Lost in Criterion

What happens when a writer and a director who despise the best-selling reactionary violence of private detective Mike Hammer decide to make a Mike Hammer movie? And then the government tells them it's too violent so they cut out the entire mafia plot and replace it with a radioactive macguffin (that screams and melts your face)? Well, you get Robert Aldrich's highly influential Kiss Me Deadly (1955).

Kon Ichikawa's 1985 adaptation of the Jun'ichiro Tanizaki novel (serialized from 1943-48) is seemingly a new leaf for our experience with Ichiwaka's work. We've had his avant-garde sports documentary. We've had his strong anti-war films - perhaps the best anti-war films in the Criterion Collection. And now we get a pre-War tale of four sisters in a merchant family, a family epic shot on a television budget. It's also a topic that Pat has interest in and insight into since his day job is, in part, teaching Japanese history. Well, I'm glad one of us was engaged by it.

Insignificance, Nicholas Roeg's 1985 adaptation of Terry Johnson's play of the same name, is a study of fame and guilt, womanhood and the bomb. If the concept of "Barbieheimer" were a single film, it may look something like this.

In 1940, Charlie Chaplin determined that the only way he had to stop the fascists march around the world was to use his voice, literally, and produce his first true sound film with The Great Dictator. Inarguably, this film did not stop the war, but it did give us one of the most enduring calls to humanism ever put to celluloid.

Returning guest Adam S. joins us to talk about this marvelous movie that mocks fascists, which is always a worthwhile cause.

If Pale Flower were just composer Toru Takemitsu's Musique concrète score and sound design it would be worth talking about.

If Pale Flower were just director Masahiro Shinoda's avant garde deconstruction of a Shintaro Ishihara story and yakuza films in general, a New York Noir but Japanese, it would be worth talking about.

But Pale Flower (1964) is both, and more for the sum of it's parts.

Jonathan Demme's Something Wild (1986) is a fun, sexy, if a little weird Manic Pixie Dream Girl road movie. That is until about the halfway point, when the music and lighting suddenly both get darker, and Ray Liotta walks in to change this movie into something like an action thriller. In less steady hands, this could have felt more like two separate movies, but Demme and screenwriter E. Max Frye stick to their guns and stick the landing.

Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981) is a political thriller for the dawn of the Reagan Era which is, not coincidentally, a political thriller for the Trump Era, which is, really, a political thriller for any USA age post the assassinations of the MLK, Malcolm X, and, primarily to Blow Out, the Kennedies. Like the Trinity Test, JFK's assassination was a genie released, and while high-profile USA political assassinations have fallen off in recent years, I think we can all agree they don't seem that far away.

Ken Loach's 1969 film Kes is like a British 400 Blows, but Loach takes seriously the political reality of the working class characters he portrays in a way I just don't find in Truffaut. Maybe I'm being less than gracious to the French New Wave pioneer, but maybe also Loach just knocks it out of the park in such a way that it sets a new standard.

Since it's an additional feature on the Criterion release, we also get to talk about Loach's 1966 teleplay Cathy Come Home, which is positively Godardian in style, though politically harder-hitting than Godard would get outside his work with Jean-Pierre Gorin.

In both films Loach appears to intuitively understand that the critique of traditional forms of art that the French New Wave was doing is an inherently political exercise, and Loach embraces its political nature without sacrificing the artistic form.

Our first Claire Denis film (well, unless you count all the work she did for Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch), 2009's White Material is the story of a white French coffee farmer trying to hold on to normalcy as the African country she lives in decolonizes. The crux of the problem of course being that while "normal" may mean "I can harvest and sell my coffee" it also means "the French army maintains an oppressive stranglehold over an entire nation." While colonialist forces wring every resource possible out of the country on their way out the door, unfortunately for Maria the coffee farmer, that doesn't include her coffee.

Victor Schertzinger's 1939 adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado is the first film adaptation of a Gilbert and Sullivan work, the only one to include members of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, and the first Technicolor picture put out by Universal.

But let's face it, it's only in the Collection because of Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy. Should have been a bonus feature, though I suppose if it had the Topsy-Turvy release would have been bloated. Instead we get a standalone episode dedicated to this piece of 19th century British Orientalism. Great.