Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 10
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
64/365: Matador (Pedro Almodovar, 1986) (Vudu, Amazon Prime)
A Spanish teddy bear now, Almodovar in the ’80s was one of the most reckless, diabolically inventive voices to arise from, or at least alongside, the post-punk years of Reaganometry and new-wavey glitz. (Of course, his real incubator was the oppressive Franco dictatorship, which ended with the generalissimo’s death in 1975.) The opening act of this scorcher tells you everything: a montage scrambling real bullfighting carnage, a depressed ex-bullfighter masturbating to TV slasher gore, and the sexual day trip of a sultry lawyer-seductress who picks up a loser, kills him in mid-sex with a hairpin estocada through the back of the neck, and continues to, er, necrophilic satisfaction. The film, arguably Almodovar’s most vividly outrageous, proceeds from there along a path of psycho-romantic sex-death that deliberately echoes hysterical Hollywood classics like Duel in the Sun, and in the process shines an x-ray on Spanish bloodsport culture that felt brand new in the ’80s and seems remarkably savvy still. Strong but pretty poison, from an era when trouble-making and censor-disturbing were high priorities.
65/365: Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927) (YouTube, Amazon Prime, Vudu, Google Play)
Murnau’s career-peaking moment and the crowning film from that sacred, edge-of-the-abyss year of 1927, this luminous silent classic is so commonly and universally hallowed you may be surprised by its preachiness and very retrograde sexual politics. But oh how little textual complaints matter if you’re caught in the silvery path of this perennial and succumb to its ordeal by light. Every discussion of cinematic movement and its marriage to meaning begins with here: a Hollywood “prestige” project that left ’20s audiences cold (it debuted exactly two weeks before The Jazz Singer instantly turned silent film into yesterday’s jalopy) but remains one of the medium’s genuinely fresh experiences. That is, individual passages (the marsh walk, the trolley ride, etc.) are so lyrically tactile, so swoony in their intention to transform your spectatorship into something else, that their experience is like music you cannot hear, and they virtually define what is “cinematic” from that point on, away from the old debts to novels and theater. It’s also just a melodrama, a story of a marriage’s collapse and restoration and mortal trial, but the achievement of Murnau and his team is having made the film move in ways that aren’t narrative, but poetic.
66/365: Lured (Douglas Sirk, 1947) (Amazon Prime, Vudu)
One of the American B-movie programmers Sirk spent a decade making in Hollywood after emigrating, before the vivid, big-budget Ross Hunter melodramas that eventually formed his reputation in the ’50s, this luscious matinee daydream is virtually constructed wholly out of studio-set cobblestone, costume-bin chicanery, and fog-machine atmosphere. Sirk’s eloquence and exuberant staging is as manifest as his high-culture European-ness. Set in the present but quickly overcome with timeless gaslight (it’s not an England that knew WWII), the movie is a murder mystery in which Scotland Yard enlists out-of-work Yankee broad Lucille Ball to be bait for a personal-ad serial killer (who may or may not be Casanova/theater producer George Sanders). Even the forensics are made rich and fascinating, and the supporting cast is a hive of eccentrics, particularly Boris Karloff as a red-herring lunatic who solicits girls to playact his own glorious fashion-designing past amid mannequins and an enthroned bulldog. It’s also character-star George Zucco’s finest hour, looking every bit like Keith Moon Sr., truckling around as an undercover dick forced to watch over the irritatingly sassy Ball. Craftily written (by Leo Rosten), with triple twists that would only become familiar stuff in the ’80s, it’s as inventive, confident, and spry as B movies got in the day.
67/365: Flooding with Love for the Kid (Zachary Oberzan, 2007) (Vimeo)
This nano-indie is as much of a stunt as it is a movie: Oberzan’s idea was to remake First Blood (or, more accurately, adapt David Morrell’s original novel), in a 220-square-foot New York apartment with one video camera and one lone wild-eyed filmmaker/actor/editor/designer/soundman — himself. The refrigerator serves as the town diner, his closet is the flashback-to-‘Nam ratpit, his bathtub is a river, his living room (complete with CDs stacked in the old fireplace) is the northwestern woods, with only a few fir branches scattered around suggestively. The just-do-it Godardian disregard for realism and movie-movie ardor is a given with these boundaries, and shouldn’t be dismissed. But look at what it becomes — filling out more than 20 roles by himself (as well as three police dogs), Oberzan scuttles and runs and crawls through his own apartment playing pretend like a gradeschooler, with all of the earnest conviction and passion that implies. This isn’t a question of whether anyone could make this film — in a large way, we all did already, as kids. With the familiar pulp narrative playing out (there’s no Stalloning involved; Oberzan reimagines every character, often with ridiculous accents), the experience becomes a poignant paean to preadolescent imagination and how much cinema owes to it. In fact, the degree to which you can get sucked into Oberzan’s reenactment becomes rather astonishing — a pivotal night “chase scene” through the “wilderness” is actually almost thrilling — and you’re reminded yet again how easily, like children, we accept transparent fakery of the worst kind in service of old-fashioned, Edwin S. Porter-style storytelling. It doesn’t matter, finally, that the megaphones are disposable cups and the ham radio is a toaster and the forest animal Oberzan’s Rambo kills, cooks and eats is a small teddy bear.
