Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 9
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
57/365: 1900 (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1977) (YouTube)
A twelve-course feast of a movie if there ever was one. In the early 70s Bertolucci had massive global hits with The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris, and so he cashed in his cachet to make this over-5-hour national epic, which surveys pre-WWI Italian history like it was a world-sized painting come to thunderous life. Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu are an aristocrat and a bastard peasant, respectively, born simultaneously before the turn of the century, and maturing together during the rise of Fascism. Politically naive, this seemingly limitless pageant is chockablock with masterful set-pieces and stunning travelling shots, scored heartachingly by Ennio Morricone, and photographed like a Mediterranean dream by Vittorio Storaro.
58/365: Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998) (Hulu)
Anderson’s second film and arguably his best, this unpredictable and absurd coming-of-age farce may be the closest to an autobiography Anderson will ever make — being the saga of a 15-year-old genius-slash-misfit-slash-precocious savant, who can’t master the drudgery of schoolwork while only wanting to run the world his way. Jason Schwartzman is Max Fisher, a self-made ruler of his own little universe (a pretentious private school), in love with a grown woman (Olivia Williams), and unleashing one scheme after another to make her his. Ounce for ounce, moment for moment, the funniest film in Anderson’s catalogue, with an Oscar-worthy turn by Bill Murray as a disillusioned local businessman whose family life is collapsing. The movie is as tirelessly inventive and quirky as Max himself, and dense with fabulously realized characters, without getting over-structured like Anderson’s later films.
59/365: If… (Lindsay Anderson, 1969) (Amazon Prime)
British critic-turned director Lindsay Anderson made his mark in the British New Wave of the 60s with this boarding-school scorcher, which remade Jean Vigo’s famous rebel yell Zero de Conduite down to the rooftop climax, but in the process cut the English disciplinarian education system to ribbons. It was, also, a generational anthem-film, ill-mannered and furious and finally shockingly violent, and it offered a sharp-eyed Malcolm McDowell as an iconic figure for the time, making him Stanley Kubrick’s inevitable casting choice the next year for A Clockwork Orange.
60/365: The Wolfpack (Crystal Moselle, 2015) (Netflix)
Sometimes a documentary feel inevitable — as in, how could someone not make a film about the Angula brothers? Six of them, products of a Peruvian father and a midwestern mother, who grew up almost entirely sequestered in their cluttered Lower East Side apartment, hidden from the world, and absurdly saturated in Hollywood movies, which they would transcribe and reenact themselves, with homemade costumes. The family is more than a little warped (it’s all the father, who insisted the kids all grow their hair waist-length and be given ancient Sanskrit names), but the bros are fabulously charming, with big relaxed smiles and a zest for performance that puts them perfectly at ease in front of a stranger’s camera. Filming took five years, during which time the family’s bell-jar equilibrium gets turned upside-down by five of the six brothers entering into, struggling with, or emerging from adolescence, leading the boys, and Moselle’s film, into daylight at last.
61/365: Pi (Darren Aronofsky, 1998) (Amazon Prime)
Darren Aronofsky’s ferociously inventive debut movie (an award-winner at Sundance) doesn’t tell a story so much as jack it into your nervous system. Shot in black-&-white for $60K, rough, messy and primitive, but full of ideas, the movie follows the (largely interior) progress of a reclusive mathematician, whose entire apartment is a hard-wired, do-it-yourself computer devoted to discovering the secret code beneath what he sees as the ultimate system of ordered chaos — the stock market. After his homemade computer-room happens upon a potentially significant string of digits and crashes, the nervous brainiac is stalked by both mercenary Wall Street personnel and a Kabbalah sect intent on discovering the secret code hidden within their ancient texts, a number that may be the very name of God.
62/365: Clean, Shaven (Lodge Kerrigan, 1993) (Amazon Prime)
Lodge Kerrigan’s debut indie, forgotten in the Sundance heyday of Tarantino, Haynes, Moore, Linklater & Co., and a dangerous, defiantly experimental movie, following a mid-meltdown psychotic (Peter Greene) to his grubby home town to find the young daughter who had been taken from him, though we don’t know when, or if she’s real, or if most of the incredibly anxious film we see and hear isn’t entirely imagined by the tortured protagonist. Kerrigan eschews any kind of backstory, motivation or explanation, preferring instead to plant us within inches of the fuming, frenzied character, and giving us no room in which to breathe. No wonder it didn’t seduce Sundance mezzobrows — it may be the toughest and most evocative portrait of mental rupture in the history of film.
63/365: Drugstore Cowboy (Gus van Sant, 1989) (Amazon Prime)
Gus Van Sant’s second film but his first full-fledged masterwork, following the expressionistic yet ultra-real journey of four dopeheads (Matt Dillon, Kelly Lynch, James Le Gros and Heather Graham) as they live on the road, rob drugstores and eventually come apart at the seams. Adapted from an unpublished novel, and just as darkly funny as it is creepily fascinating, Van Sant’s exploration of fringe America — the backroads and weedy yards and empty rented tract houses of the restless, homeless high-seeker — burns with authenticity. With a saturnine cameo by Beat legend/junkie paradigm William S. Burroughs.
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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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