Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 26
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
176/365: Klute (Alan J. Pakula, 1971) (Vudu, Amazon Prime)
The first leg of the underappreciated Pakula’s great Nixon-era “paranoia trilogy” (followed by The Parallax View and All the President’s Men), this weird, spooky thriller, about a missing businessman who turns out to be a serial killer, has something at its heart that sets the somewhat ordinary plot-stuff ablaze: Jane Fonda in her first Oscar role, as a tough New York call girl who’d can’t stand the idea of being a victim. Angry, defensively icy, supercool, struggling not so successfully to lift herself above the squalor of pimps and junkies, Fonda’s ’70s Everywoman is a masterpiece of four-dimensional character creation. The film around her — elliptical, haunting, dripping with urban angst — is pretty great, too.
177/365: District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009) (Netflix)
Oscar-nominated for Best Picture (!), this startling South African sci-fi satire begins with an alien ship arriving over Johannesburg — except that the aliens are all sick and malnourished, and the relocation camp they’re brought to transforms, over decades, into an active slum, with native residents hating the “prawns” and treating them like, well, immigrant “aliens.” Science fiction really boils when it’s got some meaty sociopolitical fish to cook, and here every Westernized culture’s privileged animus toward “others,” going back centuries, is sliced for sandwiches (particularly when one character begins mutating into one of the alien race). Blomkamp’s subsequent Hollywood-funded films haven’t lived up to the high bar set by this outrageous thing.
178/365: 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957) (Vudu, Amazon Prime)
Lumet’s directorial debut, and a doozy of a film-converted theater piece: on a hot afternoon, a dozen jury members in a closed room attempt to decide on a seemingly open-and-shut case of urban patricide, until one liberal unwilling to coast on assumptions (Henry Fonda) slowly turns the room around. Every man in the room is a walking-talking social type representing a sociopolitical viewpoint, either positive (Fonda’s white-suited progressive), viciously negative (Lee J. Cobb’s generational warrior, Ed Begley’s rabid race-baiter, E.G. Marshall’s neo-con intellectual), or somewhere in-between, waiting to be swayed away from all-American self-concern and toward a universal humanitarianism. Credit is split between the vivid, motley cast of scrambled character actors, to legendary cinematographer Boris Kaufman, capturing the sweat and tension in stark black-&-white, and to Lumet’s brisk pacing, compositional inventiveness, and dedication to meaningful performance. Movies confined to limited spaces tend not to reward multiple viewings, to put it mildly, but Lumet’s does; the dozen characters and the off-screen story they must focus on, despite their own rampaging agendas and neuroses, keep this Eisenhower-era artifact plummeting along its procedural track with an energy that has, if anything, grown more robust with age.
179/365: Fallen Angels (Wong Kar-wai, 1995) (YouTube)
The great Hong Kong modernist hit an international stride with Chungking Express, a year before, and this swooningly romantic companion piece entwines two pulpy-to-high-heaven broken-heart stories: a lonesome hit man (Leon Lai) has an impossible love-bond with his secretary-agent (Michelle Reis), whom he can never actually meet. Meanwhile she helps an escaped mental patient (the great Takeshi Kaneshiro), who breaks into and runs closed shops at night, forcibly selling merchandise to weary urbanites; he also falls impossibly in love, with a nocturnal girl nursing her own romantic wounds. Wong is the irony-tinged, self-crucifying Romantic poet of modern cinema; his particular kind of woozy, dreamy intensity might be a matter of taste, but it can be addictive.
180/365: The Trial (Orson Welles, 1962) (Amazon Prime, Vudu)
Welles’ second-career — as a Hollywood outcast roaming Europe and assembling potently Wellesian films shot by shot, budget despot by deposit, as fate and fortune would allow — produced a raft of masterpieces, including this, the best-ever Kafka adaptation, in which Anthony Perkins plays an irate citizen accused of an unspecified crime by a monstrously opaque bureaucracy. Lurid, absurdist, and at times terrifying (Kafka can be read as hyper-mundane and Existentialist, but Welles saw this nightmare as a grand Gothic headtrip), with Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider and Elsa Martinelli as various maddening women who cannot help him.
181/365: Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1958) (Amazon Prime)
Post-noir, post-melodrama, post-Golden Age, post-everything, this knives-out screamer takes the Tinseltown Cemetery vibe of Sunset Boulevard, eight years earlier, and quadruples the bet, giving us living legends Bette Davis and Joan Crawford performing autopsies on their own careers and decades-long rivalry — and the essentially rotten concept of movie idolhood in and of itself. Davis is a deranged, aging, drunken ex-child star (under a mudslide of unwashed pancake makeup), Crawford is her wheelchair-bound sister (Crawford), whose own stardom was cut short years earlier; trapped in a decaying Beverly Hills mansion, they spiral into a mutual hell of secrets and poisonous ideas of regaining fame. There are sardonic laughs here, but just as many nauseated winces.
182/365: Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993) (Amazon Prime)
A gracious, free-form trip down memory lane for Linklater, and a kind of organic, inadvertent masterwork — the film seems to have no structure or even story, just life happening, in a small Texas suburb in the late ’70s, on the first day of summer break. Trailing after a dozen or more randy, fun-seeking teens as they search for a party, contemplate their dubious role in the social order, and inflict/escape from the hazing rituals that may have been particular to the Austin area, the film is dense with detail, one-liners, deft performances and astutely observed reality — though it may take two viewings to mesh with the movie’s unique rhythms. Once you do, it can become a part of your own life. Amid the fabric of unsteady, unruly teen-ness here Linklater also triggered a raft of future careers: Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Joey Lauren Adams, Milla Jovovich, Adam Goldberg, Nicky Katt, Rory Cochrane, Renee Zellweger, Jason London, etc.
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, 25
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