Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 32
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
218/365: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972) (Tubi, Google Play, Amazon Prime)
Establishing his bona vides the shoot-the-wounded way, German New Wave freebooter Werner Herzog created a new ceiling for historical realism in this masterwork, stranding his crew, his cast and himself in the Andes for this Age of Exploration nightmare (and searing parable on fascism), which feels so authentic it could’ve been shot in the 16th century. Spanish conquistadors lost in the Amazonian jungle, suffering successive mutinies, native attacks, the apparent endlessness of the river itself, and the deranged ambition of the titular megalomaniac (Klaus Kinski) — it’s a muscular, undeniably tactile experience (no safely dismissed special effects here), and essential viewing.
219/365: The Secret of the Grain (Abdellatik Kechiche, 2007) (YouTube, Google Play, Amazon Prime)
Shot like a Dardennes film in the immigrant dockside French community of Sete, Kechiche’s family epic seems simple on its surface — the members of a long-acclimated Arab family, and their myriad of in-laws, babies, cohorts and lovers (there are at least 20 significant figures in play), are prototpical displaced persons, relying on each other and the bonding ritual of family meals. The story’s axle is Slimane (Habib Boufares), a solemn, divorced boatbuilder currently on the fringes of his extended family’s bustle. Slimane’s layoff from a job he’s had for decades is just one tumbling domino; others include his hesitant relationship with his landlady (whose daughter, played by the saucy, relentless Hafsia Herzi, is his most loyal comrade), a philandering son’s ruinous marriage to a Russian immigrant, the ex-wife’s love-hate regard for Slimane, the vagaries of bureaucracy surrounding docking rights, Slimane’s plan to open a North African restaurant using a dilapidated ship, and the question of couscous, made, praised, maligned, eaten, lost, and restored. At over 2.5 hours, the film never rushes — rants and ordeals and meals are experienced in more or less real time, with the first late afternoon family meal lasting an extraordinary 20 minutes of laid-back, jabbering, mouth-stuffing conversation. The movie has no shortage of life-energy, honestly come by, and characters are matter-of-factly introduced midway without context or trouble — it’s a real world, Kechiche is saying, and there are people in it you don’t yet know. This is the film Kechiche made before Blue Is the Warmest Color, and it delivers the same passion on a far broader canvas.
220/365: The Lineup (Don Siegel, 1958) (YouTube)
A seasoned film noir rapier from veteran hardboiler Siegel, whose first minute crash-blams from an abrupt airport theft, a chase, a crash, a rundown cop, a bullet and the title sequence — whazzat? The next quarter of the film is a disarmingly stiff police procedural, full of unanswered questions, but then the story opens up onto the outlaw machinations behind the crime, dominated by the neurotic, co-enabling bromance between Eli Wallach’s whipcord sociopath assassin and Robert Keith’s seedy, debonair handler, the two of them assigned to retrieve troves of heroin across San Francisco (every notable landmark is visited), come hell or high water, and for fun keeping a log of their victims’ “last words.” Stress you didn’t see coming mounts when Wallach starts rectally examining a little girl’s expensive Oriental doll, and the movie turns positively feral once a man in a wheelchair is kicked off a public balcony, but the final trip on the road to nowhere of the unfinished Embarcadero Freeway is virtually an axiomatic noir image.
221/365: Deep Red (Dario Argento, 1975) (Vudu, Tubi, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Google Plus)
The Orson Welles of Italian giallo thrillers, Argento’s career never seemed to be all his fans wanted it to be, but this bloody romp still grips, and still fuels Argento’s reputation as Europe’s late-20th-century premier pulp wizard. A ridiculous serial murder plot set in Rome, with slumming star David Hemmings as the wrong-man investigator-cum-target, is all you need to know about the film’s nods toward traditional “content” — the story turns out to be so baroque and hermetic that you end up just surrendering to Argento’s boggling visual density. A moody, sadistic opera bouffe of swooping camera moves, infectious Old World atmosphere, movie-movie references, compositional clues, and nutsy set-pieces that don’t speak to the ostensible psychosis of the killer so much as to the obsessive imagination of the filmmaker, it’s a dizzying goof, and makes you wonder when Quentin Tarantino will get around to making his own giallo.
