The Criterion Collection Archives - Page 2 of 6

An Actor’s Revenge (1963) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

May 9, 20181960s, 2018, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Japan, Revenge, The Criterion Collection

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Kazuo Hasegawa, Fujiko Yamamoto, Ayako Wakao, Eiji Funakoshi
screenplay by Natto Wada, based on the novel by Otokichi Mikami, adapted by Daisuke Ito and Teinosuke Kinugasa
directed by Kon Ichikawa

by Bryant Frazer An Actor’s Revenge, director Kon Ichikawa’s colourful melodrama depicting an elaborate revenge plot by a Japanese onnagata–a kabuki actor trained to play exclusively female roles–begins, appropriately enough, in the Ichimura Theater, where the very first shot illustrates that a panoramic aspect ratio is a perfect match for the wide proscenium. On stage, beefy and androgynous, is Yukinojo (Kazuo Hasegawa), a renowned onnagata appearing in Edo for the first time. This beautiful sequence, defined by Ichikawa’s precise, modern Daiescope framing and by the intense reds, pinks, purples, and greens of Yukinojo’s costume, is not just kabuki on film. It’s simultaneously an expression of character, showing how Yukinojo experiences the rest of the world while in performance, and a declaration of aesthetics, introducing Ichikawa’s stylized approach using techniques borrowed from or inspired by theatre.

The Breakfast Club (1985) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 12, 20181980s, 2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, John Hughes, Teen, The Criterion Collection

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Emilio Estevez, Paul Gleason, Anthony Michael Hall, John Kapelos
written and directed by John Hughes

by Bill Chambers Necessity is the mother of invention, and The Breakfast Club‘s iconic plot–aped so often it’s become a modern myth, like Rashomon–was designed to ease John Hughes into directing and keep the budget low. The script wasn’t just a formality, though, proof of that being his refusal to cast Jimmie “J.J.” Walker (then in his mid-30s and a frequent passenger on “The Love Boat”) as Bender in exchange for financing from Canadian dentists; he was still able to draw a line between artistic compromise–which had given shape to the material–and selling out. Nor was it some cynical “calling-card,” unlike those one-and-done horror movies career-minded filmmakers like making to get their foot in the door. Yes, The Breakfast Club wound up capitalizing on a bull market for teen fare, but Hughes had an honest interest in telling stories about youth. Proof of that being his screenplay for National Lampoon’s Vacation, doctored by director Harold Ramis to shift the dominant P.O.V. from the kids in the backseat (as in the LAMPOON piece that inspired it, Hughes’s “Vacation ’58”) to the paterfamilias. Through a mixture of savvy and kismet, Hughes had crafted the platonic ideal of a directorial debut for himself, and then something funny happened: the comparatively epic Sixteen Candles became his first feature instead.

Jabberwocky (1977) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 29, 20181970s, 2018, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Fantasy, The Criterion Collection

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Michael Palin, Max Wall, Harry H. Corbett, John Le Mesurier
screenplay by Charles Alverson and Terry Gilliam, from the Lewis Carroll poem
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Bryant Frazer The pre-credits sequence of Jabberwocky features director Terry Gilliam’s ex-Python troupemate Terry Jones portraying a hunter collecting trapped wild animals from a pastoral forest as shafts of sunlight stab through tree branches and featherlight moths flit among the leaves. The natural beauty is subverted, ominously, by point-of-view shots taken from far overhead, accompanied by boomy, creature-feature sound design (think Jaws, released a couple of years previous), suggesting the hunter is also the hunted. Jones glances around quizzically, a dopey, open-mouthed expression plastered across his face. With a jump cut, he turns suddenly towards the camera, wide-eyed and screaming in extreme close-up. The camera pulls back from the ground and carries Jones with it, still yelling and beating his arms frantically in the air. He jerks his head this way and that, his tongue lolling about in and around his mouth, delivering a death scene of such unexpected intensity that it’s hard for an audience to know how to respond. Is it scary, or hilarious? Or just…goofy?

