Man Not There, Woman Under Influence

If I was forced at gun-point (or perhaps in this instance umbrella-point is more apt) to list the ten most beautiful movies ever made, Jacques Tati's 1967 masterpiece Playtime would handily be on said list -- I've watched this sucker projected on the wall of the Museum of Modern Art, for goodness's ake. And I don't mean inside one of their movie theaters -- I mean in the actual art part of the museum they had this several minutes of this film projected on a wall right beside paintings for a few years and every time I walked past it I would sit down on the bench provided and re-watch the footage for the gazillionth time. It's about as perfect as such things go and so the news that Criterion is dropping the film onto 4K disc this upcoming February is some happy news indeed. (And obviously the folks at Criterion agree with me on this film's stature since this FOURTH release they've given it, after DVD, blu-ray, and their must-own Tati box-set.)

Indeed I don't usually start these monthly Criterion release announcement posts with one of their now constant 4K upgrades, but Playtime on 4K is obviously a most special ocassion. The rest of February's hardly a slouch though -- take for instance Sidney Lumet's 1976 media master-class Network, which is entering the esteemed Collection for the first time, and also in 4K. That movie turns 50 next year and feels as timely as ever -- and of course I speak of how we all would still have sex with Old William Holden even if we were hot young things like Faye Dunaway was. Obviously! Why -- what did you think I was talking about? 

Next up on February 3rd there's the 1957 Western 3:10 to Yuma, which I must admit I've never seen -- I've seen the remake with Christian Bale but never the original with Glenn Ford. Should I? Tell me your opinion as if you're talking to someone who doesn't have a lot of patience with Westerns in general. Because you are. Nor do I have a lot of patience for John Cassavetes' much-beloved 1974 drama A Woman Under the Influence, which is getting what I believe is its first standalone release after being part of the Cassavetes box-set previously. I tend to agree with Pauline Kael's infamous opinion here -- that Rowlands is just doing Way Too Much in this movie. I understand why actors love the performance, but as a viewer I'm just not into it. (That said I'm sure this is getting this standalone drop because of Rowlands' recent passing and that's nice for her fans.)

February ain't stopping there, though -- you want a box-set of Ernst Lubitsch's musicals, you say? Well you got it! Their reinstated "Eclipse Series" is unloading four of the champagne-synonymous filmmaker's movies starting with The Love Parade in 1929 right through One Hour With You in 1932. I haven't seen a single one of these, but every time I have seen The Love Parade's title anywhere I think of that being the title of Tobey Maguire's book in Wonder Boys. (Is that weird? I'm weird. God I love Wonder Boys. Put Wonder Boys in the Criterion Collection dammit!) After that there's the great Kiyoshi Kurosawa's most recent thriller Cloud, which also happens to be streaming on Criterion Channel right now -- it's about an online reseller becoming unhinged as he tries to score questionable deals, and yes I related to it an awful lot. Which brings us to the last but hardly least February drop -- the Coen Brothers' 2001 black-and-white Noir-riff The Man Who Wasn't There, starring Billy Bob Thornton and Scarlett Johannson among many others. Here's where I admit I don't think I've seen this since it came out? Which is strange indeed because I remember liking it. Huh. Well now's my chance! 

What out of February 2026's releases has you most excited?

Back To Boyd

Lots of Boyd Holbrook popping up this week unexpectedly -- I re-watched both Gone Girl and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny over the past two nights (I'd totally forgotten he was in Gone Girl at all) -- and along with the fact that it's his birthday tomorrow, well why not let him have tops-of-the-blog honors before I head off for a long weekend? And somehow these two vintage photos of Boyd from his pre-acting modeling days didn't make it into the enormous gratuitous post I did of him back in 2015. (I go back to that post so often -- it soothes me.) Anyway yup, it's a four day weekend. I am off until Tuesday and there are zero movies out this weekend worth talking about so I got nothing to recommend. I'm going to spend it catching up on the quite terrifyingly large piles of blu-rays I have been buying, and going to see a couple of movies at the "Bigger & Louder" series at the Paris here in NYC, which just revamped their system. I am seeing Playtime in 70mm tomorrow, holy shit! Anyway this weekend is just the quiet before the storm of fall movie releases -- NYFF will be swallowing me up by the end of September -- so I'm going to enjoy this breath whilst I can take it. Y'all have a good one and see you in September! (And as always if you see something good, say something in the comments.)

