The Big Picture - Criterion Channel Is a Streaming Miracle. Here are 25 Movies You Should Watch Now | The Big Picture

Episode Date: April 10, 2020

The Criterion Channel streaming service is celebrating its one-year anniversary this week and it has been a shelter in a storm for movie lovers during quarantine. To celebrate, we've asked 15 friends of The Big Picture—writers, filmmakers, and critics—to explain why the Channel is so crucial and suggest one must-watch from its massive and essential library. (And maybe a few runners-up, too.) Then, Sean is joined by Criterion programmer Penelope Bartlett to break down how the movies find their way to the service. Hosts: Sean Fennessey Guests: Ari Aster, Penelope Bartlett, Erin Lee Carr, Amanda Dobbins (and Amanda's dad), Sam Esmail, Liz Hannah, Barry Jenkins, Miranda July, Adam Nayman, Amy Nicholson, Alex Ross Perry, Peyton Reed, Chris Ryan, Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelley, and welcome to The Ringer Podcast Network. We hope The Ringer can provide you entertainment and companionship during this time. So as always, feel free to check out TheRinger.com, where we're still covering the latest in sports, pop culture, tech, and media. And The Ringer's YouTube channel can provide endless amounts of entertainment. You can find that at YouTube.com slash TheRinger. I'm Sean Fennessy, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about a miracle of movie watching. I'm talking, of course, about the Criterion Channel.

The streaming service is celebrating its one-year anniversary this week, and for me, it's been a shelter in a storm. So what is the Criterion Channel? Way back in October 2008, the WarnerMedia and Criterion collaboration film struck, closed. Six months later, the Criterion collection rose in its place, preserving the spotlight on world cinema, classic Hollywood, documentary, female filmmakers, and specially curated series into a channel of its own. And basically from jump, it became the most essential streaming service for cinephiles, combining the Janice Films permanent collection of Bergman and Fellini and Kurosawa, those movies with Howard Hawks and John Ford films, with all sorts of special collaborations

in between. In its first year, it has launched dozens of cleverly designed monthly programs. An ode to oddball sci-fi 70s earlier this year is among my favorite things I've seen. The Criterion Collection is obviously the most hallowed name in home video entertainment, going all the way back to its launch with Laserdiscs back in 1984. The company has licensed and sold more than a thousand different titles in that time. Their releases are high-end fetish objects for physical media obsessives like myself, and they're priced as such. They include special features and original art, remastered transfers, the works. These discs are really expensive, but the channel is a downright bargain. For $99 a year or $10.99 a month,

you can have a world of film history at your fingertips. Tens of thousands of hours of entertainment, education, and extras. My favorite thing about interviewing filmmakers on this show is getting to ask them not just about the movies they've made, but the movies they love. So to celebrate the miracle of Criterion Channel on its one-year anniversary,

we rang up some of my friends of the show and some of the best directors on the planet to talk about the movies they're watching on the service and what you should look at too. At the end of the show, I'll have a conversation with Penelope Bartlett, the programmer of the channel and one of the key people responsible for what you see every time you fire it up. There are more life-changing movies

on the channel than you could possibly imagine, but before we get into those recommendations from our friends, I wanted to offer five fast ones of my own that you can watch on the service right now. So here's a brief top five. Number five. The women in his glamorous life. The hushed up scandals.

His secret loves. His lost weekends. You want to be careful. Pops a man with a crocodile's temper. The Big Knife, directed by Robert Aldrich. Classic Hollywood story about classic Hollywood. I love a movie about making movies. The Big Knife is one of the best and one of the least known.

It stars Jack Palance and Ida Lupino. Jack Palance plays a very successful Hollywood actor who's having a bit of a crisis of faith. It is a dark and simmering and slick and fascinating portrait of how Hollywood felt like it operated in 1955. I would recommend this for anybody who is as obsessed with Hollywood as I am. Number two. Tokyo Drifter by Seijun Suzuki, the late Seijun Suzuki, who one of the great Japanese stylists

in world cinema history, he had a kind of neon, hyper-monochromatic, fascinating look at crime movies. Tokyo Drifter is probably his masterpiece. One of the slickest and most fascinating and most high art concepts on top of a crime film ever made. If you were interested in where Japanese cinema went after some of those Kurosawa and Mifune movies

that we talked about last week on the show, I would definitely recommend you check out all of Suzuki's movies, but especially Tokyo Drifter. Number three. It all started the morning after Thanksgiving. After my sister's husband, Louis, left for work, she found a note. It looked like a love letter written to Louis. The Day Trippers. Greg Mottola. Greg Mottola is somebody you might know from movies like Superbad or Adventureland. But Mottola to me is the bard of Long Island. He is from the same hometown as me.

And The Day Trippers is one of the best movies I've ever seen. Not just about what Long Island families are like, but what people who grow up on Long Island, what kind of relationship they have to New York City. It's a very small story about a woman who's trying to determine whether or not her husband is cheating on him, but she does so on a long car trip with her entire family. Let me just say that this movie echoes inside me. It feels very specific

to my own personal experiences. So that's The Day Trippers. Number two. Harlan, Kentucky is cold country where men work long hours for short wages, where poverty, black lung, and needless disaster are facts of life. In 1973, the men voted to join the United... Harlan County, USA, directed by the great Barbara Koppel, one of the most significant and important documentary films ever made.

This movie came out in 1976. It covers the Brookside strike, an effort of 180 coal miners and their wives against the duke power company and it is one of the most profound representations of what a corporation will try to do to destroy people and what those people can do when they work together uh it's also it's truly representative of what happens when you just stick a camera in front of human beings and see how they react in extraordinary circumstances. I think the people that you see in this story, which takes place largely in Harlan County, Kentucky, are people that we don't often see in movies and people who

don't often get a chance to talk in movies. And that certainly includes the people who are suffering from black lung and who have to work in these coal mines. But it also includes the people that are trying to crush those people. And it shows them talking in, um, in upsetting and harrowing ways. If you like the movie American factory that we talked about a lot last year, which won the best documentary at the Oscars,

then I would highly recommend you check out this movie, which is really a precursor in many ways. And the last one I'll choose wedding bells ring for the candidate and his lady, the most exciting power couple since Liddy and Bob Dole. But nothing's

not a movie. It's a series. It's called Tanner 88. It aired on, I believe, Showtime back in the 80s. It was made by the late great Robert Altman, one of my favorite directors of all time. And it is a multi-part series that is depicting the slow rise of a presidential campaign and a candidate played by Michael Murphy. We are in an election year. And let me tell you

that politics don't really change very much. And if you go back and look at this movie, which is a wry and dark satire of the political process in America, you'll see that some of the things that we'll be thinking about come November were resonant back in 1988 as well. So those are five that should give you about 15 hours of watching time over the next few weeks. But if that's not enough, I did want to talk to some people

who know about this stuff even better than I do. Reached out to people who I know have been spending their quarantine watching movies and have an incredible reservoir of knowledge and taste. So now let's talk to some pals about what you should watch. We'll start with three of the best. We'll start with Josh Safdie, who you may know as the co-creator of Uncut Gems and a frequent guest of this show and one of the greatest guys making movies around. And then I'll also talk to Liz Hanna, who is a screenwriter who co-wrote The Post and co-wrote Longshot and is co-writing a lot of movies that

I think you're going to like in the future. Then our old pal Sam Esmail, back after the director's game to share some insights. Let's go to those guys to start. So I want the Celtics to cover. I want the Celtics halftime. I want Garnett points and rebounds. What do you know? I don't know. I just know. What's the dumbest bet I ever heard of? I disagree. All right, look, let's do this thing. It's my birthday today, by the way.

Oh, shit. Happy birthday. Thank you. Are you recording? You got your own rig? I just have a little Zoom guy, so I'm going to hit record now. All right, I'm recording. We got Josh Saffty birthday boy with us josh how are you i'm all right how you guys doing we're hanging in there man um i'm enjoying my car by the way i'm

like you know i feel like my i've designed my living quarters for the past 15 years to be a bunker for the end of day end of times like all the records and books and movies and stuff like that and so i'm just kind of rediscovering stuff but yeah i've been i've been i've been uh devouring criterion channel some great stuff up there you notice they just put a bunch of stuff up like two weeks two days ago yeah man every the first of every month they drop a treasure trove i saw they put a that aorgos Lanthimos movie I'd never even heard of up today. Oh, Alps? Alps?

No, it was born before that. Oh, Kaneta. Kaneta, yeah. I'd never heard of it. Kaneta's cool. Alps is like his, is like, Kaneta's is kind of like his first movie.

And it's good. But Alps is really special. That was the movie he made when he couldn't get the money for lobster together. So if you had to choose one movie out of this insane collection that keeps growing every day, what would be your one suggestion

for listeners of this show? My one suggestion? I would say the one that I'm the hottest on right now is Atlantic City by Louis Malle. You guys see you got the Burt Lancaster behind you. But yeah, that went up there recently, maybe like last week. And it's a really fantastic regional movie pre-Louis Malle's interest in documentaries and documentaries of America. You can feel his interest in America.

He somehow makes Atlantic City feel like the French Riviera at times. You have an incredible performance from Burt Lancaster, really. And the character is so great. This small, two-time, very bottom of the food chain gangster uh the gopher who like you know is just stuck taking care of a woman uh in his building and it's like pre-major development of of uh redevelopment of of atlantic city so the movie opens with this great destruction of a grand hotel uh but it's it's great it has um and susan sarandon is i mean the opening is is definitely yeah it makes you look at lemons in a totally different way yes it's worth checking out

would be what we should say about it and wallace sean has like a little cameo in it because it's the year before he did my dinner with andre uh which i which i don't love that movie but it's the year before he did My Dinner with Andre, which I don't love that movie, but it's cool. I prefer My Breakfast with Blassie. But it's cool. Classic for wrestling fans. Yeah, I love that movie. I'm going to write Criterion people and tell them to put that up on there

because that's such a great movie, My Breakfast with Blassie. But yeah, no, I love the movie. And I was surprised and i just started to read about it and um you know i was surprised to see got all these big i got every major oscar nomination and and uh but it was not a very it was just not a commercial hit uh it was kind of a slept on movie so that movie was my that was actually my gateway drug to louis mal um oh really yeah because it had bigger names and it was american and you know it was easier to it was easier to get that movie a blockbuster than it was uh yeah yeah for sure i don't you know like the gallows

yeah exactly um but just can you just talk a little bit about mal and kind of like what he does and what makes him a special filmmaker so so in particular with atlantic city he he has and he got into this more and more you can see like seeds of it um in in his career uh is is his interest in the like the micro being expressive of the macro like he'll he'll start a scene on kids playing with an antenna uh going up and down the mobster's car from philly um and and and he'll get into the scene through this small observation and he started to get more and more into smaller observations and and real people and and the cast feels very of atlantic city uh you know and then the entire thing is happenstance. The entire movie is just kind of like, well, what does a low-level street kid do

when he knows there's a Dropbox in a phone booth? And that's how the whole plot rests upon the fact that this guy's just ripping off this drug deal. I actually lived, when I lived on Madison Street in Lower East Side 10 years ago, there was a phone booth on the corner. The phone didn't work, but I would notice someone would go and use the phone every morning. And then about 20 minutes later, someone would go and use the phone, quote unquote, and leave with something. And one day I went in after the guy went in,

the first guy in the morning, and I looked around and I saw that it was a stash. It was stupid of me. I probably could have gotten in trouble, but I was just curious. I just went in there and pretended to use the phone. I'm sure the guy who was doing the pickup saw me go in there and was like,

oh shit, we've been caught. But yes, the movie opens with that. But yeah, the small opens with that but but yeah there's the the the small nature of that movie and i say small in like in like the grand sense you know that the that these small moments define us uh and these small characters are really like defining of of of um of a place uh in a specific time and ends up being an incredible document of America. I have a friend from Philly. He said that's like his favorite movie of all time. He's born in the 70s. It's 40 years, I think, since that movie first came out. It's an awesome pick. I appreciate it, Josh.

Oh, yeah, of course. And also there's no score, which is move, that's that like, and he has fun with it. You know, he has no score, but he'll juice the diegetic score by, you know, having her with her little radio running around playing actual, you know, music that, you know, that he needs that's convenient. Amazing. Thank you, man. I appreciate this. That was an awesome pick. Okay. Yeah, of course i'm happy you're doing this criterions you know they're like a godsend right now you know it's incredible that uh we have this option and and like and if you if you want to go into the collection collection you know sometimes they'll they'll just put up a movie and you could stream that movie but they

have their collections on there as well and the the police story one and two collection is unreal it has so many extras just like probably i'd say three and a half hours worth of extras on the police story one and two like uh tile or whatever it's called jackie chan it's it's great that's my that's my secret other suggestion to everybody. Okay. We won't dime on you for picking two movies when we're trying to hold everybody to one. But if it's for Jackie Chan, it's good. In classic Safdie fashion, as soon as we finished chatting with Josh, he realized that there was more he needed to say, more he needed to share, more he needed to celebrate at Atlantic City. So we gave him a call back.

