Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 44
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
302/365: 2046 (Wong Kar Wai, 2004) (Amazon Prime)
Reportedly, Wong began only with the number — the hotel room number in In the Mood for Love — and an idea about a Thai hitman, or a Dickian futureworld of isolating technology, and the nagging ghost of heartbreak continuing from the earlier film. So, he did it all. In the Mood for Love serves as 2046’s torturous prelude — after that, Tony Leung’s Mr. Chow lives out the remainder of the 1960s in a embittered state of romantic confusion, bouncing between cities and unfathomable women, revisiting the eponymous digs years later, and decides to board in the flat next door; still, the numeral also refers to Chow’s sci-fi stories of unattainable androids and wastrel romantics riding atomic tube-trains to nowhere. Chow skitters his narrated tale — as he writes it? — around, from Christmas to Christmas, 1966 to 1969, from Gong Li’s darkly vulnerable casino gambler to Zhang Ziyi’s tempestuous low-rent courtesan to Faye Wong’s emotionally unstable hotelier’s daughter, and back again, often in flashbacks and often in raw new encounters. It’s all texture, in which visual and aural pathways boomerang down hallways, around corners, over rooftops. Mood is everything for Wong, galvanized by a score so rich with pop songs, bossa nova drama and symphonic mournfulness it’s almost a movie on its own. The film may be a Chinese box of earnest meta-irony, but that should not suggest there aren’t bleeding humans at the center of it: Gong, Zhang and Wong (with her plate-sized eyes wandering astray) all deliver masterfully detailed portraits of women ensnared in romantic impossibility. Leung, having endured the ordeal of the filmmaker’s fickle modus operandi, has well earned his iconic stature as a Bogartian Everyman made world-weary by fate and his own selfishness.
303/365: Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) (Crackle, Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Wilder’s classic not only pioneered the portrait of the camphorously demented American shut-in (and therein opened one of the drains leading to Psycho), but brilliantly joined it to the hip of Hollywood. Here was an Industry vision of the Industry’s fake-life boneyard, wherein the meta-world of movies — already so notorious for corrupting the hopes and sensibilities of moviegoers — also condemns its godlings to an empty afterlife. Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond is the paradigmatic matinee-idol has-been witch-beast, alone with her glory days for so long in a curtained mansion that eventually Gothic cliches are reborn as Beverly Hills pathology. Fabulously dyspeptic, the film’s central concept is as qualmy as any movie of the 1950s. It was all certainly more than the postwar moviegoer could bear — he/she, as well as the Academy, preferred the relatively callow theater-world cynicism of Mankiewicz’s All About Eve. What’s not often recognized is the indelible, self-sickened performance of William Holden as Desmond’s boy-toy/hired hack. Holden always had a vivid streak of introspective malignity about him, and as the revolted Everyschmuck wandering into a web of dank dreams, his acquiescence to Hollywood — to even its castoffs and horny mad hags — is so queasy you can smell him rotting from the inside.
304/365: Miracle Mile (Steve De Jarnatt, 1988) (Amazon Prime, iTunes)
A runaway train of delirious paranoia, post-nuclear dread and madcap domino-theory madness, this neglected apocalypse story poses an inevitable Cold War question — if you found out the world was going to end in an hour, what would you do? Painfully average, trombonist Anthony Edwards accidentally shows up at hours late for a date at an all-night diner, just in time to answer the ringing pay phone outside — on which a panicked voice from a missile silo in North Dakota tells him “this is the big one, we’re locked in!” Of course it’s a wrong number, and Edwards finds himself at the center of the ultimate wrong-place-wrong-time scenario (“Forget what you just heard,” a second voice tells him, after a gunshot, “and go back to sleep”). Staggering back inside and blurting out what he’d just heard to the motley assortment of 4 AM coffee swillers, the schmoe triggers a city-wide panic begins. “Am I Chicken Little?” Harry aptly wonders at one point — we’re never 100% sure either, as downtown L.A. becomes a self-immolating mob scene of Biblical proportions. Extinction being what it is, the hero’s journey up the Mile ends up at the La Brea tarpits; de Jarnatt packed every sharp-toothed joke about modern culture he had into this film, and most of them are visual, making it a distinctively buoyant Armageddon.
305/365: Ed Wood (Tim Burton, 1994) (Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, Amazon Prime)
Background is necessary, if you’re not a Woodiste already: Ed Wood is renowned as the worst film director of all time, Eisenhower-era auteur of laugh-out-loud trainwrecks like Glen or Glenda?, The Bride of the Monster and, most notoriously, Plan 9 from Outer Space. More than just an inept moviemaker, Wood was many things: carnival geek, guileless transvestite, world-class rummy, homeless pornographer and the sweet-talking axis of a loony cabal of Hollywood outskirters featuring the psychic Criswell, budding transsexual Bunny Breckinridge, Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson, and aging horror star/dope addict Bela Lugosi, all of whom appeared in his films. Penniless, broken and pie-eyed, Wood eventually died hammering out deranged porn novels between whiskey runs, and was duly forgotten until his cheap-to-lease films began appearing on late-night TV stations around the country. The films themselves worked their peculiar magic on several generations of Americans, and the Wood legacy became common culture. Burton is certainly a Woodiste, and this lovely, hilarious biopic comes off as a ravishing, lovelorn portrait of an all-American loser dizzy with his own dead-end daydreams. Wood’s poignant relationship with the morphine-wracked Lugosi as the latter faced the grave motors the film, and the sense of lives lived within the lurid, intoxicating shadow of Movies is palpable and evocative. Burton’s main triumph here may be casting: Johnny Depp is superb in his stylized take on Wood, Martin Landau won an Oscar for his letter-perfect Lugosi, Bill Murray steals scenes as the effete Breckinridge, even former pro wrestler George “The Animal” Steele (talk about casting coups) is perfectly ogrish as Johnson. As Criswell intoned in his ludicrous prologue to Plan 9, “You are interested in the unknown. The mysterious. The unexplainable. That is why you are here.” Amen.