Lost in America (1985) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 10, 2017****/****, 1980s, 2017, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Road Movie, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Albert Brooks, Julie Hagerty
written by Albert Brooks & Monica Johnson
directed by Albert Brooks

by Bryant Frazer Early in Lost in America, David Howard (Albert Brooks) is trying to convince his wife, Linda (Julie Hagerty), that it’s a good idea to abandon their Los Angeles house in favour of an interstate-ready mobile home. He describes the amenities in detail–it even has a “microwave that browns”–and outlines his dangerously misguided fantasy of dropping out of society to explore the country. “Linda,” he says, “this is just like Easy Rider, except now it’s our turn.” That’s a good line, and not just because Albert Brooks–round-faced, pushing 40, with enormous glasses and a distinctive Jewfro–is a physically and temperamentally unlikely candidate for the Easy Rider lifestyle. It’s really funny because it’s so clearly a terrible idea. In a rush of pride and vocal anger at being passed over for a desired promotion, David lost his job as an advertising copywriter, unwrapping himself from the protective swaddle of gainful corporate employment. Now he wants to drag Linda, a department-store HR functionary, into the void with him. It’s like a car wreck in slow-motion, except the guy driving sold his air bags for gas money and is delivering a peppy monologue about how great it feels not to be wearing a seat belt. This, we understand, is a calamity in the making.

Ghost World (2001) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

September 26, 20172000s, 2017, Authors: Sydney Wegner, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Scarlett Johansson, Teen, The Criterion Collection

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson, Brad Renfro, Steve Buscemi
written by Daniel Clowes & Terry Zwigoff, based on the comic book by Clowes
directed by Terry Zwigoff

by Sydney Wegner Say “privilege” in 2017 and you will inevitably trigger an allergic reaction, particularly if you precede it with the word “white.” “Privilege” feels inflammatory and overused, a casualty of the movement for basic human decency snidely referred to as “PC culture.” For those to whom it applies, it can be hard to confront and accept–especially in America, where the idea that anybody got anything by luck alone goes against everything we’ve been taught is admirable and pure. But in order to use your unjustly-granted powers for good, the knee-jerk defensiveness needs to be agonized over and dealt with. As I’ve matured, I’ve learned that you can’t grow without feeling like garbage, that the concept of learning from your mistakes often applies to learning from the ones you didn’t make intentionally. Now that being a better person seems to have become a radical political act, it’s something that is on my mind a lot.

The Exterminating Angel (1962) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 28, 2017****/****, 1960s, 2017, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection

El Ángel Exterminador
****/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Silvia Pinal, Jacqueline Andere, José Baviera, Augusto Benedico
screenplay by Luis Buñuel, based on the story “Los Náufragos de la Calle de la Providencia” by Luis Alcoriza and Luis Buñuel
directed by Luis Buñuel

by Bryant Frazer The first scene of The Exterminating Angel takes place at the gate outside a stately mansion where the house’s butler, Julio (Claudio Brook), confronts Lucas (Ángel Merino), a servant trying to sneak off the grounds just as the staff is preparing a dinner party for twenty. The worker hesitates for a moment, then continues on his way, the butler calling angrily after him: “Never set foot in this house again.” It’s the beginning of a very long night for the steward, who is vexed as his waiters and kitchen staff, one by one or in pairs, desert their posts for the evening at the worst possible time. The servants know something’s wrong, and though they’re not sure what it is, none of them–save the unflappable Julio, who keeps the gears turning smoothly–are willing to stick around to find out. When Lucia (Lucy Gallardo), the frustrated lady of the house, barks her offense at this betrayal, Julio is there to reassure her. “Domestic help grows more impertinent by the day, madam,” he declares.

