Lost in Criterion

What if all the people in charge were actually criminals, but so insulated by power that no amount of clear evidence could lead to them being investigated? Crazy right?

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) is our only film from Elio Petri in the Criterion Collection, which is disappointing because from what we can tell his work is like if Pier Paolo Pasolini only did mass market genre stuff. Of course it's also just impeccable mass market genre stuff filled with radical politics, which Petri termed PolPop, political popular film. It's right up our alley.

Greta Gerwig's writing and acting in the titular role go a long way to make us like our second Noah Baumbach film much more than our first. While Kicking and Screaming (Spine 329) was a little too Whit Stillman for us - and over half the podcast ago - we found 2012's Frances Ha much more relatable and entertaining. It also helps that our friend Casey B. dropped everything to talk with us about a movie she loves.

Charlie Chaplin's first movie with synced sound (as opposed to his first film to feature onscreen dialogue) is the great silent film star saying no thank you to the concept of synced sound. City Lights is a great first start as we decompress from 24 Zatoichi films and relearn how to do the podcast, but I'll be honest it's rough going rewiring our brains from that.

We say goodbye to the Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman Boxet with film #25: Zatoichi's Conspiracy (Kimiyoshi Yasuda, 1973), and we end with neither a highlight or lowlight, but  a solidly middling entry. It doesn't help that not only are we tired of this, last week's set contained both the best and worst the series has to offer and this last one is just an inoffensive end to the series. We also cover the additional materials in the set with commentary from Tony Rayns and a short documentary on the life of Shintaro Katsu during the Zatoichi tv series of the late 70s from John Nathan.

Our penultimate Zatoichi episode brings us one that is possibly the best Zatoichi movie, one that is not quite the most middling of the middle ones, and one that is quite probably the most infuriating movie the Criterion Collection has made us watch so far.

Zatoichi and the One Armed Swordsman (Mimiyoshi Yasuda, 1971) is probably a metaphor for international relations as we see Ichi meet Shaw Brothers' wuxia hit The one Armed Swordsman travel through time and over seas to have a lot of misunderstandings due to the language barrier. Zatoichi at Large (Kazuo Mori, 1972) has perhaps the best pre-credits sequence of any movie ever and then settles into a rushed and blase tale of people failing to communicate even through there is no language barrier. And Zatoichi in Desperation (1972) sees star Shintaro Katsu step into the directors' chair much to the detriment of the series and our mental health.