Marcello Mastroianni is a fantastic actor who more often than not plays some fictionalized version of famed director Federico Fellini, even when the film he's in is not directed by Fellini himself.
With Luchino Visconti's 1957 film Le Notti Bianche we get Mastroianni playing a wholly non-Fellini for the first time I can remember, and please correct me if I'm wrong on that. It's also the most explicit adaptation of Dostoevsky in a string of three films that all claim inspiration from the Russian novelist.
We talk a lot about Adam's belief that he is a Dostoevsky main character on this week's Lost in Criterion with Le Notti Bianche, listen via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
We've watched a lot of Marxist films for Lost in Criterion so I guess it's only fair that they serve us up a "youths are bad" film from a xenophobic, nationalistic hard right politician.
Shintaro Ishihara wrote the novel Crazed Fruit is based on as a cautionary tale about the violent and rebellious younger generation in post-war Japan. He then went on to become a hard right politician -- "the Japanese Marine Le Pen" and a big supporter of doomsday cult Aum until the whole Sarin gas thing -- and it's impossible to talk about the Ko Nakahira's film without talking about Ishihara's politics.
We unpack a political life on this week's Lost in Criterion with Crazed Fruit, listen via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
I recorded this episode of the Round Up just before moving nearly 3 years ago and only just now found cord to connect my camera to my computer. Great job, me!
This week we check another off my quest to drink a root beer from every state with one from Hawaii. It's good!
I've still got a lot of states to go, but I'm very close to a couple of bingos! A Vermont root beer would get me one from each state of New England which seems like it should be easy, and one from Nevada would give me a straight line from coast to coast. Make some suggestions!
But on to this week's ratings!
Capt'n Eli's
Capt'n Eli's Soda
Shipyard Brewing, Portland, Maine
Probably the only root beer with an official tie in graphic novel, Capt'n Eli kicks butt? At least in the comics. Dark and heady, it's very creamy vanilla. Tastes like a waitress on roller skates ought to bring it to you in mug.
Rating: 4.5
Blumer's
Minhas Brewery, Monroe, Wisconsin
The Minhas family currently owns Blumer's brewery which is the second oldest brewery in the country according to them. I don't doubt that. The nose on this is very sweet and fruity, but with an undernote of hops. The flavor is rather unlike root beer, fruity and syrupy, tart but still somehow medcine-y. Perhaps the weirdest thing is that it's still quite palatable.
Rating as a root beer: 1
Rating as a soda: 4
Waialua Root Beer
Waialua Soda Works, Waialua, Hawaii
Locally sourced ingredients feed this Hawaiian root beer. The birch/wintergreen in this is almost pepperminty, like a wintergreen lifesaver more than birch, but it's creamy and vanilla-y with a classic draft root beer smell and principal flavor.
Rating: 4
Our third, and for the time final, film from The Puffin is a third adaptation of British theatre, this time around working with playwright Terrance Rattigan to adapt his play 1948 play The Browning Version. Unlike The Importance of Being Earnest which stuck close to the source material or Pygmalion which worked from a script Shaw himself adapted with a disdain for film, Rattigan expands his play for the film version, adding an entire third act and a more poignant and inspiring ending. Or at least less depressing.
Listen to Pat get emotional about teaching on this week's Lost in Criterion episode The Browning Version via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
This week we fall in love with Robert Rossellini's adaptation of The Flowers of St. Francis, particularly Br. Juniper, but the film fails to cover one of my favorite Juniper adventures, so here it is as recounted by Shane Claiborne:
"On one occasion, Brother Juniper was left in charge of the cathedral by the caretaker. (Not sure what he was thinking.) Some beggars came to the door asking for food and money. Juniper had little to offer, but he mentioned that there were some silver bells in the cathedral they could have, since it was God’s house. So he helped them with that. When his superior, the bishop, got word of this, he scolded Brother Juniper. Legend has it he yelled so loudly that he lost his voice. Brother Juniper, feeling remorse for having angered him so badly, made some porridge that night to take to the bishop. He carefully carried it by the light of a candle to the bishop’s house. When his superior answered the door, he was irate, having been awakened from his slumber. He wanted nothing to do with Juniper’s gift. So Juniper, with the innocence of a child, asked the bishop if he would mind holding the candle so Juniper could eat the porridge before it got cold. At this point, the bishop was so taken aback, he fell apart with laughter at the absurdity of this simpleton. He held the candle, and they finished the porridge together."
