Lost in Criterion

Spine 313: Kill!

Our final film in the Rebel Samurai boxset is also the craziest, a parody of samurai films from the preceding twenty years or more, 1968’s Kill! directed by Kihachi Okamoto. Donovan H. finishes us out as well, though he’ll be back soon enough I’m sure.

Samurai Spy

It’s cold war superhero spies that are also ninjas. And it’s a period piece.

Spine 312: Samurai Spy

Movie three in the Rebel Samurai boxset is Masahiro Shinoda’s Samurai Spy, the 1965 Le Carre-ian Cold War espionage film that happens to take place in the political turmoil of the early part of the 17th century in Japan. Also the main character is a traditional Japanese folk hero who the audience should know about but that’s not at all important until it is very, very, incredibly very important to understand the plot in the last ten minutes of the movie. We talk cold war politics, historical...

Sword of the Beast

Sometimes the alternative title is so much better.

Spine 311: Sword of the Beast

Number two in the Rebel Samurai boxset is Hideo Gosha’s 1965 Sword of the Beast, also known as — as Pat delightfully points out — Samurai Gold Seekers. Donovan H. joins us again as we talk more about Samurai mythos deconstruction and economic systems of the past! Hurray!

Samurai Rebellion

Oh, hey, political corruption disguised as cultural mores.

Spine 310: Samurai Rebellion

We kick off the Rebel Samurai boxset this week with Masaki Kobayashi's aptly named Samurai Rebellion. Toshiro Mifune stars in a film that plays as a companion piece to Kobayashi's great Harakiri that we talked about back in July. Donovan Hill joins us this episode and for the rest of the boxset, and it's always a joy to have him.

Ugetsu

Ugetsu is quite possibly the greatest film ever made.

Spine 309: Ugetsu

Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu is like a lot of films made in the years after World War II in Japan: decidedly anti-war. That already gives it a lot of points in our book, but it's also brilliant, beautiful, melancholy, and just downright among the greatest films ever made period.

Masculin Feminin

Godard wants you to take teens seriously, but can't take women seriously. It's a bit of a problem.

Spine 308: Masculin Feminin

This week Pat puts his Anthropology degree to use to take issue with Jean-Luc Godard's sociology practices. Masculin Feminin is a sprawling look at the young people of Paris just before the 1965 re-election of Charles de Gaulle, a re-election that would lead to the events of May 1968 we've discussed previously with Godard's (superior) Tout va Bien. Unfortunately, Godard doesn't give the respect to his female stars that he wants to say the entire generation deserve.

Naked

Mike Leigh's brilliant but often hard to watch post-Thatcher update of Boudu. Now with more explicit rape.

Spine 307: Naked

Mike Leigh's Naked is a bit of a Thatcher-era take on Boudu Saved from Drowning and a bit of an end times prophecy. It's also a pretty off-putting movie, what with all the rapes. Partway into the episode I present a reading of it as an adaptation of the Odyssey, with David Thewlis's Johnny as Odysseus. While I think that's a fair reading even though there's no cyclops, I only later realized that it's Claire Skinner's Sandra who returns from overseas to kick a bunch of interlopers out of he...

Le Samourai

Le Samourai is a French gangster movie that doesn't quite understand samurai films, but it's still brilliant.

Spine 306: Le Samourai

It was only a matter of time before we found a Jean-Pierre Melville film I actually like. We do make one big mistake in this weeks episode though. Despite being a film with Samourai literally in the title we did not invite Donovan Hill back to join us for this French gangster classic. I publicly apologize to him and you listeners for that oversight. He'd have hated it, and those are some of the best episodes. Le Samourai starts with a fake quote about bushido and is philosophically inconsi...

Boudu Saved from Drowning

No values is better than bougie values.

Spine 305: Boudu Saved from Drowning

We get one of our earliest Jean Renoir films this week, and it's a treat. Noted for it's encapsulation of Paris between the wars, Boudu Saved from Drowning is a critique of Bourgeois values via rejection. It's also noted for essentially allowing star Michel Simon to play his no-holds-barred libertarian and libertine self. Pat and I have problems with rejecting Bourgeois sensibilities for right wing individualism, but maybe we just have problems with spitting in books.