Woman in the Dunes (1964) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 5, 2017****/****, 1960s, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Japan, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Womaninthedunes1

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Eiji Okada, Kyōko Kishida, Kōji Mitsui, Hiroko Itō
screenplay by Kōbō Abe, based on his novel The Woman in the Dunes
directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara

by Walter Chaw The first morning amateur entomologist Niki (Eiji Okada) wakes in a house at the bottom of a hole carved into a sand dune, he finds his lessor–the titular, nameless Woman (Kyoko Kishida)–asleep in the nude, with sand crusted over her body like a thin, granular mantle. Director Hiroshi Teshigahara sweeps over her body with a sculptor’s attention. It’s intensely erotic, though for all its voyeuristic intention, it’s not prurient. No, there’s a sense of intimacy in this: it’s the attention you give a lover when her skin is near your eye and you love her and desire her: you want to touch her, to taste her, to consume her. There’s much talk of “the flesh” in David Cronenberg’s The Fly; flesh makes you crazy. The way Teshigahara shoots surfaces in Woman in the Dunes makes you crazy. When they finally make love, Niki and the Woman, each individual grain of sand on Niki’s skin stands out like a monument. When the Woman bathes him, rubbing suds between her hands and running them down his legs and back, you can feel her hands play across your own calves, and you can feel him beneath your hands. Not just flesh, but the textures and tides of the dunes over which Niki practices his minor distractions from the day-to-day of whatever it is he does in the city, where he’s nothing, accomplishes nothing of note, and will not be missed but for the missing-person’s report we see at the end as the film’s pithy epilogue. Based on Kōbō Abe’s novel of the same name, Woman in the Dunes is in one way the best, most insightful and evocative adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” there ever was, from Eliot’s winsome protagonist looking to escape regret into experience to, literally, these lines about entomology as a metaphor for being seen clearly and judged wanting:

Editor’s Choice: The Year in Blu-ray

December 20, 20162016, Arrow Video, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best-of Lists, Blog, Blu-ray Disc, The Criterion Collection

by Bill Chambers The reason film and physical media are prematurely pronounced dead every few weeks is that the mainstream keeps narrowing, limiting the visible spectrum of both industries. Studios remain halfheartedly committed to Blu-ray Disc but, as this Top 10 list incidentally shows, it’s really become the domain of boutique labels restoring and annotating studio-neglected fare, capitalizing on streaming’s short-term memory and populist leanings while inspiring devotion among connoisseurs. Please note that I limited my selection process to titles I’ve personally audited and would endorse anyway, with or without frills. Some of these may be reviewed in full at a later date.

Punch-Drunk Love (2002) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|[The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

November 21, 2016****/****, 2000s, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, DVD, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Film Festivals, Romance, The Criterion Collection

Pdl1

****/****
BD – Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
DVD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmán
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

by Walter Chaw Indicated by spacious compositions and a bracing unpredictability, Paul Thomas Anderson’s romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Love is a marriage, if you will, between Claire Denis’s audacious Trouble Every Day and Steven Shainberg’s sadomasochism fairytale Secretary. Here’s a trio of films that announce 2002 as a year perhaps best defined by its aggressively non-traditional, hopelessly romantic love stories (toss Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven, Cronenberg’s Spider, and Roger Avary’s The Rules of Attraction into that mix).

The Immortal Story (1968) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

October 19, 20161960s, 2016, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Orson Welles, Drama, Esoterica, France, Television, The Criterion Collection

Immortalstory4

Histoire immortelle
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Jeanne Moreau, Roger Coggio, Norman Eshley, Orson Welles
written by Orson Welles, from a short story by Karen Blixen
directed by Orson Welles

by Bryant Frazer It’s one of those salutary coincidences of movie history that the final narrative film completed by Orson Welles would turn out to be this rumination on an old man’s obsession with storytelling. It’s not that Welles was exactly elderly at the time (he was 51 when he made it), but there’s a matter-of-fact finality to the work that becomes just a touch spooky in retrospect. Commissioned by the French national television agency as a Jeanne Moreau vehicle to commemorate the transition to colour television, The Immortal Story required that Welles work in colour for the first time, catalyzing a fairly dramatic evolution of his style. But it gave him the opportunity to adapt a short story by Karen Blixen (a.k.a. Isak Dinesen), one of his favourite writers, and to work again with Moreau, one of his favourite actors. Less than an hour long, it has remained an obscure film for a variety of reasons, but it’s intermittently remarkable despite its modesty.

