Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 28
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
190/365: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson, 2004) (Vudu, Hulu, HBO Max, YouTube, Amazon)
A helium-tickled beach ball of a movie, Anderson’s strange farce is all absurd-ironic concept: the fairy-tale misadventures of a Jacques Cousteau-style oceanographer-documentarian, more of an aging brand-name icon than an actual scientist, embarking on an impulsive final mission. Steve Zissou (Bill Murray, in a Grizzly Adams beard and red Calypso cap) is a tireless self-mythologizer enduring a waffling sort of mid-life crisis, but since it’s an Anderson movie, Zissou’s obsolescence (nobody cares about his films anymore) hardly impinges upon the full-frontal whimsy. The perpetually stoned hero is confronted with an affable grown son (Owen Wilson) he didn’t know he had, endures the peccadilloes of an eccentric multi-culti crew, calls for an impromptu midnight beach shoot when hundreds of glowing jellyfish wash ashore, encounters Henry Selick-animated fish you’ll never see in any aquarium. Anderson’s Asperger-y tropes emerge full-blown: archly flat compositions, direct camera address, expository demonstrations for the camera’s sake, an abstracted nursery world-view, a vaudeville sense of progression. There’s considerable charm in the concept of spinning magical-realist footle out of a cultural manifestation that vanished decades ago into the bottomless well of televisual nostalgia (all of Zissou’s equipment is dated to the Cousteau era), and Murray is always pleasurable company, his barely-suppressed soulfulness supporting this dawdling big fish story effortlessly.
191/365: The Cycle (Dariush Mehrjui, 1978) (YouTube)
As feverishly canonized in Iran as Makhmalbaf and Kiarostami, Mehrjui predates them all (making history with 1969’s The Cow) and offers a subtler, less structuralist, more unpredictable menu. This bitter satire, which is often absurd but rarely funny, was made in 1974 under the Shah’s regime, which predictably banned it until 1978 for its merciless criticism of the society’s rampaging corruption and bureaucratic evil. (Ironically, its modern dress, female flesh, sexy clinches and free-for-all degradations would’ve killed it under the new regime a year later.) The protagonists, a studly young man named Ali (Saeed Kangarani) and his wheezy, grizzled father (Esmail Mohammadi) come walking into the familiar construction-wasteland outskirts of Teheran as if from off-stage; in no time the old man coughs and collapses in the dirt. But in Mehrjui, there’s always unknown unknowns, and after waiting impatiently the young man rouses him and gets him walking again, continuing on their penniless search for medical treatment they cannot afford. The pair end up at the gates of a palatial but decaying hospital complex, as impenetrable in principle as Kafka’s castle (getting in isn’t as difficult as actually getting treated), and their efforts to raise money quickly gets the leather-jacketed Ali involved in a sleazy blood-selling ring, which rolls out into other quasi-outlaw schemes that tellingly mirror the capitalist heartlessness of society as a whole. The film is chockablock with the exploited poor, the neglected elderly, embittered modern women (mostly nurses) and all manner of human refuse; everywhere Ali goes, mysterious processions and wanderers litter the desolate background. Immediate and visually disarming, Mehrjui’s rough and furious movie has been typically hard to find, and deserves general New Wave-era consideration beyond the hallowed, if covert, place it holds in the annals of Iranian cinema.
192/365: The Kings of Summer (Jordan Vogt-Roberts, 2013) (Vudu, iTunes)
Yet another disaffected-teen indie but one loaded to the brim with energetic personality, comic timing, bizarre non sequiturs and raw script wit, busy TV comedy helmer Vogt-Roberts’s debut settles on two buddies with generational problems — motherless Joe (Nick Robinson) has commanding widower Nick Offerman dishing him sarcastic shit every day, while Patrick (Gabriel Basso) endures hilariously overripe helicopter parents (Megan Mullally and Marc Evan Jackson). Amid the usual bullies and unattainable blondes, and after a park party is broken up by gunfire, Joe discovers a patch of forgotten woods, and decides that he and Patrick, trailed after by a third kid, the cryptic weirdo Biaggio (Moises Arias), will run away, build a makeshift house in the secret glade, and “live off the land,” more or less forever. The dissection of The Outsiders mythology is deft, and there’s no denying the film’s blast of nonstop drollery (even a running gag about the largest Chinese takeout dumplings on Earth keeps paying off). Vogt-Roberts (a Funny or Die vet) knows how to squeeze rapid and dry laughs from everyone in his cast; while Arias’s homunculus schtick has little variation, Robinson’s quick-minded deliveries never get predictable, and Offerman is peerless.
193/365: The Colossus of New York (Eugene Lourie, 1958) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon, Google Play)
A little-known, gadzooks sci-fi indie from the fecund postwar years of American genre heaven, this dizzingly literate beaut secretly sports a prodigious resume: produced by Welles cohort William Alland, scored by theremin maven Van Cleave, shot by Hitchcock stalwart John F. Warren, and based on a story by Willis Goldbeck, whose script credits run from Freaks to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The ambition oozes out of the film; in a decade of pulp indies that aimed low at drive-in teenagers, this movie simply feels weird, strangely intellectualized, pregnant with import and secrets. The focus is on a family of scientists — two grown sons (one a world-class genius, played by Wild Wild West star Ross Martin) and a megalomaniacal father (Otto Kruger, who handles his heady paragraphs of scientific spleen with icy gusto, and comes off almost too convincing). When the star son is killed, the survivors decide to put his peerless brain inside a seven-foot, Jack Kirby-ish robot, with an obligatory but unpredictable litany of disasters to follow. The living son (John Baragrey) installs a safety switch — “so he won’t be able to destroy himself.” “Why should he?” the father asks. “Why shouldn’t he?” is the reply. The machine itself is shaped like a god but suffers serious glitches, not the least of which is an existential qualm. The crisis is emotional — the lost man in the Colossus laments the contact he cannot have with his wife and child, and rebels against the father’s grandiose visions of ubermenschen. Unsurprisingly hampered by a low budget, Lourie’s movie is a palm-sized breath-catcher, with uncanny visions of the robot simply walking across the bottom of the East River to cross from Manhattan to Long Island, and, in the end, the Colossus going mad and becoming a Randian fascist — bent on eliminating human “trash” — in a movie released just one year after Atlas Shrugged climbed the bestseller lists. Whew.
