Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 24
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
162/365: Malcolm X (Spike Lee, 1992) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
An important film by virtue of its very existence, this trouble-making biopic epic is graceful, energetic, and ferociously righteous. In a career performance by any standard, Denzel Washington grabs the Malcolm persona by the throat, impeccably reinventing the man’s jabbing speech patterns, physical rhythms, fastidious post-Rotarian guise and cool-headed verbal surgery on societal structures. Lee’s story follows Malcolm’s chameleonic life from KKK-terrorized preacher’s kid to zoot-suited Harlem underworlder to bitter prison inmate to the angry young media man and Muslim convert we’re most familiar with, winding up finally (after a pivotal trip to Mecca) as the reborn, more racially flexible El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, who met with the vengeance of his prior allies at the pulpit of the Audubon Ballroom in 1965. Lee leaps from phase to phase with his customary moviemaking zeal, with the opening and closing sequences — the Rodney King footage intercut with an American flag burning down to a huge X, the crackling assassination scene itself — as perhaps the film’s visceral high points. Equal parts hagiography, exciting testament to civil justice and vital pop history, and 3.5 hours long.
163/365: It Came from Kuchar (Jennifer Kroot, 2009) (Kanopy, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Kroot’s amused documentary launches you into a movie-movie realm you might not have had a chance to experience before: the eccentric, dimestore film universe of the Brothers Kuchar. George and Mike Kuchar were just two film-crazy and intensely weird Bronx twins who went to the movies almost every day growing up and were given a 8mm camera for their 12th birthday. After that, American “underground cinema,” as it was beginning to be known then in the shape of Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, became a playground for the brothers, who made torrid, ludicrous, never-less-than-unconvincing horror films and melodramas in their mother’s apartment and on the city’s rooftops. Seeing a Kuchar film is like getting an intravenous eight-ball of movieness, but without the screenwriting, polish and taste, and Kroot’s portrait is a great place to start, contextualizing the bros’ movies with testimonials from John Waters, Guy Maddin, Atom Egoyan, longtime pal Buck Henry, comic artist Bill Griffith, and many others. You need context, because Kuchar films are both unlike “regular” movies in every way and very much the essence of pop cinema distilled down to its vapors. Logical story, believable sets, honest acting — forget it. The Kuchars’ unspoken contention, from their first big “success” I Was a Teenage Rumpot (1960), was that what we love about movies more than cohesion and structure is sensational moments, raw emotional explosions. You could say a big-budget genre film is to a Kuchar film what a giant jellyfish is to a few drops of its purified poison. It’s semi-clear here that both brothers are still very weird men, mentally off-kilter and possibly Asperger’s-y, but you still come away wanting to see, in their entirety, Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965), The Craven Sluck (1967), The Devil’s Cleavage (1975), and so on. Whether or not Kroot’s film by itself is all the Kuchar you can handle, the movie world will seem a far larger and less predictable place.
164/365: The Hours and Times (Christopher Munch, 1991) (Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play)
A classic from the New Queer Cinema heyday, this palm-sized indie (shot in black & white and breezing by in a brisk 60 minutes) explores what might’ve happened during a getaway 1963 weekend spent by John Lennon and Brian Epstein in off-season Barcelona, just as the Beatles were on the cusp of becoming a worldwide pop phenomena. Munch’s film is all the more remarkable for what it’s not — it effortlessly resists cheap answers, hagiography and scandal-dishing. Epstein was openly gay, and Lennon embodied the impetuous, teasing, privileges-of-youth rock bohemianism at the time, and though the issue of sexual preference hovers over the film like a flock of gulls, Munch characterizes it less as sex per se than as the dignified dialogue of personalities between two of pop history’s preeminent figures. Epstein and Lennon (played, respectively, by David Angus and Ian Hart) are perfect, and Munch renders the Lennon legend humanly palpable, without resorting to Beatle iconography (the only rock is a Little Richard record); we see instead the 23-year-old Liverpudlian teetering on the edge of deification and attempting to make young-punk sense out of his rocket-ride of a life via the temperamental manipulation of others, the joyless appropriation of women, the restless nihilism so common to working-class Brits. Pop idolatry being what it is, Munch’s film is a melancholy tone poem of a movie, giving us one last, sad glimpse of Lennon and Epstein before they became more than human, and therefore somehow less.
165/365: A Prophet (Jacques Audiard, 2009) (YouTube, Amazon Prime, Vudu, Google Play)
A French prison movie to beat them all, plunging us into this morally poisonous human zoo alongside Tahar Rahim’s convicted thief, an Arab-born orphaned twentysomething who, almost immediately, is pressed for sex by a snitch passing through the prison; a vicious Corsican crime boss (Niels Arestrup) who owns the guards tells the newbie that he’ll have to kill the snitch or die himself. This is no tough-guy genre scenario; the realism sets your teeth on edge. Once the assassination is managed, in a panicked struggle and with a hard-won jet of throat blood that makes every torture-porn bit of gore you’ve ever seen look fake, our hero’s problems only begin. Stuck between the growing number of Muslim Arab convicts and the Corsican mob, he slowly begins to see his own way, using the prejudices and desires of both factions to begin building his own dope cartel. In many ways it’s a classic prison film, and could’ve been made anywhere, but is hardly a mere crime procedural — it’s loaded with subjective asides and raw poetry, from dreamy memory swatches to the calm presence of the dead snitch, sometimes on fire, as Malik’s more or less permanent bunkmate. It also builds like a bolero, from the tale of one lonely Arab to the story of over a dozen fated lowlife, from three or four rival gangs, struggling up the pile, and you’re hit with enough story for two movies. While Arestrup is titanically menacing as the ice-eyed kingpin, Rahim really owns the movie, and every wary shift of his eyes takes us with it. It could almost be a silent movie, so much is internalized and expressed through action.
