Viewing Criterion

By cost-benefit analysis, the Criterion Channel for a while seemed to be the streaming service I could best afford to cancel, but sentimental and prudential reasons kept me from doing so.  I didn’t want to relinquish my charter subscription rate ($10/mo), and even when I wasn’t watching much, I wished to support Criterion’s outstanding efforts to preserve and present classic films.  I even considered it payback for all the quality that Criterion Collection disks contributed to the Cinema Salon film club at the Clark. 

But for that very reason, there was not a lot on the channel that I hadn’t seen, or else probably didn’t want to.  So it was either a matter of filling in the odd omission or lacuna in my viewing, or re-watching something familiar.  Both may be combined in the “Collections” the channel presents from month by month, either by director or star or theme.  I figured I’d get around to availing myself of that resource, in adding more “Career Summaries” in the column to the right of this page. 

It turned out to be a “Starring Burt Lancaster” collection that got me started down that path.  First I watched a couple films I’d never seen before, by directors of interest.  But then I went on a Burt spree that spun off a career summary as a sidebar.  By the time I worked my way through that collection, I’d become committed to the essential primacy of the Criterion Channel among streaming options.

So here I embark on an ongoing diary of my random walk through the channel’s offerings.  There’s no better place to begin our stroll down memory lane than Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night (1974), my sentimental favorite if not the greatest of his films.  There are many films that repay re-watching, but I know of no other that regenerates the original joy of seeing it every time, except for once when I saw a dumb dubbed version.  I feel that I know every frame of this film, yet it surprises me by never failing to deliver that delicious jolt of cinephilia.  Partly for the music, with what is for me the most evocative movie score of all time.  Then of course there’s the autobiographical pleasure of seeing my favorite director playing a pretty direct version of himself.  If you have any interest in films about filmmaking, this is the greatest of them all (though there are lots of good ones).  On the theme of autobiography, I have to recall that the peak moment of my “career” in film programming was the month I lured a solid score or more of Cinema Salon film club regulars through a whole series of seven double features in a Truffaut retrospective.  That was when I should have written up a career summary appreciation of the lodestar of my film universe, but I suspect I’ll get around to it eventually, when I tire of watching anything new. 

I revisited another favorite New Wave director, Eric Rohmer, with The Green Ray (1986), one of his “Comedies & Proverbs” series, originally released in this country with the generic title Summer.  In commentary on Rohmer’s recent centenary, this was frequently cited among the best of his films, though what stood out in my memory was the irritable and irritating central character.  Well, upon reviewing, Marie Riviere is all that, but also a lot more.  Really a co-author in fact, since this is a rare Rohmer that is largely improvised.  A young Parisian woman has recently broken up with her boyfriend, and now a planned vacation with a girlfriend falls through, so how will she fill the sacrosanct August vacation?  Another friend urges her to join a group in Cherbourg, but she feels restless and lonely there, returns to Paris, then gets the loan of an apartment in the Alps but after one lone hike does not even stay the night, finally out of the blue she gets the offer of an apartment in Biarritz, where she remains sad and querulous.  Until at the last minute, fate intervenes.  The storyline seems simple, but takes in a lot, not least a travelogue of French vacation spots.  The film was re-released a few years ago, which may be why it is more familiar and praised than many of Rohmer’s woefully-unavailable films.  This is the more lamentable because as much as any auteur ever, his entire career makes one work within a singular pageant. 

Besides his most famous early series, “Six Moral Tales” (My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee, etc.), relatively few of Rohmer’s films are available for streaming.  I particularly want to revisit the later “Tales of Four Seasons,” most of which never reached DVD either.  But I did find one of the “Comedies and Proverbs” that I’d never seen, Full Moon in Paris (1984, Kanopy), which is completely different and totally the same as the film it precedes.  Written dialogue, mostly on carefully designed sets, but still a restless young woman trying to fathom her own mind and will, in interaction with others.  Here’s hoping Criterion presents further Eric Rohmer collections that will prompt me to another full career summary, though I did a previous survey here.

