Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 30
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
204/365: Bloody Sunday (Paul Greengrass, 2002) (Amazon Prime)
Irish director Greengrass established a galvanizing paradigm — the heart-stoppingly tragic docudrama, shot and cut like razor wire, as he would exploit four years later in United 93 — with this meticulous, minute-by-minute, gunshot-by-gunshot reenactment of the famous slaughter in Derry, by British soldiers, of unarmed civilians during a peace march on January 30, 1972. Its methodical march through the injustice is what the film is and what it does — the sense of outrage is blistering, and the history lesson is not easily forgotten.
205/365: The Bridge (Bernhard Wicki, 1959) (Vudu)
Nominated for an Oscar in its day, as well as netting a Best Foreign Film nod from the National Board of Review, this gut-wrenching WWII film was the first German film since the war to get a broad international release. A rather superbly executed anti-war saga, Wicki’s movie hones in on a small village’s teenage boys at the tail end of the war — most of whom, along with the village’s adults, are all cynical about National Socialism. Responding to the Wehrmacht’s last-ditch draft with a naive yen for soldierhood even before they’re over their first high school crushes, the kids are assigned to pointlessly guard the bridge to their own hometown, and naively engage with Allied tank squads, triggering their doom. Shot in pearly black-&-white with a restless and observant camera, it’s a German film that dares, as a bitter new generation matures, to interrogate their country’s history and what about the culture allowed Nazism to flourish.
206/365: Nocturama (Bertrand Bonello, 2016) (Netflix)
A controversial and disquieting French film that begins by following a motley assemblage of Parisian teenagers, plotting something… until we understand it’s an anarchist terrorist bombing, after which the spoiled, delusional punks and punkettes hide out in a lavish department store, wallowing in pointless luxury and materialism, as the web of circumstance slowly tightens unseen outside. Elliptical, morally ambivalent, and mercilessly critical of modern European complacence, Bonello’s film avoids simple political positions, and coalesces into a kind of Sartrean object of unease.
207/365: Wicked as They Come (Ken Hughes, 1956) (YouTube)
A decidedly B- film noir, directed by a nobody, but one that turns a spotlight on the pivotal figure of the genre’s so-called “femme fatale” — amoral and often homicidal women characters who were at first seen as the crucial cause of mens’ downfalls, but whom feminists have since reconfigured as survivalist heroines, facing a brutal masculine world with limited options, and meeting it on its own mercenary terms. Here, cat-eyed knockout Arlene Dahl is a working class woman cornered by abusive, manhandling dudes, forcing her to use her sex and launch into a gold-digging career of fortune-hunting that empties her out even as it makes her wealthy.
208/365: Minding the Gap (Bing Liu, 2018) (Hulu)
This multiple-award-winning doc was made by one of three low-class Illinois kids, all of whom grew up devoted to skateboarding and getting high and escaping their uniformly abusive homes. We follow the racially mixed kids as they enter their 20s, with unwanted babies and crap jobs and nowhere to go, and confront how poorly they are equipped to face being adults. Liu is the luckiest, having found the vocation of movie-making early in his teens; the others are lost boys, in a middle America you rarely seen in films.
209/365: Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004) (Amazon Prime)
A hypnotic, confident tour de force that centers on a beautiful widow (Nicole Kidman), and the little 10-year-old creepazoid (Cameron Bright) who asserts that he is the reincarnation of her dead husband. But the metaphysical suggestions turn out to be merely a device (co-scripted by ex-Bunuel-scripter Jean-Claude Carriere) to scrutinize the woman’s gangrenous case of grief, and Glazer’s film is crafty, subtle (Kidman’s manner sometimes suggests prescription tranquilizers, but not so as you’d notice) and in the end heart-rending. There’s also this, for what it’s worth: several bright critics have noted how the film features scores of visual echoes of Bunuel’s 1929 Surrealist assault Un Chien Andalou, itself a madcap dream parable about lost love.
210/365: The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) (Amazon Prime, Vudu)
The first film by a 25-year-old Huston, and an adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel that seems to transpire entirely inside a few unremarkable rooms, the dialogue a cat-&-mouse maze-game played around a single solid-gold artifact, played by four characters: Humphrey Bogart’s savvy detective, Mary Astor’s compulsive-liar femme, and scheming lowlifes Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. All dialogue, a lot of it lies, the movie is a blissful daydream of deceit, double-crosses, and treachery.
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, 28, 29
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