Lost in Criterion

Pat is a huge fan of the Beatles, which he inherits from his dad, and which he this week fails to pass on to his own children. Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night (1964) is a movie those kids should like; it's fun and funny, it's The Beatles just on the cusp of being THE BEATLES. Popular as anything already, but not quite bigger than Jesus yet. The film is an interesting look at how that popularity is a prison for four guys in their early 20s.

Georges Franju's homage to/remake of Louis Feuillade's 1916 serial, Judex (1963) is a dreamy tale of revenge full of contrivance and illogic and every single frame is a masterpiece. Encountering films like this is biggest reward of doing the podcast.

Howard Hawks directs this grand western in which Montgomery Cliff maybe introduces Hollywood to The Method and John Wayne learns to act. It's a story about greed and America but it's not an open critique because it would be bad if we said America is bad. If nothing else John Wayne would quit the production.

Since first watching Taste of Cherry way back at Spine 45, we have looked forward to each Abbas Kiarostami the Criterion Collection has shown us. Color us intrigued when we found out that Like Someone In Love (2012) was made in Japan. Unfortunately, Pat maybe gets a little hung up on the fact that much of what the characters in this movie do don't really make sense within Japanese culture. Aside from that, it's a fantastic film.

With Il sorpasso (1962), Criterion once again shows us a single movie from a director we've never heard of and they will never mention again. As per usual, this is a great movie. An road trip through the effects of consumerism across class lines in post-war Italy, the film is a pretty clear inspiration for Easy Rider, and maybe after contextualizing Easy Rider as an American Il sorpasso we could like that movie more, too bad we'll never watch it again.

We are thrilled to finally have another film from our (second?) favorite Danish director. Master of the House (1925) is the earliest Carl Th. Dreyer we've seen and the last the Criterion has to offer us. When we watched our last Dreyer film, this one wasn't even in the Collection yet. Unfortunately, there's a reason this is the only film from Dreyer's pre-Joan of Arc period. While the seeds of what we love about Dreyer are there, this light domestic dramedy doesn't hit nearly as nicely as any of his later work that we've seen. But hey, it's still Dreyer.

We are thrilled to finally have another film from our (second?) favorite Danish director. Breaking the Waves (1996) is the first film Lars von Trier made after establishing the Dogme 95 framework, but he mostly ignored that to make a 1970s period piece about patriarchy, religious and otherwise, in rural Scotland.

The back story on Don Siegel's fantastic Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954) is pretty crazy, and I promise we do eventually talk about it this week. But this is a message picture about prison reform, so we have to spend some time talking about the history of prison reform, and how there's no reforming a system that's designed to disappear human beings.

We get Harold Lloyd's classic silent college movie The Freshman and a handful of shorts on this week's episode. Sam Taylor and Fred Newmeyer direct the feature, among the most popular silent comedies in history for good reason, even if its relationship to higher education is very of its time. Do you know enough about football to understand comedy football? Harold Lloyd didn't think so, but still made this stellar movie.

Paolo Sorrentino's 2013 film The Great Beauty is in line with many an Italian film we've seen, a story of a middle aged man having an existential crisis. Like many a Fellini film, this crisis is also a crisis of art, a crises of self as expressed in art. Oh and parties. So many parties. A positively Slurms MacKenzie level of parties.