Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 25
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
169/365: Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959) (Vudu, Crackle, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
The epochal, all-American courtroom psychodrama, turning a seamy Southern murder trial into a sweaty, rape-happy combat-circus with the help of James Stewart as the least scrupulous defense attorney in film history, and a brand-new-to-movies George C. Scott as his Army-appointed, junkyard-dog opponent. Preminger plays all his cards at his peak, with a cast thick with antagonistic brio, particularly Lee Remick as a black-eyed slattern whose violated but incredibly questionable virtue instigates the whole megillah. This was one of the movies that helped shock-start the old Hollywood into what became the 60s, and it dates better than last year’s Oscar winners.
170/365: Shirin (Abbas Kiarostami, 2008) (Fandor, Amazon Prime)
An anti-movie, a mad-scientist experiment — maybe there is no name, but fans of Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami won’t need one. A majestic trickster who constantly, modestly reinvented what movies are, Kiarostami adapts a classic Persian legend here, full of romance and swordfights, but doesn’t show us the movie — which exists only as a soundtrack anyway. What we see is the audience in the dark, dozens and dozens of women in close-up, watching the film that isn’t there. (They’re not even listening — typically for him, AK concocted the hot-blooded soundtrack later.) So what is it we’re watching? A film about film-watching, about being watched as we watch, about voyeurism-as-empathy, and about women’s surveilled lives in radical Muslim countries, where if they’re lucky they can escape into the darkness and imagine another life.
171/365: What Happened Was… (Tom Noonan, 1994) (Amazon Prime, Google Play, YouTube)
This chillingly mundane portrait of a first date that never should’ve occurred is an adapted one-act play, also written by Noonan. Even so, it’s less theatrical than brutally personal, and the observations about modern mating, lonesomeness and communication breakdown — it’s always the same — are white-hot. Noonan also stars as the closeted white-collar dweeb invited into the home of a desperately lonely and not too bright co-worker, played with nerve-wracking honesty by Karen Sillas. She’s lovely, but out of her element in the Manhattan power zone; he’s a solitary misfit who seems superior and ambitious (he lies about being a writer), but is actually an unmitigated zero. What ensues between them is a naked thumbnail sketch of urban despair, and once Sillas begins reading her deranged, vanity-published children’s stories aloud, things get very, quietly crazy. A winner at Sundance, and a paragon of what can be done with a small budget, one room and two people, Noonan’s film feels like a standing threat; singles should treat it like an isotope.
172/365: Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (Mark Rappaport, 1992) (Vimeo, Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
Perhaps no one has ever performed exploratory surgery on a Hollywood legend as thoroughly or sensibly as Mark Rappaport’s deeply imagined hour-long treatise. Shot on video, and essentially comprised of snippets from Hudson’s oeuvre, Rappaport’s video elegantly makes hash of both the notion of gay identity and of cinematic representation; if you believe movies reflect reality, Rappaport will prove otherwise; if you don’t, he’ll prove they do. Superimposed over the video clips, Hudson (portrayed rather colorlessly by actor Eric Farr, the piece’s only handicap) takes us on a dryly narrated tour of the man’s on-screen career, commenting with detached amusement upon the psychosexual conundrums Hudson the actor was impelled to participate in. “It’s not like it wasn’t up there on the screen, if you watched carefully,” he intones, meaning gayness, or at least subtextual gender chaos. The spatial relationships with co-stars like John Wayne and Robert Stack are, like nearly every aspect of the Hudson filmography, interpreted as sexual, every on=screen moment a double entendre of gay tension. Rappaport’s apex comes with a hilarious, and ultimately pitiable, analysis of Pillow Talk and the other Hudson-Day movies, in which Rock’s characters were always masquerading as housecoat-wearing queens. “I was a gay man pretending to be straight, portraying a straight man pretending to be gay,” is how Rappaport’s Hudson puts it, and seeing the chronically confused Hudson make his dazed way through the pre-sexual revolution bedroom farces is unarguably poignant.
173/365: The Death Ray (Lev Kuleshov, 1925) (YouTube)
Silent Soviet cinema seems today like so many shovelfuls of dry hay, fed to viewers to make them work, but look out: Lev Kuleshov, most famous for the montage experiments that fueled the USSR’s agitprop film industry through the 20s and 30s, was also a devoted pulpmaster, and this hardly-ever-seen film may be the most crazed and happily psychotic film from that lost nation’s peak era. Essentially a nutso espionage serial unrolling in the familiar landscape of factory uprisings and budding industry towns, the movie comes off as a scramble of Feuillade and Kenneth Anger, but on fast-forward — it’s virtually impossible to follow the story, which pits “fascists” (whose hideout harbors a mascot owl) against virtuous workers, amid a cataract of slapstick, wicked jump cuts, ritualized caricature, raving performances (particularly from Mrs. Kuleshov, the elastic-faced Alexandra Khokhlova), rampaging action editing, hidden passageways, surprise disguises, quicksand, knife fights, and on and on. The Russian landscape here feels more like the secretive, mysterious Paris of Les Vampires than the laborers’ paradise of other Soviet films — and there’s even a black-tight-suited cat-burglar spy who scales buildings. Co-scenarist Pudovkin shows up as a pious priest, but this campy, rambunctious lark is nothing if not self-satirizing — while seemingly blowing raspberries at both action serials and collectivist propaganda dramas of the kind Eisenstein made famous that same year. Reels have been and still are missing, but you won’t be able to tell from where.
174/365: The Good, the Bad, the Weird (Kim Jee-won, 2008) (Hulu, Amazon Prime, iTunes).
Winking and bopping and hip-swiveling from its opening credits to its last gasp, Kim’s lo mein western is an entrancing study in excess — as the camera swoops alongside through 1930s Manchuria to a hurtling locomotive about to be beset by multiple heists, you can just feel Quentin Tarantino’s zipper strain. The Sergio Leone-ish-ness is as self-conscious as the title — Kim lifts entire structures from Leone’s The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, and scores of other movies, Tarantino-style, and puts the mixer on frappe. The story revolves around the hunt for a treasure map, sought after by a sharpshooting bounty hunter (Jung Woo-sung), a sharpshooting, posturing psychopath with eyeliner and a hyper-coif (Lee Byung-hun), and a bumbling yet equally dangerous bandit (the beloved Song Kang-ho). Or something. Plus Manchurian bandit clans, the Japanese army (the history of Japanese colonialism is not ignored), and several other competing factions, all storming across the Asian plains trying to kill each other and win the prize. Kim turns on his Gatling gun and never lets the trigger loose, and at well over two hours it can run you down.
175/365: The American Astronaut (Cory McAbee, 2001) (Google Play, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Folky-indie-world star Cory McAbee’s first feature film is a bracing spray of garage-band silliness, a science fiction film that looks and smells suspiciously like a bar movie. McAbee is an unlikely underground superstar: lanky, shy, leathery and diffident, he suggests a hungover Scott Wilson, wiped out from last night’s show but ready to play-act Cool Action Hero, and his film is as nonchalantly make-believe as a treehouse game of Buck Rogers. Casually transversing the solar system and comprised mostly of shadow and bass lines, it could’ve been shot almost entirely on the Bowery. An asteroid is represented solely from the interior of a low-ride gin mill, Jupiter is an old Maspeth ballroom, Venus is an open field populated by waltzing Victorian maidens. The story involves interstellar espionage and commerce involving the trade in women and/or their clones, and was (surprisingly) midwifed through the Sundance Writers’ Lab; it feels as if it sprang unedited from McAbee’s honky-tonk daydreams, down to the song-and-dance numbers. Waiting for a cult.
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, 24
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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