Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 33
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
225/365: Ashes of Time Redux (Wong Kar-wai, 1994/2008) (Amazon Prime)
Hong Kong’s maestro of postmodern romanticism, Wong has always made contemporary sagas of weary urban fatalism and resonating heartbreak, except this one time — this gorgeous, fantastical wuxia pian epic is based on a ’50s pulp serial that’s been otherwise adapted more than a dozen times. But of course Wong’s film is a unique storm of rue and melancholy, dispensing with whole rafts of plot and focusing on a number of doomed love tales, all intersecting somehow with Leslie Cheung’s frontier sword-for-hire. Brigitte Lin became legendary as a warrior that periodically becomes his own sister; Wong avatar Tony Leung is a blind swordsman trying to make his way back home; Maggie Cheung is the hero’s long-lost love, who before dying sends him a bottle of “Forgotten Love” wine, so he can forget her… Etc. This version is the one Wong cleaned up and released, shorn of seven minutes, in 2008.
226/365: The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, 1997) (Hulu)
Based on Rick Moody’s novel, Lee’s film is a melancholy portrait of a very particular time and place: wealthy Connecticut bedroom communities in the early 70s, when polyester suits were in, Nixon haunted the airwaves, cocktails flowed like monsoon rainwater, and the sexual revolution began to sour the lives of restless suburbanites. What unfolds amid the martinis and Jonathan Livingston Seagull paperbacks is less of a story than a multiple character study: the affable Dad (Kevin Kline) equally bewildered by his affair with a trendy neighbor (Sigourney Weaver) and his slowly disintegrating family, the Mom (Joan Allen) lost somewhere between girlhood and disillusionment, the rebellious daughter (Christina Ricci) experimenting with shoplifting and mock sex with the neighbor’s boys (Elijah Wood and Adam Hann-Byrd), the sweet-natured son (Tobey Maguire) impassively grappling with puberty. It’s Thanksgiving weekend, 1973, when Watergate rages on the TV and the worst ice storm in 30 years hits the east coast, a metaphoric arena for the family’s eventual rendezvous with tragedy. It’s the kind of scrupulously adult, deeply imagined piece of work Hollywood should be able to generate regularly; the key to its disarming depth is the fact that the events of the story mean wholly different things to different characters. What sticks most clearly to your skull are the lyrical moments, from Ricci impulsively donning a rubber Nixon mask for her first awkward dry hump, to the awful silent slide of a boy’s prone body down the ice-covered street.
227/365: Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944) (Vudu)
One of the chattiest, dreamiest, and wittiest of noir mysteries, this prickly landmark begins, unforgettably, with a murder and a romance — cool cop Dana Andrews falls in love with Gene Tierney, who is murdered, with his ardor drawn entirely from her absence, and her massive wall portrait. The suspects are vetted — Clifton Webb’s acidic newspaper columnist (his first role, and it made him a star), Vincent Price’s faux-affable dolt, Judith Anderson’s aging viper — and then Tierney’s heroine walks in from a weekend away, and no one’s sure who the body really belongs to.
228/365: The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston, 1975) (Amazon Prime)
So old-fashioned it seemed always starved for respect, this boisterous, broad, achingly sad Kipling adaptation was a long-coveted project for Huston, who by this time had been directing for over three decades. Two renegade British officers in India (Michael Caine and Sean Connery, in their prime) decide to traipse into unexplored Kafiristan (now part of Afghanistan), in order to take over and become kings. The frontier of colonialism is more than these louts bargained for, of course; inside the Kipling-ness lurks a subtle critique of imperial chutzpah. And you’ll never hear “The Minstrel Boy” with dry eyes ever again.
229/365: Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951) (Netflix, Vudu)
One of Hitchcock’s grandest masterpieces, a relaxed yet white-knuckled study of psychopathy, with suave nut Robert Walker meeting tennis pro Farley Granger on a train, and suggesting that they swap murders — Granger’s bitch of a wife for Walker’s abusive father; without motives or relationships to the victims, they’ll never get caught. Of course Walker’s disconnected maniac goes first, and the dominoes tumble from there. Some credit goes to Patricia Highsmith, whose novel might be the best source material Hitchcock ever had, but the creepy force of the film is 100% grade A Hitch.
230/365: The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986) (Amazon Prime)
On the strength of only seven films before his death in 1986, Tarkovsky was one of film’s giants, a probing metaphysician and camera-move maestro for whom film was a means to a spiritual end. This is his final film, made in Sweden, the story of a single man (Erland Josephson) who strikes a bargain with God to prevent an impending nuclear holocaust. Individual passages — levitation, conflagration, miracles — are lived through like witnessing a sleeping god’s dream.
231/365: The Host (Bong Joon-ho, 2006) (Hulu)
A box office record-breaker in South Korea, this craziest, brambliest, and least predictable of digital-behemoth thrillers was a breakout for Bong, who had already been making movies that toggle between modes of improper comedy, holy-shit mayhem, yowling pathos and poetic mystery with an electron’s fickleness. This one is merely a revisit to the likes of Swamp Thing, Day of the Triffids and countless radioactive-monster programmers — thanks to the improper dumping of chemicals into the Han River in Seoul years before, a snakehead-fish-like mutant amphibian the size of a city bus appears (in broad daylight) and begins eating people. But Bong frontloads the movie with a customarily bizarre stew of social satire and character farce, focusing his narrative on a single, ludicrously dysfunctional family whom, despite a cataract of hilarious chaos and caricature, we come to heroize, respect and hope for. Uncomfortably unAmerican moments like a weeping brawl before a dead girl’s memorial photo and an evil-government-authority lobotomy (in a subplot about state control and crisis exploitation) only make the experience riskier and funnier.
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, 32
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