Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 15

Michael Atkinson
Nov 8 · 8 min read

A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming

99/365: Mother (Bong Joon-ho, 2009) (Vudu)

The new film Parasite is terrif, but this might be Bong’s best film, seething with his signature brand of narrative risk, razor-wire satiric invention, and genuine pathos. Ostensibly a murder mystery, the film places all of its bets on a lower-class, middle-aged mom (Kim Hye-ja), whose semi-retarded twentysomething son Do-joon (Won Bin) gets himself arrested for the bludgeon murder of a local girl. We slowly realize, as Kim’s diminutive mother relentlessly tries to disprove her son’s guilt and find the real murderer, resorting to flat-out crime, suicidal risk and then much worse, that this overlooked woman (nameless, except for “mom”) is another kind of animal altogether: a peasant herbalist who still cuts her son’s food up for him, who is as determined and fearless as a superhero, and who is also, it becomes clear, absolutely insane. In no time at all (just about the time she unwittingly causes a car wreck in mid-street), Do-joon’s mother becomes an unforgettable cinematic creation, a mysterious and even fearsome agent of rectitude so vividly crafted you remember her as you might a very real and crazy aunt. As usual with Bong, the modern South Korea she wends her way through is an unbalanced character all its own — the police are Keystone Kop fools and sadists (a recurring Bong motif), the social rituals (meals, funerals, even investigated crime scenes) are hair-raising debacles, the society itself is sick with secrets. Bong doesn’t control our reactions to his film — there are gruesome hunks of any Bong film that may seem fizzily funny to many viewers, and vice versa, and you never know how you’ll react.

100/365: Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, 1951) (Criterion Channel)

Barely heralded today among the midcentury Hollywood auteurs, Albert Lewin was as distinct in his personality as Alfred Hitchcock or Fritz Lang or Sam Fuller, and just as much of a terrarium-maker. His best film, this oddity is romance movie-ness on steroids; there’s nothing half-hearted or middling or realistic about it. True love equals cosmic doom and nothing less. Shot in mesmerizing Technicolor by master DP Jack Cardiff (Michael Powell’s favorite), Lewin’s film mixes up the between-the-wars air of Hemingwayesque aimlessness and despair with a mythic star-crossed love story, complete with ghosts and transmigrated souls — starring Ava Gardner yet, in her first color film and redefining what it means to be a four-dimensional sex-bomb movie icon. The story conforms fair tightly to the poppycock you’d imagine when you read the title — Gardner is a cynical expat earth goddess lingering in Spain with a coterie of smitten men, all of whom will either die or kill for her, until James Mason appears mysteriously in a yacht and slowly reveals himself to be, yes, a cursed Dutchman atoning for his sins for centuries. The film certainly looks like no other — Surrealist artist Man Ray supposedly contributed designs, and there’s no denying the film’s extraordinary compressed perspectives, American-Night beaches, antique totems, and Spanish landscapes, organically evoking the paintings of Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dali.

101/365: Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996) (Vimeo, Tubi, Hulu)

The only film to ever win awards from both the Cannes Film Festival and Adult Video News, this toxic Cronenberg prize is the kind of film that carves out its own exclusive territory in the cultural forebrain and dares us to cross its border. Adapted from the much-more-galling novel by J.G. Ballard, the scenario’s thrust is obsessively simple: a portrait of a tribe of deeply miserable people compulsively aroused by death and its proximity, defined with adroit precision by Ballard as that most singularly insane by-product of modern convenience, the car crash. Set amid the anonymous asphalt deserts of Toronto (an improvement, at least visually, over the novel’s English landscape), the movie tracks Jim Ballard (James Spader) as he experiences a devastating car crash and, upon recovering, plunges into a joylessly sexual exploration of his experience and of car wrecks in general. The film’s clincher is the postmodern rut between Ballard and Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette), a brace-supported wreck victim whose monstrous, vaginal leg scar becomes the ultimate orifice. It’s all an existential metaphor you can’t escape, particularly if you’ve been in a wreck yourself — and that includes most of us.

102/365: The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975) (Vudu)

Talk about existentialism: Antonioni brings his distinctive primal inquisition to the Third World, in his second English-language film. It’s a desolate parable about a mediocre TV reporter (Jack Nicholson, keeping it all buttoned up inside) stuck in North Africa who impulsively exchanges identities with a dead acquaintance in a desert hotel, not realizing then or caring much later that his new identity turns out to be that of a gunrunner with a whole boatful of open accounts. Everyone wants to sign up for a second chance at life, but here it becomes clear that no amount of identity-switching will save this nowhere man from himself. Camus could’ve written it, but only Antonioni could’ve shot it — it’s a stunningly beautiful, and beautifully desolate, film, with some of Antonioni’s most profound traveling sequences (which means they’re among the greatest tracking shots in film history).

