Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 12
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
78/365: Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985) (YouTube)
Kurosawa’s vast, steamrolling samurai-period epic, defiantly dragging hyper-Kabuki acting into the ’80s, and conjoining the narratives of Macbeth and King Lear into a cake-rich palace saga of betrayal, ambition, family skullduggery and wholesale war. The director was an autumnal 75 at the time, and never more of master orchestrator (the battle scenes are mad, and of course entirely pre-digital) and deep-dish storyteller. “Ran” is Japanese, by the way, for “chaos.”
79/365: The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) (Amazon Prime)
Adapting Larry McMurtry’s melancholy novel about a fading Texas town in a stringently unnostalgic 1951, Bogdanovich briefly became one of the American New Wave’s golden boys, and rightly so: the movie serenely juggles nearly a dozen fine-grain character studies (good old boy Jeff Bridges, moody teen Timothy Bottoms, restless housewife Ellen Burstyn, lonely spinster Cloris Leachman, town patriarch Ben Johnson, etc.) and limns this desolate, all-American time and place with taste and patience and a graceful facility with actors Bogdanovich never seemed to muster again. Interrogating national identity even as it revels in the gritty details, it’s a canonical classic now, with a raft of Oscars under its belt.
80/365: Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1984) (Netflix)
The gangster epic as fractured opium daydream, tripping back and forth in the skull of a Jewish hood (Robert De Niro) until the past, present and future more or less mush into a mournful opera of betrayal and guilt. All the more swoony for being Leone’s grand swansong, decades after his Clint Eastwood westerns, this reckless monstrosity of a genre film spends its plot, characters and themes like a drunken sailor, and that’s part of its ugly splendor — settle for nothing less than the nearly-four-hour version, but even then, the film can barely contain so much stuff. 1890s New York childhoods, teenage hookers, Prohibition, hits, rapes, backstabbings, lost love, tragic arcs that span decades: Leone left nothing out, making the buddy elegy flip-side to The Godfather’s familial moan. With, ironically enough, one of Ennio Morricone’s most heartfelt scores.
81/365: The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986) (Hulu)
Master of his own obsessive body-horror domain going back to his first films in the ’70s, Cronenberg leapt into the hot mainstream with this thoughtful, harrowing sci-fi badtime story, a remake of the 1958 film about a scientist whose transportation invention gets him inadvertently intermingled with a housefly, turning him into a monster. In Cronenberg’s version, the process is gruelingly gradual, with the human physicality dissolving over days and morphing into something altogether different and altogether disgusting, and the film itself becoming in the process both spikingly hilarious and tragically sad. In what is virtually a two-person film, Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis became stars.
82/365: L’Age d’Or (Luis Bunuel, 1930) (Amazon Prime)
Luis Bunuel’s first feature, and the Surrealist movement’s official house movie — which means it’s dream-like Molotov cocktail that’s still exploding. Free-form, almost narrative-free, the film seeks to offend, with Gaston Modot as a seething Everyman whose efforts at blissful coitus are interrupted by society, which is mocked at every turn. Fetishes, rebellion, anti-clerical insults — Bunuel’s battery of obsessions is on full display, and it was enough in 1930 to incite a protestors’ riot. (Think about that: a riot). It still has the ability to appall and incense the church-going American who’ll never see it, never submit to the fingerless-hand caress, the obscene sucking of statue toes (reaction shot of the marble figure’s expressionless face!), the idea that Jesus attended a Sadean orgy, and the entire last act’s relentless, driving military drumroll. Or has its day passed? History does funny things to manifested acts of artistic insurrection — it sanctifies them, makes them beautiful and holy and honorable. The moment of the tumult passes, but the object becomes the moment’s testament, a deathless song of hope.
83/365: Gates of Heaven (Errol Morris, 1978) (Netflix)
In the ’70s, maverick filmmaker-daredevil Werner Herzog told procrastinating film student Errol Morris that if he ever finished a film, Herzog would eat his shoe. Then Morris did, completing and landing national release for this sublimely odd documentary, about a pet cemetery and the very odd Americans who bury their beloved pets there. Morris honed a peculiar style, planting his subjects in front of the camera dead-center, letting them talk and allowing the discomfort of the process and the awkwardness of dead air to etch an indelible, and sometimes riotous, portrait of an America you never see on film. As a result, Herzog did, in fact, fly to California, cook a work boot, and eat it in front of a UC audience, as Les Blank’s short film “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe” (1980) joyfully documents.
84/365: The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946) (Amazon Prime)
William Wyler’s heartbreaking postwar ballade did an extraordinary thing for its day — focus itself entirely on the workaday lives of ordinary, Midwestern Americans picking up the threads of their lives once WWII was officially over, focusing on Fredric March’s aging banker, Dana Andrews’ lost ex-soda jerk, and Harold Russell’s very real (for Russell, too) tribulations of returning without his hands. While glorying in Wyler’s trademarked in-depth compositions, the story hews close to the ordinary trials of the day: the moment when reunions grow awkward, the struggle of going back to work, having family squabbles, getting your parents (and your girlfriend) used to your prosthetic hooks. Oscars all over the place, and it’s easy to see why: for a moment, Wyler sucked the Hollywood out of American movies, and replaced it with real people.
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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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