While eagerly awaiting the streaming release of her final film, Varda by Agnès, I’ve looked around in the CC collection, “Directed by Agnès Varda.”  One film I hadn’t seen since its original release seemed likely to register differently decades later:  I remembered One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977) as a milestone in the era of “Women’s Liberation,” but not much beyond that.  It was a pleasure to revisit the film and the era, which straddles Roe v. Wade in this country and women’s struggle for control of their bodies in France, through the relations of two women over a period of years.  One is an apple-cheeked, dandelion-haired, tie-dyed hippie who becomes the singer; the other is slightly older, with sad eyes and straight black hair, with two children already.  The former helps the latter get an abortion in Switzerland, then their lives diverge until they meet a decade later at a pro-choice rally.  Varda’s inimitable mix of fiction and documentary -- along with her intelligence, activism, and good humor – is on full display.

I watched some of her early shorts, and might someday take another look at Vagabond and Le Bonheur, but a new film to me was Lion’s Love (1969), but I couldn’t get more than ten minutes into it, with some of the Warhol crowd coming to California.  On the other hand, Black Panthers (1968), a documentary short from the same period, when Varda and Demy were living in California, definitely retains interest.  One of Varda’s films that I had been looking for was her celebration of her deceased husband’s career, The World of Jacques Demy (1995), which was quite endearing and led me to venture beyond The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and his other canonical work.

Having seen no more than half of Demy’s films, I enjoyed catching up with A Slightly Pregnant Man (1973), appropriately slight but quite amusing, in a different twist on his fairy tale style.  It stars Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve right around the time they were making Chiara (now an actress herself, whom I always find fascinating for the way her face morphs between her very different but both beautiful parents).  He’s a driving instructor and she’s a salon operator, and they have an 8-year-old who must be one of the least appealing kids ever to appear on screen.  Marcello is quite funny in a deadpan manner as the symptoms of pregnancy overtake him, and there’s plenty of opening for social satire.  Catherine is a riot of long blond curls, bright colors, and outlandish clothes, in Demy’s eye-popping style.

I had less interest in Une chambre en ville (1982), in which Demy fails to recapture the magic of Umbrellas of Cherbourg or Young Girls of Rochefort, in a working-class story with all-singing dialogue.  For one thing, Dominique Sanda is no Catherine Deneuve, and whatever autobiographical interest there might have been for Demy to revisit the time and place (Nantes) of his youth, is drowned out by the nonsensical melodrama of the story.

From a more current category of the channel’s offerings, I watched Jafar Panahi’s latest, 3 Faces (2019, MC-78), which I quite enjoyed, but cannot recommend to anyone who has not seen his films (or those of his recently-deceased mentor Abbas Kiarostami, to whom this is an implicit homage) from before the Iranian government banned him from making them (this is the fourth “not-a-film” he’s created since then).  With the appropriate background and context, this is an engrossing and amusing self-reflective docu-fiction; without that, it seems slight and inconsequential.  Panahi himself drives a famous Iranian actress to a remote Azeri village in the north (reminiscent of his earlier Taxi, and Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry), in search of a young woman who sent a video of herself committing suicide because her family would not allow her to go to acting school in Teheran.  Both the humor and the social critique are too subtle for the casual viewer, but if like me you have a particular interest in Iranian cinema, this is a must-see.