What compelled you? What did you realize? What triggered the, like, I need to be back in the mix on this? I realized I got distracted by the one actual outside in the apartment, Aaron, that had to get done. So I just kind of like brushed my brain clean. I realized I didn't talk about any of the awesome shit that makes this movie really special. Like Robert, I love Robert Goulet, right? So Robert Goulet appearing, when you see him in the opening credits, you're like, wow, Robert Goulet's in this movie. I wasn't expecting that. And, you know, he has his one scene where he's singing, it's a it's it's in the frank sinatra wing you know what i mean the specificity of this movie is so uh uh minute i mean the fact that uh uh the lou character is running a numbers game in the in the black community of atlantic city and he's

trusted and he's running it's and the and the tally is so sad it's like two dollars and twenty You know, when he brings it in and he's like, he shows up when he goes around collecting. This guy is so low on the totem pole. But the specificity of that, that there's this numbers game. Also, you could just see Louis Mall getting excited when he sees that parking, the auto park, probably what was one of the first auto parking systems and he does that great uh chase scene you know the the to use that the idea of like the the casino worker subculture like the the fact that you know he did his research the fact that you know susan sarandon's character once has these aspirations of being a dealer in uh monte carlo but she's gonna start as in like the clam bar the oyster bar in atlantic city and then she ends up getting she ends up getting screwed because her husband's a felon and she you can't and she has that sleazy relationship with that french dude who's teaching her about card you know card dealing and he's distracting her and

there's every single thing has a nuance to it uh Even that weird house that she's helping rebuild that everyone hangs out at and where he sleeps with her. I mean, also the excitement that Lou has at the end. I don't want to spoil it for people, but his excitement is so... It's a paradox and it's awesome. It's a paradox and it's awesome. It's really awesome. And that guy, that dude who runs that private card game who he sells all the coke to, he keeps his money in his palm and a rubber band wrapped around his fist. I mean, there's so many awesome little details in this movie that make it, just when you think it's on the precipice of becoming somewhat schmaltzy, it gets grounded with some crazy detail. Let me ask you really quickly about this Atlantic City, the place. You've been there. You've spent some time there.

I shot some of Lenny Cook there. That's right. What do you think the movie gets right about it, and what do you think it's trying to kind of myth make about it? I mean, I think that the, I mean, having been to, we were going to shoot the ending of Gems was going to be in Atlantic City originally. It's probably more true to life that it would be Atlantic City. But I just needed the spirituality of Mohegan Sun. uh but but um but but the uh but but yeah atlantic city is you know atlantic city is a a very um bootleg vegas uh it has a but there's a beauty to to its um seediness you know what i mean at the also in light of of uh of you know that know, the, now I think Atlantic city, but I was just really, as the golden nugget gave, made a really hard pitch to us to shoot

there. And it was something about, they got some crazy amount of money from the state. I don't remember, but there's, but there's a seediness to Atlantic city that goes back obviously to its beginning, you know hey early heydays and then you know i think with the movie i think the movie gets it right that it was you sense that it was a it's living in the shadow of this grand time that it once had uh you know in the early 20th century uh and it feels like the kind of like when you lift up a rock uh when you're like say you're you're gonna move uh uh uh move a rock away so you can put in a park bench when you pick up that rock

there's all these weird like roly polies and things like that that's what that movie has the vibe of all the roly polies running around and and uh and the worms uh what does it get what does it kind of miss i mean i think that it has a little bit i think at times it really does feel like like the french riviera but i think that's because of like i think louis mall is like maybe had a glass of port too much and like sometimes thought he was actually in the south of france uh instead of uh jersey but um but but yeah so sometimes it has a little bit of uh uh i don't know how that he's even capable of achieving that this is maybe like the way he just shoots it just has a slightly like it's missing like every time i've been to atlantic

city you know there's a there's a sense of real trouble uh that i could get into if i do the wrong thing or go the wrong place and there's no even though the movie is about trouble there's a whimsical there's a whimsy to the movie that kind of cuts that hard edge uh so that that that to me is like you know but that's it's that's what kind of also is the charm of the movie too is that it's a sweet movie and it's about these people who are in a dangerous world but you know even murder has like a strange uh whimsical nature to it yeah like a good tri-state area boy i had my bachelor party in atlantic city so i i know from the trouble that you're you're talking about there and it doesn't feel some trouble well you know a reasonable amount i would say a justifiable amount yeah um but i do feel like it doesn't really it it's it's

kind of ultimately even though there's tragedy it's kind of a sweet movie yes totally very heartful movie totally and ac is ac is it's grimy hard and yeah it's grimy for sure no but it's but you know there's like some fucked up shit happens in this movie well I mean also that's true but it but I but it's weird it's just Louis Malle just doesn't he doesn't it doesn't feel dangerous like if Abel Ferrer made that movie you know it would have felt very dangerous and it would have been like oh Atlantic City is kind of tough you know what I mean uh it was also when i was watching the credits i saw that the it was like a canadian you know how's you know how like her she's from sasquatch sasquatch how do you say that um uh uh she's from saskatchewan i never know how to say

that he's she's from saskatchewan she's definitely not a sasquatch no she's from sasaskatchewan i still can't say it and uh i think that's that's how they got money from canada she just like they had to have a plot point john guar like wrote that in but i love the detail of like the sister being a hari krishna do you remember what after they ransacked the apartment she's sitting in the bathtub just saying doing her hari krishna they basically davening back and forth. It's great. All the details are great. I mean, that aging beauty that Lou works for, her little bell that rings him to bring him down.

And she knows everything he does. She thinks he's so pathetic, but also totally in love with him. It's a cool movie. There's a lot of good details. But you're right. It definitely, there's a sweetness to the film, even though some fucked up shit happens in it, that it ultimately, that undercuts that hard edge of Atlantic City. But I don't know if the movie would have worked if it didn't have that to it.

You could also see him, I love his documentary, Pursuit of Happiness and the Pursuit of Happiness. And you can see him start that interest to an america like the the part of america that's like very aspirational uh i think he's just like he's totally enamored with it you can see that in the beginning here i think that doc is also on the criterion channel right it totally is yeah it totally is yeah that was in the clip was one of their eclipse discs and it was um yeah that's i that's a really cool movie. Pretty sure that's on there. These are great.

I'm glad you came back to give more details. I do want to say, it's amazing that the first detail that you remembered was Sarandon and the lemons. I will never forget that. You put your finger on that one pretty quickly. You couldn't forget that. How are you supposed to forget the lemons? Even Lou askers, what's up with the lemons? What's up with the lemons?

And it is a mystery in the movie she does she does she does you know let you in on her secret but but it's a it's a very provocative secret and it makes sense too when you when you when she reveals you like oh yeah I guess that makes a lot of sense I might need to fire that movie back up thanks Josh I appreciate

you thanks Sean I might need to fire that movie back up. Thanks, Josh. I appreciate it, dude. Thanks, Sean. Do you have the papers? Not yet. This is a devastating security breach that was leaked on the Pentagon. I don't even know how we're going to do intros and everything yet, but I'll just very quickly like tee you up. Okay, cool. Sounds good.

Here we go. Three, two, one. Hey, we've got screenwriter Liz Hanna here to make a recommendation. Liz, what have you been watching on the Criterion channel? And what do you want people to watch? So I think there's, first of all, there's amazing, there's an amazing group of options there. There's a wide ranging from foreign films to classic films, comedy and drama. My pick is actually a documentary, which is the Complete Monterey Pop Festival by D.A. Pennebaker.

I love it. Why did you choose that? So I think it's, first of all, something that not a lot of people have watched. It's kind of been around. I didn't watch it until recently, actually, like in the last few years. And it's really kind of been surpassed by Woodstock as, you know, Woodstock came two years later and is the world-renowned kind of music of the 60s festival. But Monterey Pop was first.

And it was the first time Janis Joplin performed in front of like a large audience. And it was Otis Redding's introduction kind of like to the world. Like he'd been obviously Otis Redding for years and years and years, but this was like his kind of debut for a much larger audience. And if you want to just watch 15 minutes of amazing,

of an amazing performance and amazing cinema, you just watch his performance. So I find it a fascinating. It's this capsule of time from, you know, 1967. It's also music that we of our generation kind of grew up with. My husband and I were talking about it last night and we were like, when we were born in the 80s, it was less than 20 years from when that had been released. So it was the music of our generation, of our parents' generation. So stuff we grew up listening to, but it's also in this era we're living in of not being able to leave the house and consuming

everything. I have found it very comfort food to have on in the background. And it's a way to be engaged in something that's not social media or the news and be entertained. But I'm not being forced to analyze something something or, you know, really it's not requiring me to spend two and a half hours of paying full attention. Yeah, no, that's a great, it's a really great pick. It also is a reminder that once upon a time there was communal life when thousands of people gathered to hang out and

have fun and watch music. That feels like it was happening 10 years ago. Penny Baker is such an interesting figure. He obviously he made a Bob Dylan documentary. He's one of the you know, he just passed away last year. He's one of the signature documentarians of his era. This one is such a good pick because the variance that you get of performers in this festival, like I had always wanted to be at this show more than Woodstock. If you look at the different kinds of artists that are here, you know, like the who played here, Otis Redding, you mentioned, the Mamas and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel. You know, there's a very famous Jimi Hendrix performance from there. I feel like that's something that you would see like in clip shows all the time growing up.

Are you like a big concert film person or is it there's just something about this one that clicks for you? I'm in certain, I think in the way that certain, in the way that people are concert film fans in terms of like, stop making sense, you know, I like, I think stop making sense, which is also on the criterion channel. I know I'm not allowed to, but just FYI it is there. But I like, you know, I think things for me that are, are as engaging as going to a concert. I don't really watch, you know, like just YouTube videos

of performances, but I think it, you know, again, in this time where it's like, I can't just watch people. It's weird for me to watch television now that's from like a week ago and have people walking down the hallway and talking to each other. That feels like that sends me into a weird panic, but watching this communal activity and about something and music that is so, it crosses generational lines and it crosses every, it's kind of the one uniter that we all have. And so I think it's really lovely to be able to kind of watch that now. Let me ask you a question. As you've gotten just a little bit older, do you find that it's more difficult to go to concerts? Yeah, my feet hurt.

I'm really old. Yeah, me too. I'm just not cool anymore. I'm like, I don't, we went to a concert recently and I was like, my knee hurts. Can we sit? Where do we sit? I have the same feeling.

It's terrible. And like, going to concerts was such a big part of my 20s and my 30s i have found that it's much easier to just sit on the couch and watch monterey pop than to get out into the world yeah and i i'm just i mean for me it's also like when i love that people get into it and standing up but i'm like you're blocking it if i if you sit down i could watch this also we'd all be sitting and enjoying it um there will be nobody blocking your view if you turn on monterey pop so uh exactly exactly well thanks liz i appreciate this thank you

there's a powerful group of people out there that are secretly running the world i'm talking about the guys no one knows about the guys that are invisible the top one percent of the top one percent the guys that play god without permission i think i i'm here someone there hi sam i'm here yeah hey i'm uh i'm recording right now so you want to you want to jump right into it so well tell me again so this was like the one pick from the Criterion channel, right? That was the role. Well, obviously, this is a very, very, very tough decision. There's so many great films.

And especially right now, where people can just start binging and watching all the great masters. By the way, the film I'm going to tell you in a second, I discovered because it was, it was the, it was the summer before film school and they had released, it was the summer before I went to AFI and AFI had released their like 100. It was instead of like a reading list, it was a movie watching list. And so that summer i just binged all these great classics and honestly so just anybody listening out there just just go into criterion and just start watching some stuff i mean they're they're some of the greatest pieces

of work you'll ever see and you'll fall in love with certain filmmakers and the filmmaker i ended up falling in love with was uh bunuel louis bunuel i the film that was on the list was bell de jure but that's not the film that i ended up just falling in love with the film i i still hold in high regard and still probably consider it my favorite film of all time time is the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie. It's a great pick. Tell me, tell me why I have. Yeah.

