Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 23
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
155/365: Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997) (Netflix)
Only PTA’s second film, an expansive and farcical portrait of a rather sweet corner of the American porn industry, as it grew in the ’70s and then confronted real money, drugs and trouble in the ’80s, centered on the improbably jejune figure of one Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg), whose naivete is as giant-sized as his sexual equipment. A hilariously broad culture lambaste that steals freely from Scorsese, and fills its corners with great character bits (Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, Don Cheadle, William H. Macy, etc.), gently mocking the Ford-Reagan years’ atrocious style and music trends more than the reality of sex work.
156/365: The Italian Straw Hat (Rene Clair, 1928) (Amazon Prime)
A late silent comedy masterwork, and quite possibly the invention of screwball — however based upon a 19th-century stage play. It’s set on a single wedding day, an occasion plagued from the beginning by portents of disaster — a pin lost down the back of the bride’s dress (she twitches for the rest of the film), a missing glove, a dress shoe that needs three men to jimmy on. But the real crisis begins when the groom’s carriage horse gets away from him en route, and half-eats a straw hat it finds in the bushes — which belongs to a married woman caught with en flagrante with a soldier in the brush. Soon enough, the dragoon and his hilariously swoony mistress find their way to the groom’s house and demand he replace that hat — without which she cannot go home — despite the fact that the wedding will proceed, and face its own debacles. Clair’s touch is vivid not only in his serene master shots, but with the performances: the full-body reactions of Albert Prejean’s distracted groom or Paul Ollivier’s stone-deaf uncle or Olga Tschechowa’s constantly fainting demimondaine need whole rooms and get them.
157/365: The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975) (Amazon Prime)
A dated and clumsy genre piece from the ’70s, sure, but consider this dynamite-under-the-seat scenario: an educated, artistic, restless young urban wife is moved to the suburbs, where her sense of alienation amid the rampant conformity and provincialism reaches a kind of screaming peak when she realizes that the mild, gossipy wives she meets aren’t women at all, but automated simulacra engineered by the husbands, robots who are non-argumentative, undemanding, obedient, obsessive about housekeeping, and always sexually available. In short, it’s a sci-fi/satiric scenario built for the Women’s Lib era but ready for combat in the 21st century, when (it seems) frustrated, powermad male privilege is once again our culture’s primary crisis. From the casting (thank God for Paula Prentiss) to the implication of the Disney combine, it’s a mildly executed cultural handgrenade that explodes in your head afterwards. Pay no attention to the deliberately campy and perfectly execrable 2004 remake.
158/365: Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016) (Hulu)
Grown-up sci-fi in the waning Obama era, this heady interface-with-aliens drama is actually about love and grief — if you grasp (maybe after two viewings) that what at first seems to be preliminary backstory flashbacks… are not. Spoiler? Maybe, but getting a hold of that trick of the light, amid the movie’s cognitive-engineering science and dizzying use of language itself as a MacGuffin, allows you to receive the climactic gut-punch in all its poignant glory. Amy Adams is, as usual, radiant.
159/365: Boy Meets Girl (Leos Carax, 1984) (Vimeo, YouTube)
One of the key post-punk films, and bad boy Carax’s first film, this uppity, thorny, nose-thumbingly romantic ditty limns a shadowy Paris where everyone seems in the middle of a heartbreak, including watchful semi-simian acrobat Denis Lavant and suicidal tapdancer Mireille Perrier, who eventually find each other. The ghost of Godard is everywhere, but what’s captured in amber is the era’s youth-culture brio — the intoxicating sense of discovering everything, including love and misery and music and cigarettes and French New Wave movies, for the first time. Photographed in silvered black-&-white by Jean-Yves Escoffier.
160/365: Experimenter (Michael Almereyda, 2015) (Netflix)
A cool, crafty biopic of one Dr. Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard), a Yale psychologist who in 1961 decided to lab-test his ideas about “role-playing, authority, conformity,” in what became an infamous and dismaying masterpiece of clinical sleight-of-hand. Milgram would set up two test subjects in two close rooms, one administering increasing electric shocks to the other as memory-test questions were missed. Immediately we see that the shock-receiver is part of the doctor’s team and is not hurt; told to continue no matter what, the true test subjects (of which we see scores, including Anthony Edwards, John Leguizamo and Taryn Manning) press on with varying degrees of distressed panic, most of them reaching the last dial on their shock machine only because they were instructed to do so. Would you? Milgram’s book questioned “obedience to authority, but for Almereyda the trials explore our innate resources of sadism, guilt, secrecy, abasement, and soullessness.
161/365: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931) (Vudu)
The best version of the Robert Louis Stevenson pseudo-thriller classic, and the most berserk, with Fredric March winning an Oscar — not really for the placid, pale, junkie-boy Jekyll, but for the seething beast-perv that is Hyde. Welcome to the jungle: with his misshapen head, loose-in-the-socket eyes, primate gait and teeth that grow out of his face like tree stumps, Hyde is a true grotesque, an utterly mundane, utterly terrifying goon with hygiene issues. Hardly the quasi-werewolf of other movies, March’s Hyde is a hateful mutation of a normal man, seething with malice. At times you can’t imagine that it’s the same actor; Hyde is even a few inches taller than Jekyll. “How you must love me!” he spits sarcastically at Miriam Hopkins’ terrified streetwalker before a night of (off-screen, but still) rape and whippings. The nerve of this film, for even an early “pre-Code” talkie, is dazzling, and its plunge into masculine sociopathy is unique in pre-war Hollywood.
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, 22
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