Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 5
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
29/365: The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015) (Amazon Prime)
This recent freakout, the fourth film by Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, may be the strangest, and most disarming film of the last decade. It’s all metaphor all the time, following nebbish Colin Farrell through a monotonal dystopic world (depicted as a lush, old-fashioned Euro-resort) in which single people must find mates or be transformed into the animal of their choice. There are, chillingly, animals everywhere, and anti-coupling rebels that live in the woods, and a very cruel love story. Should be seen at least twice.
30/365: Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965) (Amazon Prime)
Movies’ pioneering modernizer, Jean-Luc Godard believed in film as a fascinating part of life, not an escapist alternative to it. He dominated the ’60s, and smack in the middle of that most Godardian era came this genre-art-film lab explosion, equal parts film noir, dystopian sci-fi, self-knowing meta-film, unstable espionage thriller, genre satire, and so on. Godard doesn’t take his Bogartian agent’s covert battle against an evil computerized dictatorship seriously, and at the same time nothing is more vital in the world than the faux-drama and hyper-coolness saturating the film’s shadowy Parisian streets, lobbies, hallways and hotel rooms. Every cock of Eddie Constantine’s fedora and shudder of Anna Karina’s eyelashes is, for Godard and us, both the stuff of modern myth and as real in our lives as food, sex, music and friendship.
31/365: Blue Is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013) (Netflix, Amazon Prime)
A three-hour French epic about one girl — the camera-seducing Adele Exarchopoulos — whose messy life gets much messier when she decides she’s gay, falling in love with the more-experienced, blue-haired Lea Seydoux. Sounds simple, and it is, but the accumulation of moments is blisteringly real (including the infamous sex scenes), and in the end it’s the saddest doomed-lesbian-romance movie ever made.
32/365: Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) (Hulu, Amazon Prime)
And this is its companion piece, the saddest doomed-closeted-gay-cowboy-romance movie ever made, which makes it sound campy while it’s anything but. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal are are indelible as the herd hirelings keeping their secret in the mountains of Wyoming, Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway are the women they betray, and director Lee makes the tragedy bleed. Won piles of awards, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay Oscars.
33/365: Lessons of Darkness (Werner Herzog, 1992) (Netflix)
German adventurer Werner Herzog always made documentaries beside his feature films — which were often a kind of documentary themselves, mixing risky natural reality in with the fiction, and letting the chips fall where they may. Here he goes to the oil fields of Kuwait after they’d been set ablaze during the Gulf War, and flies amidst the desert infernos as though he were a messenger angel visiting Hell. A masterpiece of pure, awful visual spectacle, brimming with implications about humanity’s folly inflicted on nature.
34/365: Female Prisoner Scorpion X 4 (Shunya Ito & Yasuharu Hasebe, 1972–73) (Amazon Prime)
This crazy quartet of Japanese pulp explosions — from Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion to Female Prisoner Scorpion: #701’s Grudge Song — comprise a rambling women’s-prison/vengeance odyssey in which a lone beauty (the ever-iconic Meiko Kaji) battles the male world in a spiralling exchange of bloodletting mayhem of every imaginable kind. The directors stopped at nothing, and saw no reason not to stop-motion animate the heroine’s hair, wash sets in contrasting Day-Glo colors, spasm characters into Kabuki make-up, shoot through glass floors that weren’t there, and so on. A B-movie cyclone of voguing gender war, scored to a single plaintive pop ballad, a “grudge song… of vengeance!”
35/365: J’Accuse (Abel Gance, 1919) (YouTube)
French giant Abel Gance thought movies should be monumental — his 1923 masterpiece La Roue is over four hours long, while his most famous film, Napoleon (1927), taps out at 5 ½ hours. This early silent anti-war saga is a mere 166 minutes, revolving around a tortured love triangle in the south of France. But it’s big in its own way, being the first major film about WWI, shot partly on real battlefields before the war was over (Gance was a recent vet himself), and, in the famous hallucinatory climax, using real maimed and crippled veterans as a zombie-like army of returning war dead.
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Smashcut 365 is a weekly recommendation of films for budding cinephiles — seven films a week, one a day, no repeats — ranging from classic masterpieces to new and provocative indies and imports, intended to kickstart your cinephilic habit.
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