Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 18
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
120/365: Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, Netflix)
The great Italian modernist crowns his ’60s run by coming to Swingin’ London and crafting this furiously enigmatic puzzle-film, in which a narcissistic fashion photog (David Hemmings) thinks he’s accidentally photographed evidence of a murder in Maryon Park, and then becomes increasingly unsure that what he sees, or what we see, has any relationship to reality at all. Supercool, paranoid and fascinating, it’s a key movie of the ’60s; in the day, every literate person over 17 saw it and argued about what it really meant, even as they knew it expressed their own uncertainties about the modern world.
121/365: Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger, 1947) (Vudu)
Wildly overlooked in its day and since, Preminger’s movie is a shadowy “woman’s film,” focused on career-woman Joan Crawford stuck between men in a muddled and morally ambiguous postwar America. Crawford’s designer-girl Daisy carries on a relaxed and cynical affair with married man Dana Andrews, a big shot lawyer who knows Walter Winchell (walking through, playing himself), who irresistibly calls other men “honeybunch” and “dewdrop,” who patronizes his brittle wife (Citizen Kane’s Ruth Warrick) and spoils his daughters even though he’s always on his way to somewhere else, and who never in Preminger’s view remains either only a selfish louse or a helpless alpha-male trying to do the right thing. Fed up, Daisy defects and takes up with returning soldier Henry Fonda — who’s a calm bundle of off-hand, secretive, amused, suicidal contradictions himself. Hollywood’s easy answers are nowhere in sight, a stunningly grown-up revelation for the late ‘40s.
122/365: Peppermint Candy (Lee Chang-dong, 2000) (Vimeo)
The Korean New Wave gained its first head of steam with this second film by maestro Lee, a wrenching drama that became an anthemic touchstone for an entire generation of South Koreans. We begin with a disoriented man committing suicide in front of his old schoolmates; then, the movie leapfrogs backward through time, tracing regressively the dark-hearted hero’s life from the wasteland of the present to his life as a neglectful husband and brutal cop to post-schoolboy innocence, intersecting with two decades of troubled history along the way. Fueled by remarkable performances by Sol Kyung-gu and Moon So-ri (both of whom became transnational stars), and Lee’s long-take visual savvy, the movie leaves bruises, particularly when visiting the national shame of the military crackdown responsible for 1980’s Kwangju massacre of protesters.
123/365: The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis, 1955) (YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Brutish, dark, mercenary film noir, with obsessive cop Cornel Wilde getting in way over his head battling a gang comprised of bristly character-actor all-stars Brian Donlevy, Richard Conte, Lee Van Cleef, Earl Holliman and Jay Adler. Premier bloody-knuckle genre stuff, and famous among noiristes as being a crowning achievement by DP John Alton, whom Paul Schrader memorably characterized as “perhaps the greatest master of noir… an expressionist cinematographer who could relight Times Square at noon if necessary.”
124/365: Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015) (Netflix)
A Best Picture Oscar winner no one, really, thought was actually the best film of 2015, this workaday, truth-based expose-drama remains worth everyone’s time, as a lovesong to investigative journalism and as a protest against the institutional corruption represented by the Catholic Church’s cover-up of priests’ endemic child abuse. Nuanced and dynamic as always, Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo lead the team under grim fluorescent lights, and the factual rollout of malevolence and cover-up is appalling, as it’s meant to be.
125/365: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966) (Amazon Prime, Vudu)
Sergio Leone’s mega-cartoon Italian anti-western — three men, the Civil War and a cache of hidden loot — is long, vast, patient (go ahead, get a beer, no need to hit pause), and full of machismo run awry, to the point of being a gloriously obsessive riff on Western-ness, in all of its vexed ethical dilemmas. Clint Eastwood is good (but not really), Lee Van Cleef is bad (really), an out-of-control Eli Wallach is ugly (and bad), the Spanish landscape is captured in voluminous widescreen, and Ennio Morricone’s hysterical score is comprised of two or three of the most famous soundtrack ear-worms in the history of movies. A feast of old-school movieness.
126/365: The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997) (Amazon Prime)
From a heartrending novel by Russell Banks, a heartrending film by Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, exploring what happens to a tiny, snowy Canadian town when a school bus full of kids slides out onto an iced lake and sinks. (Egoyan lets us see this happen in long shot — you hold your breath.) The ramifications start quietly and build, spurned by the troubling presence of Ian Holm’s invasive insurance agent, who has haunting problems of his own. Novelistic, wise about human nature, and unforgettable.
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
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