194/365: India Song (Margeurite Duras, 1975) (Mubi, Amazon)
A challenging aberration amid the flow of the French New Wave, the films of novelist Marguerite Duras are beautiful, monstrous sleepwalkers, creeping through modern emptinesses and doped on remembered conversations. In a real sense, they feel like movies made by and about dead people — narrative experiences from limbo. Despite the presence of French cinema’s Brahman caste, from Delphine Seyrig to Jeanne Moreau to Bulle Ogier, the characters are petrified figures in the landscape, and around them the films don’t really move, but float like smoke in a sealed room. Her most acclaimed, this somnambulistic art-thing is a look-backward tale of romantic disaster and cross-purposes, set almost entirely in the French Embassy in Calcutta (but shot in French estates) and starring Seyrig as the compulsively promiscuous wife of ambassador Michael Lonsdale. It’s an opulent frieze of poised intentions and desires so repressed the actors don’t dare move a muscle — the famously unsignifying Last Year in Marienbad looks like Mad Max by comparison. Duras shifts almost entirely toward narration to relay story, employing multiple voices articulating inner and outer ruminations over the often immobile cast, as if the filmmaker has decided she only trusts language and not the rest of cinema’s arsenal. (Duras’ general intentions, she has said, was to “murder” cinema.) India Song is as haunting and dreamlike as it can be soporific; once Lonsdale’s cuckold begins (and never stops) howling in agony off-screen, it coalesces into a kind of anesthetized horror film.
195/365: Yesterday Girl (Alexander Kluge, 1966) (YouTube)
This film, along with Volker Schlondorff’s Young Torless released a few months later, signaled the beginning of the New German Cinema, eventually to be subsumed by the three godheads of Herzog, Fassbinder and Wenders. In ’66 the task for young filmmakers watching the New Waves of Europe explode around them couldn’t have been easy — how to reinvent your national cinema in the still-living shadow of your parents’ Nazism — and Kluge was the one that rose to the challenge, officially declaring with a pack of cronies in 1962, in the “Oberhausener Manifest,” that the old German cinema is dead, long live the new. This movie is a pure-hearted serving of loose, inquisitive New Wavey goodness, chronicling the travails of a penniless East German girl (Kluge’s sister Alexandra) after she escapes across the Berlin Wall and lives hand to mouth to scam to gutter in West Germany. Social issues don’t interest a budding ’60s troublemaker for long, of course — Kluge’s film is, typical for the time, collaged up and down with snapshot family histories, direct address, intertitle quotes, still lifes, dreamy zippings through the city, animated toy soldiers, and so on, a free-associative manner that suggests that just as the characters are “hanging out” (the New Wave films were the first to capture that essential human activity), so was the movie itself. The film has plenty of elbow room for social satire (a pretentious academic shows up and talks himself into a hole, while nearly every other conversation steers too quickly toward somehow rationalizing some minute aspect of the Holocaust). Historically, it’s a must-see, for its ignition-switch importance, for its documentation of the spirit of the age, and for the visual and physical DNA that it contributed to Wenders’s Wings of Desire.
196/365 The Ister (David Barison and Daniel Ross, 2003) (Vimeo, Ovid.tv, Amazon)
This mega-doc cuts its own genre — if there have been, generally, movies made for almost every tribe of human obsessive, then this is a gift to hardcore historical philosophy geeks. It’s a fascinating if often impenetrable cataract of abstractions scrambled with concreteness, as the two Australian filmmakers limn the resonances between Holderlin’s poetry and Martin Heidegger’s ideas about it, and how modern poststructuralist philosophers read the dialogue, as they travel the hundreds of kilometers from the mouth of the Danube (Holderlin’s “Ister”) in Romania to its source in Germany, and carve out history lessons, from the myth of Prometheus to Heinrich Himmler, along the way. It’s upriver all the way, for more than three Heideggeran hours, interfacing with the ruins and scars of one genocide and totalitarian mess after another, and if the movie coalesces at all, it seems to bemoan the arrival of industry in all its forms, as the Nazi-apologist Heidegger did (despite the Holocaust’s industrialization of massacre, a matter the film takes up at length, if not conclusively). Because it’s the Danube, the history is all cataclysmic, reflected eloquently in the matter of its bridges, built and then destroyed, over and over, from the Romanian site of the Dacian Wars to the NATO-blasted bridges of Vukovar and the Soviet destruction in Hungary. Philosophy in essence is not hospitable to film, but Barison and Ross have created a massive movie in the form of a physical-travel-plus-abstracted-existentialism dialectic, and if the results doesn’t harbor the bracing sensual charm of a Chris Marker, it’s still one of a kind.
Year Three 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
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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