The music I play in the front office gets a lot of comments—from “What’s that beeping noise?” to “Wow, you really love that Timberlake album.” Of late, several people have commented on the profusion of Talking Heads and Madonna coming from my speakers (interspersed with Christmas carols, of course!), and the surprising response is that upcoming Criterion DVD supplements are responsible for my current pop playlist. I was absolutely over the moon when I first heard that Kim was interviewing David Byrne about his work on the soundtrack for The Last Emperor. In fact, that very same day I had been singing “Girlfriend Is Better” on my way to work! And when Alex sent an e-mail update about the 4 by Agnès Varda set (which he is producing), I had to call him to check and see if it was really the Madonna who’s in one of the new Cléo from 5 to 7 supplements, on the off chance that it was actually some obscure, Varda-specific Madonna that I’d never heard of. But there is, after all, only one Madonna, and now she’s on Criterion DVD!
Another star has just appeared in a Criterion supplement (of a sort) as well: Will Ferrell and Adam McKay just released the “Criterion Edition” of their popular Internet movie The Landlord. Scroll down to watch the deluxe version, as inspired by Criterion commentary tracks. Happy viewing!
16Dec07
Who’s That Girl? BY TAMARA HELLGREN
10Dec07
Two-Lane Blacktop: Slow Ride BY KENT JONES
The two movies that opened the door to “youth culture” in Hollywood, The Graduate and Easy Rider, were milestones to be sure. But can it really be said that they were milestones in the art of cinema? “I think The Graduate is not really a very good film,” said Monte Hellman when I interviewed him in 1984, “but it’s a great film because of just what it is.” In other words, nothing much as a film strictly speaking, but very much as a cultural event, the Saturday night at the movies that gave the American middle class its first real glimpse of the paltry value placed upon its legacy by its own sons and daughters. “There are certain very strong stories or ideas for films that touch the core of the psychology of the audience so profoundly that they absolutely cannot fail,” Hellman went on to explain. The Graduate marked the beginning of countercultural consciousness in American movies. In the fading memory of that moment, now layered with so many ironic reversals, retrenchments, and disappointments, it is less the film that is recalled than the potent effect it produced, an effect largely unavailable to artists more nuanced and less fixated on the public eye than Mike Nichols. Shorn of its contemporary context, Nichols’s film is a nicely executed comedy of romantic embarrass-ment tarted up with Felliniesque close-ups, Antonioniesque spatial configurations, and Bergmanesque silences. If nothing else, The Graduate is a terminally “esque” experience.
A similar fate has befallen Dennis Hopper’s 1969 bombshell, the movie that finally breached the already crumbling fortress of old Hollywood. Andrew Sarris hit the nail square on the head, as he often did: “See Easy Rider for Nicholson’s performance, easily the best of the year so far, and leave the LSD trips and such to the collectors of mod mannerisms.” As Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, and Buck Henry were to The Graduate, Jack Nicholson and, to a slightly lesser extent, Peter Fonda were to Easy Rider. Hopper’s chosen cinematic forebears were, if anything, even headier than Nichols’s (Bruce Conner, Kenneth Anger, Jean-Luc Godard), but, ultimately, both films rested their thematic affectations, stylistic embellishments, and musical accoutrements on the shoulders of less noticeable items: that bravura comic timing in the former and beautifully crafted characterization in the latter.
Hellman was able to make his greatest film thanks to the massive success of these two cultural coups, Easy Rider in particular. “We realized that the reason that deal was made was because of Easy Rider,” he told me. “There was no question that we appreciated its success as a ticket to a kind of freedom that wouldn’t have been available to us otherwise.” The now celebrated moment of youthful enfranchisement that swept through Hollywood in 1969, allowing films as diverse as Taking Off; The Hired Hand; Drive, He Said; Five Easy Pieces; and Hopper’s infamous Easy Rider follow-up, The Last Movie, to be made, did not last long—three years to be exact, until The Godfather ushered in a new era of high, wide, and handsome Hollywood moviemaking. They are not all great films, to be sure, but they inaugurated a wave of invention and exploration in Hollywood that more or less thrived all the way through the early eighties.
1971
103 min
Color
2.35:1
10Dec07
Ten (sixteen, actually) Reasons I Love
Two-Lane Blacktop
BY RICHARD LINKLATER
01 Because it’s the purest American road movie ever.
02 Because it’s like a drive-in movie directed by a French new wave director.
03 Because the only thing that can get between a boy and his car obsession is a girl, and Laurie Bird perfectly messes up the oneness between the Driver, the Mechanic, and their car.
1971
103 min
Color
2.35:1
6Dec07
Double Trouble BY PETER BECKER
It’s been one of those weeks. First we learned we’d made a mastering error on our Mala Noche edition. Then the first run of the new collectors’ set Ingmar Bergman: Four Masterworks shipped with the wrong disc—the Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films edition of The Seventh Seal—in the Criterion special edition package. I’m just hoping these things don’t come in threes.
We’ve stopped all shipments of both products, but if you got one of the problem discs, please send it to us. We’ll replace it and send you a $10 gift certificate (good at criterion.com) to offset the postage. Please don’t send the whole package, just the actual Mala Noche or Essential Art House Seventh Seal disc in an envelope. Send your disc to the Criterion Collection, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003, and mark it “Attn: Jon Mulvaney.” Be sure to include a mailing address in the U.S. or Canada for the replacement as we cannot ship outside of North America. Please also include your email address in the package and we’ll send your gift certificate by email once we’ve mailed you replacement DVD(s).
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