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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

01:26:10

Spine 557: The Times of Harvey Milk

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/07/21

Rob Epstein's The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) is a poignant look at the assassination of the San Francisco Supervisor, his assassin, and his organizing paradigm. Not just fighting for gay rights, but helping to build a coalition for liberation, Milk's life as shown in the movie is an important lesson on movement building. Even if it were just that, I would recommend it to everyone. But beyond the 90 minute film, the Criterion release provides 3 hours of additional materials diving deeper into Milk's

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01:40:44

Spine 556: Senso

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/07/14

After years we finally get another Luchino Visconti film and it does not disappoint. Like The Leopard, Senso is set against the backdrop of the struggles of Italian unification, an idea that Visconti seems to have seen as analogous to the struggle to implement communism in his own time. Unlike The Leopard, Visconti takes a melodramatic love story and just shoves all that political stuff in there until it's about to burst. It's a beautiful film, thanks in no small part to the film's 3rd

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01:24:18

Spine 555: Sweet Smell of Success

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/07/07

Every so often the Criterion Collection shows us exactly one movie from a director and will apparently never show us another. With very few exceptions we've loved these one-and-dones, and Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Succcess is no outlier. It's very dark, it's very entertaining, and we'll never see anything from Mackendrick again.

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01:24:24

Spine 554: Still Walking

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/06/30

Hirokazu Kore-eda's 2008 drama looks at a day in the life of a Japanese family, a day that just so happens to be the anniversary of the eldest son's death by drowning. It's a little bit Ozu, it's a little bit Naruse, and it's a wonderful exploration of the ways trauma and grief linger in family relationships.

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01:43:25

Spine 553: Fish Tank

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/06/23

Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank is, refreshingly, a "this is how the poor people live" movie from someone who actually grew up in similarly impoverished situations to the protagonists of their film. Criterion also provides us with 3 of Arnold's short films, each dealing with a similar theme to those that show up in the main film: young womanhood, single motherhood, and grief.

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01:33:38

Spine 552: Broadcast News

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/06/16

First a note: Sorry to have missed last week, but Adam was in the hospital after a bicycle accident left him with a fractured elbow. He's on the mend, and we should be back to the regular schedule. This week we're talking James L. Brooks office rom-com set against the changing background of 1980's newsrooms. 1987's Broadcast News is a fun movie, indicative in many ways of Brooks' decades writing cutting edge sitcoms. Unfortunately, he doesn't take the opportunity of a larger story to punch any

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01:37:14

Spine 551: Cronos

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/06/02

Guillermo del Toro's first film, Cronos (1993), is flat out just a really great vampire flick, with an eye toward how the machinations of adults effect the children in their lives, like many of his best films. But that bit of family-focus isn't the only way Cronos rises above simple genre film, as del Toro uses the vampire to tell a story of capitalism and colonialism, and the particular evil that is created when Christianity unites with those powers and principalities.

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01:32:56

Spine 550: The King of Marvin Gardens

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/05/26

We finish up the America Lost and Found: The BBS Story boxset with one more film from producer, director, and one of the B's in BBS Bob Rafelson. The King of Marvin Gardens may have our favorite Jack Nicholson role of the bunch, and is a strong finish in a boxset that really ebbed and flowed for us. "It's Monopoly out there" is going to enter my lexicon.

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01:30:51

Spine 549: The Last Picture Show

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/05/19

America Lost and Found: The BBS Story has been really up and down for us, but Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971) is definitely toward the top. Stylistically and homage to John Ford (and, to a lesser extent, Howard Hawks), this coming of age story is set in the 50s but still manages to engage in the politics of the early 70s better than a lot of the other movies we've watched this last month.

