Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 50
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
345/365: The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018) (YouTube, Vudu, Amazon Prime)
For our money the most consistently inventive directorial voice at work today, Lanthimos staked out his scandalous, metaphor-drowned territory with Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and then pivoted semi-mainstream with this insidiously hilarious costume biopic, set in 1708 during the troubled reign of the sickly and depressed Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), surrounded by a vexing web of court intrigues, particularly by way of her two court “favourites” and off-&-on lovers (Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone). Performed within an inch of its life, written in acid, and shot with Lanthimos’ characteristic dry-fish-eye sarcasm, it’s a bracing anomaly. Colman won an Oscar, even though all three actresses insisted they should be counted, and awarded, as a triumvirate.
346/365: The Swimmer (Frank Perry, 1968) (Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube)
Only in the ’60s — a strange, creepy wedge of all-American existentialism, based on a canonized John Cheever story, about a man (Burt Lancaster) appearing in his neighbors’ New England yards and proclaiming his intention to “swim home” through a series of their luxurious pools. The clues start dropping, mostly from his baffled neighbors’ mouths, about how the opulence, euphoria and familial joy the man feels is in fact all dead in the past, and the present is a lost and terrified stumble through the ashes of a failed and empty upper-middle-class life. So strange and dark its producer disowned it, the film has the quality of a real nightmare, the child-like terror of getting stranded, near-naked, far from home, but in the persona of a postwar family man, for whom things are very far from the way they’re supposed to be. One of its posters cut to the bone, asking, “When You Talk About ‘The Swimmer,’ Will You Talk About Yourself?” Try to ignore the perfectly rancid Marvin Hamlisch score.
347/365: Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (Jay Roach, 1997) (YouTube, Vudu, Amazon Prime)
By now a franchise and a near-universal cultural gag, Mike Meyer’s deft retro creation is not at all a parody of the James Bond series but of the secondary Bondian culture, much of it self-satirizing, exemplified by James Coburn’s Derek Flint, Dean Martin’s Matt Helm, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and the Dick Clement/Ian Le Frenais series of spy spoofs. In other words, Myers was aiming at the cheesiest aspects of ’60s culture, not the most popular, and his vapid, hedonistic, terminally trendy British superspy, “the ultimate gentleman spy,” is a masterwork of time-capsule comedy. Given to velvet pantsuits, possessed of extraordinarily bad teeth, and behaving generally as if he stepped out of a Richard Lester movie gone rancid (complete with psychedelic musical numbers), Powers, even after he unthaws in the ’90s to chase Dr. Evil, is a rotating-bed, Burt Bacharach-scored wonder, peerlessly evocative of his era as we experienced it in matinees and on TV.
348/365: Here Is Your Life (Jan Troell, 1966) (Criterion Channel)
Little seen in the ’60s outside of Sweden, Troell’s feature debut is one of the New Wave era’s mega-bildungsroman epics, a nearly-three-hour mood piece about growing up in the Nordic high country at the beginning of the century. Adapting a three-volume autobiographical novel by eventual Nobel-winner Eyvind Johnson, Troell crystallizes the European period’s rampaging affair with experiential details and mood, following his young hero through poverty and brute work in a fluttering flow of impressions and experiences, with little or no exposition or context surrounding them, and none required. Encounters, challenges and obstacles arise, but we understand the passage as in-between details and moments, overheard conversations, dalliances with girls, views from train windows, memories of hard work. Along the way, the watchful but not terribly vocal boy becomes slowly radicalized, in the WWI years of nascent Bolshevism, democratic socialism and bohemian anarchism, and his politics chop up against his employers in a building crescendo, as he matures and the actor (Eddie Axberg) playing him seems to actually age. Troell throws in every subjective trick in the book: freeze-frames, double exposures, extreme perspectives, cutaway evocations of memories and dreams, elliptical time jumps, and so on, shot (by Troell) in lustrous black-&-white when the film doesn’t in fact burst into hazy color. The collage-y shape of the thing is fabulously seductive, and its place of pride in the evolution of mid-century art film is rock-solid — without perhaps being seen at all, the film seems to have influenced everyone from Terrence Malick to Miguel Gomes.
349/365: The Gleaners & I (Agnes Varda, 2000) (Vudu, Amazon Prime)
French New Wave stalwart and independent film queen Agnes Varda, 70 at the time, had a global hit with this self-referential documentary, which is quite a bit like contemplating the world over wine with an anarchist aunt. Always present in her own film, to the extent that she will often detour and simply contemplate the wrinkles on her hands or the deterioration of her house (shared for many years with the late Jacques Demy), Varda is simply sharing, and her film is profoundly humane. Her target subject is a slippery one, and one that has more social significance in France than it does here: “gleaning,” as it is depicted in the famous 1867 Millet painting of women scavenging for wheat kernels left after the harvest, and as it is performed today — the salvaging of crops, of appliances, of prepared food, of trash to be used as art objects. Varda’s ruminations consider this practice within every context imaginable, by fringe-dwellers rejected by the capitalist mainstream, and by others for whom it is a matter of ethical living in an insane world of mass production, mass distribution and mass disposal.
350/365: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols, 1966) (Netflix, Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
The landmark film of the landmark play, a four-handed autopsy of postwar American life’s failures and disappointments (a sibling-film to The Swimmer, you could say, but the ’60s were hip deep in movies and novels plumbing that zeitgeist), in which two university-faculty couples — an aging second-rate professor and his tyrannical wife (Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor), and a new hire and his innocent wife (George Segal and Sandy Dennis) — face up for a long evening of drinking, cruel confessions, battering-ram marital warfare, and mutual emotional disembowelment. Merciless and nuclear-dramatic in a way movies-from-plays have long forgotten to be, it was Nichols’ first film; everybody was Oscar-nominated, and Taylor and Dennis won.
351/365: Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
The prototypical realist outlaw road movie of the Nixon days, Terence Malick’s first film is a fictionalized account of the Charlie Starkweather-Caril Ann Fugate Midwest murder spree of the late ’50s. Gorgeous and scary, it’s a lyrical portrait of disaffection, in which the teen killers, played with mesmerizing vacancy by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, never seem to care what happens or why. Riveting and dismaying, the movie implicates the movie-soaked pop culture from which the youths sprang: “He looked just like James Dean,” Spacek’s Holly explains in her hick True Confessions-type narration, which sees the film’s whole landscape through the rose-colored squint of a teenage mind overfed on cheap magazines. As much a film about America as, by now, a piece of Americana itself.
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, 49
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