Sometimes Criterion Month feels like school. I watch a slow, long, sad foreign film and then have to bang out a half-assed essay at the 25th hour. The experience is usually rewarding, but it feels like eating your vegetables too. Which is why I get low-key excited when I get to watch a movie like Mona Lisa. There’s no pretension here. Just a schlubby Bob Hoskins wandering around London to a Phil Collins’ song. Now that’s my kind of movie.
For a second, while watching Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, I thought we were heading back to Breaker Morant and military legal drama territory. However, it’s just one of the opening scenes that takes place at a military tribunal, while the rest of the film concerns the events leading up to that tribunal. Still, it does sound like it’s in similar territory as this other recently reviewed film, as it also depicts what happens to men on different sides of a war when influenced by their own allegiances and the muddy morals of wartime, and it even shares an actor in Jack Thompson. Continue reading
With John covering Pink Flamingos a few days in addition to my earlier review of Multiple Maniacs as well as one of his key influencers, we’ve now covered a decent amount of John Waters during our Criterion Months. He’s an unlikely candidate for a director with multiple films in the Collection, since the Criterion Collection doesn’t tend to favor comedy or shlock all that much. Still, Waters’ renegade spirit and the way he turned trash and filth into extremely entertaining cinema absolutely deserves to be enshrined and appreciated, and I suppose we’ll see if Criterion continues to do more of his films, as there are still plenty to go around from his more mainstream, big studio era. Polyester is in many ways the bridge between that latter era and his earlier, low-budget movies made with the Dreamlanders, and offers a nice mix of what was great about both eras of his career. Continue reading
Breaker Morant is not the first military legal drama we’ve written about on this blog. Hell, it’s not even the first one I’ve written about this year. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about this sub-genre it’s that it always comes down to following orders. Whether it’s in WWI France or Gitmo, the tension always stems from the men giving orders and those that choose to follow them (if there ever really even is a choice). But I don’t think I’ve seen a movie yet that took this idea into such murky waters. So murky, in fact, that I still haven’t made up my mind about “Breaker” Morant and his fellow accused.
One Sings, the Other Doesn’t …and you’ll never guess which one’s which! Just kidding, this film’s many, many musical performances make it extremely obvious. Agnès Varda’s eighth feature is about the friendship between two women who could otherwise be given a number of labels. That Varda tells us (quite literally, she’s the film’s narrator) that the only difference between them that matters is singing is demonstrative of the movie’s somewhat subtle approach to being a women’s liberation story. So, living in not-so-subtle times, does One Sings, the Other Doesn’t still work?
Now that I’ve written about Orson Welles’ most celebrated film, it seemed appropriate that I should turn my attention to what is actually his most influential work. You might be inclined to scoff at that claim, listing other movies like The Magnificent Ambersons (how good could that even be when Welles doesn’t even star in it?) or Touch of Evil (how much of that movie to you really remember aside from the oner at the beginning?) or The Trial (which I’ll inevitably pick the first Criterion Month it’s eligible) or even Chimes at Midnight (which I forgot to mention last time has an all-time great poster because the movie stars Welles in a fat suit). The movie I’m referring to is F for Fake, a 1973 docudrama about forgery, hoaxes, and good ol’ fashioned lies. And the reason it means so much to me is that it popularized the format that would eventually become known as the “film essay.”
It seems that each year we do Criterion Month, there’s always one movie that I end up picking that I have the least amount of context for going in. Fantastic Planet is probably that movie this year, as I really had very little prior knowledge of what the film was about or what birthed its brand of strange animation; I mostly just knew it was French and had giant blue alien guys in it. After watching it, the film does still feel kind of strange and foreign to me, but at the same time, there is plenty in both the film’s visual style and its allegorical sci-fi story for me to latch onto and wrap my tiny humanoid brain around. Continue reading
