Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 8
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
50/365: City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2002) (Hulu, Netflix)
An unforgettable, and unforgettably savage, Brazilian film deep-diving into the titular Rio housing project, as it evolves from a sprawling 60s wasteland to a mad, 80s Gomorrah of drug trade, impulse killing and nightened chaos. You can smell the friction of experience on it, while at the same time Meirelles (who came north afterwards, to make The Constant Gardener in 2005 and Blindness in 2008) powers the taletelling with all kinds of visual torch-juggling — panicky digital dollies, jazzy blax-era freeze-frames, massacres shot from satellite cameras, abject strobe frenzy, the P.O.V. of a fatefully ricocheting bullet — and it all feels integral to the sordid story, which involves way too many kids. (The entire cast are amateurs, culled from Rio slums; according to Meirelles, the tykes would occasionally advise him on details when filming street violence). The sight of so many very small children carrying and using handguns is eventually disorienting — a collapse of civilized perspective, a vision of hell on Earth.
51/365: Stranger than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984) (YouTube)
The movie that broke the ground of the punk-era American ultra-indie, made for ten cents and proud of it, shot without coverage (or even alternate angles) and luxuriating in the comic stillness of anomie and awkwardness. Two listless downtown dudes (John Lurie and Richard Edson), an unhappy Hungarian cousin (Eszter Balint), a why-not trip to Cleveland, lots of empty air and deadpan one-liners — Jarmusch carved out his defiant indie profile here, shooting every scene in one grainy, unmoving shot and daring us to lean in, to understand these rumpled characters’ lostness. In the end, much more than the sum of its naked, grungy parts.
52/365: Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000) (Netflix, Amazon Prime)
Many of us remember high school as a war zone, and in this ludicrous, disturbing, fascinating Japanese film the feeling is made literal: in some near future on the verge of youth-gang social collapse, Japan’s fascist government randomly selects a class of teens every year and strands them on an isolated island with one imperative: that they kill each other until one student is left standing. Sticking its nasty head out from the bloodsport-satire-dystopia line running from Elio Petri’s The 10th Victim (1965) to The Hunger Games franchise, this humdinger goes all emotional about high school (as is the tendency in Japan), and the kids’ catalogue of slights, betrayals, ostracisms, jealousies and clique-creation becomes suddenly a matter of homicidal payback and adolescent prairie justice. You think you had it bad.
53/365: Sorcerer (William Friedkin, 1977) (Amazon Prime)
Four men, two trucks, a distant oil fire, a load of unstable nitroglycerine, and a bajillion miles of unpaved South American hellhole roadway. A remake of the famous 1953 French film The Wages of Fear, Friedkin’s muscular, existentialist bad dream of a film has a sense of desperate emergency to it, being a jugular ordeal by environment and circumstance that no amount of vertiginous CGI fart-noise will ever approximate. The four men (an Arab terrorist, a Spanish hitman, a wealthy French embezzler, and Roy Scheider as an American mobster) must face the music to escape from their hideout in the mud, and Friedkin (riding high after The Exorcist) went with them, pulling a Werner and going deep into the Dominican Republic forest, spending like a drunken sailor, wrestling with nature itself, reveling in the American New Wave mania for hardcore reality. Even by ’70s standards, Sorcerer was a heart-attack movie, a voyage to somewhere you weren’t sure cameras were even supposed to go.
54/365: A Touch of Zen (King Hu, 1971) (Amazon Prime)
Indisputably the Gone with the Wind of Mao-era wuxia epics, King Hu’s never-forgotten landmark was the first wallop of Chinese genre mayhem many Westerners ever saw, and it won a prize at Cannes. Made in Taiwan, not Hong Kong, before Mao’s ban of all fun on the mainland was lifted, this three-hour-plus intrigue-athon begins when a supremely hot and impossibly cool mystery woman (Hsu Feng) moves into a haunted fort, attracting the interest of a local artist/buffoon (Shih Jun) but also bringing in her wake a torrent of internecine conflict, masquerading blindmen, warrior badasses, and a powerful eunuch’s sword-flashing minions. Hu didn’t invent wuxia hijinks here (he did that earlier with Come Drink with Me and Dragon Gate Inn), but the trampolining brio at work was the hi-test in the engine of the Hong Kong assault of the ’80s and ’90s. (The bamboo-grove battle was stolen outright by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and didn’t originally require digital touch-ups.) It’s far from a breathless or economical film; the old-school yarn and serene action editing can be, at such length, almost meditative. Settle in, feel your breathing, and get saturated.
55/365: Mudbound (Dee Rees, 2017) (Netflix, Amazon Prime)
A justly praised and awarded saga of all-American racial combat, this lyrical, sepia-soaked drama is set in ‘30s-’40s Mississippi, with two families (black tenant farmers, white bigots) pitted against each other over and on the same unforgiving plot of farmland. World War 2 snatches up sons from both families, and their respective destinies bring the tensions to a homicidal boil. Shot (and given a post-production umber glow) by Rachel Morrison, the film makes its points gracefully, while being filthy with poetic moments and emotional eloquence. (A mesmerizing standout in the cast, Mary J. Blige just has to look at you to make the story’s tragic dimensions resound.)
56/365: Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962) (YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Made for peanuts in Kansas (and the Utah salt flats) by a company normally busy with industrial shorts, this ghostly orphan of the ’60s is one of those movies whose ill-exposed film, stiff acting and general air of gray yesteryear poverty lends it a fantastic chill. A woman in a car gets run off a bridge — but survives, it seems, into an arid Lawrence, Kansas, where the heroine (an unforgettable Candace Hilligoss) sometimes goes unseen like a phantom among the populace, and is herself haunted by silent ghouls. It may be a loose adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” but it’s the dead-air sense of menace and dislocation that makes it stick in your memory like a burr. Like a movie made by dead people.
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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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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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