Criterion Collection Releases for March 2009

The Criterion Collection has announced its new releases for March 2009. Last month, they announced the planned release of their three February titles, Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel (Spine #459) and Simon of the Desert (Spine #460), and also David Lean's Hobson's Choice (Spine #461).

The four titles planned for March release:


Spine #462: The Last Metro (1980) (d. Truffaut)



Spine #463: Il Generale Della Rovere (1959) (d. Roberto Rossellini)



Spine #464: Danton (1983) (d. Andrzej Wajda)



Spine #465: Dodes'ka-den (1970) (d. Kurosawa)

New Criterion Titles Announced on 11/14/08

As Professor Farnsworth would say, "Good news, everyone!": The Criterion Collection has announced its new releases for February 2009. Last month, they announced the planned release of their three January titles, Roberto Rossellini's The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (Spine #456), Douglas Sirk's Magnificent Obsession (Spine #457), and Gregory Nava's El Norte (Spine #458).

The three titles planned for February release:


Spine #459: The Exterminating Angel (d. Luis Buñuel)



Spine #460: Simon of the Desert (d. Luis Buñuel)



Spine #461: Hobson's Choice (d. David Lean)

Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park (2007)

For Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant has adopted Kubrick’s approach to releasing his films with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 (“full screen”). So to fully enjoy the rich photography, I’d recommend viewing it on a square monitor rather than a rectangular one.


I do not blame the viewer who would stop Paranoid Park within or around the 20 minute mark. Those first 20 minutes are exasperating. ‘What is he doing?’ you might be wondering about Van Sant (most of those who’ll seek this film out will be Van Sant fans and thus willing to humor his indulgences) as he insists on following around newcomer and acting novice Gabe Nevins (born in 1991), a kid who has the expressiveness of a blank wall.

His friends are a paltry bunch, and the bankruptcy of their character is only compounded by their insolence and discourtesy. Then it dawned on me: Alex (Nevins) is the only one who is not insolent or discourteous – he remains silent much of the time amidst the rudimentary discourse of his peers and fellow skate park delinquents.

The introduction of his girlfriend, Jennifer, is a stab to the nerves, as the girl playing her (Taylor Momsen, 15, who the DVD box informs is an actress from “Gossip Girl”) can be best summed up with one word: Ugh. Her acting was so foully amateurish I concluded that the sometimes straying good judgment of Van Sant had now wandered out of sight completely.

But, being an open-minded chap and in the habit of humoring the most discouraging artistic deviations, I stuck with it. As the film progresses, Nevins’ perpetually blank demeanor, when juxtaposed with the simultaneously jaded and callow (the most odious youths of them all) personalities and attitudes of his schoolmates and boarding buddies, becomes a small oasis of reticence. When an abiding police detective (Daniel Liu) asks to speak with all of the boys at the school about the freakish death of a night security guard down at the Portland railway, the boys exhibit the behavior manifested by a complete and utter absence of breeding. Many of these boys, including Alex, are the products of broken homes, and though it seems to be a very minor element of the story, divorce is a crucial theme of this film.

I believe Gus Van Sant and the film is fascinated by Alex for these reasons: compared to the other kids in this movie, he is a paragon of courtesy and introspection. We see his father, clearly once an unsavory individual (both arms have tattoo sleeves); now just a distracted dad, and he inquires about Alex’s life in a perfunctory manner, “You still boarding?” - Alex: “Yeah.” - “Right on.” The film is not condemning parents who divorce, just displaying from a dispassionate perspective the way that divorce is often the result of selfish adults. Divorce can sometimes lead to a vague state of anomie, producing base children and base teenagers. And why shouldn’t they be? Without a reliable positive adult influence, how are they to learn tact? So it is unusual for someone like Alex to surface, who is good and decent and courteous from instinct. He’s a good kid, and Van Sant provided me with one of the most moving and joyous scenes in recent memory: Alex’s little brother, Henry (Dillon Hines), with an uncanny lack of self-consciousness, jubilantly recounts scenes from Napoleon Dynamite in front of his big brother, who listens with tact and abidance. It is a wonderful, wonderful scene.


