Criterion Month Day 10: Daisies

Daisies (1966)

Sometimes, it’s worth giving a film a second chance and your full attention. My only previous experience with 1966’s Daisies was watching a snippet of it in a film history class back in college, I believe of the opening scene of the movie. The film starts off in such a strange, disorienting place that I wasn’t sure I liked the unhinged absurdity the film was going for. So I put off revisiting it for a long time, despite the fact that I’ve made a concerted effort to seek out important films by women filmmakers over the years. Well, turns out I just needed to watch the whole damn film, as its very particular, anything-goes nature takes a while to get used to, but once you do, it makes for one of the more singular films I can recall seeing. Continue reading →

Criterion Month Day 9: The Flight of the Phoenix

The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)

A group of men must band together in order to complete a job that will hopefully save their lives. It’s a simple premise that has gotten used plenty over the years in various films and one that is at the heart of 1965’s The Flight of the Phoenix. Somehow, this film was not a huge hit when it came out, despite the fact that it feels like a real crowd-pleaser and has an amazing cast (though the box office vitality of a bunch of character actors and an aging Jimmy Stewart may have proved faulty). It’s a little hard to believe also because it fits so nicely along “team of dudes” movies from this era like The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, or director Robert Aldrich’s next film, The Dirty Dozen. But maybe the film was too ahead of its time, as it also brings to mind the disaster movies of the 70s as well as one of that decade’s biggest hits, Jaws.

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Criterion Month Day 8: The Executioner

The Executioner (1963)

How does one make a great film while living under a fascist dictatorship? It’s not a question that Hollywood filmmakers are quite having to ask themselves yet, but it’s something that director Luis García Berlanga had to navigate during the majority of his career working in the Spanish film industry under Franco’s rule. The truly amazing thing is that The Executioner in many ways comments on Franco’s government, as its main character works for the state, doing its most unseemly business of carrying out the death penalty. Yet somehow, the film managed to weave its way around the censors while wringing some dark laughs out of the material and commenting on how society forces all of us into doing its dirty work. Continue reading →

Criterion Month Day 7: The Silence

The Silence (1963)

In my neck of the woods, we have a little thing called the “Seattle Freeze.” What this means is that when reacting to out-of-towners, Seattleites are often perceived as cold, detached, and emotionally distant. This phenomenon, if you choose to believe it, is said to have been inherited from Scandinavian settlers, who prefer small, close-knit circles as opposed to 200 friends.

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Criterion Month Day 6: Big Deal on Madonna Street

Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958)

I had kind of a depressing thought while watching 1958’s Big Deal on Madonna Street: am I still capable of being blown away by the crime genre? It has been a little while since I’ve watched a crime movie for the first time that really made me reconsider the genre, which is a little sad for me personally because the crime genre was really my gateway to film geekery. From gangster movies to film noir to capers-gone-wrong like this one, it’s a genre that can contain the most exciting elements of storytelling and ways in which to use a camera. And yet, at this point, it’s a genre I fear doesn’t have all that much to say about the world as I perceive it, which isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of exciting and visually inventive moments in today’s film. Continue reading →

Criterion Month Day 5: The Lovers

The Lovers (1958)

“I know it when I see it,” chances are good you’ve heard this infamous quote regarding pornography before. The quote comes from former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in regards to the 1964 case “Jacobellis vs. Ohio”. Nico Jacobellis was a theater owner who was charged in 1960 with possessing and exhibiting pornography when he decided to screen Louis Malle’s 1958 erotic/drama The Lovers at the theater he managed in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

Jacobellis’ conviction was upheld by both the Ohio Court of Appeals and the Ohio Supreme Court, but was overruled in a 6-3 vote by the U.S. Supreme Court. The majority found that the film did not meet the legal definition of obscenity (no shit dude, you barely see a nipple). Though when it came to defining pornography, the judges were divided.

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Criterion Month Day 4: Sweet Smell of Success

Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

Who doesn’t love some juicy gossip? For as long as we’ve had famous people, we’ve had other, lesser people starting some shit about them. Nonetheless, and rather inexplicably, the jury’s still out on whether that’s a good thing or not. Mostly you’d think we’d condemn the rumor mill for appealing to our basic bitch jealousy and false sense of superiority, but what about the ever-important gossip whispers that have snowballed into the social outcries that exposed and kinda, a little bit brought down evil men like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein? In the era of #MeToo and Instagram followers and Yelp ratings and Uber ratings and Letterboxd ratings, maybe we’re actually living through peak gossip right now? Or maybe it was the late 1950s, when Sweet Smell of Success came out?

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