Gotta Get Ulrike Ottinger

Heads up on a new obsession o' mine -- if you've got Criterion Channel you need to check out Ulrike Ottinger's 1979 film Ticket of No Return, which they've got streaming this month as part of the director Richard Linklater's picks. And yes if you know about my ambivalence towards the films of Linklater then you might understand it when I say him putting this movie in front of me is the greatest thing he's ever done. Thanks, Richard! Starring frequent Ottinger collaborator Tabea Blumenschein in a nearly wordless performance the film follows a woman who goes to Berlin to do nothing but drink herself to death -- imagine Leaving Las Vegas directed by Douglas Sirk, or as I called it on Twitter, "Tati Meets Fassbinder shot by Guy Bourdin." 

It is so my shit! So it will probably be your shit. This was my very first Ottinger film -- the Metrograph theater here in NYC had planned a big retrospective of her films in March 2020 where she was going to be here and everything and then, well, March 2020 happened. They did end up streaming them virtually that fall but I missed it because I have no idea, I was probably curled up in the corner of my apartment crying -- it was 2020. Anyway I'm now furious I missed out on this, especially because her movies are basically impossible to see. They aren't available on home video unless you order them from Ottinger's website (thx Ross) but I warn you they're outrageously expensive. 

Which is a damned shame, given how immediately and entirely infatuated I found myself with Ticket of No Return. Oh and my Fassbinder mention above isn't just because both filmmakers are German -- there are a slew of overlapping collaborators, including Peer Raben doing the music and actors like Volker Spengler, Eddie Constantine, and Kurt Raab popping up. There's also just a vibe -- a big vibe -- that they share. Queer and depressive and fabulous all at once. I'm in love. Release a boxed-set, Criterion! I gotta get my hands on Freak Orlando ASAP. Any Ottinger fans out there?

5 Off My Head: Siri Says 1958

My "Siri Says" series always starts and comes and goes and stops in fits and starts, but after last week's enormous 2016-a-thon -- where I named my 25 favorite movies of that absolutely fabulous year in film -- I'm feeling like pushing the rock a little further down the hill, checking off one more year in the history of cinema. So I asked Siri today to give me a number between 1 and 100 and (after several answers that we'd already done) she gave me the number "58." Which means today I'll be talking The Movies of 1958!

I've probably admitted this before in one of my other posts about the end of the 1950s but this period in movies, save a couple of bright spots, isn't especially my bag. It's all Rat Pack and technicolor Movie Musicals and bloated war epics, blah blah blah. Most of the mainstream respectable shit reduces me to groans. (Except Paul Newman, who reduces me to... different groans.) But on the sidelines there's some fun sci-fi / horror happening, and I've been known to enjoy me a sword-and-sandal picture now and again. This year introduced both Steve Reeves as Hercules and Christopher Lee as Dracula! Neither of those make my top five though...

My 5 Favorite Movies of 1958

Vertigo

(dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

-- released on May 28th 1958 --

Invention For Destruction

(dir. Karel Zeman)

-- released on August 1958 --

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

(dir. Nathan Juran)

-- released on December 23rd 1958 --

Mon Oncle

(dir. Jacques Tati)

-- released on November 3rd 1958 --

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

(dir. Richard Brooks)

-- released on August 29th 1958 --

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Runners-up: The Fly (dir. Kurt Neumann), I Want To Live! (dir. Robert Wise), Touch of Evil (dir. Welles), Bell Book and Candle (dir. Richard Quine), The Blob (dir. Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.), Hercules (dir. Pietro Francisci), Dracula (dir. Terence Fisher), Elevator to the Gallows (dir. Luois Malle), Terror in a Texas Town (dir.Joseph H. Lewis), The Long Hot Summer (dir. Martin Ritt), A Time To Love and A Time To Die (dir. Douglas Sirk)

Never seen: South Pacific (dir. Joshua Logan), The Hidden Fortress (dir. Kurosawa), The Left Handed Gun (dir. Arthur Penn), Indiscreet (dir. Stanley Donen), The Defiant Ones (dir. Stanley Kramer), Separate Tables (dir. Delbert Mann), Damn Yankees (dir. Abbott / Donen), The Young Lions (dir. Edward Dmytryk), Bonjour Tritesse (dir. Preminger), Lonelyhearts (dir. Donehue), Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (dir. Juran), The Magician (dir. Bergman)

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What are your favorite movies of 1958?

