Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 25
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
169/365: Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967) (Amazon Prime, Vudu)
Years before Deliverance, newbie Brit director Boorman came to America at Lee Marvin’s request, and with a cool Donald A. Westlake story made this definitive Los Angeles film — a wide-screen vision of sun-bleached destitution and soulless greed, visualized as if by a TV-commercial-era graft between painters Edward Hopper and Yves Tanguy. Marvin, icy and formidable as ever, returns from the past, after being disposed of by his criminal cohorts post-heist, demanding his cut of the take — except as he climbs the ladder of the “syndicate,” piling up bodies, he discovers it is now a hierarchical corporation, with no Mr. Big, just layers of bureaucracy. An American New Wave landmark — that is, a new kind of film Hollywood could never and would never make just a few years earlier, and going back to the industry’s beginnings.
170/365: Bird Box (Susanne Bier, 2018) (Netflix)
Believe the buzz: this much-hallowed Netflix apocalypse is a thunderously tense sci-fi metaphor-machine, in which something — something — has infiltrated modern reality and instantly drives anyone who sees it to suicide. What that is remains a withheld quantity — as if the movie is set on trauma-training innocent Netflix watchers to think symbolically, to decide for themselves not what that is in the film’s story, but what it means, as the Modernists began to do in their texts almost a century ago. Here’s one reading: that what everyone cannot see is the classic Existentialist sense of life’s meaninglessness, in a modern commercialized world. Note that only the insane can see “it” without being compelled to self-destruction.
171/365: Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra, 2015) (Vimeo, Hulu)
A vivid and disarming anti-colonialist odyssey from Colombia — likely the first Colombian film to be released stateside, and win international festival awards — this two-sided jungle trek follows two Northern explorers (a German scientist in 1909, and an American in the ’40s) journeying into the Amazon to find a medicinal plant. Accompanying them in each strand is a local tribesman, the last of his clan, played young and old by Nilbio Torres and Tafillama-Antonio Bolivar Salvador, two very real, no-shits-given, non-pro tribal members who both lend the film a startling veracity that borders on documentary. Shot in stunning black-&-white, it’s a searing indictment of the white man’s plague-like impact on indigenous culture.
172/365: The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973) (Amazon Prime)
At the height of his 70s golden age, Altman brought his unique formal voice — that bewitching mix of aural chaos, superbly evoked off-screen space, focus-challenged realism, foreground foofaraw and narrative long jumps best seen in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us, California Split, M*A*S*H and Nashville — to this adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s classic detective novel, published 20 years earlier. This film’s laconic detective Philip Marlowe is no cool Bogart paradigm, but a slovenly, mumbly, irreverent Elliot Gould, slumming around glitzy 70s LA like an old dog who’s lost his sense of smell.
173/365: Grosse Pointe Blank (George Armitage, 1997) (YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Coming out of nowhere, this glib pro-assassin-returns-to-his-high-school-reunion comedy shouldn’t have worked, but it does, in ways and with a dose of energy and speed that Hollywood pulp moviemakers could all study. Director Armitage shows up every now and then and delivers bizarrely hilarious and idiosyncratic nasty comic inventions; between Miami Blues (1990) and The Big Bounce (2004) came this underseen beauty. In all of them you can hear his voice in the torrent of repartee and in the characters’ bemused regard for the world, and the dishiness served by John Cusack (who co-starred and co-produced) and Minnie Driver (as the hitman’s sarcastic old girlfriend) is to die for.
174/365: Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1959) (Vudu)
The rough but crystallized moment when movies, taking the planet’s temperature, looked around at the glorious, wide-open postwar era and decided to declare all-American independence. Synching up with Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (in the U.S., the two were first officially shown five days apart that November) and nudging the idea of “a movie” so far into the wilderness of real and spontaneous life-chaos that it changed the medium forever, Cassavetes’ first film is a lot of firsts: the first important movie made in America by a person instead of a company, the first vision of American city life as it actually was, the first real movie period, man. It’s a gritty portrayal of lower-middle-class city dwellers, in this case three grown black siblings sharing a flat long after the death of their parents and dealing with intimate racism, but it’s not about plot — Cassavetes deliberately made the film dawdle, wander, vogue, and go on drunken jags, just like its maker. And just like life — here is where movies discovered what everyday reality was really like, dashing from streetcorners to coffee shops in the rain, loitering in public spaces, draping over furniture in tiny apartments. While other movies told stories in 1959, here was the real deal.
175/365: Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006) (Netflix, Amazon Prime)
Set in post-Civil War Spain, del Toro’s beloved fantasy follows 12-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), trapped in abandoned mill with troops ruled by a malevolent Fascist captain (Sergei Lopez), who’s impregnated her desperate mother (Ariadna Gil); the girl confronts summary-execution brutality and tool-shed torture in the real world as she also deals with the secretive demands of a parallel fantasy realm, of which she might be the reincarnated princess. Hidden “feasts,” secret keys, and visions of meta-cannibalistic bloodshed in one world are reflected in the other, and the inevitable question of which-is-real? fades into irrelevancy: for Ofelia, it’s all real, all dangerously grown-up, and all equally incomprehensible. Maybe del Toro’s richest film, and certainly the one that made him a generational figurehead for millennials everywhere.
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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, 24
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