Listen to us talk religion and the responsibilities reformers have to actually acknowledge why reform needed to happen on this week's Lost in Criterion episode The Flowers of St. Francis via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Unfaithfully Yours is about a man who finds escapism in imagining various ways to murder his wife. Our last encounter with director Preston Sturges -- Sullivan's Travels which we watched three years ago(!) -- was about how people need escapism more than intellectual movies, but that did not leave me ready for the pitch black slaptstick we get here. It's an immensely funny film, particularly when reality fails to meet the protagonist's dreamed expectations.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode The Phantom of Liberty via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Ernst Lubitsch's vision of the afterlife as the bureaucratic world of 1940's titans of industry is in line with many of my very favorite comedic depictions of satan and hell, reminding me both Bedazzled (1967) and The Good Place but in time and place appropriate clothing.
Heaven Can Wait is the first film Lost in Criterion has stumbled upon in our quest in a very long time that doesn't have an overt political point, which is refreshing but also doesn't stop us from talking about it's subtextual political point at length. On one hand we can read politics into anything, but on the other I think we have a fair reading. In any case, it's a funny film.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode The Phantom of Liberty via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
There will come a day when all the best bits from Luis Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty will have -- through the magic of memory -- been in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and I won't feel bad about not liking most of The Phantom of Liberty. It's ok! There's some really really great bits! But Bunuel is better than the sum of this film, and we've seen him be better.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode The Phantom of Liberty via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Hoop Dreams is a film about young men with promising futures in basketball. Futures that promise to be one of the few pathways to hope for young men who come from their circumstances. Arthur Agee and William Gates, the young black men in question, come out of Chicago and are really quite good at the game, but as Agee's mother says about single mothers like her: the system doesn't care.
And that's where Hoop Dreams does something bigger than it's originally intended 30 minute documentary on street ball could have ever hoped. While it may just be the fact that I was 9 at the time it came out, but that particular time in America basketball seemed more popular than any other in my life: the Bull's heyday, the 1992 Dream Team sweeping the olympics, heck, NBA Jam had just come out. Basketball, perhaps particularly Chicago ball, was in the zeitgeist. Hoop Dreams tapped into that, then took its audience to unexpected places and challenged them for how they treated the people who produced this thing they liked. Often filmmakers Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert do so subtly, and others it does so in no uncertain terms.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode Hoop Dreams via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Orson Welles's F for Fake reminds us that fake news exist because we incentivize it's existence. There's a market for it. There's money in it. And when enough people want something to be true it doesn't matter if it is or not.
And it's not just fake news. It's fake experts. It's fakes raised to the level of oracle for saying palatable lies. It's not just WorldNewsDailyReport.com, it's also, say, JD Vance.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode F for Fake via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
We've seen a number of behind the scenes documentaries in our trip through Criterion -- A Constant Forge, My Metier, Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie -- but most are much for reverential than Les Blanks' warts and all portrait of Werner Herzog's disastrous production of Fitzcarraldo.
Equal parts portrait of a mad artist and anthropological study of exploited native peoples, Burden of Dreams explores an obsession that boarders on colonialism.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode Burden of Dreams via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
The actor who Fellini clearly favors as his Fellini-stand in (he'd star in 8 1/2 the next year) stars as a serial philanderer. Heck, they even watch (and are bored by) La Dolce Vita, where Marcello Mastroianni also plays the philandering Fellini star.
Pietro Germi's Divorce Italian Style is a comedy about killing your wife in order to marry your cousin. A lesson we all need.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode Divorce Italian Style via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Perhaps a better title for the third and final film in our Andrzej Wajda War Films boxset would be "Ashes or Diamonds". The question asked is what will become of his nation after the traumatic flames of war and occupation. Though, perhaps, Wajda is letting us know that there are both ashes and diamonds to be found.
The title comes from a piece by the rather great Polish Romantic poet Cyprian Norwid. I read it in the episode, as two characters do in the film:
So often, are you as a blazing torch with flames
of burning rags falling about you flaming,
you know not if flames bring freedom or death.
