Anna Kendrick’s Closet Picks

I'm Anna Kendrick. I'm in the Criterion Closet. I thought I would have a strategy, and now that I'm here, I don't. But that's okay. Sometimes great things happen when you don't have a great plan. Okay, this is one of those things, it's fine, I'm not going to get embarrassed about it. You always want to say that you saw all these movies, like, at least a decade ago, right? But I just saw this a few years ago, All That Jazz. I had that feeling of, like, why did no one tell me about this? You know, when it's like, a movie was, like, made for you, and it feels like it's been in your bones your whole life, and you're just like, I can't believe I've just been wandering the earth, and none of my friends are good enough friends to have told me to watch this movie. I'm sure they did. Clued is one of the coolest fucking movies. I remember watching this, I think I had my laptop, and, like, a little external disc drive on the set of one of the Twilight movies, because I spent a lot of time in my trailer on those movies, because I was barely in them. You know, toward the end, like, Donald Sutherland is, like, rushing in to save Jane Fonda, and I'd get called to set, and I would be, like, irrationally unhinged, like, on edge, and just, like, wanting to get back to my trailer. Yeah, wanting to get back to your trailer makes you sound like a dick, but, you know, when you're halfway through Clued, I think that's a good excuse. Stalker, beautiful, stunning, hypnotizing, and really kind of deals with the nasty business of looking at oneself, and how devastating that can be, and thematically. That's my shit. Passion of Joan of Arc. I will say, I think that sometimes I fall victim to that thing where, um, certain scores for silent films, uh, take me out of it, and I will say, like, one of the cooler cinematic-going experiences I've had is, uh, they were showing a print of this at the Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax, and there were these two guys who did, like, a modern experimental score to this, and I was weeping uncontrollably almost the entire time. It's a French courtroom drama take on the Medea myth, but also, can I say, between this and Anatomy of a Fall, what's going on in the French court system? This is not a joke. This is not, like, a jokey thing I'm doing. I would really love for, like, someone who knows the French legal system to, like, I don't know, hit me up on Twitter. I don't know. It seems a lot more like a family therapy session than a legal structure in both films, but, um, yeah, if there are French lawyers who speak excellent English, because my French is shit, um, that would be so amazing. Okay, I will say, I did, I feel incredibly special, and I did not just pull this off of the shelf at random. This is, um, like a kind of, uh, comprehensive Bergman collection. I think when I was, like, maybe 18, uh, somebody gifted me the Fanny and Alexander, uh, box set, and it was one of those experiences where sometimes you watch a movie, and you immediately love it. Like, all that jazz, where you go, this is like someone's looking inside my brain, and that was not that experience, but it was something challenging. Like, it was something that touched a part of me that was untouched or that was too sensitive to touch. I remember even watching interviews with him where he would talk about, late in his life, talk about how he still was terrified of death and had not resolved that, and particularly as someone who was, like, a teenager at the time, that was very unsettling to hear, because you want to hear that people, as they get older, become okay and accepting of death, and it's like, even in his interviews and certainly in his art, it's like he's incapable of telling lies to keep himself comfortable and certainly to keep you comfortable. And it sent me down this journey, and now he is one of, if not my favorite directors. I think Winter Light is probably my favorite Bergman film if I had to choose. I also particularly adore Cries and Whispers. The production design, the performance is wonderful, but there's this scene where these two sisters have this kind of come to Jesus, and then at the end of the trip, as they're departing, one of the sisters is like, I'm so glad that we had that moment and we've kind of had this breakthrough. And the other sister goes, I mean, I'm translating from Swedish, so it's not this. She's like, oh God, I know, that was so silly. That was ridiculous. Anyway, it was so good to see you. And it's just, it makes you want to never speak to another human being, and then it also makes you realize that that's the only thing worth doing, like to curl up in a ball out of that fear of being distanced and rejected is not a way to live. I just, I love this man. I love this man, and I love you guys so much for pulling this out for me, but I'm gonna get out of here. This has been an absolute delight, and yeah, I feel like I just robbed a bank, so I gotta go.