Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 38 — Quarantine Week 5
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
260/365: Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon, 1985) (Hulu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Maybe the Naked Lunch of the Reagan/Thatcher-era indie gore-horror wave, this legendary snark detonation has lost none of its ironic savagery and kitschy wit; in fact, as the textural tropes of the ’80s come to seem more stylized to us with each passing year (those gel lights and profusions of fake room smoke), Gordon’s spectacularly tasteless hit appears to strike a perfect balance between earnest genre gravity and explosive nonsense. Lovecraft’s modest story, with its rogue medical student attempting to Frankenstein his way to glory with a manic-zombie-producing “re-agent,” is fleshed out as if in a straight-faced soap opera bubble, and the tone is both epitomized and tested by Jeffrey Combs as the megalomaniac with the glowing green hypo, in a hyperbolic, bloodshot comic tour de force that made him a cult figure. The rest of the cast, particularly debased maiden Barbara Crampton, are remarkable for how their intensely bland ordinariness is eventually ground into burger meat by the story. Crampton’s climactic ordeal is a still unbelievable fusion of Sade and Dante, nude and subjected to the slaverings of a handheld severed head. A movie that launched a million genre geeks, it remains a merry scandal, and the most inspired movie of its kind.
261/365: Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1948) (Archive.org)
One of film noir’s greatest and most morally awake entries, Polonsky’s seething masterpiece exudes a distinctive confluence of soul-rot and poetic eloquence that’s utterly unique. John Garfield stars as the lawyer of a numbers-racket combo, and his already poisoned sense of purpose combusts when a rigged scheme threatens to destroy his elder brother’s numbers “bank.” As the overweight, bitter, cardiac-challenged brother, Thomas Gomez delivers the performance of his career, boiling over with spite and regret, and the dialogue he’s given pulses with intelligent anger. “I’m a man with heart trouble,” Gomez’s sour nowhere man tells his mob-terrified bookkeeper, “I die almost every day myself. That’s the way I live. Silly habit.” The movie, like many other noirs (see Gilda), parallels postwar organized crime to legit business, breaking down the numbers racket into such logical layers that it begins to resemble any other capitalist enterprise. Still, Polonsky also proves himself a heartstopper on par with Anthony Mann in the experience of noir violence, in an explosive basement-restaurant skirmish that climaxes with a bullet to the face, and a triangulated, floor-level shootout in a pitch-dark office that rivals the best moments of Lang. At the center of all this despair and Cain-Abel angst stands Garfield, mannered as always but powerful, as the all-but-loathsome schemer convinced that everyone has a price as he does (secretly dreading the fact that perhaps they don’t), and hoping that saving his brother from doom will redeem him.
262/365: Barking Dogs Never Bite (Bong Joon-ho, 2000) (Hulu, Vudu, Tubi, Amazon Prime)
The auteur behind Parasite (and Mother, The Host and Memories of Murder) began here, with this small-boned, modest, low-budget farce, wielding its helmsman’s quirky personality like a shoulder grenade. Set like so many quasi-existentialist movies in a massive, modern, inhumanly devised apartment complex, the film (the original title is A Higher Animal) is a black comedy about urban ennui, in which a disaffected college teacher (Lee Sung-jae) becomes obsessed with killing whatever dog it is in the building that won’t stop barking, and a waifish bookkeeper (soon-to-be-Korean-cinema axiom Bae Doo-na) who dreams of become a video-captured real-life hero. They cross paths and head toward a romance, even as the canine population around them is routinely killed, tossed from rooftops and butchered for stew. The uneasy, never-know-what’s-coming tonal turnabouts are classic Bong, even if they are not as intense as they become in the later films; the contrast of carnivorous social critique (the doomed dogs are often very cute) and innocent-seeming rom-com beats is consistently disarming. The scent of narrative risk is never distant; bizarre social satire can spike and nova in the middle of a serious Bong scene so suddenly you’re left rubbing your eyes in shock.
263/365: The Year of the Cannibals (Liliana Cavani, 1969) (Amazon Prime)
A blistering conceptual cataract of political-film magma perfumed with the pungent haze of dated hipness, this long-overlooked landmark of counter-culture Absurdism lands us in a bare-bones dystopian hell, set in a damp Milan ruled by an unseen totalitarianism; the results of a recent revolution has left corpses littered all over the city. The sprawled cadavers lay across stairwells, on the floors of subway cars, in the centers of highways, and everybody just navigates around them, carrying on with their business, while ubiquitous street posters declare that anyone who touches the bodies will be sentenced to death themselves. (The imagery is purely metaphoric; the dead don’t show any marks of violence — they’re just place-holders, signs of universal injustice.) Cavani is adapting Sophocles’ Antigone, but they extrapolated the tragic Thebian’s story onto the entirety of modern society (not only Italy, where the “Years of Lead” were just beginning), as Britt Ekland’s defiant Everygirl ventures out with the help of Pierre Clementi’s wild-child misfit to defiantly bury her brother’s body. Practically every inventive beat of the film’s imagery radiates outrage: when Ekland and Clementi run buck naked through the streets chased by stormtroopers and police dogs, everything from Treblinka to Vietnam is summoned to mind, and a search through piles of neglected dead explicitly indexes the struggles of too many people in too many corners of the globe. The film can be also fabulously silly — Ennio Morricone’s score (along with Slade’s Don Powell offering a howling vocal turn) is hippie-dippy to a hilarious degree, and Ekland’s crystalline beauty (as well as her overprimped mane of red hair) is utterly distracting.