Mister Johnson (1991) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 21, 20161990s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, The Criterion Collection

Mrjohnson1

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Maynard Eziashi, Pierce Brosnan, Edward Woodward, Beatie Edney
screenplay by William Boyd, based on the novel by Joyce Cary
directed by Bruce Beresford

by Walter Chaw I’m not sure exactly when or why Aussie director Bruce Beresford became the cinematic spokesman for the African experience. It probably, in Hollywood’s peculiar racial calculus, had something to do with his appalling Driving Miss Daisy being the Oscar juggernaut that Do the Right Thing was not. Credit Beresford for the years he spent living in Nigeria and the stands he took in films like The Fringe Dwellers to work with an Aboriginal cast against counsel, but something nettles that, with the remake of “Roots” still warm and Beresford and fellow Aussie new-waver Phillip Noyce at the helm of half of its four episodes, somehow Beresford is the acceptable choice to tell these Black stories. This isn’t even an indictment of his pictures, mind, but rather an indictment of a system so heavily skewed towards one racial group and gender that whatever the quality of the product, there’s a good conversation to be had about the people making it. There’s dissonance.

The River (1951) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 12, 2016****/****, 1950s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Jean Renoir, Drama, FFC Must-Own, France, India, Romance, The Criterion Collection, UK

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A+
starring Nora Swinburne, Esmond Knight, Arthur Shields, Suprova Mukerjee
screenplay by Rumer Godden, Jean Renoir, based on the book by Godden
directed by Jean Renoir

by Walter Chaw There’s something ineffable about Jean Renoir’s same-named adaptation of Rumer Godden’s The River. It has to do with how the light is different in our memories of childhood, the good days and especially the bad, captured here in three-strip Technicolor that understands at last Impressionism as a birthright of film. It’s more real than real ever was, the “real” of nostalgia and melancholy and Romanticism. It’s not possible to see in any other visual medium, though I confess I’ve seen it in certain poetry by certain poets. But there are moments–like in the films of Powell & Pressburger, who did their own Rumer Godden adaptation, the socio-sexual horror flick Black Narcissus–where you can definitely see it in cinema. The past, I mean. Not as it was, but as you remember it. The River captures the fear and longing of lazy summers on the cusp, of passing from innocence over to experience, of remembering things you never experienced so that you know you’re connected to the entire stream of lives you’ve lived and lives you haven’t, or haven’t yet. I don’t know how The River does it, but it does.

In a Lonely Place (1950) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

July 8, 2016****/****, 1950s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Romance, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Inalonelyplace5

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Carl Benton Reid
screenplay by Andrew Solt, adaptation by Edmund H. North, based upon a story by Dorothy B. Hughes
directed by Nicholas Ray

by Walter Chaw In another time and place, they would’ve called Gloria Grahame “one sick twist,” and the brand would’ve stuck. There are stories, a few of them true. There’s the one about her stepson, and the thing where she keeps getting plastic surgery until her face is paralyzed, which was the alleged goal after Grahame became morbidly devoted to Kuleshov’s editing theories. There’s the weird book an ex-lover wrote about her last days, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, and indeed, her story has been told largely through the men who wanted her, the men who had her, and the men who ruined her. In many ways, she’s the quintessential femme fatale of the noir era, not just for the roles she took, but because the roles she took reflected the traps she was in. She’s the patron saint of the way we treat women first as objects of desire, then as objects of disgust. Her late moment as the girl who “cain’t” say no encapsulates the perversity of Rodgers & Hammerstein, sure, and the sad decline of a woman who confessed at the end of her life that she never quite figured out Hollywood–though it sure looks like Hollywood had her figured. She is one of the great tragic figures of the age, both microcosm and avatar of that wonderland of image-fixers and dream-crushers. For my money, the film that best captures Grahame in her complexity, in all her multifoliate relationships with the world and her millions of voyeurs, is Nicholas Ray’s scabrous In A Lonely Place. It’s a masculine confession and an apology. It’s hollow. Aren’t they all?

