Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 32
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
218/365: Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007) (Netflix)
Fincher brings his insidiously precise and paranoid touch to the famous real-crime serial-killer spree of the late ’60s, when Northern California was haunted by an unidentified maniac who also enjoyed taunting the press with elaborately coded messages. Five confirmed kills but the case was never solved, which is Fincher’s ace in the hole here — it’s scary, creepy, authentic history lesson with no resolution, no knowing. Jake Gyllenhaal is the newspaper cartoonist/crypto-geek obsessed by the case, Robert Downey Jr. is the cynical reporter actually assigned, Mark Ruffalo is the lead detective, all of whom (with a packed supporting cast) take back seat to Fincher’s sepulchral visual smarts, which constantly hints at the maddening mystery of never being sure of what’s really happening out there.
219/365: Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski, 2013) (Vimeo)
A sublime, toast-dry period comedy of manners — but the period, so long ago, is 1980, and the social strata being picked apart for stifled chuckles is the world of computer programming geekhood, in which a tiny “convention” of programming nerds coalesce in a shabby hotel to compete their programs against each other, to see which can best a human chess player. Catastrophes of fashion, lugging appliance-sized hard drives and monitors, more than intimidated by the hotel’s other gathering — sex therapists — the film’s cast of lowly heroes are both hilarious and endearing. Best of all, Bujalski, so far a reigning doyen of “mumblecore” indies, shot the film in circa-1980 black-&-white video, giving the film a Ghost of Technology Past aura that grows more beautiful with time.
220/365: Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977) (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Vudu)
Allen graduated from goofy stand-up skit-schtick to profound, character-based auteurist comedy with this timeless Oscar-winner, a fictionalized (and self-excoriating) portrait of his romance with Diane Keaton, who stars as a goofy version of herself, an out-of-town New England bubblehead lost in New York and effortlessly dazzling Allen’s celebrity comic, who seems in any case to be entirely incapable of happiness. (The original title was Anhedonia.) Ingenious, effortlessly witty, and by now something of a cultural touchstone, it’s also one of the greatest of New York movies, and, at least, a bracing reminder of the writer/director Allen used to be, long before he became his own worst imitator.
221/365: Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947) (Amazon Prime)
Film noir at its slickest and most heartbroken, this enthralling act of cinematic despair-on-the-road has smalltown mystery man Robert Mitchum get involved, all over again, with devilish gangster Kirk Douglas and his female problems, namely Jane Greer’s Kathy, a femme fatale that defined the stereotype just as she’s quite scannable today as the scenario’s ultimate victim, traded and used by men until she turns into a killer. Moody, tense, acted in a tense whirlwind of suspicion and betrayal, and written (by Daniel Mainwaring) with breathless cynicism.
222/365: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000) (Netflix, Amazon Prime)
Ang Lee’s blockbuster, digitally enhanced gloss-up of the Hong Kong wuxia pian genre isn’t quite as much eye-popping fun as the real HK pulp of the ’80s and ’90s (particularly those directed by King Hu, Ching Sui-tung and Tsui Hark), and die-hard genre purists have been put off. (The major set-pieces, like the fight high in the bamboo grove, are all borrowed from earlier films.) But for the rest of us it was the trippy martial arts movie we could love, with Chow Yun-fat cementing his global star status, Zhang Ziyi appearing like an avenging ghost from nowhere, and Michelle Yeoh bringing a sense of maturity and wisdom the HK films never bothered with. Still the most successful foreign-made film in US box-office history.
223/365: Shoeshine (Vittorio de Sica, 1946) (Vudu, Amazon Prime)
De Sica was a matinee idol and successful director when he and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini helped invented Italian Neo-Realism with this hardscrabble postwar drama. A rare children’s prison film, Shoeshine is compromised by a preening score and careful compositions, but the thrust of it — street orphans abused, herded, scrap-fed, manipulated, and punished like stray dogs — is appalling, especially in today’s utopia of pre-K “purposeful play” and child tracking devices. Naturally, the kids, particularly twelve-year-old Rinaldo Smordoni, are artlessly affecting.
224/365: Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, 2005) (Amazon Prime)
One of the most narratively challenging American films of the last quarter-century — as in, you have to see it twice, and know a good deal about international relations and corporate power, in order to sort out the plot’s tangle of intentions, betrayals and espionage. But that alone gives this movie props you can’t fake — when’s the last time we saw a major release that demanded news literacy? The drama is a tripartite plunge into the contemporary nexus between Mid-East oil, the American government, and multinational corporate interests, following the uncertain tracks of combustible CIA op George Clooney (playing, in effect, real-life ex-op Robert Baer), principled-yet-compromised lawyer Jeffrey Wright, and vulnerable economist Matt Damon. Gaghan weaves in other stories, including a Pakistani youth shut out of work on the Arabian Peninsula and succumbing to jihadi conversion. A big plateful, and worthy of study.
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, 31
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