Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 3
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
15/365: Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004) (Netflix)
A postmodern, fractured fairy tale that rejiggers how you watch movies, this Charlie Kaufman-scripted wonder dives into the frazzled brainpan of a neurotic loner (Jim Carrey) as he signs on to have his memories of a heartbroken romance (with impulse-impaired trainwreck Kate Winslet) erased. Gondry goes digital but makes it look spontaneous and handmade, and the WTF results need to be seen twice.
16/365: Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofky, 1996) (Amazon Prime)
An epic documentary of all-American madness, this landmark film explores an entire backbiting Arkansas town after three Cub Scouts are murdered, and three innocent Goth teenagers are railroaded onto Death Row as the perps. And this is merely the first chapter: two sequel docs have been released, another entirely different documentary, West of Memphis, and a feature film version starring Reese Witherspoon and Colin Firth. Thanks to the 15 years of media attention, the convicted ex-teens were finally released from prison in 2011. All told, the films comprise a social portrait with teeth, about a forgotten marginalized society on incremental auto-destruct.
17/365: A Page of Madness (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926) (Amazon Prime, YouTube)
It’s not merely the most psychotic Japanese silent film ever made (or seen outside of Japan, anyway) — it’s an avant-garde landmark. Set in a mental institution amid flailing, dancing lunatics, and offering only a web-thin story about a janitor and his inmate wife (there are zero title cards), the movie is really a stream of uneasy images and abstracted mashups, it presages everybody from Carl Dreyer to Maya Deren, Val Lewton and Jean-Luc Godard. The spooky thrust feels organic, as if the thing were spawned spontaneously from a sulfur pit.
18/365: This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984) (Hulu)
Years ahead of its time in its invention of the comedic mock-doc (a la The Office, Parks & Recreation, etc.), Reiner’s first and best film traces the clueless trajectory of a fictional heavy metal band, “one of England’s loudest,” made up of co-writers Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer, from the 60s to the 80s. An expert, improvised, deathlessly funny film that asks the classic question, “What day did the Lord create Spinal Tap, and couldn’t he have rested on that day too?”
19/365: A Report on the Party and its Guests (Jan Nemec, 1966) (FilmStruck until 11/30; other availability TBD)
A film so openly lacerating about life under totalitarian control that it’s hard to believe it ever got made in Communist Czechoslovakia, this brisk nightmare plays out the social reality of irrational power and collaborative weakness in the context of a picnic subsumed by mysterious strangers. Everything about the film is totemic, down to the real identities of the “guests,” many of whom were persecuted artists.
20/365: The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974) (Amazon Prime)
In the weirded-out post-JFK-RFK-MLK ’70s, when America felt like one assassination after another, we have Warren Beatty as rogue reporter sniffing out a conspiracy behind a politician’s murder, and ends up inside of an assassin training program. Director Pakula was the dark prince of Nixon-era paranoia, and this film forms a paranoid-Pakula trilogy with Klute (1971) and All the President’s Men (1976).
21/365: Seven (David Fincher, 1995) (Netflix, Amazon Prime)
Fincher became an auteur with this darkling mystery, an often stomach-churning tour through the moral abyss of modern American urban life as seen by the film’s beyond-fanatical serial killer (and by screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker. Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt bring a chilling degree of conviction to the step-by-step parade of mutilative scenarios, while Fincher weaves a rainy, shadowy cityscape around them with grim precision. It can get under your skin.
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Smashcut 365 is a weekly recommendation of films for budding cinephiles — seven films a week, one a day, no repeats — ranging from classic masterpieces to new and provocative indies and imports, intended to kickstart your cinephilic habit.
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