Criterion Link Collection: October 5th 2015

Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that I bookmark and share a ton of links everyday. Over the past few years I’ve tried to get a regular link post series going here on the site, but inevitably I just fall back to sharing Criterion-related links directly on our Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr pages.

I’ve recently caught the “I should start a link post again” bug, and here we are. We’ll see how long I can keep this going again.

Feel free to email me, or tweet at me, if you have links that you think I should bookmark or include in my daily round-up here on the site.

Articles

Our friend Jamie S. Rich has been taking time out of his busy comic book editing schedule to start posting to his Criterion Confessions blog again lately. His latest entry looks at The X From Outer Space, coinciding nicely with this weekend’s release of The Martian!

The X from Outer Space is fun and ambitious, while also clumsy and strange. Plot points don’t always connect, nor do the explanations for what is happening at any given time. Nihonmatsu’s picture, which was heavily guided by Shochiku, Japan’s second-oldest film company, is clearly designed to hit certain popular trends. Its rubber-suit monster, Guilala, is little more than an alien cousin to Godzilla, and would be perfectly at home on Monster Island. Its sci-fi setting seems a little too late for the 1950s space race pictures that Hollywood gave us (The Day theEarth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Forbidden Planet), but it provides the movie’s best segments.

Our friends Aaron and Mark have posted their latest episode of the Criterion Close-up podcast, in which they cover Moonrise Kingdom, and the other films from Wes Anderson, with David Blakeslee.

We also discuss the dichotomy of Wes Anderson. Why is he such a divisive director? What is it about him that attracts and repels people with such passion?

All of you should be following Guillermo Del Toro on Twitter. If you’ve missed any of his book recommendations, Book Riot has you covered.

For the Guardian, Philip French digs into Ang Lee’s “father knows best” trilogy:

The rituals of cooking, serving and eating both public and domestic meals are carried on from Pushing Hands into The Wedding Banquet and remain central to Eat Drink Man Woman, which is set in Taipei, where Lung is a widowed chef of genius at the city’s grandest restaurant. He’s coping with his three daughters’ emotional problems while also enduring the temporary psychosomatic loss of his sense of taste, which is initially treated as comic but becomes a deadly serious theme.

Don’t miss this video, also at the Guardian, featuring David Gulpilil (Walkabout).