Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 3
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
15/365: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1967) (Netflix, Amazon Prime)
The ogre-king of spaghetti Westerns and an absurdly hyperbolic vision of American greed (however curiously Italian) at play in the carrion-strewn fields of the Civil War, Leone’s epic solidified Clint Eastwood’s international box-office lock as well as set a new ceiling for mock iconicity and Ennio Morricone soundtrack hysteria. “Good” bounty hunter Eastwood, “bad” bounty hunter Lee Van Cleef, and “ugly” all-around outlaw Eli Wallach circle each other while they close in on a cache of gold buried somewhere in the outlands, but the star is Leone, going big like no other Western-maker ever had with his wide-screen exploration of landscape — the far scapes of vast deserts and the ultra-close scapes of actor’s craggy derma. So visually outlandish it’s almost not a western but a kind of retro-fantasy, set on a distant planet, this three-hour giant is blood-red adolescent fun, full of totemic-ironic flourishes that surely made Sam Fuller cry with envy.
16/365: Bright Future (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2002) (Amazon Prime)
J-horror icon Kurosawa’s innovative absurdism has always lurked under the moody genre surfaces, and at the center of this bizarre entry is a glowing, thoroughly poisonous pet jellyfish, the symbolic freight of which goes entrancingly uninterpreted. The invertebrate’s owner (Tadanobu Asano), is a discontented twentysomething temping in a hand-towel factory with another inexpressive youth with social difficulties (Joe Ogadiri). Kurosawa clutters these layabout’s lives with indecision and stasis; maintaining the jellyfish tank’s transition from salinity to fresh water occupies their thoughts. After an off-hand (and off-screen) murder, the glutinous creature is accidentally dumped and slips beneath the floorboards, where we sometimes glimpse a mysterious body of water under Tokyo, and sometimes finds only a dirt hole. The lost-yet-ever-present jellyfish takes on a proactive and entirely nonsensical role of its own, as the characters obliquely try to salvage their lives. The relaxed confidence in which Kurosawa strolls through his narrative, suggesting apocalyptic significances without assuring us that he has anything particular in mind, is impressive. And then in the eleventh hour, the film diverts its gaze to an odd youth gang outfitted in starched-white Che t-shirts rousing themselves from disillusioned torpor and, in a stirring traveling shot, hunting for relevance and confrontation in the streets. As a waving flag of anarchic will, it evokes the coda of Bunuel’s Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie; as an ending, it leaves you speechless.
17/365: Phantom (F.W. Murnau, 1922) (Vimeo, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
An archival film-geek event, this long-neglected 1922 detour in German master F.W. Murnau’s tragically brief career is a reverent morality play derived, rather reverently, from forgotten Nobel laureate Gerhard Hauptmann. In it, an ambition-less bookworm (the saturnine and 43-year-old Alfred Abel, veteran of Lang classics, playing a “youth”) becomes awakened from his inertia after being run down by a beautiful blonde’s carriage — and his pursuit of her and Romantic glory as a poet lead him, in a spiraling fashion, to the depths of despair. Made smack in the middle of Murnau’s most fecund period (it was one of three movies he made between 1922’s Nosferatu and 1924’s The Last Laugh), Phantom is as much an object lesson in Murnau’s subtle reinvention of visual expression as his more famous works, matter-of-factly using distant background action (through windows) to fuel the foreground, and employing a vast variety of double exposures, warping perspectives and even elaborately-built set constructions to articulate the protagonist’s fevered confusion.
18/365: What Happened Was… (Tom Noonan, 1994) (Vimeo, Amazon Prime)
Almost an outright real horror film, this chillingly mundane portrait of a first date that never should’ve occurred is an adapted one-act play, also written by Noonan. Even so, it’s less theatrical than brutally personal, and the observations about modern mating, lonesomeness and communication breakdown — it’s always the same — are white-hot. Noonan also stars as the closeted white-collar dweeb invited into the home of a desperately lonely and not too bright co-worker, played with nerve-wracking honesty by Karen Sillas. She’s lovely, but out of her element in the Manhattan power zone; he’s a solitary misfit who seems superior and ambitious (he lies about being a writer), but is actually an unmitigated zero. What ensues between them is a naked thumbnail sketch of urban despair, and once Sillas begins reading her deranged, vanity-published children’s stories aloud, things get very, quietly crazy. A winner at Sundance, and a paragon of what can be done with a small budget, one room and two people, the film is effortlessly menacing, creepy and finally scary. Unattached, lonely singles should be forewarned; everyone else will be thankful they have somebody to talk to afterwards.