Bitter Rice (1949) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 10, 2016****/****, 1940s, 2016, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Italy, The Criterion Collection

Riso amaro
****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Vittorio Gassmann, Doris Dowling, Silvana Mangano, Raf Vallone
screenplay by Corrado Alvaro, Giuseppe De Santis, Carlo Lizzani,Carlo Musso, Ivo Perilli, Gianni Puccini
directed by Giuseppe De Santis

by Bryant Frazer Bitter Rice is a heck of a film. It’s the story of a couple of refugees from an American film noir who stumble into a grindhouse showing an Italian social-issues drama. The beautiful losers are Walter and Francesca (Vittorio Gassman and Doris Dowling), a pair of small-time crooks on the run following the heist of a lifetime. The social conscience is personified by a class of peasant women who have for hundreds of years travelled from all over the country to work hard days in the rice fields of northern Italy, and also by, to some degree, ethical, committed soldier Marco (Raf Vallone), who lingers in the rice fields after his discharge because he has come to care about the fate of the women there. And the sex appeal is provided, in spades, by Silvana Mangano, a bombshell and a half. When producer Dino de Laurentiis and director Giuseppe De Santis cast the 18-year-old in the role, she had already appeared in a few films and had been the teenaged girlfriend of young Marcello Mastroianni. But her performance in Bitter Rice–a role that had her shaking her tits, swinging her hips, and hiking her skirt up to here–made her an overnight sensation.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 16, 2016****/****, 1940s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection, UK, War

Colonelblimp3

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Anton Walbrook, Deborah Kerr, Roger Livesey, Roland Culver
written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

by Walter Chaw The prototype in many ways for Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, although lighthearted and easily mistaken for a romp, is an existential horror film that, for all the things it’s otherwise about, is most vitally about what it’s like to grow old. There’s a moment early on–when our hero, Clive Candy (Roger Livesey), realizes he’s let the love of his life marry his best friend–that clarifies exactly what the picture has on its mind. For the rest of the film, as the kingdom of his memories grows to a size that dwarfs modernity rushing past, Candy finds shades of the lost Edith (Deborah Kerr), his personal Lenore, resurfacing in the faces of young women the world over. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp understands that as one grows old, an entire village sprouts in the mind, full of beloved businesses and places that have long since disappeared, peopled by old flames and loved ones, dead or just vanished, but in any case never again to resume the form in which memory has frozen them. Though memorable for its technical brilliance, its Technicolor vibrancy, and its courageously sprung narrative structure, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp‘s ability to pinion the sadness, the loneliness, that experience carries with it is what makes the movie what it is. Life as a process of emotional attrition: Last man standing is cold comfort, indeed.

Code Unknown (2000) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

January 11, 2016****/****, 2000s, 2016, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, France, Germany, Romance, Romania, The Criterion Collection

Codeunknown1

Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys
Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Juliette Binoche, Thierry Neuvic, Sepp Bierbichler, Ona Lu Yenke
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Bryant Frazer In the vignette that opens Code Unknown, a young girl in pigtails, maybe 9 or 10 years old, cowers against a plain wall, trembling before director Michael Haneke’s static camera. If you know Haneke’s work–his previous film at the time, Funny Games, had depicted the torture and murder of a bourgeois French mom and dad plus their fair-haired moppet–the image is more than a little disturbing. But Haneke immediately pulls the rug out. Rather than cry, the girl suddenly stands and smiles, looking expectantly towards the camera. Haneke then cuts to reverse angles on different children, in close-up, also looking towards the camera. The girl has an audience, and so we understand that she was giving a performance. In this case, it’s a game of charades among deaf children, with the spectators attempting to guess, using sign language, what the girl was trying to convey. “Alone?” one girl signs. The girl in pigtails shakes her head. Another signs, “Hiding place?” No. Nor is she trying to convey “guilty conscience,” “gangster,” “sad,” or even “locked up.” In the face of so many impassive classmates, the girl in pigtails finally looks weary and maybe on the verge of tears for real. With that, the screen goes black, and the title appears: Code Unknown.