The Man Who Fell to Earth

This film may be more about how Howard Hughes really is an alien.

Spine 304: The Man Who Fell to Earth

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) may be our favorite Nicholas Roeg film, though the bar has been set pretty dang low. Even without David Bowie's performance -- and is he playing any more of a character than "David Bowie" ever was? -- this film deserves its cult status. Still as science fiction it fails for us on two major points: 1) The inventions don't seem that mind-blowing/paradigm shifting for 1976. 2) The departures from the source material eliminate the main anti-American militarism a...

Bad Timing

Our first Roeg film since Walkabout does nothing to further endear us.

Spine 303: Bad Timing

There's a lot about Nicholas Roeg's 1980 psychological thriller Bad Timing that is just bad: Art Garfunkel's staring turn, Harvey Keitel's inconsistent accent, the fact that the film spends 122 minutes suggesting that having sex with an unconscious (and dying) woman isn't rape, etc. Still the story format itself is interesting -- even if, as one reviewer suggests, there would barely be a story if it were actually told chronologically -- the ambiguity of the nature of the flashbacks is most...

Harakiri

Donovan Hill joins us for more deconstruction of Samurai Jidaigeki.

Spine 302: Harakiri

We'll be exploring a string of samurai deconstruction films in just a few months as we tackle the Rebel Samurai boxset. Though virtually every Jidaigeki samurai film we've seen so far is a deconstruction of the genre, the deconstructionists hit hard in the 60s as young men disillusioned by the war became the nation's primary voices in film. This week we have Harakiri, Masaki Kobayashi's hard-hitting 1962 entry in the genre (and we'll see more from him in the coming boxset). While the title...

An Angel at My Table

Jane Campion adapts Janet Frame's depressing yet triumphant life story.

Spine 301: An Angel at My Table

Based on Janet Frame's trio of autobiographies (and taking its name from the middle one), Jane Campion's An Angel at My Table from 1990 is a lovingly crafted look at the life of the Kiwi author. Frame was lucky to escape the hand she'd been dealt as a woman who did not fit the mold many men in her life expected her to, particularly the moment she was scheduled for a lobotomy by winning a national book prize. Horrific. And utterly normal, it turns out.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

It's fun to have friends!

Spine 300: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Spine 300. Wow. For all the jokes about doing this until either we or the Criterion Collection itself dies I don't know that we ever realistically thought we'd be Lost in Criterion for this long. I suppose we may as well stick it out. Wes Anderson is a favorite of the Collection and we will eventually see all of his films as part of it. He's also a favorite (or decidedly not) of many of our friends who we've invited on this week's episode to discuss his 2004 film The Life Aquatic with St...

Story of a Prostitute

When a very progressive message is still not progressive enough. CW: Rape. Systematic rape.

Spine 299: Story of a Prostitute

We had a good run with Seijun Suzuki, but like most heroes, eventually you find something you have to step back from. While much of the message of Story of the Prostitute is similar to and on par with the anti-militarism, anti-toxic masculinity themes of his great Fighting Elegy, the framing element here leaves quite a bit to be desired about the true nature of Japan's history with so called "Comfort Women". Historically these women were (mostly) kidnapped and forced into prostitution for ...

Gate of Flesh

It's our second to last Suzuki film in the collection! Unless they add more before we're done in 15 years.

Spine 298: Gate of Flesh

We love Suzuki here at Lost in Criterion, and sadly we only have two more of his films to watch before we're all out of them. Well, unless the Criterion adds more before we're done. There's certainly an incredibly good chance of that. We finish with two of the earliest of his that we've seen (though Youth of the Beast was earlier than either). This week it's Gates of Flesh a story of post-war desperation.

au hasard Balthazar

I'd call this peak Bresson, but I think Bresson will surprise me.

Spine 297: au hasard Balthazar

We get to watch a movie about a donkey! But the donkey doesn't talk. It's not animated. It's depressing. I'd call au hasard Balthazar peak Bresson, but I'm betting Robert Bresson will keep surprising me. In any case this is the third and final in a string of films that claims inspiration from Fyodor Dostoevsky, and it certainly fits with the Russians' tone (though perhaps not his religiosity).

Le notti bianche

“Recommending a Dostoevsky book is like telling someone to get a second job.”

