Lost in Criterion

Lasse Hallström had quite a career, getting his start directing a plethora of ABBA music videos and going on to direct The Cider House Rules, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Chocolat, and a few other awards-season darlings, though Hallström himself has never won an Oscar. Somewhere in there lies My Life as a Dog, his 1985 coming-of-age tale about life in a Swedish small town.

Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta's The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) is a tale of a woman criminalized for normal behavior to the nth degree. But Blum is more than that, as it also tackles the corrupting relationship between law enforcement and the media, and how both forces spread fear through the masses, decimating civil rights under the guise of "anti-terrorism". It's brilliant, hard to watch, and teaches lessons that we continually need reminded of.

A great story, perhaps especially a great short story, leaves the reader to answer some of the questions. A bad one does, too, mind you, but a good one does it well? I digress. Ernest Hemingway's The Killers is a great short story that leaves a lot of questions for its readers, and for some reason people making film adaptations seek to answer them all. We're watching two such adaptations this week, and a third that leaves well enough alone. Andrei Tarkovsky's short student film version from 1956 is the most straightforward adaptation of the bunch, for better or worse. Likewise, Robert Siodmak's 1946 version starts with a straightforward retelling then veers into wildly unlikely directions with it's solid Noir adaptation. Meanwhile Don Siegal's 1964 version veers so wildly it would be nearly unrecognizable as an adaptation if it weren't for the title. But then, Siegal's is the only version with Lee Marvin as an anti-hero and Ronald Reagan in his only villainous roll. Watching any of them is a great way to spend your time, watching all three is a, well, something we did.

"Only a goddamn lunatic would write a thing like this and then claim it was true."

Godard's Band of Outsiders is an immensely influential film about a woman who has zero agency in her own life.

We return once again to films of The Archers, the illustrious British duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, with The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Made during the blitz and released in 1943, Blimp is certainly a pro-war propaganda film, but specifically propagandizing what sort of war the British should be fighting. Spoiler: I find the moral of this film absolutely reprehensible. Pat doesn't find it much better

Julien Duvivier's early noir is a film so nice America remade it twice in under a decade.

We give Jean-Luc Godard another shot and it really pans out for the best, considering Contempt (1963) is one of the greatest movies I've ever seen.

We have our first encounter with the legendary Ernst Lubitsch this week, with his 1932 film Trouble in Paradise. Released before the code was in effect, Trouble in Paradise has all the moral-rotting adult themes, innuendos, and victorious criminals the Motion Picture Production Code sought to protect us from. It also has, quite probably, my favorite opening establishing shot of Venice in any film ever.

At the height of the Summer of Love powerhouses in pop music came together to hold the first Monterey Pop Music Festival, possibly the first pop music festival ever. D.A. Pennebaker was on hand to record the proceedings to be released as a film, though his footage was eventually released as three. We're talking all of them on this week's Lost in Criterion, including supplemental materials, as we explore the Complete Monterey Pop Festival box set containing Monterey Pop (1967), Jimi Plays Monterey (1986), and Shake! Otis at Monterey (1986).