Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 5
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
29/365: Diner (Barry Levinson, 1982) (Amazon Prime, YouTube, Vudu, Google Play)
Levinson’s debut film, and a small masterpiece of social anthropology, recreating the 1959, stuck-in-a-groove lifestyle of six Baltimore guys in their 20s, swapping yucks at the all-night eatery over gravied french fries like they have since they were kids, and not being much more savvy than that about adulthood or women. The semi-improvised banter is fascinating, and the clothes, norms, styles, lingo and music are all on the money. Steve Guttenberg and Mickey Rourke shine as they did only here, Kevin Bacon and Daniel Stern have rarely had better roles, and Paul Reiser expertly energizes what began as sideline role, and made it pivotal. (The sixth, Timothy Daly, is a relative dull straight man with dull girl problems.) Guttenberg’s slightly dull-witted Colts fanatic is getting married, and the guys collect in the mid-winter, in their wool overcoats, to see if it’ll happen. If it sounds like a hundred other small movies from the ’80s on, that’s because this is the first one of its kind, the best, and, incidentally, a significant ticket-to-ride in chatty screenwriting for a young fanboy named Quentin Tarantino.
30/365: The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005) (Vudu)
The Romanian New Wave has been swinging for 15+ years now — a poor ex-totalitarian nation that had little visible film culture at all for decades is now the hotbed of what the world’s film festivals are perceiving as new-millennium cool, fresh, expressive and pertinent, and like many Romanians, this one won at Cannes. Another kind of road movie, Puiu’s film is an odyssey of modern bureaucratic agony that’s Kafkaesque in its shape but painfully particular in its details. As the titular Romanian nowhere man is escorted via ambulance from one Bucharest hospital and disinterested doctor to another by an exhausted but conscientious Virgil (a middle-aged EMT played with acidic sympathy by Luminata Gheorghiu), the movie dallies in the drained night spaces as if chiding us for thinking we have something better to do than watch this luckless old bastard’s body shut down in an uncaring modern economy. The film’s length (154 minutes) and deliberately meandering sense encourages us to grow impatient, and then harbor guilt, and then refocus, and so on — it’s a movie about empathy, and the modern lack thereof, in the viewer as well as the characters. Marketed as a comedy, the laughs stick in your throat.
31/365: Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002) (YouTube, Amazon Prime, Vudu, Google Play)
Our most dogged explorer of how midcentury America revealed itself in pop culture, Haynes crafted this melodrama as a virtual reincarnation of the Rock Hudson-era movies of Douglas Sirk. Here, Dennis Quaid and Julianne Moore are the perfect 1950s couple right out of a TV show (perfect kids, loyal housekeeper) — until she catches him kissing another man, and then finds solace in the sympathetic companionship of her courteous, responsive gardener (Dennis Haysbert), who happens to be black. If you haven’t seen Sirk’s Magnificent Obssession (1954), All that Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959) — and you should — you might not get the full force of Haynes’ ironic-passionate feeling for the era and the genre, but he’s not merely being nostalgic: it’s a deliberate attempt to make the nervy movie about the failure of middle-class surfaces that audiences should’ve had the chance to see in 1956, but the studios were too timid to make.
32/365: Dark Passage (Delmer Daves, 1947) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
A classic if underrated film noir, this Humphery Bogart number, directed with impressive verve by journeyman Daves, begins with a San Quentin prison break; all we see is a pair of hands sneaking out of an oil barrel on a truckbed. In fact, for more than the first half-hour we don’t see Bogart’s wary, been-wronged con at all, just his POV and establishing shots, accentuating his sense of alienation after he’s picked up by sympathetic artist Lauren Bacall and smuggled into San Francisco. Then Bogart emerges for us, under bandages after a back-alley face-lift, and his story begins a seemingly hopeless drift toward salvation, with the wolves coming out of the woodwork. The structure and character sense of the David Goodis novel is intact, and a full-throttle supporting cast have a ball with meaty parts, particularly Tom D’Andrea as an interventionist cabbie and Houseley Stevenson as the black market surgeon.
33/365: The Power of Kangwon Province (Hong Sang-soo, 1998) (YouTube, Google Play)
Korean New Wave rom-com pro Hong Sang-soo used to be an acidic sturucturalist, and this heartbreaker, his second film, is one of the movement’s most critic-revered seminal works, and a sobering draught beside the intoxicated barn-burnings of Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho. It’s a diptych, the hurting heart of which is not clear until the two narratives collide. First a wispy co-ed (Oh Yung-hong), sometimes on the verge of misery, visits the titular region with two friends for a few days hiking and touristing; mid-way through, the film hops over to an unemployed teacher (Baek Jong-hak) who is vaguely dissatisfied with his life and eventually joins a friend on a Kangwon trip of his own. The two vacations are simultaneous, and are backgrounded by a current of mystery, but they never cross paths — the story of the protagonists’ failed romance ended before the movie began, and what we see are its vapor trails and vacuums and bruises. Shot with rigor, in a current of stock-still middle-shots, the film unfurls like a haunting memory, replaying itself but always failing to find an elusive truth. For Hong’s lost generation, the past never adds up to the present, and modernity is merely a fabric of lies.
34/365: Winter Soldier (The Winterfilm Collective, 1972) (Fandor on Amazon)
Leaving possibly the deepest bootprint of any film record of the American-Vietnam War, this long-lost and rarely-glimpsed document, shot and assembled by an anonymous filmmaking collective (including later Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple), captures the 1971 “Winter Soldier Investigation.” A month after the news of My Lai shook Americans rigid, over a hundred returned vets testified in a Detroit Howard Johnson conference room to the fact the My Lai was no aberration, but a paradigm of U.S. activity in Vietnam. The resulting first-person-witness assault enables us to experience not only the atrocities but the shock waves felt by the perpetrators and witnesses and the emotional venom that still necrotized their lives. The sympathies do not lie only with the terrifyingly calm and earnest speakers; every story is a story about Asian farmers butchered and obliterated as a kind of sickened imperial bloodsport. Roundly shunned and unbroadcast for over 30 years, the film finally found distribution in 2005, in the middle of the Bush administration’s assault on Iraq, and should’ve been the whole time, in an ideal United States, a voter registration requirement.
35/365: Keane (Lodge Kerrigan, 2004) (Vudu, Amazon Prime)
Shot on the shoulder in Manhattan, this defibrillating indie centers on a Beckettian lost one any urban dweller knows well: essentially homeless, absolutely alone, living on disability and borderline psychotic, the kind of man you don’t make eye contact with on the street. Keane (Damien Lewis) is seen first pleading with Port Authority clerks for help finding his daughter, who (he says) disappeared months earlier on his watch from a boarding platform nearby. Of course, whether or not this is true is a question that goes unanswered, and turns out to be irrelevant — the movie feels as though the character, however painfully specific, represents a morass of out-of-control modern anxieties. Eventually, he crosses flop-hotel paths with a desperate mom (Amy Ryan) and her pensive seven-year-old daughter (Abigail Breslin), giving Keane cause on one hand to try to realign himself into something socially presentable, and on the other to rescue himself with magical thinking and a hair-raising reenactment of the dreadful moment when he thinks his life went wrong. All the more dazzling, then, is the sly emotional arc and invisibly heroic denouement. Lewis holds the film in his bloodshot gaze, but Breslin is its secret weapon: utterly convincing, wary but naive, saddened by adult inconstancy but heart-rendingly susceptible to hope and attention.
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4
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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