Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 43
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
295/365: A Town Called Panic (Stephane Aubier & Vincent Patar, 2009) (Vudu, Tubi, Amazon Prime)
This Belgian nonpareil reinvents the lost universe of childhood — the wryly obsessives filmmakers go one step further, peopling their free-associative, lunatic stop-motion mini-landscape with toys, and the only thing missing from every shot is the presence of real kids’ hands manipulating the figures. The materials were found at flea markets; the characters and props vary in sizes and provenance, as if the film emerged spontaneously from a ramshackle junk drawer. It’s a giddy litany of foolishness, it’s about almost nothing but its own good times, and its textures and sensibility are as high-spirited and zippy as a grade-schooler’s imaginings after a few bowls of Cap’n Crunch. Horse, Cowboy and Indian — often complete with green plastic patch attached to their feet so they can stand — live together in a house amid a tabletop farming community where the animals brush teeth, read and run errands. It’s Horse’s birthday — the realization of which for his roommates initiates a catastrophic Rube Goldberg adventure, involving 50 million bricks, a family of frogmen, a romance with a horse piano teacher, a visit to the earth’s core, a giant robot penguin run by evil scientists, a war fought with flying swordfish and catapulted cows, and so on. A Wile E. Coyote inevitability rules the action, but forget the very idea of “story” — the point of the film is to embody the inspired runaway-train nature of juvenile make-believe. The movie ignites a great deal of child-like good will — amid the chaos, there is always an unalloyed urge to rebuild and clean up. Life is good and no bad news matters if you can still get lost in play.
296/365: Our Man in Havana (Carol Reed, 1959) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, Google Play, YouTube)
Carol Reed’s career spanned almost four decades, encompassing 33 features, and yet he finds his way onto the pantheon’s higher shelves on the strength of only a handful of films, most of those written by Graham Greene, whose particular ironic-tension story skills gave many a medium-boil filmmaker their best shot at sublimity. This outright Boulting-style comedy set in the Greene-ish world of pre-revolutionary Cuba, remains relatively neglected. Alec Guinness plays Wormold, a disaffected, but far from dim, vacuum-cleaner salesman stuck in Havana with his luscious but oddly immature teenage daughter (Jo Morrow); he is accosted by dapper OSI agent Noel Coward (the only man in Cuba constantly plagued by panhandling mariachi bands), and because the money is tempting, agrees to become a field agent, even though he has no ideas what he’s watching for or whom he’s spying on. Soon it becomes apparent that the easy-street situation will collapse unless Wormold recruits some subagents and does some espionage, so he fabricates, and fabricates enough to warrant more attention and actual staff members (including Maureen O’Hara as the least pretentious woman spy ever). So he must fabricate further, to extricate himself from the grips of genuine political trouble. Guinness’ sweating fool-in-the-middle is impeccably droll; Coward, winding up his spy-master expositions with a flurry of hands and an “all that rubbish,” is crispily hilarious; OSI chief Ralph Richardson makes every line of his sound like a hardboiled egg thrown through a window; and Ernie Kovacs chews his scenery like a cigar butt as a corrupt and horny head of Havana police. Four years before Dr. No but in the bestseller heyday of Ian Fleming’s pulp geyser, Brit spy culture gets a vinegar pie in the face.
297/365: Mary & Max (Adam Elliot, 2009) (Amazon Prime, Google Play, YouTube)
For a claymation feature, this Australian film is rather shocking in the depth of its story and the frankness of its scalding subject matter. The film was never released theatrically in the U.S., and despite its dazzling ingenuity it is not difficult to see why — this is a movie focused on a child, but it is not for children. A bittersweet tall tale about child neglect and alcoholism and New Globalism and Asperger’s and loneliness and death, Elliott’s film is based on a true story — Mary (voiced by Bethany Whitmore) is an eight-year-old Australian girl lost on her own in a scruffy suburb with a drunkard kleptomaniac mom, no money and no friends. She has an overactive imagination, and she cares for herself, badly, and is eventually motivated to make a friend by picking a name out of the Manhattan phone book at the post office. The name she nabs, sending off a letter of questions and a candy bar, belongs to Max (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a massively obese, lonely 44-year-old with debilitating Asperger’s. A correspondence begins and lasts years — Mary grows up (into Toni Collette’s sparely used voice), and the epistolary relationship expands, deepens, complicates, self-destructs and heals, and life deals both of the eponymous misfits a big ration of shit. Best not to spoiler it — but be prepared for nastiness and cruelty, depicted as it were a fairy tale. Though tragic, the film ends up exhilarating and buoyant, thanks to Elliott’s unfailing inventive energy.
298/365: Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, 1967) (Vimeo, Kanopy)
Of the old-school doc gods, Wiseman is our resident all-American archivist, with a 40-year trail behind him of common life stuff cast in amber: work, aging, illness, commerce, the righteous lunacy of public institutions, zoos, ballets, high schools, military camps and cops. It all began somewhere a little more than ordinary: the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater, which in the 1960s was still a careless basin of human abuse, and which Wiseman entered, with a camera, God knows how, while in his 30s, and filmed. The man’s filmmaking strategies haven’t changed since — he films his subjects head-on, without narrative, narration, talking heads, music or interaction of any kind — and the resulting doc is, famously, an infernal ordeal, in which psychotic patients are stripped, force-fed, hosed down and humiliated in cement rooms as the guards giggle and ask them mocking questions for the camera’s sake. But it’s a thornier patch still: is Wiseman exploiting them, too? However doggedly Wiseman’s technique insists on fly-on-the-wall objectivity, is that what it is, in the room with a camera and boom mic, or later in the editing room? They’re not easy questions, especially when you consider how Titicut Follies terrified the Massachusetts state government into multiple lawsuits and a 20-year ban, and helped to precipitate just by its presence a nationwide reform of state hospitals like Bridgewater. It’s not a just mere movie, finally, but a dogfight between ethical contingencies.
