Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 19
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
127/365: The Kids Are Alright (Jeff Stein, 1979) (Amazon Prime)
If there were ever one film that captured, as if in amber, the winged, defiant exuberance of the mid-century bopping, headbanging, guitar-wrecking lifeforce that is rock and roll, it’s this six pack of canned champagne, a historic archival record of The Who. For many the irreverent and back-biting law firm of Townsend, Daltrey, Entwistle & Moon may not have any competition as the greatest rock band of all time, but suffice it to say no one has ever rivaled their fusion of powerhouse personality, analog technical virtuosity, sincere folk ambition, reckless abandon, and famous in-person combustibility. They were uniquely made for movies, in other words; Stein, a mere fan at the time, culled fifteen years’ worth of footage — there was no shortage, from what might be the most extroverted band of the pre-Internet age — and provided no commentary, allowing the boys to simply tell their tales and trash their stages. Moon, dead at 32 midway through production/compilation, is more than a movie’s worth of irrepressible human tragicomedy all by himself, and Stein’s film is the most pungent not-exclusively-aural record we have of his existence. It’s a blessing.
128/365: Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941) (Vudu)
Writer-director Preston Sturges was for a time the sharpest comedic tongue in Hollywood, crafting absurd scenarios and comic rhythms that outran everybody else’s by a country mile. This is his masterpiece, a torrential Industry farce about a successful Depression-era director (Joel McCrea) who aches to make a “serious” film, despite the studio’s horror. Blockaded by flunkies at every step, he launches off onto the road to meet the real America — which includes wisecracking nowhere girl Veronica Lake and whole platoons of desperate, out-of-work normal people. You get a sense of the Hollywood talent pool all in one place and working at the top of their games; McCrea and Lake are deadpan hilarious, surrounded by an army of character-bit geniuses.
129/365: Raw (Julia Durcournau, 2016) (Netflix)
This gross-out French film spikes the smelly soil of pulp with the flammable compost of feminist discontent, as an unpretty, shy daughter of a stridently vegetarian family (Garance Millier) begins her studies at a very, very strange veterinary school, beset so intensely by a maniacal hazing culture that you soon realize the film’s whole set-up is an expressive, almost surreal place-holder for something else — as in, for a young girl, every kind of identity crisis, loss of autonomy, and sexual uncertainty. Forced to eat the forbidden by upperclassmen, the girl sees her meticulously cultivated veggie-ness gives away to a fascination with flesh, in any condition, alive or dead, off any animal. Her body changes, cannibalism occurs almost as an afterthought (as something learned, like capitalism), and the premise bends into a screaming family psychopathology that leaves many questions, even metaphoric ones, unanswered.
130/365: Mr. Arkadin (Orson Welles, 1955) (Amazon Prime, Vudu)
A recrystallized phantom from Welles’s scattershot autumn years, this mystery-cum-mirror-maze was so often butchered there have been up to seven versions floating around. A kind of reworking of Citizen Kane’s narrative chicanery on one level, this slippery movie is a perpetually unfinished symphony prophesying its own incompleteness, long since losing its right to be viewed outside of its own evasive history. Suitably, it’s about the shadowy effort to figure out a billionaire’s biography — which he himself (Welles) obscures — with as much hope for resolution as the film’s final form itself, as if its ramshackle history had been consciously imprinted on the text from the beginning. For Wellesians, it’s a draught of ambrosia.
131/365: The Hour of the Furnaces (Fernando Solanas, 1968) (YouTube)
A nearly 4.5-hour Tyrannosaur of a documentary, one that bears a title card thus: “This film is not for spectators, it is for mobilizing revolution.” A rampaging, spittle-flecked anger machine, Solanas’ movie breaks down decades of rule, misrule and economic skullduggery in Argentina, taking down the colonizers, the aristocrats, the bankers and the politicians (at home, in Europe and in the US) responsible for the nation’s repeated pillagings. No bones are made about it: the working class is encouraged to arm up and storm the ramparts of power.
132/365: Bronson (Nicholas Winding Refn, 2008) (Hulu)
Tom Hardy emerged in this confrontational biopic of one Michael Peterson, a career criminal who was judged at one point to be the most violent man in England. Refn scrambles the time line, and lets Peterson himself (dubbed “Charles Bronson” by a fight promoter) tell the story and dictate the thrust, which it eventually becomes clear is a life-or-death matter of self-expression, working in brawling and bloodletting like an artist works in oils or clay.
133/365: Black Orpheus (Marcel Camus, 1959) (Vudu)
Suddenly with this beloved import, postwar American filmgoers knew the fiery power of the South American sun, the frantic colors of Brazilian style, the dizzying blast of relentless samba, and the rangy life lived in the slums of Rio, all of it bouncily, sexily packaged around the Orpheus myth and the swoony fervor of Carnaval. Irresistible, Camus’ fantastic one-off stood for decades as one of the most popular films ever imported to the U.S., and people who confronted it in the midcentury loved it their whole lives. A tropical-summery idyll like no other, from the sunrises on the hill to the airy tumbledown shack of Eurydice’s cousin (virtually the idealized set for a children’s TV show, albeit one with scantily clad Brazilians slinking in and out of costume) to the streets filled with ecstatic sambistas, all of it crawling with kittens and jungle birds and farm animals in almost every corner of every shot, the movie is unchallenged as a cinematic pathfinder to earthly bliss, a simple state of being where we worry about our quotidian trials less and dance a little more.
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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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, 16, 17, 18
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