I haven't seen it a long time though. Um, I think we talked a little bit about this in your, on your, on, on the pod when we were doing the, the, the,

uh, director game. Um, and you had picked Carpenter, which I was very jealous of, uh, for the director game. And you had picked Carpenter, which I was very jealous of for the 70s. And it's a little similar to how I feel about Carpenter in that Bunuel is so creative and doesn't let anything slip by

without considering it in the most imaginative offbeat quirky uh uh inventive way and um and so that so a large part of the reason why i love this movie is that at every beat and every turn he is constantly giving you these interesting ideas and um and i always call this film the sort of the ultimate fuck plot movie um it was you know i i i've said that in interviews before because to me when you watch a movie and you and you sort of process it and time goes by. It is not the plot mechanics of how characters go from one scene to another, etc. It is the experience and tone and vibe

that I think you take away from it. And Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie almost taunts you by refusing to adhere to any sort of plot that's going to make any sense the mechanics of how the care and essentially the story if you could even call it that is a group of six rich friends are trying to have a meal they either going to a restaurant or inviting people over for dinner or for lunch, and they can never quite actually sit down and have the meal. That's loosely what the story is about, but that's not what the movie is about. The movie is about all the stuff that happens in between, and honestly, it sort of defies logic in a way intentionally so like every time you think you're about to learn

something about the plot like one of the characters is an ambassador to a fictional country miranda and as he's about and he's gotten his two other friends there and as he's about to sort of divulge some information about what he does and you think okay here we go here's the story a car drives by and the sound sort of just overtakes the track and you can't hear any of the dialogue and that happens multiple times throughout the movie so he's intentionally trying to avoid you following any sort of threat and in fact i think that's honestly the the point the the movie is essentially a bunch of disconnected episodes strung together and sometimes you're in dreams and sometimes you're in memories of minor characters uh and and then you're in and out of

them um and i don't want to spoil too much because i think the fun of it is like just dropping in and not knowing any of the stuff that I just said. So in a weird way, I've already spoiled too much. But I later then saw the show Mr. Show. Did you ever see that show? Mr. Show? Bob Odenkirk. Yeah. Of course.

Hugely influential on me. Yeah. Well, that was a great show. And it kind of does something similar to that. If you remember how those episodes were structured, is you would start off in a story, and they would kind of lean on devices more, so you would start in a story, and it would turn into a news report, and then you start to follow another character who's watching that news report, and then that's a dream of somebody else's.

So that's a little bit the way to discreet charm of the bourgeoisie but it's less about the device and just more about i think thematically what bunuel and i think he did this in a lot of his films but specifically with this film this film was about capitalism and class done in that satirical way and it kind you know it's kind of fitting that we're talking about this in light of uh parasite uh my favorite film of of last year not your favorite not your number one right number two it was number two number one was uh once upon a time in hollywood but it was um but the the weird thing is in this film the the the screecher and the bourgeoisie actually has these, the focus is not on the poor, but on the rich, so on the elites. And none of these characters are redeemable.

You're not really invested in them or rooting for them. I mean, they treat the poor with such callousness and and and bunuel because he doesn't have you know generally speaking when you are um when you're watching a movie there's an avatar of some kind there's a character or characters that you're rooting for that you have empathy for and you invest in and that's sort of your way into the story bunuel because of the artifice and i mean and i'm telling you in general in the style of it like even the sets look cheap and look like soap opera sets just to a certain extent and i think that's the point he keeps this distance from you he wants you to be very aware that you're watching a movie the entire time and so it becomes more of an essay about elitism and about class and capitalism and less

about a story and honestly a movie like that should not work when he sort of ignores the sort of rooting interest in characters and and places you in such a distance like that and places you in such an observer role like that and the only other i was thinking about this because the only other film that i remember that kind of has a similar um relationship with the audience is 2001 where i i'm not entirely sure if there's a specific character i don't know if i'm necessarily rooting for dave all that much and he's also not even in the first 20 minutes of the film i don't know sometimes i feel sympathy for hal but i don't necessarily know if i'm rooting for him either so it's almost like an

s and and so again discrete charm to me is like on that level of a film that works so well despite the fact that you have zero emotional engagement and it's all because of the wit and charm of the script and the direction i mean everything from the staging you know you have characters who are in the middle of conversation and a character who's not speaking all of a sudden walks in front of the frame and takes over the frame for 10 seconds for seemingly no reason and then walks away um you have these incredible dream sequences of a character that literally will walk in as if on cue and he would he would tell this it would be a soldier telling this horrifying uh memory slash dream you kind of are not clear of how he grew up and how he poisoned his family and then when that

dream comes and then when he sort of finishes telling that story the our ensemble characters are complaint are more outraged that the restaurant they're in doesn't have tea or coffee and and and it's just that sort of wit and excellent biting humor that just kind of always keeps you engaged no matter what and by the way this film is so political in in terms of what it's talking about with social i mean there's at one point in the film a war breaks out and of course the elite in the in the house are still trying to go on with dinner you know wondering if the house will be spared um and then you know that

the war takes a break for the general to come back in and invite them to dinner at his house um it's so it's where i was going with it it's so political and this movie was made in 1972 and it doesn't feel dated at all all the politics still apply to anything that we're going through right now um it just shows how bunuel has just a weird way of just sort of transcending uh he sort of sort of transcends the conversation to really root it into what it means to live in a society where we have this sort of class disparity and um and that the politics of it really don't matter when it comes to that and so um uh if you want me to keep going or or just just tell me one thing sam tell me how how did this movie specifically influence what you try to do i think the great thing about

what bunuel does is is the lack of self seriousness. You know, when you watch his film, I'm not talking about just discreet charm, any of his films, I mean, you know, exterminating angel,

uh, the obscure object of desire where the, where the main characters, by the way, played by two different actresses, you, you, you see that he always is winking at you. And there's something about that that really causes

you to be entertained while actually being provoked to think about these really, like what we just talked about, really sort of horrifying things about what it means to be alive. And it's that combination that I think is great. I never want one or the other. I never want an empty comedy and I never want a self-serious drama. I want my cake and eat it too. And that's what he does. And that's sort of what I at least strive. I don't, you know, i'll leave it up to everybody else

to decide how successful i am but at least strive to have that mix because i think that's always the winning combination because the one thing with been well is you're gonna have fun he wants you to have fun it's almost relentless and the minute he he it's almost like he knows when you start to drift or get bored he's almost it's almost as if he's bored with whatever the plot is and then he starts to switch to a different thread and that that kind of energy and by the way i forget how old he was he was this is the last film he made in fact i think the film he made before this tristana i think that was supposedly his last film and then he couldn't because because i think um if i remember

this correctly i think he he he thought he was getting repetitive so he he was gonna stop and then he came up with this idea and he wanted to make a movie about that repetition so i think it's like that energy of bunuel is what I strive for is the idea that he's sort of relentless relentlessly trying to entertain while also provoke you and that's sort of what I go for in the stuff that

I do. Sam it's a great pick and I appreciate you and I hope you're staying safe man. You too man hi amy how's it going sean hello how are you i'm good hanging in there thank you for doing this oh i'm so excited i'm so excited to talk about this movie alright so I hit record let's do a movie let's do it yeah you're you're a pro at home recording now I know I love

this new mic it's like what if we never go to the studio again okay we're joined by our old pal Amy Nicholson co-host of unspooled film critic extraordinaire Amy you are a movie watcher of some caliber. What's your recommendation from the Criterion Channel? I'm going to recommend something a little random.

It's not black and white. It is full on strange color. It is a movie from 1978 called Thank God It's Friday. It's a disco movie. Do you know this movie? I've never seen it. I just added it. So tell me about this movie.

Oh, you're going to die. You're going to die. You're going to die. Okay. So it's from 1978. It is so disco that Donna Summer is a character in the movie. She actually won an Oscar for this movie. This is the movie where she does that song Last Dance. And it won an Oscar, which made Leonard Maltin, a buddy I love, who called this movie a bomb. He said it was perhaps the worst film to have ever won some kind of an Academy Award. Oh, wow. So what's the story of the movie? Like, is it take place in a disco? Oh, yeah. It not just takes place in a disco. It takes place in the most amazing disco. So I'll describe the disco and then I'll tell you a little bit of the characters. The disco here is called the Zoo Disco. And I mean, picture the inside. There's

giant snakes on the walls. There's an elevator operator who wears a gorilla costume. There's like statues of penguins. There's statues of polar bears. It is wild. And it's actually shot in a disco that was a real disco here in LA in the 70s called Osco's Disco Club. So they just shot it there. It's like the space age looking disco on the outside and so you feel really like you're visiting ancient la they go to tale of the pup in this movie i was like oh my god i want to i want to get a time machine and live back in here but okay here's what's going on in the disco because it's just a lot to be honest there's like a couple single guys there's a couple single girls there's a single guy who's looking for this date that he's got set up with by computer, which is all sci-fi and futuristic. And he's this

rageaholic angry person. There's this young couple. They've been married for five years and she drags her husband to this club and he doesn't want to go. She gets seduced by the club owner, the nightclub owner for like a cash bet. If he can like seduce her, he wins a bunch of money. And meanwhile, like her husband gets pulled away by this dental hygienist who's also crazy punk rock looking and has this like giant wig and gets him cracked out on all of these different drugs. There's this DJ at the booth who's like live streaming his show to live streaming, who's like broadcasting his disco hits to the radio. And he's all stressed out because he's trying to get the commodores to show up on time and then of course there's donna summer she's playing like a kind of newbie wannabe disco

star named nicole and her whole thing is trying to like break into the dj booth and get him to play her song so that she can just become legendary i mean it's insane there's like just tons of characters i didn't even mention there's these two high school girls who are trying to win a dance contest so they can get kiss tickets. There's a dude who just calls himself the Leather Man. And he does this like exuberant dance thing out in the parking lot on top of all these parked cars wearing like head to toe leather. And he starts yelling that dancing is the only thing that matters and everything else is bullshit. It's just the most amazing movie. Oh, and I left out the coolest part, which is the sleazy nightclub owner is played by none other than Young Jack Goldblum.

Oh, wow. I can't believe I've missed this. So I saw that this was added to the channel's 70s style icons collection of movies but you know the other movies that are in that collection are these really kind of like classy paranoia thrillers you know movies like clute or you know like three days the condor like that kind of a thing this did not seem like that is the is the style actually good in this movie or is it oh god no okay that's what i thought it looked terrible i mean a character at one point refers to the nightclub as disneyland with tits i mean that's what you're getting into when you watch this movie i will say i loved the absolute living hell out of it though

that's an amazing recommend recommendation um amy i appreciate you taking a little time out i hope you're staying safe oh i I appreciate you maybe watching this film. And if you watch this film, you have to tell me what you think. I will hit you up as soon as I do. I'll watch it tonight. Thanks, Amy. You got it. Thank you.

Okay, let's take a quick break to hear a special word from Bill Simmons. Hey, it's Bill Simmons. I just wanted to make sure you were listening to podcasts on Spotify. Here's how you do it. First, search for your favorite podcast on Spotify's app. They have a library of over 750,000 pods at this point. So let's say you're searching for the Rewatchables or the Dave Chang Show or the Ringer NBA Show. Once you find them, click on the Follow button.

That's how you subscribe. Then click on those letters near the top of the app that say podcasts. All the pods you're following will pop up separated by episodes, downloads, and shows. Wait, it gets better. In Spotify, you can adjust the speed of the pods to seven different speeds. 0.5 times is the slowest. I actually sound drunk at 0.5. You can do 0.8 times, 1.2 times, which is my favorite. Everyone sounds like they

just had a good cup of coffee. And then there's 1.5 times, two times. And if you're completely insane, three times. Anyway, Spotify's app connects directly to many of the best automobiles in the world. It even has a car play feature. That's pretty cool. Best of all, it's free. Download Spotify on any device and you're good to go. Should you be embarrassed that you're not listening to podcasts on Spotify? Well, I don't want to app shame you, but the answer, unfortunately, is yes. Make the move. Listen to podcasts on Spotify. Back to yours. Okay, we're back and we've got more friends ready to talk about movies. Had to go to our pal Peyton Reed, who you may know from the Ant-Man films and movies like Down

with Love and Bring It On, who's got a great pick. We also got a chance to talk for the first time with Miranda July, who has an edition of Me and You and Everyone We Know coming to Criterion later this year. And she's also got a new film coming to theaters hopefully later this year called Gajillionaire. She gave us a great pick. And then we talked to our old pal ari aster who of course you know from movies like hereditary and midsommar he's got a great pick for us as well so you have the force of a 200 pound man behind a fist a hundredth of an inch wide you're like a bullet you punch too hard you kill someone too soft. It's a love tap. In other words, you have to know how to punch. I was in prison for three years.

I don't know how to punch. Hi. How are you? I'm good. How are you? Good, man. Thanks for hopping on and doing this. Yeah.

So tell me, is it, you want to just record? Do you want picture, no picture? Heidi, what are we doing? It's just all. We don't need picture. We're recording via Zoom. I assume you don't have any kind of audio ring in your home. I don't. I wish I did.