68/365: Our Nixon (Penny Lane and Brian L. Frye, 2013) (YouTube, Amazon Prime, Vudu, Google Play)
Born from a miracle of found footage, this found-footage assemblage provides an inside portrait of the 20th century’s most scandalous presidential administration. When you consider the Nixon regime’s neurotic obsession with surveillance, proactive espionage and secret-keeping, it’s a head-slapper: hundreds of reels of 8mm home movie footage shot in and around the White House by self-professed “camera bugs” H.R. Haldeman, John Erlichman and Dwight Chapin from the 1969 inauguration until 1973, when the staffers were forced to resign and face the Watergate hearings. Four short years, but what a payload of historical poison, and what a time in the history of modern American government to have these innocent-seeming soul-sellers acting like camera-crazy tourists in their own lives. (The films were seized as part of the 1973 Watergate investigation and sat forgotten in the FBI archives.) The home movies are buttressed by news reels, TV interviews and, best of all, reams of secretly recorded phone conversations between Nixon and the 8mm-enthralled staff, as they all confront in flustered damage-control mode first the Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers, and then the self-immolation that only began with burglar Donald Segretti and the break-in at the Watergate Hotel. It’s almost by definition an audio-visual footnote to the real history of the Nixon years, and as such it’s less involved with factual revelation than with glimpses of emotional context — an almost pathological narcissism, or at least a giddy sense of privilege and power that these convicted schemers would do almost anything to protect.
69/365: The Burglar (Paul Wendkos, 1957) (Amazon Prime)
A neglected, crafty, muscular film noir, adapted by noir pope David Goodis from his own novel, this lowdown crime jaunt gets in deep with wary break-in artist Dan Duryea, whose last job — a single bejeweled necklace high in a mansion’s safe — is compromised by his ersatz stepsister (a young and strangely affecting Jayne Mansfield), his own tortured past, his high-maintenance cronies, and, finally, a corrupt patrol cop who schemes to relieve him of the booty. The supporting cast is indelible if not often savvy (the exception is a man-worn Martha Vickers, best known as the nympho younger sister in The Big Sleep). Shockingly frank about legacies of sexual abuse and all-American corruption, it deserves to be reseen and lofted up onto the genre’s higher shelves.
70/365: The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998) (Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play)
There is little dispute any longer about the preeminence and magical stature of this war epic, adapted by a long-absent Malick from the old James Jones novel and molded into the most radically mainstream-defying non-narrative art film ever made on the Hollywood dime. Awake viewers knew immediately what they had: an epic Whitmanic lyric, using Guadalcanal and the Pacific war as a defiantly free-associative brood on man’s fraught relationship to nature. Its greatest achievement, arising from the weft of cutaways, dreamtime soundtrack reveries, found phenomena, disconnected combat episodes, and explicit metaphysical inquiry, is the creation of a cinema with a truly communal voice, a portrait of humankind not refined down to individuals and story. In some ways a manner of reimagining Wenders’s Wings of Desire but without the angels, Malick’s everyone-is-Everyman approach empties the film of traditional screenplay clockwork, filling it up instead with an elegiac, epiphanic sympathy that feels almost liturgical. In a deliberately ironic move, the bigger stars (George Clooney, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack, John Travolta) play officers and are barely seen; other then-newbies (Adrian Brody, Jim Caviezel, Dash Mihok, Ben Chaplin, Jared Leto, Elia Koteas) are more front and center, with Sean Penn and Nick Nolte standing in as opposing forces of wartime humanity and bloodthirsty ambition, respectively. But there’s no hero, no main character. Just the lostness of war.
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Year One 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, 50, 51, 52
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