Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 49
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming — Fourth of July Edition
338/365: Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1984) (Netflix)
The gangster epic as fractured opium daydream, tripping back and forth in the skull of a Jewish hood (Robert De Niro) until the past, present and future more or less mush into a mournful opera of betrayal and guilt. Along for the pageant: James Woods as a weaselly cohort, Elizabeth McGovern as the trollop that got away, Tuesday Weld as a decaying slattern, and Joe Pesci as an unlucky rival. Directed by the man that made Clint Eastwood famous in a classic run of ambitious spaghetti westerns, this reckless monstrosity spends its plot, characters and themes like a drunken sailor — settle for nothing less than the nearly-four-hour version, but even then, the film can barely contain so much stuff. 1890s New York childhoods, teenage hookers, Prohibition, hits, rapes, backstabbings, lost love: Leone left nothing out, making the buddy elegy flip-side to The Godfather’s familial moan. With, ironically enough, one of Ennio Morricone’s most heartfelt scores.
339/365: The American Friend (Wim Wenders, 1977) (Criterion Channel)
Wenders was once a legitimate rival for the New German Cinema kingship alongside Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and this rueful neo-noir, adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel, is one of his major claims to fame. It’s a strangely epochal tale of criminal doom, starring Bruno Ganz as a terminally ill nobody sucked into an assassination plot by Dennis Hopper’s scheming Ripley (the same character from Purple Noon and The Talented Mr. Ripley, among other Highsmith versions), and down the underworld rabbit hole they go, amid Wenders’ usual New Wave zest for jukebox in-jokes and movie-freak references.
340/365: American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
1962 was still the ’50s in George Lucas’s small California burg, where, for some, Buddy Holly’s death marked the end of something grand, and the looming threat of the draft and Vietnam meant something else entirely was on its way. How could the antiseptic overlord of the Star Wars industry have thunk up something so charming, spontaneous, idiosyncratic and humane? A ’70s masterpiece, and the beginning of an entire culture phenomenon: retro-cool, this sublime evocation of a postwar Modesto of cars, rock ‘n roll radio and lost sub-adults certainly established the timeless stereotypes of that post-graduation summer night that everyone experiences: the high school sweethearts confronting college and separation (Ron Howard and Cindy Williams), the itchy smart kid who doesn’t know if college is what he wants (Richard Dreyfuss), the hopeless dweeb looking only to score (Charles Martin Smith), the cool dropout hood who cannot adjust to the real world (Paul LeMat). Seminal, roaringly funny and bittersweet.
341/365: Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (Craig Baldwin, 1991) (Fandor/Amazon)
A different kind of movie altogether: a famous bricolage “found footage” experiment, comprised entirely of disparate pieces of film-scrap ephemera (everything from Japanese sci-fi to Caribbean travelogues) into a hellzapoppin secret history of modern politics that itself executes media credibility and exposes our crazed thirst as a society for half-meaningful imagery. In a hilariously far-reaching conspiracy theory “rant” that entwines Atlantis, inner earth theory, Armageddon theology, killer bees and all-too-real Cold War American skullduggery in and around Central and South America in the postwar years, Baldwin skewers anti-Red mania, by positing “Communists” (a word mentioned only once) as reptilian aliens looking to take over the Earth. According to Baldwin’s conspirational narrator, Eisenhower met with the alien “Quetzals,” the CIA was invented for the sole reason of monitoring their activities, and a veritable laundry list of western hemisphere hotbeds — Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, etc. — are pinpointed as Quetzal ground zeroes. Early on, the 1949 suicide of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal is illustrated by an obvious dummy tossed from a high window and the title “UNDER TELEPATHIC ORDERS?” An activist at heart, Baldwin is also a post-punk “cargo culturist” whose garage-band politique sees no reason to tread lightly; representing Noriega with Lon Chaney’s Wolfman and Castro with a flea-bitten Moses are characteristic tropes.
342/365: American Honey (Andrea Arnold, 2016) (Netflix)
Perhaps no movie has captured the scroungy, aimless sense of modern American youth as acutely as this lengthy, detailed, ultra-realistic saga, which trails after a tough but trouble-plagued teen (Sasha Lane), who runs away from what crumbs of home she has and gets seduced into a shady sales crew driving across the Midwest selling magazine subscriptions door to door. The job is less a task to perform than a cult to join, led by sleazebag Shia LaBeouf and cold-hearted punk-queen Riley Keough, and the film treats the characters (many of whom are non-pro first-timers) as wildlife in a hostile landscape, with no room for sermonizing or easy answers. Arnold gets so close to her people that startling, immediate intimacy is the movie’s primary achievement.
343/365: Team America World Police (Trey Parker, 2004) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
The South Park and Book of Mormon boys may’ve broke their bank with this marionette satire, modeled formally on the old Thunderbirds Are Go! TV series, and plunging bobble-head-first into the morass of American political sentiment. Possibly the most Rorschachian political farce ever produced in Hollywood, the film appears to rub its shitty boots on U.S. militarism as well as Hollywood liberals, Arabs as well as the blinkered American perception of Arabs, unilateral destruction and Kim Jong-il. But really, just like South Park, Team America is a fairly consistent attack on Middle American slope-headedness, reproaching the millions of then-Bush-voters for their love of balls-out martial power, their gut-level xenophobia, their suspicion that “durka durka!” is an accurate-as-far-as-it-matters facsimile of how Arabs speak, their comic-book view of the world, their instinctive hatred for outspoken liberal celebrities, and, of course, their ardor for Jerry Bruckheimer movies. The songs alone, including the unforgettable “America, Fuck Yeah,” are worth the rent — but be prepared for puppet sex, puppet gore, puppet everything.
344/365: American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000) (Hulu, Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
A film that found its audience long after the time of its release, and long after the American era that it satirizes, Harron’s tasteful dance through Bret Easton Ellis’s mutilation catalogue of a novel (scripted, wittily, by Guinevere Turner) is a poison-pen letter to the Reagan era, with Christian Bale going all in as young 80s Wall Streeter Patrick Bateman, a disaffected automaton whose lifestyle is comprised on one hand of soulless brand-name consumerism and coke-fueled status-seeking, and, on the other hand, of psychotic murder. Capitalism and consumerism are amoral wastelands here, and Harron and Bale get plenty of merry yocks from the film’s sardonic stance. The film’s details are spot-on, its tone is ludicrously ironic (Reese Witherspoon makes a fabulous blue-blood filly, and all of Bateman’s associates are played by actors who all have the same chiseled brow and jaw), and the casting is deft. It’s Bale that pushes the movie away from tasteless moralism and toward absurdism: he begins by playing Bateman broadly, as if the guy were a pompous graduate of Animal House’s evil-bastard fraternity, and then slowly Bale pushes him into a warped TV-fueled caricature, a Wink Martindale-inflected gargoyle who’s learned all he knows about being a man from newscasters and sitcoms. Seeing Bale earnestly launch into a dissertation on Huey Lewis & the News while preparing to axe a very drunk co-worker (Jared Leto), is to see why this movie has snagged an entire new generation of devotees — and why there’s been talk about a contemporary remake.
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, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48
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