Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 34
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
232/365: West Side Story (Robert Wise, 1961) (Netflix)
Practically an American institution, and in its day an entrancingly radical invention: a musical retelling of Romeo & Juliet in modern-day New York, as a story of fated lovers (Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer) caught between warring street gangs. Shot on location and bursting with style (the creative team included Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins and Stephen Sondheim), it was a handgrenade of a movie in the legacy of the American musical. Its in-your-face, mega-voguing style and acrobatic dancing are an acquired taste by now, but you may well have acquired them. Oscars went everywhere, even to poor George Chakiris, whose career may have never survived his hair.
233/365: The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, 2016) (Amazon Prime)
South Korea’s reigning prince of vengeance, bloodletting and lurking pathology hit gold with this complex, immaculately staged and shot period psychodrama, intimately entwining sexual predation, class combat, same-sex confusion, and inexorable tsunamis of revenge with the oppressive sociopolitics of the early-century Japanese occupation of Korea. Written, performed and filmed within an inch of its life.
234/365: The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut, 1959) (Vudu)
The turn of the key that started the engine of the French New Wave’s international buzz, Francois Truffaut’s debut masterpiece is a rough-&-ready document of a young teen (Jean-Pierre Leaud), ill-raised by self-obsessed parents, restlessly rebelling against school and slowly veering, as Truffaut himself had, into petty crime and the jaws of juvenile detention. Essential viewing shot on the fly in and around Paris, it boils down to a simple but wondrous thing: an uninflected and true-hearted manifestation of a 14-year-old’s view of the world and the uncaring adult machinery to which he is subjected. As fresh from the soil as the day it was made.
235/365: Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1999) (Hulu)
Russell’s third film and an acidic winner: four American soldiers during the first Gulf War embark on a treasure hunt in the desert for Kuwaiti gold; it’s symptomatic of this movie’s sand-blasted humor that they find the map sticking out of the ass of an Iraqi prisoner. The band of thieves is led by George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube and some goofy hick played by director Spike Jonze (Adaptation); the hunt, and the heroes’ consciences, are compromised by the plight of Iraqi civilians. A ripping anti-war sting electrocutes this raucous comedy-adventure, and as usual with Russell the comic scenes are explosions that keep exploding.
236/365: Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967) (Netflix)
A never-beloved-enough American New Wave firestarter, this strange fable follows ne’er-do-well rebel Paul Newman onto a Southern chain gang, where merely by virtue of his anti-authoritarian nature he becomes something like a Messiah. Resoundingly filmed in ultra-realist tones, the film isn’t a Christ story really (despite a disarming number of symbolic crucifixes); it’s something more interesting: a metaphoric exploration of the very human impulse to create Christs and messiahs, even within society’s lowest levels.
237/365: Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) (Amazon Prime)
The landmark film that awoke the planet to the unique reality and style of Japanese cinema, this epochal piece of period-drama ultra-modernism is also one of the most famous and reused plot inventions ever invented (courtesy of turn-of-the-century writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa): following a rape and murder, an investigation interviews the bandit (Toshiro Mifune, becoming a global brand in an instant), the woman he raped, the dead man he killed (via a spooky medium), and a bystander — all of whom have different motivations and tell different versions of the story. Truth is the ultimate casualty of human folly, a point the film makes with a vengeance. Are they lying, or just remembering it differently? What really happened? Maybe all four?
238/365: Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018) (Hulu)
A kind of brother film to Get Out, this screamingly irreverent absurdist farce plunges its African-American hero (Lakeith Stanfield) into a wild futuristic corporate-sales world, once he succeeds in sounding white on sales calls. From there, the vision of white-boss malfeasance (personified by an outlandish Armie Hammer) runs gleefully off the rails, and Riley’s film (his first) leaves reality (and its capacity to offer little more than preachifying and pat morals) far behind.
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, 33
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