Frezno's Criterion Challenge: June 2023 Trip Report

Welcome back, my friends, to the broadening cinematic horizons which never end! It's once again time for a Criterion Challenge Trip Report, and can you believe that after this one we're halfway done with the year and the challenge? How time flies. This month's challenge also took place during Pride Month, so I slotted in some films with queer themes. If I'd thought of this beforehand I would have saved The Times Of Harvey Milk for this month instead. Nothing stopping you from watching it yourself for Pride Month, except for the fact that by the time you read this Pride Month will probably be done. Well, still watch that movie anyway. And probably a few other movies on this list that I watched in June 2023, if they're good. Let's find out together if they were or not, starting with...

22. Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971, dir. John Schlesinger)

Appropriately, I watched this on a Sunday. Well, I watch most of the films on Sundays, so that's a bit moot. Still though, this film is certainly something. There's a term I recall from anime genre description called "slice of life" which fits this film to a T. Here are the lives of three people who are in a sort of polyamorous relationship and trying to navigate the highs and lows of that. Bob the artist has a girlfriend named Alex, but he's also boyfriends with a doctor named Daniel. Sit back for two hours and watch how they each navigate through their relationships and the things that bubble forth from within. 

It's a luxuriate film doing some interesting things, like the repeated use of people answering telephones and talking with a telephone operator who we keep cutting to. I think there's something thematic under the hood there, about communication and wires being crossed in this tangled three-party line of polyamorous affection. It's not all lovey-dovey romance, as there's some tension between Bob and each of his lovers that pops up from time to time. On the other hand, major props for a movie being so casual about a gay romance. They just meet up in this movie and smooch, good for them, no big deal. 

I have little to say because it's the kind of movie that you just have to sort of experience. One thing I didn't like, though: a poor dog that gets hit by a truck in the film. It comes out of nowhere and is a shock of cold water, and not something I enjoyed seeing. A harsh shock on an otherwise luxurious Sunday morning. Nevertheless, this film was fascinating and if you can handle that hard shock now that you know about it, plunge on into it.

23. Mothra Vs. Godzilla (1964, dir. Ishirō Honda)

I cheated just a little in making the Criterion Challenge list, as they happen to have a big Showa-era Godzilla box set in their rotation. This also means that every Godzilla film between the original and like 1978 or whenever that era stopped is on the channel. So, I gave myself a little treat. Far from the broadening of horizons, this is the type of movie I would normally watch. A classic kaiju picture! I talk about one or two of these a year in my October Halloween marathon, and so here I was ready to bring that energy in to this. It wasn't broadening my cinematic horizons, and I'll be honest: it didn't really broaden my kaiju horizons either.

I was shocked and surprised to learn that among Godzilla fans this is considered an absolute classic. In some aspects I can see why, as it has the usual strong themes that I come to expect from these films and this genre. It's a movie with strong anticapitalist undertones where the good guys succeed by doing the right thing and working for the goal of harmony in nature, taking responsibility for what collective humanity is doing to the planet and striving to do better. This is usually my kind of jam! Yet, here I am watching the movie, and I am sufficiently whelmed. Why is that? I think it's because this project has me in that mindset of broadening my horizons and finding new experiences. When it gives me something so similar to what I've had before... Well, it's an adequate One Of Those, but it leaves me wanting.

There are things to like, of course. The anticapitalist comeuppance, where they fight over money before one kills the other and then he gets fucked by Godzilla stomping the hotel he's in, is sufficiently satisfying. The actual fight between Mothra and Godzilla is neat, for kaiju fighting standards. It's not that it is a bad kaiju film. This is something much worse. It's an adequate and workmanlike kaiju film. At this point, I've seen enough of them that a straightforward one gives me the same feeling that Marvel fans must feel at this point, when the new thing comes out and it's Yet Another One Of Those. It's fine, but it's not replacing the original or Godzilla 1984 in my mind anytime soon, is what I'm saying.

24. Orpheus (1950, dir. Jean Cocteau)

Now we're talking. This is the kind of horizon broadening I mean. I knew of the reputation of this film beforehand. Oddly enough, it's because of Doctor Who. One of my favorite underrated Classic Doctor Who serials is a late Tom Baker one called Warrior's Gate. It's very poetic and lyrical, with a lot of walking though a white void and passing through mirrors into other dimensions. The creatives behind the serial were heavily inspired by Cocteau: there are lion men in the serial who take their cue from Cocteau's Beauty And The Beast, and all the passing through mirrors is drawn from this film. 

I'm a sucker for some mirror imagery, and the mirror imagery in Orpheus is very good. So are the effects for passing through mirrors. Hell, the whole movie has amazing practical effects for the time, and you can probably figure how they did a lot of them. They still impress, though, and give the film its uncanny vibes. The movie, like the Doctor Who it would inspire 30 years later, is a very poetic and lyrical dream taking its cues from the Orpheus myth. It takes those broad strokes of a man descending into the underworld for his lover and creates something entirely new out of them. Its twist on the "don't look at Eurydice" part is especially cruel.

I think I would enjoy the movie more if Orpheus himself weren't such a shit. He flip-flops between walking into the underworld itself to save his wife and just being a dismissive little shit to her. Also all the flirting with Death, or a facet of Death, behind her back. Yikes. No wonder half the city hates this little shit's guts. That left me at a bit of disconnect with the film emotionally, I'm afraid, but the artistry at hand here is astounding enough to make this worth a watch. Forget calling comic book IP the modern mythology. Stuff like this is how you do modern mythology.

25. My Own Private Idaho (1991, dir. Gus Van Sant)

Gus Van Sant! A director I've heard of! I went and checked his filmography, and I shit you not he did a movie about Harvey Milk in 2008. We've come full circle. Well, here's another film with queer themes to close out the month. Oh. Oh it's actually a very heartbreaking and tragic film about those themes. Well, shit. That's a downer, but what's pleasant are the vibes of this film. They're really strong this time, and I found myself very impressed. What sort of vibes are we talking about?

Vibes of loneliness. We feel them in a character sense through our protagonist Mike, as played by the late great River Phoenix, who wanders through the film as a lonely drifter without a sense of home. His lonely heart yearns for affection and romance, and this loneliness is matched by the environs he finds himself in. The empty barren highway of nothingness in the titular Idaho is the most striking to me, as it reminds me of the empty stretches of nothing in between places here in Newfoundland. I have been down many a lonely highway like that, but even the other locations in the film are imbued with this sense. From run-down hotels that the downtrodden congregate in, to the vast green fields of a farm in Italy, that sense of loneliness and isolation follow Mike everywhere he goes.

Supposedly this film is a loose adaptation of Shakespeare plays about King Henry. Parts of it feel very theatrical, but that sense of tragedy looms over the movie too. Mike doesn't break free of his loneliness and isolation. All that he finds is more loneliness, eventual betrayal, and then the death of others close to him. It's not exactly a happy film, but those vibes make it a film I'll never forget. Right, then. Halfway through the challenge. Well, one film off of being halfway done, but that's nothing we can't fix. See you next month for... whatever I have planned.