Lost in Criterion

Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love. Such a beautiful and poetic film. Released in 2000, a scant three years after the British returned rule to China, a time of many questions and possibilities, the film tells the store of a love parallelogram that for better, or usually worse, can't quite come together. There's little to say here except watch it? And give us a listen.

Kalatozov's The Cranes are Flying takes a critical look at what World War II did to the average person's psyche. Well, a lot more critical than almost anything released west of the Iron Curtain.

Milos Forman claimed he didn't mean for The Fireman's Ball to be a condemnation of the Czech government. Maybe it was just a happy accident?

We're headed back to Czechoslovakia this week for a few rounds with prolific Czech director Milos Forman. First up is Loves of a Blonde, Forman's 1965 comedy about a working class girl in need of...distraction. It's possibly the best known film of the Czech New Wave, and for good reason.

What happens when a man is so singularly obsessed with possessing a woman that he doesn't even pay attention to who she is? It's a question possibly only accidentally asked by Luis Bunuel in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Bunuel's final film, it is also arguably rather autobiographical, and from what we've learned from Bunuel he is the sort of self-deluded fool that thinks he knows himself so well to make a film like this as autobiographical. While it certainly contains Bunuel's common satire of the upperclass, this film subdues his famous surreality into just how people react, or don't react, to what's going on around them. Oh, and the female lead is played by two different women and no one notices. The film is either brilliant or really dumb. Or both.

In his 1977 film The Last Wave Peter Weir sought to show what it would be like if a pragmatic person started to have visions. Of course, a pragmatic person who starts to have visions would ignore them, so the premise is flawed in any attempt to make a film longer than thirty seconds. Instead what Weir makes is the classic tale of a white man trying to find meaning in traditional spiritualism after becoming disillusioned with modernity, unfortunately with all the problems such a premise usually comes with. That is not to say this is a racist or even bad film, but it certainly doesn't handle its story nearly as well as Peter Weir probably thinks it does. And yet, it remains interesting and engaging.

Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise (1945) has been called the French Gone With the Wind because it is also long and racist? At least Children of Paradise keeps its racism contained to a few background characters in terrible blackface. Also, unlike Gone With the Wind, which features a war, Children of Paradise went the extra mile by being filmed during and just after the Nazi occupation of France, taking a bit of a break for D-Day. That's right, the French undermined Nazi authority to make a movie about a mime that doubled as a day job for a good chunk of the Resistance.

Federico Fellini's 1963 navel-gazing comedy-drama 8 1/2 -- named for how many films he'd reckoned he'd made at the time -- may prove that Fellini is self-aware but it also prove that knowing and acknowledging your problems doesn't automatically absolve you of them. Still, Fellini's acknowledgement that he -- or at least his stand-in character Guido -- is really not very good at life is pretty entertaining.

Ingmar Bergman had a busy 1957, releasing The Seventh Seal in February and then running along to make a television film and Wild Strawberries. Inspired but his own memories of childhood -- and with a name meaning "an underrated place" -- Wild Strawberries is the story of a grumpy old man who takes a trip back in time as he travels to his hometown to be honored by his Alma Mater, though his actual mater isn't quite that alma. But hey, he learns an important lesson.

Donovan Hill adds a third point of view that probably isn't "truth" as he joins us to talk about Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950). The film invented an oft-poorly-imitated film convention and introduced Kurosawa to the West. Pat says modern Japan sees it as one of Kurosawa's "classics." You know, like the rest of his films.