Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 3
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
15/365: Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube)
A brilliant Hollywood comedy that immediately became a piece of our common language, this metaphysical Bill Murray movie posits a simple conundrum: that the cynical, nihilistic TV-weatherman hero must repeat a single day, in a nightmarishly sugary Middle American town, as many times as necessary until he gets it right. What’s “right” is a little vague and questionable, but there’s no getting past the metaphoric payload that scenario musters, from evoking the cosmic trials of reincarnation to the dead-end cycles of addiction and madness, to imagining what life would be like if it were a movie, and you kept screwing up take after take. Meanwhile, Murray is at his heroic peak, of course, one of the post-‘60s great Americans.
16/365: The Yes Men (Chris Smith, Sarah Price and Daniel Ollman, 2003) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
A documentary about culture jamming, in which irreverent activists Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno defy the presumed sanctity of modern commercial culture and media. Bichlbaum once reprogrammed the SimCity video game so that its background characters would become gay bodybuilders on certain dates, while Bonanno, as a member of the highly publicized Barbie Liberation Army, participated in the campaign to switch hundreds of Barbie and G.I. Joe voice boxes and then return the toys to store shelves. Together, the boys simply set up a website parody of the World Trade Organization, dryly cheerleading the institution’s economic cut-&-burn tactics, and then they were invited to speak in person, on CNBC and at economic conferences, as representatives of the WTO. Which they did, complete with inflatable phalluses. Seeing is believing.
17/365: The Honeymoon Killers (Leonard Kastle, 1970) (Amazon Prime, Vudu)
Like creeping water damage running down a Levittown tract house wall, Kastle’s uber-cult-indie is another suburban nightmare, decked out with high-watt light bulbs, vinyl seat covers and polyester prints. It’s long been among the most celebrated of forgotten cult items, touted once by Truffaut as his favorite American film, and might’ve been Martin Scorsese’s first film had he not been booted after a week of shooting. Based on the trial transcripts of the infamous 1950 Lonely Hearts Club Murder Case, the film recounts the exploits of porcine ex-nurse Martha Beck (Shirley Stoler) and seedy Spanish conman Raymond Fernandez (Tony Lo Bianco), who were executed in Sing Sing for murder after spending years stealing from lonely women and dumping their bodies. What’s even more fascinating than the true crimes or characters is the movie’s chilling portrait of the American Underbelly, powered by its stark images, canned sound, abrupt explosions of Mahler, and overall clamminess.
18/365: Buffalo ’66 (Vincent Gallo, 1998) (Tubi, Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube)
Enigmatic, heartbreaking and visually inventive, Gallo’s directorial debut might be the most pungent and least sentimental movie about a horrific childhood ever made in this country. Gallo admitted the movie is semi-autobiographical, and you can tell (the house in the film is actually one of the houses Gallo and his apparently disastrous family lived in during his childhood). Gallo plays a loser released from prison after a five-year stint during which he’s constructed fabulous lies for his parents about a successful government job and a fiancee. Desperate to impress the parents he cannot actually tolerate, he kidnaps a voluptuous young tramp (Christina Ricci) he finds in a tap-dancing class, and persuades her to pretend she’s his wife. The story is what it is, but Gallo made a film of astounding textures, going ultra-gritty with out-dated stock but also creating a mini-nightclub dream-world for monster dad Ben Gazzara, inserting super-8 home-movie memories right into the larger image, and depicting an imagined gun slaughter by circling his camera around the frozen participants, with their splattered blood frozen in midair. Zoiks.
19/365: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009) (Netflix, Vudu, Amazon Prime)
No other living director exudes such adolescent joy with what Orson Welles called “the biggest train set a boy ever had,” and Tarantino’s palpable elan behind the camera is part of this beloved meta-film’s charm, as much as the actors’ brio, the anarchic glee of diegetic breaks, the intersections with the living legacy of movies in dozens of different ways, the deliberately protracted bolero-like elongation of suspense sequences, and so on. See it twice, and notice how you can’t quite think of another major American filmmaker whoses films are less visually like video games (the genre-borrowed martial arts of “Kill Bill” notwithstanding). This alt-world WWII saga is in no hurry, trifles not with digital effects, never opts for overdesigned coolness over character or copious dialogue, respects its audience’s cognitive abilities, never exploits violence, rarely manipulates our reactions, and never cuts or moves when it doesn’t need to. It is, in all of its zesty ramshackleness, a model of grown-up, eloquent, unpretentious moviemaking, and the fact that it is still also an incurable crowd-pleaser, and that millions loved it despite the absence of attention-deficit super-editing or CGI flash or comic book childishness, makes it a gift, a deliverance via lovable cinemania.
20/365: Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980) (Criterion Channel)
This gargantua is no mere movie — at 15.5 hours long, it is a work that demands a revision in our method of watching, experiencing and assessing cinema, and becomes, eventually, about its own length. Adapting a 1929 novel by Alfred Doblin that has haunted Fassbinder his whole life, the manic New German Cinema giant made a near-endless briefing for a descent into hell, from an already hellish Weimar Germany, where women are bawling trash, men are lurking hyenas, and the world is a combustion engine run on souls. What happens is like the slo-mo footage of a fatal car wreck: Franz Biberkopf (Gunter Lamprecht), a great, bullish, dim lug of a man, is released from a prison stint for manslaughter, and is thrust back into his old life of pimping and violence. The opening chapter is titled “The Punishment Begins”: from the start, it’s clear that Biberkopf is unhinging, and as the hours press on, and his struggle to stay honest and happy becomes truly hopeless, the film takes on the aura of a saintly tribulation.
21/365: Airplane! (Jerry Zucker, David Zucker and Jim Abrahams, 1980) (Hulu, Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Coming at the end of the ’70s like a fresh fart, this breathtaking farce made Mel Brooks’ comedies look high-brow — and yet, there’s something inspired about this elephantine schtick’s steamrolling assault of crude sight gags, surreal equations, and puns, puns, puns, delivered with a murderers’ row of old character-actor straight faces (Leslie Nielsen, Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack, Peter Graves). There’s no reality being made fun of here, just the rapturous ether of silly old movies (The High and the Mighty and the Airport films, predominantly) and the spirited play of language and outrageous nonsense. Practically a masterpiece.
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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