Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 43
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
295/365: Thirst (Park Chan-wook, 2009) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
The first vampire film to ever win a prize at Cannes, this Korean humdinger from the director of Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance places the ethical dilemmas of human parasitism and survival front and center — the hero (Mr. Korean New Wave Song Kang-ho) is an earnest priest, who dies in a vaccine experiment and is then mysteriously resurrected, confused and at first harmlessly quenching his blood-hunger by sipping IV bags at the hospital. Soon, though, he is entwined in a fraught romance/co-addiction, and soon the straight-on vampire stuff turns a subtle but savage corner, sliding into a hair-raising dogfight of surreal irony and anxiety. Park’s joke shots turn out painful, and his serious art-film tableaux always have a sardonic gag buried in them; the image of the two lovers feeding from each others’ slit wrists is only the beginning of the struggle between devotion and predation.
296/365: Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002) (Netflix, Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
This is the only Adam Sandler film you need to see, and not only because it’s thoroughly atypical of the man’s catalogue — it’s a PTA film through and through, eccentric, larky, capable of any kind of poetic inversion. Sandler is a socially anxious schlub with a bizarre novelty-plunger business, a coven of hilariously abusive sisters, a half-assed contract put out on him by four gangster brothers, and a romance he’s trying to keep alive, with the redoubtable Emily Watson. There’s more — including a master bit by Philip Seymour Hoffman — and none of it is predictable or ordinary.
297/365: McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, Google Play, YouTube)
Perhaps the greatest anti-western, if that’s what it is, this New Hollywood landmark is pure time travel, as sensually immersive as any American film of any era. The manifestation of a foggy Pacific Northwest mining town in the 1880s (abetted famously by Vilmos Zsigmond’s pre-flashing the film stock) has the intoxicating quality of a gaslight memory, a diffuse, smoky, groggy return to the past. Warren Beatty is a smalltime gambler come to town, Julie Christie is the seasoned hop-head prostitute looking to open a brothel, and their union thrives so well that eventually moneymen come from the East, looking to take over. Altman’s camera floats into this dead-on milieu with wide-open eyes, piercing the mist and exploring as it were one of the town’s newcomers, half-hearing conversations and squinting through bustling human fauna. It all unfolds so organically it’s like heavy snow falling and building drifts, with a classic Altmanesque weft of crisscrossing stories: Shelley Duvall’s vulnerable young mail-order bride/widow, Keith Carradine’s good-time cowboy, a young black couple’s observant existence on the social edges, plus a half-dozen other recurring personages, all alive and busy in the life of the town even when, it seems, they’re not in the frame.
298/365: Lost in America (Albert Brooks, 1985) (Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube)
Brooks has only made seven films in the last 40 years, and six of those (excluding 1999’s unaccountable oddity The Muse) remain among the most scabarous mainstream American comedies ever made. Unlike Woody Allen, whose interrogatory impulses were always buried in vanity and nostalgia, Brooks is a bare-knuckle self-excoriator, self-aware to the point of self-crucifixion, and this might be his most socially aware film, framing up narcissistic Los Angeles media affluents for the firing squad. He plays a hyper-neurotic ad exec geared up for a promotion he doesn’t get; after a tantrum, he’s fired, and convinces his wife (Julie Hagerty), who also suffers from an aging sense of lost ’60s freedom, to liquidate everything, “drop out,” buy a camper, and joyously hit the road. Brooks’ masterstroke is structural: they get almost nowhere, after Hagerty’s even-keel better half loses her mind in Vegas and gambles away their nest egg. The anxiety and abuse of the story is never not funny, but it’s also far more hopeless and misery-laden than Hollywood films can ordinarily hope to be, focusing single-mindedly on the crisis of sudden poverty, and putting a flamethrower to complacent American materialism in the Reagan era. In the meantime, Brooks’ wheedling jerk is unforgettably awful, and the cataract of combative dialogue throws away more good lines (“We’re in Hell, we entered Hell, when?”) than most movies muster in their entirety.
299/365: Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
An odd Golden Age classic, kind of melding Hitchcockian thriller and “women’s film,” this haunter brought Ingrid Bergman her first Oscar, as a young wife whose suave, secret-keeping Mediterranean husband (Charles Boyer) may be trying to drive her insane. From whence came the verb “to gaslight,” this nerve-jangling essay on marital distrust will brand the duplicitous Boyer (and his constant refrain of “You’re forgetting again, Paula”) on your memory forever. The earlier, subtler version made four years earlier in England (forbidden a US release by MGM after a remake was slated), starring Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard, is also available on Vudu.
300/365: Four Lions (Chris Morris, 2010) (Hulu, Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Jihadist terrorism gets a Brit pub-lad slagging with this deft comedy, which trails after four London Arab punks (led by Riz Ahmed) who aspire to martyr themselves with a spectacular act of violence, but can never get out of each others’ way. As orchestrated by Brit-TV vet Morris, it’s a hellacious cascade of dumb and dumber, which in this case leads to self-destructive catastrophes that are as sharply satirical as they are satisfying. Unjustly neglected.
301/365: Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) (Netflix, Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
If you haven’t been to this well yet, you’re overdue — here QT defined his vision, his audience and a substantial section of millennial culture, in a tasty self-mocking melange of genre tropes (including outright thefts from French gangster films of the ’60s and Hong Kong crime films of the ‘80s). A murderers’ row of actors (Jackson, Travolta, Thurman, Keitel, Willis, Walken, Stoltz, etc.) are, amazingly, completely upstaged by the screenplay. Which won an Oscar.
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, 40, 41, 42
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