166/365: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (Kerry Conran, 2004) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube, HBO)
Firsttime director/CGI expert Kerry Conran’s film robs iconography from old movie serials of the 30s and 40s, remaking those creaky, cheap, dull programmers into the shimmering futuristic visions that the paperback and magazine cover paintings promised. At the very least, what we’ve got here is a unique brand of eye-candy, stuffing Angelina Jolie, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow into an all-digital pioneering-greenscreen panorama that looks like a Depression-era kid’s idea of what 1989 might resemble, down to snappy pre-WWII couture, alien robots that look like humongous, car-crushing toys, and high-flying megalopolis architecture stolen from Fritz Lang. The story, in which the titular pilot-hero attempts to save the world from the onslaughts of bizarre, energy-depleting behemoths from God Knows Where, is serviceable goofball fun — certainly no sillier than George Lucas’s billions-earning kiddie melodramas. It wasn’t a hit, Depression-era nostalgia being a narrow market in the early 21st century, but it remains a heavenly lark, a silvery sunbath in antique futurisms, a visit to the inside of a wartime 13-year-old’s skull as he reads Amazing Comics and dreams about rockets and Martians and superheroes. The most and least you can say about Conran’s movie (his only film) is that, while its astonishing style is wholly derivative from a very real past we all share, the film looks like no other on Earth.
167/365: A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974) (Amazon Prime, Vudu, iTunes)
Cassavetes remains the imperial pope of postwar American realism, lionized for generations of grit-loving filmmakers and actors to this day. For Cassevetes, the actors are the auteurs and the camera is in their service; appropriately, the members of his acting troupe — mostly family and friends, many of which helped finance his films as well — approach their roles with the committed fervor of a calling to the priesthood. His America is distinct in movies, and nowhere is this psychographic terrain as clearly chronicled as it is here, universally considered Cassavetes’s career apex and his particular subgenre’s archetype: a visit with a family living in the American Inferno’s ninth circle, where madness, ignorance, humiliation and emotional bloodshed are a way of life. Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands star as Nick and Mabel, a California working-class couple with three young children who are doggedly trying to preserve their life together in the face of Mabel’s chronic mental deliriums. We begin at an ostensible moment of normalcy — Mabel sending her kids to her mother’s so she and her husband can spend a private night together — and follow in graphic detail her descent into the abyss, climaxing with the latest in a presumed series of committed hospitalizations. As Cassavetes would have it, the leads run the film: Falk’s husband is a bullying blue collar schlub lost at sea in his combat-zone of a marriage yet courageously eager to meet his wife on her own shaky terms, a quick-tempered paisan whose Old World reflexes — to surround himself with family and friends at times of crisis — often precipitate disaster. As Mabel, Rowlands (Mrs. Cassavettes) gives the performance of her career, a disconnected fireball of confused, infantile impulses, a woman cut loose from society and any idea of how to behave within it. Hers is the most soberly wrought train-wreck personality in film history. She just can’t get out from under the magnifying glass; in fact, it’s the worrying, microscopic study of her — by the other characters as well as the camera — that frequently appears to ignite her breakdowns. Cassavetes works without narrative shortcuts: we’re dropped like parachuters into the middle of this family’s life, with no exposition or forewarning, and no relief from the unpredictable real-time psychodramas.
168/365: Home (Ursula Meier, 2008) (Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play)
A bizarre, mysterious entry in the Post-Modern Gallic Family Blues derby, hyperreal to the touch but keeping symbolic secrets, set in a compelling modern place: a lonely, nondescript brick house sitting on the shoulder of a huge expanse of decommissioned highway. Who would live here? We meet this clan of five as they enjoy a rollicking, late-night game of street hockey right on the empty highway — Mom (Isabelle Huppert) sharing butts with her oldest, surliest daughter Judith (Adelaide Leroux) as Dad (Olivier Gourmet), and the two youngest kids dash about a little too enthusiastically. It’s one of those families, in movies and in real-life, that stands a little too close, shouts a little too loudly, bathes together, dresses inappropriately, and sometimes doesn’t dress quite enough. We don’t get a full bead on the family, on what makes them click, until halfway through, when one of the daughters simply says, “Mom only feels well here.” Ah — every wacky eccentricity, natural or playacted, falls into place for us, just as pressure is brought to bear on the family in the form of highway workers and a new onslaught of traffic. Suddenly, home is a detached zoo cage at the mercy of a million cars — they cannot even leave without crossing the multi-lanes on foot, or crawling under the road through a drainage tunnel.It’s a simple, insidiously logical scenario, but one where you can smell the fumes of Michael Haneke, J.G. Ballard and Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend, which is to say, subtext rules. We never leave that one location; “reality” only intervenes via local radio news, declaring the new highway a public-planning triumph. Huppert is of course fierce, terrifyingly unpredictable, and absolutely convincing.
Year Two 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
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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