Consuming all that you must cherish
if ashes only will be left, and want Chaos and tempest
Or will the ashes hold the glory of a starlike diamond
The Morning Star of everlasting triumph.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode Ashes and Diamonds via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
A lot of people died in the Warsaw Uprising. The opening narration of Andrzej Wajda's Kanal -- the second in the Three War Films trilogy boxset from Criterion -- reminds us that everyone we're meeting is going to die. And they do! Everybody loves a film that delivers on its promises, right?
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode Kanal via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
One thing Andrzej Wajda wanted to do with his first film, 1955's A Generation, was to include a frank explanation of Marxism to let it stand in marked contrast to what the Soviets were actually running in Poland and hope that it would push a popular revolution. To his surprise the Soviet censors let the scene through. To his horror the revolution did not come. Oops.
We're starting a string of Wajda's first three films, contained in Criterion's Three War Films boxset, and they just get better from here.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode A Generation via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Jules and Jim (1962) is really the story of Catherine, a woman so strong-willed that even Francois Truffaut can't let her be the center of her own story. The last line -- "But it was not allowed." -- sums up his view, or at least society's.
The problem is that the love triangle at the center of the story is based on reality, and while the three of them did eventually part ways none of them committed murder or suicide. Society may have made the relationship untenable in reality, but it did not push anyone to murderous psychopathy. Perhaps Truffaut himself knew that presenting this relationship as actually working is what is truly not allowed, but it seems like that's not even a thing he wanted to do. Oops.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode Jules and Jim via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Kihachi Okamoto's The Sword of Doom is, according to guest Donovan Hill, "like the most nihilistic Kurosawa film with exponentially increased cynicism." It's dark and violent and when the main character first shows up I thought he was an avatar of Death, not just a person who seems to think he's an avatar of Death. Donovan joins us as both our resident aficionado of Samurai film but also our resident aficionado of nihilism. A twofer!
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode The Sword of Doom via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebookor support us on Patreon.
Say a German filmmaker, born at the start of World War 2, makes a film about a kid just trying to fit in who goes along with it when the more popular boys start torturing a minority student? Would you say that the film is probably about the Nazis? Well, you'd be wrong. It's about everyone. Hey, humanity, be better.
Young Törless is Volker Schlöndorff's 1966 film that is a bit like Lord of the Flies but more honest. It doesn't take being cut off from adults for privileged young men to become monstrous; it can happen anywhere. And it often does.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode Young Törless via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Years ago we watched L'Avventura and really just could not get into it. L'Eclisse is the third film in a loose trilogy that L'Avventura started. In a few more years we'll watch the middle film. La Notte, and maybe things will get better. One thing I think long time listeners will notice is that the more films Lost in Criterion watches, the less Lost we feel. Still, L'Eclisse misses us, or we miss it. In either case in the three weeks between watching the film twice before record the episode and sitting down to actually edit it for release I completely forgot everything about the movie. At least I can remember things about L'Avventura, even if I hate it.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode L'Eclisse via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
You can actually notice when people slip into Shakespearean-like speech because it is weird. I trust that Gus Van Sant knows how weird it is when he combined a modern day Falstaff script with a film about a narcoleptic street hustler. I mean, read that sentence. It's patently obvious that this is a weird thing. Which is not to say this is a bad film, because it is a very, very good film.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode My Own Private Idaho via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Point of advice for filmmakers young and old -- heck point of advice for anyone who seeks to "give voice to the voiceless": the "voiceless" have a voice, don't speak for them, but allow them to speak for themselves.
In making The River Jean Renoir made one very good choice: he hired Satyajit Ray as a local expert. The work here later helped to inspire Ray to make the Apu trilogy, but first off it allowed Ray to suggest that maybe if -- like Renoir claimed -- they were to make a movie that actually respected India and it's peoples, they should include some of those peoples in major roles. renoir agreed! And added one principle female Indian in a story about an aristocratic family of white British people.
When you have a pedestal and wish to raise someone else up, do what Brando did with Sacheen Littlefeather: use your name and clout, but step back and let the people you claim to represent tell their own story.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode The River via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
In the past year Lost in Criterion has talked about a lot of films about revolutions, and art being what it is most of those films view revolt as positive. Though one of my favorites, Visconti's The Leopard, at least points out that revolutions rarely change anything except who gets to do the oppressing of the poor. Marxism theoretically seeks to change that, but as Tout va Bien shows us, the aftermath of Marxist revolt in western nations often still ends with the lower classes wondering what's changed.
