Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 7
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
43/365: Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988) (Hulu, Amazon Prime)
An almost inexplicable sci-fi nerve-shredder, this hallowed Katsuhiro Otomo anime follows a testy band of cycling youths in Neo-Tokyo as one of them crosses paths with a long-secret government project, which transforms him into a burgeoning, telekinetic monster. The detailed images of wholesale urban destruction are awesome and harrowing. It’s had many imitators co-opting its anarchist’s eye for cataclysm, Ghost in the Shell (1995) among them.
44/365: The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) (Netflix)
We’ll assume you’ve seen The Godfather, the darkling saga of which this hallowed, awarded sequel/prequel expands in two directions, going forward through the postwar years with the surviving Corleones, and backward, tracing the passage of the young Vito (Robert De Niro, another Oscar) and his rise to mafia don in the early century. Together it’s as deep-dish as American movies get; along with The Conversation, it makes an unmatched three-films-in-three-years coup for Coppola.
45/365: Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman, 1965) (YouTube)
There are 20 Bergman movies you need to see, stretching over a 30-year span, and this is merely one of the creepiest and most gothic. Max Von Sydow is an alienated and repressed artist with a pregnant wife (Liv Ullmann), on a remote Swedish island seemingly barren but for a patronizing aristocratic clique trying to penetrate the couple’s existence, and of course the artist goes slowly mad. The question remains whose hallucinations we see, and what exactly is true or imagined or dreamt.
46/365: It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) (Netflix)
A deserving indie hit, this inventive horror film-slash-Absurdist exercise is so insidiously full of subtext it’s barely sub — the MacGuffin is a shapeshifting force that’s transferred like a virus through sex (unless you pass it on, it will find you). Of course, it’s actually about more than STDs — the movie has a gravity and feeling of inexorable doom that suggests bigger things, meaning it might be the definitive 21st-century film about evolving into adulthood. Best of all, Mitchell limns the life of the stalked characters with agonizingly 360-degree pans, slowly coming back around to what no one else sees coming, a daylight haunting so ordinary you might not notice it until it’s too late.
47/365: Alois Nebel (Tomas Lunak, 2011) (Amazon Prime)
This tiny, moody, unheralded, Czech animation went unreleased in the US, but it’s a masterful, eye-popping mini-masterpiece, filthy with psychological atmospherics and physical detail, and nailing down the sensuous experience of a particular place and time — a rural train station in the Jesenik Mountains, in the late ’80s right before the collapse of Communism. The rather mysterious story revolves around a nearly mute middle-aged station agent, his memories of the war, and his eventual mental breakdown, which appears to coincide with a stranger illegally crossing the border in the middle of the night. The same computer rotoscoping tool employed by Richard Linklater in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly is at work here, deftly mustering visionary moments, suggestive shadow, dark-dreamy connections, and historical pain, and it never needs a propulsive narrative to keep your eyeballs glued to its stunning surfaces. Certainly, it’s one of the most hypnotizing movies ever made “about” the darkness of the European forest, which can easily be seen as having become substantially and irrevocably darker since 1936. Let’s get this odd beaut seen.
48/365: Hyenas (Djbril Diop Mambety, 1992) (FilmStruck until 11/30; other availability TBD)
One of the greatest of sub-Saharan African films, this sharp-eyed Senegalese bad boy adapts Friederich Durrenmatt’s play The Visit, in the tale of an embittered old woman returning to her village decades after being cast out, and offering the impoverished inhabitants all the money they need if only they’d execute the man who impregnated and abandoned her years before. As the title suggests, the townspeople do not comport themselves well, and the satire lashes out not only at human folly in general, but the corruption of the post-colonial world as well.
49/365: The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) (YouTube, Amazon Prime)
The Soviets in the ’20s were experimenting like madmen, but none were quite as risk-happy and radical as Vertov, however much he remained a happy Communist propagandist until the whims of the party made his free-associative visual style politically incorrect. This landmark is a portrait of ’20s Russian life, a portrait of the moviemaker as portraitist, and a portrait of cinema itself as a liaison between life and artifice. In 2012, the British Film Institute’s one-a-decade global critics’ poll judged this free-form doc to be the eighth greatest film ever made.
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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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