Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 17
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
113/365: I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007) (YouTube, Amazon Prime, iTunes)
Haynes’ film is such a risky, ambitious, passionate conceptual big-brain freak of a movie that, whether you find yourself loving it or hating it or not knowing what in hell to make of it, you can sympathize and even agree with anyone who ends up with the opposite take-away. Ambivalence is an appropriate response, given the subject: Bob Dylan, or, rather, the elusive, chameleonic, deliberately free-associative nature of Dylan’s public personality, and the idealized and sometimes ridiculous ways we’ve conceived it for ourselves, and hence the absurdity of pop culture celebrity in general. Haynes crafs a weave-movie made of strands that only occasionally cross each others’ dreamscape and more often launch out into the ether. There are roughly six threads, each of which playact through or simply comment upon one aspect of Dylan’s arc: Christian Bale as a Dylanesque folk god who goes evangelical; Cate Blanchett in drag as the ’60s acoustic-to-electric, interview-disaster Dylan; Marcus Carl Franklin as a self-legendizing black 12-year-old who hops trains, calls himself Woody Guthrie and visits the “real” dying Guthrie on his deathbed; Heath Ledger as the James Dean-ish movie actor who attained crass fame by playing Bale’s character in a biopic; Ben Whishaw as a talking-head “Arthur Rimbaud,” dispensing cryptic observations straight into a documentary camera; and Richard Gere, as a kind of lost outlaw wandering through a surreal Old West full of circus dwarfs and giraffes. Haynes’s strategy for organizing this snake pit of narrative ideas is not to have one; the film bops from one to the other, again, much like Dylan always slipped like a blob of mercury from one high-flying story about himself to another.
114/365: The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956) (Criterion Channel, Archive.org)
Ichikawa sort of signaled the beginning of the Japanese New Wave with films that dug unflinchingly into the then-recent history of genocidal massacre, cannibalism and kamikaze destruction, but this masterpiece harbors something of a broken heart — its portrait of a close-knit Japanese platoon, singing their mournful variation on “There’s No Place Like Home” while scrambling away from combat during the war’s last days and eventually awaiting repatriation as the British attack, borders on the idyllic. But the experience is convincing and genuinely felt, and subject to a dire trajectory: the unit’s beloved lute player Mizushima (Shoji Yasui) is sent into the mountains to persuade a stubborn group of soldiers to surrender, just as the bombs fall. Mizushima’s compatriots fear the guileless private is dead, but Mizushima survives, by masquerading as a Buddhist monk in his return journey through the massive WWII killing fields, changing in the process, surrendering his old life and eventually committing himself to burying the uncountable dead. Consider: a decade after Hiroshima, a Japanese filmmaker makes the most heartbreaking anti-war film of all time. Little about it seems ground-breaking today — it is simply a cudgel on your tear ducts, and arguably the first war film made anywhere that suggests the war finishes nothing, and indeed creates traumas and responsibilities without end.
115/365: Tideland (Terry Gilliam, 2005) (Tubi, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
This snark-hunted freak is still waiting for its historical moment, decades from now, when someone makes a case for it as a neglected masterpiece. It’s certainly been treated like boot-stuck dog crap for now — which, given Gilliam’s unpredictable nose for audience-pleasing, can make any hardy cinephile predisposed to love it. It may be one of those films that require a distanced cultural context, not the demands of the marketplace *now*, to frame it — but it is certainly a strange, slouching beast of a film, whose slouching is a ferocious effort to, as Gilliam has said, capture the world through the imagination-fogged eyes of a child. It certainly does that — the film lurches and lopes around its lone prairie farmhouse, in which a defiantly self-preservative preteen heroine (Jodelle Ferland, capable of unearthly rapport with the camera) manages to sustain her imaginative life despite having had both parents die from opiate ODs — and one of them, her father (Jeff Bridges), is a rotting corpse sitting upright in the living room. The mood is a sense of being lost in the skull of daydreaming trauma victim. Gilliam’s familiar, post-Python visual style reads like a cinematic code for pop-fantasy fun and games — did he realize we might misread his intentions, that his style was in conflict with his material? Or do they seem in conflict only because we’ve been preconditioned to think that Gilliam’s emphatic, fish-eyed pallette and cinema-of-cruelty art film are mutually exclusive? This may not be the right question to ask, but we may not figure out what the right questions are for years to come.
116/365: Diva (Jean-Jacques Beiniex, 1981) (Vudu, iTunes, Amazon Prime)
Beiniex’s first film was a global hit, for all of its supercool attitudinizing and its cohesive vision of Paris as a parade of secret cultures, movie-movie posturing, quixotic obsessions, multiculti matter-of-factness (years before it became truly chic), and postpunk fashion. The vibe is eductive: the film conjured a modern urban universe in which everyone is an impulsive, hell-or-high-water artiste, whether they’re actually producing art or merely cluttering their rooms with wrecked cars and doing jigsaw puzzles. Every one dallies; aping Godard, Beineix sets up a suspenseful crime tale and then loiters in an apartment for a fat dose of flirting. The plot wanders through a messy underworld of music piracy, murderous police corruption, kleptomania, chain-smoking, thuggery, and movie fetishism, revolving, bizarrely, around opera, and a particular reclusive, record-refusing diva (Wilhelmenia Fernandez) fond of “La Wally.” It begins, more or less, with a shoeless woman running for her life in a raincoat (nod to Kiss Me Deadly), graduates to tableaux of a nude-model Vietnamese girl coasting through a puzzle-piece-strewn millionaire’s loft on roller-skates, and a moped chase through the Metro. Beineix’s idea of quickly transitioning from the street to the underground is to watch a passing woman get her skirt billowed up over an subway grate, and then cut to a shot from beneath. The film is not jacked on crank, exactly, but it’s restless and consistently inventive; nothing in it is ordinary, and no shot is drab or uninhabited.
