Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 16
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
106/365: The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) (Netflix, Amazon Prime)
One of those films that feels more creepily prescient today than when it was made, this Andrew Niccol-scripted sci-fi satire postulates a 24-hour reality show about a single man’s life, born and raised and grown-up on TV, in an artificial TV-studio world he never knows isn’t real. Until, of course, the artifice reveals itself by accident, initiating a crisis for Truman (Jim Carrey) and for his global audience. So rich in metaphorical resonance it makes your head spin, Weir’s movie casts a deceptively glossy and comedic eye on the confusion we all share in the modern age between what’s TV and what’s real — which by now, 20 years later, might be no difference at all.
107/365: Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1986) (Netflix, Amazon Prime)
Stanley Kubrick goes to Vietnam — or, actually, his England-studio recreation of same, adapting Gustav Hasford’s novel The Short-Timers into a quintessentially Kubrickian experience of disconnection and inquietude. Certainly, the vivid manifestation of basic training — experienced by dimwitted “fatboy” Vincent D’Onofrio and startlingly marshalled by real-life training officer R. Lee Ermey — leaves powder burns on your memory, while the subsequent plunge into combat is less visceral than ironic and morally troubling. As with all Kubrick, moments and images pop out at you, and have found lives of their own in the culture at large.
108/365: Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955) (YouTube)
Sweaty and paranoid, this first film noir of the nuclear age has Ralph Meeker (as mystery author Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, except that director Aldrich through most of Spillane’s book out the door) trying to find out what happened to a hitchhiker he picked up, and ends up confronting black-box secrecy, black-market atomic shenanigans, and the hellfire of the Great Whatzit. Low-budget enough to suggest things instead of show them, it’s a film famous for its nasty personality, apocalyptic aura, and sense of social near-chaos.
109/365: First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2017) (Amazon Prime)
Paul Schrader — the man who scripted Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ — has been directing his own movies since the ’70s, but never has he made a film as urgent and bruising as this new five-alarm-fire indie about spiritual crisis and ethical catastrophe. Ethan Hawke also visits his career peak as a tortured priest at a tiny historical church in upstate New York, scarred by guilt and already uncertain of his own relevance when a local parishioner forces him into a corner with their own ethical dread and the realities of environmental collapse. Literate, desperate and unforgettable.
110/365: Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1953) (Vudu, Amazon Prime)
The pathmark American musical, without which no film education is complete. The full-on, full-color, all-dancing postwar Hollywood entertainment may’ve reached its apex here, with Gene Kelly as a Douglas Fairbanks-ish movie star in the ’20s dealing with the coming of talkies — as is Oscar-nominated Jean Hagen as his glam screen partner, with an outrageous impossible vocal personality. Brash, in your face, full of manic brio, and at time riotous, it’s also a fascinating portrait of the industry’s trials during the waning hours of the silent era. Always a contender on Top Ten of All Time polls.
111/365: L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960) (Amazon Prime, Vudu)
Modernism in movies could be said to have begun in earnest in 1960, with the appearance of Godard’s Breathless and this pivotal launch of existential bitterness, Antonioni’s sixth film and the one that made him a global arthouse superstar. The film’s coolly lacerating set-up is famous on its own: when a boatload of narcissistic nouveau riche hipsters land on a rocky Mediterranean atoll, one woman (the one we thought was the heroine) vanishes; the subsequent search peters out, until the woman’s lover and best friend become lovers and forget entirely about her. As does the film. What begins as a poison-pen takedown of spoiled Euro-brats becomes a quietly terrifying exploration of empty lives and hollow souls. Even so, Monica Vitti, as the BFF, became a star, too.
112/365: Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013) (Netflix, Amazon Prime)
Music video maestro Jonathan Glazer has made only three features: the strange, nerve-wracking post-gangster saga Sexy Beast (2000), the equally odd grief-soaked psychodrama Birth (2004), and this even stranger sci-fi indie, which follows Scarlett Johansson, as some kind of alien predator in human guise, driving her SUV around Scotland and seducing men, whom she then lures into some kind of inter-dimensional tarpit, to be… consumed. Shot at times like a documentary (many of the men are legit passersby, not acting so much as reacting to ScarJo’s come-ons), the film isn’t big on exposition, leaving us to figure this berserk scenario as we go and to wade into its feeling of relentless eerie menace and portent, down to a stunner ending deep in the highland forests. Whatever you make of it, it’s not like any other film.
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.
Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
Keep up with Smashcut 365 by following Smashcut on Medium, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.
What is Smashcut?
Smashcut partners with universities and organizations to develop and deliver customized online film programs. The Smashcut platform enables a high degree of collaborative instruction and features real-time student project review via live 1:1 video sessions with instructors. Smashcut is dedicated to increasing access to film education, and supporting a broad population of emerging film students. Learn more at Smashcut.com. Learn more at Smashcut.com.