Criterion also has the final film from Kiarostami himself, 24 Frames (2018, MC-77).  I confess to watching only 8 of the Frames, and skipping through the rest, and there’s no way I’m going to convince you to watch this, or even try, unless you happen to be into video art installations.  After making films in Italy and Japan, Kiarostami apparently returned to Iran in the last three years of his life and avoided interference by working in this non-narrative, semi-animated style.  Each Frame is four minutes or so, and animates a still image, turning a painting or photograph into a meditative fable.  The first is a Bruegel winter scene, where smoke rises and snow comes down, a crow flies and a dog takes a leak.  After that, he works with his own stark and lustrous black & white photographs, landscapes and seascapes mostly, inserting birds and animals and the occasional shock.  Some are exceptionally involving, and some are tedious, but all require patient viewing.  So in elegy, I quote my comments on his two previous narrative films, which apply as well to this one.  Of Certified Copy I said, “If you’ve seen Close-Up or Taste of Cherry (and if you haven’t, you should), you will know that Kiarostami can wring endless convolutions of meaning out of the simplest means, with an aura of intellectual mystery, if not mystification.”  Of Like Someone in Love, “He makes you think, to be ever seeking for his meaning, yet in a manner that instills confidence that there is meaning to be found.”

In a Jean Arthur collection, I managed to catch an enjoyable double-feature of films I’d never seen.  I’m not a particular fan of the three she did with Frank Capra (Mr. Deeds…,Mr. Smith…,You Can’t Take It With You), nor of screwball comedy as a genre (unless we’re talking Stanwyck or Hepburn), but these two old movies managed to take me a bit by surprise.  The Devil and Miss Jones (1941) is a late-Depression comedy, directed by Sam Wood, in which capital and labor are reconciled in the good-heartedness of said Miss Jones, as played by Miss Arthur.  Her boyfriend (Robert Cummings) is a union organizer in the department store where they both work, and the devilish owner of the department store (and much more) is played by Charles Coburn.  The More the Merrier (1943) is saucier, with the topical hook of the housing shortage in D.C. as thousands arrived in Washington in the wartime expansion of the federal government.  Charles Coburn is again the plutocrat, in town to lobby Congress for support of his housing scheme.  He seeks a hard-to-find room when he arrives too early for his hotel reservation (“Full speed ahead” is his constant refrain) and barges in to take the spare bedroom in Jean Arthur’s apartment.  In turn he rents out half his room to Joel McCrea, and proceeds to play Cupid to the two younger people.  Good fun in a silly way, this George Stevens film earned Miss Arthur her first Oscar nomination, probably as a career nod, as she was on the verge of stepping back from Hollywood after a decade as its most popular sweetheart.

I’ll comment on a few more films I’ve come across on the Criterion Channel in random browsing, but in the course of this post I have confirmed it as an essential streaming service, well worth its monthly subscription. 

From the time I watched the excellent HBO documentary Jane Fonda in Five Acts, I wanted to take another look at her Oscar-winning performance in Klute (1971), and then it turned up in a Criterion collection called “’70’s Style Icons.”  Jane’s performance certainly holds up, and takes added dimension from all the other acts of her life, up to her recent civil disobedience over climate change.  Though Donald Sutherland has the title role, he’s meant to be a cipher, a private detective from the sticks, on the trail of a missing man who seems to have been involved with a high-class Manhattan call girl named Bree Daniels.  Fonda makes every aspect of her life believable, and would have been even more so, if she weren’t trapped in Alan Pakula’s attempt to make a latter-day noir-ish thriller.  Better yet if the film were just a series of vignettes of Bree/Jane doing her versatile seductive act for various men, and then maybe talking about the encounters with her therapist.  Klute is a decent indecent movie, Bree could have been a brainy erotic masterpiece.

A Special Day was one of a dozen or so pairings of Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, directed by Ettore Scola in 1977, which I’d heard of but never seen till Criterion restored and released it.  A far cry from Marriage Italian-Style, it’s a poignant two-hander set against the backdrop of Hitler’s 1938 visit to Mussolini in Rome, which has cleared out the entire housing complex and left two solitary individuals, who will inevitably cross paths.  Sophia’s the unappreciated mother of six, all off to the parade with her Fascist husband.  Marcello’s packing his bags in anticipation of deportation for expressing anti-Fascist views on the radio, and other deviancies.  They intertwine in a delicate duo of loneliness and longing, repression and release. 

