Lost in Criterion

Oh boy, another Roman Polanski film.

Tess (1979) is Polanski's adaptation of Thomas Hardy's 1890's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles. The film is well acted and well shot and we'd love to just talk about that but all the bonus material is about how Polanski was a brave genius making his first movie after an unfortunate incident in which he did something that was really quite normal at the time and he got blacklisted from Hollywood. Tess won three of the six Oscars it was nominated for, and we get to spend so much time talking about this movie in the context Criterion has provided.

So content warning.

Alfred Hitchcock's pre-war spy thrillers are interesting because on the one hand they're romps and on the other hand they're designed to subtly push the British public against Germany in a time when the film cannot openly call the bad guys German. This tonal dialectic really worked for us in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, Spine 643) and The Lady Vanishes (1938, Spine 3), but falls a little flatter in The 39 Steps (1935, Spine 56) and Foreign Correspondent (1940). Here the unevenness is more noticeable, and that's because bubbling just below the surface is a fight between Hitchcock's desire to make a normal Hitchcock movie and producer Walter Wanger's desire to make an up-to-the-minute ripped-from-the-headline-writers' view of the impending war, unhelped by the army of writers working on it throughout production. But also very much helped by the visual effects and production design.

Abdellatif Kechiche's adaptation of Jul Maroh's Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) offers us a lot to talk about, but Criterion's release offers no additional content to frame our conversation, which is extra weird considering the hundreds of thousands of words written on this film upon its release. We're just two cishet guys talking about a lesbian relationship, but maybe that's ok because it doesn't seem like there were any lesbians involved in the lesbian romance movie anyway. But beyond the male gaze-y sex scenes there is a deeply interesting story of a relationship, of a young working class woman coming into her own, and of a student becoming a teacher becoming a burned out teacher.

According to director Terence Davies, he wasn't interested in presenting what happens chronologically next in a film, but emotionally what's next. As such The Long Day Closes (1992) is a stream-of-consciousness coming-of-age exploration of memory, budding sexuality, music, film, and musical films. Oh and there's a like a two minute shot of light on a carpet and it may be the most perfect thing we've ever seen?

We fell in love with Aki Kaurismäki when we first watched Le Havre (2011, Spine 619), and are very excited to talk about the original film in which André Wilms plays Marcel Marx, another tale of immigrant rights but this one an ode to a Paris that no longer exists, a bohemian lifestyle that is increasingly impossible under capitalism. Oh and speaking of being an artist under capitalism, we also talk about Martin Scorsese's recent announcement that he's using AI for storyboarding, a thing he is obviously not actually doing so I hope the money is worth it.