Lost in Criterion

After nearly nine years we finally get a second Stanley Kubrick film from the Collection with Paths of Glory (1960), his first collaboration with Kirk Douglas made just before Spartacus. This is our third "anti-war" film in the last month or so, and the second American one. With Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line we discussed whether or not an American film made after WW2 could truly be "anti-war", but I think Paths of Glory comes closer than any other we've seen.

Big thanks to Adam S. for joining us, because it's always nice to have someone who may actually know what they're talking about on the podcast.

Statistically speaking, I think we're more likely to be watching an Ingmar Bergman film in the Criterion Collection than not, which is why it's surprising that The Magician is the first one we've seen in like 2 years. This time Bergman brings us a tale of conmen in unbelievable costumes and bad audiences that don't know how to have fun.

Terrence Malick makes spiritual humanist films. He also decided to make this war film.

OK, "anti" war film. Whenever we watch an anti-war film the comment attributed to Truffaut comes up: "there's no such thing as an anti-war film". We don't entirely think that's true. We've seen spiritual and humanist anti-war films as recently as last week's episode that I would say achieve their goal. Unfortunately, as we discuss this week, American culture, particularly post WW2, may be so steeped in war that an American cannot make an anti-war film.

Still, Malick tries, and if the production stories are to be believed, it took quite a toll on him.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) is positively chaste compared to the other Nagisa Oshima films we've seen, as the sex here is always boiling just below the surface. This experiment in stunt casting pays off as one of the best anti-war movies we've seen, digging into the humanity and inhumanities of a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and their Allied prisoners, and leaving us to think about who gets punished and why.

Our second experience with Maurice Pialat does not help us beg down the man's politics. This time we have L'enfance nue, a film that owes a lot to Truffaut, both because it's in the vein of The 400 Blows and because Truffaut produced it.A semi-documentarian look at the state of French Social Service's treatment of abandoned children, Pialat tries not to get too judgemental while showing us a system that is patently broken and clearly failing the children it's meant to "protect".

Our second of the pair of Terry Zwigoff documentaries is one that initially no one wanted to touch, despite the success of Louie Bluie. Was it just that all that good will had evaporated over the course of a decade? Or was it that this time around Zwigoff turned his camera on his friends: gonzo cartoonist R. Crumb and Crumb's even more eccentric brothers. Eccentric is a good word here.

We kick off a pair of documentaries by Terry Zwigoff, starting this week with Louie Bluie, his 1985 look at musician and artist Howard Armstrong. Start to finish just an absolute delight of a documentary.

We finish up the Three Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg set this week with the best of the bunch, really, The Docks of New York (1928), a melodrama about a himbo of a steamship furnace stoker who thinks himself unlovable and absolutely refuses to believe in private property. He's the best.

Lost in Criterion is 10 years old! Does that make us the longest running Criterion podcast? Who cares.

We started this podcast as an excuse to talk after Pat moved to Japan. While Pat and I were far from cinephiles, we enjoyed the conversations we'd have leaving the cinema after a movie, and wanted to continue having those talks even though we weren't going to the same cinema anymore. So we, pretty arbitrarily to be honest, picked a list of movies to talk about, and happened to pick one that now grows faster than we release episodes. We will never be done! So look forward to more decade anniversaries in the future!

To celebrate this anniversary, we decided to revisit one of the first 100 films we talked about. This is a redemption thing. While we moved to podbean so that our entire catalogue of episodes would be more easily available, we do not recommend the first 100 (or more!). They're rough. They're evidence of two idiots getting film education by fire. I like to think we've gotten better over the years, but our iTunes reviews disagree.

So Pat and I made a list of films we particularly wanted to revisit from those first 100 Criterion Spines. Over the last few weeks, our Patreon supporters have voted on which film they'd like to hear us re-examine. The winner is a movie I loved, but was only going to watch again if I was forced to because it is so long.

Andrei Rublev (1966) is the first Andrei Tarkovsky film Pat and I saw and we were not prepared. The original episode finds Pat calling everything but the bell making sequence "boring" and "confusing" and me finding the film hard to defend because I liked it on vibes alone. Have our opinions changed? Well, they'd have to have, but you'll have to listen to this episode to be sure.

Thanks to everyone who voted! Thanks to everyone who's listened to and supported us over the years! Maybe someday we'll be done!

After a series of setbacks, including changing the film we were going to do twice and rescheduling with a different slate of guests (one of whom then had to drop out because we took too long working out technical problems), we finally caught the metaphorical polka band tour van and made it home for the holidays for this year's special: the Coen brothers' fifth film, The Hudsucker Proxy.

While one end of year holiday - New Year's - is symbolically important to the film's time motif, every gift-giving holiday of the winter season takes place uncommented on in the background of this movie that is explicitly about a best-selling toy. And that's not the silliest aspect of this silly film!

The last week notwithstanding, we had a good year this year! We kicked off 2022 with Jeanne Dielman, a film that by the end of the year was declared the best movie ever or something. Well, it's certainly up there. We were introduced to the wonderful works of Mira Nair this year, and took a way too long working through the second By Brakhage Anthology, sorry! We talked Z and Hunger and Che and we sure do love it when Criterion gives us a political film to sink our teeth into, even when the director claims their obviously political film isn't political at all (looking at you Pedro Costa and Josef von Sternberg!) Oh, and we got to watch another Antonioni film we didn't like, but at least we enjoyed talking about it this time!

Hope your year's been as good as ours! We've been doing this podcast for a full decade now! Wow. Next week we're going to have a special retrospective episode, looking back at a film from the first 100 Spines of the Criterion Collection that our Patreon supporters voted for us to revisit. Can't wait to share that with you!

For now though, happy all the holidays!