That's okay. Is the sound shitty or extra shitty right now? What's the... This is honestly better than most of the calls I've had thus far. So I don't know why your fidelity is so strong, but it is strong. All right. Good. Okay, good. I'm actually going to press record, Bobby. Are you ready? You got your pick? Yeah.

Okay, Peyton Reed, tell me what you, what are you suggesting for us on the Criterion channel? Well, my suggestion is, of course, Paper Moon, Peter Bogdanovich, 1973. I mean, I have to tell you, I have been recommending to people who've been holed up during this whole weird time, get Criterion channel because it's like,

what is it, a 100 bucks for a year? And the curation on the channel is unbelievable. And there's such a breadth of stuff. Paper Moon to me has always been a favorite. I actually saw it first run when it opened in 1973. I was nine. I was exactly the same age as Tatum O'Neill. And unfortunately, at the time, I had a haircut that was shockingly similar to Eddie Gray's haircut in the movies. My family would make fun of me. But that movie has really stuck with me for many, many years and has aged incredibly well. And to me, it's one of the great comedies of the 70s, obviously, and I think, for me, one of the great comedies of all time. And one of the things I still marvel at in that movie is the comedic timing,

but also that it's such a beautifully shot movie. And that's, to me, in that peak Bogdanovich era, to me, he did four masterpieces in a row. Targets, Last Picture Show, What's Up Doc, and Paper Moon. I mean, there are very few directors who have had four movies like that in a row. It's unbelievable. And Paper Moon, to me, is my favorite. I love all those movies for different reasons.

But Paper Moon, to me, is where kind of everything came together. And it's always been this guiding force in terms of people and filmmakers who love comedies and want to make comedies. Paper Moon is this sort of shining beacon in terms of everything is right about it. It shows you that you can do a comedy that's spontaneous and hilarious, but also beautifully, beautifully shot. How is it specifically suffused your work? You know, I feel like the, the way that he works with actors is so amazing and the interplay that he has between Tatum and Ryan is, is just like unreal.

And also Madeline Kahn. I just remembered like her extraordinary performance in that movie. Yeah. Trixie delight. Well, I mean, I think it's, it's, if you've ever seen those outtakes, I think they were on the DVD wayd way back shockingly i don't think paper moon is on blu-ray uh now i think maybe there's a british one but in in america it's not but there were these outtakes which bogdanovich clearly was a huge influence on ryan o'neill's comedic acting and what's up doc and paper moon and in the paper moon outtakes there were shots where they set up the shot and filmed Bogdanovich doing the Ryan O'Neill

stuff. There's the thing where he gets up out of the bed and switches the light off and everything. So you get a sense that he really was, that Ryan O'Neill was kind of a vessel for Peter Bogdanovich. He had such a clear idea of the comedic timing of every moment in that movie. And

there's a precisionism about the way it's shot. And it's legendary in a way that the directors who want, you know, sort of the ultimate control over their thing to protect their movies from a studio, he would shoot literally only specific pieces of scenes and specific setups. So there were very limited ways that you could edit it.

And speaking of editing, you know, Verna Fields cut that movie and she cut it, I think it was the same year she did American Graffiti. And obviously not long before she did Sugarland Express and Jaws, but there's a precise nature to the way that it's shot. And it's, you know, a lot of times, and I've talked about this before, when we were making Down With Love,

particularly it's like you want the lighting to be just so and you want the lighting to be very specific but that can sometimes fight the comedy and sort of the comedic performance and it's this delicate dance and paper moon to me is just the pinnacle of those two things working together uh it's and it's such a it's such an amazingly entertaining movie i mean ryan o'Neill to me, Ryan O'Neill has three of the absolute most enjoyable comedic performances of the 70s. What's Up Doc, Paper Moon, and Barry Lyndon. To me, those are like three brilliant and

very different comedic performances. And I have the feeling that Bogdanovich was a large part of sort of training him in that regard and realizing that he had a facility with it. But he is, he's amazing. And the choice, of course, to shoot it in black and white, Bogdanovich always talked about how sort of beautiful Ryan O'Neill and Tatum O'Neill were.

Like they were very healthy and very California. And that wasn't going to work in the context of Paper Moon and making it black and white, not only sort of sold the period aspect of the movie, but also sort of, you know, cast them in a different light, very literally, which I think was,

was a very smart choice. Peyton, I'm a little bit of a Bogdanovich file myself. I'm always curious for people who really are passionate about him and care about him. Like, is there a later period, lesser known work of his that you dig or that you think is a little bit misunderstood well i mean saint jack yeah that's

i mean that's that's that's kind of an obvious one i mean listen i when he i think had not done a movie for eight or nine years and was going to do cat's meow it was not long after i worked with kirsten dunst on uh It On. And she told me, she's like, yeah, I think I'm going to do this movie called Cat's Meow with this director, Peter Bogdanovich. She couldn't pronounce his last name. And I was like, Peter Bogdanovich. And she's like, yeah, what do you know about him? And of course, I went on to tell her probably way too much about what I knew about him. And like, yeah, he just, he's a genius and he's done this amazing work. I said, but maybe be careful because I know he also likes young blondes a lot.

I love cats me out. I think cats me out is I love that movie. Um, it was really fun. And, uh, and noises off like that movie as well. I mean, there's a lot of sort of stuff, but there was just this firing on all cylinders quality that Paper Moon has. And it is interesting. Like we talked about Verna Fields editing it, but also the Polly Platt connection is always much discussed in terms of peak Bogdanovich. And if I'm remembering correctly, this is the last movie I think that they did together. That's a fact. Yeah. And, you know, there is a compelling argument to be made that like that partnership between the two of them was just,

there was something that they gave each other that maybe was missing in the later movies. Certainly in terms of like choosing the material and helping pick the material that Mike Donaghy was doing, she was crucial. But yeah, this is a movie that I have a lot of nostalgia for, but also I try to eliminate that from when I watch the movie now. I don't want it to be a nostalgic experience. I just want to experience it and see how it plays today. And it's interesting because it does have this certain ironic detachment that was really sort of fresh at that point, particularly for a comedy. And it seems like time has caught up with the tone of that movie in a great way. It's an amazing pick. I'm glad you cited it. Bogdanovich is one of my heroes. Thanks, Peyton. I appreciate you doing this. All right. Thank you, Sean. Objectively speaking, if you weren't my children, would you think that guy looks okay?

Are you mad at us? Yeah, totally. I think you look good. Hello! Hi. I have some very broken headphones. Oh, that's better than nothing. Hi. Can you hear us? Yeah, only one ear of them works. Okay. Well, I'll just hold this one in my ear. Okay. Thank you for using broken equipment to power through this. I appreciate it.

I'm slightly embarrassed because like for me to really know a movie, it has to be something that I saw as a teenager, you know, and have watched every time since, which is, I mean, whatever, they release only good movies. So one needn't feel embarrassed by any choice. So what did you land on? What is something that you found in your teenage years that you've held on to? A Room with a View. Oh, great pick. So why that film? Well, I saw it. I should check when that movie actually came out. I feel like I saw it when it came out and that I was maybe 14 and, um,

just prime territory to just live in a romantic dream world. And it's as if that movie is my experience of love or like how I lost my virginity or something like it's when I think about that movie I don't think of it as like a movie I think of it as like um how I came to be a woman or something like some event you know but I realized oh that was all in my head like nothing actually happened to me but Helena Bonham Carter like she had her that experience um and I lived through her that summer um and more or less for the rest of my life yeah to this day I mean I've probably seen it um just an insane amount of times yeah what what do you do you find that you get something new when

you return to a movie like that over and over again yeah I mean you you all you get something new when you return to a movie like that over and over again? Yeah. I mean, you get to also look at yourself at all these ages, you know, like I'm not so overwhelmed by seeing, what's his name? I should have checked everyone's names before we should all. Daniel Melia? Or Julian Sands, you mean? Yeah julian sands yeah and sands yeah like i think i was so overwhelmed by seeing his nudity you know as a young girl and now i'm like oh right like that it's not doing as much for me now um but like her her, her perfect little face, um, is, is always incredible to watch. Um, and, um, Daniel Day-Lewis also like not aging that well in that performance, to be totally honest. Um, like it is just like, so over the top,

you know, um, like a parody, like could you stick out from the movie anymore, but it fits the role and it's like really good for top, you know, like a parody, like, could you stick out from the movie anymore? But it fits the role. And it's like, really good for the role. Well, I feel like Merchant Ivory has this reputation as being very stodgy and stiff, and like homework for some people. But you know, their films are pretty sensual. It seems like you had some awakenings watching this movie. I mean, like, how did you know to see a movie like this at 14 years old? Like, how did it come into your life? Oh, you know, I grew up in Berkeley.

I feel like that's a good question if I actually like went to a theater or if it was a VHS rental. But there was a pretty good video store in Berkeley. And I got, there were all kinds of things. I mean, I could have chosen like Jane Campion movies for this, but I felt like I should be honest about what I had seen more than anything. Yeah. So it wasn't a, it wasn't a big stretch. I mean, I grew up like watching like Stan Brakhage movies that my dad showed me, you know. And so this was like, yeah, fairly mainstream and very, very 80s. That's like a very 80s movie, isn't it?

It's sort of like that, that Laura, I'm picturing just like Laura Ashley wallpaper. You might not, that phrase might not resonate with you. I know as much as it does with some of our listeners. You'd be surprised. You'd be surprised. Okay. Just talking about like just floral prints and, and that kind of,

that kind of dress. God, what was these dresses that had these princess sort of bodices? Like there was a kind of dress god what was these dresses that had these princess um sort of bodices like there was a kind of over the top romanticness of the 80s that i think that movie you know plugged into and i was a teenage girl so in some ways it wasn't there was a lot um sort of superficially happening as well. That was very resonant. And even, I feel like even in the hairstyles,

even in Helena Bonham Carter's hair, it's like, it is oddly very eighties, even though the story is set in the early 20th century. It's like, it's fascinating what a weird time capsule of a time capsule it is. Right. Right.

Yeah. I, I like, there's like, if you watch, like, Friends, there's, like, a certain kind of, like, arty woman that was allowed to have, like, big curly brown hair messily swept up, you know? Yeah. the whole reason to watch the movie is just for the point where the the dad of Julian Sands says like you know my dear you know don't don't you love him don't you love my son and she's she's kind of been you know unreadable for the whole movie and she just breaks down and she's

like of course I do of course I love him and she's just sobbing and then she like runs after the the um carriage or whatever and is I forget even what she's saying there but she has to catch it in order to do something or call something off or call someone back or something but she's just running and just how she like goes for it there and like the total breakdown and abandon that to me i was like if i could just do that again and again throughout my life you know like break down and admit complete desire you know that would be that would be a great let me just aspire to that again and again so that's the entire game plan of my life. That's just an amazingly human impulse.

Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate it, Miranda. Hopefully we'll see you for Kajillionaire soon. Yeah, that'd be nice. Take care. Okay, bye-bye. I told you that I want to go to that festival in Sweden oh you said it would be cool to go

yeah and then I got the opportunity and I decided to do it I don't mind you going I just wish you would have told me that's all I'm very glad to have Ari Aster back on the show Ari you are your film scholar in a way what's what's your criterion channel pick here well you know I I feel because I've been kind of like living on the the criterion channel for the last few weeks I feel the urge to just sort of give you

a laundry list but um uh I guess I've been really uh back through the films of the Japanese new wave. I've been just navigating all of the, you know, anger and sadness and just total feeling of impotence. And, you know, of this last month and those films, uh, particularly the films of, uh, Shohei Imamura, Nagisa Oshima, and Teshigahara's films, uh, you know, there's a, an anger and, uh, and, uh, and a reverence and a, just a total rejection of just about everything that, that has been sort of a balm for me lately.

I'm lobbing a bunch of films together to give one recommendation, but I would recommend watching really anything by Imam Murrah, especially the films he was making in the 60s and 70s. Insect Woman or Intentions of Murder are a great place to start. Vengeance is Mine, Profound Desire of the Gods,

which kind of ruined his career for a bit and then he ended up not remaking it but kind of revisiting a lot of its themes in The Bell of Narayama and both of those films, Profound Desire of the Gods and Bell of Narayama were kind of influences

on me when I was writing Nidzar um and then uh for oshima uh who is uh is different from imamura in that he kind of reinvented himself with every film imamura kind of just was always attacking the same themes, playing on different variations on the theme of, I guess, people who have just been fucked by society and their place in the hierarchy. Oshima, who is much more experimental and kind of doubly political i would i would recommend

boy uh or uh death by hanging um or in the realm of the senses or empire of passion um those are all very different films but but all kind of equally exciting. And then, uh, for, um, Hiroshi Teshigahara, who, uh,

is sort of an outlier in that he, he only made so many films before he, um, went, uh, I guess back to the family business of, uh, of flower arranging. Um um is that true yeah yeah uh

yeah he was more of a renaissance man um and that's staggering considering the films that he made i know i know well his father his father had um uh a business that's um that Toshigahara was always, I guess, supposed to move into. And then when his father died, he, he kind of, he kind of took over the,

the family business, but he, he, he's very exciting for me. And his films are more, I guess, distinctly allegorical than the other two filmmakers. And they're also, all of his best films are distinguished by his collaboration with the novelist Kobo Abe, who is sort of a Japanese Kafka. And I really recommend his books. But he is, I guess, the trilogy that he's best known for. If they're really a trilogy, they're all kind of totally disparate.

