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PODCAST

Lost in Criterion

Lost in Criterion

The Adam Glass and John Patrick Owatari-Dorgan attempt the sisyphean task of watching every movie in the ever-growing Criterion Collection. Want to support us? We’ll love you for it: www.Patreon.com/LostInCriterion

tv & film

All Episodes

01:56:46

Spine 577: Cul-de-sac

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/12/08

8 years ago this week our episode on Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water posted and we had a discussion about the director's misogyny. Two years ago this month, we talked about Roman Polanski's Repulsion and had a discussion about the director's misogyny. Now our third of his movies, Cul-de-sac (1966), offers us a chance to armchair psychoanalyze the man once again, as it becomes clear that his misogyny stems from his understanding all human relationships as power-struggles that someone must win. It

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01:49:51

Spine 576: Secret Sunshine

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/12/01

Lee Chang-dong's story of incredible loss and grief, of where community can be found and where it cannot, Secret Sunshine (2007) shows the failings of a religion designed to solve status quo middle class problems under capitalism, but reminds us that there is still hope. Hirokazu Kore-eda (director of Spine 554: Still Walking) called this the best film of the 21st century so far, and he may be right, but while Secret Sunshine is a must see, it's hard to imagine having the emotional fortitude to

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01:45:02

Spine 575: The Killing

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/11/24

We get two early Stanley Kubrick films this week, not just The Killing (1956) but also Killer's Kiss (1955). While both are New York noirs, each offers a different view of the famed director. Killer's Kiss is the last film in which Kubrick did almost everything himself: directing, shooting, producing, and writing the story from scratch. The Killing is a Hollywood production, with Lucien Ballard behind the lens (albeit to Kubrick's chagrin), James B. Harris producing his first of several

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01:41:03

Spine 574: Life During Wartime

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/11/17

Your hosts of Lost in Criterion were juniors in high school on September 11, 2001, and that certainly colors our opinion of Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime (2010). And so do current events. Solondz is also 25 years older than us, and while I agree, as Solondz says in one of the bonus features on this release, that the suburbs of New Jersey (where he grew up) and the suburbs of Ohio (where we lived in 2001) are not so different, I think that difference in generations is perhaps insurmountable. The

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01:44:49

Spine 573: The Music Room

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/11/10

It took far too long for the Criterion Collection to show us anything from Bengali director Satyajit Ray, but we're finally here with the singular and beautiful The Music Room (1958). Ray's attempt at a more popular movie after his first two films (the first two of the Apu trilogy) failed to connect with an audience, The Music Room integrates classical Indian music into a story of decayed aristocracy, how holding onto power destroys everything you love.

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01:49:27

Spine 572: Léon Morin, Priest

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/11/03

Jean-Pierre Melville's Léon Morin, Priest (1961) is the story of a hot priest and a hot communist having banal religious conversations that rarely rise to a level that we can even pretend they are theological or philosophical. That these conversations also take place in a French town occupied by Nazis should raise the stakes, but the whole thing largely seems flat. It's a love story, and any depth beyond that didn't connect with us. But in retrospect maybe that is the point, maybe Melville is saying

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01:56:01

Spine 571: Black Moon

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/10/27

Our second in this pair of Louis Malle at his weirdest, Black Moon (1975) is an Alice in Wonderland-ish coming of age story during a literal battle of the sexes. We were concerned about a French male director making such a movie at the height of second-wave feminism, but Malle is nothing if not surprising. Malle claims he wrote the film on a sort of automatic writing while also changing course whenever a plot line looked like it might be emerging, which leaves us with a film quite widely open to

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01:43:29

Spine 570: Zazie dans le Metro

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/10/20

With the Louis Malle films we've seen so far it was clear the man was willing to reinvent his style, but I had sort of assumed he had eras at least. This week we start off a pair of his more out there films, one from very early in his career and one from the height of his career in the 80s. This week it's Zazie dans le Metro, an adaptation of a popular French book that borders on Finnegans Wake-level nonsense made into a live action cartoon that borders on Playtime-level nonsense. It's a real

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01:33:37

Spine 569: People on Sunday

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/10/13

In 1930 a group that would soon be the who's who of young German filmmakers, including the Siodmak brothers and Billy Wilder, released People on Sunday, a semi-narrative semi-documentary look at how to spend a weekend in late-Weimar Republic Berlin. Also on the Criterion release is Eugen Schüfftan's Ins Blaue hinein (1931), a narrative short about hustling during the Depression. Both offer a fascinating look at these soon-to-be-greats' early careers and at everyday life in Germany before Hitler's

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01:36:56

Episode 568: Kiss Me Deadly

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/10/06

What happens when a writer and a director who despise the best-selling reactionary violence of private detective Mike Hammer decide to make a Mike Hammer movie? And then the government tells them it's too violent so they cut out the entire mafia plot and replace it with a radioactive macguffin (that screams and melts your face)? Well, you get Robert Aldrich's highly influential Kiss Me Deadly (1955).

