Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 18 — Thanksgiving Edition
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
120/365: Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play)
Allen’s great, sweeping, intimate, moving comedy-drama about a sprawling, neurotic New York showbiz family, their failures, cross purposes, heartbreaks and hilarious obsessions, all of it spanning two Thanksgiving Day celebrations and tracking the crisscrossing paths of three grown sisters (Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey and Dianne Weist), each lost in their own way. Segmented into brisk, poetically-titled chapters, scored with a mix of old show tunes and Puccini, and armed with brave performances (including Michael Caine, Max Von Sydow, Maureen Sullivan and a sadly semi-Alzheimer-ish Lloyd Nolan), it’s one of those rare, grown-up films — even from Allen — that summons a palpable sense of healing, joy and resilience without for a moment pandering to sentimental wishes or surrendering its sometimes harrowing relationship with the real world. It’s not merely the premier film for the season, but it is certainly that.
121/365: King Kong (Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play)
Growing up a New Yorker in the TV never-never-land of the 1960s and 1970s, Thanksgiving meant one thing: giant apes. For some obscure reason a local broadcast station (back when we had local broadcast stations) would always air, year after year, King Kong, Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young from noon to dinnertime. In some households it was the Dallas Cowboys, in others it was the Macy’s parade, but in certain homes the day was filled with images of black-&-white hand-animated gorillas rampaging through the respective jungles of Skull Island and midtown Manhattan. The then-brand new Empire State Building instantly acquired a legendary aura for millions worldwide who had never been to New York, while Kong’s decimation of the Third Avenue El has become — in our movie culture’s subconscious, at least — how the famed subway actually disappeared. This counterprogramming was so consistent it became an ersatz annual tradition for a generation — and exactly why those anonymous, old-school TV programmers (channel 9, we think) chose this very narrow subgenre of movies for this particular holiday remains a mystery. Somehow today it makes sense, if for no other reason than because Thanksgiving, to kids, is often little more than a big meal. So, on a day that’s dependably gray, cold and somewhat dull, we were treated to grainy Depression-era urban camaraderie, holy-smokes wisecracker Robert Armstrong, foggy island-scapes, vertiginous cliffs (stalked by pterodactyls!), and horrific images of gargantuan chaos — escapism defined, best seen on the living room rug with a good November rain rasping outside. Annual traditions can tend to be silly and arbitrary in America, and there’s no reason this one shouldn’t catch on again.
122/365: Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, 2006) (Criterion Channel, Amazon Prime)
American movies don’t come much smaller, subtler or swoonier with tactile experience than Reichardt’s festival hit, her second feature — a rare commitment to heartfelt naturalism, the most difficult special effect of all, keeps the movie free of bull and cool-indie toxins. In Portland, Oregon, one old college friend calls another: let’s get lost, just for a few days, in the Cascades. It’s a distinctly 21st-century generational impulse, one Reichardt caught early, and proceeds to dismantle with doubt and ambivalence. Mark (Daniel London) is a watchful, even-tempered father-to-be with a high-pressure job; Kurt (Will Oldham) is an unmarried searcher, still living the West Coast dorm-life paradigm with odd jobs, a headful of weed, and stories of spiritual awakenings. They head for a hot-springs retreat in the forest, can’t find it, camp elsewhere, then arrive and kick back. That’s it, but we see much more: it might be the only film ever specifically made about that universal moment when the bonds of youth begin to rust and fade and become irrelevant beneath the pressures of age and responsibility. The moist wilderness around the protagonists is unforgettably sensual, but it’s the men’s unspoken conflict, with the onslaught of time as much as with each other, that haunts your thoughts.