222/365: The Exiles (Kent MacKenzie, 1961) (Fandor)
A true lost-&-found indie, this rough time capsule of modern Apache twentysomethings wandering the long night of Los Angeles outsider-dom, made on the heels of Cassavetes’ Shadows but utterly neglected in its day, trails after a gaggle of cynical, drunken, unambitious Indians off the rez, “exiled” in the poor Bunker Hill section of the city, killing time, boozing, sleeping in their cars, and distractedly hunting for entertainment because they cannot find meaning. For one pregnant woman (Yvonne Williams), the restricted promise of nighttime store windows sums up her second-class-citizen status. Every infusion of drink inspires them to dance the old tribal dances; the present is empty so the communal past is summoned to fill it. Narration, in the form of interviews of the cast members, often plays over the desperate shenanigans, and though the discourse can get preachy, there’s nothing like the sting of veracity to make you submit to unpleasant truths. Image after image, of the displaced characters amid the press of a modern LA and of vertiginous, dilapidated Bunker Hill itself (especially the Angels Flight trolley climbing up and down the hill all day in a Sisyphean cycle), has the force of a metaphor and the blade-edge of truth. It may be dubbed wall-to-wall (and not very deftly, giving the film a dreamy distance from the real life it is unarguably documenting), but it’s also shot (by three DPs) with highly textured high-contrast images that often suggest Ansel Adams as much as it does Robert Frank or Walker Evans.
223/365: Cronos (Guillermo del Toro, 1993) (YouTube, Amazon Prime, Google Play)
Del Toro’s first film announced his pulpy-sophisticate sensibility with authority: a glossy but low-budget Mexican vampiric-living dead tale that invents its own very odd, beautifully impossible mythology, going back centuries, and turns it in its contemporary phase into a parable on AIDS, addiction, Howard Hughes-sized wealth, American-Mexican relations, aging, and scores of other resonating issues. The 14th century opening limns the creation of the Cronos Device, a gold-plated, palm-sized egg which harbors an unspecified beetle-creature that lives on blood and prolongs the life of its host indefinitely. Then, the present day, when the secreted egg is accidentally discovered by an old antique dealer, and becomes its newest host. Addicted to the device and bloodthirsty himself, the coot becomes the target of a dying industrialist zillionaire (Claudio Brook, a Mexican film industry giant and a favorite of Luis Bunuel), who desperately searches for the device by all means possible before his number comes up. Not as subtler than del Toro’s other films, it does hit you between the eyes with the occasional timeless image, as when the undead old man returns to his granddaughter’s house, where she innocently tucks him in at sunrise inside her toy chest, complete with teddy bear.
224/365: Ironweed (Hector Babenco, 1987) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play)
One of the most maligned major films of the Reagan era, Babenco’s adaptation of William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is often clumsy but the raw stuff of it is often beautiful and terrifying. Set in 1938 Albany, amid the demimonde of deep-Depression vagrancy, where the bums and skidrow losers have only wild-animal decisions to make, the film opens dreamily but settles on the windy, trash-strewn lot where Francis Phelan (Jack Nicholson) awakens under cardboard after a particularly bad night. Phelan left his family 15 years earlier, we learn, after accidentally dropping and killing his newborn son; everyone he meets has a similarly awful story from which they’re hiding. The action of the film is in some ways kickstarted by a day spent digging graves for pocket money; Phelan ends up in his dead boy’s cemetery, and the scene where the slow, stooped man confronts the grave might be among the top five swatches of Nicholson’s redoubtable career. But of course he’s overshadowed by Meryl Streep, as a sickly, ex-radio chanteuse who drifts in Phelan’s shadow (when she isn’t letting other bums fondle her for a night’s sleep in an abandoned car), and half-lives in a fantasy world of affluence and lingering fame. Muttering her lines in a deep, confused voice, her bloodshot eyes unsteady in their tiny sockets, Streep makes it perfectly clear without saying so that her Helen is both chronically ill and borderline psychotic. The tragedy of the film is both fearless and bracing.
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, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31
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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