Jean-Luc Godard and his political film collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin explore a group of factory workers who feel left behind after the May 1968 events in France, an uprising that's own organizers say "succeeded socially but not politically", which is to say, did nothing. It also asks what the role of celebrities and intellectuals should be in the revolution. (Something like "stand back, for your own safety.")
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode Tout va Bien via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Jules Dassin's last film in America, 1949's Thieves' Highway, is a very good movie.
Jules Dassin's first film in France, 1955's Rififi, is one of the best movies.
But in between, in 1950, Dassin's path in life took him through London where he made Night and the City. On the one hand Dassin could make a noir film in his sleep, on the other, with Night and the City, he did. The director claims he never even read the script, and in many ways it feels like someone tried to make The Third Man from memory without a very good memory.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode Jules Dassin's Night and the City via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Jules Dassin's Thieves' Highway is no The Wages of Fear, but that's no indictment against Dassin or the film itself. We just have a high bar for films about truck drivers after discovering Clouzot's classic early in Lost in Criterion.
Instead, 1949's Thieves' Highway is an American postwar film about a returning soldier suddenly disillusioned with the corruption he encounters at home. In that way it feels like Kurosawa's postwar works like Stray Dog. It's also, perhaps, a critique of unchecked capitalism, so no wonder it got Dassin blacklisted.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode Thieves' Highway via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
It's that time of year where I list my favorite albums I've purchased in the last 12 months, mostly ranked by how often I've listened to them with very little other objective concerns. Though this year I bought a few objectively good albums, and that did complicate the listings. Anyway, my most played record this year isn't one I bought anyway: My good friends Jonathan Hape, Nick Baker, and Andy Foster perform together as Room and Board. They released a new EP this year and were kind enough to give me a copy. Check it out here.
Elsewise, on with the list.
-
Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner, and James McAlister's Planetarium (2017)
I really love Sufjan. I do. Since I started making these yearly lists his new releases have been at or close to the top as they come out. Here he works with some amazing collaborators all building on compositions by Nico Muhly, which makes it even more bizarre that the album mostly feels like rehashes of Stevens' earlier work. While the title itself suggests a weird expansion and dilution of Stevens's aborted 50 states project, the songs mostly sound like Age of Adz b-sides, most notably Jupiter, which sounds so close to Vesuvius to my ear that I just get the earlier track stuck in my head when I hear the newer one. And at 17 tracks the album wears thin long before it's over. Sufjan, I still love you, but I don't love this. -
Lo Tom's s/t (2017)
It's 2017 and 90's fringe Christian acts Pedro the Lion and Starflyer 59 finally come together to form the supergroup they probably could have been 20 years ago. As two bands it was ok for me to be into in high school as far as my parents were concerned (well, so long as they didn't actually listen to Control), I've been a long time fan of both groups, and they all musically mesh quite well. Lyrically, though, Dave Bazan isn't quite as hard hitting as he has been in the past. Bad Luck Charm is like a single song version of Control, which couldn't possibly encompass everything that album had to say. Likewise some of the other songs feel more clever than smart. Still, it's well crafted guitar rock that doesn't feel like a rehash of either of the bands that make up the supergroup. -
Spoon's Hot Thoughts (2017)
It feels kinda of like a sin to list a new Spoon album this far up the list, and Pat may never talk to me again for not putting it closer to number one, but Hot Thoughts just didn't hit me as hard as any Spoon before. Maybe it was just where I was as a person, but their last release They Want My Soul was immediately my most played album when it came out, and is still up on that list. Meanwhile, the perfectly good but not great Hot Thoughts has yet to strike me as something I need to listen to. Previous Spoon was addictive, this just isn't. I listen to each of the ten albums on this list just before ordering them and writing the reviews, and even this morning it was hard to focus on all but a couple of songs. -
Galaxie 500's Today (1988/2009)