Blind Chance (1987) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 15, 20151980s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Drama, Poland, The Criterion Collection

Przypadek
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Boguslaw Linda, Tadeusz Lomnicki, Marzena Trybala, Monika Goździk
written and directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski

by Bryant Frazer Before Krzysztof Kieslowski became the standard-bearer for the latter-day European art film with ravishing portraits of unspeakably beautiful women living their lives under unutterably mysterious circumstances, he was a gruff but adventurous chronicler, in both documentary and narrative films, of lives lived in the rather more drab surroundings of communist Poland. Well, money changes everything. It was the arrival of funding from Western sources that bestowed the gift of abstraction: Beginning with the internationally celebrated The Double Life of Veronique in 1991, it made Kieslowski’s expressions of ennui beautiful. But in the 1980s, Kieslowski had less time for beauty.

Gates of Heaven/Vernon, Florida [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 30, 2015****/****, 1970s, 1980s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Documentary, The Criterion Collection

VERNON, FLORIDA (1981)
****/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
directed by Errol Morris

GATES OF HEAVEN (1978)
****/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
directed by Errol Morris

by Walter Chaw Trying to decode what it is about Errol Morris’s best work is a thorny proposition. There are times his work feels mocking, but it’s always uncertain whether that’s extant in the piece or intrinsic in the audience. Certainly, it’s tempting for me to compare Morris–especially early Morris–to Diane Arbus or Shelby Lee Adams, but even the marriage of those two artists in opposition or sympathy to Morris opens cans of syllogistic worms. At the least, it’s not much of a stretch to predict, just based on his first two films, Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida (both sharing space on a new Criterion Blu-ray), that he would one day partner with Werner Herzog–another brilliant documentarian who lives right there on the edge of disdain for subject/spectator, surrealism/documentary, Brechtian absurdity/Maysles vérité–and that the two of them would, together, support someone like Joshua Oppenheimer. I interviewed Errol Morris back upon the release of his Robert McNamara documentary The Fog of War and was existentially worried to do so. All this by way of saying that I don’t have the facility to judge the quality of Morris’s work. A mountain is a mountain. But I can appreciate its truth, beauty, and implacable impenetrability.

Night and the City (1950) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 26, 20151950s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, Googie Withers, Hugh Marlowe
screenplay by Jo Eisinger, based on the novel by Gerald Kersh
directed by Jules Dassin

by Bryant Frazer SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Richard Widmark is hungry. There’s no better way to describe it. As Night and the City opens, he’s scampering, lean and lithe, through darkened London, avoiding a barely-seen pursuer like a cat trying to make it home with dinner jammed between its jaws. I’m not sure anyone in movie history runs as well as Widmark runs in this film, pulling Donald O’Connor-esque twists and turns that send his limbs flailing about in silhouette, and then ducking around a corner and pressing himself flat against the wall, as though wishing he could disappear into the bricks themselves. He’s got beady eyes that suggest venality and a face that stretches taut over high cheekbones, light and shadow throwing the contours of his skull into sharp relief. As Harry Fabian, an overconfident con artist with a small-time hustle who’s always imagining angles on a big score, Widmark is worse than a loser–he’s a dead man walking. You’d be a fool to trust a man like that, and yet someone always does.

The Fisher King (1991) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 4, 2015****/****, 1990s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Terry Gilliam, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, Amanda Plummer, Mercedes Ruehl
written by Richard LaGravenese
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Bryant Frazer New York City is cast against type in The Fisher King, where it plays an urban fantasy realm complete with castles, towers, villages, and wilderness. Kings and queens look down from their lofty aeries on the dirty streets below, where peasants defend their hard-won territory against barbarian hordes. Imposing forests of skyscrapers jut up from the concrete, cave dwellings yawn open at the base of the Manhattan Bridge, and the city’s homeless specialize in ad hoc musical theatre. The Holy Grail may be hidden in a fortress on the Upper East Side. And there are no dragons in New York, but the Red Knight is a motherfucker.