Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 20
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
134/365: Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino, 1997) (Netflix, Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Equal parts blaxploitation reconstitution and 90s “ironic” indie, but all Tarantino, this is the workaday genre movie Tarantino has always said he’s wanted to make, but with a cine-literacy and post-noir savviness that can only come from his unquestionable devotion to the medium. The story is from Elmore Leonard: Pam Grier, in her first starring role in over two decades, plays a hard luck stewardess who gets caught smuggling cash and drugs for homicidal kingpin Samuel L. Jackson. She cuts a deal with the feds (Michael Keaton and Michael Bowen) to hand over Jackson and his half million bucks, and plays both ends against the middle with the help of an avuncular bailbondsman (Robert Forster) who wants out of the business, helplessly involving also Robert DeNiro as a dim-witted ex-con associate of Jackson’s, and Bridget Fonda as Jackson’s Malibu chippie. Of course, QT is most interested in the details, and the film is bursting with incidental characters and bits of business, and a respect for adulthood you don’t see much — to that end, it’s Forster’s movie. Nothing in Tarantino’s oeuvre, or in Forster’s long but disappointing career, could have prepared us for the raw simplicity and honest soulfulness that Forster delivers — Max Cherry the bailbondsman is the film’s exhausted heart, and maybe QT’s most deeply realized character.
135/365: The Clone Returns Home (Kanji Nakajima, 2008) (Amazon Prime)
A kind of homage to Tarkovsky’s Solaris, this lyrically haunting sci-fi film, never released in the US but popular at festivals, literally doubles down on every doppelganger scenario you can think of, beginning with an astronaut (who tragically lost a twin brother when he was young) consenting to cloning treatment as insurance against deep-space accidents. So, the dead twin is reborn, kind of; when the astronaut is killed, the identical clone is awoken, into a state of loss, and impulsively begins a cross-country odyssey off the grid, searching for the other self/twin he cannot locate in himself. Then a second clone is produced and woken, and so on, releasing a dreamy array of visions of lost-doubled-astronaut-ness that feels utterly unique — especially when we glimpse a dead spaceman floating across a clear blue sky. When the clone collapses after carrying the spacesuited corpse (or empty spacesuit, depending what perspective we’re experiencing), only to have the suit groggily sit up, pick up his “brother” and continue the march, the metaphors flow like champagne, and feelings about identity and wholeness and connectivity mix in the flood.
136/365: Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960) (Tubi, YouTube, Google Play)
Maybe the British film industry’s most incendiary and dangerous film at least until A Clockwork Orange, Powell’s late-career psychodrama might be the most perverse British film ever made — released the same year as Psycho. The story revolves around Mark (Karl Boehm), a soft-spoken German fellow in modish London, working on movie sets, living in an apartment house and, we learn not too slowly, murdering women with a spiked tripod leg (his third leg!) as he films them with a 16mm camera. We see the film he shoots often, including one early scene wherein Mark has a kind of symbolic orgasm during a victim’s death screams. Powell lays out the character’s warped world quietly and effectively, tracing the unforking path of trauma and perversion immediately back to Mark’s father, who experimentally terrorized the boy and filmed his abused reaction. Virality will out, it seems — the film’s harrowing thematic layers take root as it explicitly links Mark’s masturbatory obsession with our own voyeurism as movie viewers. When it is revealed that Mark compounds the cinematic assault by positioning a mirror before his victims, forcing them to watch their own deaths, what we really get is a dissection of the lurid relationship between film, filmmaker and film viewer, in which images of pain and tragedy elicit our most feverish attention. Brian DePalma stole much more of significance from this film than he ever did from Hitchcock, just as Powell referenced Fritz Lang’s M and its semi-sympathetic child slayer by way of casting Boehm, who looks and sounds a good deal like Peter Lorre. Everywhere you turn, you’re confronted with the complicit nature of movies, in which the suffering of others is laid out for our quasi-carnal satisfaction. The movie’s critical reevaluation has been slow in coming, but today, it looks like a discomfiting masterpiece.
137/365: Ivan’s Childhood (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962) (Criterion Channel, Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Both a resonant product of the Khruschev thaw and the apprentice-work of a genius idiosyncrat, Tarkovsky’s first film is a WWII tale (then and for a long time a reliable source of righteous outrage and drama for the Soviets), focused often impressionistically on the experiences of a war-hardened, Nazi-orphaned 12-year-old boy (Nikolai Burlyaev) who runs missions as a scout across the Western front. Haughty and demanding, Ivan gives his adult soldier guardians hell, and if he sees himself now, despite rosy memories of country life with his mother, as a war hero, the officers in charge struggle with the decision of sending him back into the combat zone or away to the safety of a military school. Whenever Tarkovsky wrestles his characters free of an enclosed room and expository dialogue (all deftly handled in any case), his Kalatosovian wings spread: the compositions become alarming high-contrast, the shots grow longer and become mobile, the primal landscape stretches out indefinitely, a dazzlingly dense and optically disarming birch forest becomes more than just a setting but a cinematic visitation to another person’s unforgettable experience. (Indeed, the film’s key scenes, including the sadly beautiful climactic shot of a sun shower falling upon horses busy eating dropped apples on the beach, are reproductions of Tarkovsky’s childhood memories.) It’s a film of sublime orchestrations, as in the famous shot of a flirting Russian soldier and girl among the birches crossing a trench, the camera dipping down into the hole and gazing up at the couple, as the soldier catches the girl and kisses her.