19/365: The Last Wave (Peter Weir, 1977) (Criterion Channel, HBO Max, Amazon Prime)
An early mood-work in Weir’s career (which as slip-slid between brilliant, unnerving apocalypses, a la Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, and Fearless, and bloodless, if evocatively filmed, cliche-fests Witness, Green Card, and Dead Poets Society), and a prominent facet of the Aussie New Wave, this creeper falls somewhere in the middle, an orthodox yet fanciful doomsday machine derived from Aboriginal myth. Something of a riposte to the glut of Bible-based horrors of the 70s, the movie’s glowering countdown follows a stuffy corporate lawyer (Richard Chamberlain) through the various stages of Indigenous world-end. As smug-white-civilization-getting-shook-down fantasies, this is a low-key triumph of atmosphere and nightmare imaginings: a schoolkid-assaulting hailstorm, sourceless water running down a carpeted stairwell, a dream of flooded urbanity as seen from inside a submerged car, etc. Weir’s eye for unorthodox visuals is hard at work — Australia has never seemed so unearthly. The white-man’s-burden context of the cosmic portents loads its own ironic thrust — like us, Chamberlain is helplessly outside of the mythic action, looking in, helplessly without access to meaning.
20/365: The Girls (Mai Zetterling, 1968) (Fandor, Amazon Prime)
Old-school feminist emancipation from Swedish star-turned-New Waver Zetterling — three actresses (Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson and Gunnel Lindblom) set out on a theater tour performing Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, and come to realize that the ancient women-halting-war-by-withholding-sex comedy isn’t all that farcical, and speaks sharply to modern times. In 1968, Vietnam never has to be mentioned, but the gender combat is unrelenting. Shot in black-&-white so high contrast that black figures are often subsumed by the whiteness of rooms or snowy fields, Zetterling’s film is vivid, zesty and sometimes sophomoric in its post-Godardian disjunctures, down to a typical daydream sequence in which an audience of irate women pelt movie images of Stalin, LBJ and Moshe Dayan with pies. As bullhorn metafilms go, it’s rousing and endearingly evocative of its groovy day and age.
21/365: Child’s Pose (Calin Peter Netzer, 2013) (Fandor, Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
Ah, the Romanians — sometimes it seems like no one else is bothering to make movies for grown-ups anymore. This drama enters Cassavetes territory, where the thin ice of haute bourgeoisie life cracks and opens wide. It’s a character study under pressure, with Luminita Gheorghiu at its center. Her Cornelia is a retired Bucharest architect-slash-uber-mom, aging into a moneyed loneliness with an ineffectual husband and a single grown son (Bogdan Dumitrache), who hates her. Self-directed and passive-aggressive, Cornelia is a Black Hawk of helicopter moms, and her whining son is trapped in her shadow. The boom is lowered early, after a child is killed in a car accident; a fur-adorned Cornelia calmly insinuates herself into the police station and struggles to save her “poor boy” from any culpability, down to questioning the witness reports, monitoring the blood tests, and seeking to perhaps bribe the forensic experts examining the car. Snapped into quiet overdrive, Cornelia therein attempts to remother her son, and the story twists up several secrets, all disrupting Cornelia’s presumptions about the modern world, her son’s life, and the vast class chasm that separates her from the poverty of the dead child’s village. It’s Gheorghiu’s show — the climactic Cornelia challenge, at the family table of a near-penniless “average” Romanian, wracked with tears, is as unpredictable and deft as any acting set-piece filmed in the last decade. Gheorghiu, with vivid and perfectly judged performances in a half-dozen masterpieces or more (including two Michael Hanekes), may be the best actress of her fading generation, and here the entire film depends upon her restraint and nuanced interiority, in what could’ve been a Bette Midler meltdown. You’ve seen this woman, impatient at store counters and over-youthfully-dressed at receptions, and as a piece of old-school cine-anthropology, Child’s Pose captures a cultural moment in amber.
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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