Apologies for not having a newsletter last week. I had watched a few films, but they were slightly out of order because I had to return them to the library (this project wouldn’t be possible without my wonderful library which has hundreds of Criterion films in its catalogue). I didn’t have a ton to say, so I opted for combining the two weeks. But there’s an exciting announcement at the end of this week’s newsletter to hopefully make up for it.
Criterion Death Race Progress, August 5th through August 17th, 2024
#21. Dead Ringers, David Cronenberg, 1988
#22. Summertime, David Lean, 1955
#23. RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven, 1987
#25. Alphaville, Jean-Luc Godard, 1965
#26. The Long Good Friday, John Mackenzie, 1980
#27. Flesh for Frankenstein, Paul Morrissey, 1973
#28. Blood for Dracula, Paul Morrissey, 1974
#29. Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir, 1975
#30. M. Fritz Lang, 1931
#21. Dead Ringers
I like strange arthouse fare with a tendency to body horror, but Cronenberg and I have not always been on the same page. I liked Crash (1996, #1059) and Videodrome (1983, #248) had it’s moments, but I’ve never felt like I fully “got” the appeal of Cronenberg. Dead Ringers was no different, but I did have fun with it. It felt a lot like a Brian De Palma film of the same era (there’ll be several from in him due time). Jeremy Irons does a great job playing both of the twins, making them distinct and interesting. This is definitely a cult classic kind of movie, but I thought it was pretty good.
#22. Summertime
I’ve seen quite a few David Lean movies, and I’ve yet to see a bad one (more from him soon). This is not as grand as his Hollywood fare or as stirring as Brief Encounter (1945, #76), but it’s still a very solid movie. Katharine Hepburn gives a performance worthy of her talents as a middle age woman vacationing in Venice looking for something missing from her life. But she’s not sure what it is—love? romance? It’s a subtle mystery, left unsolved, but the journey is one of fleeting pleasure and moments of profound humanity. A very good movie.
#23. RoboCop
You probably didn’t know RoboCop was in the Criterion Collection because it seems so unlike a typical Criterion collection movie (and also because they lost the rights a long time ago). Sadly, it’s the only Verhoeven film in the collection (though I think they want Showgirls added if/when they can work out rights, but that’s just a gut feeling I have). So this is my lone chance to talk about one of my favorite directors. And everything that makes Verhoeven such a singular force is on display in this essentially perfect film. Of course it brings the action, but it also brings some big laughs in well-timed moments of satire. It’s amazing that a film so good at critiquing the privatized nature of American policing can also be so wildly entertaining. This, and so many other things, make RoboCop a film that is one of one, a film with as much style and message as many other films in the collection. This was my second time watching it, and it’s always great when an amazing film is even better the second time around. It goes without saying that RoboCop is a must-watch as one of the finest American films of the 1980s.
Where’s #24? See below.
#25. Alphaville
I generally like Godard films, but this one really didn’t work for me. Maybe I was in the wrong frame of mind for it, who knows. It’s a very sprawling and challenging work of science fiction poetry, but there didn’t seem to be anything under the surface if you put in the effort to really follow it. It was a little reminiscent of Godard’s Weekend (1967, #635) which also seemed like a half-formed idea with more flashy experimentation than coherent substance. You might like it more than me.
#26. The Long Good Friday
I was a bit distracted when I watched this, so I suspect it might land for me more when I rewatch it. Still, this was pretty good. In recent years I’ve struggled with some gangster mob movies which sometimes say something about masculinity, religion or violence, and sometimes are just kind of cool. I’m not sure which this is, but I did enjoy it. Bob Hoskins is a force to be reckoned with. It’s long been quite hard to find, but now it’s back streaming on the channel, and will be reissued in 4K and blu-ray later next month. I probably wont race out to get it, but maybe sometime down the line.