Pics of the Day

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If you follow me on Instagram then you know I spend all my time that's not used up seeing movies hitting up art museums and exhibitions here in New York -- it's my other psycho passion -- and I've got a couple of things to recommend if you're in or coming around this way any time soon. (These are besides that show of hand-drawn 80s action-movie posters from Ghana that I already told you about -- and you can see more pictures from that show, since I've actually been to it since I wrote that post, right here.) First off if you're not aware MoMA just reopened after a massive six months remodeling, adding approximately three billion square miles of space to their galleries... well it's something like that anyway; I've been there three times now since they reopened and I don't think I've come anywhere near seeing everything new. But one thing I have come upon is that they have happily...

... integrated film stuffs into the wide collection, instead of keeping it isolated to the lower levels where their screening rooms are, and right now they've got a gorgeous collection of stills from some silent classics on display, including the ones posted above from Nosferatu and Metropolis. (click to embiggen) And speaking of you can also find an original Metropolis poster in one of the galleries, which is really hard not to just start licking, believe you me. Other film stuff on display right now: they're constantly projecting the office scene from Jacques Tati's masterpiece Playtime in one gallery (I keep wishing they'd just project the entire film start to finish, personally, but I guess they don't want layabouts like me camping out all day long) and...

... they've got an entire little theater devoted to Andy Warhol's shorts, including my beloved "Blowjob" seen above. I never grow tired of "Blowjob." (I also never grow tired of saying "I never grow tired of 'Blowjob.'") And then down on the lower levels where the screening rooms are they've got a fantastic series of home movies on display -- of non-famous people but also ones from classic Hollywood mega-stars like Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. And that's just the stuff I've stumbled upon so far. 

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New show of DAVID LYNCH art at Sperone Westwater #art #painting #davidlynch #sculpture #surrealism

A post shared by Jason Adams (@jasonaadams) on Nov 2, 2019 at 11:40am PDT

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The other film-related NYC thing I highly recommend seeking out is only related to film by the artist who made it -- you probably already know that David Lynch is a painter and a sculptor besides being The Greatest Living Film-maker, but maybe you don't know that his stuff is actually fantastic? I love it anyway -- it's as surreal and funny and sweet and terrifying as anything he's ever directed. Well he's got a show up of new works here in New York at the Sperone Westwater Gallery on Bowery -- it's on display until December 21st and you should probably go check it out and be as cool as me is, is my point. But not as cool as my boyfriend is, since that'd just be totally obnoxious...
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My boyfriend just hung out with this fella tonight without me — anybody got a couch I can sleep on? pic.twitter.com/238wgXcsuS

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) November 6, 2019

Great Moments in Movie Shelves #126

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Sixteen minutes into Wim Wenders' 1987 masterpiece Wings of Desire our friendly angel task-force of Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) drag their overcoats and ponytails under the big top of the Berlin State Library, and spend some time listening in on the thoughts of the folks inside. The library's over-stuffed with angels - they know afterlife-worthy design when they see it, I guess!

The library has the air of a cathedral minus the pesky religion, so it's pretty perfect for Wings of Desire, a film that entirely avoids using the word "God" at all. Why believe in God when there are bookshelves, that's what I have always said. 

Wings was shot by the  famed cinematographer Henri Alekan (the circus in the film is named after him), who forty-one years earlier had filmed Jean Cocteau's La belle et la bête, and you get the same sense of weightlessness to the way his camera moves here - the dream -scape of that earlier fairy-tale carries over to this world of celestial beings hovering just outside of time, hovering just in between worlds... not unlike the city split in half, East and West, that the film is psychically elegizing (it was shot two years before the Wall came down) so lovingly.

When I watch this sequence what I'm always reminded of is the monochromatically pea-green office cubicles of Jacques Tati's Playtime - the way the cameras of both films turn our shifting perspectives of these spaces into lush 3D experiences, almost video-game like now, where we twist inside and around the corners of these enclosed cubes, searching, searching, searching, turning Modernist architecture into an excavation of the soul.

5 Off My Head: Siri Says 1971

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They call the 1970s the "Golden Age of Hollywood" and I guess Siri has been feeling like a Golden Girl lately because this is the third out of the past four editions of our Siri Game that the voice inside my telephone has given me a digit in the 70s when I've asked her for a digit between 1 & 100. Today she gave me "71" and so today we'll be hitting up The Movies of 1971. And speaking of the "Golden Age of Hollywood" there really truly were some astonishing movies that came out in 1971. (Including a certain movie that's got a remake coming out this very weekend!) My personal picks are a little off-center because I am a little off-center, but the runners-up really do represent a pretty astonishing bunch of movies themselves.

