Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 21
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
141/365: Idiocracy (Mike Judge, 2006) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Judge’s now-beloved fangs-on satire paints such a hilariously bleak portrait of Homo Americanus that it was essentially censored and dumped by its distributor in 2006, unleashed for a week onto only seven screens on the entire North American continent, none of them east of the Mississippi. Then came home video. By way of a military hibernation experiment that sends clueless Everyman Luke Wilson 500 years into the future, Judge furiously limns out an America completely clogged with rank stupidity, and he did it a decade before Trump. Fox News-style media takes a big hit, amid the hailstorm of vicious jokes, but the mostly obese citizens in Judge’s future world who can’t add or entertain a thought that doesn’t involve immediate sensory indulgence take most of the responsibility for the collapse of civilization. (A memorable throwaway image: in a dilapidated city inundated with garbage, cars continue to drive off the edge of a broken highway ramp, one after the other.) It’s a messy movie, and Judge’s low budget sometimes forces him to cut corners, but it should be seen and kudo’ed just for its principled stance against the cretinism most American entertainment happily exploits.
142/365: Frownland (Ron Bronstein, 2007) (Criterion Channel)
This barely-seen film conjured up some of the most intense superlatives ever thrown at a cheap New York indie (The New Yorker’s Richard Brody called it “one of the most unusual and audacious American independent films ever made”), while still generally sweating bullets of qualification, as if holding a wolverine by the short hairs. We generally expect movies to sympathize with our empathy, as it were — to facilitate an emotional connection between us and the characters at hand. Bronstein’s film does the opposite: it’s an alienation campaign, a personal-space-invading character portrait of a witless, neurotic, helplessly irritating schlub named Keith (Dore Mann) who meets life’s insurmountable challenges with fight-or-flight thoughtlessness and a compulsive stream of repetitive babble. Shot on 16mm with a minimum of lighting, the film offers as depressing a view of low-rent New York life as anyone’s seen since the punk films of the ’80s, and Bronstein’s pro-am aesthetic is restricted to claustrophobia and nauseous vertigo. Most of all, what we get is a pure-hearted piece of selfless acting, as Mann creates his character’s desperate and embattled relationship with society on the fly — negotiating the worst job (a fake door-to-door beggar for a fake multiple-sclerosis charity), a suicidal ex-girlfriend he can’t not try to sleep with, a fed-up roommate (who’s in the catastrophic position of being jobless and beholden to Keith for shelter). The social firefights that explode from Keith’s guileless demands for contact are uncomfortable and harrowing, and eventually lead to a comprehensive meltdown. Certainly, it’s a movie that would be a jolt to the system for those who believe the American indie-hood is repped by the award-winners out of Sundance.
143/365: Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008) (Crackle, Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Simulacrum wrapped in theatrical conceit wrapped in self-consciousness, Kaufman’s film is a daunting, fabulous construction that dares to be both magical and depressively reductive, the kind of culture work can veer into self-negation, into Dada, and can in any case explode like a handgrenade you don’t throw away like you’re supposed to. An absurdly inhabited, love-filled chronicle of catastrophic loneliness, as well as a portrait of titanic creative achievement (not unlike Kaufman’s, of course) that plummets into the abyss, following Philip Seymour Hoffman’s nebbishy theater impresario as he decides to assemble a theater piece about his life, as big and detailed as life itself. Which of course includes actors playing him and his tortured family, and then more actors playing those actors, and so on. Time itself eventually collapses, and the film becomes an often unpleasant but indisputably monumental thing, a magnificent testament to one man’s existentiality.
144/365: Hypocrites (Lois Webber, 1915) (Amazon Prime, Kanopy)
Daring and innovative, this rocket of pioneering feminist filmmaking, from a heyday when women directors were common (during the reign of reactionary bigwig D.W. Griffith), within what quickly became just a few years later an almost completely all-male industry. Weber herself was an acute visualizer, with a moral sense that easily outgrades Griffith’s neo-Victorian ethos, and this film is infused with a quite feminine sympathy even as it excoriates entire chunks of society for their amoral selfishness and fake piety. For a 50-minute film, it has a dazzlingly complex structure, layering (but not paralleling, exactly) the story of an old-time monk persecuted for a nude statue, and a modern minister troubled by his congregation of middle-class four-flushers and gossipers. The same actors serve both tales, but then Weber falls into a third mode, mixing the first two in a guided tour (our hostess is Naked Truth, played by an anonymous nude woman) of the modern American’s iniquity hidden with his and her public lives. Weber could shoot, too; the exposure of the ascetic’s statue to a medieval community of fair-goers is performed in a breathtaking series of long dollies, encompassing vast amounts of human activity and emotion at a point in the history of cinema when Griffith’s cramped-room-tableaux were supposed to be the height of eloquence.