#27. Flesh for Frankenstein
This is very much a B horror movie with little budget and little substance. And that’s okay. It’s got enough artsy stuff going to make it watchable. But if you aren’t particularly into this horror aesthetic, it’s only barely watchable (and also very hard to find legally). The best I can see for it is that it’s interesting to think about it relation to Rocky Horror Picture Show a couple years later. That’s about it. This feels very much a lesser tier of Criterion, an oddity that’s fine to randomly watch on the channel but not worth full-fledged inclusion in the Criterion collection.
#28. Blood for Dracula
I didn’t think Flesh for Frankenstein was particularly good or interesting, but Blood for Dracula is the very rare Criterion movie that I actually think is pretty bad. The campy horniness of the first is here dialed up into full-on softcore territory to little meaningful effect. Sequels are rarely as good as the first, and that’s certainly the case here. Clearly it’s tossed in here to make it a duo of similar films, but this is the very rare film that I would actually take out of the collection. To some degree it’s “not for me,” but I actually think this film is bad. It falls below the mark of “important classic and contemporary films” that the Criterion collection espouses. I think it’s just a pretty bad movie.
#29. Picnic at Hanging Rock
I suppose I’d seen this before, a couple years ago, but it didn’t seem like it. Still, this is the kind of film that feels like you have to watch it several times before you have any kind of grasp of it. To call it more “vibes” than plot is putting it mildly, and slightly missing the point, as these vibes are kind of the whole thing (in a good way). Premised around a disappearance and ensuing mystery, the film tells you straight out at the beginning that the mystery remains unsolved. It dares you to believe it. Can you, as a viewer, accept a film that is not so much “ambiguous” as it is gleefully obtuse? If you can, the merits of Picnic are numerous, from the lush landscape shots to the brief glimpses of character that make you want to know more (which you never get). It’s a film squarely between Walkabout (Roeg, 1971, #10) and The Virgin Suicides (Coppola, 1999, #920). It won’t be for everyone, but especially in this hit-and-miss stretch the last couple of weeks, I was glad to have liked it a lot more this time around.
It hasn’t come up much yet, because most of the movies in these low numbers I haven’t seen before, but I’m glad that this project is forcing me to rewatch some of these. I probably would have rewatched Picnic at Hanging Rock eventually, but given my lackluster response the first time, it probably would have been 5 or 10 years from now. Sometimes I watch a film and feel like something was missing, and these films I’m eager to rewatch. But this wasn’t one of those times, so I’m glad this project forced me to reevaluate it. I needed that little push.
#30. M
I’ll make this simple: many people consider this one of the best films ever made, and I didn’t like it very much. This is very much a time when you should make up your own mind because, like with Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954, #2), I am very much in the minority here. I liked aspects of it, but I mostly found it too long, too slow, and a chore to get through. I really wanted to like it, but for whatever reason, I just didn’t.
Unfortunately there weren’t a lot of top-tier highlights in the 20s though RoboCop certainly towers tall. This might continue, with a couple of David Lean Dickens adaptations and the infamous Nanook of the North next up in the queue. I’m not a fan of Dickens, but if anyone can make me enjoy it, it would be Lean, but we shall see.
It’s not entirely fair to say that the 20s were lackluster because there’s one #20s movie we didn’t cover, Kurosawa’s High and Low, which I liked a lot when I first saw it. So why didn’t I address it this week? Well, because I thought it would be fun to save it for Noirvember in November. I love noir and this unofficial spotlight month for it to shine. With Noirvember, it’s fitting to similarly spotlight horror movies in October, so I’m going to do just that. There aren’t tons of horror titles in the collection, but there are plenty. So October will spotlight 15 films in the horror/thriller vein. We’re going way out of spine order here to pull titles ranging between #35 and #215. Then for Noirvember, the spotlight will be on 10 noir films with spines from #24 to #274. To do 15 would take us all the way into the 400s, and I didn’t want to stretch that far (there are plenty of noir titles in the collection, but most are in the 500s and later).
I think the next few weeks will be a hodgepodge of good and maybe not quite so good. Hopefully having these special focus months down the road can help sustain us through this stretch. If you have any ideas for other special focus moments, let me know. I’d hoped to watch a Gena Rowlands movie in tribute this week and include that here, but it didn’t happen.
Thanks for reading. Till next week!