Afleveringen
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Jonathan Wacks' Powwow Highway (1989) takes a lot of trappings of a holiday road movie, but leaves them behind when needed as we explore the characters and relationship of two Cheyenne men struggling in to hold onto tradition in a world controlled by colonizers. This may be the first holiday film we've covered where the only person who says "Merry Christmas" is the villain. Christmas in Powwow Highway exists as a colonizers' holiday, but perhaps one held in tension as well.
Our dear friend Stephen G. joins us for as we celebrate another year in the books!
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There are two David Fincher movies in the Criterion Collection, and The Game (1997) is the better one by a long shot, solely for not featuring the monstrous simulacrums of the human form that exist throughout The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008. Spine 476). The Game is mostly an interesting thriller that doesn't do enough with its San Francisco setting, but then in the last few minutes it jumps of a building and utterly fails to stick the landing.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Marcel Carné made Les Visiteurs du Soir (1942) during Nazi occupation of France for a Nazi-owned production company, and while one could argue that this is collaboration and one could also argue that Carné used his position to help Jewish artists keep working, that fact that this is a Nazi-produced film is somehow not the most egregious part of the production. We spend a lot of time on what the most egregious part actually was in this week's episode, actually. Carné was clearly a man in conflict during production, but it's still mostly a delightful film and another data point for my list of cinematic Satans.
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Paul Bartel directs this black comedy that's "not Lubitsch—but it’s not quite John Waters either", according to Criterion essayist David Ehrenstein. Eating Raoul (1982), is a story of America, of the normally hidden and unpunished violence of wealth accumulation. Or it's a story of America, of two prudish weirdos punishing the people they don't like. Or it's a story of America. the dream of revenge against the managerial class.
Or it's none of these things completely, as we get into a discussion this week about just how strong the metaphor in Eating Raoul is. But hey, it's still a pretty fun movie.
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In 1975, the enigmatic Ken Russell adapted and directed The Who's concept album/rock opera Tommy into a memorable film. The Who, apparently, really enjoyed making movies and decided to follow it up four years later with an adaptation of Quadrophenia (1979), but this time hiring Franc Roddam who would go on to create MasterChef and is noticeably not Ken Russell. Quadrophenia is a throwback to kitchen sink dramas, angry young men disillusioned with a society they will be joining within a few months, but mostly just fighting each other and being sexist and racist while their at it. For a film about some of the most stylish subcultures of 20th century Britain, the film itself lacks style and flair, but maybe we just wanted Ken Russell back. It's a bit like Stephen King movies after The Shining.
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We get three early films from Paul Fejos all under the banner of his 1928 part-talkie Lonesome. Also on the Criterion release is the much more interesting to us Broadway (1929) and the much less interesting to us The Last Performance (1929). Each film is inventive and interesting in its own right, but Broadway just kept getting bigger, facilitated by Fejos and his team inventing a camera crane, and then needing to build a sound stage that could accommodate their camera crane, and then needing to make a movie to justify it all.
The additional features on the Criterion release also give us plenty to talk about with biographical information on Fejos' later-career shift to anthropology and ethnography, a topic we are always willing to jump in on, though Criterion doesn't provide any examples of this aspect of his work.
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Andrew Haigh's Weekend (2011) is an exquisite character study of a Friday-Sunday fling between two pretty opposite young men, in a precarious time where homophobia is constantly bubbling in the background. It's also just one of the cutest love stories we've experienced in the Criterion Collection. Just an absolute delight of a movie.
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Last week Criterion introduced us to the work of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne with a phenomenal film, but this week they follow it up with something somehow even better. From it's frenetic first few minutes, Rosetta (1999) is the story of a a young woman that believes she can find freedom, or at least dignity, or at least normalcy in work. But she, and we, live in a society that doesn't actually care about freedom or dignity or even, really, normalcy, at least not for the lower rungs of the economic ladder Rosetta lives in. It's sort of an answer to and modernization of Bresson's Mouchette (1967), but the Dardenne are much more interested in social realism than Bresson ever was.
Like last week's film, and many social realist films we've seen, Rosetta doesn't end on a hopeful not, but perhaps on the hope for hope and the promise of freedom and dignity that comes from community and care. We need that now.
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Our introduction to the films of Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, La promesse (1996) is, like last week's Le Havre, a story of African migrants in Europe. But where Aki Kaurismäki took a more magical approach, the Dardenne's hew much closer to the intense realism of, say, Ken Loach. The brothers' history in documentary perhaps make it even more intense than what Loach we've seen. It's a story of rejecting what you've been told is the order the world must work in, and finding the community and care that your heart cries out for. A better world may be illegal, but it remains possible.
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Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre (2011) is a hard movie to categorize. It's the dramatic tale of solidarity and sanctuary, of a community setting aside petty differences to protect a vulnerable migrant. But it's not social realism; It's more magical than that. Some critics call it fairy tale-esque, Pat calls it a children's story, none of them to dismiss it. The moral here is one of a kids' book, but it's a child's morality that needs to lead us: Community brings life.
And that's not a miracle; it's a fact.
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Steven Soderbergh's film adaptation of Spalding Gray's monologue about avoiding an eye surgery, Gray's Anatomy (1996) girds Gray's George Carlin-esque delivery in some dynamic visuals and inter-cuts them with stark black and white testimonials of people recounting there own terrible eye injuries. Perhaps not for the squeamish, but it's still an engaging story.