299/365: Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, 2006) (Amazon Prime)
After elusive and sometimes grim beginnings, Hong has become the Woody Allen-ish rom-com auteur of the Korean New Wave, and this rigorous trifle is Hong at his simplest and most trusting; a mismatched triangle — a neurotic, womanizing director, his schoolmate-cum-set designer, and the married set designer’s “girlfriend” — head out to an off-season seaside resort to finish a screenplay. They can’t get rooms, but then they do; the men volley for the woman’s affections, but she’s sarcastic and self-assured, and gives neither of them much leeway. The relationships begin to collapse, under sexual pressure, betrayal and drunkenness. Eventually the three go separate ways, and we stay with the director, who returns to the resort town and ropes in another woman, under the pretense that she resembles the other (she doesn’t), and haphazardly begins to relive the first dalliance all over again. And then the first woman returns… The actors are healthily free range — as the director, Kim Seung-woo is such an irritating, cretinous, moist-eyed mess he is at times difficult to watch, and it’s hard not to wonder if, given Hong’s patterns and recurring concerns, if there’s isn’t a little autobiographical chili in the kimchi. But this was Hong’s first genuinely warm film — the women emerge unscarred, and there even lingers a sense of hope for the men. Not named after the 1947 Jean Renoir romance-noir, involving two men and two women and a seaside, for nothing.
300/365: Katyn (Andzej Wajda, 2007) (EasternEuropeanMovies.com, Amazon Prime)
Polish grand master Wajda capped his long career with this scalding redress of history, as he rummages around in the legacy of WWII and its aftermath, centering on a particular massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia in the titular forest, at the war’s outset in 1940. Wajda’s father was one of the victims, and for years after the war the new Communist Poland forged its soul on the bitter memory of the Katyn killing field, which was sown, propaganda said, by the Nazis. But families knew, through various means, that the Soviets did the slaughtering, something the USSR didn’t officially own up to until 1990. (What strategic reason Stalin had for ordering the killings is still a matter for debate.) Wajda digs at this public wound with an old man’s slashing pick, chopping up timelines, jumping stories, introducing new characters without ado, lifting off the old scab with what used to be Costa-Gavras’s dedication and ire (and has been Wajda’s at least since 1981, when Man of Iron became the house movie for the Solidarnosc movement), and ceaselessly examining the caught moments when Poles, trying to survive during the war and having to survive after, feel the whip of the massacre’s memory and the moral compromise it forced on the whole country. Naturally, the movie is shaped like a bolero, and the massacre is reserved for the last 15 minutes, which are inexorable, savage and cold-hearted, beginning with the first bulldozer.
301/365: Anvil! (Sacha Gervasi, 2008) (Documentary Heaven, Amazon Prime, Google Play)
Unarguably one of the most heart-swelling and moving films ever made about rock and roll, and at the same time very unlikely to convert any viewers into passionate Anvil fans; the band’s thunking, adolescent caterwaul seemed destined for only moderate success for ’80s heavy metal acts. The film focuses on the aging yowlers in the present: the two remaining members, Steve Kudlow and Robb Reiner, both of them terribly easy to love and root for, as they live out the heartbreaking b-side of the American show-biz dream: once on the verge of global stardom, the boys are now back in small-town Canada, cobbling together low-rent livings in food-service and construction. And they’ve been there for 20 years, still touring on occasion (playing to often threadbare audiences, sometimes to no one at all), and still hoping their luck will turn around. Well, of course it has, thanks to Gervasi’s film, which like Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line has literally rescued its own subjects from the fate the film documents. (Post-film, Anvil was backing up AC/DC, with their self-promoted latest album rereleased by VH1.) If anyone has earned it, Kudlow and Reiner have, and not just with longevity but with purity of heart — they were going to their graves playing as Anvil, even if it meant playing only to their loyal wives and kids. Kudlow is the protagonist here, the most guileless and endearingly unpretentious aging rocker of all time, his watery basset-hound eyes and huge crooked grin beseeching an unfair world for another chance to play classics like “Metal on Metal,” “Flight of the Bumble Beast” and “Infanticide.” Reiner, the drummer and the more widely acknowledged musical innovator, is far more introverted, but naturally Gervasi’s film becomes a portrait of the two men’s lifelong hard-rock marriage-of-passion, a working friendship that has lasted so long it seems more durable than any other relationship in their lives. In fact, as the we see, the ascent from menopausal zeroes to heroes had already begun, in the mysterious differential between a ripoff Berlin nightclub appearance featuring a few dozen spectators and a invitation to a festival in Japan, where for some reason the stadium fills with thousands of raving young Asian fans.
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, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42
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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