The film contains Van Sant’s usual brilliant Impressionist renderings of spiritually barren domestic interiors. It also continues his fascination with youth, especially youth on the margins. Anyone who tries to tell you that Van Sant has a prurient ulterior motive when choosing these stories is being obtuse, glib, and mean-spirited. These are generally the same people who, upon superficial inspection, conclude that the sexuality on display in KIDS (1995) is intended to be titillating. I once heard an unsubstantiated item of gossip that Van Sant was sleeping with Elias McConnell, the young man who plays the photographer Eli in Van Sant’s Elephant. Even if that is true, the motivation for making the film was thematic and aesthetic, as was the motivation for making My Own Private Idaho and Last Days, all of which incorporate homosexual youths into the fabric of the story.

Van Sant’s last three films, Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days are all morbid minimalist works; together they constitute Van Sant’s informal “Death Trilogy.” This collection of three, is, in my estimation, among Van Sant’s best work (along with Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho), an avant-garde magnum opus that, by the rigors of its concept, sifts Van Sant’s good directorial propensities and his rotten inclinations, filtering out the crap, and leaving pure, spare lyricism. The films grew increasingly more fatalistic on the journey towards the gloomy end, showing microcosms that took order for granted, finding hidden reserves of lawlessness and despair inside ostensibly functioning systems. So it is a relief to discover that Van Sant has now provided us with a film which quietly observes hidden reserves of thoughtfulness and decency inside derelict communities ostensibly forsaken to philistines.


Grade: A-

"I'm sorry - I thought you was corn."

New Criterion Titles Announced on 10/17/08

I do this compulsively every week: scan The Criterion Collection, even though they generally only publish news of 2 or 3 new titles once a month. Last month, they announced the planned release of their two December titles, Lars Von Trier's fourth feature film Europa (Spine #454) and Samuel Fuller's White Dog (Spine #455).

The three titles planned for January release:


Spine #456: The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (d. Roberto Rossellini)



Spine #457: Magnificent Obsession (d. Douglas Sirk)



Spine #458: El Norte (d. Gregory Nava)

"Deliberately Buried." The 4 Markers of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): Deciphering the Monolith

The 4 Markers

First Marker: The Dawn of Man

Stage 1: Beasts. Sentient, but without the ability to deduce or reason. The first marker improves that.






Second Marker: Buried beneath the surface of the Moon near Clavius (which is an actual lunar crater)

Stage 2: Man - with the newly formed ability to deduce, grows over millions of years, steadily using their new powers of reasoning to access Space. Electronic signals are coming from the moon, despite satellite read-outs revealing only a bare lunar surface. The electronic signal is too strong and too persistent to neglect investigation. The reason the electronic signal seemed to emanate from a bare space was because the source of the signal was buried beneath the surface of the moon.


Once the astronauts get close enough to touch it, the marker emits a piercing sound. This is not an attack on the astronauts, as Heywood Floyd is very much alive when he leaves the prerecorded instructions for the Discovery mission. The high-pitched piercing sound was a communication between the second monolith and another source somewhere near the planet Jupiter. The purpose of the Discovery mission is to locate the source of the communication with the second monolith. Before the Discovery reaches its destination, there is a battle of wits and wills between Bowman and the computer mainframe, HAL 9000.


HAL with his lack of human emotions could be said to be the next level in intelligence. Artificial intelligence, devoid of pity, doubt, regret, etc. - pure, dispassionate logic. It is only natural that these two should battle to see who earns the right to enter the third stage of development.


Third Marker: in orbit around Jupiter




Stage 3: In India, the Hindu view of human development comprises four stages or Ashram: 1) Brahmacharya, 2) Grihastha, 3) Vanaprastha, and 4) Sannyasa. The third stage, Vanaprastha, is defined as “a period of secluded life in the forest with severe discipline, austerity and penance. This is a stage in preparation for the final stage of renunciation, that is, Sannyasa.”