Awhile back I had The Aquabats' song Waterslides stuck in my head and posted the lyrics "I'll stick around to be your hero, your tugboat captain" on Facebook, to which someone responded "I love Galaxie 500". Obviously, that someone was confused, but they turned me on to this classic jangle pop band, leading ultimately to me buying the three albums they released between 1988 and 1991 when they broke up. The final song of their first album, Tugboat, was my first introduction to them by that confused Facebook friend, and is still my favorite, but all three albums are great. -
The National's Sleep Well Beast (2017)
From here it gets very hard to rank, because I love each of the coming albums so much. Evident by Lo Tom, DAMN, Terrible Freedom, and others, 2017 was a year for songs about endurance more than hope. But sometimes endurance is all we need for hope to grow. Sleep Well Beast is a little sloppier than previous The National records, a little more chaotic, and in that a little more organic. My chief complaint about Trouble Will Find Me was that it just sounded too much like High Violet, and Sleep Well Beast rectifies that, feeling familiar without feeling repetitive. Though somewhat grittier tracks like Turtleneck push beyond anything I would expect from them. -
Joanna Newson's The Milk-Eyed Mender (2004)
It took me a very long time to get over the shrillness of Newson's voice. Lots of people have played me her music over the years to indifference from me. But I bought her debut on a whim and found a lyrically engaging album full of spriteful charm. And her voice grew on me pretty dang quickly to boot. -
The Mountain Goats' Goths (2017)
Every tMG album is a slightly different take on the concept of a concept album. 2009's The Light of the World to Come took its song titles and concepts from individual verses of the Christian Scriptures. 2015's Beat the Champ are stories from the world of professional wrestling. This year we have Goths, inspired by an adolescence listening to chiefly British synth pop and gothic rock, like Bauhaus or Siouxsie and the Banshees, though the album's music is seemingly much more inspired by Nick Cave or New Order. Still the mood is invoked, and Darnielle's clever lyricism invokes the bands he's feeling inspired by in smart ways. -
TW Walsh's Terrible Freedom (2017)
I know Walsh from his work with Pedro the Lion (and as such, he's also featured above as a member of Lo Tom), but I wasn't familiar with his solo work. Thankfully, my friend Jason Anderson (who himself makes pretty dang good music with his wife) is a big fan, and his interactions with Walsh on Twitter turned me on to Terrible Freedom.
While lyrically Terrible Freedom circles around fear and disillusionment at modern societies increase dependence on technology -- a complaint I have some issue with -- the exploration of anxiety lands on resolve, if not hope:
Open wide to the dread that's creeping.
Never let your fear turn you wild.
Come to terms with a terrible freedom.
Whatever comes, just let it arrive
- Kendrick Lamar's DAMN (2017)
Last year I read Drew Hart's book The Trouble I've Seen and early on he challenges readers to inventory their book collections and see just how diverse they may be. My library, like that of many middle class white people, is predominantly made up of the voices of white men.
The same goes for my music collection, something I've noticed in the last few years and tried to rectify (to varying degrees, as you can see if you've read the above list). People I know who are into hip hop are often surprised that I like Kendrick or Chance the Rapper -- and I can't blame them, look at me -- but it's hard to ignore objectively good music.
Well, then again, it's not hard is it? We do it all that time. It takes empathy to get into the art created by someone whose life is -- or is perceived to be -- so different from your own. But on the flip side, seeking out the art of people different to you is a great way to start growing empathy.
Of course I don't need to grow so much in order to relate to Lamar's lyrics of spiritual fear. I am very interested in artists exploring Christian faith outside of the confines of the Christian Music Industry, and the sense of urgency in Lamar's lyrics is impossible to ignore.
- Beyonce's Lemonade (2016)
So Lemonade is inarguably the best album to come out in 2016, and I was very happy to see it released on vinyl late in 2017. Also, in a time when so many artists fail to include a digital download with their vinyl packages, Beyonce in her infinite goodness not only provided a download code for the album, but one for the accompanying video album.
The break up album for a relationship that didn't actually end, Lemonade is full of songs of hurt and healing, of standing up and demanding respect. Even a white dude can find that inspiring.
Instead, the current state of Italian society is what kills her. So she's the old state of Italian society? Well, Pasolini did write the film, but forewent directing in favor of focusing on making Mamma Roma, so the seeds of a similar metaphor are there.
