Erotic Thrillers: Part 1 – The Dawn of the Eighties

by Cláudio Alves

Mainstream cinema feels more sexless than ever. Even at the height of the Hays Code's second coming, sex had a place of pride in Hollywood, often sublimated into insinuation to avoid censorship. There's art to horniness, to making the camera a conduit of erotic reverie or a purveyor of desire, want itself synthesized as form. Sexual films can also be rich texts, telling us much about the times when they were made, the culture that created them, and the audiences that either embraced or repudiated the movie. Whether prurient or intellectual, there are many ways to engage with erotic cinema, especially when carnal craving collides with violence, and annihilation that goes beyond the ecstasy of an orgasm.

Erotic Thrillers is the theme of one of the Criterion Channel's latest collections, released right in time for the You Must Remember This podcast's new season - "Erotic 90s". After tackling the 80s last year, Karina Longworth is heading into a new decade, and we're going along for the ride. For the next few weeks, we'll explore all films in the Criterion program, taking a journey from 1980 to 1996. Let's begin the adventure with a Hitchcockian riff full of fucked-up notions of gender, a postmodern neo-noir, and an unlikely message picture… 

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1987: The Untouchable Sean Connery, a look at the late actor's Oscar-winning performance

by Josh Bierman

When I heard about our 1987 retrospective I wanted to choose a film that I had never seen. I’ve been striving to cover blindspots in my film viewing history since the start of quarantine. I looked at the list of movies released in that year and when I saw The Untouchables the choice became obvious. At my home film festival, Cinema Quarantino, I’ve fallen in love with Kevin Costner as if it was 1991. I’ve also been really drawn to the films of Brian De Palma. All of that fell by the wayside when I woke up on Saturday morning to the news of Sean Connery’s passing. 

We’re all friends here, so please don’t judge when I say in keeping with the theme of having serious blind spots, the only other Sean Connery movie I’d seen is Murder on the Orient Express. Connery released his last studio film just as I was becoming obsessed with movies around the age of ten, so he wasn’t someone who was on my radar. I mainly associated Connery with Darrell Hammond’s inimitable SNL impersonation on Celebrity Jeopardy as well as his later career interviews (we’d be remiss to forget his one worded declaration of the Best Supporting Actress winner of 2002, we know Kathy Bates hasn’t). As if I wasn’t eager enough to watch it already, I welcomed the opportunity to not only watch a bit of Connery’s filmography, but the movie that won him his Academy Award...

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Today's Must Read: Pedro Almodóvar talks Madonna and Oscars

by Nathaniel R

Pedro quarantined and tripping through memory lane.

You can keep all those celebrity sing-alongs or other social media attempts to cheer us up collectively. Instead give us gossip to chew on. More juicy shared "diaries" of stir-crazy stars, please!

The occassion for this request is that we've just finished reading a new article by Spanish genius Pedro Almodóvar. He wrote a piece for the Spanish website el diario about... well, a lot of things. It begins with memories of getting dressed up to go on an errand during quarantine and segueways into other memories of getting dressed up for movie events. Lots of fun anecdotes follow including a night with Jane Fonda (!). But the bulk of the piece centers on 1990-1991 when Madonna entered his life via Dick Tracy through the essential documentary Truth or Dare (1991). You must read the whole thing -- Spanish readers will probably enjoy it most but the rest of us will have to suffer through a google translation.

I've excerpted the Dick Tracy story after the jump...

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Horror Actressing: Amy Irving in "Carrie"

by Jason Adams

When we talk about Brian De Palma's 1976 horror masterpiece Carrie we talk about Actresses. But we tend to talk about the Big Two -- Sissy Spacek as Carrie White and Piper Laurie as her mamma Margaret, who were both rightfully Oscar-nominated. (They both should have won too, says me!) Then if there's oxygen left in the room after talking those two we'll gravitate towards the showier female roles below the line -- Nancy Allen playing one of cinema's greatest bitches Chris Hargensen, or wondering if Betty Buckley's Miss Collins is, in the grand tradition of P.E. teachers, same-sex-oriented.

What I haven't seen nearly enough love for is Amy Irving, who's celebrating her birthday tomorrow and who gives a truly complicated performance as Sue Snell, the girl whose motivations switch midway through, the one who sees through to the error of her ways but too late, and the one who ends up giving the film's tragedy, Carrie's tragedy, its shape....

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De Palma's Domino Falls Shortly

by Jason Adams

Last year marked the 50th anniversary of director Brian De Palma making feature-length films -- I've never seen 1968's Murder à la Mod, which was thought lost until it popped up as an extra on Criterion's Blow Out disc in 2011 (can we all just agree that Criterion is nuts, you guys), but I think it's safe to guess that there's something worth seeing in it because even at his worse (and he's had plenty of those moments) Brian De Palma always gives us something to stare at... 

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