Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 7
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
43/365: The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973) (Criterion Channel)
Arguably the most beautifully wrought first film of the European ’70s, Erice’s first film insists with its visuals that everything, even the vast, furrowed Castilian plains themselves, signify emotional intangibles. Set in post-Civil War 1940, the movie dreamily documents a rural village’s quotidian, but does it so elliptically that half the story and all of the backstory must be sought at the movie’s fringes, between its scenes, and in its silent ruminations. The connections between the central family — two ebony-eyed young sisters (Ana Torrent and Isabel Telleria), a distracted, love-letter-writing mother (Teresa Gimpera), a older, beekeeping father (Latin cinema vet Fernando Fernan Gomez) — aren’t even apparent until deep in the film. Instead, precedence is given to the overbearing call-and-answer between earth and sky, and to the arrival in town of a traveling projectionist and an old, dubbed copy of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931). For the girls, the film’s fierce oddness, experienced in a cinema-poor context, is electric, and the phobic scene in Frankenstein when the monster confronts a flower-picking girl by the pond continuously haunts Ana’s worldview — particularly once a wounded fugitive with large feet appears in an abandoned barn. Shot in an unforgettably jaundiced twilight (the cinematographer, Luis Cuadrado, was reportedly going blind during the shoot, and killed himself in 1980), the film is a graceful and potent lyric on children’s vulnerable hunger.
44/365: The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005) (Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play)
This modern western about the US-Mexico border tolerates no foolishness, as the Guillermo Arriaga screenplay (he wrote the shuffle-narratives of Amores Perros, Babel and 21 Grams) leads up to the accidental killing and secret burying of the titular immigrant by a hot-headed border patrolman (Barry Pepper), and then follows the rough trail of justice as the corpse, thanks to the righteous intervention of an aging cowboy buddy (Jones), undergoes two more internments — “official” and finally, in Mexico, correct and decent, with Pepper’s newbie kidnapped into responsibility at gunpoint. It’s easy to appreciate the gallows humor of hauling a friend’s blue body across the countryside, trying to comb its dead hair and making it chug anti-freeze to keep the ants away, and the irony-rich tale is imbued with a sharp scent of social critique the film’s textures don’t have to amplify. It certainly feels even more humane and knowing today than it did during the Bush years. Arriaga and Jones both won at Cannes.
45/365: Altered States (Ken Russel, 1980) (Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play)
This hellbent sci-fi melodrama was derived very loosely by irate screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky (who fought director Arthur Penn off the project, and then disavowed the movie after fighting with Russell) on the LSD-plus-sensory-deprivation experiments of Dr. John Lilly, author of The Center of the Cyclone, and it has a lysergic personality all its own, due largely to the collision between Chayefsky’s dead-serious pseudo-scientific dialogue and Russell’s fun time with hallucinogenic ideas and the narrative’s essential craziness. Which follows the trips of a megalomanic scientist (this is where William Hurt first came from) as he successfully de-evolves into an ape-like proto-simian… and then beyond. Full of great, zesty performances, it’s one of a kind, finally, even if you’re not sure what the heck happened.
46/365: La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Fellini’s reputation has not thrived in the most New Wave years, but this film is still a potent, expressionistic launch into postwar Euro-emptiness, sharing a rarely acknowledged Existentialist helix with Antonioni’s classic L’Avventura, released just five months later that same year. Outlandishly fashionable in its day thanks to the very decadence it critiques, Fellini’s desolate portrait of a self-disgusted “society” reporter (Marcello Mastroianni) as he wanders in and out of the Roman celebrity-royalty-publicity swampland around him is never less than salient. Hardly just bourgeois target practice, Fellini is careful to satirically focus on what had become of pop culture after fascism, when gossip, stardom and cheap entertainment media had laid siege to the world consciousness. The director’s trademarked roaming, cluttered, hollering-background mise-en-scene has a chilling sense of gravity here, and its bracing cynicism was powerfully influential, at least in the US — open season was declared on official cultural industries in so many films (The Manchurian Candidate, Medium Cool, The Long Goodbye, Smile, Network, etc.) that it became an American New Wave motif.
