Back to basic Criterion

 
There have been times when months pass without my watching anything on the Criterion Channel and I begin to think about canceling my charter subscription, but then I’ll recall what a resource it is, and begin to find plenty to watch.  It definitely is one of the bedrock sources for streaming availability.  But I have to say, it might better to subscribe only intermittently, when there is something specific I want to explore, either director or performer, genre or theme, nationality or era.
 
Here I intend to catch up with brief notices of some of the old and new films I’ve watched in passing over recent months, and also to dig a little deeper into Criterion’s offerings, especially as some other streaming channels fall into Covid-delayed production.  I’ve been keeping up this list for a while, but will start this survey with a recent viewing that could easily have fallen under the heading of my recent post “Delving into mental health.”
 
John Cassavetes is more of a hero to younger independent filmmakers than he is to me, and I’ve never really undertaken a survey of his work, much of which is on Criterion.  I’m not even sure which of his films I’ve even seen.  In truth, I didn’t uncover any memories of having ever seen A Woman Under the Influence (1974, MC-88), generally taken to be his best film, earning a Best Director nomination, while his wife and star Gena Rowlands won a Best Actress nod.  It’s a peculiarly compelling piece of work, overlong and overwrought, but you can’t look away or guess what might happen next.  Rowlands goes well beyond tics and eccentricities to depict a young wife and mother fighting off psychic disintegration.  She’s beautiful and charming, perceptive and honest in her own way, at times a little scared and scary, but by no means is she the craziest person in this family, just a sensitive soul who is the bearer of others’ dysfunction.  At least that’s how I read it.  Peter Falk as the husband has his loving moments, but he’s an overbearing brute, a laboring man’s man.  His mother (played by Cassavetes’ mother) is the greatest cross that Rowlands has to bear, with scant help from her own mother (played by her real mother).  Three children are her refuge and her delight.  I appreciate the naturalism of the film, and the violence of its emotions, and Gena Rowlands is a wonder, but I find myself resisting the character of the director more than that of his characters.  He doesn’t seem like a guy I would want to know (an image perhaps derived from his role in Rosemary’s Baby).  I thought to take a look at a couple of his other films, but couldn’t get past ten minutes into either.
 
Fishing for titles on the channel, I paid attention to an email blurb on the most-watched movies of the month and noticed the unknown-to-me 1999 film Clockwatchers (MC-64).  Seeing that it starred Toni Collette, Parker Posey, and Lisa Kudrow, I needed no further recommendation.  With that cast, the Sprecher sisters – writer Karen and director Jill – could hardly go far wrong, but in truth they didn’t go far right.  Four temps work in the sterile, big-brother-ish atmosphere of a credit office, but find a fragile little community of their own.  Somewhere in the continuum between 9 to 5 and The Office (UK version), this film finds its modest little niche.
 
As if to show me what I’d be missing without it, the Criterion Channel recently brought out a new collection that suggested just how essential a subscription can be:  Art-House Animation.  Of the 32 films in the series, I’d seen six, liked them all, and reviewed them here previously:  Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress (2001, MC-70) and Paprika (2006, MC-81), Persepolis (2007, MC-90), Waltz with Bashir (2008, MC-91), Chico & Rita (2010, MC-76), and Tower (2016, MC-92).
 
So I made big plans to watch and comment on the entire series, but then decided against a deep dive, though I may revisit the list from time to time.  There are only two I’ve gotten to so far, one the most recent and the other most recommended.  I was quite enamored of the painterly style of No. 7 Cherry Lane (2019, MC-72), the first animated film from longtime director Yonfan.  It’s a visually stunning portrait of Hong Kong in the late Sixties, when it was still a British colony, and nothing like the international trading city it would become.  But the protests against British rule prefigure the unrest over today’s takeover by Beijing.  The story is likely autobiographical, with a nod to The Graduate, about an English literature major who falls for a beautiful, willful girl he’s tutoring, and then discovers his true love in her mother, who derives an inner liberation from the films of Simone Signoret and erotic dreams of a Taoist nun.  Personally I’d never seen a Yonfan film before, and I can bet you’ve never seen an animation quite like this – swooningly sensual, nostalgically melancholic, mesmerizingly surreal, and very adult.
 
It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012, MC-90) couldn’t be more different.  Don Hertzfeldt’s crudely-drawn, low-def graphics combine with stark deadpan narration to tell the tribulations of Bill, an existentially distraught stick-figure neurotic.  Some love the dark humor of it all, you may hate it, I fall somewhere in-between.  Though I have to say, I stopped watching the collection after this – but I’ll give some others a try at some point.
 