123/365: A Cottage on Dartmoor (Anthony Asquith, 1929) (Amazon Prime)
A kind of modern-Gothic psycho-thriller that is astonishingly frank for its day, this long-forgotten silent is almost certainly one of the greatest of all British films made before WWII. The story begins with a prison break and a chase on the moors, but soon “wakes up” to life in a busy London salon, where a socially awkward barber (Uno Hemming) loves a manicurist (Norah Baring), who really has eyes for a goofy rich client (Hans Adalbert Schlettow). You’d think the scenario would careen down predictable avenues, but it doesn’t — and neither do any of the three characters remain defined by our initial impressions. In the meantime, Asquith pulls out the Expressionist-Murnovian-Eisensteinian-Hitchcockian stops — POVs reflected within other reflections, arch shadow design, hypnotic use of Vermeerian light, sweaty off-kilter close-ups, skewed compositions, even instances of illustrative montage (cutting to what the characters are thinking or talking about as they talk or think about it) several years before Fritz Lang’s M. Even the second act’s throat-cutting climax, complete with the dazed razor-wielder absent-mindedly wiping his victim’s blood on his own face, has nothing on an amazing 13-minute set-piece in a movie theater, in which we never see the screen — on one hand, it’s a smashing multiple-perspective satiric dig at the early talkies, where the orchestra relaxes with beer after the overture, and the audience relearns how to watch (and strain to listen to) movies. On the other, it’s a propulsive montage of viewers being menacingly watched and homicidal fantasies being shared. Breathtaking.
124/365: Avalon (Barry Levinson, 1990) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play)
The third of Barry Levinson’s four Baltimore films is also the most ambitious, tracing the arc of a Russian immigrant family from 1914 into the ’60s, a tumultuous arc punctuated by Thanksgiving dinners — get-togethers that are fraught with generational hostility and growing pains, all of which Levinson limns with gentle wit and knows enough to not rush. Armin Mueller-Stahl, Aidan Quinn and Elijah Wood constitute the three levels of father and son, while Levinson’s B-town bustles authentically around them (a rare achievement in ambiance, visual detail and mood that’s hard to overpraise). It’s an ebullient film, but the course of the holiday celebrations allows Levinson to make a strong critical statement about modern life — as the years press on, the family dissipates and fragments, and the ever-present television slowly takes pride of place, instead of conversation and family intimacy.
125/365: L’Age d’Or (Luis Bunuel, 1930) (YouTube, Amazon Prime)
“Sometimes, on Sundays,” the title card reads, and buildings explode. Bunuel’s first feature (co-written with Salvador Dali) is a Surrealist-anarchist love letter-slash-handgrenade, an hour-long slipshod rain of irrationality, sexually outrageous affronts, and vicious anti-bourgeosie satire. In those youthful Surrealist days of yore, the film’s scandal was such that Parisian right-wing groups protested and mobilized their newspapers’ readers to physically decimate the theater in which it played (slashing Dali and Ernst paintings hanging in the lobby as they went); two days later, police shut the movie down for good. It’s been a long time since the League of Patriots stormed Studio 28, and the days when a mere film could incite riots and encourage civilians to lay siege to the projection booth are long gone. More’s the pity. Of course, the film’s ability to appall the middle-class has faded, but we still get the scorpions, the fingerless caress, the obscene sucking of the statue’s toe, and Gaston Modot striding fiercely through the movie as the angry, horny free spirit battling the controls of European morality. Looking quite like a nattily attired Bruce Campbell in a Guy Maddin visitation to the Surrealist years, Modot’s Everyman opens with a hot grapple in the mud with his beloved (Lya Lys), interrupting a solemn honorary service for the skeletons of dead bishops on a hillside; he is apprehended and separated from the woman, swooning with frustration and growing dizzy imagining her sitting on the toilet. (Flush! Close-up of seething magma!). And so on. The thrust was and still is unique — an already crazy film gone thoroughly off its meds, grabbing at a dream of liberty.
126/365: The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play)
Malick’s ultimate personal statement — beginning with the origins of the universe. This grand patchwork, moving blithely from cosmic forces to dinosaurs to Malick’s own childhood in North Texas and beyond, is maybe too big for its britches, but it’s also executed with haunting lyricism; Malick is enough of a magician to craft breath-catching moments by the dozen, especially when he stays close to the boys (particularly the two older, discontented Malick avatar Hunter McCracken and Laramie Eppler, playing the doomed, favored middle son and resembling his movie dad Brad Pitt to a startling degree). This particular experience of boyhood is nailed to the wall for all time — the endless lawns and wide streets, the spaces between houses and neighborhoods where adults can’t find you, the idle moments amongst friends in the woods thinking up something dangerous with which to fill up their summer afternoon. Forgive the puzzling grandiosity (really, those dinosaurs) and the movie comes off as an intimate anthropological ode to a lost America only Malick could’ve made.
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
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
Keep up with Smashcut 365 by following Smashcut on Medium, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.
What is Smashcut?
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.