But are Pitfall, Face of Another, and Woman in the Dunes. And they all make a lot of sense right now. And so I guess those are my recommendations for now. Yeah, Woman in the Dunes in particular is quite a quarantine watch. It's kind of a quarantine Hall of Famer in a lot of ways. It's really perfect for right now. Yeah, yeah. If you had to, out of all three of those filmmakers,

what is the first, what is the first film you think anybody should watch out of all their work that's available on the channel? Well, I, I would say. Emma Murrah is the filmmaker I feel closest to. Um,

he's, he's just a really important filmmaker for me in general. Um, he's very funny. He just, his films are distinguished by this like wholesale rejection of sentimentality, which is especially exciting given the fact that he makes films about people

who are struggling through poverty. He really reminds me of Buñuel in the way that he kind of rejects the idea of the, you know, the, the noble peasants and, and his films are very much about how, if you put somebody in a desperate position, it doesn't necessarily bring the best out of them.

And I would say if I had to point to one film in particular, I would probably point to Profound Desire of the Gods, probably because it just feels like it's jammed, packed with kind of everything I love about him. It's maybe his longest film. And it seems to be the film that he kind of kept returning to throughout his career. It was a huge flop. And he didn't make another narrative film for,

I mean, almost a decade after it came out. But it seems to kind of haunt his body of work more than any other that I can think of. So that's the one, I would say. This is an amazing and deep series of recommendations. I appreciate you coming through for this, Ari. Yeah, thank you. I'm so grateful for the Criterion channel right

now. It's a lifesaver. Me too. Hopefully, we'll get a chance to see you in person soon. I hope so too. Thanks for having me on, Sean. I need supports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. We got big baby Jesus, Chris Ryan here. Chris, what's up, man? Hey, man, how's it going? I'm okay. Have you been watching the Criterion channel lately?

Yeah, you know what's really good? The Criterion channel. It's amazing. Yeah, I've been doing that a lot. I feel like the thing with this really funny with criterion channel is um it makes me feel like a real scumbag if i like skip around or like eject in the middle of a movie because they're so lovingly curated and it just feels so good to fire up criterion channel movie that if you ever like like just decide you're not really up for the marriage

of Maria Braun, you know, maybe 40 minutes in and you just kind of want to watch like what we do in the shadows, you you really, really bad about it. So it's it's good. It's got some self-flagellation, but it's also got it's one of the most edifying, rewarding streaming services that's ever been invented. So what's your pick? Tell me about what you think people should be watching right now. I can only be myself. I wanted to come up with something really obscure, really, you know, offbeat, but I'm going to recommend Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 Le Samurai starring Alain Delon. If you are a fan of any kind of nameless Ronin guys rolling through cities, doing jobs, working in the underworld,

this is the sort of Rosetta Stone for that. It is one of the coolest movies you will ever see. It is a knowingly cool movie that basically invents a kind of minimalist, modern hitman film for decades to come. You can see it in Drive. You can see it in Driver. You can see it in Ronin. But it is an absolutely magical movie. It's a great pick. It was on the top of my mind in 2019 because apparently this is one of the movies that Brad Pitt studied when he was preparing for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And if you look at Alain Delon and a lot of his work, Pitt is he's lifting a lot of the moves, you know, the quiet stillness and the sort of effortless, less handsome quality

and that kind of like stealth charisma that Pitt has gotten so good at projecting. It's like it's right there in that movie. It's a great pick. I feel like you're a big Melville guy. Yeah, so a few more of his films had been on the Criterion Channel, Army of Shadows, which is a masterpiece. And my favorite one of his straight crime movies, which is The Red Circle or Cirque du Rouge. But the ones that remain are still worth watching.

And the coolest thing about it is that I think Melville is probably a little bit a tier below the Truffauts and Godards of his generation of French filmmakers. But in a lot of ways is a great gateway to get into other European filmmakers because so much of what he does is borrowing from 1940s and 1950s American crime films and then shooting it through the lens of that kind of ennui European kind of existential left bank bullshitting stuff that I also get off on. Amazing pick. I knew I could count on you, Chris. There's no shame in shouting out Le Samurai.

Appreciate you, dude. Thanks, man. Okay, now let's talk to the big homie, Barry Jenkins, who of course you know from movies like Moonlight, Oscar winner, one of the great filmmakers alive. We're also going to talk to Aaron Lee Carr, one of the most successful documentarians around right now. You can check out How to Fix a Drug Scandal on Netflix if you're interested in seeing her work. She's also made several films, great true crime films for HBO in recent years. And then after that, we'll talk to Josh's brother, Benny Safdie, who's got a bit

of a double dip recommendation for us. You ready for this? I've never been more ready for anything in my whole life. You know I love you. Barry Jenkins, what movie do you think people should be out there watching on Criterion channel right now? I mean, there's so many choices, man. I saw Yorgos' first film was on there, which I've never seen, and so

I want to watch that. There's this whole Quincy Jones, it's sort of like the sound of Quincy Jones, and you can kind of watch them in chronological order, so I've been kind of working my way through those. The biggest thing for me as a kid who grew up kind of

watching films in the late 90s into the early 2000s um is that the commentaries you know uh the special features which we kind of take for granted now uh with everything streaming you know you buy something on itunes and you just load it right up you know you don't go to the menu you know and sort of check out the special features so um and it's interesting because you know lulu and i are here but, and it's interesting because, you know, Lulu and I are here, but, you know, it's just like, we only have each other, so who the hell do you talk to about each other?

And cinema is such a communal experience. So it's been cool for me to be digging through the interviews with all the filmmakers on the website, on the Criterion Channel

dot com. And because I watched Caché the other day because I was like, I feel like I want to watch Caché. And even though Caché is not on the website, there are all these interviews with Hanuki on the website. And so I went and watched a few of those. Um,

but for the purposes of this, uh, I chose picnic at hanging rock, um, by Peter Ware, um, which is, um, a cool film. I actually had never heard of this movie until a little bit of trivia. I got staffed by Damon Lindelof on season two of The Leftovers. And when I first came into the writer's room, didn't get to write any episodes, didn't do much. So it wouldn't be a shock if nobody had any idea that I had anything to do with The Leftovers. I mean, at the end of the day, I had nothing to do with The Leftovers. But when I first came into the writer's room, there was a starter pack you got, which was you had to have watched all the first season, had to read Tom Parada's novel. And then there was this Bible they had cooked up.

It was like, oh, and you have to watch Picnic at Hanging Rock. And so I watched this film that I'd never heard of. And Damon was just obsessed with it you know not as like a reference point because parada's book you know was the basis of the show but there's just something about the atmospherics of it um the the tension of it you know all these ideas of uh colonialism sexual hysteria all these things bound up and what's kind of like you know the supernatural uh mystery but made up very grounded elements and so he had us watch that film over and over again. And then I came out of the writer's room

and went and made Moonlight and never didn't really think of it again. And now that we're here with all this time, I was going to the website and noticed that it was on there. I have a lot of criterions that I have here in hard copy, but I don't have that one. And so, yeah, I plugged that one up.

You know, it's one of those overlooked gems from the late 70s that I think stylistically, story-wise, is still very relevant to a modern audience. So that would be my pick. Do you have any relationship to Weir's other movies? Is he a person that you've looked at in the past or is that the one film that sticks out for you? No, it's not the one film that sticks out for me. I mean, there were a few others, you know, I mean, obviously the really big, like massive ass films that everyone's seen, which you wouldn't think the same guy made Picnic at Hanging Rock. You know, it's kind of like, I don't know, the Cannes selection of his sort of IMDbography. But no, I can't say

that I've ever really been a big fan. And I gotta say, you know, shout out to Damon because it was a filmmaker. And I think one of the things about the Criterion Channel that's really cool is there are just so many filmmakers that as time moves on, you know, they're not as present in our lives, not as present

on our screens. And this is an opportunity to sort of reacquaint ourselves with those filmmakers. And yeah, Peter Warr is a G. And this movie is awesome. I'm educating myself a lot right now and trying to see as many things as I can that I've never seen. Hadn't never seen any Shohei and Mamura films.

I'm kind of going through those at the moment. Is there anybody else, like one filmmaker that you want to say, well, a lot of their work is on the service right now? Maybe you should peep this. There's a few. I mean, I think Agnes Varda has quite a few pieces up on the website that people should check out. I think there's some of the lesser known, Hanneke, that's on the website that people should check out. When this all first started, I watched Time of the Wolf,

which is also one of the lesser known or lesser seen Hanneke films. And then I was like, well, I got to watch more. And I just loaded up the app and started working my way back through them. I think for me, though, what I try to do is I try to use the website and I have it up on my iPad here. I actually like to look at it

on my iPad. I don't know if you can see on my iPad. Yeah, yeah. It kind of reminds me of the old school being in a video store where I sometimes

just get on there and I just hit the explore button. I always go to the leaving, you know, I just hit the explore button. You know, I always go to the leaving right now is leaving April 30th. I go through there and go, okay, what, what am I missing that I need to hit? And there's always, you know, as much as I could think of myself, you know, I'm nowhere near, there's so much shit that I need to see. And literally like on the page,

I'm looking at right now, if there's 16 films on here, I maybe have seen four, you know, that are just on the screen right now. And so I remember when I first got to film, I would go to Blockbuster

and I told the story to the Moonlight Press Store. I would just grab a random box, didn't care what it was. If I hadn't seen it, I was like, okay, I'm going to go home and give two hours to watch this.

And I think you can do the same thing with the Criterion channel right now. Just, I don't know, touch a button and, you know, go home and give two hours to watch this and i think you do the same thing with criterion channel uh right now just i don't know touch a button and you know go ahead and watch it get transported barry thank you for doing this i appreciate it man these are this is a great pick my pleasure man hopefully someday we can do it again in person man take care of yourself see you soon you too buddy thank you Thank you. A single person's act. These allegations do not implicate any system-wide practices.

How do you come out and make a statement that no one's been wrongfully convicted? How do you know? You just assume they're doing their job unless you're told by the law. How you doing? Medium, I would say, is the best that one can say. Medium to low. I'm like headquartered and hiding in a remote place in Connecticut. Medium, I feel like, is good.

I feel like that... Anybody who says that's great, shut it down. No way. Yeah, can't trust that. Psychopath. Psychopath. Yeah, I agree with you. You prepared to make a recommendation?

Yep. So how many recommendations do I get? Just one, man. One? Oh, I had four. All right. Oh my God. Erin, come on.