“This stage denotes a transition phase from material to spiritual life.”

“In this phase of life, the person is in retreat from worldly life. He lives away from the city, in a jungle as a hermit...”



Fourth Marker: in the room that was prepared for Dr. Bowman by the beings that placed the Markers. You can hear these beings communicating at points during Dave's stay in the room. It sounds like ghastly chortling.


Much earlier in the film, Dr. Heywood Floyd is briefed en route to the Tycho lunar crater that the (TMA-1 ~ Tycho Magnetic Anomaly) has been caused by an artifact “that appears to have been deliberately buried.” If we assume that the second marker was placed by a higher intelligence, then we can assume the first marker was too. It seems to be a game in which the first stage of human development is set into motion and by the time the second clue is able to be accessed, then that alerts the higher intelligence that clue #3 can now be activated. Once Dave reaches the third Marker, he is sent beyond Jupiter into another plane of existence.


He is very nearly obliterated by sensory overload during this experience.


It is a wonder that he makes it through intact or still breathing.


Presumably, the fourth Marker summons and morphs Dave Bowman onto the exalted level of the Star Child: pure, self-sustaining Mind.

“I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophical content...I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does...You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film.”

-Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

“Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.”
- George Bernard Shaw


The monolith: a symmetrical nomadic apparition, at once alternatively and simultaneously sinister and awe-inspiring, a configuration whose geometric proportions have been refined to the nth degree. It is the perfect embodiment of an abstraction that Kubrick wanted to communicate about the evolution of the human mind. The roughness and crudity of the apes living in primitive disarray is thrown into such wildly contrary relief in the midst of the monolith, that it is no surprise that even the most rudimentary conception of learning plants itself in the slightly comprehending brains of the feral apes. Something about the precision and the sharp corners of the 4 right angles of the uniform black shape sets a slow-burning charge on the faculties of one of the more thoughtful creatures, and one day, while thoughtlessly milling around some old elephant bones, the ape remembers… he remembers that strange apparition he saw, and then he looks at the bones, and the powder keg explodes: Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra” sounds the fundaments of triumphant epiphany. Of course Kubrick’s implicit irony is generally overlooked on first viewing because the sheer grandeur of the music and imagery is so intoxicating. The irony of course is that the celebration of discovery trumpeted by the Strauss piece belies the fact that the ape’s seminal innovation is instantaneously utilized for purposes of murder. And so the evolution of mankind begins.

The transition from the bone to the spacecraft is often noted for being the single biggest transitional leap in time in all of cinema. And of course, we don’t need any of the space in between to lose Kubrick’s point: man has discovered how to use the raw materials that have been rationed to him by existence to astonishing and frightening ends, the bone being the original utility and the spacecraft being the most advanced. But even after 2000 or so millennia, the banality of existence persists: aboard the impossibly sophisticated and advanced technical achievement millions of years in the making, Space Station 5, the massive floating steering wheel Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) docks with as a mid-point between Earth and Clavius, there are advertisements for Hilton Hotels, who presumably own the rights to the space station, and a placard for Howard Johnson’s, that chain of restaurant’s rustic name as glaringly incongruous with the aseptic cutting edge interior of the space station as a Taco Bell logo plastered inside a bio-lab. It’s deflating to see that Howard Johnson’s sign, just as it is deflating to witness Dr. Frank Poole’s (Gary Lockwood) insipid chit-chat with his parents via telecommunication while he traverses the lofty reaches of space aboard the Discovery One. Poole himself seems mildly disgusted during this sequence, and the music played over Poole’s birthday chat with his parents is sorrowful.

