Lost in Criterion

This week Pat and I spend five minutes joking about Sting stemming from our mistaken belief that he was in Genesis. Sorry, Phil Collins, but all bald British musicians are the same. Genesis only comes up because they have a prominent opening credit listing in this week's movie Neil Jordan's great neo-noir Mona Lisa from 1986. This is Bob Hoskins's third outing in the Criterion Collection so far, and boy is it always fun to see him. Can't wait for Super Mario Bros!

Bertrand Tavernier's noirish Coup de Torchon transports Jim Thompson's 1964 novel Pop. 1280 from racist rural Texas to racist French West Africa. It works out. The story of an ineffectual local sheriff who decides to use his public image for private evil, Coup de Torchon is probably the jauntiest, brightest, jazziest nihilism we've ever experienced here at Lost in Criterion.

There's a lot to be said about Spartacus. It's famously one of the only films Stanley Kubrick directed in which he didn't have complete creative control. It's one of the biggest contributing factors to the end of blacklisting in Hollywood. It's possibly the greatest movie ever made out of pure spite.

In 1969 Masahiro Shinoda adapted a 1721 bunraku puppetry play into Double Suicide, a highly stylistic interpretation that, while live action, holds firmly to many of the theatrical elements of the style, and perhaps other styles of Japanese theatre as well. It's hard to describe a story of a murder suicide pact between a man and his mistress as fun, but Shinoda clearly took a playful attitude toward his interpretation.

In Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve (1941) Henry Fonda plays a rich boy scientist with either a really specific case of face-blindness or the intelligence of Buster Bluth, while Barbara Stanwyck plays a con-woman who can't seem to not fall in love with him. It's a classic romantic comedy, and in that the plot doesn't make a lick of sense upon any amount of scrutiny. It's got some funny bits though!

Luis Bunuel's 1972 tale of five upperclass twits trying to have dinner but being interrupted by a series of surreal or otherwise highly unusual events is one of the most ridiculous and wonderfully funny films we've seen

After the delightful non sequitur of last week's film, Criterion throws us back into things with an emotional Bergman that Pat just can't connect with. The surprisingly vivid - for what we're used to from a Bergman film - Cries and Whispers (1972) won a well-deserved Oscar for it's cinematography while playing with themes of faith and redemption and femininity that Ingmar liked so much.

It's Spine 100! To celebrate the milestone Criterion threw us a bone: The Beastie Boys Video Anthology, a collection of videos from the hip-hop trios first two decades. It's also basically the only DVD in history to actually utilize that "Alternative Angle" button on your DVD remote. Yeah, it's fancy and fun.

The "death" of an "era" with Gimme Shelter, the Maysles and Zwerin's account of the Stones' '69 US tour that ended in the only way it could.

Someday I may understand what Michelangelo Antonioni was saying in 1960's L'Avventura. That day is not today.