Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 52
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
359/365: Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946) (Hulu, DailyMotion, YouTube)
Hitch hitting home runs in his third major phase (after the Brit ’30s and before the magisterial passage that began with Strangers on a Train in 1951), and one of the subtlest and most expert Hollywood films of its decade, this WWII espionage pulser pivots on Ingrid Bergman as a cynical, troubled souse who is convinced by Cary Grant’s implacable OSS agent to leave her wanton lifestyle in Miami behind for some undercover work in Rio, which certainly compromises their budding affair. The job eventually leads to marrying a man she doesn’t love (Claude Rains), tangled with the Nazis over a new kind of rocket fuel (hidden in wine bottles, a quintessential MacGuffin), and the two protagonists must persevere in their skullduggery despite resentment and lingering passion for each other. This might be Hitch’s best from this period, as the drama is completely comprised of wary looks, realizations, unspoken questions, and lurking suspicions. Grant is so understated he barely opens his mouth when he speaks, Bergman is a sad and wounded beauty, and amid the pregnant meanings, Ben Hecht’s script plumbs the psychology of patriotism, social mores and love all at once.
360/365: There’s Something About Mary (Peter and Bobby Farrelly, 1998) (Vudu, Redbox, Amazon Prime)
This effervescent and defiantly sophomoric hit was and still is resolutely politically incorrect — despite being also terribly romantic, the famous semen, scrotum, breast, cripple and dead animal gags notwithstanding. No joke is too base for the Farrellys, who can get away with flabbergasting trash by virtue of naked nerve, visual gravity and the unwillingness to allow a comic situation pass before it is squeezed completely dry. It’s a simple tale: Ben Stiller is a shy high school misfit who, because he’s kind to her retarded brother, gets asked to the prom by blonde goddess Cameron Diaz. Prom night is scotched with a tux zipper debacle (you can’t unsee it), and cut to 15 years later: Stiller’s nebbish decides to track his lost love down with the help of Matt Dillon’s hilariously craven private dick who, once he watches the honest, gorgeous and gratuitously generous Mary for a while, decides he wants her, too. The picture is further complicated by a raft of supporting characters, all of whom also love Mary, and who are lying to her and to each other to better their chances. Thick with comic set-pieces (Dillon’s struggle to revive Mary’s doped pooch, Stiller’s life-&-death battle with speed-freaked version of same, the Stiller-Diaz date beginning with the mysterious misplacement, and then galling discovery of, a stray dollop of sperm) — through it all, the actors are so game you can’t help sometimes wincing: asked to do things you wouldn’t wish on a politician, Stiller’s timing is perfect as usual, but Dillon is a genuine surprise in his loopy role, all oversized teeth, silly noir mannerisms and eyes so uncomprehending they can only hint at the dimness behind them.
361/365: Beanpole (Kantemir Balagov, 2019) (Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube)
A new Russian film that simultaneously batters you with densely rich visuals and sneaks up on you with its story, this WWII-set drama latches on the titular heroine (the extraordinary Viktoria Miroshnichenko), a strangely tall and awkward misfit working as a nurse in a dire hospital for damaged and traumatized soldiers. Lya, a.k.a. Beanpole, a head-wound victim herself, has periodic seizures, and the first act of the film culminates, disarmingly, with such a fit, accidentally smothering her little son. Except, we eventually find out, it wasn’t her son — an Army friend (Vasilisa Perelygina) returns eager to reunite with her child, and thus, already caught in a downward spiral of tragedy, these two fractured women try to fill the hole in their lives, amidst inadequate men, useless bureaucracy, and their own ruined lives. Balagov, whose third film this is, was only 29, but this rigorous and painful film instantly puts him in the contemporary Euro-company of Christian Petzold and Ruben Ostlund.
