We’re in the holiday season full-time and that means more special releases from Criterion to buy and stick in those stockings. While two films are re-releases, a collection from Iran’s cinema master, a hidden film by Spain’s enfant terrible, and three new Hollywood additions, including the last from a major auteur, all come aboard the C train. Mixing the audacious with the realistic and fun in each theme of these movies, even when one of those is a documentary about the psychopathy of filmmaking, here’s the list for November.
Hell’s Angels (1930)
In Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, the film’s beginning shows Howard Hughes working as a perfectionist director in recreating World War I dogfight scenes. No expense was spared, moving from Los Angeles to Oakland because there are clouds in the sky to show the planes actually flying while filming these hazardous scenes. As in the film, the reception to Hell’s Angels was enthusiastic, with its audacious shooting in the air to show that they were flying. In the middle of it is a melodrama about two brothers (Ben Lyon and James Hall) who join the fight amidst their love for the same woman, the blonde bombshell Jean Harlow, and the rules of engagement with the war which threatens all of them. It may not have recouped what it cost to make, but the visual experience was worth every dollar spent.
El (1953)
“He,” which translates in Spanish, is Luis Buñuel’s dark turn while living in Mexico about a woman (Delia Garces) dealing with her much older husband (Arturo de Cordova) and his obsessiveness with preventing her from being ogled on by others. Using his trademark surrealism, the young wife must navigate his paranoia to break free from his grasp that is no longer based in reality. Buñuel continued his attack on the bourgeoisie, regardless of where he was living at the time, and El is his midpoint feature of a resume full of thrillers, drama, and satire about the type of people he despised.
Eclipse Series 47: Abbas Kiarostami—Early Shorts and Features (1970-1989)
Before becoming a mainstream star of Iranian cinema, Kiarostami got his start making different types of movies, especially evolving around children. Seventeen of these are in this one collection, capturing the changes of the country with the Iranian Revolution of 1979 in between. Starting with his first film, Bread And Alley, all the way to his education-based documentary, Homework, those key themes and techniques which would appear in some of Kiarostami’s masterpieces, all came about through here and his gazing eye remains unmistakable.
Burden of Dreams (1982)
Made in parallel with making his South American Amazon epic, Fitzcarraldo, director Werner Herzog allowed documentarian Les Blank to film the absolute mess of a production, which would result in a masterpiece akin to Apocalypse Now. Funding, a sudden change in cast, and very dangerous shoots were part of the chaos, yet it was seeing Klaus Kinski, Herzog’s infamous collaborator, publicly losing his mind and threatening people left and right, while the natives found themselves in the middle of their livelihood threatened by these strange foreigners. It’s Germany’s version of Apocalypse Now with the chaos of filmmaking at such a scale in the woods and this incredible documentary captures every bit of it.
The Breakfast Club (1985)
The second re-edition is John Hughes’ 80s-defining teen movie about strangers and the archetypes we had in high school serving one Saturday detention. Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, and Anthony Michael Hall give us generational-transcending performances which gave them the label the “Brat Pack,” a term they really didn’t like, but it made everyone a permanent cultural star of the era. Now, if Criterion can give this treatment to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Sixteen Candles, they really would have a great trilogy worth buying.
House Party (1990)
The rap duo Kid ‘n Play were major hip-hop influences in the early ’90s before the emergence of gangsta rap. This film, in Reginald Hudlin’s debut, exemplifies the feeling with the comic touch of urban life with teenagers who just want to go out and have some innocent fun with one night getting together. Along with the rap duo, comedian Robin Harris, Tisha Campbell, and Martin Lawrence star in this teen comedy that encapsulates this short period in transitioning between the decades and the type of rap which was popular turning to a more hardcore style.
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
The last film by Stanley Kubrick, released four months after the director’s death, was polarizing upon release, but has improved as time moved on as a worthy finale to Kubrick’s career. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, both married to each other at the time, play a couple whose relationship is tested after a shocking confession leads to a nighttime journey into a secret orgy with dangerous threats. Sydney Pollack and Todd Field, who then went behind the camera after making this film, co-star in Kubrick’s exploration of sexual relations and the underbelly of power which has its own desires that no one knows or should know and what it means to be faithful.
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