Agnès Varda is always worth a watch and Criterion has nearly all of her work, ideal to discover or revisit.  I’ve written about her films before, and may some day put together a not-exhaustive career summary, if and when I go back and re-watch her earlier fiction films, in the context of her great late career as an autobiographical documentary essayist.   From her middle period, Mur Murs (1981) was a revelation, the possibly over-clever title (Wall Walls in French) unfolding into a bracing documentary about the mural traditions of L.A.  But there’s no denying the cleverness of her visuals in depicting the murals in juxtaposition both to the artists who painted them and the largely-black-and-brown community who live with, and are celebrated within, these painted landscapes.  (This film was an accomplished precursor to her acclaimed later documentary, Faces Places – Visages Villages in French.)  Documenteur (1981) was made at the same time in the same places, and actually features her 8-year old son Mathieu Demy, playing the son of the main character, a divorced Frenchwoman trying to make a go of it in the unglamorous precincts of the City of Angels.  Sensuous and probing, in the Varda manner, this short feature film does not have the impact of her major work.
 
A similar pairing occurred later that decade with Kung-Fu Master! and Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988), the latter a documentary profile of Jane Birkin, and the former a feature film written by and starring Jane B. with a teen Mathieu Demy as her love interest, and her teen daughter played by her real daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg.  Both films are curiosities, and dependent on the viewer’s interest in Ms. Birkin (from scandalous nude scene in Blow-up, through storied film, fashion, and music career, to the eponymous handbag).  They also are testaments to the friendship between the two women, and there must have been some difficult moments for Agnès serving as de facto intimacy counselor in love scenes between her friend and her own 14-year-old son, who is the master game player of the title.
 
A great find on the CC was Vittorio De Seta’s excellent series of ten short documentaries, made in wide-screen color in the late 1950s, set in Sicily and Calabria.  They depict a peasant lifestyle that goes back centuries, and gave me a vivid sense of my paternal ancestry.
 
Another documentary find was Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Earth (2020, MC-72), a further devastating case about humans as the predominant geological force of this era, horrifically beautiful in the same vein as Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (reviewed here), and continuing Geyrhalter’s career project from Our Daily Bread (review here).  Rather than adding ominous music or gloomy narration, with each depiction of the eight worldwide sites of massive earth-moving, he directly interviews the operators of the huge machines that move mountains, for one reason or another.  Most love the grit and power of their job, but have reservations about the impact of their work.  The film offers a paradoxical mix of wonder and horror in cautionary tableaux.
 
There were some Criterion exclusives that appeared among the best films of 2020 on Metacritic’s critics poll.  Personally, I was unimpressed by Bacurau (MC-82), an odd hybrid of political thriller and sci-fi from Brazil, and could not bear to watch Vitalina Varela (MC-86), so dark and slow, for more than a few minutes.  One CC “exclusive” that did make my 2020 list of favorites, Sorry We Missed You (reviewed here), I’d already watched at first opportunity on Kanopy.
 
Then there are older TCM-type films that balance CC’s exhaustive range of Janus Films from the golden age of cinephilia.   There were quite a few that filled in minor gaps in my vintage film viewing.  I note them in passing, just to fulfill the very earliest purpose of Cinema Salon, to record what I’ve seen so I don’t watch it again (unless I really want to). 
 
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The Grass is Greener (1960) was one of my better finds, from a Cary Grant collection in which I’d seen all the rest.  He stars with Deborah Kerr as an aristocratic British couple, with Jean Simmons as the playgirl with her eyes on Cary, and Robert Mitchum as a visiting American who falls for Deborah.  Stanley Donen directs in the tradition of marital comedy, and I must say, I quite enjoyed it, rah-ther. 
 
Not so keen on a similar find in a Judy Holliday collection, The Marrying Kind (1952).  Under George Cukor’s direction, we find her entering divorce court with her husband (Aldo Ray).  The judge recesses and takes the couple into chambers to see whether “this marriage can be saved.”  We see the history of their relationship in flashbacks narrated by each.  The most distinctive aspect of the film is the location shooting in NYC.
 