362/365: Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997) (Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, Amazon Prime)
A frosty, philosophical dystopian vision that is all science and no action, and a kind of grandfather to scores of straight-to-Netflix high-concept sci-fi indies, Niccol’s film conjures a future corporate world wherein genetic engineering is standard practice, and so the only kind of disadvantaged background you could have is if you’re conceived the natural way, and are therefore significantly less than perfect. To work at the Gattaca Corporation (or anywhere else, it seems), you must meet certain genetic requirement, a test for which can be quickly made from a stray hair, a flake of shed skin, a drop of urine or blood. Ethan Hawke is a “faith-birth” who is determined to beat the system, rise up in Gattaca and eventually be shipped out to a planet colony, and to do so he strikes a deal with a disabled athlete (Jude Law) to assume his identity and use his hair, skin and blood. But every time Hawke’s Everyman sheds a hair, he’s in risk of being outed. Delightfully off-putting, Niccol’s movie is as cool and suppressed as its emotionless genetic elites, and triumphs with quiet details: the urine sample that *is* a job interview, the relentless hunt for stray hairs and skin, the walk-in genetic analysis shop that co-star Uma Thurman uses as if it’s an ATM. Shot beautifully (by Kieslowski’s DP Slawomir Idziak) in many real locations a la Godard’s Alphaville, Gattaca has text and subtext enough for three movies, not to mention visual nods to Welles’s The Trial. Superficially a parable on racism and classism, as well as an alarmist take on the hot issue of genetic therapy, Niccol’s movie is on a deeper level a harrowing and upsetting essay on body control, a nightmare in which any one of the hundred thousand skin cells you shed everyday could give you away and ruin your life.
363/365: Salt of the Earth (Herbert J. Biberman, 1954) (YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Independently made (when only exploitation movies were “indie”) by real union miners and McCarthy victims, this clumsy but gutsy movie about the Empire Zinc Strike — Mexican miners organizing resistance against their white company bosses — remains the premier American union film. No education on American progressivism, or lefty culture in general, is complete without it; Biberman, alongside producer Paul Jarrico and writer Michael Wilson, were all blacklisted by HUAC, which is as hardcore as liberal bona fides got in the mid-50s. The production met with federal interference at every juncture, and Mexican star Rosaura Revueltas was imprisoned and deported as a Communist; on top of that, the film was condemned on the floor of Congress, and went largely unseen because theaters were afraid to book it. Stirring not just as a movie but as evidence itself of corporate injustice (echoed later in Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County USA), it’s a movie that Noam Chomsky likes to note, saying that it’s hardly a coincidence that it’s a little-known cultural pariah, and the union-demonizing On the Waterfront is an Oscar-awarded, AFI-approved landmark.
364/365: Happy, Happy (Anne Sewitsky, 2010) (Tubi, Hoopla, Amazon Prime)
The snowy, reindeer-sweater middle-class Scandinavian suburbs enjoys a fresh flogging in Sewitsky’s feature debut, in which Agnes Kittelsen, as harebrained young mom Kaja, limns her character’s anorexic nutjob parameters in 30 seconds flat. We’re set up for a heebie-jeebie domestic meltdown immediately, once Kaja and her uncommunicative husband (Joachim Rafaelsen) welcome a new couple as tenants in their second house (Maibritt Saerens and Henrik Rafaelsen), bringing their adopted black son and their own embittered, sexually impacted emotional cargo. You can smell mid-period Von Trier in the lurking pathologies, and Sewitsky walks the line between cold giggles and social grotesquerie, and the cast (particularly the women) boils with danger, as the couples stalk each other, find weaknesses, drink too much, and shed their inhibitions. (Meanwhile, Kaja’s sadistic son “plays slave” with the new kid in town, in a scorching satiric plot sidebar that’s probably played very differently in Norway.) Familiar territory, but Kittelsen’s masterful portrait of the ultimate Ms. Instability, all fearful nerves and guileless cat eyes and Dr. Seuss-drawn smiles, is unforgettable.
365/365: Zero de Conduite (Jean Vigo, 1933) (Criterion Channel, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Son of an anarchist and a consumptive art-film martyr who died at 29 leaving less than three hours of film behind him, Vigo remains one of cinema’s preeminent artists, and this joyful schoolyard revolution is one of the 20th century’s great cultural myth-ideas: the dreamy exaltation of adolescent rebellion, personified here by a gaggle of students in a chaotic, pompous and repressive school who decide, impulsively, to fight back. The joyful, surrealistic shock waves of this rough-hewn, homemade handgrenade (shot without sound, which was added later, and as unpolished as freshly dug shale) are still rippling across adolescent brainpans everywhere. No film has ever spoke to the reckless hearts of boys with the same sympathy, and it might be the first unsung glint of the spirit of rock ‘n roll.
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, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51
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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