Lost in Criterion

The second movie in the America Lost and Found: The BBS Story boxset is the one that artistically put them on the map. It was the Monkees' money that got the movies made, but it was Easy Rider (1969) that got them legitimacy.

Dennis Hopper directs this classic tale of...freedom? People tell me this movie is about freedom. I'll be honest, given the cultural hold this film seems to have I was surprised at how bleak it is.

This week we kick off one of our longest boxsets yet, America Lost and Found: The BBS Story. In it we'll see some of the most well known early New Hollywood films of the late 60s and early 70s produced by Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, and Stephen Blauner.

We start off with perhaps the most out there of the set. Rafelson and Schneider are the creators of the Monkees, and much of BBS's success can be attributed to the just tons of money they made from that show. Our first film, directed by Rafelson, is Head (1968), the psychedelic swan song for the prefab four.

Our good friend Jonathan Hape, a long-time Monkees fan who'd never seen Head before, joins us for a rollicking conversation about the film and the band.

Modern Times is our first proper Charlie Chaplin film in the Criterion Collection - though The Immigrant (1917) was a bonus feature on Spine 330, Louis Malle's Au revoir les enfants (1987).

Modern Times is just such a classic film, and a perfect fit for us as it's Chaplin's first excursion into what could be considered political film. We'll get more of that from Charlie in a few months with The Great Dictator, and really cannot wait for that! For now his heart is in the right place even if he's doing a lot that Rene Clair already did in A Nous la Liberte with a better political message but no Chaplin set pieces so it's really hard to rank them against each other. Clair's production company actually sued over Modern Times, but settled out of court and Clair himself was horrified that they sued his friend Chaplin. In the end, we get two great films about the hellish nature of technology in the hands of capital.

Since we first encountered Lars von Trier with The Element of Crime way back at Spine 80, he is a director who we - Pat especially - look forward to as the Criterion Collection trickles out his work. Antichrist, however, was a film we were both cautious about, knowing what little we did about it.

Ultimately, the film is sort of a mix between Salo and Haxan, and like Salo it is a film that I am glad I watched but will never recommend to anyone. Like Salo, Antichrist is steeped in sexual and gender-based violence, some of it graphically self-inflicted. You should not watch the film without knowing that is coming.

But still, it is a fascinating look at depression and grief. And this is one of my favorite episodes as of late, and we've watched a lot of good movies lately.

Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter has been so vindicated in the decades after its release that it really is quite a shame that the man not only never made another movie but died before he got his due respect.

The Darjeeling Limited is possibly Wes Anderson at his most self-aware, but sometimes its still difficult to tell the difference between deeper symbolism and the director's stream-of-consciousness aesthetic styling, particularly when it comes to the religious elements.

Speaking of religious elements, a note: this episode we spend some time talking about the [Anglo] Latin Catholic influence in India since that is the Christianity we see in the movie (and it gives us a chance to reference Black Narcissus). While the colonialism of more modern waves of Christianity into India cannot be sidestepped, we should point out that Christianity has a 2000 year history in parts of India, particularly the south, and it’s not all the rather austere Latin Catholicism that we see in the movie and talk about in this episode.

Casey Hape joins us once again as the person we know who has been into Anderson the longest, and we got her husband Jonathan to sit in as well.

Nobuhiko Obayashi's sole film in the Criterion Collection (so far!) is the 1978 avant garde horror comedy House, a movie co-written by his 8 year old daughter.

After nearly nine years we finally get a second Stanley Kubrick film from the Collection with Paths of Glory (1960), his first collaboration with Kirk Douglas made just before Spartacus. This is our third "anti-war" film in the last month or so, and the second American one. With Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line we discussed whether or not an American film made after WW2 could truly be "anti-war", but I think Paths of Glory comes closer than any other we've seen.

Big thanks to Adam S. for joining us, because it's always nice to have someone who may actually know what they're talking about on the podcast.

Statistically speaking, I think we're more likely to be watching an Ingmar Bergman film in the Criterion Collection than not, which is why it's surprising that The Magician is the first one we've seen in like 2 years. This time Bergman brings us a tale of conmen in unbelievable costumes and bad audiences that don't know how to have fun.

Terrence Malick makes spiritual humanist films. He also decided to make this war film.

OK, "anti" war film. Whenever we watch an anti-war film the comment attributed to Truffaut comes up: "there's no such thing as an anti-war film". We don't entirely think that's true. We've seen spiritual and humanist anti-war films as recently as last week's episode that I would say achieve their goal. Unfortunately, as we discuss this week, American culture, particularly post WW2, may be so steeped in war that an American cannot make an anti-war film.

Still, Malick tries, and if the production stories are to be believed, it took quite a toll on him.