Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 37 — Quarantine Week 4
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
253/365: Downhill Racer (Michael Ritchie, 1969) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
An overlooked porcupine of the American New Wave, this skiing saga might be the most stringent and unsentimental sports movie ever made. Among the many sung glories of Hollywood cinema of the ‘67-‘80 period was the sudden discovery, in an American landscape Balkanized by war, of genuine subcultures, from cockfighting and drag-racing to door-to-door salesmen, junkies, hillbillies, rodeo stragglers, hoboes, Little Leaguers, and so on. Here it’s competitive skiing, and the narrative (provided by writer James Salter) organically steers very clear of exalting triumph, and instead simply follows blonde wonderboy Robert Redford, a narcissistic and socially repressed hot shot dedicated to winning at nearly any cost, as he negotiates the European trials as a member of the U.S. team leading up to the Olympics. Every ultra-realist scene is an exercise in anti-showbiz restraint, to the extent that the film ends up almost feeling like a wildlife documentary, patiently observing the Ugly American wade uncomfortably through the chalets and hotel dining rooms of the Swiss Alps. On the slopes, it’s another matter — the hand-held downhill POVs were a pioneering move, and much of what we see otherwise (especially the spills) are taken from actual competitions. This was the day when American films were interested in textural truth, and when stars like Redford could play mundane pricks with complete conviction, and never beg for our sympathy. (After a disappointing season end, Redford’s wary hunk returns home to his bitter Dad and rural Colorado shithole, and no one needs to say anything more to clarify his character.) Ritchie, whose acidic perspective would bloom, however briefly, into bracing satire with Smile, The Bad News Bears and Semi-Tough, de-glamorizes a potentially decadent milieu, and Salter’s story implies that the hero’s championship status is a morally compromised mess. A box-office crash-and-burn, the film may’ve been too tough and withholding even for 1969, but today it’s a window on a bygone grown-up movie world.
254/365: A Very Long Engagement (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2004) (Hulu, Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
French serendipity-fantasist Jeunet went whole hog with this atmospheric, sweeping, heavily-CGI epic about WWI, fated love and post-battlefield fallout, which was inexplicably unpopular in France. It didn’t reach Amelie-sized audiences here, either, and it’s hard to fathom why — Sebastien Japrisot’s source novel is an intricate detective story infused with magical thinking, and the film remains faithful both to its headlong lovelorn-ness and the authentic horrors of early-century warfare. Audrey Tautou plays a crippled girl who will not accept the news of her fiancee’s death at the Somme, and the film revisits again and again, from different and endlessly complicated perspectives, what happened on that blood-soaked patch of no man’s land in 1916. It’s a genuine 20th-century fairy tale, and deserves eyes.
255/365: Horse Feathers (Norman Z. Macleod, 1932) (Archive.org)
One of the Marx Brothers’ three genuine masterpieces, set on the campus of Huxley College (back when higher education in America was seen as an elitist farce far too absorbed in football), where Groucho’s surreal shyster is again inappropriately given a position of eminence (university president), while Zeppo does time as his son (!) and as the film’s romantic lead, and Harpo and Chico conspire to peddle football plays to the rival college Darwin. And so on — in their classic way, the Marxes dismantled the conventions of movie plotting as deftly as they attack American institutions and indulgences. Timeless, hilarious and full of joy.
256/365: Every Man for Himself (Jean-Luc Godard, 1980) (Criterion Channel, Amazon Prime, iTunes)
Famously the moment when Godard, having owned the ’60s like no other director but then entered into a decade-long mid-life crisis of Marxist cant, emerged into the public air once more, this proto-Godardian essay-cum-sociological drama explores the high-temperature battle of the sexes between Jacques Dutronc’s TV-producer JLG avatar and his dissatisfied ex-girlfriend-to-be Nathalie Baye, and between self-possessed young prostitute Isabelle Huppert and the men of the world at large. Of course the form defies the content, and the characteristically slippery current of the film plays all kinds of games, including a bout of hide-and-seek with the unseen Marguerite Duras (whom Dutronc invokes to a class of high schoolers as refusing to budge from the next room; when asked years later what this was about, Godard confessed that she was actually in the next room). Toying with our reactions to and preconceptions about domestic violence, sexual autonomy, romantic possibility, female objectification, and the tragedy of passing time (as well as cinematic dramatics and punctuation; the prankish use of music is a discourse all by itself), the film is an integral landmark in Godard’s singular career.
