Filmstruck / Criterion Channel

In the future all movies will only stream for fifteen minutes.

i pick a lot of my watching from the "leaving this month list" and ive never counted but that doesnt seem like much more than usual - they seem to churn through stuff at a pretty good clip

Half of it seems to be Buster and Fatty. Still, may be time to rewatch AI.

Jewel Robbery was fabulous, thanks for the recs

Finally saw the Oppenheimer doc from 1981. Extremely interesting, though still leaving some questions open for perhaps a deeper dive.

✨MARK YOUR CALENDARS✨ Starting in September, HIGH SCHOOL HORROR is coming to @criterionchannl—featuring VHS-era exploitation shockers, '90s teen-movie touchstones, & cult favorites.

DONNIE DARKO
SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE
THE CRAFT
SUSPIRIA
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER
& more! pic.twitter.com/X1F95lcwdn

— Criterion Collection (@Criterion) August 11, 2023

Full list of September 2023 additions: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8230-the-criterion-channels-september-2023-lineup

I watched QUICK MILLIONS and that's a really good one. Spencer Tracy as a truck driver who basically manifests his way into becoming a crime boss with a steel grip on the unnamed city's construction industry, with an ending Johnnie To might have skillfully borrowed for Election 2, and one of the great final dialogue exchanges to nail the lid shut.

Hangover Square is p good

There’s a film of it?

Oh, with Linda Darnell and George Sanders, just like Forever Amber.

The talented star of that one, Laird Cregar, died shortly before the film came out from a dangerous crash diet he undertook for the role.

Dangerous crash diet?

Yeah, including amphetamines.

Ah.

Hal Hartley!!! oh man i have been wanting to see trust and the unbelievable truth again for ages. can never find them streaming or on dvd. they are showing all his movies! throwing a bone to us gen x grumps.

Hangover Square is a good one. i always like a good "during my blackouts i'm a murderer" story, and this one is elevated by the setting and the fiery conclusion (and the fiery disposal of one victim.) SPOILER as soon as i realized he was going to dispose of Netta by disguising her body as a Guy Fawkes effigy and sticking her atop the pyre i was impressed the film was going to go there. That ending is quite something, a real cataclysm. I don't know how well-regarded the film is overall, the wiki seems to suggest it was regarded dismissively, but i think it's very good.

I'm going to watch Massacre at Central High for the first time.

FINALLY watches Sorcerer. It was good. A nice relaxing movie. Didn't have that infuriating ending that Wages of Fear did. Had a different one, but I was glad.

October 2023 additions: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8262-the-criterion-channels-october-2023-lineup

Love that they're slipping The Devil, Probably into horror month.

I've been curious about Paul Morrissey's Frank/Drac films for years, glad I'll finally get a chance to see them.

Unfriended is a terrible movie.

gonna start in on some Linda Darnell films this week. She was mesmerizing in Hangover Square, just such a vicious and alive performance.

Fallen angel is p good

3 wives of course

She’s usually very good, despite her alleged and not totally surprising insecurity. At one point it seemed like maybe she was only remembered for My Darling Clementine and her horrible death.

Forever Amber worth watching also for George Sanders as the king with his entourage of dogs following him around and telling them “Come children!”

Wow that was Sanders? It's been so long since I've seen that I'd forgotten that!

She's great in Summer Storm

She’s great on What’s My Line?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KVk5fthbTU

Also I just found a recent audiobook of BBC radio productions of Patrick Hamilton plays that looks really intriguing.

Still kind of enjoying my teenage favorite "Dark City"

That’s a good one. I believe Roger Ebert once did a shot-by-shot analysis.

Linda Darnelll's birthday today, according to Criterion.

Linda Darnell even

Catching up on Kay Francis before those films leave. I was totally charmed by everything about One Way Passage.

November 2023 additions: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8291-the-criterion-channels-november-2023-lineup

December 2023 additions, arriving a few days earlier than usual: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8309-the-criterion-channels-december-2023-lineup

Wow...I apparently missed the news that 140 minutes (!!) had been restored to Abel Gance's "La Roue" since the 2008 restoration, now making it almost 7 hours long.

I can’t even.

(xpost) Oh god--it's a key work of poetic realism, but when I watched the 2008 restoration I had to fast-forward to not give up halfway through.

