Criterion Corner

Criterion Corner: Defending Your Life (#1071)

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We left off last time with a cinematic version of what the Great Beyond might be: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life, in which the newly deceased have a few days in a threadbare but friendly waystation to decide on the one memory that would be made into a film, and that film would then be all that remains of them for eternity.

Defending Your Life, Albert Brooks’ 1991 romantic comedy with a satirical slant, shares some surprising qualities with Kore-eda’s film. Its afterlife is also entirely mundane, though in a decidedly more American way, and it is likewise staffed with people who are there to determine what happens with you next. Like in After Life, none of the people who have just died question their fate, nor do they seem overly concerned with metaphysical questions. No one brings up God or religious belief, though in Brooks’ version of the hereafter people are somewhat concerned with heaven and hell – where will they go to next? But first there are more important questions – where will they go for dinner? This afterlife is a place of all-you-can-eat restaurants that will pack you nine pies to take back to your anonymous hotel room. Judgment City is the American hereafter, after all.

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Criterion Corner: After Life (#1089)

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You arrive at a sort of waystation. The people working there give you a room, they provide food, and they tell you what has happened.

You’ve died.

Also, you’ve got three days to choose a memory of yours. The staff will take that memory, turn it into a short film, and that will be what you are left with, and what is left of you, for eternity.

So, go ahead. Choose. It can’t be all that hard, can it?

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Criterion Corner: Miller’s Crossing (#1112)

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I only discovered the Coens and their films in 1996, with Fargo – a film that I loved the first time I saw it, and that I’ve only come to enjoy more and more every time I rewatch it. Which kinda messed up my first viewing of The Big Lebowski; I don’t know what exactly I expected, but I definitely didn’t expect this shaggy dog story of a Raymond Chandler parody. I have revisited the film repeatedly, though, and I’ve come to enjoy it a hell of a lot. Still, even though I bounced off of The Big Lebowski the first time around, I still tried to get my hands on some of the Coen brothers’ other films (possibly still on VHS at the time). One of the films I watched was Miller’s Crossing.

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Criterion Corner: La Piscine (#1088)

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Warning: The following post will spoil most of the plot of La Piscine. While it’s not necessarily a film to be watched for the twists and turns of the plot, be warned if you haven’t seen the film.

Really, it should be obvious: Maurice Ronet should stay well away from Alain Delon, and that goes double if they’re anywhere near water. The first time I saw the two of them together in a film (in Purple Noon, the French adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley), Delon’s Tom Ripley stabbed Philippe Greenleaf (played by Ronet) to death and tried to sink him to the bottom of the ocean. Let’s just say that Ronet doesn’t fare much better in La Piscine, and again, it’s Delon that dunnit. Apparently, the two were close friends, but if I’d been Ronet, I would have been very careful around the former when there’s a camera running anywhere nearby and when there’s water in the picture.

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Criterion Corner: Thelma & Louise (#1180)

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In her fascinating series “Erotic ’90s”, Karina Longworth, creator and host of the long-running podcast You Must Remember This, discusses Thelma & Louise, Ridley Scott’s early ’90s pop-feminist modern classic. (Should I leave out that “modern” once a film is over 30 years old?) I remember being faintly aware of the cultural conversation about Scott’s film at the time, but as a teenager in the pre-internet age I certainly didn’t get more than the occasional snippet. At school, our English teacher had a subscription to Newsweek, so I may have read an article about the film, but other than I wouldn’t have been known about the brouhaha in the US that Thelma & Louise prompted. Listening to Longworth’s podcast, it’s crazy to imagine the culture wars hysterics that gripped especially male critics – but then, in 2023, no amount of culture war craziness should come as much of a surprise.

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Criterion Corner: Army of Shadows (#385)

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Superficially, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows isn’t too dissimilar from the gangster movies the director is famous for: it is a chilly meditation on a world inhabited predominantly by men following a grim, unforgiving code. Trust is rare, paranoia habitual – but there are islands of friendship and absolute loyalty, so that betrayal, if and when it strikes, is all the more tragic. And yet: even if the protagonists of Army of Shadows resemble the cops and robbers of Le samouraï or Le cercle rouge, even if they live their lives according to similar rules, they are heroes in ways that Melville’s gangsters aren’t. Their goals aren’t self-serving. They fight the Nazi occupation of France.

So why does their fight feel so unheroic?

