Naked (1993)

Sometimes you end up picking a movie for Criterion Month that makes you question why you chose it in the first place, or even why someone would want to tell this particular story. I asked both these questions while watching Naked, although the first question was easy to answer, as I’ve seen a number of Mike Leigh movies and liked every one of them that I’ve seen. So even though I watched half of Naked in college and found it pretty offputting, I still felt compelled to finally watch all of it, since it’s often regarded as one of Leigh’s best films. Also, I just figured my younger self was too dumb to comprehend it. Well, over a decade later, I still have a hard time wrestling with this one, since it has to be among the bleakest movies I’ve ever seen. And yet because Leigh is a director with such specifically-designed characters, you still can’t take your eyes off of Johnny, even if he is at the end of the day, a miserable twat. Continue reading →

Girlfriends (1978)

Ah, the awkward allure of a low-budget debut feature film. The Criterion Collection is so rife with debut films from directors who would go on to direct movies with bigger stars and bigger budgets that John ended up doing exclusively these types of films one year. It’s a genre of movie that has a certain scrappy appeal to it, where not everything is as fine-tuned as you’d expect from a big studio film with set decorators and costume designers and make-up artists. But there’s still something very pure and honest about it, even if the film is imperfect in many ways. And when a debut film of this sort happens to be made by a director who never got to go on to direct bigger movies, due to the all-encompassing power of Hollywood sexism, the film becomes something you want to grab onto and give a big hug, not unlike you’d do to an old dependable friend. Continue reading →

Touki Bouki (1973)

It didn’t dawn on me until now that this will be one of the few Criterion Months where we didn’t cover a film that came out during the height of the French New Wave, although we will cover a French New Wave director later in their career. Fortunately, Touki Bouki is a movie that embodies the style and ideals of the French New Wave about as well as any movie I’ve seen, French or otherwise. It’s also a movie that carries on our tradition of covering Criterion movies about France’s occupation of African countries, be it the Algerian War, the French Foreign Legion’s presence in Djibouti, or another great Senegalese director depicting a woman’s emigration to France. Unlike a few of these movies, Touki Bouki actually takes place in Africa (and is proud of it), yet the influence of France is a constant, repeated presence. Continue reading →

The Learning Tree (1969)

It takes a special kind of person to be able to claim that they were the first Black director to helm a Hollywood studio film. It takes a polymath to able to make that claim, but also while having their directing career be just one of many creative pursuits that they received widespread acclaim for. That happens to be the case with Gordon Parks, whose The Learning Tree was a breakthrough in Hollywood studios becoming open to hiring Black directors. However, this came after Parks had already spent decades as a revered photojournalist, capturing the minutiae of mid-20th century African-American life, while he also published a few books before turning his semi-autobiographical novel The Learning Tree into his first film. And this was before he started scoring his own movies as well as painting in his spare time. Continue reading →

Purple Noon (1960)

The theme of this year’s Criterion Month seems to be life getting in the way of me being able to get all my reviews published on time and to my own satisfaction, and Purple Noon is another example of that. I started reading Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley a few weeks ago, in the hopes of having finished it before watching Purple Noon, the first big adaptation of Highsmith’s classic tale of ex-patriotism, murder, identity, and Italian beachfront property. While I was only able to get a little over halfway through the book before the day to watch the film had arrived, it was still enough for it to be apparent that Purple Noon takes a fair amount of liberties with adapting its source material, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Continue reading →

The Music Room (1958)

When exploring the work of a great director, it’s always hard to know what the best “next steps” are outside of their most highly regarded work. This is something I had to figure out when deciding to watch a Satyajit Ray film for this year’s Criterion Month, since Sean had effectively taken the Apu trilogy off the table. I have to imagine that those films are also probably the best introduction to Ray, which perhaps put me at a disadvantage when watching a film like The Music Room that was made around the same time as these more famous films. Still, The Music Room seems like it was a solid choice, since several esteemed filmmakers and critics like Mira Nair, Werner Herzog, Roger Ebert, and Pauline Kael are all big fans of the film. While I had a bit of a hard time sinking my teeth into this one, it still does make me curious to explore more of Ray’s work. Continue reading →