I know, I know. Well, I'll just do it when you, are we recording already? We can start whenever you want. So I was sequestered before all this happened. I went to Florida to basically like take a month off and uh one of my friends was like you have to check out criterion and like i'm making a film right now and so it was like you know putting all of these uh other filmmakers thoughts and you would

think that somebody like me would come up with like the the lesser known director but i found myself i kept uh true to my form i like i watched some alfred hitchcock and i watched the lady vanishes and that's um you know i think that people really always talk about psycho about vertigo um but i am somebody that really tries to think about sort of female hysteria and what does it mean and so so I, you know, I just like, the sort of the plot is about there's somebody that, that goes missing on a train. Is she dead? Is she gone? It's a whodunit. But at the root of it is this rich white woman who is,

who's trying to figure out what happened to this lady that was sitting next to her. And you may be like, listen, we don't need to listen to any more rich white ladies and what they're thinking about things. But you know, all the men around her are like, yeah, you're imagining things. It is, it doesn't exist. So it's like this weird gaslighting. And it's one of the first forms of gaslighting that I've seen in that, you know, and really seen it as gaslighting. And it's also just like playful and funny and evergreen. And I just kind of like, you know, I think my true thing is, am I not going to pay attention to my phone when I'm, when I am looking at this? And I really wasn't. And I had saved this

like stone crab and I was just sitting there and like, like a like a tabletop in Florida just like eating like crab and like watching this uh this Hitchcock film and it was just I don't know really fun where does it sit for you in the the Hitchcock pantheon like do you love those classics or are you kind of like looking for to understand him in a different way than just the traditional psycho north by northwest stuff I mean all, so I make psychological thrillers that are also documentary. And so anybody that is a master of that sort of, of that, those sequences of those films

of complicated women, I think Hitchcock had really three, really dimensional relationships with the women on screen. And so he's always been somebody that I have, that I just decode, that I try to understand. And like, obviously, like, you know, Vertigo and North by Northwest are going to be particularly like, they're just so beautiful. But I do really enjoy sort of, you can see his personality in these other films of like,

what he's sort of trying to say. but also maybe that's just me thinking, I know what Alfred Hitchcock has to say. And I've always just loved his relationship with his wife, how he always would like try to share the praise. And I think so often with male directors, it's like, keep the lady to the left. Like,

yeah, she might be like, you know, doing everything and helping me out, but like I am the great grand director. And so I just, I always sort of liked out, but like, I am the great grand director. Um, and so I just, I always sort of liked that, but you know, there's, there's complicating factors with all these directors. How do you actually take inspiration from Hitchcock and put it into a documentary? How does that like help me understand how that works? Yeah. I mean,

so there's a lot of, um, sort of, uh, especially in true crime, here's a question and here's an answer. And it follows a very linear format. Like me as somebody who's watched so much of it, sometimes I can just know exactly how this is going to unfold. And so when I watch these narrative films, it's really about how do you pose questions at the top and you foreshadow events that are going to show up later. And so it's like, you know, in terms of mental instability or in terms of sort of this is an unreliable narrator or, you know, things like that, that you can flag at the top of films in the middle of films that ultimately have this sort of payoff. And yeah, I think that that's the way I do it. And

I think documentary films are really moving towards narrative films and the way they looked and the way that they're sold and the way that sort of, you know, that they're directed. And so I've always been a little bit of a purist being like, no, I don't want to do recreates. I don't want to do that. But I think that audiences demand a certain level of sophistication. And we're going to be getting into a moment where I think documentary films are going to start to look a lot like narrative films. I thought How to Fix a Drug Scandal was very cinematic, very Hitchcockian. Erin, thanks for chipping in on this. Thank you. Next. You're incredible. Do you understand? I'm serious. You think I could have done that without you standing next to me being strong you going quarantine beard i am nice it's literally just physical passage of time i don't think the only other time I've done this was,

um, good time. And this is like three times that level. The beard. In the very beginning, in the very beginning, I have it because then I shave it at the, that's the whole point is he cleans me.

He cleans me up. Right, right, right. Okay. Okay. Well, it looks good.

So, um, so yeah, let's, let's do this thing. Did your brother tell you what he picked? No, he didn't tell me what he picked, but it's, it looks good. So, um, so yeah, let's, let's do this thing. Did your brother tell you what he picked? No, he didn't tell me what he picked, but it's, it's, it's, uh, what did he pick? He picked, uh, Atlantic city.

I have not seen that. It's good. We talked a lot about Susan Sarandon's use of lemons in the movie, which you'll understand when you see it. It's important stuff. There's, I, there's two, uh, they're very similar, but The Harder They Fall and On the Waterfront. Oh, wow. You doubled up on me.

So tell me about The Harder They Fall for people who are not familiar with it. It's unbelievable. It's incredible. But it's Bud Schulberg. You know, he wrote it. And then it's about, I guess it was Bogart's last movie, which is insane. It's Bogart's last movie which is which is insane um it's bogart's last movie and then he i guess he plays a sports writer an over the hill sports writer who gets hired by the mob

essentially and the the leader of that is rod steiger he he basically hires him to build up this guy from argentina toro who's the seven foot monster essentially strong man to be a boxer in the united states and it builds him up all the way to the heavyweight fight in the madison square garden it's incredible so you basically see him fighting all these people it's just an incredible movie you see him going town to town fighting all the people in those towns and there's a bus that has like toro on it it's incredible What made you want to check this movie out? I was reading Ringside by Bud Schulberg and he mentions this movie and then he talks about, of course,

on the waterfront, which I had never seen until recently. Oh, no kidding. So I wanted to see, I was like, okay, let me check out the Harley-Full. It's got everything I want, you know? Plus it's Bogart. And it was just like,

I remember watching it like, wow, this is, and I had never really heard of the director before mark robson yeah i don't know his work but it was just like doing some incredible stuff and they're like these insane dolly shots and also the actors that are in it are amazing you're thinking real legit real boxers playing themselves in the movie which is amazing you know it's like you've got this one guy who's so punch drunk but you're like this guy's got to be you there's no question he was a boxer you know the his face the way he talks about it it's all so built into the narrative it's incredible and then there was there was another

guy who um well toro is on his own is incredible because he's just literally this like seven foot argentinian strong man you know and um it was there's his trainer it's like this trainer guy is incredible i don't know like the casting of it was perfect and it was just so well written and well paced and it was just awesome what came first did you watch the heart of they fall before on the waterfront i did yes so and why how is on the waterfront like an open space for you i feel like that should be in your i know that's the thing there's certain there's certain movies that like you have in front of you that you never touch because you just don't know if you're ever ready

for it and then you always push it off for me though for the longest time it was the godfather you know all throughout college i can't everybody talks about the godfather i've never seen the godfather and then i finally see like oh yeah everybody talks about it for a reason you know but this so finally like but that's like an example is that you you don't ever revisit those certain things that kind of feel like um mammoth kind of movies and so this was one of them and i was like how good can it be i wasn't i just wasn't ever ready for it and then i watched it i was just this is just next it's next level on so many different terms and it's also rod cybers in that too and he might have he has the standout moment i think in the whole movie when it's him it's funny i don't want to like i'm like oh i don't want to ruin it for anybody

don't spoil this 70 year old movie i know but that's how i feel gosh we're talking about the other day that you can spoil movies that don't. Was it? Yeah. Either way. So there's, there's a moment where he has to talk to his brother, which is Marlon Brando.

And it's when Brando's giving his speech that could have been a contender, all that stuff. But it's Steiger who is so lost in so confused that he doesn't even say any words. He just kind of talks to, like these sounds come out of his mouth when he's sitting in the back of the car. And I was just like, that's like acting on a whole other level. Like everybody points to Brando, but nobody ever looks at him in that scene. And it's just a perfect, perfect kind of pairing.

Steiger's incredible. I don't know. It's like, and then the pawnbroker is a perfect example of him steiger's incredible i don't it's like and then the pawnbroker is is a perfect example of him just being a great actor he's in um the heart of they fall he's amazing too but and and pawnbroker is also on criterion channel so you want to have a steiger triple feature you can do it yes which you can and the thing is is he i don't know what i can't pinpoint exactly what it is but there's a certain instability to his character. It's like a kind of, not craziness, it's just he's off.

He's not comfortable where he is. And especially in Heart of the Fall, you think he's on top of his game. But the moment the matches that he has fixed start falling apart, you're just like, he it you know and he's like picks up the phone he's calling bogart he's like you don't understand i gotta do this you don't work for me i like it this is easy he goes wild and he and he it's weird because he's strong but you feel in both of them he plays a similar character he's a strong character who you don't necessarily know is going to go all the way or be able to do it. But are you saying he's like a Howard Ratner-esque figure?

Kind of. I guess you could say that. Yeah, you're attracted to a certain type, I think. Let me just ask you quickly, do you think you're the first person in history to go in this order from ringside to the harder they fall to on the waterfront? I don't think anyone's ever done it that way. I don't think so. Yeah, it's like, well, the thing is, you mentioned Howard Ratner, and you have What Makes Sammy Run, which is the other Schulberg,

which is amazing. But Ringside, I've had sitting there for so long, and I was like, you know what, I'm going to pick it up and go through it. It's amazing. But just hearing the way he talks about the movies, he's just like, at one point he talks about how Brando's giving everybody trouble because he's shit-talking the Academy. But meanwhile, Schulberg doesn't even want to do any press

because he has a boxer that he's working with. It's amazing. So then to watch those movies with a little bit of backstory is pretty cool. That's perfect. You gave us three for the price of one. I appreciate it, man. Thank you so much.

Of course. Okay. Amanda, how are you today? I'm good. I think, yeah, I did the jam session. Did some other work. Here I am. Did you speak nox um he sent me an email i did i i spoke to him for um five minutes he can't really get him on the phone because he

only checks his phone once a day at 11 45 p.m eastern so he's living so but i did speak to him last night and he picked a movie and he explained it why it's a very cute little email okay i started recording oh okay great um do you want me to record this on my thing yes please okay just making sure uh we're joined by my big picture co-host amanda dobbins amanda what's up hello sean uh so I asked you for a Criterion channel recommendation and your first thought was to go to your father. Why was that? I outsourced it. So my dad is probably the number one movie fan besides you, Sean, and also definitely the number one Criterion fan in my life. I don't know anybody who is more jazzed about the Criterion Collection than my dad.

My husband and I gave him a subscription for Christmas last year because he's really into movies in general. He sees a lot of movies and he'll find kind of weird stuff on streaming services, but he didn't have Criterion. And every time I talk to him now, we only talk about how much he loves the Criterion channel and how glad he is that Zach, my husband, got him a subscription. I have been cut out of the equation, even though it was a joint gift, but he loves my husband and he loves the gift. So it's worth it, I guess. But yeah,

he only wants to talk about these movies. And so I thought that I would share his enthusiasm. And I spoke to him briefly last night and I gave him a homework assignment, which was to pick a movie and to write a brief explanation of why he picked it and why he liked it. And so he picked, this was exciting actually, on the phone he told me that he was going to do Sweet Smell of Success, but he changed his pick and he went with M by Fritz Lang. Before you describe why he pitched M, have you seen M? I haven't. Okay, M's wonderful movie.

It's very, very depraved. And so the fact that your father recommended this is fascinating to me and maybe a little bit revealing, but let's hear his affirmation of M. It's fascinating to me and maybe a little bit revealing but let's let's hear his let's hear his affirmation of them it's fascinating to me too and i just want to say that if my father had been able to get his homework assignment in on time i would have watched it before we did this but he didn't because he doesn't check his phone that often but i'll read part of his explanation but what stood out to me in his explanation was how similar he and I are in terms of what we think is scary and what we respond to his film, which is very cute and exciting. But anyway, okay. He notes that he read some other reviews and wanted to try to use them, but then he decided

to use his own language. Okay, here we go. M is about a serial child killer in Berlin in the 1930s. It is scary, and it's still on nerves as I write this. There are no gruesome scenes or depictions of the killings. I guess this is a spoiler. My dad also likes to spoil movies. Sorry. We know immediately who the killer is, so no suspense there. And though the bug-eyed Laurie is memorable, he is gentlemanly, even gentle, except when he gives into his urges, which we never see. I am not sure I can explain why the movie is so frightening. It is not because of its immediacy. We are not horrified because we fear we might encounter this sort of horror the way we are afraid of depictions of terrorist bombings or housebreakers.

Maybe the film is terrifying because the period and place and people M depicts are terrifying outside of the serial killer storyline. We, unlike the audience in 1931, know what is to come. It will not surprise you that I appreciated the movie because this early talkie is not over-dialogued, which I really enjoy. This keep goes on. I wish I had more understanding of cinematography and scene direction and design so that I could analyze why the visual effects of this black and white are so striking. I can't, but they are. And then he says he would love to talk to me

and my husband after we watched it. Wow. He really took the homework assignment to heart. Should we publish that on The Ringer? Again, like father, like daughter. Okay? No, it's a great pick. There are a bunch of other fritz lang movies um on the service right now i think the big heat is on there obviously his landmark metropolis man knocks you can't let him get too close to this show he might overwhelm both of us no i know well the thing that i just

wanted to point out about this it's not a movie i've seen obviously so i really shouldn't be talking because i don't know anything. But I was thinking about our most recent conversation about aliens and just the fear of what you can't see versus the fear of what's there right in front of you. And apparently that is a genetic disposition in my case. Incredible stuff. Amanda, thank you for communicating with your father. Thanks for sharing the insights.

Do you have anything that you want to pitch? Any criterion love that you have? I don't know if you've been on the service lately. Not off the top of my head. I really just, I focused on Knox. I want to stand by Knox Dobbins in his shining moment and his favorite service. Filial piety is a beautiful thing. Thanks, Amanda. Once again, thank you to Amanda Dobbins and especially Knox Dobbins for those picks. Let's go to our final batch of recommendations. First, Alex Ross Perry, also a two-time guest of the show,

making his triumphant return to make an unusual and unexpected recommendation. And then we'll go to our old pal Adam Naiman to close things out before Penelope Bartlett comes through. Hi. Hi, it's Alex, but I don't care. Hi. Hi, it's Alex. How are you?

