Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 47
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
323/365: Idlewild (Bryan Barber, 2006) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play)
Set in a 1935 Georgia backwater with a busy moonshine industry and a funeral home the size of Tara, this overlooked hip-hop musical is a self-mocking, anachronistic three-ring circus, starring and scored by OutKast (Andre Benjamin and Antwan A. Patton). Tinted sepia and dolled up in supreme period duds, this all-black universe revolves around the Depression’s only nightclub/speakeasy/whorehouse with fire-breathing, body-painted strippers beside the chicken coops on the stage. The opening set-up is a nostalgic childhood revery, an archival credits-sequence reminiscence by Benjamin’s Percival about his motherless childhood spent in a mortician’s office, elbow-rubbing with rumrunners, mourners and Rooster, a wily orphan as rootless as Percival is confined. From there, the two pals’ stories run more or less parallel: a faithless family man and “singer” on the club’s stage, Rooster (Patton) witnesses his boss getting whacked by a rabid hood (Terence Howard, out-acting everybody), and thereby inherits the establishment’s debt and managerial duties. Meanwhile, piano-player Percival, who works dressing corpses by day under the eye of tyrannical dad Ben Vereen, meets cute with an out-of-town chanteuse (Paula Patton, no relation), and pursues an awkward romance. Typically, a heartsick morning ballad by Benjamin transpires amid dozens of synchronized, chorus-singing cuckoo clocks; the film mixes CGI, goofy dance numbers, homages (to movies old and not so much), and maybe too much else — as when Rooster raps out a duet with his (animated) drinking flask while driving in a dusky, tommygun-peppered car chase.
324/365: Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) (Hulu, Vudu, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
A berserk and instantly notorious slab of mainstream social satire, this evergreen hit might rub you the wrong way, or run off its own rails in the end, but after you’ve seen it, you feel like you’ve seen something with horns. Edward Norton’s unnamed protagonist is a white-collar nobody whose empty life creates both an inability to sleep and an addiction to catalogue consumerism, a dead-end he solves by attending every terminal-illness group therapy he can find. Into this void stumbles Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a closet anarchist and lowlife who lives off the grid in an abandoned house and who splices porn frames into family films at his job as a projectionist. (He also makes designer soap from human fat stolen from a liposuction clinic.) After our hero’s apartment inexplicably blows up and he moves in with Tyler, the two of them act out their frustration by simply beating each other into pulps in a bar parking lot every Saturday night. Others join in and the ritual eventually becomes an underground tribal cult, a secret club in which the joy of hitting and being hit is its own means and end. Like Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, the film has been seen as anthemic to the exact demographic — emasculated white boys — it looks to mock, roasting the post-tech world’s frustrated masculine aggro on a spit, but it amounts to an odd, vivid, almost apocalyptic vision of lost modern men. The dark intimations and masochistic subtexts to this wickedly out-of-control scenario are large and creepy, and you shouldn’t let it be spoiled by the Conradian twist of the dreaded Trick Ending.
325/365: Nothing But a Man (Michael Roemer, 1964) (YouTube)
A rarely seen marvel of small-movie acumen, detailing an average black man’s struggle for dignity in the early 60s Deep South, this Cassavetes-era indie is shot and acted with the same restraint its protagonist, played by Ivan Dixon, displays with such superhuman effort when confronting Alabama crackers. Dixon’s Duff Anderson is a nomadic, pensive railroad worker born of a prototypically hellish place and time, a regular guy less interested in drinking and whoring than his rootless co-workers (including a young and glowering Yaphet Kotto). Once he meets the local preacher’s daughter, played with a wry smile and dazzling gentleness by jazz diva Abbey Lincoln, he decides to break the mold, marry, and begin a family. Giving up his relatively well-paying rail job, Duff gets work at the local saw mill, and when he doesn’t play interpersonal ball with the ubiquitous rubes — the racist underpinnings of nearly every line, every situation, are maddeningly subtle — Duff’s problems begin. Falsely accused of attempting to unionize the other “boys,” Duff won’t let himself be treated as anything less than a grown man, and he’s fired for not apologizing. His subsequent jobs get progressively degrading, which just adds fuel to the fire of Duff’s dignity crisis. A few more unfriendly confrontations with the local white trash and Duff finds himself fulfilling the mold set by his own father: a wife-beating, family-abandoning loser. Roemer’s film thrives when its actors are in close quarters, making the inexorable descent into rage and desperation all the more personal and affecting. Like Dixon, the movie rarely raises its voice, and everything it says is therefore clearly heard.