La Commare Secca is the debut film by the then 20 year old Bernardo Bertolucci who arrived on set with barely an idea about how to make a movie and a fervent denial that his Rashomon-inspired movie was Rashomon inspired. It clearly was, not that there's anything wrong with that.
This week's episode of Lost in Criterion is La Commare Secca. Give it a listen via iTunes, your favorite podcatcher, or on LostInCriterion.com. Oh, and support us on Patreon for monthly non-Criterion bonus episodes, or just like us on Facebook?
It's the end of the year, the darkest night has past (in the northern hemisphere) (literally, even if not symbolically), and we gather our loved ones as we start on our crawl back into the light, rising like Winter Wheat.
Our non-Criterion end of year special this year, Martin McDonagh's 2008 film In Bruges, uses Christmas as purgatory, a time for self-reflection and pushing forward with new resolve. Also a time of depression. Christmas is complicated. Joining us in the complication this year are long-time friend Stephen Goldmeier, returning winter friend Sam Martin, newcomer Ben Jones-White, and (arriving late to the party) occasional guest and theme music composer Jonathan Hape. Hurray, friends!
We've had a good year here at Lost in Criterion, taking the year in small chunks, as we spent nearly a month with late period Jean Renoir, nearly a month with Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, and over a month with the works of John Cassavetes. We also just watched a ton of movies about different sorts of rebellions and revolutions -- Ikuru, Battle of Algiers, The Leopard, and Salvatore Giuliano among a few of others -- because our trip through the Criterion Collection knows we needed escapism about pushing back against apathy, corruption, and tyranny. Hey, speaking of those exact themes: Merry Christmas!
Thank you all for listening! Extra special thanks to those of you who support us on Patreon where you can get access to the rest of the year's non-Criterion bonus episodes! You're all great! Hope you have a wonderful end of (Gregorian) year holiday, whatever you choose to celebrate. Or just a good day today. And a fantastic new year. You're great.
Listen to this year's Lost in Criterion non-Criterion special end of year episode In Bruges via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Jacques Becker's Touchez Pas Au Grisbi is a very weird gangster film because Becker maybe didn't really want to make a gangster movie? He glosses over all the boring plot points that move the story along, and instead focuses on the small character moments. Like the teeth brushing. It's, uh, actually really amazing.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode Touchez Pas au Grisba via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Jacques Becker made a perfect movie with Le Trou. He was very good at making movies, you see.
Unfortunately, earlier than that masterpiece of a final film, he made Casque d'Or. It has a lot of good things going for it, particularly an amazing final sequence that doesn't quite do what everyone thinks it does but is still quite good. Also, two guys have a knife fight and the only audio is them huffing while they roll around on the ground which is the sort of realism I actually appreciate because it's ridiculous.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode Casque d'Or via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
From 1966, Seijun Suzuki brings us the tale of a red-pilled incel MRA whose worldview quickly leads him to fascist terrorism, as it pretty much has to.
Hey, don't be like this dumdum.