Good. How's it going? Not bad. Can you see us and everything? I can see you. Yes. Hello. My first Zoom. Very exciting here. You really crushed it. 1030 on the dot. You nailed it. We were a little nervous. Yeah. Well, it's 130 for me. So I've had a whole morning so far. You want to do this thing? Yeah. I got nervous thinking like, what if I picked the same thing that someone else has picked if I'm number eight?

But it's been a lot of like the classics. Sure. Criterion stuff. Great. Well, that's not what I picked. Perfect. I had a feeling you would go left. Alex Ross Perry, what'd you pick from the Criterion channel?

I picked The Ascent, which is a Russian film. Haven't seen it. The Ascent, a 1979 Russian film directed by Larissa Shapitko, um, was my, is the movie that I thought I would recommend. I don't know if you know this movie. I've never seen it. I've never even heard of it. But didn't, now correct me if I'm wrong. And part of the reason I thought this would be a good selection didn't you stump for come and see recently I didn't but I'm I'm interested in it I mean I've seen it and I know that they were planning this big re-release it was right around this time I think I was supposed to come to LA unfortunately now I'm not going to get a chance to see it in theaters I thought some people had I thought I'd been seeing some notion of people watching it recently. Yeah, people are

watching it because it opened, I think it played in New York, and then it was going to play in LA, and then it was supposed to go to Criterion after that. So this movie is directed by the wife of the filmmaker of Come and See. Oh, okay. But if you like World War II movies, which, you know, a lot of people do, and you like the sort of intensity and philosophical hopelessness of Russian filmmaking, which for most people is just, you know, Tarkovsky and Eisenstein, then discovering these Russian World War II movies is very exciting because their relationship with World War II is not America's relationship with World War II, even though we were technically on the same side. So when you watch, like, Come and See, people's responses to a World War II movie are like, oh, I'm not used to seeing the visual language of a war movie, but devoid of any pursuit of victory. So what is The Ascent, what is it about specifically? Is it about a squad? Is it about a battle battle like what what actually takes place in the movie so similar to come and see uh it's really just mostly about survival and deals with the story there's like a sequence in come and see with the belarusian army that has

sort of turned on their countrymen and are now helping exterminate Russians in the name of German victory. And this movie kind of deals with that as well, but similar to most of Come and See, it's mostly just about the overwhelmingly improbable odds of survival in these tundras during a time of ravage and hopelessness. And, you know, it's not that the way you're describing, I'm describing it. You think, Oh, it must be three hours long. It's under two hours. Not like a, an impossible Epic. It's a pretty straightforward movie, but it is just basically two characters moving through the tundra,

trying to survive and then ultimately being imprisoned and then ultimately dealing with the opportunities to sort of turn and it's just you know it's not much more than that it's not a very plot heavy movie there's no like maps or charts or taking the hill or taking the battlefield it's really just about the bleakest sense of survival, which recently watching a handful of not just Russian, but European World War II movies all on Criterion Channel. We were looking at, you know, Army of Shadows, as I just mentioned, Ballad of a Soldier, this, The Tindrum,

kind of looking at the scope of World War II from the French perspective, the German perspective, the Russian perspective, but represented decades later through film was really kind of a fun winter activity that Criterion Channel basically made possible to curate like a 10-mo of just this where you never see decisive victories you never see Churchill or the Battle of the Bulge or anything that you're used to seeing you just see desolate landscapes suffering and survival and that's kind of the Russian relationship with World War II and the ascent in the way that I feel like Come and See has been restored and people are kind of now saying, how did I not know about this movie?

This is one of the films. I feel like if I can put the ascent into that category and say, well, if you liked Come and See and you're interested in more thoroughly, aggressively challenging Russian World War II survival stories, this is one of them. And they weirdly came from the same household, you know, less than a decade apart, which I find very strange. Sort of like the Varda Demi of depressing Russian, you know, fatalism. I knew I could count on you for an uplifting pick, Alex.

I had a strong feeling. Yeah, I don't know. I knew I could count on you for it for an uplifting pick, Alex. I had a strong feeling. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Well, it's not that I'm saying, Oh, you know, if you're stuck inside and you're looking for some positivity right now, this is the movie, but it is, um, kind of just a towering film that similar to come and see has sort of slipped in and out of availability i'm sure i'm sure there was a dvd of this at some point and i'm sure that i at some point missed a handful of opportunities to see a print of it somewhere in some russian cinema series but this is the kind of thing that

when i see it streaming i'm like even streaming is young but still in my mind streaming does not exist to service films like this like it's just so crazy to me that this is a click away I guess do you use the channel at this point and because you've seen everything you you spent years at Kim's you had access to things that people didn't have access to. Do you use it to discover stuff or do you use it as comfort food at this point? Well, both. I mean, this is a great example. Another World War II movie that I forgot to mention that's on there is Capo, the Guillaume Pontecorvo movie, which is like, everyone knows Battle of Algiers. That movie is like canonical foreign film. And then the rest of his body of work has largely been unavailable. You know, he has this sort of weird

Marlon Brando movie called Burn that pops up sometimes with Ennio Morricone's score, I believe. But then Capo is this very, very early concentration camp movie, if not the first and one of the earliest films to fictionally depict film scenes in a concentration camp. And I'd always wanted to see it and it was never really available. Again, I'm sure there were bootlegs or torrents of it somewhere, but it was just always eluded me. And then this winter, I noticed it was just on there. And when I'm when I'm looking for something, it's a combination of like, I've always wanted to see this, and this seems like a great way to watch it. And like, you know, the other day, I think they sent out that email.

There was like five picks from Wes Anderson, and he recommended The Out of Towners. And I was like, oh, I've actually never seen that. A comedy would be great. And then I, you know, was just sort of directed straight from that email to watching the movie a few days later but then other times it's just you dig deep and i see something like the ascent or capo that i've always kind of wanted to track down and it's the sort of thing that even if criterion did put it out would i $30 for a movie I've never seen but is probably going to be great? And then the fact that they're just making these, you know, not obscure because these are famous movies.

Like, I think The Ascent won top prize at Berlin. So it's not like this is an unknown movie. But again, like the brain patterns of what streaming offers you don't necessarily think this is a great way to finally fill in some blind spots of 70s and 80s Soviet cinema. And yet, that's what the Criterion Channel has been offering. And I pretty consistently find myself really floored by what is on there. Me too, which is why I wanted to do this. It's an amazing pick for a film that I haven't heard of and now I have to go watch. Thanks again, Alex, for doing this. I really appreciate you taking the time, man. Yeah, good luck with the rest. I look forward to listening to it. You are now calling outside the domestic United States.

International rates may apply. We're joined by our old friend Adam Neiman, Ringer contributor, one of the great film critics. Adam, how are you doing, man? I'm doing okay. Greetings from Toronto. From Toronto, what are you going to recommend for the universe from the Criterion channel? I think they just added it or added it recently is Orson Welles' third film, The Stranger, which was made right after World War II. And you can see the post-war themes because he plays a high-ranking Nazi who flees to a small Connecticut town where he's hiding. He's very conspicuous, not so much because he's a Nazi,

but because he's Orson Welles. And this is Welles right between Citizen Kane and Magnificent Ambersons being these masterpieces that no one liked at the time, or few people liked, and him trying to just stay in the industry after doing a lot of radio stuff during World War II and things falling through. So he gives himself this great part as this like brilliant nasty dog murdering nazi and edward g

robinson chases him to this small town and is trying to you know figure out if this teacher with this weird mysterious past who keeps making speeches about the nazis is like actually secretly a nazi and um it's just this great propulsive noir and if you read about it it was meddled with a lot like they cut lots of stuff out of it wells was trying to prove he could bring a film in under budget and so one of the things he did was he shot everything in long takes of the producers would have nothing to cut it's like you can't get rid of any of this because it's there and it's not as big a flex as citizen kane or ambersons but it's just really good and it has this weird history where it ended up in the

public domain for a while like i think either no one owned it or wanted to own it but now criterion's got it and it's obviously a really nice print and looks great and i'm just finding at the moment and it's not to drag this into pandemic talk, but just like Orson Welles' showmanship, his commitment to being entertaining, making sure that you are entertained and leading in this movie with his own awesome acting is just a real comfort.

It's an amazing pick. I've seen this film. I love this film. Can you give a couple of other Wells tips for people if they want to do like a Wells deep dive because I think most people know they obviously know Citizen Kane and Ambersons was was reissued in its truncated form

by Criterion a couple years ago I think but what else is out there that people should look into if they want to have a Wells deep dive I mean leaving aside that any worse than Wells deep dive begins with YouTube and all the commercials that he did for money towards the end of his career in life, which and I'm not even saying it's in a mocking way, like the don't give a fuck level of these for Wells people are interested in. You can look at all different phases in his career. I mean, you can go on YouTube and listen to the war of the world broadcast from 1938,

which is like the great, one of the great multimedia hoaxes or just an amazing piece of radio stagecraft. A couple of years ago, Netflix put out that completed version of his lost film, other side of the whim, which interestingly casts John Houstonuston as a thinly veiled version of Orson Welles, and Huston was actually supposed to direct The Stranger,

so there's a certain kinship between the two of them. But the one that's on, I think it's on Criterion Channel now too, and which just rules the earth, is Ethics for Fake, which is where Welles is just basically narrating and describing a series of hoaxes and sleight of hand tricks, including his own movie, again, showmanship. And just a little adjacent to that on YouTube, the single best thing I've watched during the pandemic, not that you asked, but I will give it to you, is Ricky Jay and his 52 assistants, which is the YouTube video of Ricky Jay's stage performance. That's one of the only times in the last three weeks I've been purely uninterruptedly happy

for 55 straight minutes is watching Ricky J's insane arcane patter while like throwing cards as darts and tricking people. It's the best. Criterion should have it. But until they do... I agree. It's cinematic. It is cinematic.

I think House of Games is on Criterion now too if people want a Ricky Jay fix. So I saw Ricky Jay and his 52 assistants on HBO when it originally aired. And that actually was my gateway drug to House of Games. And then seeing Ricky as his career as an actor and working with Mamet and Spanish Prisoner and all those other films. You're right, though. That should be on Criterion. It is worthy of that home. Yeah, I mean, it should be in the loop, basically.

It's the greatest thing I've ever seen. And if anyone is still listening at this point, the New Yorker profile that they wrote of Ricky Jay in 1993 is one of the greatest profiles I've ever read, too. You come away from it thinking that the guy is either legitimately supernatural or just a really really good uh study you know he's the best you're a good study too Adam I appreciate you taking a little time out man my pleasure everybody uh listening please stay safe you too man we'll talk to you soon I'm delighted to be joined by Penelope Bartlett, the programmer at the Criterion Channel. Penelope, thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. I was hoping to start, you could take us back to

October of 2018 when Filmstruck closed. That was a sad day, I think, for a lot of people who spend a lot of time watching movies at home, streaming, you know, serious, great historical art house, indie cinema. Just what was happening at that time? What was that like for you guys? And what was, what did you think the future was going to hold? Yeah, that was really a devastating time for us. I remember having to share the news and saying that I felt kind of like I'd been broken up with. It was really, really sad. We loved working with TCM and it was a fantastic platform.

And at that point, we weren't really sure what the future was going to hold. And we were really just sort of going back to the drawing board and figuring that out. But I think one thing that we knew is that we absolutely wanted to get our library back into the streaming space for people to enjoy and have access to as soon as we possibly could. So what happens there? For your role in particular, do you have to start building a plan of any kind?

