Lost in Criterion

Every so often the Criterion Collection shows us exactly one movie from a director and will apparently never show us another. With very few exceptions we've loved these one-and-dones, and Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Succcess is no outlier.

It's very dark, it's very entertaining, and we'll never see anything from Mackendrick again.

Hirokazu Kore-eda's 2008 drama looks at a day in the life of a Japanese family, a day that just so happens to be the anniversary of the eldest son's death by drowning. It's a little bit Ozu, it's a little bit Naruse, and it's a wonderful exploration of the ways trauma and grief linger in family relationships.

Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank is, refreshingly, a "this is how the poor people live" movie from someone who actually grew up in similarly impoverished situations to the protagonists of their film. Criterion also provides us with 3 of Arnold's short films, each dealing with a similar theme to those that show up in the main film: young womanhood, single motherhood, and grief.

First a note: Sorry to have missed last week, but Adam was in the hospital after a bicycle accident left him with a fractured elbow. He's on the mend, and we should be back to the regular schedule.

This week we're talking James L. Brooks office rom-com set against the changing background of 1980's newsrooms. 1987's Broadcast News is a fun movie, indicative in many ways of Brooks' decades writing cutting edge sitcoms. Unfortunately, he doesn't take the opportunity of a larger story to punch any harder.

Guillermo del Toro's first film, Cronos (1993), is flat out just a really great vampire flick, with an eye toward how the machinations of adults effect the children in their lives, like many of his best films. But that bit of family-focus isn't the only way Cronos rises above simple genre film, as del Toro uses the vampire to tell a story of capitalism and colonialism, and the particular evil that is created when Christianity unites with those powers and principalities.

We finish up the America Lost and Found: The BBS Story boxset with one more film from producer, director, and one of the B's in BBS Bob Rafelson. The King of Marvin Gardens may have our favorite Jack Nicholson role of the bunch, and is a strong finish in a boxset that really ebbed and flowed for us. "It's Monopoly out there" is going to enter my lexicon.

America Lost and Found: The BBS Story has been really up and down for us, but Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971) is definitely toward the top. Stylistically and homage to John Ford (and, to a lesser extent, Howard Hawks), this coming of age story is set in the 50s but still manages to engage in the politics of the early 70s better than a lot of the other movies we've watched this last month.

The BBS films we've been watching are culturally important for telling new types of stories within major studio-released films, but for the most part, outside of Head, the form of the stories hasn't been that different. The sex is more explicit, the drug use is forefront, but the actual structure of the film is more familiar, I think. Maybe that's just because we're 50 years on and it's less new.

Head was out there structurally, of course, and second to Head comes Henry Jaglom's A Safe Place, a film I cannot believe Columbia put out. It's structure has more in common with Chris Marker's Le Jetee (1962) than Easy Rider, and it feels more daring than anything we've seen in weeks of the BBS set. Jaglom is trying to chase Cassevetes, but unfortunately lacks Cassevetes' abilities. But at least he's got Orson Welles in his picture.

For us, this is honestly the nadir of the BBS boxset. Drive, He Said is a movie that can't even take it's own political moment seriously, hamstringing the "revolutionary" at the center of the film into a lone man driven insane by "free love" with no reference even to the draft, even as the very campus Jack Nicholson was shooting on was literally being set on fire in organized anti-war protests possibly DURING production. And the filmmakers even made the ultimate revolutionary act in the film much, much less revolutionary than their source material had it, so they have no excuse as far as we're concerned.

But maybe as Ohio boys we're just mad that Drive, He Said is set in Ohio but not filmed there.

It's well acted though! Despite the poorly drawn character, Michael Margotta is fantastic as Gabriel, and Karen Black's performances continue to be the highlights of these films.

What Easy Rider does for hippie-adjacent drug dealers, Five Easy Pieces (1970) does for upper class piano prodigies? It's becoming increasingly clear that the ideas the BBS guys and their associates have about "freedom" are very much at odds with Lost in Criterion's ideas about liberation.

We think Carole Eastman's script was probably a lot more interesting than Bob Rafelson's movie, but who can say.