326/365: Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (David Blair, 1991) (Vimeo, YouTube)
David Blair’s kaleidoscopic, experimental SF video feature — ostensibly, the “first” film uploaded onto the Internet — has the genuine flavor of inmate dementia, while effortlessly conjoining its loopy hero’s unsummarizable spiritual journey with the quite palpable realities of modern warfare. Still, it’s only nominally a linear narrative — held together by a deadpan narration, the furious current of electronic imagery, computer animation, found archival footage, video warping, and fresh tape shot on-location at Trinity Site during actual Air Force bombing maneuvers frequently threatens to explode from the constrictions of story and fly off in every direction. Told in first person, it’s the story of one Jacob Maker, the son of famous paranormal cinematographer and beekeeper James Maker, from whom Jacob has inherited hives full of rare “Mesopotamian” (read: Iraqi) bees which, we soon see, converse with the dead, traffic in alternate realities and literally implant a crystal- shaped TV monitor in Jacob’s head. The plot-arc, if that’s what it is, follows Jacob’s metaphysical journey through the world of the super-bees and into other realms of consciousness, climaxing, as does Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, within the mind of a falling bomb — this time, though, the bomb is targeted for Iraq.
327/365: The Finances of the Grand Duke (F.W. Murnau, 1924) (Kanopy, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
A classic-film-culture head-scratcher, at least for the post-WWII generations: a Murnau comedy, made in the filmmaker’s Weimar heyday, scripted by Lang partner Thea von Harbou, and as light as kasekuchen. The material is simultaneously typical Ruritanian-style Euro-farce, and a fascinating political two-way mirror on the times, presenting us with a fictional Mediterranean-isle mini-dukedom run into bankruptcy by its affable but clueless hedonist of a duke (Lubitsch vet Harry Liedtke), and beset by a quite complicated phalanx of schemers, backstabbers, debt-buyers and exploitationeers. Though an off-screen revolution is mercenarily engineered, the tensions reside between the micro-nation and its usurpers, not between its ruler and its peasants. With idealized exteriors shot in Italy and on the Croatian island of Rab, Murnau’s most atypical film is cluttered with broad characters (including Nosferatu’s Max Schreck as a hired goon), surreal non-sequiturs (a rafter-swinging ape-man “animal impersonater,” an amoral playboy who stages wild dog races in his own mansion), and an intertitle voice that’s as ironically chummy as Lemony Snicket. A stereotyped Jewish-financier villain is an unwanted gas pain amid the fizziness (what Lotte Eisner, in her book The Haunted Screen, pointed to as a “lapse into bad taste”), but Murnau’s comic touch and management of actors picked up a good deal from Lubitsch, even as his lovely Art Deco compositions give way eventually to a veritable swashbuckler of an ending. Preproduction having begun on The Last Laugh, it would seem Murnau was working on assignment here, and perhaps a little on holiday himself.
328/365: Pale Flower (Masahiro Shinoda, 1964) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
A supercool black orchid of a Japanese noir, Shinoda’s seminal yakuza saga is a revered classic now among Nipponophiles but is far less known in the West. The movie also initiated a new genre — the bakuto-eiga, or gambling film — but every fiber of it, thematic and visual, delivers an existential blast of modern doom, as rich and pure as a Coltrane wail. Muraki (Ryo Ikebe) is a hitman returning to Tokyo and its gambling dens after doing time for a mob killing, and immediately he lays eyes on Saeko (Mariko Kaga), a doll-faced, ebony-eyed waif badly addicted to cards and generally pining for mindless thrills. Shinoda’s story (co-written with Ataru Baba) is the duo’s slow dance through losses and wins and yakuza politics toward each other, conjoining in a dangerous pas de deux mediated by suicidal risk and mutual nihilism. Every extraordinary Shochiku Grandscape shot is a vision of postwar Japan as a dark underworld corridor seething with secrets and moral emptiness. It’s a movie of rash, savage contrasts — within the images and between them, dialectic-style, and the details are haunting, from the rattle of the shuffling *hanafuda* cards to the ticking clocks filling the flat of Muraki’s old girlfriend to Saeko’s unfashionably fashionable ’60s accoutrements, the moneyed accessories of a bruised, death-seeking femme who remains as much a mystery to us as she does to Muraki. Mention should be made too of Toru Takemitsu’s wild score, which bubbles under the action like a crank-jagged jazz orchestra playing from Hell.
329/365: Night and the City (Jules Dassin, 1950) (YouTube, Amazon Prime)
On another page expressionistically, Dassin’s epi-noir classic, for all of its arabesque shadowiness, may not be an authentic noir, right? Richard Widmark’s self-deceiving dreamer is far from the prototypical, fate-slammed noir Everyman, London is positively anti-noir-ish in its touristy quaintness (only occasionally does the on-location shoot find Blitz rubble), and the supporting cast of elocutionist Brits (Francis L. Sullivan, Googie Withers, etc.) reek of Old Vic plumminess. However defined, the movie’s a moody piece of Wellesian chiaroscuro (shot by Max Greene, nee Mutz Greenbaum), and an occasionally discomfiting underworld plunge, particularly when the mob-controlled wrestling milieu explodes into a kidney-punching donnybrook. Handed to the young director by producer Darryl Zanuck as a vehicle to get him out of the country before the HUAC hammer hit him, as it did warbler Edward Dymtryk a year or so later, this is therefore the first of many Dassin films centered on a Yankee expat lost in an oblivious Europe — a situation the filmmaker knew all too well. Tellingly, the film’s doomy final quarter rolls ineluctably on as if Widmark’s hapless, hunted club tout is already dead, an American ghost searching for an elusive Old World sanctuary.
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, 44, 45, 46
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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