306/365: Daughter of the Nile (Hou Hsaio-hsien, 1987) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Hou has long been something of the arthouse-film gold standard worldwide, building one of the world’s most rigorous and beautiful oeuvres, and schooling us all on slow-cinema eloquence, long-shot heartbreak, and stories you have to decipher from the messiness of life. This early triumph is a quintessential modern family tragedy we walk into like uninvited and invisible guests. The Lins live on the weedy, ramshackle fringes of Taipei; 20-year-old Hsaio-yang (Yang Lin) is our point person, an honest girl burdened with keeping her entropic family in one piece. Her mother’s gone from cancer, her little sister’s still in grade school, her father (Tsui Fu-sheng) is a chronic reprobate dropping in occasionally from his job in the south, and her big brother (Jack Kao) is a petty crook making a big roll opening a bar with his cronies. Devoted to the eponymous Ancient Egypt manga, Hsaio-yang also works at KFC and goes to night school and pines for her brother’s no-good gangster buddy (Yang Fan), and naturally her life begins to come apart as the boys’ schemes and betrayals spawn real violence. This is all framed in a timeline jumble we don’t really detect until the end, abetted by Hsaio-yang’s rueful retrospective narration. But more to the point, the narrative isn’t laid out for us so much as hidden in the layers of life, seeping into view in Hou’s signature way. No one can create movie space as organically as he does (nothing ever feels set up for the camera); it’s lean-in cinema, respecting the regions in the characters’ lives we don’t see and can’t fathom.
307/365: The People Versus Paul Crump (William Friedkin, 1962) (YouTube)
Crude and rude, this vintage doc is historically a kind of verite-era prophecy of Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line — both in its focus on an unjustly convicted death’s-row convict and in its brazen chopshop approach to the precepts of documentary filmmaking. Friedkin (it’s his first film, made for TV when he was 20) follows reporter John Justin Smith into the Cook County Jail to interview Crump, a Chicago black man set up by his cohorts for a stockyards-robbery murder he didn’t commit. But the film is so hyper-fictionalized — starting with the reenactments and continuing through Smith’s rehearsed proto-noir interrogation — that it constitutes more of a furious prison ballad than a true work of nonfiction. No small amount of pre-Kiarostamian frisson is mustered by the presence of Crump’s mother, Lonnie, playing herself in flashbacks trying to dissuade the Daley I-era Chicago fuzz from apprehending her son — who’s portrayed by an actor, Brooks Johnson. Just over an hour long, Crump is economical yet flamboyantly righteous, as it should have been — the existence of the film played at least a small part in keeping Crump out of the chair. (He spent 39 years in stir before being paroled in 1993.)
308/365: Wet Hot American Summer (David Wain & Michael Showalter, 2001) (Hulu, Vudu, Google Play, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Saying this ultra-cheap, ultra-self-conscious genre looks to parody Meatballs-era summer camp comedies doesn’t quite cover it. That such films deserved parodying is a concept itself up for derision; in fact, nothing here is exempt from farce, including itself. Being painfully unfunny, a la Andy Kaufmann, was also a viable goal, as was sometimes irony so subtle you couldn’t tell the comedy from the merely awful. The film bounces nonsensically from one style of farce to another, leaving large vacuums and dead spots — which themselves might well be deliberate. (Even the crudeness of the filmmaking is its own self-reflexive gag, since Meatballs et al. were wretched to look at as well). All the cliches are there, from nerdy Jewish kids to lip-glossed makeout queens to geeks who can’t muster the courage to talk to girls, but here, there’s a ‘Nam vet kitchen chef who converses with a can of beans and likes to hump the fridge, a matter-of-fact rash of camper drownings (leading the negligent counselor to dump prepubescent witnesses on distant country roads), the neurotic craft teacher whose class becomes a therapy group, the mock-satiric/mock-earnest takeoffs on Flashdance and The Karate Kid, a gay wedding, a short trip into town that seems to take hours and ends up with everyone shooting smack in a crackhouse, and a climactic crisis when Skylab threatens to land on the mess hall. The stretches of seemingly sensitive dramatic scenes aren’t, I think, any more serious than the rest of the film, which is so conscientiously uneven you can’t get a bearing on it. So, often it’s funny, and often it isn’t, a diagnosis that probably wouldn’t disturb Wain and Showalter, whose only worry seemed to be that we couldn’t fathom what was coming next.
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, 43
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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