Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 28
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
190/365: Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin, 2011) (Amazon Prime)
A searing, startling directorial debut, this Sundance fest award-winner plants us in the haunted shoes of the eponymous girl (Elizabeth Olsen, in her first real role), as she escapes from a creepy Catskills-backwoods cult, and, in flashbacks, gets subtly seduced into it, becoming one of the compliant harem workers centered on would-be mini-messiah John Hawkes. Durkin shoots and cuts this movie like an insidiously calm bad dream, making it a model for a low-budget indie you can’t tear your eyes from. Of course, Olsen’s hypnotically sad, watchful eyes are their own kind of movie magic.
191/365: The Stranger (Orson Welles, 1946) (Amazon Prime, Netflix)
Five years after Citizen Kane, Orson Welles was already making amends to the Hollywood machine for being the independent genius he was, and this, his third feature (after The Magnificent Ambersons had been butchered three years before) is an almost entirely orthodox film noir, in which Edward G. Robinson stars as a war-crimes investigator drolly and carefully tracking down a runaway Nazi (Welles) to a small Connecticut town. You can see Welles fingerprints on it, and the visual choices, however restrained, are essentially perfect. It’s also the first film to feature real footage taken of the concentration camps after their liberation at war’s end.
192/365: Shirkers (Sandi Tam, 2018) (Netflix)
A bracingly bizarre true-life saga of indie filmmaking gone squirrelly and disastrous, this new doc explores the unmaking of another film, which itself was, or seemed destined to be, Singapore’s punk-era generational anthem movie, a teen-written, candy-colored amateur phantasia-experiment — “a road movie set in a country you can drive across in 40 minutes” — that might’ve triggered a national super-indie New Wave that never happened. Tan wrote and starred in the unfinished film, the footage of which was stolen by her mysterious Svengali mentor, and went missing for decades, sending Tam on a reconstructive mission, investigating what actually happened, and how Asian film history might’ve been different.
193/365: Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) (Vudu, Amazon Prime)
The classic, early proto-noir, adapted from the nasty James M. Cain novel, in which cynical insurance investigator Fred MacMurray and homicidal golddigger Barbara Stanwyck decide to bump off her negligible husband (Tom Powers) in a way that’ll pass insurance-investigation muster, and there we are, with them in the shadowy hills of nighttime Los Angeles, hoping they succeed. The darkness has been with us ever since.
194/365: Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008) (Hulu)
Vampires, yawn — but this thoughtful, surprising, emotionally fecund Swedish film explores the cascade of bad things that happen around the friendship between a bullied 12-year-old boy and a neighboring girl, who seems the same age, but is slowly revealed to have a physical need for blood. Along with Park Chan-wook’s Thirst (2009) one of the very few recent entries in this very, very tired subgenre that dares to reimagine the social tragedy of human predation. Ignore the 2010 American remake.
195/365: Ride Lonesome (Budd Boetticher, 1959) (Vudu)
Boetticher became a professional Mexican matador right out of college, a scenario difficult to beat for hard-won iron-man chops in Tinseltown, before migrating to Hollywood as a technical advisor on Rouben Mamoulian’s Blood and Sand (1941). As a B-movie director, he peaked with a small cycle of westerns he made with Randolph Scott, producer Harry Joe Brown and scriptwriter Burt Kennedy, from 1956 to 1960, all of which still feel shockingly mature and unique. Ultra-realistic, weathered, fatalistic and never less than adult, the “Ranown” films reforged the dynamics of the genre and cleaned out the mythic baloney, paving the way for Peckinpah, Hellman and the very idea of an “anti-western.” This entry, in which Scott is a bounty hunter playing Whack-a-Mole with a gang of outlaws (that include Lee Van Cleef and James Coburn), amid a siege of Indians, exudes the series’ remarkably tough everyday-ness and a virtually Renoir-like empathy for hollowed-out heroes and troubled outlaws alike. All told, they remain some of the most incisive, unpretentious and knowledgeable genre movies of the 50s.
196/365: The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (Goran Olsson, 2011) (Amazon Prime)
This remarkable doc-slice of history is a found-footage amalgamation comprised entirely of film shot by Swedish television crews covering the American civil rights unrest and the arc of activity pursued by black radicals like Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers during the hottest years of the post-King era. American television coverage of these players was limited at the time, and the exposure we’ve had since to their reasoning and ambitions has been almost nil. So this unexpected treasure trove is a revelation, a rewrite of popular history, and an awakening to the savage extent to which state power responded to articulate black activism with brute force and skullduggery. It’s a piece of cinematic documentation that belongs on every high school curriculum, which is exactly where it hasn’t been.
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, 26, 27
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