ando here

The latest spate of Friday Double Features have been fun. I'm sure (or nearly-sure) I've seen Devil-Doll before but Mad Love (1935, Karl Freund) was new to me. And a pleasant surprise.



Fairly typical trailer but the film is anything but - everyone in the cast was on their A game that month. The movie easily topped most of the horror junk that I saw in October. See it if you can.

ando here

Discovered Written by Harold Pinter, added a few days ago by accident. CC, curiously, didn't add it to the banner "Now Playing" or "Newly Added" links.

featuring:
The Servant (1963)
The Pumpkin Eater (1964)
Accident (1967)
The Go-Between (1971)
The Homecoming (1973)
Butley (1974)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981)
The Comfort of Strangers (1990)
The Handmaid’s Tale (1990)

ando here

"In 1990, Martin Scorsese founded an organization whose stated mission told the world, in no uncertain terms, that movies mattered, that the art of cinema and its history was a legacy worth preserving. Three decades later, The Film Foundation has become an indispensable pillar of moving-image culture, helping to make possible 850 restorations to date and raising much-needed awareness of the urgent necessity of film preservation as central to the safeguarding of our cultural heritage. In recognition of thirty years of vital work, the Criterion Channel looks back at a selection of the many masterpieces that, thanks to the efforts of The Film Foundation, have been rescued from the ravages of time and now live on for future generations to discover. Beginning with these thirty titles, the series will expand over the next year, with new additions to be announced monthly."

Features: The Broken Butterfly (1919), Trouble in Paradise (1932), It Happened One Night (1934), L’Atalante (1934), The Long Voyage Home (1940) The Chase (1946), The Red Shoes (1948), The River (1951), Moulin Rouge (1952), The Bigamist (1953), Ugetsu (1953), Senso (1954), The Big Country (1958), Shadows (1959), The Cloud-Capped Star (1960), Primary (1960), The Connection (1961), Salvatore Giuliano (1962), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), The Night of Counting the Years (1969), Soleil Ô (1970), The Mattei Affair (1972), Insiang (1976), Xiao Wu (1997)

Shorts: The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933), Uncle Yanco (1967), Black Panthers (1968), The Eloquent Peasant (1970), Audience (1983)

There's also a rumor that the channel will do a Scorsese filmography in the near future. Now that will be a series to catch.

ando here

Well, the channel only has two of the 15 films currently streaming and I'm really only a fan one one, the first Godzilla. King of Monsters is the other streaming entry in the series. May watch it after another turn with the original but they seemed to get increasingly hokey as the series went on - and I'm not sure that the allusion to the nuclear age remains as poignant, if at all. This dude gives a nice run-down on the physical set -

ando here

"...I'm not ready for this" encapsulates what I felt when I bought and initially starting watching Kon Ichikawa's An Actor's Revenge (1963) a few years back. Ready or not it's tonight's pick. Thing is, for me, ancient Greek and Kabuki theater always require a brain reset - a silencing of conditioned Western cinema expectations of narrative. A Cup o tea's not a bad idea...

ando here

Grand Illusion (1937, Jean Renoir) isn't on the Criterion Channel, but should be. The hard copy has long been out of print. So I'm expecting a re-release. In the meantime I'll point out a good streamer when I find one. And while I tend to agree with Brando that there really are no great movies this one comes fairly close. It's in my top 3, at any rate.

ando here

Japanese Noir looks great but I've been into the Jane Fonda retrospective, supplementing it with films not included like Coming Home, Agnes of God and The Morning After.
Like her or not, she had fairly good judgement and most films she appeared in are worth seeing at least once.

ando here

Kinda like this collection that they recently pulled together on the channel -



You Only Live Once (1937)
They Live by Night (1948)
Gun Crazy (1950)
Where Danger Lives (1950)
Tomorrow Is Another Day (1951)
Pierrot le fou (1965)
The Honeymoon Killers (1970)
Badlands (1973)
Thomasine and Bushrod (1974)
One False Move (1992)
The Living End (1992)
Deep Crimson (1996)
Sun Don’t Shine (2012)
Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (2013)

Not a bad list. Badlands, starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, is a favorite. I see (for representation-sake, I guess) the gay semi-classic, Living End, is there but Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together is also streaming and (imo) a better flick. One False Move (the black pick?) is fun, too.

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ando here

Alright, being a sole contributor to any thread sucks so I might as well make it worth any curious lurker's time.

The thread will now be dedicated to Criterion titles currently streaming on YouTube.

I'll start it off with something you actually won't find on the channel, anyway -



HEAD (1968, Bob Rafelson)

The Monkees, tripping. Screenplay by Rafelson and Jack Nicholson.

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ando here

Tampopo (1985, Juzo Itami) Fun, different kind of story. A Japanese widow nearly breaks her neck in an attempt to make a good bowl of Ramen for her new restaurant. The YT post is in Japanese, naturally, with close captions in Japanese but, believe me, the story is so easy to follow that the English language track is hardly needed. But the channel version has it.

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