My 5 Favorite Movies of 1971

The Devils

(dir. Ken Russell)

-- released on July 16th 1971 --

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

(dir. Mel Stuart)

-- released on June 30th 1971 --

A Clockwork Orange

(dir. Stanley Kubrick)

-- released on December 19th 1971 --

The Abominable Dr. Phibes

(dir. Robert Feust)

-- released on May 18th 1971 --

Harold & Maude

(dir. Hal Ashby)

-- released on December 20th 1971 --

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Runners-up: The French Connection (dir. William Friedkin), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (dir. Robert Altman), The Last Picture Show (dir. Peter Bogdanovich), The Beguiled (dir. Donald Siegel), Play Misty For Me (dir. Clint Eastwood), Duel (dir. Steven Spielberg), Straw Dogs (dir. Sam Peckinpah), Bananas (dir. Woody Allen)...

... The Omega Man (dir. Boris Sagal), THX 1138 (dir. George Lucas), Let's Scare Jessica to Death (dir. John Hancock), A Bay of Blood (dir. Bava), The Andromeda Strain (dir. Wise), Beware of a Holy Whore (dir. Fassbinder), Whity (dir. Fassbinder), Wake in Fright (dir. Ted Kotcheff), The Boy Friend (dir. Ken Russell)

Never seen: Carnal Knowledge (dir. Mike Nichols), Vanishing Point (dir. Richard C. Sarafian), Sunday Bloody Sunday (dir. John Schlesinger), Death in Venice (dir. Luchino Visconti), What's the Matter With Helen? (dir. Curtis Harrington), Trafic (dir. Jacques Tati), Willard (dir. Daniel Mann)

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What are your favorite movies of 1971?

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5 Off My Head - Siri Says 1953

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What a difference one week and a couple of years make. Last week for this series - wherein we ask our phone a number between 1 and 100 and then choose our five favorite movies corresponding to that year - we did 1955 and we had too many to choose from. This week Siri gave us 53, and you know what? The Movies of 1953 ain't as hot a bunch. (Montgomery Clift aside.)

Oh I'm sure there are classics that've fallen between the cracks that I haven't seen - and I look forward to you telling me in the comments what they are! - but out of what I have seen there's only one film I love unabashedly and four that I like well enough, I suppose, but in another better year they probably wouldn't make a list like this. And on that note of enthusiasm, let's do this thing!

My 5 Favorite Movies of 1953

The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T

(dir. Roy Rowland)

-- released on July 1st, 1953--

Roman Holiday

(dir. William Wyler)

-- released on September 2nd, 1953 --

Monsieur Hulot's Holiday

(dir. Jacques Tati)

-- released on June 16th 1953 --

From Here To Eternity

(dir. Fred Zinnemann)

-- released on August 5th, 1953--

All I Desire

(dir. Douglas Sirk)

-- released on August 28th 1953 --

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 Runners-up: Tokyo Story (dir. Ozu), 

House of Wax (dir. Andre de Toth),
 Jeopardy (dir. John Sturges)

Never seen: The Earrings of Madame de... (dir. Max Ophüls), The Wild One (dir. Laslo Benedek), The Wages of Fear (dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot), Fear and Desire (dir. Kubrick), I Vitelloni (dir. Fellini), Niagara (dir. Henry Hathaway)
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What are your favorite movies of 1953?

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A Hard Candy Kubrick-mas

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A lot of movie-geeks are going to get their stockings stuffed but tight and good this holiday season! Yesterday we told you about that Criterion boxed-set of Jaques Tati's six masterpieces, and a few weeks ago we learned about both that beautiful Herzog boxed-set (which is out TODAY, swoon, must have) as well as a slew of Lil' Stevie Spielberg's movies coming to blu-ray at last... and now here comes a humdinger of a collection from that dude who Spielberg stole A.I. from once he was dead, huzzah!

On November 4th Stanley Kubrick: The Masterpiece Collection will hit the streets, as the saying goes; it's ten discs of material including several docs and then the films, oh god the films - Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut. It's an excellent time to be a movie nerd, y'all. Have I missed any good sets coming out soon?