I always check the monthly list of expiring titles, to see if there’s any I don’t want to miss.  Or have never heard of, like Girl on a Motorcycle (1968).  A few things caught my interest -- year of release, directed by famous cinematographer Jack Clayton, starring Marianne Faithfull. Call it a period piece from my era, or call it a guilty pleasure, but I didn’t mind watching.  A year ahead of Easy Rider, this film exploits the visual splendor of following a motorcycle through varying landscapes, occasionally shading into psychedelic lightshow.  Also the visual splendor of the leading lady, clad (and unclad) only in a leather jumpsuit with an inviting zipper.  There is definitely a tune Ms. Faithfull can carry, though registers she cannot reach.  I even enjoyed her working in a bookstore.  Until Alain Delon walks in, and the hot stuff commences, with the motorcycle the primary fetish.  Many voiceover Sixties platitudes, and more than a whiff of misogyny, makes this something that has to be watched with brackets around it.  Both the philosophy and the sex turn risible, but there’s a perverse nostalgia to it.

Since titles cycle in and out of availability on the Criterion Channel, I can’t guarantee any particular title covered in this post will still be on the streaming service when you look for it, but I can guarantee that there will be lots of new and old films well worth seeing.  Certainly enough to warrant an occasional month’s subscription, if not a continuing commitment.  (A lot of them are also available through Kanopy, if you have a library connection.) 

Odds & ends

I’m working my way through two composite posts arranged around different themes, which will go online soon.  In the meantime, I will collect my off-topic commentary under this heading, and update accordingly.

When my brother posted his own Top 25 list of political movies, which I took as the sincerest form of flattery, I endorsed his picks in turn, but they led me to two recent films I’d missed, because I need a particular reason to see anything with a Metacritic rating of less than 75.  The only film on his list that I hadn’t seen was Miss Sloane (2016, MC-64, AMZ), and I was glad to watch it.  Jessica Chastain in the title role would have been enough, but the supporting cast is generally good, and John Madden’s direction is workmanlike, though the story is over-plotted and under-characterized.  Miss Chastain is a Washington lobbyist who is red of lips and nails (and hair) in a world that is red in tooth and claw.  When the firm she works for signs on with the gun lobby, she flips (!) to the opposite side.  Though gun control is her cause, her genuine goal is winning, and all’s fair to keep a step ahead of the other side.  It’s not a pretty picture, and this was before Trump!  D.C. really is a swamp, and our gal here is one fierce alligator.

Chris mentioned Election as one film he’d missed, and I replied that it would perfectly replace his one clunker – with one of my all-time favorites, the film that made me a life-long fan of Reese Witherspoon and director Alexander Payne.  Thinking of Payne made me wonder what he’d done lately, which led me to the overlooked Downsizing (2017, MC-63, Hulu), and again I was glad to watch it, even if it didn’t come up to his best.  The film takes an intriguing premise, and amusing set-up, to wander all over the map, both literally and figuratively.  Norwegian scientists have discovered how to shrink people to a height of five inches, and propose that as an answer to ecological disaster, as a way to use less of the world’s resources.  But science in the service of capitalism and marketing means the creation of the ultimate in gated communities for small people, where their assets in the big world buy them so much more.  Matt Damon is our bland Nebraskan surrogate in entering this world.  Things do not turn out as he expects, and the story takes many twists, too convoluted to recount, for him to end up linked with a peg-legged Vietnamese dissident, a character who was criticized in p.c. circles, but whom I found touching and very well acted.  Too ambitious and diffuse, this sci-fi satire is a departure for Payne but still fun to watch.

