Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 26
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
176/365: My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar-wai, 2007) (Tubi, Amazon Prime, YouTube, iTunes)
A quintessentially Wongian daydream of romantic suspension and sweet lyrical conceits, but filmed in English with Anglo-American stars (Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, Natalie Portman and… firsttimer Norah Jones). From the very first extended sequence — when lovably relaxed Manhattan diner-owner Jeremy (Law) modestly regales heartbroken nowhere girl Jones about the jar of keys on his counter (left by wrecked lovers but never retrieved), and how he, heartbroken as well, stays at the restaurant waiting for his girl’s return because his mother taught him to simply remain in one place if he were ever lost — you know you’re seeing the world in Wong’s terms. As our heroine spirals out away from the diner and its comforting late-night servings of otherwise untouched blueberry pie, running away from her pain to Tennessee and Vegas, she encounters twin lost souls Rachel Weisz and Natalie Portman (the three could be sisters) and gets involved in their self-destructive stories, as if passing through funhouse mirrors and seeing alternate versions of how her life could’ve turned out. Wong’s textures are all here — sublime poetics, overripe dramatics, smudge-edited mood, jukebox jouissance, and raw gorgeousness, in many ways all of it combatting everyday complaisance, frustration and bitterness, everything that prevents us from seeing the lovely, life-valuable nature of a broken heart, a romantic obsession, a symbolic devotion (in Wong, it’s often a devotion to food). Typically, Wong didn’t know if Jones could act (he’d just heard her music) or if novelist Lawrence Block could write screenplays (Wong’d just read his crime novels), but both could, making us wish this is the way every movie was made, motored by romantic impulse and intuition.
177/365: Walker (Alex Cox, 1987) (Amazon Prime, Fandor)
The arch-punk behind Repo Man (1984) and Sid & Nancy (1986), Cox tested his fame and fortune as an indie star with this historical satire, one of most viciously prankish, politically outrageous fireballs ever to hurl out of Hollywood. The film takes on the late career of William Walker, a polymathic doctor, writer, adventurer and megalomaniac who, in the mid-1850s, was sent to take over Nicaragua by Cornelius Vanderbilt (played like Nero by Peter Boyle). Which he did — Walker ruled the tiny, colonialism-beset country as a dictator for two years, until he went completely mad, revoked Nicaragua’s progressive abolitionist laws, fought for his throne with a coalition of other Central American armies (and Vanderbilt’s forces), and was eventually executed in Honduras in 1860. At first, Cox and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer treat Walker’s saga as merely tongue-in-cheek history, but gradually the film descends into madness itself, crazed with genre-movie allusions, boozy slapstick, meticulous period flavor, satiric anachronisms (the film climaxes with a helicopter drop of ‘80s-era Marines), moments of raw Grand Guignol, and a pervasive sense of lysergic mayhem. Of course, the target was really the Reagan Administration and its expansive program of destruction in Central America. (The film was shot in Nicaragua — during the period when the Iran-Contra Affair was becoming news, and just as the Tower Commission Report came out — with the full cooperation of the Sandinistas.) Cox always had an eye for the iconic, and his movie seethes with mysterious signifiers, from Ed Harris’s bright-eyed performance as Walker to Joe Strummer’s hilariously parodic score to moments of Peckinpah-esque slo-mo and fascinating prophecy.
178/365: The Wedding Director (Marco Bellocchio, 2006) (YouTube)
Forty years after his confrontational New Wave debut, Bellocchio mellows here into a ruminative, absurdist autumnal mood, and this mysterious comedy might be his most enjoyable film. The larky story begins as Sergio Castellitto’s theater director becomes baffled by the real-not-real performances of his own cast; then a woman begs to see him, as she’s being chased by police agents of some type. Looking for an escape, he flees to Sicily, where his movie-movie world seems to follow him: along with meeting a supposedly dead director who’s hiding out so he’ll receive prizes posthumously, the whimsical fugitive meets a wedding videographer who has the intimidating task of making “a real film!” from the upcoming wedding of a homicidal aristocrat’s daughter. The job defers to our hero, who embraces the unreality of the assignment as well as the daughter, with whom he falls instantly, movie-ishly, in love. Bellocchio winks at us but gently; we’re never sure how much Elica is “directing,” or how much he’s being directed by the bride’s father (the surveillance at the villa is non-stop), or how much the whole thing isn’t a fictional concoctive window onto the protagonist’s creative process. The scenario flirts with Hitchcock, too, but it’s wisely, doggedly funny, and full of ironic character, with Castellitto’s dog-eyed, rumpled, Richard Lewis-y watchfulness serving as terrific reactive fuel to the film’s absurdities, and, therefore, to the nonsensicality of our own presumed omniscience as film viewers.
