Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 10
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
64/365: Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2005) (Hulu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
The comedy about writer’s block, but so much more: screenwriter Charlie Kaufman is his own protagonist (played by Nicolas Cage), and the movie we’re watching is one he cannot write, until he does, sort of, with the help of a twin brother he doesn’t have (also Cage), but the screenplay doesn’t actually get written as far we know, but of course it did in reality (with the fictional brother’s name on it), eventually spiraling the movie into exactly the preposterous mainstream idiocy the film’s Kaufman abhors, which is not to say that Kaufman himself abhors the same, because he wrote it that way, out of desperation or insecurity or ambition or… You decide. Ostensibly about orchids and adapting a book by a New Yorker writer (Meryl Streep), it’s actually a neurotic essay on creation posing as a self-analytical failure to evolve into an ordinary cinematic chronicle of action and feeling. Hidden in the farce is the DNA of Godard and Kiarostami, but really, Kaufman is his own high bar.
65/365: 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1962) (Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Which could lead you back to this pioneering autobiographical meta-film, in which Fellini (at the time, the world’s most popular and famous purveyor of “art cinema”) probes his own restless creative blockage, as his proxy Marcello Mastroianni is a mega-auteur stuck in mid-project, and bounced like a pinball through his private life, professional pressures, memories and manic daydreams. More than a little male-centric, it’s also one of the few Fellini films where the outrageous imagery and gargoylish caricatures cohere with the story into a vivid whole. A huge arthouse hit internationally, and one of the Coen Brothers’ favorite films.
66/365: After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985) (Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Going small after the severe personal and professional rollercoaster ride afforded by New York, New York (1978) and Raging Bull (1980), Scorsese makes his first and only full-on comedy, from a tight indie spec script and starring the spectacularly quick Griffin Dunne as a naive, urban-lonely ’80s yuppie who heads downtown to meet a girl and spends the entirety of the night trying to get back home. A million NYC jokes packed into a small package (back when Manhattan still had sections of bohemian sleaze and real danger), the nighttime odyssey de-evolves into madness, pretentious art, inexplicable women, lynch mobs and more. Hilarious top to bottom, in ways that might make this the Scorsese film for those who don’t care for Scorsese films. The eight or nine of you.
67/365: The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin, 2015) (Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
The film-crazed mad scientist of Winnipeg, Maddin has been crafting his ferociously odd, hilarious, self-consciously retro fantasias for 30 years, evoking ancient film genres and defunct cinematic modes but always in outrageously unpredictable ways, in narratives that twist into Freudian knots and make hash out of movie storytelling itself. This meta-movie orgy of excess is something like a magnum opus — a boiling melange of stories (doomed submarines, lumberjack gangs, tropical nightclub intrigue, jungle vampires, volcano worshippers, and endlessly on), inspired by lost films and piling up absurdly upon and within each other as they often succumb to faux nitrate decay. Don’t expect it to coalesce into narrative order — it’s a film bursting with pure, unchecked movieness, and it cannot be tamed by something as mundane as structure. Plus it’s a riot.
68/365: Guelwaar (Ousmane Sembene, 1992) (YouTube)
Ousmane Sembene was subSaharan Africa’s sole cinematic voice for decades, a powerhouse of a kind of post-colonialist “Third World” filmmaking that spoke to Africans’ reality before it worried about what the festival-goers thought. This is his third-to-last film, made when he was 69, a lean and mean satire on contemporary Africa’s Christian-Muslim conflicts, shot entirely in the drought-stricken badlands of Senegal. An assassinated liberal activist’s corpse vanishes, and is then discovered mistakenly buried in a Muslim cemetery, where the mere presence of infidels on the holy turf would be blasphemy punishable by death. The imbroglio (acted out mostly by local villagers) has bigger implications, of course, and nobody comes off well, as the two camps bicker over a patch of arid desert of no inherent value beyond what meaning is arbitrarily imposed upon it. This is not the Africa you see in Hollywood films.
69/365: Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948) (YouTube)
After more than 15 years of directing, in Germany, France and the U.S., this is Max Ophuls’ first authentic masterpiece, a Hollywood production pulsing with insane Romanticism, set in a studio-created turn-of-the-century Vienna contrived on the old Universal backlot (on sets probably left over from the Frankenstein films of the ‘30s). A gangly teen (Joan Fontaine) becomes instantly obsessed with a dashing concert pianist (Louis Jourdan), even after she moves away and ages, leading her to turn down suitors, leave her family, and essentially stalk the pianist, who is such a narcissistic libertine that when he meets the girl again years later, he doesn’t recognize her, but seduces her in any case. Then he leaves without a thought — and this tragic pattern, of undying obsession met with brutal indifference and masculine ego, continues for decades, ending at a death bed in a typhus ward, with the mysteries of time and love disappearing like steam in the air. The plot can seem far-fetched, but the leaps of logic, coupled with the heroine’s unreasonable passion, constitutes the movie’s unique personality. Everything here is played in the key of heartbreak. Chosen early as one of the first hundred films to be selected and preserved by the National Film Registry, it’s a totem movie, one of those emotionally reckless films that attract the feverish devotion of filmgoers in ways they cannot quite explain, even to themselves.
70/365: The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962) (Amazon Prime)
The postwar era’s first real conspiracy thriller, launching us into the ’60s and an American landscape of assassinations, government skullduggery, deranged military action, and unceasing protest. Richard Condon’s berserk Cold War novel was crazy on its own, but the film, starring Frank Sinatra and filthy with Korean War brainwashing, Sino-Soviet conspiracy, sleeper assassins, kung-fu mailmen, and McCarthy-like demagoguery, is something else, a paranoid tour-de-force that still thrills, still musters a creepy Oedipal jolt (thanks to Angela Lansbury as the ultimate Bad Mother), and still seems shockingly prophetic in light of the Kennedy Assassination 13 months after the film’s release. Remade to no great effect in a different era (2004), starring Denzel Washington.
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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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