Lost in Criterion

White people love Wes Anderson, so a few white people join us to talk about his films. Joined by Jonathan and Casey Hape.

I don’t often talk about our recording schedule, but this week’s episode is already terribly dated for terrible reasons. Pat and I watched Hearts and Minds, Peter Davis’s 1974 documentary on the Vietnam War, way back in September. I actually watched it on the 11th, because I don’t want to be happy. The world has changed a lot, even in the last eight weeks. On the one hand, we recorded this so long ago because Pat took paternity leave for the birth of his second child. On the other, the concerns of continued militarization of Japan Pat expresses in the episode have come to fruition, and it’s a bitter fruit. I rhetorically ask what it will take to forget the lessons we learned from the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, like we forgot the lessons of Vietnam -- naively suggesting that those wars are over and that we actually learned a lesson -- and it seems we may now have an answer.

Kon Icihikawa' documentary of the 1964 Olympics is brilliant, hilarious, agonizing, and very human. No wonder the Japanese Olympic Committee hated it?

Alec Guinness first tried to read Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth during World War II, but couldn't bear its stream-of-consciousness narrative. Sometime later his wife impressed upon him to give it another shot and he went on to adapt it into a screenplay. Ronald Neame was brought into direct the resulting film, released in 1958, with Guinness staring as the eccentric artist Gulley Jimson. It's often called his funniest film, which is a pretty tough crowd to beat out. Personally, I'd lean toward Murder by Death or Kind Hearts and Coronets for that honor, but The Horse's Mouth is right up there, and quite a bit more poignant even as a comedy.

Barbet Schroeder "directs" Uganda's Idi Amin in what the dictator hopes will be his "Triumph of the Will". Hilarity and death ensue.

From the guy who would later bring you Pineapple Express comes a much more depressing, much more amazing film.

Stephen Soderbergh not only directed his 2000 drug drama Traffic, but stepped behind the camera as well in order "to get as close to the movie" as possible. That is a weird metaphysical way of describing it, but sure. The film itself, based in part on the Channel 4 series Traffik, paints a sprawling portrait of the US drug trade as it stood -- and in many ways still stands -- at the turn of the century. Other films may do better to condemn the failure of the War on Drugs, but Soderbergh manages to drive home that the current angle just doesn't work.

Jean-Pierre Melville is called Melville because he really liked Moby Dick and apparently the French Resistance just let you pick your own codename because anti-fascism. His 1956 film Bob le Flambeur is a French gangster film that is often called a precursor to the French New Wave, but Pat and I aren't buying it.

If you've listened to any of our early episodes concerning her roles, you're no doubt aware that Pat and I love Giulietta Masina, long time wife and part time love interest of Federico Fellini. After the success of the great 8 1/2, Fellini decided to do some more navel gazing in 1965 with Juliet of the Spirits, but this time the author avatar character would be gender-flipped and played by Masina. It seems that Masina did not enjoy playing the female version of her husband, as rumor has it that the fights on set between star and director got so intense that friends were sure they'd divorce. They didn't, though that is certainly due to circumstances outside of the film, which flopped. And probably for good reason.

After The Cranes are Flying a few weeks ago we may have set our hopes too high for our next foray into Soviet "Thaw" era films about World War 2. It's not that Grigori Chukrai's Ballad of a Soldier isn't good, but that bar was really high. Released in 1959, two years after Cranes, Ballad of a Soldier feels like a throwback, more influenced Eisenstein than, well, anyone other than Eisenstein. And Eisenstein is great! But Ballad's exploration of (rather chaste) love in many forms just doesn't land with us.