Lost in Criterion

Arnaud Desplechin's 2008 A Christmas Tale wears its influences on its sleeve and meshes them into a cohesive whole, but perhaps an overly-full whole. There's a lot going on here, and clearly the version we're seeing was meant to have even more going on.

We loved the last Costa-Gavras film we saw, and we love this one. Z (1969) is a story pulled from the headlines of the director’s homeland of Greece that takes a hard look at police alignment with far-right politics and the disastrous results oh letting that power go unchecked.

Wim Wenders Wings of Desire is one of the most arthousey arthouse films we've seen since our last Jean Cocteau, but this one has Peter Falk and is thus much more accessible.

We finish up the "And Seven Short Films" included on the Monsoon Wedding release with the four fiction shorts included: The Day the Mercedes Became a Hat (1993), her section of the 11'09'01 anthology (2002), Migration (2007), and How Can it Be? (2008).

According to the cover, the title of Criterion Spine 489 is Monsoon Wedding and Seven Short Films, and we're being extra completionist by dedicating two episodes for covering the Seven Short Films. This week it's the three documentary shorts: So Far from India (1983), India Cabaret (1985), and The Laughing Club of India (2002).

Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding is a fantastic look at family at a few crossroads in an India at a few national crossroads of its own. And as if the movie itself weren’t enough, the Criterion Collection packs this release with seven other shorter pieces from Nair, which we’ll be covering in the coming weeks.

James Ivory’s adaptation o the E. M. Forster novel, Howard’s End is a star-studded, period-accurate recreation of a Britain in transition from patriarchal colonialism to kindler, gentler, female-inclusive neoliberal colonialism. It actually doesn’t deal with the colonialism all that directly, but we still see the failings of the new order in regards to class equality, how a even a little power can corrupt and how charity isn’t justice.

Alexander Korda’s 1941 biopic of Emma Hamilton and her love affair with Horatio Nelson doubles as an attempt to convince the US to enter World War 2. Korda almost faced a Congressional inquiry for this act of propaganda, but Pearl Harbor happened five days before he was to appear. As far as pro-war propaganda goes, this is possibly the worst we’ve encountered in the Collection, which would explain why it’s Winston Churchill’s favorite movie.

The Criterion Collection was kind enough to give us a David Mamet film previously so that we could establish our distaste for him before diving into the complicated and delicate political and racial identity issues at the heart of Homicide. I doubt we threaded the needle we were trying to thread here.

Honestly, it's hard to remember that Whit Stillman's ode to the yuppies who killed disco is a period piece. One because there's very little in the main characters that feel of the time period the movie is set in, but also because the moneyed class gentrifying neighborhoods and cultural movements out of existence is a perennial problem.