257/365: The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959–61) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy)
This new-wave-era behemoth, clocking in a 9.5 hours long (divided into six feature-length sections but originally released in three three-plus-hour double-shots), is a pained wartime jeremiad (from the novel series by Junpei Gomikawa), focusing not on interiority but on the full scale of injustice inherent in Japanese culture. Tatsuya Nakadai, in the role that established him as a New Wave icon, is a pacifistic middle-class manager despairing, at the outset, of being drafted into army service during “this damn war!” An assignment to Manchuria to manage a POW-manned mining operation offers him hope, and he sees an opportunity to rectify a brutalized situation — which is only his first mistake, in a Biblical litany of trouble the fuel of which may be his stubborn humanism and hatred of violence, but the engine of which is the militaristic sensibility at the heart of Japanese masculinity and imperialism. Shot in the best mid-century-Japanese shades of chrome and stormcloud, made less than 15 years after Hiroshima, the film limns an agonizingly protracted crucifixion, but the dramatic details of it vary; characters come and go, motifs reappear, the hero bristles with self-knowledge and rebellion, until his ideas of a just world are squandered on the killing fields.
258/365: Diaries Notes and Sketches (also known as Walden) (Jonas Mekas, 1969) (Amazon Prime)
American experimental cinema’s grandmaster, Mekas was also close to a documentarian, and this three-hour epic portrait of the ’60s is essentially a home movie. Mekas apparently took his Bolex everywhere and filmed everybody and everything, ending up with both an indelible time capsule and a distinctive portrait of the artist-with-a-camera. In a frantic weft of impressions (hardly a single shot stays still or lasts for more than a few seconds), the film documents the boho landscape of the time, peopled by the likes of Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, John & Yoko, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Peter Beard, Carl Dreyer, Barbet Schroeder, Edie Sedgwick, Timothy Leary, etc.). The movie is never just a record of Mekas’s travels and daily lingering; it also hectically reimagines the world as a shake-&-bake cascade of sensations (with a free-associative soundtrack of old records, readings and subway racket). Whether we’re on the Bowery or at the Brakhages’ mountain cabin or at a lavish Newport wedding, Mekas’s take is jumbled, often double-paced, and strictly observational — the feeling is that this movie intends to keep up with daily events, instead of slowing them down and controlling the flow.
259/365: That Thing You Do! (Tom Hanks, 1996) (Hulu, Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
A sweet, giddy, unpretentious lovesong to one-hit wonders in an age when show business was still an impromptu, hands-on party practically anyone could join, Hank’s movie pulses with gentle respect for its characters and a genuine ardor for pop music and the middle class lives it touches. Every time you think there’ll be a love triangle, a clash of personality or a contrived tragedy, the film skips over it gracefully and simply attends to the music, the times and the beguiling characters’ delirious good time living out the American Dream. “You’re way better than anything,” says one of start-up pop group The One-ders’ first fans, and damn if she’s not close to right: the Erie, PA quartet’s first and only hit single (written by the late Adam Schlesinger) is so adroit and propulsive you don’t mind hearing it 18 times by film’s end. The film mostly follows the footsteps of Tom Everett Scott’s insouciant drummer, who joins the band (which includes Jonathan Schaech as the self-absorbed songwriter/frontman, and Steve Zahn as a wisecracking guitarist) with dreams of jazz greatness. It’s a small film, aiming modestly low and hitting every bull’s-eye, and the performances are engaging, especially Zahn as the group’s inspired wisenheimer and Liv Tyler as Schaech’s selfless girlfriend. At the same time, it cuts a slice of the ’60s no one seems to remember anymore — the still-cleancut, soda-pop Middle American-ness just beginning to be raised on rock radio.
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, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36
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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