Watching Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth I was brought back to those weekends with my dad. He passed down to me my love for Cary Grant, watching films like Father Goose and Mr. Lucky and North By Northwest. We had nothing else in common, so I clung to those stars and movies and absorbed them like a sponge, hunting them out so I could ask … Continue reading Criterion Catch-Up: The Awful Truth (1937)
When I was deciding what film was going to kick this off, I wanted something that was familiar. Sure, I could have gone with the challenge of something like A Brighter Summer Day but in the week of recharging the batteries in the midst of work and health/life stress I needed some comfort, something that I knew would be slightly less onerous than a four-hour … Continue reading Criterion Catch-Up: Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
If you’re a cinephile (or movie addict – use whatever nomenclature you feel comfortable with; we’re not snobs here) tell me if this rings a bell: A new release gets announced, you rush to pick it up…maybe while you’re there you have some extra cash to spend so you get that reissues you’ve been meaning to see, and there’s a sales and that movie isn’t available for streaming, so you decide to take the plunge. You get home, all set to watch, promising yourself no new movies until this batch is watched. But then that new episode is streaming today! And your kids are hogging the television! And you’ve got an early day tomorrow for work!
And then dammit, wouldn’t you know it – there’s a other sale, another release…and you find yourself caught in a strange loop where the backlog of titles grows and grows, and you keep telling yourself you’ll get to it…eventually.
Continue reading “Criterion Catch-Up: Introduction”
In the distant past of April 2020, Chris and I dove deep into an episode of our podcast Cinema Dual on the films of French filmmaker Agnès Varda. Though technically not my first experience with Varda, that week of watching Varda’s movies was eye-opening, to such an extent that when Criterion announced they were going to release a Blu Ray box set of her complete filmography, I jumped at the chance to catch up on everything I had missed. Each post will cover 1 of the 15 discs in the set.
In the intro to Part 12 of this series, having just seen the trailer for The Matrix: Resurrections, I asked what it meant for Lana Wachowski to return to that series. The answer, explicitly stated in the film, was that Warner Bros was going to make another Matrix with or without her, and under those conditions, Wachowski signed on. I’m almost completely sure that no one was threatening Agnès Varda to make her own biopic without her involvement, but the first thing she clearly states at the beginning of The Beaches of Agnès (2008), is that she is playing a role of a person telling her own life story, but that it’s other people that interest her. The challenge of the project becomes how to reconcile these competing impulses.
In the distant past of April 2020, Chris and I dove deep into an episode of our podcast Cinema Dual on the films of French filmmaker Agnès Varda. Though technically not my first experience with Varda, that week of watching Varda’s movies was eye-opening, to such an extent that when Criterion announced they were going to release a Blu Ray box set of her complete filmography, I jumped at the chance to catch up on everything I had missed. Each post will cover 1 of the 15 discs in the set.
In 2010, Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal released a documentary called Exporting Raymond, which chronicled his adventures in Russia trying to break through cultural barriers while adapting his show for a new country. Though its success largely depended on you being in any way invested in the original source material, in the margins of the movie were little scenes of Phil trying out local food, showcasing Rosenthal’s harmless goofball nature. Years later someone would make the call that sending that goofball to different food spots around the world would make for generally pleasant televison, and they were right. Somebody Feed Phil (and its predecessor I’ll Have What Phil’s Having) is a gentle, comforting show featuring good food and Phil cracking terrible dad jokes. In the year of our Lord 2021, what more could you want?
In the distant past of April 2020, Chris and I dove deep into an episode of our podcast Cinema Dual on the films of French filmmaker Agnès Varda. Though technically not my first experience with Varda, that week of watching Varda’s movies was eye-opening, to such an extent that when Criterion announced they were going to release a Blu Ray box set of her complete filmography, I jumped at the chance to catch up on everything I had missed. Each post will cover 1 of the 15 discs in the set.
While this series has focused on the films of Agnès Varda, it’s reductive to describe her only as a filmmaker. Her career in photography predates her filmmaking career, and helps to inform her earliest film work, from the shots of the couple in La Pointe Courte to the contrasting images of a pregnant woman next to a pumpkin being hacked open in L’opéra-Mouffe. Likewise, her film work also informs her other artistic endeavors. In 2006, Varda reused film stock from Les Creatures, one of her less commercially successful films, to create the installation Ma Cabane de l’Échec (My Shack of Failure). A cursory glance at Varda’s work will show a specific eye towards visual details, which while not always pre-planned, always end up becoming incorporated into the final product.
As a creator of art, Varda has her instincts. As an interpreter of art, those instincts change over time.
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