Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 24
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
162/365: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956; Philip Kaufman, 1978) (Amazon Prime)
Such is the uncanny force of novelist Jack Finney’s original “body snatcher” scenario that each adaptation of it (these are the first two of four) resonates in a different way, depending on its era. Siegel’s unbeatable Cold War parable about alien pods falling to Earth and systematically swapping out humans with conformist replicas always felt like more than just a pulp exercise in paranoia — it’s a searing indictment of postwar America, with individualists hunted through California suburbs by a placid, hive-mind majority. Kaufman’s inspired late-‘70s remake, fronted by oddballs Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams and Jeff Goldblum, transfers its anxieties to post-hippie San Francisco, where the dread of conformism meant losing hard-won quirky uniqueness to the swelling yuppie conformism of the approaching Reagan era. Both films are masterpieces of hair-raising tension and nightmarish panic.
163/365: Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981) (Vudu)
One of the last great battles of the American New Wave, Beatty’s ideological-historical epic dared to give the lavish biopic treatment to John Reed, the early century’s most famous American socialist. Interpolated with dabs of dozens of interviews with real writers and celebrities old enough to remember Reed and the WWI years (from George Jessel to Henry Miller to Rebecca West), and packed with intimate character portraits (particularly Jack Nicholson’s acidic Eugene O’Neill), it’s as passionate, fiercely literate and grown-up as Hollywood movies were to ever become. For it’s context alone, limning the beginnings of American bohemian subculture and the rise of labor unions and the experience of the Russian Revolution, it’s one of those films no American should be able to graduate high school without seeing.
164/365: Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam & Terry Jones, 1975) (Netflix, YouTube)
The most repeatable, most quotable, most densely comic film farce made anywhere since Duck Soup — here the now-famous law firm of Palin, Jones, Chapman, Cleese, Idle and Gilliam capitalize on their defunct TV show’s newborn fame in the US by roasting Arthurian legend, and the result is less a film experience than a club you join for life. Unique, inexhaustible, impishly joyful, and one of those films that could blare sunlight into any dark day.
165/365: What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming-liang, 2001) (YouTube)
One of the godheads of the Taiwanese New Wave, Tsai makes serene, odd, “minimalist” films in which, sometimes, not much happens at all. Lives unfold in real time, and then sometimes take alarming turns — here, a young watch-seller in Taipei, grieving the death of his father, is implored to sell his own watch to a girl who’s leaving for an uncertain business trip to Paris. The exchange haunts the guy (played by Tsai regular Lee Kang-sheng), compelling him to begin turning every timepiece he sees — even the city’s large public clocks — back to Paris time. A bone-dry romantic comedy about loneliness that becomes, imperceptibly, achingly sad.
166/365: The Look of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2014) (Vimeo)
Oppenheimer’s 2012 documentary The Act of Killing pulled open the global curtain on Indonesia’s astonishing culture of genocide celebration, a madness that still lingers decades after the 1965 anti-Communist massacre that killed roughly a million citizens in about six months’ time. This companion film focuses on a 40-something optician whose family members was butchered before he was born, and his confrontations with various death squad alumni, trying to get someone to admit responsibility for the killings. He calmly proceeds from one old massacre vet to another, often checking their vision first as a pretext, as we watch the entire culture’s web of deception melt and congeal on the killers’ faces. The details remain appalling: multiple militia “heroes” enthusiastically admit to routinely drinking the fresh blood of their victims, so as to ward off the prospect of “going crazy,” as some did after simply “killing too many people.” (“Salty and sweet” is how one of them describes the flavor, without being asked.) Chillingly, the credit roll is made up mostly by “Anonymous” — scores of crew members and assistants for whom participation in Oppenheimer’s project would be a death sentence.
167/365: The Good, the Bad, the Weird (Kim Jee-woon, 2008) (Hulu)
An explosively riotous Korean-made “Chinese western” action comedy that takes off like a rocket and doubles down on absurdity and speed every quarter-hour. Something about a treasure map in Japanese-occupied Manchuria in 1939, with various bandits, bounty hunters, armies and losers racing to steal it from each other — the movie doesn’t take the plot seriously, and neither should you. References to Sergio Leone westerns abound, in a kind of frothy, Tarantino-on-dexedrine way, making it all a reckless, lightning-paced meta-movie circus.
168/365: Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965) (Vudu)
Only Polanski’s second feature, and his first outside of Poland, this feverish psychodrama plops us down in a London flat with Catherine Deneuve’s nearly mute walking wounded, as she is going slowly, monstrously insane. What’s real and what’s imagined is undefined: cracking walls, rotting rabbits, dream rapists, murdered corpses. Going all post-Hitchcockian misanthrope, Polanski’s film isn’t about the female psyche per se, but our psyches as viewers, and our taste for voyeurism and suffering. The famous, final Rosebud-like shot — dollying in to a family photo oozing with suggested menace and sick history — tells us perhaps all we need to know, while at the same time leaving everything a mystery.
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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, 22, 23
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