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01:38:36

Spine 548: A Safe Place

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/05/12

The BBS films we've been watching are culturally important for telling new types of stories within major studio-released films, but for the most part, outside of Head, the form of the stories hasn't been that different. The sex is more explicit, the drug use is forefront, but the actual structure of the film is more familiar, I think. Maybe that's just because we're 50 years on and it's less new. Head was out there structurally, of course, and second to Head comes Henry Jaglom's A Safe Place, a film

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01:48:40

Spine 547: Drive, He Said

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/05/05

For us, this is honestly the nadir of the BBS boxset. Drive, He Said is a movie that can't even take it's own political moment seriously, hamstringing the "revolutionary" at the center of the film into a lone man driven insane by "free love" with no reference even to the draft, even as the very campus Jack Nicholson was shooting on was literally being set on fire in organized anti-war protests possibly DURING production. And the filmmakers even made the ultimate revolutionary act in the film much,

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01:42:18

Spine 546: Five Easy Pieces

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/04/28

What Easy Rider does for hippie-adjacent drug dealers, Five Easy Pieces (1970) does for upper class piano prodigies? It's becoming increasingly clear that the ideas the BBS guys and their associates have about "freedom" are very much at odds with Lost in Criterion's ideas about liberation. We think Carole Eastman's script was probably a lot more interesting than Bob Rafelson's movie, but who can say.

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01:44:32

Spine 545: Easy Rider

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/04/21

The second movie in the America Lost and Found: The BBS Story boxset is the one that artistically put them on the map. It was the Monkees' money that got the movies made, but it was Easy Rider (1969) that got them legitimacy. Dennis Hopper directs this classic tale of...freedom? People tell me this movie is about freedom. I'll be honest, given the cultural hold this film seems to have I was surprised at how bleak it is.

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02:00:53

Spine 544: Head

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/04/14

This week we kick off one of our longest boxsets yet, America Lost and Found: The BBS Story. In it we'll see some of the most well known early New Hollywood films of the late 60s and early 70s produced by Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, and Stephen Blauner. We start off with perhaps the most out there of the set. Rafelson and Schneider are the creators of the Monkees, and much of BBS's success can be attributed to the just tons of money they made from that show. Our first film, directed by Rafelson,

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01:56:53

Spine 543: Modern Times

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/04/07

Modern Times is our first proper Charlie Chaplin film in the Criterion Collection - though The Immigrant (1917) was a bonus feature on Spine 330, Louis Malle's Au revoir les enfants (1987). Modern Times is just such a classic film, and a perfect fit for us as it's Chaplin's first excursion into what could be considered political film. We'll get more of that from Charlie in a few months with The Great Dictator, and really cannot wait for that! For now his heart is in the right place even if he's

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01:53:59

Spine 542: Antichrist

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/03/31

Since we first encountered Lars von Trier with The Element of Crime way back at Spine 80, he is a director who we - Pat especially - look forward to as the Criterion Collection trickles out his work. Antichrist, however, was a film we were both cautious about, knowing what little we did about it. Ultimately, the film is sort of a mix between Salo and Haxan, and like Salo it is a film that I am glad I watched but will never recommend to anyone. Like Salo, Antichrist is steeped in sexual and

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01:36:19

Spine 541: The Night of the Hunter

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/03/24

Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter has been so vindicated in the decades after its release that it really is quite a shame that the man not only never made another movie but died before he got his due respect.

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01:51:23

Spine 540: The Darjeeling Limited

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/03/17

The Darjeeling Limited is possibly Wes Anderson at his most self-aware, but sometimes its still difficult to tell the difference between deeper symbolism and the director's stream-of-consciousness aesthetic styling, particularly when it comes to the religious elements. Speaking of religious elements, a note: this episode we spend some time talking about the [Anglo] Latin Catholic influence in India since that is the Christianity we see in the movie (and it gives us a chance to reference Black

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01:43:12

Spine 539: House

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/03/10

Nobuhiko Obayashi's sole film in the Criterion Collection (so far!) is the 1978 avant garde horror comedy House, a movie co-written by his 8 year old daughter.

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01:37:08

Spine 538: Paths of Glory

Lost in Criterion ·

2023/03/03

After nearly nine years we finally get a second Stanley Kubrick film from the Collection with Paths of Glory (1960), his first collaboration with Kirk Douglas made just before Spartacus. This is our third "anti-war" film in the last month or so, and the second American one. With Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line we discussed whether or not an American film made after WW2 could truly be "anti-war", but I think Paths of Glory comes closer than any other we've seen. Big thanks to Adam S. for joining

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