138/365: Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) (Criterion Channel)
Still alive and active, for nearly 60 years Godard has been cinema’s premier modernist, its most audacious and forward-seeing pioneer, as well as our most recalcitrant anti-sellout rebel god, our most eloquent and infuriating commentator on the empty-hearted state of humanity, and our irreverent guide through the mirrored hallways of media, meaning, communication and ethical responsibility. This late-‘60s landmark is one of the most troublesome films of the man’s golden decade, but essential viewing even so. The “Her” of the title is not the heroine (a middle-class mother who works as a call girl during the day, this shot in Paris a few months before Bunuel made Belle de Jour there), nor the actress Marina Vlady, who is recognized in the film both as herself and as the wife/whore, but Paris herself, which Godard envisions as a cataract of industrialization (a freeway’s arduous construction is recorded from every angle, and at all stages), soulless exploitation, brand-name salesmanship and reflexive prostitution. People talk, signs are read, commerce plows on, all montaged up and crystallized by Raoul Coutard’s bold, pop-art cinematography. Godard’s strategy from 1960’s Breathless on has been to subvert our passive submission to film narrative, and this stormy, ruminative film is the first Godard film to dispense with story altogether. Instead, it’s a new kind of film: an active exploration of ideas, suspicions and critiques the filmmaker is sharing with us directly, not through the scrim of character or plot. The object of the film may be Paris, but the real subject is the conversation we and Godard are having, the fragmented sense we’re trying to establish together about why our culture is so hollow, how the atrocities of Vietnam could be publicly rationalized, how images have been drained of their meaning by the imperatives of capitalism.
139/365: He Ran All the Way (John Berry, 1951) (Criterion Channel, Amazon Prime)
Noirs at their best can be proletariat passion plays, and none came sweatier, meaner and more eloquent than Berry’s classic, his sixth and last Hollywood film. The politics are on the surface — Berry, star John Garfield, and fronted scripters Dalton Trumbo and Hugo Butler were all fellow-traveler HUAC casualties, and the film seethes with second-class-citizen fury. In one minute flat we understand Garfield’s nowhere guy (living with boozy-tramp mom Gladys George, who later answers the police after Garfield shoots a cop, “Get him? Kill him!”), as he corners himself after a bad heist in the family flat of a young Shelley Winters and dad Wallace Ford. Berry owned a wrecked career, but this honey reveals an ambitious, truth-telling sensibility of which Hollywood was then and is now in dire need. (After it was released, Berry left America for a 13-year exile, and Garfield died of a heart attack.) The film is as rich in visual expression, thematic frisson and acting beauty as any film of the ’50s (Winters hits notes of guileless, sympathetic reality here you don’t see in other noirs), and there’s no canned happy ending to spoil the the purity of its gloom.
140/365: Flirting with Disaster (David O. Russell, 1996) (YouTube, Vudu, Amazon Prime)
Russell’s second film, and a criminally ignored semi-indie comedy powerhouse. The story is a classic type of high-concept comedy premise: Mel, an adopted New York entomologist (Ben Stiller), upon having a son of his own, is suddenly fraught with a desire to know who his biological parents are, and embarks on a cross-country journey to discover them. Along for the sojourn are his kind but frustrated wife (Patricia Arquette), their infant son, and a leggy, chain-smoking adoption-agency psychologist (Tea Leoni). You know that the trip is going to go all pretzel-ish, and it does in unpredictable ways, including mistaken identities, sexual near-betrayals, serendipitously crossed paths, inadvertent LSD consumption, armpit sex and the miserable, meddlesome joy of Jewish parents (played masterfully by ultra-goyum Mary Tyler Moore and George Segal). What makes Russell’s film sing is Russell — it’s a masterpiece of off-kilter rhythms, dead-perfect line readings and unpredictable reaction shots. There’s hardly ever merely one thing happening in each scene; each character is the star of his or her own mini-movie, and is often stunned to find they’re muddling through someone else’s. Watch Leoni and Stiller listen to the other characters, especially Moore’s rip-snorting mega-Mom (who is prone to displaying her cleavage to make a point about support bras), Josh Brolin’s bisexual cop (who hitches along for the last leg of the trip and who just won’t shut up about sex), and Alan Alda’s unctuous post-hippie, who turns out to be Mel’s actual father and whose desert house is an acid factory. Comedy is like splitting the atom with timing and ingenuity, and here Russell achieved fission.
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19
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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