Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 17
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
113/365: Lady Vengeance (Park Chan-wook, 2005) (Tubi)
Park’s films became famous, with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy, for taking the Asian movie culture’s yen for emotional meth and tripling the dose — we came to expect that there will no half-measures, no dramatic gasoline unignited, nothing short of horrified respect for the costs of suffering, cruelty, memory and rage. This capper to the “vengeance” trilogy is Park’s most sullen and patient film, and yet it’s breathless pop filmmaking. This time, the decades-of-elaborate-retributive-plotting template is handed to the heroine, Guem-ja (Lee Yeong-ae), who after serving some 13 years for the killing of a little boy. She insists she did it, but we begin to suspect otherwise, as the bolero of dread builds over a complex jigsaw puzzle of a narrative, and soon enough Guem-ja’s frosty post-prison intentions come to light, revealing her prey — the kindergarten teacher actually responsible for the murder, played Oldboy’s unforgettable Choi Min-sik. The methodical scope of her payback plan, which utilizes her cultivated jailbird cohorts and the families of other murdered children, is vast and galling, but Park is less interested this time in submitting us to the chopshop than having us pick over prairie justice, even collectively enacted, and consider the mechanics of hatred.
114/365: Stars in My Crown (Jacques Tourneur, 1950) (Amazon Prime)
An utterly overlooked studio beaut, crafted by Tourneur (who’s more famous for Val Lewton horror films, a la Cat People, and glossy noir, a la Out of the Past) as a sober, sweet, rueful and sometimes grave love letter to small town life in the mid 1800s. The focus is on Joel McCrea as a Civil War-vet pastor essentially building the town by himself out of prayer, communal respect and solicitude, but of course the swarm around him is rich and resonant, from heroically kind neighbors to KKK lynch mob members — which, it’s made clear, are sectors that overlap. Blessed with an observant script (by Margaret Fitts and Joe David Brown, from Brown’s book), Tourneur captures passages that clear your lungs and sting your eyes; co-star Ellen Drew, as the pastor’s wife and mother to Dean Stockwell’s orphaned narrator, has her career peak in a single shot, fraught over her sick boy and worried that she should’ve been kinder to him, as though he were already dead.
115/365: My Joy (Sergei Loznitsa, 2010) (Kanopy, Sovietmoviesonline.com)
Imagine the early, hellaciously bleak Cormac McCarthy transposed to the corrupt outlands of modern Russia and Ukraine and composed with a steely psychopath’s disregard for cohesion, and you have something like Loznitsa’s debut feature, a two-hour-plus decathlon of evil cross-purposes and runaway iniquity. A documentarian by trade, Loznitsa trusts his camera, and distrusts dialogue just like his dire landscape’s assortment of feral mercenaries, whores, scroungers and cutthroats. It begins with a body tossed — splat — into a cement-filled pit and covered by a tractor in broad daylight; you forget about this gob in the eye soon enough, and instead follow a wary truckdriver (Viktor Nemets) trying to deliver his load but having his “story” get mangled, sidelined and hijacked. Mysterious strangers, inexplicable stoppages, leaps into the future, the ubiquitous presence of one kind of Russian bottomfeeder or another, all of shot with a restraint and gravity that’s almost terrifying. With a wandering dolly shot or a single abrupt cut, the narrative jumps the tracks, years pass, dramas we trailed after end very badly off-screen. It’s a maddening vision, elusive and enigmatic but clear as a winter day.
116/365: Leila (Darius Mehrjui, 1997) (Imvbox)
Mehrjui started making films in the ’60s, so he stood as a kind of grand mentor to the Iranian New Wave that followed. This late masterpiece, a clear-eyed, quietly devastating portrait of a newlywed Persian woman caught in the crosshairs of tradition and modernity, hits its marks by way of psychological nuance and patient observation. Its most crushing moments occur when we expect the film to cut away from the heroine (Leila Hatami) in the busybody Hollywood fashion, and instead it watches her as she ingests the reality of her situation — having discovered that the newlywed Leila is infertile, the couple is subject to insidious in-law scheming, in order to find a second wife (a rather unpopular but still available traditional option in Iranian society). The dynamic is very delicately worked out: the husband claims to have no interest in children or marrying again, while his mother works on the shy Leila like a jackhammer, getting her to endorse the second marriage because she’s led to thinks it’s what her husband truly wants. As the family shifts to accommodate the process of courting, Leila descends into an abyss of self-denial and depression. Mehrjui makes these connections subtly; often, we come to understand three or four layers of intention and response without anything being explicitly said. The pensively beautiful Hatami doesn’t act for us in the traditional sense; she cannot show her feelings to anyone. But her face, watch patiently enough, does the work.
