Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 9
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
57/365: Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) (YouTube, Amazon Prime, Vudu, Google Play)
Maybe the most overused, meaning-stripped icon in pop culture, the F monster really began here, and Whale’s film is still a mysterious, moving, Old World nightmare, thanks to patient direction, Expressionist design, and most of all the seminal, haunting performance of Boris Karloff. Forget the decades of geysering imitation and co-optation if you can, and Karloff’s patchwork nowhere man reveals itself as one of cinema’s most original and daring creations; a walking metaphor for every existentialist predicament ever conceived, the Monster is thoroughly modern, thrust without the benefit of childhood into a savage world he cannot fathom, resulting in an utterly convincing — and uncomfortably realistic — portrait of feral, lost-child helplessness. Maybe it’s not frightening today as it once was, but it resonates with pain, and the gray, set-bound, early-talkie vibe is unforgettable.
58/365: The People vs. Larry Flynt (Milos Forman, 1996) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Crackle)
Like some exhilaratingly depraved parody of a Lincolnian biopic, Forman’s film is a self-made-man story that could only happen, and be told, in America — Flynt’s inglorious arc from adolescent moonshiner to hustler, pornographer, bacchant, tycoon, convict, psycho, junkie, holy roller, civil lib icon and assassination victim. Oddly, this deft comedy manages to be tasteful and wise without being at all timid; the screenplay by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski has a both an effortless confidence and a scalpel-sharp sense of the absurd, and in its bemused jockeying between debauchery and litigious grandstanding, the film dares to expand what could’ve been simply a portrait of a mercenary sleaze into a dry-eyed social satire and a tragic love story. Woody Harrelson is broadly gamey as Flynt, and Edward Norton is spectacularly entertaining as a young lawyer whose notion of professional standards is slowly peeled away by Flynt like so much chicken skin. But the film’s real revelation is Courtney Love as Flynt’s ex-stripper wife: her Althea is a corrosive, silky, sensible whore, and every time Love cracks that sick smile, the camera swallows her whole.
59/365: Far from Vietnam (Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, William Klein, Alain Resnais, Joris Ivens, Claude Lelouch, Agnes Varda, 1967) (YouTube, Amazon Prime, Google Play)
It could be the most eloquent and incisive protest film ever made, for decades an unattainable Holy Grail for cineastes and New Wave aficionados. This famous cataract of activism was intended as a cinematic intervention, delivered by a dream team of hot New Wavers who with a virtual army of sympathetic technicians, actors and producers, performed the equivalent of an angry cinematic peace march: the first documentary made in direct resistance to the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. Marker edited it together sans auteurist attribution (indeed, Varda was all but elided), and it runs amok in a rush of fragments and declarations, ironic montages and torching news footage, Great Man satire and frank first-person confession, earnest North Vietnamese interviews and mocking visions of angry Americans. The mix includes self-condemning speeches from Hubert Humphrey and General William Westmoreland, folk satirist Tom Paxton singing “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation,” a detailed stock-footage history of post-colonial Vietnam, footage of a “traditional” North Vietnamese clown play about President Johnson weeping over his air force’s failure, visitations with the American homefront’s vein-popping protests, interviews with Ho Chi-Minh and Fidel Castro, and so on. Typically, Godard’s segment inches beyond the others philosophically, as the filmmaker muses on camera about his conflicted relationship with sociopolitical injustice. “The best I can do,” he says ruefully, unable to go to Hanoi, “is make cinema,” though he’s doubtful of its utility. (His hesitant solution, for us all, is to “instead, let them invade us.”) The aggregate’s hammerblow, however, comes with Klein’s segment about the legacy and surviving family of Norman Morrison, a 31-year-old Baltimore Quaker who in 1965 doused himself with kerosene outside Robert McNamara’s office window at the Pentagon and set himself ablaze. Predictably dismissed in its day for being subjective, “frantic,” and frankly Communist, the movie remains not merely a movie but more of a fact of history itself.
60/365: Wendy & Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008) (Hulu, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play)
A stark, acidicly spare indie, in which a optionless, penny-poor twentysomething girl with a dog (Michelle Williams) and a threadbare notion of how she might change her life, gets stuck in barely-suburban Oregon and can’t get out. This is 21st century America, and the intimacy we share with Williams’s lost girl is breathtaking, managed as it is simply by an attentive soundtrack (you remember the sound of her breath long afterwards), a camera placement strategy that somehow avoids all apparent agendas, and the actress’s formidable grip on her time and place and exactly how little emotion such a luckless woman would show the world in the worst of times. Williams has proven to be a faultless, often bruisingly naked actress, and here she is as completely submerged into a four-dimensional real person as any performer we’ve seen this decade. Which means, frankly, you could walk by her on the street and take no notice. Reichardt puts us close enough to Wendy that when her old car won’t start, in the center of a Wal-Mart parking lot, it feels like the sky has begun to fall. The time spent in lockup, waiting with Wendy for the local law to turn its gears while her dog Lucy remains tied up to a bicycle rack, is agonizing to a degree the makers of modern thrillers could only dream for. The mundanity of the story is equaled, and complemented by, its tragic whiplash, and though it’d be gauche to discuss the film’s delicate, unexpected, quietly heartbroken ending, it’s fair to say that the movie tests the tensile strength of your own innate empathy, and if you are unmoved, the failure is yours.
