Lost in Criterion

It's our first David Fincher film in the Collection and what a choice. A tour du force of special effects that do not hold up, Benjamin Button updates and elongates the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story into whatever this is.

Nothing like a gangster movie to get us talking about the alienation and the lack of community under capitalism. But beside (and because of) that, this is just such a fantastically bleak movie. Peter Yates directs Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973).

We close out the "Pigs, Pimps, and Prostitutes" boxset of Shohei Imamura films with Intentions of Murder, a tale in which Imamura apparently wants us to laugh an abused woman because she's fat. Hilarious! This is our last Imamura film in the Collection right now, and we're not mad about that.

We continue through the Imamura "Pigs, Pimps, and Prostitutes" boxset and continue to take issue with Imamura calling himself an anthropologist.  When we started this Criterion journey nearly a decade ago I had no idea it would lead to me ponder the question: can breastfeeding be an incestual act?

This week we kick off a boxset called "Pigs, Pimps, and Prostitutes" and ain't that something. It's three films by Shohei Imamura, the last three he made before leaving Nikkatsu for his own studio. The whole set really exemplifies Imamura's goal of making "messy films" with a self-described "cultural anthropologist" lens.