Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 16
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
106/365: Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970) (YouTube)
This is the infamous auteur brick wall with which the world-famous Italian attempted to suss out the very essence of America, in a cultural moment when the nation was eating itself alive with war, riots, assassinations, screaming commercialism and generational venom. Panned and lamented upon release, it’s actually a great and harrowing statement about the American landscape, as rich and eloquent as Baudrillard’s America or any play by Sam Shepard. (Antonioni folded in some alarming riot footage as well.) The story — an antiauthoritarian young guy and girl defect, Breathless-ly, from the west coast campus skirmishes and drop out, man, into the desert, to groove and screw and contemplate the new era — is baloney, concocted by too many screenwriters (credits go to Shepard, Antonioni, Claire Peploe, Tonino Guerra and spaghetti western hack Franco Rossetti, as “Fred Gardner”). And Mark Frechette, a beautiful carpenter/ex-mental patient Antonioni found in Cambridge, is simply awful. But the images, the meat and bones of any Antonioni film, are masterful, satiric, wicked. Antonioni’s playing sardonic anthropologist here — it’s his funniest film by far — and everything he sees in the landscape is astonishing and soulless, from the giant car-lot statues to the promotional real-estate film populated by mannequins to the cloverleafs, billboards, all-glass corporate buildings, desert highways littered with burned car chassis, and so on. Antonioni shot California as if it were the very edge of civilization, succumbing to entropy and greed and the desert sun, and there still may not be a more powerful visual portrait of that dying frontier anywhere. The notorious ending — an orgiastic montage of consumerist objects exploded in slow motion — is both chilling and fascinating, and offers a scary notion of what real anti-establishment revolution would entail: wholesale destruction of material wealth.
107/365: Right at Your Door (Chris Gorak, 2006) (Vudu, Tubi, Google Play, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
An early-millennium indie made on fumes, Gorak’s film is an active demonstration of what can be accomplished with little more than a potent idea — an idea that invades your skull much more in 2020 than in 2006. We’re in the childless home of an economically static L.A. couple, office-worker Lexi (Mary McCormack) and unemployed musician Brad (Rory Cochrane), and not long after she disappears to work the all-too-imaginable happens: the city is hit by multiple dirty bombs, and suddenly one’s location — out and working downtown, or safely ensconced at home? — becomes a matter of life and death. Ash falls on everything, fallout could be anywhere, transportation becomes impossible, panic runs riot around the film’s edges, and Brad and Lexi undergo the ultimate test of a modern relationship: who would you risk dying for? Masculine guilt and post-feminist resentment lurk at the film’s dramatic heart, when it isn’t otherwise limning the sense of your neighborhood becoming irretrievably terrified and bestial in a matter of minutes. Gorak, a busy art director who’s worked with design mavens David Fincher, Terry Gilliam and the Coen brothers, optimizes his low-budge options, capturing the scrubby L.A. suburbs better than any most films that try, getting sweaty, vein-popping performances from his cast, and focusing on the minutiae — which here boils down to an ever-shifting barrier of duct tape and plastic sheeting. Less is more — it out-hyperventilates every atomic-attack movie since Peter Watkins’s The War Game.
108/365: Drunken Angel (Akira Kurosawa, 1948) (Criterion Channel, Archive.org, Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
In terms of Japanese noir, this classic early Kurosawa is something of a relative chamber piece: the setting is a clutch of hovels and shops huddled around a giant sump, in which we’re thrust into a combative pas de deux, between a self-hating alcoholic doctor (Takashi Shimura) and the tubercular yakuza (Toshiro Mifune) he reluctantly treats for a gunshot wound. Every scene the two characters share ends up in a brawl; they loathe each other, but the doctor feels compelled to get the gangster to respect his TB and possibly survive it by living clean, and the hood demurs, lest his machismo be called into question. That is, until another yakuza gets out of prison, and starts sniffing around for his ex-girlfriend, who now runs the doctor’s practice. Both of the young stars are fierce and fascinating, but while the chiseled and romantic Mifune seemed destined for stardom, Shimura dominates the film; it’s his character, after all, that fuels the plot, and Shimura brings a wary, self-knowing belligerence to the role that’s surprising (given how we’re used to seeing him, as the elder sage in The Seven Samurai or the dying office mouse in Ikiru). Kurosawa’s potent pessimism is aimed unambiguously at his own culture, emerging guilt-ridden from the war and barely able to pull itself out of the sewer.
109/365: Tears of the Black Tiger (Wisit Sasanatieng, 2000) (Tubi, FlixFling, Amazon Prime)
Wisit’s lurid, crazy, campy Thai gorefest/melodrama was famously bought, on the strength of festival buzz, by Harvey Weinstein, who immediately put it on his I Don’t Get It Shelf of Oblivion, postponing its US release until it was bought up by another distributor seven years later. It’s a royal corker, for sure, intersecting with and parodying handfuls of old film genres, including some that were already parodic (namely, cheesy Thai versions of the American western). Yes, a Thai western, but one set in a fake Wild West of palm trees, painted fluorescent skyscapes, primary-color lighting, arch theatrical design, a Village People sense of costume design (the muscly gunslingers here all wear color-coordinated tight shirts and immaculate kerchiefs tied around their throats), sub-Herschell Gordon Lewis grue, contemporary combat munitions (rocket launchers, Uzis), and ponds crowded with lotus pads the size of truck tires. The story is a pretzel of a hundred movies — star-crossed lovers, embittered gunmen, a maiden facing an arranged marriage, tragic misunderstandings, bloodbrother betrayals, shoot-outs and corrupt villains. Frankly Wisit’s cast is rarely up to the screenplay’s demands in any serious way, but they’re not asked to be: the drama, posed and mannered, is as rabidly earnest and drolly ironic as any film by R.W. Fassbinder or Guy Maddin. (Here, when two gunfighters pledge loyalty to each other, they don’t just shake on it — they bleed into each others’ glasses of tequila, drink up, and then dance.) It’s a one-of-a-kind movie, even (reportedly) for Thailand, a freaky gout of self-conscious retro-style.
