Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 40
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
274/365: Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987) (Amazon, Criterion Channel)
From the very first airborne camera patrols of autumnal-Cold-War Berlin, with the Wall snaking through the urban spaces covered with graffiti, obliterating your view, wherever you stand, of the city’s other half, Wenders’ silvery black-&-white vision is an art film for all people, austere and gorgeous, haunting and transcendent. Here, the schizophrenic city is haunted by saturnine but benevolent men and women in black coats, occupying the thick of human flow but unseen, and always listening. The conceptual style is everything: the fact that the angels’ listening is both empathetic and voyeuristic, the precise way the angels exude patience and sympathy, the manner in which they slowly lean in and gently place mollifying hands on human shoulders, the unpredictable weft of languages and ethnicities they meet, the fact that most of what the angels hear from their earthling subjects is worry, worry, worry. The story follows one angel (the late Bruno Ganz) who begins to crave mortal human-hood, but this passionately humanist masterpiece can’t help but suggest a prescriptive notion of how we should regard our compatriot homo sapiens, and how we should seize the mundane moments as they catapult by. It’s a soaring anthem for everyday-ness.
275/365: A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018) (Hulu, Amazon, Vudu, YouTube)
A neat little B-movie, which like all good genre films runs on high-octane ideas rather than visual effects or big-budget plot-making — one family, in the woods, trying not to make any noise because this particular post-apocalyptic terrain is stalked by mysterious predators who hunt by sound. That papa John Krasinski and mama Emily Blunt’s deaf daughter (the uncanny and authentically deaf Millicent Simmonds) complicates matters is inevitable, just as the mother’s looming pregnancy is a looming dilemma. Gruelingly suspenseful, but also a deft portrait of a family life frozen in a state of non-communication.
276/365: The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953) (Vudu, Amazon Prime)
Lang is justly famous for the stupendous crime films and epic fantasias he made in Germany in the silent-to-early-talkie era, but his subsequent span of scores of American film noirs, from the ’40s and through the ’50s, is just as inventive and cynical, and a good deal leaner. This bristling crime drama is notorious as perhaps the most brutal Hollywood film of its decade — gangster Lee Marvin throwing a pot of boiling coffee in Gloria Grahame’s face may be its most characteristic moment. Glenn Ford stars as a cop going against the Mob, and corpses are thick on the sidewalks.
277/365: Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) (Netflix, Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Working five minutes in the future, Jonze, with his first original screenplay, hits the ground wistfully loitering around the life of a heart-broken nebbish (Joaquin Phoenix) who buys a new post-Siri operating system that can evolve a personality. It does, with the tequila-&-apple-sauce voice of Scarlet Johansson, and the scenario, predictably but transcendentally, tracks the hero’s blossoming love for the new A.I., its reciprocated ardor for him, and the earnest arc of an actual romantic relationship, from flirtatious get-to-know chats to passionate commitment to doubt and jealousy to — spoiler? — a fading apart no one could foresee or prevent. It’s unfalteringly ingenious and witty, even when the film and Phoenix are being dead serious, which is the grace of sci-fi at its smartest — the fermenting intimacy the genre has with satire. Her is filthy with masterly satiric touches: Phoenix wandering through public spaces filled with people also talking to their phones, the protagonist’s profession as an author of “beautiful handwritten letters” — produced by a computer via voice-recognition dictation — in a culture in which people no longer write with their hands, the eventual accepted ubiquity of human-OS romances across society (enough to propagate a volunteer surrogate service), the problems that arise when Johansson’s omnipotent OS admits to not only being in contact with thousands of other entities in the cloud at all times, but also in love with hundreds of them, virtual and human…
278/365: Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Most Hollywood-on-Hollywood movies are love letters compared to this bitter pill, a requiem card for the old, dead Hollywood written and directed by Wilder with a megadose of scathe, tracking the last, fusty, shut-in days of a once-reigning, now deranged matinee queen (Gloria Swanson, in a way playing an amalgam of a dozen aging actresses, including herself) and her uncomfortable sexual relationship with a self-hating writer (William Holden). Inhabited by has-beens (Buster Keaton, Erich von Stroheim, Anna Q. Nilsson, H.B. Warner), sick with perverted narcissism, and narrated by a drowned corpse, the movie’s remarkable cynicism still burns.
279/365: Jacob’s Ladder (Adrian Lyne, 1990) (Amazon, Vudu, YouTube)
Another gloss — spoiler?! — on Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” this riveting phobia-fest tracks the paranoid consciousness of ‘Nam vet Tim Robbins, as he negotiates two parallel realities, one of which is plagued by a heart-stopping variety of the mutant hell-creeps (courtesy of uncredited artist-photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, among others) that brands itself on your eyeballs thanks largely to the film’s commitment to in-camera effects (no post-production digitizing here). The incursion of the tangible, serpentine demonic into everyday urban life is jolting and ferocious, and it makes a stroll through downtown Manhattan a goosey experience.
280/365: Pierrot le Fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
We’re lucky to have had him, and have him still — Quentin Tarantino may be the most famous public genuflector before Godard’s legacy, but everyone from Martin Scorsese and Abbas Kiarostami to Spike Lee and Wong Kar-wai, among innumerable others, all owe him a debt they could never pay out. Of the Godardian ’60s, this effervescent, self-mocking, effortlessly iconic beauty may be the master’s quintessential work, the ultimate commentary on how life and movies mate and spawn rapturous children. It’s not merely a guy-&-girl-on-the-run film, nor a farcical tango with the subgenre, but a living tissue, a fabulous and hilarious shared week in the life of Godard, Anna Karina and co-star Jean-Paul Belmondo as they make a movie together on the Cote d’Azur, and make it part of our lives, too. Karina and Belmondo, whatever their screen names, jump magically — that is, cinematically — from being acquaintances meeting at a high-end party (where Sam Fuller appears, pronouncing famously on the essence of cinema) to homicidal lovers escaping to a depopulated, semi-tropical island (in a convertible!), blithely leaving thug corpses in their wake. Nothing much happens: where another filmmaker would focus on taletelling, Godard trains in on the vibe, the aura, the juice, the silly elan of the movie-life experience. It’s very much a young man’s movie, a spirited lark with tragic modernist undertones and a sense of pretending that plays like new lovers’ experimentation with life. But it’s not real — when asked why there’s “so much blood” in the film by a journalist, Godard famously replied, “That’s not blood, that’s red.” — it’s a movie. That is, a graceful, rebellious, life-affirming fact of our culture community, just as it was in 1965 for Godard and his young, lovely, ocean-eyed wife, playing at being a genius and a movie star on the beach.
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, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39
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