Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 31
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
211/365: THX 1138 (George Lucas, 1971) (Amazon Prime, Vudu)
A purist’s dystopia, a despairing, antiseptic vision that often encloses its numbered, hairless underground drone-humans in complete whiteness, this is, if you can believe it, George Lucas’ first feature, adapted from his still-amazing, near-abstract student short. Robert Duvall is the restless prole who decides it’s not enough, the classic kink in the gearwork. Concepts of a dehumanized future don’t get much darker than this — half the population appears to work only at surveilling the other half, whose industrial work seems restricted to the manufacture of the robot cops that keep everyone in line. Visually daunting and, ironically for Lucas, deeply suspicious of technology.
212/365: Moonstruck (Norman Jewison, 1987) (Hulu)
Romance and Italianate comedy in a kind of dreamy, magical hunk of brownstone Brooklyn, with Cher’s widowed frump dubiously accepting the proposal of Danny Aiello’s dumb momma’s boy and then falling for his troubled, one-handed brother (Nicolas Cage). Luckily, the margins of the movie are filled to the brim with witty character actors, slabs of comedic nonsense, behavioral detail, and a sense of warm-heartedness toward the follies of humankind. Here, screenwriter John Patrick Shanley captured a unique cartoon-paisan flavor, with dozens of pungent one-liners sticking in your memory like glue.
213/365: The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935) (Amazon Prime, Vudu)
One of Hitchcock’s first big hits in England, this beloved suspenser also established the Wrong Man paradigm that Hitchcock owned for decades forward — Robert Donat is a Brit Everyman mistaken for a spy and on the run from the titular espionage gang, a journey that entangles him with an innocent Madeleine Carroll and a nine-fingered man on the Scottish moors. As slick and deft as early-talkie English films ever got, it jacked up Hitchcock’s stock and brought him to Hollywood, where he reigned for decades.
214/365: Crumb (Terry Zwigoff, 1994) (Amazon Prime)
This documentary portrait of cartoonist Robert Crumb won virtually every award a nonfiction film can get (except an Oscar, for which it wasn’t even nominated), and has been declared to be by several critics the greatest documentary of all time. Crumb himself, as irascible and fascinating as he is, is only part of the story — the filmmaker explores the family, too, particularly Crumb’s two very damaged brothers, limning a portrait of an American family twisted into misery (by a long-dead monster of a father). It may not be the greatest of its kind, but it may very well be the most eloquent film about familial catastrophe ever made.
215/365: Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952) (Vudu)
This Akira Kurosawa rite opens with the image of a carcinomatous x-ray; a narrator tells us that semi-catatonic government clerk Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), has stomach cancer but doesn’t know it yet. When we see him, even as the narrator tell us “it would be boring to talk about him now” because he is “barely alive,” Watanabe is huddled within walls of moldering bureaucratic paperwork. Learning of his death sentence, Watanabe sheds the responsibilities of his life, but becomes even more miserable drinking and whoring; it’s only when we’re informed, halfway through, that the poor man has passed on, that we begin to glimpse what happened next. Via flashbacks augmenting his co-workers’ drunken wake-side debate, we find out that Watanabe spent his last months making himself a political bulldozer through modern Japan’s mountainous infrastructure, just to transform a public waste area into a usable playground. Mourning becomes a secondary concern; instead, for the deceased and his observers, the question is what use the life was put to others around him.
216/365: Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009) (Amazon Prime)
Buckle up — the Greek auteur behind The Lobster and The Favourite became a global sensation with this thorny, discombobulating mini-dystopia, about a family run like a closed-off totalitarian state, even though the three siblings in it are post-pubertal, restless and hungry for the outside world. The details are terrifyingly absurd, the imagery is startling, and the story goes where we hope it doesn’t, in one of modern movies’ most inspired metaphoric creations.
217/365: A Midsummer’s Night Dream (Max Reinhardt, 1935) (Vudu)
Shakespeare by way of Warner Bros. in the ’30s, with German-Expressionist theater maestro Reinhardt coming to Hollywood for just one film and turning the play into a faerie-land feast for the eyes, a tidal wave of ethereal mist, toyshop forests, dancing goblins, flying goddesses and stardust. The text is radically trimmed, and the cast (including Warner contractees like James Cagney, Frank McHugh, Dick Powell, Joe E. Brown, Olivia de Havilland) has a ball anyway, but the film is as much a visual object as anything, crafted by the studio staff in to one of the loveliest evocations of nursery-tale style every put on film.
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, 30
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