Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 35
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
239/365: Vox Lux (Brady Corbet, 2018) (Amazon Prime)
Underdistributed, underhyped and coolly eccentric, this laughless satire on 21st-century American culture trails its heroine from barely surviving a middle-school mass shooting to quickly rising to pop fame on the strength of a single song, and, embodied by Natalie Portman, plunging into the addiction-plagued middle-age of her glitzy Madonna-like career. Corbet is the story here: otherwise a busy brooding-hipster actor with eclectic tastes, he made his first film, the very odd and smart Sartre adaptation The Childhood of a Leader, in 2015. This is his second film as writer/director, and it bristles with confidence, invention and intelligence.
240/365: King Kong (Merian C. Cooper & Ernest Schoedsack, 1933) (Vudu)
A factor of 20th-century culture you must be familiar with in order to be a half-way literate human, this massively influential and timeless early-talkie classic is still a rousing, eye-popping experience, packed with images (giant ape, Empire State Building) so iconic and resonant they have the weight and immortality of myths. Needless to say, the stop-motion animation by Willis O’Brien is still wild, and makes most CGI look soulless by comparison.
241/365: Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) (Netflix)
A giant, hairy, angry musk ox of a movie, perhaps the definitive Hollywood portrait of the American-Vietnamese War, modeled after Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and bursting at the seams with passionate, hallucinatory sequences, from the opening jungle napalm strike to the Wagner-scored helicopter siege to the climactic wallow in neo-pagan savagery. Many layers deep and executed with a kind of brilliant hubris filmmakers don’t muster much anymore, this capped Coppola’s incredible ’70s run, which makes him legendary no matter what he’s made since.
242/365: Jeanne Diehlmann, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (Chantal Akerman, 1975) (Vudu, Amazon Prime)
Any summary of this three-hour-plus feminist classic makes it sound like a Gitmo stress position: it’s about a widowed Belgian housewife (Delphine Seyrig), who meticulously attends to housework all day, which we watch in real time, except when she’s making cash being an afternoon prostitute, which is the only thing we don’t watch her do. “A film about…” is a misleading construction — Akerman’s film just is, a life experience rather than a convenient story told. Seyrig’s heroine is observed in huge swatches of real time, making beds and breading veal and doing dishes and eating dinner with her drippily uncommunicative high school son (Jan Decorte), but observed from a finite distance — no close-ups, no emphasis, no camera movements. It’s a sensory-deprivation tank of a film, and predictably we seek to fill in the emptiness, searching for clues, reading minute patterns of behavior and happenstance, gleaning bits of info (the shadow of the Holocaust, the absence of a husband), assessing possible metaphors, until we realize the time spent watching Jeanne attempt to control her little world is like gunpowder slowly packed into a cannon, and eventually the fuse is lit. It’s a masterpiece that writes its own rules about how movies express themselves — you can’t compare it to other films, not even Akerman’s.
243/365: Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988) (Hulu)
The most scorchingly sad of all Japanese animes, this drama follows two orphaned children — a young teen boy and his uncomprehending toddler sister — through the wasteland of WWII Japan, after the firebombing of Kobe killed their mother. Harrowing and merciless, tense with fear of starvation and sickness, the film is based on true experience; if you’re used to animes being fast, violent, fun and fantastical, this movie will take you down at the knees.
244/365: Romeo + Juliet (Baz Luhrmann, 1996) (Amazon Prime)
Australian hyperbolist Luhrmann made a big splash in the ’90s with this Shakespeare modernization, updating even West Side Story by placing the Capulets and Montagues as warring crime families in a hyperviolent version of contemporary Los Angeles, and actually having the jacked-up cast speak in slang-deformed Shakespearean language. Leonardo DiCaprio and Clare Danes, both as fresh as a baby’s bottom, play the lovers, with raving back-up by John Leguizamo, Paul Sorvino, Diane Venora and Brian Dennehy. Luhrmann not only shoots and edits like a chipmunk on crank, he finds scads of sweet poetic images, and for all the noise the story lands in your lap.
245/365: I Married a Monster from Outer Space (Gene Fowler Jr., 1958) (Vudu, Amazon Prime)
This may be the greatest title ever given to an American film — and every suspicion and lurking phobia a woman can have about her new husband is metaphorically crystallized in this pulpy genre riff from the Cold War ’50s. Poor Gloria Talbot slowly realizes that hubby Tom Tryon is an alien looking to populate Earth with his cold, tentacled kind, and wives everywhere knows how she feels. This is one of those cases where a junky B movie is conceived with such simple metaphoric wit that it resonates for all time.
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, 34
Keep up with Smashcut 365 by following Smashcut on Medium, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.
What is Smashcut?
Smashcut partners with universities and organizations to develop and deliver customized online film programs. The Smashcut platform enables a high degree of collaborative instruction and features real-time student project review via live 1:1 video sessions with instructors. Smashcut is dedicated to increasing access to film education, and supporting a broad population of emerging film students. Learn more at Smashcut.com. Learn more at Smashcut.com.
