506 Dillinger is Dead

[domino harvey]

Bullshit. There was even an I Dream of Jeannie episode about it

[ambrose]

Bullshit. There was even an I Dream of Jeannie episode about it

Bloody hell! Domino Harvey is right.

[rrenault]

That was over forty years ago. A lot has changed since then as far as cinema appreciation is concerned. In today's world it's as obscure as a new foreign film that runs at Film Forum or the IFC Center for two weeks and no longer and nowhere else. In other words, only the true film lovers know about and appreciate Marienbad today.

[colinr0380]

And before anyone asks, here are the French and Saunders BBC parodies of Fellini (Dawn French is a perfectly proportioned Fellini woman!) and Bergman films.

(Though my favourites of their film parodies were those for Silence of the Lambs (Jennifer Saunders is a pitch perfect Jodie Foster!) and Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?)

[rrenault]

I was going to say. The only classic foreign art films people TODAY, aside from cinephiles, tend to know about are The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, Breathless, La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, Amarcord (maybe another Fellini or two), Seven Samurai (maybe one or two other Kurosawa films), a couple Bergman films and that's about it, unless you want to include second rate foreign films that were popular and played well to an American audience but weren't of much substance.

[domino harvey]

Who are "people today," and is there any way this argument doesn't boil down to one of elitism and condescension towards "fucking peasants"?

[rrenault]

All I'm trying to say is that most of the foreign art films Criterion has released over the years don't seem to be that well known among the general public except for what I listed up above. It's the same way only a jazz fan knows who Ornette Coleman is. It has nothing to do with elitism. The fact is that only a cinephile(I know people hate this word, but it's the most literal word one can use) is going to want to watch Last Year at Marienbad or Dillinger Is Dead, and only a jazz fan would put in the effort to listen to Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy. Not everyone is a film lover and not everyone is a jazz fan and that's okay, as long as they don't criticize others for having interests that diverge from theirs.

[zedz]

Considering we're specifically talking about the audience for Criterion BluRays (and why certain titles get the nod and others don't), this is a ludicrous argument. Dillinger Is Dead and Ferreri are complete unknowns alongside Last Year at Marienbad and Antonioni. Until the film's revival a couple of years ago, hardly anybody on this site (which is about as art-film hardcore as you're going to get) had heard of the film, let alone seen it. Sure, your average Antonioni or Godard fan might love it once they've seen it, but as far as recent 'classic' Criterion releases go, it's about the closest to a genuine unknown quantity as they ever get.

And I get that you don't like Secret of the Grain, but it's a big award-winning French hit that's played in and out of festivals all around the world, with HD materials ready to go, so it seems to me a no-brainer BluRay release for Criterion. Maybe it even did well enough for them to subsidise Dillinger Is Dead.

[SpiderBaby]

What about The Mikado, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, and Fat Girl over Dillinger?

Dillinger is a Janus title, so wouldn't it be easy for blu rights and stuff like that? People who hasn't heard of Dillinger surely hasn't seen The Mikado. Plus with Michel Piccoli, it would of caught some people's attentions. The Blu-ray group seems to blind buy 90% of these anyways, so I don't see how it would of been bad to release a Janus film on blu-ray. I could see the von Sternberg silents gamble since they have to buy the rights, but I don't know about the rights situation from a Janus title, since they are more-so, partners.

[mfunk9786]

At the time that Dillinger is Dead was announced, it was one of those titles that was on the shelf for a long time, even prior to the Blu era (like Night Train to Munich and Make Way for Tomorrow, which were windowboxed even though Criterion had already abandoned the process). I have a feeling that for whatever reason, most of the work was done prior to Blu, but they were holding out for a bonus feature or rights issue, and by the time the dust cleared, they had to decide whether it'd be worth the time and money to go back and remaster a film that was going to be a lower tier, feature-light release anyway. Titles like Stagecoach and Cronos got the bump in exchange for further release delay, but these didn't.

[zedz]

Are you kidding? (EDIT: Not you, mfunk - you just popped up in the middle.) Don't you think the Gilbert and Sullivan niche audience would be about 1000 times larger than the Marco Ferreri niche audience? (Or the Michelangelo Antonioni niche audience, come to that.) I wouldn't be surprised if that disc turns out to be one their best sellers of the year. Every time somebody goes to Amazon and types in "mikado" this is going to spring to the top of the list. (I even checked, and, indeed, the Criterion BluRay comes out ahead of the DVD or any audio recording of the work.)

