Aug 26, 2019
In our first break from format we’re following up last week’s movie - The Mikado (1939) - with a film exploring the men behind that comic opera: Gilbert and Sullivan. At first, Mike Leigh’s historical drama does some work to explain the circumstances that led to setting The Mikado in imperial Japan, and the second...
Aug 19, 2019
Imagine it’s 1939. The world stands at the precipice of war. So why not make a film adaptation of a classic English comic opera set in Imperial Japan, but all of the character and place names are silly baby-talk? And this reliance of nonsense serves as a stand-in for “foreign” which is contrasted against a view...
Aug 12, 2019
This random number generator selection process that we’re using seems to be doing the trick. For what better way to follow up a 1960s Czech medieval drama than a 1980s British coming-of-age comic drama? Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette is just what we needed. Th-Th-Th-Th-Thatcher.
If you’d like to watch...
Aug 5, 2019
Now we’re getting into it. This is the real deep-level Criterion Collection stuff here. Legendary - but largely unknown in the U.S. - all-time Czech historic cinema: František Vláčil's 1967 medieval epic Marketa Lazarova. Feuding clans must contend with themselves, the Holy Roman Empire, and the occasional mad...