Random Acts of Cinema

This week the question is asked: does having had read The Deadly Percheron enhance the viewing experience of this grimy, English, 80s neo-noir about sex work, blackmail, and unrequited love? It turns out that this doesn't really matter, because… Bob Hoskins.

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If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and reviewing Kiyoshi Kurusawa's Cure (1997).

Coming of age story? Sexual awakening? Road trip movie? These all characterize Alfonso Cuarón's tale of two young men and one women whose lives intersect for a brief period one summer… kind of. While this film displays a keen understanding of convention it constantly subverts expectations and values along and becomes something all the more charming, touching, challenging, and political at heart. Two future superstars, Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna alongside Maribel Verdu, propel this still iconoclastic film to a rare stature alongside the best of Mexican cinema.

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If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and reviewing Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa (1986).

Certainly not the arty-ist neo-noir ever made, but it's certainly the most Jean-Pierre Melville-ian neo-noir ever made. And that's more than enough to make this one of the most widely-beloved of all Criterion films. Alain Delain (who sadly passed away between our record and the release date for this episode) brought Tokyo-cool, Parisian romanticism, and American grime to this epitome of the "cool assassin" film.

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If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and reviewing Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También (2001).

Can Master Wong navigate China into the 20th-century and past the obstacles of modernity, invasive western culture, and a whole host of outside threats to tradition? Of course he can. But even he's got to admit: he looks pretty good in a boater hat and sunglasses. Tsui Hark's epic kung fu period action/comedy pits western powers, local corruption, modern technology, and the stubborn refusal to adapt against a ragtag group centered around a fighting school and its stoic martial arts master played by Jet Li.

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If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and reviewing's Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samurai (1967).

When 20 or so upper class reveler's end up at a post-opera gathering hosted by one of their peers, everything seems perfectly… polite. But then director Luis Buñuel imparts upon them the one unbreakable rule of the film: no one can ever leave the well-appointed drawing room. Ever. What follows is a study in the logistics of human survival, depravity, and an allegory of the lies we tell ourselves as we sink into fascism.

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If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and reviewing's Tsui Hark's Once Upon a Time in China (1991).

"Bowie to Bowie… Come in Bowie…" So begins a completely unrelated piece of Bowie-related media that one of us wishes he watched instead. Come have a listen to find out which of us has the appetite (or patience?) for a Nicolas Roeg-directed 1970s dystopian science fiction film starring a beguiling and beloved pop star at the top of his game.

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If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and reviewing Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel (1962).

Jean-Luc Godard returns to the podcast with a stylish and cunning exposé of modern French man. Or rather, a study of how women deal with the intransigent, petulant, sometimes comical, and always fragile masculinity of the perpetually dissatisfied narcissists that demand their attentions. Two such long-suffering women are played by Nathalie Baye and Isabelle Hubert as entirely pragmatic and fully self-aware Parisian women coping with the surprisingly similar needs of lovers, pimps, johns, and… cattle.

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If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and reviewing Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976).

Kabuki and 1950's studio style combine in Keisuke Kinoshita's lavish and heart-wrenching account of a rural Japanese family planning for and coping with the responsibilities and struggles of ubasute - a village's custom to carry elderly family members to a mountaintop in winter and abandon them. Gorgeous set and production design add a compelling dynamism to an otherwise carefully plotted family drama.

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If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and reviewing Jean-Luc Godard's Every Man for Himself (1980).

Internationally-neglected Spanish auteur Luis García Berlanga enters the collection neither with a bang, a whimper, a chop, nor a zap… but with a silenced gasp. His celebrated black comedy somehow managed to slip past Franco's censors to show us a man slowly, haplessly, and inevitably lured with only the best intentions to utterly compromise his moral values. It's a dirty job, but somebody has to be suckered into doing it.

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If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and reviewing Keisuke Kinoshita's The Ballad of Narayama (1958).

And with the coming of another Rando Awards, so too passes another season of Random Acts of Cinema. Join us as we look back and reflect on all the bests and the worsts of a solid year of Criterion films.

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If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and reviewing Luis Garcia Berlanga's The Executioner (1963).