Lost in Criterion

After many years we finally see another Roman Polanski film and maybe moving forward it would be best if we don't watch the bonus features that contain interviews with Roman Polanski, who always seems to come off as a misogynistic jerk. Repulsion itself is a pretty good thriller, technically, though it would be better if we felt that the filmmaker wanted us to be sympathetic to the main character at all.

For this year's Holiday Special we come to the saint of "movies that incidentally take place at Christmas" Shane Black. Black wrote The Long Kiss Goodnight before taking a long break from screenwriting. Renny Harlin directs, and he's no stranger to holiday-adjacent action fare having also directed Die Harder.

Joining us this year are Stephen G. and Ben JW, and Ben makes a compelling argument that this is Shane Black's most actual Christmas movie. Whether or not that's true, it's ridiculous.

In 1967 Jean-Luc Godard was like any modern young Marxist: blaming all of life’s ills on consumerism, blaming consumerism on America, yelling at his old friends for being bourgeoisie, getting into public debates with people who know his side better than he does, dating teenagers…but those young Marxists are usually college sophomores and Godard was 37. But like any good leftist unwilling to read theory, he eventually got a friend who wasn’t and could explain it to him, his in the form of Jean-Pierre Gorin. But before he and Gorin started working together, Godard had a few more things to work out and he decided to do so publicly. 2 0r 3 Things I Know About Her is just one of the half dozen or so films he made while in this ideological flux, all of which are more interesting for the meta-commentary they offer us on Godard’s mind than for being good movies.

In the mid 1960's Jean-Luc Godard was going through a lot: his politics were changing, his marriage to Anna Karina was ending, and he was becoming more and more disillusioned with US cultural hegemony. So he made a lot of movies about it, and this is the most scattershot one: Made in USA .

We finish up Masaki Koboyashi's The Human Condition and need some extra time to talk about both the third movie and the work as a whole. After nearly 2 hours talking it out we're left unconvinced that this is an anti-war movie let alone the best Japanese anti-war movie, unless you thinly define "anti-war" as "anti-the WW2 Japanese war machine". How disheartening.