117/365: Tokyo! (Leos Carax, Michel Gondry and Bong Joon-ho, 2008)(Tubi, Amazon Prime)
Gotta love a good omnibus film — and this noveau incarnation is a thorny, dyspeptic joy, less an outright “city symphony” love letter than an idiosyncratic prism-view of one of the world’s most pop-culture-disoriented urban cultures. The three sections are all by foreign directors, plumbing the city for its cramped sense of the surreal. Gondry’s “Interior Design” begins prosaically enough, as a young woman and her filmmaker boyfriend crash on a friend’s tony apartment and things get Gondrian: feeling like little more than a byproduct and facilitator of her boyfriend’s ambition, the girl begins to slowly transform into a chair, a process that is indisputably physical just as it is subjective, in the typical Gondry way — it depends on how you look at it, and her. Bong’s “Shaking Tokyo” is a lovely, resonant and oddly critic-dumped ode to dense urban life and its contingent loneliness — a catastrophically insulated shut-in, whose apartment is a labyrinth of meticulously stacked books and used cardboard, has his decade-long routine by apocalypse and romance. Carax’s lunatic entry, “Merde,” is an unfettered cataract of reckless, psychosocial id, coming at us in the form of a monster movie (Godzilla’s theme and roar figure in the soundtrack), but its society-threatening creature, rising out of the sewer, is Carax vet-acrobat-homunculus Denis Lavant, as a smelly, unwashed, outrageously dressed (green velvet suit, a cartoonishly twisted orange beard), palsy-gnarled homicidal Frenchman, appearing to limp through the streets, hurl war-surplus handgrenades and terrorize the often-terrorized Japanese. The translations (and multiple screens) mix and match between French, Japanese and nonsense, where the Japanese authorities talk about “tougher immigration regulations” against “white foreigners with red beards,” and where Merde himself becomes a pop star, complete with figurine collectibles and a TV-news logo. That Carax has Lavant continually looking up into the light in a Christ-like pose may be the final affront, for the French at least if not the Japanese, whose famed isolationist homogeneity/xenophobia otherwise takes it in the throat.
118/365: Times and Winds (Reha Erdem, 2007) (Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
Erdem’s is a Turkish art film that’s more elliptical and allusively observant even than the films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The setting is a remote Pontic mountain village, the time is unspecified, the cultural climate is post-medieval and Muslim (the hamlet has little but possesses its own minaret), the characters are two preteen boys who live out their lives in a state of embittered, anticipatory stasis. They watch animals copulate, they steal cigarettes, they work, but they also hate their parents: the sickly imam’s son relentlessly plots all manner of surreptitious patricide, while his friend, entranced by a crush on their young and serene schoolteacher, is revolted to find his righteous father spying on her. Other fathers beat and humiliate other sons and daughters and orphans, but the action of Erdem’s film belongs to the quotidian, to the relationship between moon and clouds, to the unrolling of each day (and its prayer cycle) and of the seasonal process. Sure, there’s a coming-of-age primal scene, but the girl in question retreats to her bed and weeps after seeing her parents in flagrante. Aching with the symphonic throbs of Estonian composer Arvo Part, the film suggests a version of Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive for the new millennium, even if its poetry outpaces Erice’s — Erdem punctuates his semi-narrative with surreal tableaux of his cast of children slumbering (or dead?) buried in pine needles, covered with the debris of a demolished house, in leaves, nearly subsumed by undergrowth, etc. You’re never sure what’s going on in these enigmatic images, or, really, between them (the characters do not express themselves openly), you’re just sure you’ve never quite seen this particular brand of mysterious poetry before.
119/265: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (David Lee Fisher, 2005) (Amazon Prime)
This low-budget “remix” of the seminal, all-fake 1920 German Expressionist classic pivots on a canny, even ingenius, gimmick: the filmmaker’s scanned the original film’s images (digitally cleaned up), and then used them as greenscreen sets for an all-talking remake — literally reincarnating the story scene by scene on the same wacky sets that still stand as the most famous, and culturally eloquent, design flourish in the history of cinema. Add new actors, ripe dialogue, and voila — everything old is new again. It’s a conscientiously ironic creation — how could it not be, given the technology? — but Fisher never camps it up. The movie is a movie-geek’s paradise, homaging a film history monument as it recrafts a darkling nightmare all its own, abetted to no small degree by a committed cast that includes, as Cesare the somnambulist, mime/actor Doug Jones. Unlike bigger budgeted greenscreen films of the day (300, etc.), Fisher’s throwback makes a kind of analytical sense as well — if greenscreening is all about appropriating and repurposing the contextual imagery of the past, then you should begin with Caligari, the movie with which modern movies began, shouldn’t you?
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
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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