103/365: Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954) (Amazon Prime, Criterion Channel)

A must-have, must-see film culture classic, based ultimately upon a centuries-old oral folk tale: in warlord-run medieval Japan, a railroaded governor’s wife and children are waylaid on a journey and sold into slavery, in a protracted and crushing study of power and injustice. No other film ever as carefully interrogated how corruption and social cruelty can play out over years of life — it’s not a film you should sit down to lightly; keep hankies, oxygen and ice water close at hand. Mizoguchi, semi-forgotten today and the peer to Ozu if not the superior to Kurosawa as well, is hopefully on his way to be reinstituted as a cultural giant worldwide, and this is one of perhaps a half dozen masterpieces that make the case.

104/365: Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2000) (Amazon Prime, YouTube, Vudu)

Having started as a rock journalist for Rolling Stone when he was 16, Crowe has long beens on intimate terms with the pop music beast without being the beast himself, and this semi-autobiographical comedy, about his youthful baptism-by-guitar-god-and-groupie, turns out to be a hilarious, heartfelt lovesong to sex, drugs, rock, fame, writing, moms, and the days when kids hid Foghat LPs under the beds. Crowe’s altar ego (played by the watchful, bashful Patrick Fugit) joins the company of the medium-big rock band Stillwater, whose lanky, long-haired frontman is the testy Jason Lee and whose charismatic lead guitar is a ditzy Billy Crudup, in easily his slyest and most engaging performance. At either end of the young hero’s tug of war between rock anarchy and rational life are Penny Lane (Kate Hudson), the angelic groupie princess harboring a powerful passion for Crudup, and Mom (Frances McDormand), a progressive teacher who allows her son to enter the fray without a clue as to what’s actually going on. Crudup’s phone conversation with McDormand’s uber-Mom, and his suburban acid-trip at a fan’s house, are unforgettable, and as legendary rock critic Lester Bangs, Philip Seymour Hoffman virtually thieves the film. In the end, it’s that rare Hollywood movie genuinely made for love — love of the music, love for the times, and love for the girl lost in the funhouse.

105/365: Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985) (YouTube, Vudu, Google Play)

Kurosawa’s great autumnal Mt. Fuji of a film, this Shakespearean epic made Kurosawa only the second Japanese filmmaker to ever get Oscar-nominated for Best Director (the other was Hiroshi Teshigahara, for Woman in the Dunes in 1965). Deftly jettisoning the Elizabethan texts (of both King Lear and Macbeth, conjoined here), the story follows a lord abdicating power and initiating wholesale war between his three sons, a mess abetted by a Lady Macbeth (Meiko Harada), and when Ran isn’t exploding into mass warfare, you have Kurosawa’s most judicious and effective use of Kabuki and Noh-style movie acting, set against landscapes soaked in bright blood, and employed with intimate grit when the family conflicts begin to really open and ooze. In her ghostly period guise and spidery physicality, suggesting a self-acknowledging evil that could easily slip into parody but doesn’t, Harada is a complete creep-out, but the movie belongs to industry stalwart Tatsuya Nakadai, under an exoskeleton of stylized makeup, as the beleaguered lord; it’s from his bug-eyed perspective we see the previously orderly, class-structured world literally collapse into fire, corpse stacks and madness. At the very least, you get a stylized recreation of 16th-century warfare manufactured not by programming wonks and hard drives but out of real space, real chaos (the title’s literal translation), and very real will, and we watch it roll out like the catastrophic folly of an actual war.

Previous 365

Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

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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Smashcut is a next generation learning platform built for real time, media-based education. Smashcut partners with universities and organizations to develop and deliver customized, branded, media-based online programs. The Smashcut platform features a high degree of collaborative instruction, and real-time student project review via live 1:1 video sessions with instructors. We built Smashcut to help the next generation of students learn to communicate ideas and work effectively in a culture and workplace increasingly dependent on visual media and digital collaboration. Learn more at Smashcut.com.

Smashcut

Preparing Students to Thrive in a Visual World

Michael Atkinson

Written by

is the Editorial Director of Smashcut, the author of seven books, a cinema professor for 25 years, and a member of the New York Film Critics Circle.

Smashcut

Smashcut

Preparing Students to Thrive in a Visual World

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