Lost in Criterion

It’s been a long year. Near the end of this year’s holiday special we discuss our favorite movies of the year, Criterion and otherwise, and did you know that March was part of 2019? It seems like a lifetime ago. I mean, I have an excuse. I got hit by a car in May and basically did nothing for 2 months. But still.

To look back and celebrate we gather our friends at this end of the year — Stephen Goldmeier, Ben Jones-White, and Casey and Jonathan Hape all return to the show — and discuss the 1992 Robin Willams-starring, Barry Levinson-directed beautiful mess that is Toys. Also, you should look up youtube videos of Art Metrano.

So Happy Holiday[s]. There’s just so many. You should celebrate them all. Or at least whichever one makes you feel hopeful and loved. And keep that feeling all the year.

In balance to last week’s police propaganda film, we come this week to the story of minority youth in France dealing with the oppression of society, particularly police violence. Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine is based on true events, and could be based on true events that happen regularly before the film and since in France (and elsewhere). It’s a powerful and wonderful film, and a perfect ending to our year. We’ll see you next week for the annual end of year holiday episode, then in 2020 as we continue being Lost in Criterion.

This week a bask in Jules Dassin’s visual record of mid-century New York. Of course it has to come in one of his most pro-America, pro-police works. Not to worry, though, as next week we’ll have a very anti-police movie, and in three weeks we’ll have Dassin’s own ideological answer to this one in the anti-prison film Brute Force.

But this week’s it’s The Naked City, the story that launched a million stories in the form of the police procedural spin-off tv show, and every imitator down the line. Now today there are more fictional murders on New York-based crime dramas than there are actual murders in New York, so isn’t that something?

After last week’s intensity, we settle into a more sentimental anti-war film from Kon Ichikawa. The Burmese Harp. While both films deal with the loss of humanity that war forces on its victims and perpetrators, Fires on the Plain was more of a gut-punch while Harp plucks at the heart strings. Since The Burmese Harp came out first, we call this a classic Pasolini escalation: the easier to handle films failed in their message so the message was turned up to 11.

We kick off a duo of Kon Ichikawa anti-war films this week, though the two films could not be more different. We start of with Fires on the Plane, a sort of Heart of Darkness trek through the aftermath of the Americans recapturing the Philippines during World War 2, doing its best to undercut any idea of a nobility of war.