While MMC! is still officially retired, I just wanted to take a moment to shamelessly take a lap for having called Joseph Losey’s The Servant for a wacky “C” a mere seven years ago! Not much cross-over on the extras though, which is a bit of a loss. Still (and once again, film nerds), you’re welcome!
As an aside, it’s also nice to see potential MMC! proposal candidates Targets (Peter Bogdanovich, 1968) and Thelma & Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991) each getting wacky “Cs” as well!
The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents Leadbelly.
In his final theatrical film, celebrated director Gordon Parks cast Roger E. Mosley as the iconic blues and folk singer Huddie Ledbetter, better known to music history as Lead Belly, the King of the 12-String Guitar. Dramatizing the musician’s turbulent life from his early 20s to his mid-40s, Leadbelly follows Huddie as he performs at bars and sukey jumps, learns the blues from “Blind Lemon” Jefferson, faces violent racism and its deadly consequences, and twice finds himself incarcerated, labouring on back-breaking chain gangs and performing at the behest of white authorities. Combining pastoral simplicity with the resilient and rebellious spirit of the 1970s, all to the sounds of Lead Belly’s iconic songs, Leadbelly offers a vibrant and harrowing portrait of the segregated Jim Crow South and stood as the film Parks most admired amongst his own filmography.
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October is always a fun month so let’s celebrate it with a long overdue “Trailer Tuesday.” The Criterion Collection has a 2022 October slate that is more horror-centric than it has been in years with releases of Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bayou (1997), Jayro Bustamante’s La Llorona (2019), Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), and a 4K UHD edition of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). MMC! loves its Japanese cinema and so it’s only natural that we pay particular attention to the chilling Janus Films trailer for Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure (1997) which brilliantly captures the frightening banality and emptiness of the film’s insidious psychopathy. Criterion’s hard media library welcomes Cure on October 18.
The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents Under the Bridges.
Puttering up and down the Havel River, bargemen Hendrik and Willi (Carl Raddatz and Gustav Knuth) dream of meeting a decent woman, getting married, and living a “solid life.” While traveling to Berlin, they meet forlorn Anna (Hannelore Schroth) on Potsdam’s Glienicker Bridge and mistake her for a potential suicide. The pair provide her with refuge on their barge as it heads for Berlin and each takes a fancy to the young woman, but she is too guarded to reciprocate and their friendship strains under the tension of their humble romantic rivalry. Stylishly representing working class lives in a poetic realist style, Helmut Käutner’s Under the Bridges is a heart-winning drama that imagined German life and love free from the traumas of World War II and stands as an underappreciated masterpiece of German cinema.
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The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents Maya and the Three.
An epic animated event told over nine chapters, Jorge R. Gutierrez’s Maya and the Three is the story of a brave and rebellious warrior princess whose fifteenth birthday ceremony is interrupted by the gods of the underworld who claim her life is forfeit to the God of War, Lord Mictlan. While coming to terms with her family’s secret past, Princess Maya embarks on a quest to recruit three legendary fighters, fulfill an ancient prophecy, and save their four kingdoms from the gods’ vengeance. With its Mesoamerican inspired fantasy world, its frame-breaking action spectacles, and its impeccable collection of performances by Zoe Saldaña, Alfred Molina, Allen Moldonado, Stephanie Beatriz, Gabriel Iglesias, Diego Luna, Gael García Bernal, Rosie Perez, and Rita Moreno, Maya and the Three takes its inspiration from cinema’s great works of fantasy to produce a dazzling tribute to Gutierrez’s Mexican homeland.
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The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.
Based on I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!, the autobiographical book of chain gang escapee Robert E. Burns, Mervyn LeRoy’s uncompromising and starkly realistic 1932 drama, about an out of work veteran twice railroaded into the hell of a Georgia chain gang, still has the power to shock. Paul Muni commands the screen in a brilliantly lived-in performance as a man whose only prospect is a life perpetually on the run, and the film’s gritty realism spares no anger at a cruel and unjust legal system. Eighty years later, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang remains the studio era’s greatest social message film and it stands as a crucial turning point for Warner Bros., Paul Muni, Robert E. Burns, and the American prison system.
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