145/365: How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1971) (YouTube)
Notorious as the first and possibly the only film ever made about cannibals that, insofar as it takes sides, soberly favors the moral system of the flesh-eaters over their colonial victims, this Brazilian Cinema Novo classic is actually a comedy, shot like a tropical documentary but set in the 1500s, when the French and the Belgians (among other European forces) were vying for dominance in native-rich South America, pitting one tribe against each other and scamming them all for plundered natural resources. The story trails after a pallid Frenchman (Arduino Colasanti) who after being mistaken for a Belgian (the indignity!) is captured by a cannibal tribe and set up for an honorary eight-month life of happy citizenry in their ranks (complete with wife). After his allotted time is up, he will be ritualistically slaughtered and eaten — unless he can figure a way out beforehand. The filmmaker is less interested in dramatics or empathy than in the avalanche of ironies that attend the situation, sprinkling in title-card commentary from European witnesses from the time, and even having the white man’s lovely, all-nude whip of a wife (the astonishing Ana Maria Magalhaes, who went on to be a major, award-winning force in Brazilian cinema, in front of and behind the camera) seduce him at one point with a long, sexy monologue about exactly how he’ll be killed and eaten. Colonialism is the target, and it’s such a monstrous sitting duck that the film barely has to lift a finger to make a mockery of all things old-school European. Taken just on a political level, How Tasty is one of sharpest satires of colonial history ever made, especially since it’s sourced out from the exploited culture’s sensibility.
146/365: Innocence Unprotected (Dusan Majavajev, 1968) (Criterion Channel, Eastern European Movies)
By far the biggest brat to sneak his way through the Eastern Bloc culture during the New Wave era, Yugoslav bombthrower Makavejev comprised a kind of one-man Yugoslav new wave in a time when the tense Communist nation barely had a global cultural identity of its own, and his filmography reads like a litany of post-Godardian social felonies, scattered with torched taboos and sly indictments of Soviet influence. Relatively unscandalous, this lovely and self-knowing film essentially revisits a landmark Yugoslavic film of the same name, released in 1942 while the nation was occupied by the Germans, and the country’s first talkie. Still, you’d be hard-pressed to call Makavejev’s “remake” a documentary — there are too many layers of mystery and duplicity being folded in on each other. Scrambled with the bones of this creaking and heretofore unseen landmark is ironically-placed news footage from WWII, implicitly noting the stiff melodrama’s relationship with the problems of occupation and collaborationism, and new footage of the film’s surviving cast and crew, performing vaudeville for us, having picnics on a co-star’s tombstone, and so on. The history of both films’ star, the diminutive-yet-notorious acrobat/stuntman Dragoljub Aleksic, is caught up in the film’s reverb: the director and writer of the old film as well, Aleksic was considered pro-Nazi after the war, and lived under a cloud for decades. (Old stunt footage of the performer hanging from high wires is employed in both films, as is Aleksic’s human cannonball routine, which got at least one person killed and may be another reason for his infamy at home.) Makavejev has the guy here happily declaring his own innocence and insisting that this ludicrous, howlingly acted film was made secretly under Nazi noses, and considering how the shadow of collaboration poisoned the nation and incited the tribal slaughter of the early ’90s, this second Innocence Unprotected echoes with peculiar and chilling questions.
147/365: Radio On (Christopher Petit, 1979) (YouTube)
Rare is the film that endeavors to, and succeeds at, encapsulating a cultural and generational Zeitgeist — Petit’s debut may be the subgenre’s purest tissue sample, because it freeze-dries England on the dusk of the punk era without seeming to try very hard. Supported only by a nominal narrative, the movie is really a mood piece, viewing the British landscape with a gimlet eye and finding solace only in postpunk pop singles, which structure the movie much as they structure the day for Petit’s disenchanted contemporaries, and several generations of jaded kids since. The music, always heard on LPs, cassettes or radio play, is by David Bowie, Kraftwerk, Lene Lovich, Devo, Ian Dury, etc.; the philosophically beautiful black-&-white images were shot is by Martin Schafer, longtime behind-the-camera cohort to Wenders, who co-produced the film with the BFI. The visions of industrial waste, semi-rural nowheresville, urban disconnectedness and late-capitalist angst state Petit’s position better than any narrative could, but as it is, the story hardly tries — a numb and introverted DJ (David Beames) drives in his old coup to Bristol to look into his brother’s mysterious suicide. Of course, he discovers nothing, except England itself along the way, home to lost immigrants, political fugitives (like Astrid Proll), hustlers, dispirited laborers, and punks with nowhere to go. (As a service-station attendant still mourning the death of Eddie Cochrane, Sting makes his first film appearance.) What Radio On gets at is a little difficult to articulate — a mournful portrait of national anomie, a trapped-in-amber windshield view of a conflicted, self-esteem-challenged country in economic decline.
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20
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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