Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 22
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
148/365: The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1982) (Amazon Prime, Vudu)
After the mutual crucifixion of Raging Bull, Scorsese and star Robert De Niro decided to make this absurd, bizarre comedy as a tonic — though in its way the film is as scabrous and sharp a critique of modern America as the earlier mega-film. Here DeNiro plays the unforgettable Rupert Pupkin, a would-be comic and showbiz-delusional creepazoid who kidnaps a Johnny Carson-ish TV host (Jerry Lewis) in order to blackmail his way to a network appearance. A beautifully uncomfortable experience, executed with surreal conviction by the boys.
149/365: Neruda (Pablo Larrain, 2016) (Vimeo, Netflix)
A vivid, larky biopic of the famous Nobel-winning poet (Luis Gnecco), when as a Leftist senator in Chile in the late ’40s he was targeted for political arrest and instead went underground with his adoring wife (Mercedes Moran), bouncing all over the country, from one safe house to another, appearing in public then disappearing, and taunting the authorities with his proximity and fame. His opposite number in the film is its most inspired creation: special prosecutor (Gael Garcia Bernal), a fictionalized manhunter who narrates the film, and who maintains a poetic, quasi-Les Miserables relationship with the famous man he’s pursuing. Larrain imagines this bit of history as a rhapsodic dialogue between two competing works of fiction — and for once the poet-saint triumphs, and the tale of the authoritarian ends badly, in the Andean snow.
150/365: Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953) (Vudu)
The art film gateway-drug movie for Ozu, rigorous artisan behind cinema’s quietest monumental filmography. Here is crystallized everything that makes Ozu films insidiously rich, from the hushed postwar-generational combat that for Ozu defined Japanese society’s modern problems, to his slowed-heartbeat long shots, careful visual choices, and scouring absence of distracting movie sensationalism. It may be a perfect movie, if there ever were such a thing.
151/365: Hostiles (Scott Cooper, 2017) (Netflix)
The best of the new ultra-violent neo-westerns, in which Christian Bale stars as a bitter Cavalry officer-slash-Indian hunter dealing with treaty-defined peacetime, and who to his horror is assigned to escort a famous dying Cheyenne chief (Wes Studi) and his coterie back to his home lands in Montana. The trip is rough and costly, and the film is mercilessly realistic.
152/365: Mother (Bong Joon-ho, 2009) (Amazon Prime, Netflix)
Of the famous Korean directors, Bong is the pulpiest, and this nerve-wracker is another genre piece turned inside out — ostensibly a murder mystery, it places all of its bets on a lower-class, middle-aged mom (Kim Hye-ja), whose semi-retarded twentysomething son (Won Bin) gets himself arrested for the bludgeon murder of a local girl. We tracks Kim’s diminutive mother as she relentlessly tries to disprove her son’s guilt and find the real murderer, resorting to flat-out crime, suicidal risk and then much worse. Did he do it? Will we, or she, ever find out for certain? A peasant herbalist who still cuts her son’s food up for him, this Mom is as determined and fearless as a superhero, and is also, it eventually becomes clear, absolutely insane, a mysterious and even fearsome agent of rectitude so vividly crafted you remember her as you might a very real and crazy aunt.
153/365: I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943) (Vudu)
In the ’40s producer Val Lewton became a brand name in Hollywood for a slew of low-budget, atmospheric, subtext-laden thrillers and horror films — most, in the heyday of Gothic horror, set in the contemporary world. This dream-like masterpiece follows a Canadian nurse (Frances Dee) assigned to a secret-poisoned sugar plantation in the Caribbean, where voodoo and zombieism hold uneasy sway. A conscious remake of Jane Eyre, it’s one of the most inventive and strangest movies of the decade.
154/365: Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1971) (Amazon Prime)
The Russian maestro’s most grounded film, ironically, takes place largely in space, aboard a semi-derelict space station circling the titular planet, which has played some scary games with the minds of the station’s crew. Sent to investigate, a psychologist (Donatas Bonionis) is soon joined by a replica of his wife (Natalya Bondarchuk), who killed herself years before; given a deranged second chance, their relationship begins to spiral toward the same sad end. The premier metaphysician of Soviet cinema, Tarkovsky was no pulpster, and Solaris is a long, soulful, funereal mystery, with fascinating images and a central conundrum that owes as much to spiritual needs as to sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem’s original novel.
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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, 19, 20, 21
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