47/365: The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, 2007) (Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play)
This spectacularly uncomfortable movie is about Mickey Rourke as an aging WWF icon, but c’mon, it’s actually a lacerating bad-breath vision of exactly how our culture creates and then devours idols, leaving the humiliated, fame-haunted detritus of our media distractions shambling across the landscape in broken old age like stray dogs hunting for roadside scraps. The rough-hewn textures are everything, just as Rourke sanctified his entire downward-spiral career by not quite transforming himself into Aronofsky’s preconceived character but living it whole hog, putting his own catastrophes on the table, sacrificing his own body for the sake of the character’s sadness. His Randy the Ram is a found object, incontestable and painful, and the mortal fear in his eyes, not in mid-staple-gun-&-barbed-wire assault but even earlier, in the first bouts we see, speaks unprecedented volumes about the cold and merciless heart of American popular culture (which, frankly, always eats its young, and anyone entering into it for the sake of stage-love or glory will most likely end up an embarrassing wreck, trying to get gin mill band gigs or doing dinner theater in Dayton or hawking adult diapers on late-night TV or, as with Randy the Ram, playacting a comic-book brawl in a south Jersey VFW hall, at an age when he absolutely shouldn’t.) It’s a little scary to consider how much of the film’s fanbase misunderstood its implicit critique of the brutal idiocy of professional wrestling and its lower echelons, and, by extension, the bloodsport instinct oozing from so much of American life. Randy is a pathetic victim, and the film is a majestic tragedy.
48/365: Intolerable Cruelty (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2003) (Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play)
This neglected, furious Coen farce occupies its own mocking universe, where marriage and divorce are merely maneuvers to seize or reseize assets, husbands and wives are embattled grifters, and divorce lawyers are combat super-strategists for whom no lie is too absurd. Cow-eyed matrimonial super-counsel George Clooney only becomes despondent when serial viper-divorcee Catherine Zeta-Jones appears to be marrying for love; when her duplicitous schemes arise, he becomes joyous with ardor. Conjuring a Sturges-Tashlin anti-romantic hysteria, the movie brims with high-speed legal double-speak, but it’s not above a simple who’s-on-first routine, or a crude pratfall. Whatever: it’s Clooney’s movie; to see him tenderize, season, grill and serve this hamhock of a role is to see an old-fashioned virtuoso in perpetual motion. His restless artillery of double-takes, baffled winces, fake smiles, stunned glares, tongue-on-teeth inspections and zealous line readings might make up the ripest lead perf in a Hollywood film since Cary Grant’s in Arsenic and Old Lace.
49/365: 13 Tzameti (Gela Babluani, 2005) (Amazon Prime)
Truly a movie that needs to be seen without any prior plot information — although saying that frames up its own kind of hype-exhaustion — Babluani’s movie is a nightmare in a minor key, a small-framed riff on socioeconomic injustice that will, if you let it, get under your nape skin and scratch you raw. “Tzameti” is 13 in Georgian; we follow Sebastien (the director’s son George), a young Tbilisi immigrant doing uninsured construction work in France, as he faces being kicked off a roofing job. Inside the house, mysterious messages come for the owner, a desiccated old junkie with an angry wife, and when the coot finally dies, Sebastien whimsically grabs a letter that had been portentously delivered — in it, he finds a hotel reservation, a train ticket and instructions. Without options, he takes off, wordlessly hoping to take advantage of whatever earning opportunities might present themselves, and we discover the police are trailing him. Where the lad actually lands, and what secretly happens there, constitutes the film’s left hook sucker punch that keeps hitting you, through to the last minute. It’s simple, violent, horrifyingly cold-blooded and scalding eloquent as a metaphor for class exploitation and capitalist amorality — humans as disposable trash, as pawns, as slaves, as meat ground for entertainment.
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
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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