Fist of Fury (1972)

I knew I wanted to watch something from Criterion’s Bruce Lee collection, His Greatest Hits, this year, so I picked Fist of Fury based on its name alone. It turns out that haphazard approach was even more reckless than I thought, since exactly which movie Fist of Fury is depends on who you ask. It turns out the first two movies Bruce Lee starred in were brought over to the our shores at the same time and that led to some accidental shenanigans. His first movie, The Big Boss, was meant to be retitled “The Chinese Connection” to capitalize on the popularity of The French Connection. Somehow that movie got switched with this one, meaning Fist of Fury was released as “The Chinese Connection” and, since I guess no one liked the title The Big Boss, that movie became Fist of Fury. This mess wasn’t cleaned up until 2005, so for a long time I could’ve been watching a totally different movie tonight. But I’m glad the original title was restored, because this is a movie about a very, very furious man and his powerful fists.

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Le cercle rouge (1970)

Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and said: “When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever the diverging paths, on the said day, they will inevitably come together in the red circle.”

Jean-Pierre Melville made up that Buddha which quote opens his Le cercle rouge and I am feeling it. My red circle with this film is a wide one, reaching way back to the first time I heard about it on an episode of Filmspotting from 2008 (to give you a better sense of time, it was the one where Adam and Matty reviewed Pineapple Express). That was part of their Classic Heist marathon, which I am still woefully ignorant of, but in theory very interested in consuming. Don’t believe me? That’s fair, but it motivated two draft picks in the very first Criterion Month. Those were Rififi, which directly inspired Le cercle rouge, and another Jean-Pierre Melville film, Le Samouraï. And it keeps going: Le Samouraï was indirectly remade in a couple more of my later picks, The Killer and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. So this really does feel like a homecoming.

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The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a French musical from 1964 that takes a fairly mundane story and elevates it massively with its incredible style. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say it is one of the most colorful movies I have ever seen. A stark contrast from the (mostly) black and white of Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, this film, directed by her husband Jacques Demy, makes every single frame vibrant beyond reason. Similarly, the filmmakers made the audacious choice to have the story be entirely sung-through while keeping lyrics as realistic dialogue. So people sing things like what a mechanic did to fix a car. By dialing everything but the story up to 11, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg shows that the difference between everyday events and drama is just your point of view.

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Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

Back when I drafted Hiroshima mon amour, I remember joking about how pretentious the French New Wave’s left bank group must have been, given their reputation for considering right bank directors like François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard “too commercial.” But now that I’ve seen movies from a couple left bank directors (and read Colin’s many reviews) I’m realizing I actually had it backwards. I think the left bank was poking fun at the right bank for taking cinema too seriously. It’s less that one side was more intellectual than the other, and more that the left bank filmmakers were willing to play looser and get more experimental. So in the case of a movie like Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, we get a film that seriously tackles existentialism and feminism, but isn’t afraid to get goofy with it sometimes.

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Gozilla (1954)

The Criterion Collection made a big deal out of spine #1,000 by releasing their biggest box set yet: Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films, a collection of the first 15 Godzilla movies. (The title refers to the period of Emperor Shōwa’s reign.) The set comes in an oversized hardcover book filled with dozens of beautiful illustrations and essays that make it equally at home as a display piece on the mantle or a coffee table book. I’m proud to own it and show it off… but I do have one dark secret: I’m not sure I deserve to own such a exquisite prize. You see, before this month, the only Showa-Era movie I’d seen is the first King Kong vs. Godzilla. And now that I’ve finally watched the original Gozilla, I don’t foresee see myself checking out the other 13 movies any time soon. That’s not great, because if I was just going to watch the first one, Criterion already released that forever ago. Let me try to explain why my eyes are bigger than my stomach when it comes to kaiju movies.

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