I watched several documentaries on the principle of “know your enemy.”  Donald Trump found the answer to his own question with William Barr, but Where’s My Roy Cohn? (MC-70, Starz) explains why he was asking in the first place, by going back to its subject, the sleazy lawyer whose smear is all over postwar political shenanigans, from McCarthy to the mob to Nixon to Reagan to Trump, up to his own death from AIDS, in spite of denial by the closeted homosexual.  This evil lizard of a man laid down many of the rules Trump follows to this day: defend by attacking, win at all costs, by any means necessary.  It’s an amazing mystery that such an odious person could succeed for so long as a power broker at the highest levels.  A mystery we haven’t solved yet, though this film offers some clues.  Pairs well with PBS “American Experience” doc McCarthy to show how America started down the road to where we are now.

 

Though he is off the main stage these days, Steve Bannon is definitely one of the culprits in where we are now, but I had to watch American Dharma (MC-62, Kanopy) because I almost never miss an Errol Morris film.  On the one hand Morris is giving Bannon a platform he hardly deserves, but on the other hand revealing the man as a self-promoting fantasist who fancies himself an American mythologist, deep thinker, and master of all media.  As with McNamara and Rumsfeld and many other subjects, Morris reveals more about them than they can imagine as they seem to be having their own say.  His directorial flourishes, burning flags and such, as well as some of his interview questions, make it clear enough where he stands, but he does offer extended clips from the 1950s war films and Westerns that provide Bannon’s myths.

Though I wish I’d seen the last of Bannon, a number of comparative comments made me look up The Brink (MC-71, Hulu).  While it’s not exactly enjoyable to spend another hour and a half in his company, Alison Klayman’s fly-on-the-wall verité documentary does carry the so-called “populist-nationalist” story through the 2018 midterms and out into the world.  After being dumped by Trump and then Breitbart, Bannon marginalized himself by ardent support for pedophile nutcase Roy Moore (to replace Jeff Sessions in Senate), then took his act on the road to Europe, where he tried to form a consortium of neo-fascists in Britain, France, Italy, Hungary, and elsewhere.  While Bannon is more adept at self-promotion than political action, it’s useful to see and understand how he is exploiting, and trying to extend, right-wing political movements around the globe.

At the opposite pole of documentary portraits, Crip Camp (MC-86, NFX) follows a number of differently-abled young people from a Catskill summer camp run by hippies in the 1970s, where they first experienced acceptance and inclusion, to decades of future activism and advocacy that climaxed with passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act.  A thoughtful and empathetic recounting of a civil rights success, it’s no surprise that this is another production sponsored by the Obamas.

To polish off my month’s subscription to Starz, I re-watched 24 Hour Party People (2002, MC-85), which I originally saw because of my interest in director Michael Winterbottom but turned out to be my first encounter with Steve Coogan, and I have followed their careers avidly since, both together and apart.  Coogan plays Tony Wilson, a tv celebrity who turned Manchester into a lively music scene in the 1980s.  I didn’t know any of these bands (Joy Division/New Order, Happy Mondays, etc.) before this film, and I still wouldn’t put them on a playlist, but I appreciated the energy, audacity, and humor of the actor, the music, and the filmmaking.

I sought out the rural Turkish picaresque Wild Pear Tree (MC-86, Kanopy) because I follow the career of Nuri Bilge Ceylan (esp. rec. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia), but I did so in a very disjointed way, which seemed to fit with the leisurely and episodic nature of this long film.  A recent university grad returns to his provincial region, to hang out at his parents’ place, hoping to avoid either a teaching or a military assignment.  He goes around with an autobiographical manuscript about the region, looking for a way to get it published, and having extended conversations with businessmen and political functionaries, authors and imams.  To call him hangdog would be a slur on our canine friends.  He seems like a bundle of grievance and need, and yet the conversations are engrossing.  Even one with a woman other than his mother or sister!  Ultimately he comes across as understandable, if not sympathetic.  Though the author of the book within the film makes a cameo appearance himself, you sense from earlier acquaintance that Ceylan is painting a sardonic self-portrait on another’s canvas.