Lost in Criterion

Every time we watch a documentary, we end up talking a lot about the nature of documentary. With Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker's The War Room (1993), much of that end of the conversation is focused on how Direct Cinema is not a journalistic endeavor, and how the material covered - Bill Clinton's 1992 US Presidential campaign - could have used a journalistic approach. Instead what we get is a collection of some of the worst people in US politics for the last 30 years given free reign to lie to the camera. America: it may not be a perfect system, but it sure is bad.

Mikhail Kalatozov makes some beautiful films, particularly in his work with Sergey Urusevsky, who may just be our favorite cinematographer. Many, many years ago (Spine 146!) we watched their film The Cranes are Flying (1957), and images from that film still grace my dreams. Many, many years from now (Spine 1214!) we will watch I am Cuba (1964), their final collaboration, and we can't wait.

But thankfully between these two masterpieces we get Letter Never Sent (1960), a tale of Soviet vs Nature, a story of love, lust, science, sacrifice, and lots of fire. Raising not only the normal "how did they shoot this?!" questions associated with Urusevsky's work, but new and adjacent "how did they shoot this?!" questions about the special effects.

Otto Preminger's ripped-from-the-headlines courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959) stars a delightful mix of young and old Hollywood, is a big middle finger to the Production Code, and is an ode to manipulating the US legal system. And if that weren't enough, we've got a soundtrack by Duke Ellington and titles by Saul Bass.

Louis Malle reunites with the stars of My Dinner with Andre, Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, for a production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in a an abandoned theater just off Time Square. Not just a delightful production of Uncle Vanya, but also a look at theater for the sake of theater, squatting and otherwise unmoored from financial obligations.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's only sci-fi work, World on a Wire asks the important questions: what if we asked an AI to simulate the Matrix as a 1970s German television miniseries, and then scrapped that garbage and just had a great screenwriter, fantastic cinematographer, and masterful director make it instead. While dealing with the same questions of humanity and existentialism that many tales of virtual prisons do, World on a Wire also gives us a jumping off point to talk about tech innovation, forced consumer trend, treating algorithms like gods, and how cars are bad. It's a pretty amazing production, which is unsurprising from Fassbinder and his phenomenal team behind and in front of the camera.

Lena Dunham has a tendency to say dumb things, and she's garnered quite a backlash during her short career. Because of that the inclusion of her 2010 film Tiny Furniture in the Criterion Collection appears to be often mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Bay's Armageddon and Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: that is, with Criterion aficionados asking "why is this here?"

But Lost in Criterion has long held that the Collection seems to have had a particular interest in festival darling interpersonal family dramas in the early 2000s -- of a wide variety! like Lee's bleakly hopeful Secret Sunshine or Assayas' bourgeoisie Summer Hours -- and I'm not convinced Tiny Furniture doesn't fit into that mold.

In any case, this story of a young woman our age graduating college when we did and attempting to feel like an adult and an artist during the Great Recession hits home, and gives us a lot to talk about.

Our friend and samurai-film-fiend Donovan joins us to talk about Hideo Gosha's Three Outlaw Samurai (1964). This origin story for a long-running tv show that seems like it was Gosha's version of the A-Team plays like a more cynical version of a Kurosawa tale. It's also got some fantastic camera work thanks to Tadashi Sakai.

Following the festival successes but domestic box office failures of Salvatore Giuliano (1962) and Hands over the City (1963), Francesco Rosi decided an international picture would fix his money problem, and decided to make a documentary on the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain. He didn't end up making exactly that, as The Moment of Truth (1965) is a narrative film with a neo-realist bent, and if you can get over all the ritualistic animal abuse it's probably the best bull fighting movie there is.

We've got sympathy for the Godzilla as guest Jason W. returns to talk with us about the Ishiro Honda's original Godzilla and the American recut of it, Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, the original film's anti-war metaphor (and what gets lost in the Americanization), as well as the media inspired by the film. We've got a lot to cover so save this one for long evening walk.

We here at Lost in Criterion love Luis Buñuel, and (currently) this is the last one we have in the Criterion Collection. Belle de Jour (1967) is the story of a middle class woman, wife of a surgeon, who becomes a sex worker in the afternoons. Or it's about a middle class woman who imagines that she's become a sex worker in the afternoons. Buñuel takes a lot of liberties with the source material and imagines a film that is perhaps 100% a character's fantasies, but even if it's not, it's still at least 50% a character's fantasies. And yet, somehow, it's also one of the director's most subdued films.