The same applied to Naked City (1947), shot mostly on the streets of Manhattan in the year I was born, places that would become familiar to me during my own sojourn there in the mid-70s.  Jules Dassin’s classic film noir jumps off from Weegee’s photographs to a police procedural starring Barry Fitzgerald, which would spawn the popular 1950s tv series: “There are eight million stories in the Naked City, and you have just seen one.”
 
Film noir is not a genre for which I feel a particular affinity, but I do try to catch up with some of the more highly praised examples.  Moonrise (1948), however, did not make me look around more in a Frank Borzage collection.
 
On the other hand, there are some Mitchell Leisen films that I have liked, but the draw in No Man of Her Own (1950) was Barbara Stanwyck, a great favorite of mine.  I reviewed dozens of her films in a career summary, but won’t feel compelled to add this one.  Babs is the jilted lover of a cad, who sends her home pregnant and penniless on a cross-country train, but in a preposterous premise, she assumes the identity of a new bride, unknown to her husband’s well-to-do family, after the couple (and unborn child) die suddenly on their way home from an extended honeymoon abroad.  Further implausibilities ensue, but Stanwyck is always emotionally believable.
 
The Cobweb (1955) is a real oddity, directed by Vincent Minnelli and starring tough-guy Richard Widmark as a psychiatrist at a tony private psychiatric clinic (McLean’s, perhaps?).  Gloria Grahame plays his neglected wife, Charles Boyer the founder he’s trying to supplant, and Lauren Bacall an art therapist to whom he’s attracted.  A big mishegoss develops over a change in the common room drapes.  Both the cast and setting have inherent interest, but nothing struck me as particularly authentic.
 
St. Louis Blues (1958) was a W.C.Handy biopic starring Nat King Cole and Eartha Kitt, and a host of black performers including Ella Fitzgerald and Mahalia Jackson.  An interesting period piece, both of the subject’s early 20^th-century era and the time of the film’s making.
 
Most recently, a Richard Brody rave in the NYer impelled me to an unknown film by a director with whom I have only a passing familiarity.  Despite Brody’s advocacy, Ernst Lubitsch’s That Uncertain Feeling (1941) is not some lost masterpiece from between Shop Around the Corner and To Be or Not to Be.  Rather than a censor-duping marvel of innuendo, it strikes me as a late and lesser entry in the genre of “screwball comedy of remarriage.”  Merle Oberon is not the most sparkling of actresses, but it was fun to see Melvyn Douglas and Burgess Meredith as dashing leading men, rather than the grizzled old timers familiar to me from, say, Hud or Rocky.
 
I was happy to catch a film I remembered fondly from its initial release but hadn’t seen since.  Joan Micklin Silver’s Between the Lines (1977) seems a truthful though humorous look inside a Boston alternative newspaper (The Real Paper, perhaps?), and stars the youthful John Heard and Lindsay Crouse, along with Jeff Goldblum and a host of faces that would become familiar, as well as places that would become familiar to me in the interval between then and now.
 
Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (2013, MC-91) has bounced around a number of streaming channels, and when it wound up on Criterion, I took the opportunity to revisit a favorite and show it to someone who I thought would like this highly personal and twisty exploration of family and identity.  She did, and I did, marveling at the mix of autobiography and performance.  Otherwise, I just ditto my previous review.
 
In the vein of revisiting, there are a couple of films I want to tack on under this Criterion heading, wherever you may happen to find them.  Terms of Endearment (1983) is a multiple Oscar-winner that does not hold up.  In fact, it collapses like a house of Hallmark cards.  So much closer to the 1950s than to our own day, as if the 1970s had never happened in Hollywood.  I only re-watched because I have latterly become a Debra Winger fan, but I couldn’t even make it to her big deathbed scene.  I definitely had a thing for Shirley Maclaine when I was a teen (The Apartment, Irma la Douce), but found her extremely grating in this, likewise Jack Nicholson as her boyfriend.  It was more pleasant to see Jeff Daniels and John Lithgow back in the early part of their careers.  I’ll take another look at An Officer and a Gentleman and/or Urban Cowboy, to see if they are any more tolerable.  Though as I recollect, I looked down my nose at those films when they came out, much as I disdain the franchise films of today.
 
Surprisingly, I actually enjoyed An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), even though it was cornball and borderline offensive in its stereotypes.  Richard Gere and Debra Winger definitely have “it,” and they deliver their roles with conviction and authenticity.  And Taylor Hackford looks more like a film director than tv director James L. Brooks.  This film remains retrograde, but is a throwback to some of the higher points of Hollywood romantic melodrama.