117/365: Auto Focus (Paul Schrader, 2002) (Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube)
A straight-faced yet audacious biopic about Bob Crane, the star of the ‘Nixon-era hit sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, whose life was otherwise consumed — happily — with sex addiction and amateur porn production, Schrader’s movie is as strange a modern mainstream release as you’ll find — even given the rather remarkable performance of Greg Kinnear in the lead. Crane was, famously, killed, bludgeoned in his sleep with a tripod, in 1978; in the subsequent investigation, video documentation of his obsessive sexual career became public, and we all began to see Hogan’s Heroes in a different light. Once a star, Crane didn’t know how to stop living like one, even after his career receded to midwestern dinner theater. Schrader sees the absurdity of it all, and his film has a bouncy Candide quality, as Kinnear’s ecstatic hump-king blows through several marriages and bounces from one anonymous pick-up to the next, accompanied by techie/hanger-on John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe), who provided the then-cutting edge video equipment, who depended on Crane to lure bedmates, and who was never convicted of Crane’s killing. Together, they comprise a phallus-centered, toxic-masculine pas de deux that may be, hilariously, unique in American movies. Unlike many dead celebrities, Crane didn’t OD or pickle himself with hootch or swallow a bullet — the madness of celebrity indulgence killed him.
118/365: The Red Riding Trilogy (Julian Jarrold, James Marsh & Anand Tucker, 2009) (Hulu, Amazon Prime, Google Play)
Over five hours long all told, this tripartite British saga maybe the greatest film directed by three different people. Scanning something like a unified field theory of human darkness and modern social evil, splayed out in grueling, fascinating long form, the trilogy spans a full decade of fictional history in the nastiest chunk of “the North Riding” of Yorkshire, with dozens of characters, many of whom seem like neglectable supporting nobodies until they bloom later on as primary figures of malice or guilt or fermented secrets. It’s more than just a massive crime saga, trained on an entire society instead of a single killer or victim — it’s a web of mysteries, many not solvable, with a litany of corpses (sometimes little girls, sometimes teenagers, sometimes cops whacked by other cops) and fewer convenient answers than we’re usually comfortable with. Touching down in the northlands in 1974, then 1980, then 1983, each chapter is ignited by serial killings but fueled beneath the surface by monstrous police corruption, with a cast including Andrew Garfield, Mark Addy, Sean Bean, Paddy Considine, Peter Mullan, Rebecca Hall, Eddie Marsan, David Morrissey, and scores of other familiar faces. That little is morally clear or easy is the point, of course. Even the Yorkshire accents leave words unarticulated — feel free to opt for subtitles, but even natives will lean forward in their seats, wondering what was just unsaid. Made for Brit TV (unsurprisingly) and praised by critic David Thomson as a rival to The Godfather films, Red Riding is a masterpiece, but without an auteur — credit must be freely doled out to the directors, several producers, a single screenwriter and the original novels’ author.
119/365: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Phil Lord & Chris Miller, 2009) (Netflix, Vudu, Google Play, Amazon Prime, iTunes)
Not just a kid’s movie — this fanciful lark is in fact a scalding, stomach-churning, essentially Swiftian mockery of Americans, American privilege, and American gluttony. I say Swiftian thinking of not of Gulliver’s Travels so much as A Modest Proposal, in which, you’ll remember, Swift ripped Great Britain’s feast-&-famine inequities by advocating the selling of children to be eaten by the rich. You can’t unload an elephant gun like that anymore unless you disguise it as a lovable kids’ film, which WALL-E did a few years back, lacerating modern American consumerism with such shoot-the-wounded elan I was astonished when audiences seemed altogether unchastened. The same happened with this film, which uses Judi and Ron Barrett’s lovely, unsatirical little children’s book to uncork a firehose of stomach acid upon the ways we eat, overeat, demand convenience, and generally revel greedily in our own excesses. If you don’t know the set-up: a small town’s weather begins dropping food out of the sky, pancakes and hamburgers and mashed potatoes, by the metric ton. First it’s a delicious blessing, but soon the inundation becomes apocalyptic, and the food itself has cause to come supersized in monstrous portions. If it were a live-action film, it’d be nauseating to the point of being unwatchable: fetid, ripe mountains of peanut-butter sandwiches, bulldozed landfills of ice cream, steaks as big as swimming pools crushing houses. As it is, the food-drunk denizens of this all-American burg eat until they’re insane — we’re witnesses to scene after scene of characters distending their cartoon jaws and gulping down five-foot hot dogs, and so on. It’s a family film that would’ve had Luis Bunuel howling with glee.
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
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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