But do listen to us talk about Fighting Elegy on this week's Lost in Criterion via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter were favorites during our first year of being Lost in Criterion because of Seijun Suzuki's ridiculous sense of style and clear disdain for being told what to do. Thankfully he (mostly) lacked oversight, so he did some pretty crazy things so long as he could reasonably argue that he stuck to the script. Youth of the Beast has some strikingly wonderful set-pieces, particularly the two gangs' hideouts.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode Youth of the Beast via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
After his great Shakespearean adaptations of Hamlet (Throne of Blood) and Hamlet (The Bad Sleep Well) Akira Kurosawa wanted to make a King Lear, but got distracted making a Prince and the Pauper. Lear would make a more straightforward presence in Ran, which we'll watch in the future, but first comes Kagemusha which still manages to talk about the nature of power and futility in a rather Lear-y fashion. It's also his most historically-based period piece, in a way that suggests Kurosawa was trying to tell his audience to knock it off with idolizing the historical period many of his most popular films took place in.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode Kagemusha via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings is not exactly faithful to the source material, but then, there's a certainly a solid argument to be made that the source material is open to interpretation. On the one hand because of course it is, but on the other because the four canonical Gospels hardly agree with one another on exact details -- that's one reason there's four of them in there. Still, I don't remember an orgy scene in the official accounts.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode The King of Kings via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Is Robert Altman's adaptation of an array of Raymond Carver works a critique of toxic masculinity? Probably not purposefully, but it works. We've got about a dozen male characters whose problems almost all stem from their objectification of women, their sense of entitlement to women, or their resentment of the sexuality of the women in their lives. It's basically Bad Middle Class White People: The Movie, too, so there's that.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode Short Cuts via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
This behind the scenes documentary of Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, directed by Ingmar Bergman himself, has its own spine number in the Criterion Collection, which means we get to spend two more hours watching variations on material we've spent about 10 hours with already. There's some interesting material here, particularly the sequence in shooting Gunnar Björnstrand performance as the singing clown. Mostly it teaches us that Bergman was a kind grandfather of a director.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode The Making of Fanny and Alexander via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
In part two of our discussion on Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander we turn our focus to the shorter theatrical version -- click here for part one on the television version. While it may be true that the two hours cut out for this version contain nothing substantial to the plot or story, it is also true that the shorter cut is objectively worse. This may be the only time I prefer watching a five hour version of a thing that exists in a three hour version as well, but I stand by it.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode Fanny and Alexander: the Theatrical Version, part two of our Fanny and Alexander discussion, via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Ingmar Bergman's Fanny & Alexander exists in two cuts and we'll be talking about the shorter theatrical version next week, but that can't be talked about without referencing the longer television version, which itself can't really be talked about in a single episode. All that to say: this week's episode is really part one of a two part conversation (three part if you count the fact that in two weeks we'll be talking about The Making of Fanny and Alexander).
The film itself is a coming of age story with ghosts (of Hamlet and proto-J-horror varieties) and the possible (probable?) psychic murder of a hated step-relative. It's Bergman having come to terms with his existentialism, or at least having come to accept the mystery of mysticism, and exploring it. So utterly amazing.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode Fanny and Alexander: the Television Version, part one of our Fanny and Alexander discussion, via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Back in 1960 producer Jules Borkon asked filmmaker and Cinematheque Francaise co-founder Georges Franju to make a Hammer Horror style film for a French audience. What he made, Eyes Without a Face, did not sit well with French critics or foreign audiences.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode Eyes Without a Face and try not to get that Billy Idol song stuck in your head via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com, and while you're at it, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Catherine Breillet's Fat Girl is a film about the violence faced by women, particularly young women, in a world dominated by the male point of view. Some of that violence is easily recognized as such, but some is subtler. All of it is damaging.
Listen to this week's Lost in Criterion episode Fat Girl via iTunes or LostInCriterion.com. And, if you could, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Tanner '88 is a sort of mockumentary that doesn't play as satire anymore. America!
While directed by Robert Altman, just like last week's dark political comedy, Tanner '88 was a miniseries for HBO and written by the creator of Doonesbury, and therefore quite a bit more mainstream. Not to say that it doesn't try to push the envelope, but it does so in fairly acceptable norms. Or maybe I'm projecting 21st century standards on 1988. We're through the looking glass in so many ways, so it's hard to get a read on what exactly Trudeau and Altman were trying to do beyond just making a documentary about politics without using a real candidate. It's clearly meant to be funny, and informative, and poignant, but it's also a bit blasé.
This week's Lost in Criterion episode is Robert Altman's HBO miniseries Tanner '88. Give it a listen on iTunes or LostInCriterion.com. And, if you could, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.
Robert Altman spent the 80's teaching film at the University of Michigan and being ignored by Hollywood. Or exiled? Or was it self-imposed? It's open to interpretation.
Anyway, while there he got really into theatre and started filming plays, among them the Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone play Secret Honor starring, like the stage play, Philip Baker Hall as a washed up, paranoid, suicidal Richard Nixon. While the personality on display here may be true to life, the film is not meant to be realistic, presenting a Bohemian Grove-led conspiracy to take over the US using Nixon's presidency as the impetus behind Watergate. Hall's performance is one of the best pieces of acting we've seen, up there with Renée Jeanne Falconetti in Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc.
This week's Lost in Criterion episode is Secret Honor. Give it a listen on iTunes or LostInCriterion.com. And, if you could, like us on Facebook or support us on Patreon.