264/365: Under the Sand (Francois Ozon, 2000) (YouTube, Google Play, Amazon Prime)
A quiet, oblique and finally mesmerizing work of psychological knifework, this French art film happens almost completely on Charlotte Rampling’s face. An aging European lioness famous 35 years now for icy beauty, reptilian mystery and demimondaine high living, Rampling has aged into lioness of conviction and pathos, and this might be her best film. The set-up is deliberately simple: a middle-aged couple (Rampling and Bruno Cremer) drive to their vacation house, stop for coffee, arrive, open the cottage up, chat, and hit the beach; after she wakes up from a nap, the clockwork begins: the husband is gone. A police search ensues (largely off-screen), and then a large block of time passes, and the film becomes a study of Rampling’s open-ended widowhood, a state of unresolved fate that ends up driving her mad. Ultimately, in the beachtown’s coroner’s office, the heroine and the viewer are faced with a reality that remains open for interpretation. In that scene, Rampling keeps five narrative balls in the air; she defies us to watch her eyes and read the subtitles at the same time. As for the enigmatic final shot, the ambiguity is too clear to despoil with questions.
265/365: Many Wars Ago (Francesco Rosi, 1970) (Amazon Prime)
Sweaty, tense, and alive to suffering, this Italian film is a long-forgotten but essential WWI saga, and as paradigmatic of that war’s particular class dynamics as Lewis Milestone’s version of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Raymond Bernard’s Wooden Crosses (1932), Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), and Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981). The narrative, co-scripted by Tonino Guerra from a memoir by Emilio Lussu, follows the aimless and absurd trajectory of an Italian infantry division as it faces impossible odds against Austrian forces and a maniacal iron-ass of a general (Alain Cuny) doggedly keeping faith with Old World warmaking methods and prone to executing “cowards” on the spot. The air of do-your-own-thing despair that infects the characters (primarily Antonioni discovery Mark Frechette and veteran powerhouse Gian Maria Volonte) is distinctively Vietnam-era, and suggests that those two wars have far more in common, at least for the average disillusioned soldier, than either did with the big lollapalooza of 1939–1945. Particularly, Rosi gets how in the very trenchified, ashen, no-man’s-land warscape itself the average man realized that aristocracies and governments are corrupt, untrustworthy, self-serving and carelessly malevolent. As the liberal idealist disillusioned by his command’s fanatical inflexibility and cruelty, Frechette (a placid pretty boy-rebel who, after snagging the lead to Zabriskie Point, famously made only two other films before dying in prison) withers in the presence of Volonte and Cuny, but the vast ensemble, the scarred Mitteleuropa they trudge through, and the mechanisms of wartime injustice and class atrocity, are vivid and haunting.
266/365: Last Night (Don McKellar, 1998) (YouTube, iTunes, Amazon Prime)
This Canadian end-of-the millennium film is an abstracted comedy in which there is no nighttime, everybody knows exactly when the world will end, and the only issue anyone faces anymore is what to do with the last day, the last evening, the last hour. McKellar, a Canadian journeyman with ample acting and writing credits, wrote, directed and starred in this delicate, ironic peeling-onion indie, which has a cool tone and sensibility all its own; it’s not Armageddon itself that seems to bother any of the characters, but their often futile efforts to fulfill their deepest longings before time runs out. The ensemble is led by Sandra Oh, whose efforts at last-minute shopping for her and her husband’s last dinner together are squelched when her car is first turned over by a curious mob, and then stolen altogether. There’s Callum Keith Rennie’s arrested post-teen, who has decided to satisfy his every sexual fantasy before midnight, including sex with his high school French teacher (Genevieve Bujold). David Cronenberg is a gas company exec whose project is to call each and every customer and leave a message assuring them of continued service. McKellar is a single schlub who, being single, wants to spend the last hours alone, but the world won’t let him, particularly his mother (Roberta Maxwell), who cooks a Christmas dinner although it’s not Christmas, and rewraps all of her grown children’s old toys as gifts. Vectors cross, naturally, but why, we might ask, is the world ending? Why is everyone so relaxed about it? McKellar doesn’t answer the questions as much as slide by them; the context is a generalized given, all the better to ponder what truly matters to people if they had to collectively face their world’s expiration date.
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, 37
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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