10th Anniversary: Revisiting Spine 34: Andrei Rublev

Lost in Criterion

Lost in Criterion is 10 years old! Does that make us the longest running Criterion podcast? Who cares.

We started this podcast as an excuse to talk after Pat moved to Japan. While Pat and I were far from cinephiles, we enjoyed the conversations we'd have leaving the cinema after a movie, and wanted to continue having those talks even though we weren't going to the same cinema anymore. So we, pretty arbitrarily to be honest, picked a list of movies to talk about, and happened to pick one that now grows faster than we release episodes. We will never be done! So look forward to more decade anniversaries in the future!

To celebrate this anniversary, we decided to revisit one of the first 100 films we talked about. This is a redemption thing. While we moved to podbean so that our entire catalogue of episodes would be more easily available, we do not recommend the first 100 (or more!). They're rough. They're evidence of two idiots getting film education by fire. I like to think we've gotten better over the years, but our iTunes reviews disagree.

So Pat and I made a list of films we particularly wanted to revisit from those first 100 Criterion Spines. Over the last few weeks, our Patreon supporters have voted on which film they'd like to hear us re-examine. The winner is a movie I loved, but was only going to watch again if I was forced to because it is so long.

Andrei Rublev (1966) is the first Andrei Tarkovsky film Pat and I saw and we were not prepared. The original episode finds Pat calling everything but the bell making sequence "boring" and "confusing" and me finding the film hard to defend because I liked it on vibes alone. Have our opinions changed? Well, they'd have to have, but you'll have to listen to this episode to be sure.

Thanks to everyone who voted! Thanks to everyone who's listened to and supported us over the years! Maybe someday we'll be done!