Lost in Criterion

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!

The second film of the 3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg boxset, The Last Command is a story of revenge and patriotism during the Russian revolution and, you know what, it's actually just best to ignore the story.

We kick off the 3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg boxset with Underworld (1927), a film that defined a lot of gangster movie aesthetics, and went way beyond that as well with some of the most visually striking matte work we've seen outside of Black Narcissus.

Abdellatif Kerchiche's The Secret of the Grain (2007) hits a lot of the right notes for us, but once again we encounter a director aggressively claiming their film is apolitical when their film is obviously political.

The second of our pair of Ozu films finds the director between World War II deployments bringing to screen a script he'd been working on for nearly a decade about loyalty to one's father, and by extension -- perhaps at least to the Japanese censor board that celebrated the film -- loyalty to one's emperor. This is the closest thing to a propaganda film we've seen from Ozu, but we're not convinced that was Ozu's intention.

We kick off a pair of early Yasujirō Ozu sound films this week, and first up is his earliest. The Only Son (1936) comes out during a time period in Japan that we have yet to see represented in films from the country: directly pre-war as the right-wing imperialists are cementing their rule. Against that backdrop, and just months before Ozu himself would be drafted, The Only Son looks at the sacrifices of made by women for the promise of success for their sons and brothers in the modernizing Japan, success that remained out of grasp for many as the Great Depression reached its height.

Carol Reed helms a film that suggests screenwriters Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder only had one plot. Night Train to Munich shares a lot of bones with the pairs' previously penned film, Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, functioning as something between remake and sequel as well as being the second entry in the multimedia Charters and Caldicott Cinematic Universe. It's silly, it's fun, and the models are endearingly terrible.

Visually, aurally, and plot-wise this is a movie that is absolutely about the choking hellscape extractive capitalism forces us to live in, and the alienating spiritual sickness such a system causes. That is, unless you take the director's word on what that movie is actually about. Red Desert (1964) is Michelangelo Antonioni's ode to "progress" in which climate anxiety sounds like a you problem.

We joke this week that Swedish dramas are the bread and butter of the Criterion Collection, but Everlasting Moments is set apart from the rest through not being directed by Ingmar Bergman. Jan Troell's biopic of his wife's great aunt shows us a unique picture of a woman's life in early 20th century Sweden and the freedom found in artistic pursuit.