Keir Dullea seems at cursory inspection to be a rather bland choice for Dr. David Bowman, the other conscious astronaut aboard the Discovery (the remaining three astronauts have been placed in cryogenic sleeping chambers in order to preserve their energies at maximum level until such time as they will be needed once the ship arrives at Jupiter) but in fact Kubrick (who cast Dullea sight unseen after witnessing his performances in David and Lisa (1962) and The Thin Red Line (1964)) has optioned wisely, in that only an actor as preternaturally cool, calm, and collected as Dullea could convince us that he stands a chance against HAL. HAL is voiced by Douglas Rain, and is one of the most quietly psychotic antagonists in film history. Psychotic you say? Yes. It is one thing to go after Dave and Frank, who HAL has clandestinely witnessed conspiring to deactivate him, but to murder the three sleeping humans who have nothing to do with the conspiracy, is the work of a madman. HAL’s killing spree is not entirely successful; Dave is resourceful, and when HAL refuses him entry onto the Discovery after Dave returns from a finally futile attempt to retrieve the drifting body of the maliciously jettisoned Frank, Dave, without a helmet, hazards death by propelling himself over a brief but treacherous fissure between the berth of the Discovery’s emergency airlock and the exit of the EVA (extra-vehicular activity) pod.

Besides the grandeur and scope of Kubrick’s vision, and the intellectual ambition, the film intuits themes and observations that can be lost on those who are put off by Kubrick’s dispassionate remove from the proceedings. But the film, if viewed properly, should not leave the viewer cold, but rather should incite ecstatic absorption which only begins in the brain and then charges from there to all the senses. This is not a boring film. Many claim that it is, but it is only due to the scarcity of these viewers’ imaginations and interior resources that the film will fail to react. I postulate that human beings with rich inner lives have the richest and most rewarding experiences with art (some people feel uncomfortable around negative space, even indignant, because, naturally, they have nothing of their own to fill it with; and I don’t mean IQ). And that is what 2001: A Space Odyssey is beyond all else - beyond its technical proficiency, its philosophy, its cutting-edge special effects, its iconic status - an artistic endeavor, and if you’re the right type of person, you’ll feel the blissful chemistry of your senses and Kubrick’s intuition bubbling harmoniously.

Whenever I watch 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I see the monolith, I reflexively envision Kubrick, with his dark imposing countenance and towering cold intellect. When Kubrick’s films are referred to as “cold,” generally it is the cut-and-dried nature of his presentation that is being commented on. All of this meticulous aseptic precision can result in bothersome feelings that Kubrick’s magnum opus is too pat, too exacting, the perfection is hermetically sealed. To me, it’s like the film itself is the monolith, or maybe Kubrick is.


2001 materialized before particular absent-minded and coarse terrestrials in the same manner as the silent black monolith before the howling apes; at first, they were perturbed and bewildered:

“a film out of control, an infuriating combination of exactitude on small parts and incoherence on large ones.”

- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Historian

“a thoroughly uninteresting failure and the most damning demonstration yet of Stanley Kubrick’s inability to tell a story coherently and with a consistent point of view.”

- Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice, April 11, 1968

“Such movies as 'Petulia' and '2001' may be no more than trash in the latest, up-to-the-minute guises, using “artistic techniques” to give trash the look of art. The serious art look may be the latest fashion in expensive trash. All that “art” may be what prevents pictures like these from being enjoyable trash; they’re not honestly crummy, they’re very fancy and they take their crummy ideas seriously… In some ways it’s the biggest amateur movie of them all… It’s a monumentally unimaginative movie.”

-Pauline Kael, Harper’s, February 1969

“Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?”

-Rock Hudson at the Los Angeles Premiere, April 4, 1968, according to Roger Ebert


But it was not long after the initial apprehension that Kubrick’s film seized our collective consciousness and deposited us in the warm glow of intuitive clarity, leaving the detractors and the skeptics crowing like beasts outside the orb of enlightenment.

2001 is not my favorite Kubrick (that would be The Shining) but it would be inaccurate to find any of the work he granted us previous or subsequent to this film as more vital to international culture. 2001 is the centerpiece in a peerless oeuvre.


Grade: A+



+ "Deliberately Buried." The 4 Markers of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): Deciphering the Monolith