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Criterion Corner: Le silence de la mer (#755)

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There are many kinds of resistance. The one that’s perhaps most familiar to us – more so from the cinema screen than from personal experience, most likely – is that of taking up arms against the oppressor. The French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville made a number of films in which the French Résistance and its fight against the occupying German army featured, most famously perhaps Army of Shadows (which may come up more prominently in a future post), and as one might expect, the film depicts a heroic (if bleak) armed struggle.

While the setting is a similar one – the Second World War, occupied France -, the resistance of Le silence de la mer (The Silence of the Sea) is of a very different kind; as is, arguably, the characters’ struggle with each other and with themselves.

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Criterion Corner: Midnight Cowboy (#925)

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In my head, John Schlesinger’s 1969 classic Midnight Cowboy is intertwined with Miloš Forman’s 1979 adaptation of Hair for some reason, to such an extent that I tend to mix up Jon Voight and John Savage. I have no convincing explanation why this is the case, but I suspect it may be that I watched at least the beginning of Midnight Cowboy at an age when I was too young to really take in what the film was about, so all that stuck with me was a young hick from one of the more rural states taking a bus ride to New York to begin a new life and, once there, falling in with a very different crowd than what he was previously used to. Perhaps Harry Nilsson’s melancholy hit “Everybody’s Talkin'”, playing over the Greyhound ride Joe Buck (played by Voight) takes to the Big Apple, added to that mostly inaccurate memory.

Those similarities are there, but they’re entirely superficial. Where Hair‘s Claude Hooper Bukowski goes to New York City after being drafted into the Army to go to Vietnam, Joe Buck has drafted himself into a very different kind of service: he wants to put his carnal talents, and his cowboy outfit, to good use to make the women and men of New York happy. And there’s no idealised, singing hippie tribe waiting to take Joe under their wings, but a fidgety, coughing con man named Rico “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), who at first is eager to trick the naive Texas hick out of twenty dollars – but then, for a while, becomes the midnight cowboy’s only friend and companion.

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Criterion Corner: Rififi (#115)

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Perhaps my experience of watching Jules Dassin’s Rififi for the first time would have been different, or at least more smooth, if I’d remembered its original French title: Du rififi chez les hommes. The English title, especially if you (like me) don’t know what the word ‘rififi’ means. The film is kind enough to provide something of an explanation, in the form of a song performed in a nightclub to an audience of gangsters, hoodlums and molls: rififi is brouhaha, trouble, especially the kind that goes on between gangsters over money, women, the size of their guns. But without that knowledge, the title Rififi sounded like a cocktail, a musical style that makes you snap your fingers, or a Mediterranean resort town. This together with the film often being described as the quintessential heist movie made me expect something jazzy, breezy, stylish. Something fun.

So when fifteen minutes into Rififi the main character makes his former girlfriend strip and then brutally beats her with a belt because she’d gone off with another man while he was serving five years in prison, I was taken aback – especially when the film in the scenes following the violence seemed to shrug and go, “Well, that’s what men are like, that’s what women are like, and that’s how everyone likes it.” I was ready to press STOP, eject the disk from the Blu-ray player, put it away and never think of Rififi again.

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Criterion Corner: Show Boat (#1021)

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What is it I look for in a Criterion release? Why do I not just get every single film released by the Criterion Collection? It would certainly save me some time – upfront, at least, though not necessarily afterwards, when I actually have to watch these films. Not that it’s a chore, but my various media backlogs and the increasing unlikelihood that I’ll actually get to finish all the films, series, books, games etc. that I’ve amassed in my life to date are already making me more anxious than I like. (#firstworldproblemsamirite?)

So, what is it that makes me buy a Criterion release? Obviously, the first reason is that they release a film that I already like, or the work of filmmakers and actors that I already enjoy. Next, sometimes it’s a film that I’ve heard a lot about, one of those stone-cold classics that I’ve never got around to watching on TV, and what better way to first see a classic than a good remaster with interesting extras included on the disc? (Okay, the correct answer to this is often: at the cinema. But while I’m very happy with our local cinema releases of classics, they will never cover everything I’m interested in.) Sometimes it’s simply that I’ve never heard of a certain Criterion release, or perhaps only snippets and a still here and there, but what I read makes it sound intriguing, strange or fascinating in some other way. I mean, if it’s Criterion, it’s gotta be good, right?

The final type of Criterion purchases I make comes from me feeling somewhat guilty that I’m not more broadly interested in the history of cinema. Obviously I am interested, but then I look at Julie or Alan, our two resident movie historians, and I see their fascinating with and breadth of knowledge on classic Hollywood, whether we’re talking about the classics of silent movies or pre-Code Hollywood, and there’s a part of my movie-fan ego that feels vaguely inadequate.

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