Frezno's Criterion Challenge: October 2023 Trip Report

Hey all. So, we're back again with this thing, and here's the part where I'd ramble on about it for about a paragraph or so before launching into the capsule reviews and calling it a month. This time, though, things are a little different. After thinking about it for a bit, I have decided that this will be the last entry in the Criterion Challenge, and that I won't be continuing it for the final two months of the year. There are some reasons for this, which I'll be upfront and tell you about. First and foremost is that I've lost my passion for it. At the start of the year, I had 52 interesting films and cherrypicked ones that sounded really exciting and intriguing to me. Now here I am in November, with 12 or so remaining, and the spark is gone. Combine that with the fact that I cornered myself into not just watching these films, but having to say something about them on here, and you get situations where I look at the clock and go "Do I really want to burn an afternoon throwing one of these on?". It's not fun and exciting cinematic horizon broadening for me any more. It feels like work, and I'm not even getting paid to do it.

More to the point... I got what I needed out of this. I got that horizon broadening, that sense of discovery and eclectic enlightenment. Some of the films I watched for this became new favorites of mine. Even if I didn't like them, I was pushing outside my wheelhouse and found something to write about them. They made me a better writer, and got me to expand and apply myself better. The Criterion Challenge may be counted as a failure, but in my eyes I set out what I wanted to do. I watched some new and interesting movies, got some new and interesting thoughts, and I can say I accomplished something. Instead of making busybody work for myself with movies I feel more obligated to watch than excited to watch, I can spend my last two months of Criterion subscription going onward with my own pace, watching whatever esoteric thing on the channel catches my interest without any arbitrary categories. 

Still, I would feel remiss if I didn't end things on a high note, so I'll push myself through one last time to talk about the three films I managed to get to watch in October. If you've followed along with this journey since January, thanks for doing that! I hope you've seen a real growth and maturation as I explored the finer points of cinema. Let's do it one more time before the end, and we'll start with...

38. M (1931, dir. Fritz Lang)

Oh hey, it's that guy who was in Contempt, only this time he's behind the camera. This is a much better and less aggravating film than Contempt, a dark and somber noir-ish thing about mob mentality that really sings in black and white. With nothing more than Peter Lorre's ominous whistling, the film creates one hell of an atmosphere as slowly, German children start going missing and sending the citizens of the town into mass panic. Make no mistake, Peter Lorre is doing terrible murderous things offscreen in this film, but terrible things are being done in the name of stopping him as well. You don't have to look back to the '30s to see what sort of frothing madness will be done to others "thinking of the children", but it's all right here. Accusations flying left and right, suspicious people being harangued in the streets, and eventually things devolve into a chaotic (but quite well-made) sequence of vigilante justice organized by the various homeless folks in this German town. 

All of that culminates in the finale, wherein Lorre is judged by the very mob mentality and vigilantes he and his crimes stirred up, trying to appeal to justice and fair reason when he is the one who whipped them all into becoming them. Despite being 80 years old, this is a film that still has things to say today about the lengths people will go to protect the children, and the kind of shit we'll stir up to do it. It was a pretty damn good film, is what I'm saying, and that third-act sequence of Lorre trying to run away and hide from all the homeless folks as they swarm on him and try to flush him out is some damn good filmmaking.

39. Ikiru (1952, dir. Akira Kurosawa)

I fully admit to you that I am fudging here. Ikiru is actually the last film I watched for the Criterion Challenge, but I want to end on a perfect film and I watched such a film between M and Ikiru. So, I'm putting it here. Nothing of the two influenced each other, so it's safe to shuffle here. Right then! Kurosawa! He is a director I've seen before, with Yojimbo, but this is quite different. It's heartbreaking and tragic in all the right ways, but also has a lot to say about what it wants to talk about. This is a film about living your life to the fullest, as well as the mundanity of bureaucracy preventing one from doing that. The opening, in which the public council keeps pawning off a petition to build a park to every sector imaginable, is hellish bureaucracy personified. Our old protagonist works here, and finds himself with months to live thanks to stomach cancer.

What follows is the heartbreak but poignant joy of him realizing that he's never truly lived until now, and trying to do just that as he goes out to enjoy the world around him. Though the times are hard, he does live, does find joy in the world, and then he dies. At his wake, the bureaucrats who he worked with slowly realize that he knew he was dying, poured his heart and soul into getting this park built and fighting the pointless busywork blocking of bureaucracy, and then died in it. They swear, Scrooge-like, to never let that happen again... only to slip back to the old ways at the end. It's depressing, it's bleak, but it's real, and I'll still remember Kanji Watanabe as the man who finally lived just as he was dying. 

40. Koyannisqatsi (1982, dir. Godfrey Reggio)

And so we end the Criterion Challenge, prematurely, in the best place we could do so. The most concentrated vibes-based cinematic experience I have ever borne witness to, a thing which defies plot or logic or any other sort of straightforward summary analysis. Koyaanisqatsi means "life out of balance" and that is the vibe which this film presents, showing the modern world of 1982 at dizzying speed. Cars fly by, people move on, machinery is made and microchips are soldered. With the classical music that is this film's constant soundtrack intensifying, this film was a sensory overload to me. It absolutely overwhelmed me in how it kept going, faster and faster, relentless against my eyes and ears as I lay there begging for a cut to the natural world, a pan across a beautiful vista, anything but the grinding engines of capitalist society playing out at rapid speed.

That was koyaanisqatsi. That was life out of balance, a life of the material which absolutely overwhelms the modern senses. I did get the wonder and awe of the natural world, and it was beautiful and refreshing, but I never forgot the first 30 or so minutes of the film. It does strange things like going into reverse at times, and here is where I admit that I have much more to learn. I do not know quite why it does that, why it wants to do these things. The opening shots reverse the destructive burst of a rocket, people walk backwards sometimes, explosions roll back. It is saying something with this, but it is out of my grasp. I am no perfect film scholar because of this challenge, and I have much to learn. Who knows what Don Quixote can accomplish? What I do know is that Koyaanisqatsi is perfection. It does what it wants to do perfectly, portraying the modern life out of balance by overwhelming you with 40 minutes of rapid-fire modernity. It is a film I might never have watched were I not broadening my mind and horizons. For one moment here, I opened myself to new possibilities, and that is the point of this challenge. The point that I wanted to make for myself.

Those were 40 films of varying quality which I viewed. Some great, some aggravating, all films I might never have seen otherwise. That, then, is my Criterion Challenge. Thanks for reading, and consider throwing on some offbeat films for yourself. Not because some challenge tells you to do so in this category, but because you want to. Break the limits, live a little, and have fun with the movies. Be seeing you.