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01:42:55

Spine 567: The Makioka Sisters

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/09/29

Kon Ichikawa's 1985 adaptation of the Jun'ichiro Tanizaki novel (serialized from 1943-48) is seemingly a new leaf for our experience with Ichiwaka's work. We've had his avant-garde sports documentary. We've had his strong anti-war films - perhaps the best anti-war films in the Criterion Collection. And now we get a pre-War tale of four sisters in a merchant family, a family epic shot on a television budget. It's also a topic that Pat has interest in and insight into since his day job is, in part,

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01:49:20

Spine 566: Insignificance

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/09/22

Insignificance, Nicholas Roeg's 1985 adaptation of Terry Johnson's play of the same name, is a study of fame and guilt, womanhood and the bomb. If the concept of "Barbieheimer" were a single film, it may look something like this.

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01:44:08

Spine 565: The Great Dictator

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/09/15

In 1940, Charlie Chaplin determined that the only way he had to stop the fascists march around the world was to use his voice, literally, and produce his first true sound film with The Great Dictator. Inarguably, this film did not stop the war, but it did give us one of the most enduring calls to humanism ever put to celluloid. Returning guest Adam S. joins us to talk about this marvelous movie that mocks fascists, which is always a worthwhile cause.

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01:30:19

Spine 564: Pale Flower

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/09/08

If Pale Flower were just composer Toru Takemitsu's Musique concrète score and sound design it would be worth talking about. If Pale Flower were just director Masahiro Shinoda's avant garde deconstruction of a Shintaro Ishihara story and yakuza films in general, a New York Noir but Japanese, it would be worth talking about. But Pale Flower (1964) is both, and more for the sum of it's parts.

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01:36:25

Spine 563: Something Wild

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/09/01

Jonathan Demme's Something Wild (1986) is a fun, sexy, if a little weird Manic Pixie Dream Girl road movie. That is until about the halfway point, when the music and lighting suddenly both get darker, and Ray Liotta walks in to change this movie into something like an action thriller. In less steady hands, this could have felt more like two separate movies, but Demme and screenwriter E. Max Frye stick to their guns and stick the landing.

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01:54:41

Spine 562: Blow Out

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/08/25

Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981) is a political thriller for the dawn of the Reagan Era which is, not coincidentally, a political thriller for the Trump Era, which is, really, a political thriller for any USA age post the assassinations of the MLK, Malcolm X, and, primarily to Blow Out, the Kennedies. Like the Trinity Test, JFK's assassination was a genie released, and while high-profile USA political assassinations have fallen off in recent years, I think we can all agree they don't seem that far

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01:48:11

Spine 561: Kes

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/08/17

Ken Loach's 1969 film Kes is like a British 400 Blows, but Loach takes seriously the political reality of the working class characters he portrays in a way I just don't find in Truffaut. Maybe I'm being less than gracious to the French New Wave pioneer, but maybe also Loach just knocks it out of the park in such a way that it sets a new standard. Since it's an additional feature on the Criterion release, we also get to talk about Loach's 1966 teleplay Cathy Come Home, which is positively Godardian

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01:41:53

Spine 560: White Material

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/08/11

Our first Claire Denis film (well, unless you count all the work she did for Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch), 2009's White Material is the story of a white French coffee farmer trying to hold on to normalcy as the African country she lives in decolonizes. The crux of the problem of course being that while "normal" may mean "I can harvest and sell my coffee" it also means "the French army maintains an oppressive stranglehold over an entire nation." While colonialist forces wring every resource possible

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01:43:37

Spine 559: The Mikado

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/08/04

Victor Schertzinger's 1939 adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado is the first film adaptation of a Gilbert and Sullivan work, the only one to include members of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, and the first Technicolor picture put out by Universal. But let's face it, it's only in the Collection because of Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy. Should have been a bonus feature, though I suppose if it had the Topsy-Turvy release would have been bloated. Instead we get a standalone episode dedicated to

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01:34:31

Spine 558: Topsy-Turvy

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/07/28

Before this I'd only ever seen one film by Mike Leigh, Spine 307: Naked (1993) which we watched like five years ago. I remember it being fairly dour. So when I found out we were watching a Mike Leigh musical period biopic about Gilbert and Sullivan writing an orientalist light opera, I was concerned and confused. Gilbert and Sullivan is not for me. Topsy-Turvy is for me. A story about art and capital, authenticity and caricature.

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