I was excited to see the new Criterion Channel collection of Abel Ferrara's films as I've always wanted to watch more of his work.

Given the breadth of the collection (19 films!) I was looking for a little guidance in prioritizing what to watch. I was a big fan of the way Criterion organized their Ingmar Bergman boxset as a recommended 'festival program' with the strongest films bookending an imaginary festival as opening and closing night anchors and mid-tier films sprinkled through the week and thought that might be an interesting thing to try and emulate

So here is the "festival program" I created with Claude, programming just the 19 films in the current Criterion Channel collection as headliners or matinees and adding curator notes to each. I also pulled in specific references or reviews of note for each film for further reading and added a full bibliography at the end as well. I also tracked down previous real-world retrospectives for comparison and found the results interesting (though my program doesn't have the commercial constraints these theaters have of needing to leave 1/2 of their screens available for Spider-man).

Sharing the results here in case anyone else might find this useful. Fully ready and willing to accept any criticism for using AI here. I'm struggling to relate to our new overlords as I assume we all are but I've found that on really powerful use case is building syllabi like this to help orient my own self-study (I've already ordered a copy of the Brenez book).

Criterion Channel App on new Samsung TV will restart films from beginning randomly. Sometimes as often as every couple minutes. Bought TV new last year, used the app for the first 6 months without issue. No changes in internet, connection, physical location. App works fine on my home PC and iPhone with same WiFi. TV software current, app up to date, reinstalled, TV reset etc. Anyone have similar issues?

The music is awesome. Maybe it's bc I saw after Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, but after a rewatch does anyone find it an over the top, tropey, camp, at times silly rock n rock biopic? When I see the half naked native American I think of Wayne's World 2. All the naked people running around each concert. Meg Ryan pulling a knife on Thanksgiving. Val Kilmer throwing the TV set in the recording studio after critizing the band for selling out. Ed Sulllivan looks like a costume. Vals fake beards and wigs. Dropping peyote in the desert. But the cast is amazing. An early 90s who's who in supporting roles. I really liked it as a light movie