Hahaha I honestly appreciate the feedback - I loved loved loved Gance's "Napoleon" (although it was the 4-hour edit, with the Coppola soundtrack...this was like 15 years ago) but come to think of it, I did nod off at least once. I haven't actually seen "La Roue" yet but started watching "La Fin du monde" ("The End of the World") recently, which is REALLY REALLY SLOW so far (put me to sleep after 30 min.)

Relatedly, I had a hunch that Guy Maddin took a bit of inspiration from that for his short film "The Heart of the World" - this interview (translated from French) from 2015 confirms it (and also discusses "La Roue" ("The Wheel"):
https://www-debordements-fr.translate.goog/Guy-Maddin?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp

GM: That's why I made my own adaptations of Gance, based on The Wheel and The End of the World- -(Odilon Redon- -The Heart of the World) I thought they were lost...

AND: They are: The End of the World was butchered, Gance did not edit it and completely disowned it. It's more of a document of what the project was supposed to be, and it had to be all the more than just a film - as always with him. The Wheel is not lost but there are so many versions that we no longer know what the original cut looks like.

GM: I have a 4-hour version of it. What else was it supposed to be, The End of the World?

AND: A global mystical cinema company.

Had to notice that Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is streaming on the channel. Could we possibly be blessed with a future Criterion disc release, following the same pattern as Last Hurray for Chivalry and Heroic Trio/Executioners???

been trying to sneak in some "gaslit noir" films before they leave:

Dragonwyck
Moss Rose
Ladies in Retirement

The above is in descending order of preference.

Dragonwyck is pretty great imo, a wildly goth melodrama w/the sinisterly suave Vincent Price as the latest in a long family line of mildly tyrannical upstate NY patroons who owns the title estate, and the luminously misguided Gene Tierney (the character is misguided) as a country girl from a religious family who is invited to live at the estate, falls for him, and seems to miss multiple red flags along the way, including the first act fate of his gluttonous wife. It's got a dash of the supernatural a la The Uninvited, though whether it's madness or an actual haunting is left unresolved. Joseph Mankiewicz directed it, and does a pretty solid job of things. Some excellent support from Walter Huston, Jessica Tandy, Glenn Langan, Anne Revere, and Spring Byington (as one of Dragonwyck's servants, whose early extremely on-point warnings to Tierney go thoroughly unexamined.)

Moss Rose is a bit less great but still very good. It bears some superficial resemblance to Dragonwyck, with Peggy Cummins playing an Irish girl in London of slightly ill repute whose friend is murdered, and she blackmails the man she thinks murdered her (Victor Mature) into letting her live the high life at his family estate somewhere in the English country. Like Dragonwyck, things get sinister there, and she falls for the guy. It looks good, but the big problem is Victor Mature's character is just a big lunkhead, very miscast, and it's hard to believe him in the role, let alone as someone Peggy Cummins would fall for. He tries, but no. But Cummins is quite legitimately incredible, just a real force of nature performance, the smallest person onscreen at any given moment but believably fearless to the point that you don't question why she's putting herself in a seemingly vulnerable situation. This one also has Vincent Price in it, playing a police detective investigating the murder, and he's put to good use here as a more heroic figure. Ethel Barrymore is Mature's increasingly scary and possessive mother.

Ladies in Retirement is good enough, another "remote country home" noir, mostly worth watching for the college-age Ida Lupino playing a matronly housekeeper supposedly in her forties, whose sketchy nephew in the film is played by her real-life husband at the time (Louis Hayward). Lupino's Ellen Creed has two very annoying but harmlessly insane sisters whom, in order to save from being committed, she invites to stay at the home. The home is owned by a retired former entertainer, Leonora (played by Isobel Elsom.) Leonora comes to regret allowing the sisters to stay for a couple days (because it eventually stretches out to a couple months), and orders the sisters *and* Ellen to leave, which she also eventually regrets. Lupino is excellent, and there are some beautiful visuals of the foggy moors (i presume they're the moors), some bonus nosey nuns, and the fine use of a bread oven as a tomb.

the first two are based on novels, the last based on a play.

Are they leaving? I can’t always keep track and drive myself a little crazy at the end of every month trying to figure out which films get into the lifeboat.

Wait AFIRE already arrived?

Here’s the tricky part. HANGOVER SQUARE is also part of the Linda Darnell series so I thought I would have more time to watch. Guess I was misinformed.

Screen Play by Barré Lyndon?

hangover square starts out a little slow but has a couple of incredible sequences in the back half

Opening sequence is pretty good at least.