Lost in Criterion

With Il sorpasso (1962), Criterion once again shows us a single movie from a director we've never heard of and they will never mention again. As per usual, this is a great movie. An road trip through the effects of consumerism across class lines in post-war Italy, the film is a pretty clear inspiration for Easy Rider, and maybe after contextualizing Easy Rider as an American Il sorpasso we could like that movie more, too bad we'll never watch it again.

We are thrilled to finally have another film from our (second?) favorite Danish director. Master of the House (1925) is the earliest Carl Th. Dreyer we've seen and the last the Criterion has to offer us. When we watched our last Dreyer film, this one wasn't even in the Collection yet. Unfortunately, there's a reason this is the only film from Dreyer's pre-Joan of Arc period. While the seeds of what we love about Dreyer are there, this light domestic dramedy doesn't hit nearly as nicely as any of his later work that we've seen. But hey, it's still Dreyer.

We are thrilled to finally have another film from our (second?) favorite Danish director. Breaking the Waves (1996) is the first film Lars von Trier made after establishing the Dogme 95 framework, but he mostly ignored that to make a 1970s period piece about patriarchy, religious and otherwise, in rural Scotland.

The back story on Don Siegel's fantastic Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954) is pretty crazy, and I promise we do eventually talk about it this week. But this is a message picture about prison reform, so we have to spend some time talking about the history of prison reform, and how there's no reforming a system that's designed to disappear human beings.

We get Harold Lloyd's classic silent college movie The Freshman and a handful of shorts on this week's episode. Sam Taylor and Fred Newmeyer direct the feature, among the most popular silent comedies in history for good reason, even if its relationship to higher education is very of its time. Do you know enough about football to understand comedy football? Harold Lloyd didn't think so, but still made this stellar movie.