179/365: Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (Yasujiro Ozu, 1952) (Criterion Channel)
One of the very few cinema giants you could never accuse of pretension (Jean Renoir, Luis Bunuel and Robert Bresson are the others), Ozu remains the art form’s wisest and most disciplined voice — a matter of no small magnitude in a medium naturally prone to the infantilization of noise, speed and bright colors. Each Ozu emerges from cinema’s quietest, most consistent major career to realign in our hearts what movies are good for. This late entry is a bit of a departure from the master’s generational ballads — it’s a cross-purposes marriage rondo that may have been Ozu’s homage to Sinclair Lewis’ Dodsworth, casting a gimlet eye on smug Japanese bourgeois in the postwar era, but of course it leavens the meal with ambivalence and understanding and gray regions of doubt, all of which somehow turns social critique into something pre-modern, and primordial. The ending reaches an awkward state of happy/sad we may feel within our rights to disbelieve, but the master’s steady gaze alone can absolve us from cynicism.
180/365: The Kite (Randa Chahal Sabbag, 2003) (Amazon Prime, Fandor)
This palm-sized Lebanese absurdism, coming from a culture savaged and riven by warfare, occupation, religious vendettas and geographic tumult, delivers a hard-won sense of embracing humor, setting us down on the ambiguous borderlands — set in a Druze village split more or less down its mountainous middle by the ever-shifting Israeli occupation, so that marriages must be arranged and family arguments hashed out via megaphone and binoculars, across an expanse of guarded desert valley. It’s a tragically comic set-up, politically genuine but simultaneously ridiculous, and it never gets old, especially since it’s enacted for the most part by middle-aged women in fluttering black abayas, broadcasting recriminations and, at one point, attesting to a new groom’s masculinity by hollering that when he was seven “he mounted a goat!”, such was his erection. The assigned bride in these negotiations, a vaguely rebellious girl who has no compunctions about crossing a minefield to fetch a fallen kite, is actually in love with the local lad shanghaied by the Israeli forces to monitor the town from a watchtower. Boosted by rather spectacular widescreen photography, the film considers the points of view of virtually everybody on the ground, even the Israeli officers, who know their role is idiotic (partitioning different chunks of the village at night with barbed wire and thereby spontaneously separating family members, etc.). And then comes a climactic, transporting, magical-realist flourish the filmmaker had not prepared us for. Defiance and love, knotted together, it turns out, is the only way to face oppression.
181/365: Ride the Pink Horse (Robert Montgomery, 194?) (Amazon Prime)
This magnificent cataract of film noir dyspepsia is overdue for its nomination at the top of the genre canon. A feast of complex, prowling camera moves, the movie follows Montgomery’s hostile, wary ex-G.I. in a suit getting off a bus in a small Mexican town, personifying WWII PTSD and moral desperation as eloquently as any noir hero, and naturally in town to collect a debt from a malevolent gangster/war profiteer (Fred Clark). It’s a slow burn, roping in Thomas Gomez’s avuncular carousel manager (in one timeless shot, a brutal beating is sporadically seen while the camera takes a revolving ride) and Wanda Hendrix’s puppy-like teen Mexicana as allies in the wasteland. Up against our bitter hero are an irritable army of henchman with knives, and a smooth-talking ice queen (Andrea King) of a femme fatale. Noirs can be measured by how little weakness they exhibit when dealing out their bad luck hands, and Montgomery’s movie (written by acid-tongue twins Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer) is a cynical, strong-spined sonofabitch, with one of the genre’s lowest sentiment dosages, and many of its most amazing tracking shots.
182/365: All About Lily Chou-Chou (Shunji Iwai, 2001) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Channeling youthful discontent isn’t as easy as it used to be before technology provided an infinite underground, but this Japanese ode fashions pensive cyber-lyricism out of a new generation’s instruments of introversion: in lieu of narration, his film is counter-accented with the typed-out dialogue of fan chatrooms. Iwai’s teens can only express themselves online, forming a worshipful chorus at the altar of the fictitious Tori Amos/Enya-esque diva of the title. Meanwhile, the story wanders like a brooding punk and the camera succumbs to swooping perspectives, hyper-green grasslands, dust devils, desolate consumer aisles and spasms of home-video horror. The primary protagonist (Hayato Ichikara) is a 15-year-old wallflower completely submerged in “Lilyphilia,” which he further promulgates by mastering a fansite; the chat — sourced out of thousands of posts accumulated on Iwai’s pre-script Lily website — is communal and needy, but soon enough Yuichi is forced from his hibernation by Hoshino (Shugo Oshinari), another gawky outcast who suddenly matures into a gang leader and pimp. The dramatics don’t matter as much as Iwai’s sullen atmospherics: the recurrent and hardly original image of a miserable teen standing in the wilderness listening on his ear-phones acquires a fiercely iconic melancholy. Something of an overripe pop song itself, the film mourns the despoiling tragedies of pre-adulthood and the infuriating inadequacy of nostalgia.
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, 25
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.