Robinson Crusoe is an established personal favourite, plus American period sci-fi, yet again, offers a much bigger catchment pool than foreign arthouse. And you've got to remember that, with existing titles like Robinson Crusoe and Fat Girl, Criterion knows the sales figures (and we don't) and are presumably making sound predictions (or reasonable risks) about the potential Blu audience. You or me not liking a particular film probably doesn't figure into their business model.

[rrenault]

Anyhow, to stick to Dillinger Is Dead, do people have recommendations of other films is one like Dillinger Is Dead?

[SpiderBaby]

Anyhow, to stick to Dillinger Is Dead, do people have recommendations of other films is one like Dillinger Is Dead?

Ferreri's other films are a good start. Then of course, Godard and Antonioni.

I don't know if this is too surreal for your taste, but Tinto Brass' The Howl is a fav of mine.

[rrenault]

Well CG, I'm already an Antonioni fan and have seen at least a dozen Godard films, but I would like to see more Ferreri films, but many of the ones I'd like to see aren't available in the US. I've seen La Grande Bouffe, which is great and Bye Bye Monkey. That was also interesting, but I didn't enjoy it much as much as I enjoyed Grande Bouffe and Dillinger. Either way, I appreciate the gesture. Thank you.

[SpiderBaby]

Try to watch Tinto Brass' The Howl then. You will most likely love it, if you liked the others above.

[zedz]

Zulawski's L'important c'est d'aimer, maybe?

[colinr0380]

While it might be arguable that Dillinger Is Dead is obscure (I'm not really aware of the tastes of the mainstream at the bests of times. Didn't they like Avatar?), and correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Ferreri's La grande bouffe (a.k.a. the other Blow Out - a Salo prefiguring tale of a group of jaded privileged types who decide to retire to one of the group's villas and indulge their desires for food and sex until they die by them) quite an arthouse hit/cause célèbre at the time?

That Ferreri is relatively overlooked now has as much to do with distribution deals (and the tastes of distributors for what they want to pick up or think will sell) affecting access and availability, as it does with shifting audience tastes. 'Canons' aren't set in stone - films and filmmakers continually rise and fall for different reasons.

[rrenault]

La Grande Bouffe would be a great addition to the criterion collection as a companion piece to Dillinger Is Dead.

[knives]

The present DVD for La Grande Bouffe is about as good as it will get. Just pick up the fantastic boxset while it's still going for under $50.

[rrenault]

Are you implying you don't think criterion would pick this one up if the box set goes out of print? Also, why would it go out of print?

[knives]

I didn't suggest it was going OOP, just that since(at least the last time I checked)it's going fairly cheaply on Amazon that the boxset is worth getting.

[James]

It's far more sexual, but I might recommend Radley Metzger's The Lickerish Quartet.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

The Ferreri boxset is a good investment. It doesn't have The Last Woman, but it's got a good chunk of his output. Mine just arrived and it's packaged quite well. Each film sounds very interesting so it'll be fun to make my way through the set. I prefer Dillinger to Grande Bouffe, but I can't say that it was wasted time. Bouffe is infinitely more restrained than Salo, but it touches on the same themes of privilege and consumerism run amuck.

[knives]

Bouffe is infinitely more restrained than Salo, but it touches on the same themes of privilege and consumerism run amuck.

That's why I tend to call it John Waters' Salo. It has the love and humour of a Waters' film, but is basically Salo. My favorite of the set is definitely Tales of Ordinary Madness. It takes the Bukowski element and runs with it like a cool eddy. It's also lovely how he connects the stories into a meaningful and beautiful story rather than just doing a straight adaptation or clumsily cobbling pieces together. The ending makes me tear up each and every time. It also has a scene that makes Fight Club wholly redundant. Actually just the shot of the man growing the plant makes that feature redundant.

[rrenault]

I don't think this has been brought up before, but I believe this disc is defective. I just received a copy I purchased in the mail and I noticed that without any visual damage whatsoever I skipped about 2/3 of the way through just before he's about to paint the gun red as he's entering the painting studio. It skipped in the same exact place when I rented the criterion release of the film several months ago. Back then, that disc I remember was spotless without any signs of visual damage. Also, it only occurs on the DVD player on my MacBook Pro. It doesn't happen when I play it on the player connected to my television, nor does it happen when I play the disc on the same computer using VLC Media. It's only happened to me with the DVD Player program that comes with the Mac.