110/365: Wooden Crosses (Raymond Bernard, 1932) (Criterion Channel, Amazon Prime)
A leading figure in French cinema in the late ’20s and early ’30s, Bernard eventually fell victim to the vagaries of economics and French taste — the epic, big-budget, big-message French film he represented soon fell victim during the ’30s to the far less expensive “poetic realism” trend, exemplified by Renoir, Carne, Pagnol, and Julian Duvivier. Wooden Crosses turns out to be the greatest of the early-talkie WWI anti-war sagas, with a simple thrust, taken from Roland Dorgeles’s novel: a ramshackle regiment of French trench soldiers, ordered from rueful leave time to front-line hellfire and back again and again, in a seemingly pointless undulation between irreverent downtime camaraderie, and combat experiences that are tantamount to running into a plane propeller. It’s all about the accumulated moments of human poetry lost in the mayhem. After one sudden night battle, Bernard cuts back to the sole casualty’s body, lying face down in the dirt, as yet another flare in the sky makes his shadow grow out like a spreading lake of blood. A letter comes for a dead man, and another soldier launches out on a trek to shred it over the dead man’s impromptu hand-dug grave. The irony of a climactic siege in a corpse-littered cemetery is lost on no one; when they are sent marching yet again at film’s end, the men end up parroting the same dialogue they had in the beginning. Bernard’s thematic agenda is shoot-the-wounded: the war-dead ghosts walk in endless queues, and infinite fields of crosses act as a motif. Throughout, Bernard’s camera is on a restless walkabout years ahead of its time — there’re even chaotic battle scenes filmed from a handheld perspective, making this closeted relic feel utterly new.
111/365: The Boss of It All (Lars Von Trier, 2006) (Amazon Prime)
Von Trier became famous for spearheading the Danish-slash-global mini-revolution known as the Dogme movement — ostensibly a pledge of bullshit-free purity in moviemaking, it became rather, with each successive movie, only a way for Von Trier to squirm within some kind of technical or aesthetic constriction. This comedy has an extra set of thumbscrews: this time, Von Trier’s decided to semi-automate the creative procedure, and leave the camera angles and placement up to a computer program, nicknamed Automavision. Only wholly unusable images were discarde, but as it is Von Trier gave the machine pretty free reign, and the film is filled with oddball angles and absurd cutaways, ostensibly revealing the perspective of a binary-code brain on a visually simple modern comedy scenario. The affect –which may be pure baloney — works wonders: however “unmotivated,” the movie’s disruptive, off-kilter syntax fits the story like a rubber glove. Von Trier was of course careful to concoct a plot in which hierarchal social structures, like boss over employee, are never what they seem. Von Trier vet Jens Albinus plays a self-obsessed but not terribly bright actor hired by the true owner of what might be the world’s most neurotic IT firm (Peter Gantzler) to masquerade as the company’s mythical CEO, a canard he contrived to maintain a sense of warm camaraderie that has evolved into a workplace prone to outbursts, indulgences, fistfights and desk sex. The reason for the sudden need for a big boss in the flesh is a plan to sell the company, which in itself creates emotional turmoil and ethical compromise every which way. It’s savagely clever down to the sound of the copy machine, and suggests yet again that Von Trier’s yen for experimental penitence may be merely the smoke of his sideshow, obscuring his real achievements in storytelling and directing actors.
112/365: A Grin without a Cat (Chris Marker, 1977) (Vimeo)
The French New Wave’s ruminative personal essayist, Marker chronicles here the rising-falling-rocket trajectory of the 1960s, seen in the prismatic, idiosyncratic and dialectical way that is Marker’s own. Because filmmaking isn’t merely Marker’s career but the way he experiences life, his movies aren’t shaped like composed works but instead have the associativetexture of personal correspondence — letters from a time machine ridden by the smartest eccentric in town. A three-hour-long, found-footage spiritual monologue about the global tale of the mid-century rise of the citizenry against state power, and the eventual collapse of its often conflicting ideologies, Marker is a master polemicist, opening with a montage of Eisenstein’s “Odessa Steps” massacre scene with ’60s news footage of identical waves of “riot control.” From there, we ricochet from Paris to the U.S., Bolivia, Chile, Germany, Japan, et al., from Guevara and Castro to Allende, Mao, Nixon, the Shah, Ulrike Meinhof, and so on, and to jungles and city streets where distinctive surges of popular fury rise, confront violent troops, and become tragically lost in their own utopian daydreams. This is not a film for students looking for an overview — however unemphatically, Marker calls everyone on their failures, and he blames the starry-eyed leftists for their own self-immolation (particularly after May ’68 in Paris). Still, the struggle is what interests him, because it is righteous and undeniable. He is a master weaver of colliding perspectives, forgotten stories and unanswered questions, bringing a unique measure of deep thinking to the subject, perpetually fascinated by how much “history” is formed by what is photographed and therefore selectively remembered.
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
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, 52
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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