Lost in Criterion

Robert Altman gets political again, but in a very different manner to last week's delightfully ranty satire. Instead we have a miniseries set against the 1988 Presidential race that may have been satirical in 1988, but we've gone through the looking glass as of late and instead it's just inside baseball. Which doesn't make it any less funny when it's funny, or poignant when it's poignant -- or exploitative when it's exploitative. Tanner '88, written by Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, tells the story of a failed campaign in a ripped-from-the-headlines manner involving real political players interacting with Altman's fakes over the course of 11 episodes that are incredibly uneven individually, but pretty great as a whole.

A clearly disturbed and vile president rants about the conspiracies against him while contemplating suicide, and somehow is so full of pathos that we find ourselves feeling pity instead of anger.

There are...modern parallels? Robert Altman's Secret Honor's exploration of Nixon's psyche is a class of its own, due mostly to Philip Baker Hall's masterful performance. Still it does remind us of certain contemporary pieces, namely the first episode of Comedy Central's The President Show (particularly starting at about the 5 minute mark), and Aimee Mann's brilliantly tragic entry for 30 Days 30 Songs "Can't You Tell?".

We properly finish the Five Films box set with Charles Kiselyak's 2000 video eulogy to John Cassavettes. A Constant Forge finds Cassevettes' friends and creative squad telling anecdotes about the man and his process. The biggest lesson: we've been pronouncing Gena Rowlands' name wrong for the past month.

Gena Rowlands is on an absolute tour de force in this final film in the John Cassavetes: Five Films boxset. Well, technically there's a six we'll talk about next week, but you know. Opening Night (1977) is a psychological drama about a middle-aged actress having a nervous breakdown as she prepares for a show, and it borders on being a horror film the way it is shot and soundtracked.

Two films for the price of one this week as we watch the original 135 minute version of John Cassavetes' The Killing of a Chinese Bookie from 1976 and then his director's cut which runs 108 minutes from 1978. Of course, since this is Cassavetes, the shorter version isn't just a truncated version but a rather different film in design, in character motivation, and quite a bit of plot. Right from the start we see scenes not in the longer original then a restructuring of the narrative's chronology. The pair form a fascinating look into the psyche of an extraordinary director, only compounded by the suggestion that the story is allegorically autobiographical.

There are ways in which A Woman Under the Influence is the most "Hollywood" of the John Cassavetes films we've seen so far. It's got structure! But in other very deep ways it is absolutely the furthest from anything Hollywood would ever put out -- "No one wants to see a crazy, middle-aged dame." It's quite possibly the most emotionally intense film we've ever seen.

Another John Cassavetes film that feels more like an acting exercise than a traditional film. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Like last week's film Shadows, Faces feels improvised (and grew out of improvisation exercises) and it feels all the more real for its looseness.

We kick off a box set of Five Films by John Cassavetes this week with his first feature Shadows (1959). It was a bit of a rough start for the prolific indie auteur who recut the film after a disastrous premiere before leaving the original cut in a subway car. What remains is a fascinatingly realistic look at New Yorkers in the late 50's.

In 2003 the US Department of Defense held a screening of Gillo Pontocorvo's 1966 film The Battle of Algiers at the Pentagon. A flyer for the screening read:

How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.

Subsequent US history tells us that the showing did not achieve its objectives.

There's an early iTunes review of Lost in Criterion that states that Pat says "weird" a distractingly large number of times for lack of a better way to describe things. This week the two of use do the same thing but with the word "orifice". If there is any director who comes to mind with the word "orifice" it's definitely David Cronenberg, and in 1983 he was at his most-orifice-y with Videodrome, a film that accurately predicted the future of James Woods.