I don't comment on it in the episode, but Gray gives a shout out to Columbus, Ohio, hotdog institution Phillips Coney Island, which closed in 2022 after 110 year of slinging wieners and probably causing some eye injuries of their own doing that.
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Many documentaries are introductions to their topics, assuming the audience has limited or even no knowledge of the subject. Steven Soderbergh's 2010 documentary about his late friend monologuist Spalding Gray, And Everything is Going Fine, is not. Soderbergh himself says it's for people who are already familiar with Gray. Since this is our introduction to him, it's a bit of a rocky start. Next week we'll talk about Gray's Anatomy (1996), Soderbergh's film of one of Gray's monologues, but this week it's all context for a body of work we know nothing about. That doesn't mean we aren't engrossed in it though. Well, at least one of us.
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Add Danny Boyle to the long list of British directors who claim their work is apolitical, seemingly only to distance themselves from Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. But it doesn't take the death of the author to find a political read of his brutal debut feature Shallow Grave (1994), a film about the corrupting influence of money on relationships, about how greed inherently leads to violence and even if you can convince yourself that your extractive profits have no victims, well, they soon will. Kerry Fox, Christopher Eccleston, and Ewan McGregor star as the victims of their own avarice in this fantastic film.
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In 1925 Charlie Chaplin released the highest grossing silent film of all time, The Gold Rush, a tale of desperate men fighting the harsh elements to chase the American Dream: getting rich through extractive capitalism. Chaplin is certainly capable of political film (see The Great Dictator or Modern Times) but also the Tramp is a political character, an impoverished victim of capitalism who survives by getting one over on authorities every so often. So is this a celebration of the American spirit? Or a condemnation of the system of social murder that cannibalizes it's most desperate citizens like so many Donner parties, promising riches while sending them into a frozen hell? I don't know, it's just a funny movie.
The Criterion release contains a composite of the 1925 version, reconstructed and rescored, and also Chaplin's own 1942 recut, where he added narration and trimmed what he considered excessive bits: primarily as much of the romance plot as possible since 17 years later he was no longer having an affair with the female lead, Georgia Hale.
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Ingmar Bergman's Summer with Monika (1953) was very popular in the US, due in large part to distributor Kroger Babb's cutting over half an hour and adding a lot of nudity to it. Criterion doesn't give us Babb's cut, but I guess they gotta save something for the bluray upgrade.
It's an interesting enough early Bergman, with the director moving through his 30s and seemingly finally figuring out what he wants his art to be. Wonder what that's like.
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Our earliest Ingmar Bergman film yet, Summer Interlude (1951) is a story of young love and internalized trauma. It also may be one of the earliest films we've seen where a manipulative groomer's actions are actually shown to be bad? In any case, it's Bergman before he's really BERGMAN, but well on his way to it; taking steps to assemble the troupe on both sides of the camera that will become the reason we know him as an auteur.
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Abbas Kiarostami is a man who understands the intimacy of a conversation in the front seat of a car. While Taste of Cherry (1997), which we watch way back at Spine 45 is the pinnacle of that truth, Certified Copy (2010) has plenty of driving and talking before it settles into sight seeing and talking. To keep things interesting, Certified Copy is a sort of surrealist drama, with the relationship between the two parties in this extended conversation in a slow flux, from strangers to estranged spouses in the course of an afternoon.
Also on the Criterion disc is an early Kiarostami work, The Report (1977), also dealing with a couple becoming estranged, but this time against the backdrop of bureaucratic corruption in pre-revolution Iran.
We talk about both films this week, as well as the nature of communication both within the films and to us as viewers when we're dealing with subtitle tracks that aren't great.
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Charlie Kaufman's screenwriting and Spike Jonze's directorial debuts, Being John Malkovich is a delightfully weird story of identity. Lotte (Cameron Diaz)'s storyline is particularly compelling, with Lotte experiencing gender euphoria as Malkovich, whereas our other main characters want to use Malkovich for patriarchal power, through fame or immortality.
Unfortunately less compelling is the slathering of artifice on the disc's additional features including an essay/interview by what appears to be a character from a Jonathan Lethem novel, a retrospective for a future neural implant release of the film, and scene commentary from someone completely uninvolved with the production.
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Mario Monicelli's The Organizer's title, like De Sica's Bicycle Thieves 15 years before it, had its title senselessly singularized for English release. The original title I compagni means "The Comrades" and is a bit more indicative of the ensemble organizing that is going on here. The story of a late 19th century textile mill strike, The Organizer is a warts and all look at workers exercising their power and capital bringing everything it has to crush them, from "haven't I always been good to you" manipulation to bullets.
The Organizer is the final film released by the Criterion Collection before we first started recording Lost in Criterion in April 2012, and with that milestone I wrote a short reflection on what the podcast has become, available free at our patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/milestone-and-110655785 -
In 1973 Robert M. Young made Children of the Fields, a short documentary about a family of Polo Galindo, migrant farm workers in the Southwest US including his young children living, a transient life as exploited laborers. Galindo opened Young's eyes not only to his and his family's plight, but to the struggles of an even lower rung: undocumented migrant workers. With Galindo as guide and translator, Young turned his documentarian eye to a narrative film, ¡Alambrista! (1977), showing us the life of a subsistence farmer who leaves Mexico to head north, desperate to make a living to care for his newborn baby as an undocumented migrant farm worker, taking a human look at the instability and exploitation faced in such a precarious life.
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