61/365: Kilometre Zero Hiner Saleem, 2005) (Amazon Prime)
Saleem has long been a filmmaker on the roam — an Iraqi Kurd long expatriated to France, he’s has made seven features, two in France, two in Armenia, and three, since the fall of Saddam Hussein, in Iraqi Kurdistan. But he’s a Kurd first and only, and if he and compatriot Bahman Ghobadi are any indication, Kurdish films tend toward a distinctive sort of mordant comedy, a rueful folky toughness and ardor for luckless absurdity born out of centuries of persecution and only a few years of reasonable hope for legit nationhood. In 86 lean, sand-blasted minutes he takes on the memories of the Saddam regime, as experienced by a luckless Kurd during the Iran-Iraq War of the ’80s. Ako (Nazmi Kirik) is Kurdish husband with a luscious wife (Turkish-Kurd cover girl Belcim Bilgin, no hint of sharia law here) who gets arrested and shanghaied into serving in the war with Iran on the other side of the country. Kirik is is a gawky, googly-eyed nebbish, the perfect silent-comedy foil for Saleem’s threadbare depiction of life at the front, comprised of random explosions, crazy Saddam propaganda, summary executions and disciplinary beatings. Eventually, during a siege, Ako takes to jutting his foot into the air out of his foxhole, hoping to have it shot off. His wish of disengagement comes true when he is assigned to accompany a hired taxi driver back across Iraq with a coffin strapped to the roof. The journey back is Saleem’s masterstroke — traversing a barren landscape with corpse, Ako and his irate Arab driver (Eyam Ekrem) are constantly being halted at checkpoints and told to park until nightfall, lest the civilians get upset at the sight of their flag-draped cargo. Along the way, as identically laden taxis proliferate to form a caravan on the highway, the two men face off and confront their ethnic animosities, but settle nothing.
62/365: Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) (YouTube, Amazon Prime, Vudu, Google Play)
Novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco called it not “a movie,” but The Movies, and yet that still doesn’t explain the deathless allure and hypnotic dramatic slam of this greatest Hollywood concoction, as much of a still vibrant myth system as it is a super-romantic wartime soap. Persistently popular for decades after its premiere, Casablanca ran the natural risk of becoming over-familiar, a storehouse of cliches and fabulous dialogue snippets that have, by now, found their way into the language without very many of us knowing where they came from (“I’m shocked, shocked…”). Whatevs: it’s still the quintessential mating dance between tough-guy cynicism and hearttugging love fable, between self-satisfaction and self-sacrifice, be it in the context of saving the world from Nazis or limning a love affair, or, as in this film, both. The handcraftedness of the thing, star power aside, lies primarily in the remarkable screenplay, written and rewritten a day at a time as the movie was being shot. But props need to go to Humphrey Bogart, virtually the 20th century’s first definition of an hardened man’s man, so indescribably charismatic and cool he can run into his lost love (a daydream-inducing Ingrid Bergman), spar with Nazi officers, crack jokes and subtly reveal a lifetime of bitterness and desire, all at exactly the same time.
63/365: Welcome to the Dollhouse (Todd Solondz, 1995) (Amazon Prime, Vudu)
This acclaimed ’90s indie opens in a chilling, all-too-familiar Theater of Cruelty: the junior high school cafeteria, where finding somewhere to sit and someone who will let you sit with them has all the shivery dread of being lost in a police state without ID. The camera slowly circles around the 11-year-old Dawn Weiner (Heather Matarazzo), standing there holding her tray and surveying the combat zone, her bespectacled face a knot of huddled horror, and we know immediately exactly torture lies ahead. Weinerdog, as she is ritually branded by the world at large, is trapped in a nerd-suburban ’70s New Jersey no man’s land, quietly enduring the trickle-down barbarity of bullies, the raw purgatory of the seventh grade (a terrifying moment is spent standing at the blackboard staring at math problems), a neglectful family, and her own stunted self-image. It’s the Passion of Dawn of West Caldwell, but without easy catharsis or martyred glow, but it’s also an ordeal by joybuzzer; Solondz’s style is high-ranch absurdism, and though he’s deeply sympathetic to Dawn, the movie is bitterly, blackly hilarious, Peanuts as pitiless neo-realist tragedy. However droll, loneliness radiates from the movie in heatwaves. And, carrying the whole movie on her folded little shoulders, Matarazzo is astonishingly sharp, vulnerable and authentic, just as much a found object as a portrait of pubescent gracelessness under pressure.
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
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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