That was more our leadership that was involved in making that sort of big picture decision. So our president and our CEO, and they worked really closely together to come up with a solution, which eventually took the shape of the Criterion Channel. But there were a lot of conversations about who we would work with, how we would make this happen. So there was kind of a period where it was really just sort of meetings and just talking about it and figuring out exactly what our plan was moving forward. Was the mission any different from what you guys had set out to do at Filmstruck? I mean, I think we said in our launch statement for the Criterion channel that we wanted to carry on where Filmstruck left off. So it was very much, we very much thought of it as a continuation of Filmstruck. We really wanted to make it very clear from the outset that while the Janice Criterion catalog is available in its

entirety on the platform, that there are also classic Hollywood films, films from major Hollywood studios, films from other indie distributors, contemporary films that aren't in the Criterion Collection. So we really wanted to make it as broad and deep a selection of films as Filmstruck had been because we love Filmstruck as much as all the subscribers did. And we really wanted to be able to bring something as close to that experience back to our viewers. How did you specifically get involved in doing this kind of work? What does it mean to be a programmer for a streaming service? I feel like explaining what a program, it's such a specific job that people in film all know exactly what it is. And then anyone I talk to outside of film about my job thinks that I'm like a computer programmer, which could not be further from the truth. And I would be so terrible at that job. But my background is I programmed for some different film festivals,

originally in the UK, and then moved to the US and programmed short films for a long time at the Chicago International Film Festival, films for the Palm Springs International Film Festival. So that was really my background, was reviewing submissions often and programming contemporary films, so new films, for film festivals. So I hadn't really worked in the digital space before. And I'd always been a huge fan of classic cinema, but I hadn't really worked so much in that arena for a long time. So this position was really kind of exciting to me

because it was sort of opening up something new and also a return to kind of actually, you know, exploring the classics of world cinema. So kind of combining something quite new, a digital streaming platform with sort of really getting back to watching the classics, which just seemed like a really kind of exciting juxtaposition. So yeah, that's, that's kind of how it came along. I'm not sure if that really

answers your question. No, it does. I mean, what exactly is it that you do then? So when you're when you're programming a film festival, obviously, there is a lot of new films that you have to watch and figure out what fits with the tone of the festival you're doing with the mission of the festival. Most of that work is unseen by the public or even other filmmakers in the industry. In this case, you've got 120 years of cinema history to pick through. You know, you've got a certain amount of, I assume, some flexibility inside the service to make choices. You know, how do you guys decide what to share and when to share it? It's a great question. I think one of the things that we want to always remember

is that we do have this amazing permanent library of films. So we want to make sure we're always finding different ways to surface those titles. So for example, today, April 1st, is Toshiro Mifune's, would have been his 100th birthday,

his centenary. So we have a huge collection of films with all of his most lauded performances. And most of those are Janice titles. So most of those are films that are in our library. And this is just a really exciting way to bring them together to celebrate an icon of cinema who everybody loves. We were also able to bring in a few classic Hollywood titles because he did actually appear in some Hollywood films later in his career.

So I think we always want to be finding exciting ways to surface the Janice films. But we also, we know that we have a lot of people who love classic Hollywood cinema. So for example, film noir. Film noir is always incredibly popular. So next week for our actual anniversary on April 8th, we'll be bringing back a collection that we had at the outset of the service, at the launch of the service, which is the Columbia Noir Collection. So it's a huge collection of film noir, everything from more well-known films

like Fritz Lang's The Big Heat and Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place to these sort of deeper cuts, like this great film called Murder by Contract by Irving Lerner, which Martin Scorsese is a huge fan of, but a lot of people hadn't seen before. And that did really well when we played it the first time. And we're kind of excited to bring it back and hope that some of the people who loved it the first time will introduce it to new people because we have you know obviously a lot of new people who've signed up for the service since we launched a year ago um so so yeah it's that sort of balance of you know something like the Mifune which is more the sort of world cinema side with the classic Hollywood we know that we have subscribers

that sort of really gravitate towards those two areas. And then contemporary, bringing in really great contemporary films is another thing that's been really important to us on the streaming service. We show, I would say, generally newer films on the service than we tend to release. There's obviously a few exceptions to that. I really love programming our weekly focus on women filmmakers. And that allows us to show everything from films by Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino, these amazing directors from the Hollywood

era who are not nearly as well known as they should be right up to when we're able to kind of build a collection around a film that's out in theaters at the time. So when we launched, we had a Joanna Hogg's film, The Souvenir was in theaters that May and we played her first three films, which are all just so wonderful and really not nearly as well known as they should be. I hope a little bit of the acclaim that The Souvenir got meant that people went back and watched them and watched them on the channel. And then we've done similar things with Celine Sciamma. We have her first three films up on the service now.

And everybody's sort of talking about and rightfully kind of gushing over Portrait of a Lady on Fire. So it's really nice to be able to give people an opportunity to kind of dive into her back catalog of films and mattie diop as well we have uh all of her short films available to to to stream on the service um and that those went up around the same time that um her amazing first feature atlantic uh went up on netflix so um it's nice to be able to sort of go from you know something really like you said you know early silent films right up to you know more recent films by filmmakers who have brand new films in theaters let me drill down on a couple things that you said there um you know you mentioned that you've obviously got this the janice Criterion collection to to to dig into for Mifune for example but I you know I noticed that Red Son is in the collection that you guys put up today which

is a you know pretty much lesser known Hollywood movie with Charles Bronson that Mifune appeared in so how do you guys make the decision that you want to make Red Son a part of the collection for a period of time? And then what kind of goes into that decision making? I know you're not necessarily licensing these films, but help us understand like, why does Red Sun show up? Whereas another movie, maybe Hell in the Pacific doesn't show up. I had a feeling you were going to ask about Hell in the Pacific. I like Hell in the Pacific. Yeah. So it's honestly, without getting too sort of nitty gritty, it really is. And I am pretty involved in the licensing of these films. So it truly, it boils down to availability. The film might be licensed exclusively elsewhere. You know, we very much would have liked to play that film. It's not like we didn't like forget about it. I'm sure.

Or it's that we don't have a relationship with that studio yet. So it's really just sort of logistical elements like that. We really wanted to make this as comprehensive of a retrospective as we could. And I believe we're actually going to be adding some more titles, including the 500,000, which is the one film that Mifune actually directed. I've never seen that. I haven't either. So I'm excited to see it. And I'm hopeful.

Yes, I'm hopeful that that and some other titles will actually be being added to the collection. And we do have to do that because there might be a title that's not available the month that we've scheduled the series for. And we might, our Poitiers series, for example, we've been adding titles in and taking them out over the last couple of months. And we just sort of have to do that because of availability sometimes. It seems like such a jigsaw puzzle.

And, you know, obviously one of the great things about the service is that it has not just like depth, but so much variety and diversity in terms of genre types and the different filmmakers. How do you guys land on balance? How do you decide this is the right mix for this period? Here's what we think people will be clicking. Is it data-driven or is it anecdotal? How do you guys make decisions around those things? At this point, I would say that we do have access to some analytics, but I wouldn't say that we are really making many decisions driven by those, although it's fascinating to see what people are gravitating towards and what they're watching. A lot of it

is honestly, what would we want? What would we want to watch? What would people in the company want to watch? We try to bring other people's voices in other people who work at criterion um our sort of larger kind of circle of critics and writers and people that work with us on our releases um and then we we really sit down and a jigsaw puzzle is like the perfect way to describe it um when we were first programming the service, we were literally, we literally had post-it notes and we were just moving them around. Now we have a slightly, you know, more streamlined digital version of that. And we'll just sort of go through and look at the mix and, you know, say, is there something for the person who loves classic Hollywood? Is there something for the person who loves sort of new Hollywood 70s cinema does

really, really well? You know, is there something, is there, we haven't had like an animated film for a while, or we, you know, what, we do these regular things, we do regular Saturday matinees, regular Friday night double features, and regular short and feature pairings on Tuesdays. So all of those kind of help to sort of form the backbone of the programming and then we kind of fill in the blanks as we go one of the things that the channel makes me feel and I watch a lot of films and I've seen a lot of films is that I have not seen anything is that I am like just way behind in my film literacy um I think how yeah I mean you're in your role. I feel exactly the same way.

Okay. I'm happy to hear that. That's what I'm sort of trying to drive at is how do you do this job when you realize that the more you know ultimately equals the less you know? The more you discover someone new, the more it means you have 20 of their films to catch up on or a new subgenre made in the 40s in Germany or something. There's so much depth to the history of the medium. And for someone like you, how do you make the decisions feeling confident that you are doing it in a comprehensive or sophisticated way? No, it's so true. And truly, I work with just such brilliant people and I just feel like an idiot a lot of the time, but I kind of, I kind of love that.

I'd rather be in that position than the other way around. But that also means that I have all these brilliant people that I can talk to and ask for advice. And, you know, all of everyone who works at Criterion who's been immersed in the disc releases for a long time have become, these people have become experts on specific directors or specific genres just by virtue of working on these releases and having to do so much research um and then like i mentioned we have writers that we work with who just seem to have

seen everything i mean i'm sure they haven't but it it feels that way and to be able recall such specific details about things. And those are often the people that will then call on as well to do an introduction for the channel and sort of go deep on, you know, whether it's Philanthrope Noir, Gene Arthur, John Schlesinger, you know. So I would say I have a broad sort of omnivorous approach to film myself. And then a lot of it is calling on the expertise of all the great people that I'm lucky enough to work with. Is there one program or package that you put together that really kind of opened your eyes in the year that you've been doing the Criterion channel? There's so many. I sort of made a bit of a list earlier this week because I was talking to a few people with the anniversary coming up. There's not really any one. I do really, really love the Women Filmmaker series. I feel like that's opened my eyes to a lot of really great movies that I hadn't seen and a lot of and continue it just continues to be this sort of deep well of fascinating stories

um that I'm so excited to kind of even delve even more into this year um some of the series that I've loved that we've put together um the caught on tape series that was sort of a lot of 70s paranoia films um the conversation and blow up and wait no blow out um i always get those two mixed up that's actually they're actually a great double feature and you know blow blow out is basically based on blow up but i always mix up the names. And yeah, that was a great series. What else? The Summer of 69, that was just three films,

but it sort of just seemed to capture the zeitgeist when we played it in the summer of 2019. People really loved that series. We do these streaming premieres as well, in the summer of 2019. People really loved that series. We do these streaming premieres as well, which have been playing really well. So we've brought some films that come right off of their theatrical releases onto the channel. So that's been a great opportunity

to discover some great films or films that bring films that I've seen at festivals that I've really loved to the channel. So films like Diamantino and Long Day's Journey Into Night, just really brilliant feature films that are brand new that I think a lot of people are discovering for the first time on the service. Yeah, I love that aspect of it too. That's definitely where I saw an elephant standing still for the first time because that's kind of a difficult film to see if you haven't been to a film festival. So it's great that you guys are doing that work. I'm curious how

responsive you can be with the service. Obviously, when someone like Max von Sydow dies, you know, Janice has this incredible collection of his work already in its library but you know are you able to kind of move quickly to launch a new program to address something along those lines yeah we absolutely are especially when it's a filmmaker or a star who we already have a lot of the films you know featuring them or by them in our library. Sadly, because of the field that we're in, we have this happen quite a lot. A lot of people pass away, unfortunately. But it is kind of nice that we're able to celebrate them almost immediately.

It's just sort of bringing the films together, finding a great image, and then surfacing it on the channel. So we can usually respond within 24 hours. Is there a level of art direction that goes into some of this in terms of like what people are seeing when they are seeing a new program? Like how much are you involved in the actual visual execution of the channel? In terms of creating the graphics, not at all, but in terms of looking at them and giving thoughts on the direction at the outset and then feedback once they're created,

I'm very involved. I actually love that part of the job, especially because I'll put together a series and then our brilliant editorial staff will write a fantastic paragraph that just makes it sound like such a great idea. And then our art department will put together a beautiful graphic that makes it, you know, so sort of seductive and appealing. And so then I feel like I've done something great, but it's actually just that they've done a brilliant job of making it and the films are fantastic so um yeah there's there's a lot of thought that goes into the visuals that appear on the channel I mean the

way that there's a lot of thought that goes into every sort of aesthetic product that Criterion put out into the world Penelope I'm asking filmmakers to recommend one film on the service right now. I have to ask you the same question. What is your favorite film on the Criterion channel at the moment? That is a completely impossible question. I really love Kathleen Collins' film Losing Ground. Can you tell us about that a little bit so it's one of the it might be the first um feature film made by a black woman filmmaker um an american black woman filmmaker um and it's this very sort of sensual, intellectual, thoughtful exploration of a marriage and the sort of complexities of a marriage. This woman who's very sort of cerebral and she's a college professor.

And then her husband, played by Bill Gunn, who is very dreamy and amazing in this film, is much more of a sort of sensualist. He's an artist, and it kind of explores how they navigate those differences in their relationship. And it just sort of unfolds beautifully. It really takes its time. It feels very authentic. It just feels kind of unlike anything else.

It's very much sort of a world unto itself. And I'm also reading her short stories right now, which are called Whatever Happened to Interracial Love. And they're incredibly beautiful as well. And the voice of her writing and the voice of her filmmaking are a beautiful complement to each other. So I would really recommend both the film and the short stories. That's a great suggestion,

Penelope. Thank you for doing the work that you do. And thanks for chatting with me today. I appreciate it. My pleasure. Thanks so much. Thank you to every single person that came through to participate in this mega episode of the big picture. We really appreciate it. And if I haven't sung its praises enough, if you can, please find a way to kick in on the criterion channel. I promise you,

you have the money to do so. You will not regret doing it. And from the sublime to the ridiculous, please tune into the big picture next week when Amanda and I will be talking about what is almost certain to be the last studio movie release for a long time. That's right. Trolls World Tour is coming to you very soon. See you next week.