Spine 296: Le notti bianche

We're in the middle of a trilogy of films that claim influence from Dostoevsky with the most straightforward adaptation of the lot in being the only one not loosely inspired by a half-remembered scene from The Idiot. Instead Luchino Visconti, who we last saw with the phenomenal film The Leopard last year, does a fairly faithful take on Dostoevsky's 1948 short story White Nights which turns out to be better representative of my psyche than The Idiot ever really was. My relationship to Dostoev...

Crazed Fruit

A movie written by a clearly insane rightwing demagogue. Great.

Spine 295: Crazed Fruit

Imagine if a 20 year old Donald Trump had written a book about how bad the kids are. Or Marine Le Pen. Or Nigel Farage, etc. etc. you get the idea. Crazed Fruit is based on a book by Shintaro Ishihara, a right wing populist politician with some pretty terrible opinions as well as delusions -- he once said that if he'd continued directing films (and he's only directed one full length) he'd be at least better than Kurosawa. He didn't even direct this movie -- though from certain set stories ...

The Browning Version

Our final Asquith finds us with another theater adaptation, this one much less faithful than The Importance of Being Earnest, but all the better for it.

Spine 294: The Browning Version

As of this writing 1951's The Browning Version is our final Anthony Asquith film in the Criterion Collection, and while it is also an adaptation of a play it is a very different film to the others we've watched over the years. The Browning Version is certainly bleaker than Pygmalion and The Importance of Being Earnest, but also perhaps more inspiring, in that it actually hopes to be inspiring.

The Flowers of St. Francis

Spine 293: The Flowers of St. Francis

Pat and I both come from protestant Christian backgrounds in the Midwest US, though certainly different expressions of even that niche, and more certainly we've landed in very different spots (to where we came from and one another) later in life. Still our divergent ideologies are ever more deeply rooted in humanism, and the Christian-themed films we've watched while Lost in Criterion that we've most loved are those with a humanist touch: Ordet, Winter Light, The Last Temptation of Christ. ...

Unfaithfully Yours

Walter Mitty: Murderer

Spine 292: Unfaithfully Yours

Preston Sturges's most intellectual film, Sullivan's Travels, was an argument that non-intellectual films are ok. People love them! Not everything needs a deeper point! Still, as we mentioned last week with Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait, Criterion has a tendency to serve us intellectual films, and that makes talking about a movie that doesn't want to say anything an ever unique experience for us. Of course 1948's Unfaithfully Yours is still a very smart film. It's pitch-perfectly crafted and ...

Heaven Can Wait

We can read a political message into anything, but that doesn't mean it's not really there.

Spine 291: Heaven Can Wait

It's been over two years since we've heard from Ernst Lubistch, despite his being one of the most influential directors in Hollywood. Back then we had the pre-Code Trouble in Paradise and its ridiculously risque writing, but 1942's Heaven Can Wait isn't quite so overtly sexual, in fact despite the plot stemming from the main character's insistence to Satan himself that he is an evil philanderer, we never really see him even approaching cheating on his wife. It's almost relaxing to have a m...

The Phantom of Liberty

There will come a time when I just remember the good parts of Phantom of Liberty as being part of the better Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Spine 290: The Phantom of Liberty

With The Phantom of Liberty (1974) we have now watched Bunuel's final three films, and there's a very good chance that is the not so distant future I'll find it hard to say which memorable scene belongs to which movie. Phantom is no Discreet Charm -- nothing could be -- but it still has some brilliance in it, though it's buried a bit more under some not so great ideas. We've seen other directs throw vignettes at the wall and hope they stick, and thankfully Phantom is more Slacker than Schizo...

Hoop Dreams

The greatest sports documentary is also an indictment of racism and classism in America.

Spine 289: Hoop Dreams

We finish up an array of decidedly different documentaries this week with Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert's Hoop Dreams, the story of Arthur Agee and William Gates, two young men from Chicago with athletic ambitions. Like Burden of Dreams -- though for vastly different reasons -- what was meant to be a short shoot ballooned to four years, and Hoop Dreams arrived as one of the best sports documentaries in history, as well as a lasting indictment on racism and classism in Americ...

F for Fake

Orson Welles presents a film essay that doubles as a lesson in healthy skepticism.