Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 39
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
267/365: California Split (Robert Altman, 1974) (Pluto TV, Tubi, Vudu, Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon)
Altman was a unique quantity, as he emerged as a full-on American mega-auteur in the 1970s; his films did not resemble or sound like anyone else’s, and his distinctive throng-of-American-chaos vocabulary was immediately grasped as one of the era’s idiomatic voices. Perhaps the least remembered from that decade, this corker remains American film’s greatest, savviest, most convincing indictment of gambling culture, and because it’s so incisive in its textures, it also treats gambling as a metaphor for all variety of American narcissism and folly. The fools in question are Elliott Gould and George Segal as, respectively, a committed no-holds-barred gambling junkie and an angsty journalist on the verge of vanishing like his friend into the grimy, smoky, high-strung universe of all-or-nothing betting. They meet (in an old-lady-packed poker den), they bond, they drink, they get mugged, they share flops and hookers, they come up with schemes, they abandon responsibility and bounce from Vegas to Tijuana to Reno — and all the while Altman doesn’t recreate this all-American landscape as much as visit the real deal with his camera, shooting conversations from across the room as if by accident, hunkering down with his protagonists in hotel bars and parking lots and listening to them spin their wheels, letting the spectacle of the self-destructing American Dream play itself out in our nation’s least reputable corners. Gould’s loudmouth nut expects nothing (not even profit) and owes nothing, and so he is the classic up-tempo idiot, only interested in the juiced feeling of risking everything, while Segal’s Everyman has a foot in both worlds, and is mired in gambling debt — he makes the mistake of letting the final Big Score matter to him. It’s Segal’s soul that’s on the line here, sacrificed to the unstoppable whims of easy money and sky-high daydreams, which is why the intensely sneaky ending has the unforeseeable existential impact it does. The film is by definition a comedy, and it is often brilliantly funny. But in its bones the movie actually scans more like American-century Dostoyevsky, with comp cocktails and cheap casino carpet.
268/365: End of the Century (Jim Fields & Michael Gramaglia, 2003) (Vimeo)
Like a chilling, not-so-funny answer to Spinal Tap — a fictional rock band whose drummers kept dying in absurd ways — only the Ramones’ original drummers, three of the them in 20 years, now survive. A conventional hodgepodge of interviews and video clips, this documentary is profoundly mournful, albeit kneecapped by the lack of decent performance footage. (The Ramones were never popular phenoms, so you don’t have a Kids Are Alright array of material to sort through.) All the stories told about the band’s initial impressions are the same: on stage, they were the sonic equivalent to a sudden fist in the face, playing short, defiantly simple, helaciously loud songs, no pauses, no patter, ripping it out as if they had to hurry before the roof caved in. Though doggedly self-defined, in tone and dress, as a homogenized gang,here finally the individuals emerge. Tommy the pioneer drummer-conceptualizer seems relieved he quit the band, while Dee Dee affects the junkie’s sang froid. Johnny is as bullnosed in interview as he was when bleeding on his guitar strings, but he’s also surprisingly open and frank. Joey is the most melancholy figure, a still-shy hair disaster whose success on the stage was an indisputably heroic triumph over social ineptness, obsessive-compulsive neuroses and the heartbreak of having Johnny steal his woman. But as the movie makes clear, Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee were lifelong martyrs to adolescent-reject misery — they never matured, just got older, never changed how they looked or what they played, never stopped fighting with each other and resenting the world for how unaccepted they were as teens. They remain, in fact, impossible not to love.
269/365: Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Frank Tashlin, 1957) (Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon)
This famous Hollywood trifle is a live-action comedy directed by a man who specialized, for 15 years, in Porky Pig cartoons, and the relationship between Tashlin’s long career as a gag animator and his later blooming as an auteur who used real actors and spaces is almost unique in the history of movies. Without being overly cartoonish, his features always feel on the edge of collapsing into two dimensions, and of existing in a contrived ether that is as self-conscious and manufactured as a puppet show. This artificiality reverbs beautifully here, because the story is about television advertising — a heinous form of culture unrivaled for its trafficking in pure prevarication. Tony Randall, as the titular ad exec, must save a big lipstick account, along with his own job, by securing the endorsement of Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield), a bazooka of a movie star parody in high heels and push-up bra, and gets himself embroiled in her publicity scheme as her new lover. The film is frothily content with the advertising-ization of America, or at least fiercely amused, but its ire is saved for the movie-threatening medium of television, using its widescreen compositions to spite the pan-&-scan boys at the networks, mocking fourth-wall-decimating direct address common on TV then and now, and even lashing out at the boob tube in a deft intermission, where Randall extols TV’s virtues even as the screen shrinks and the vertical hold runs amok. The film’s arsenal is led by Mansfield, who is a monstrous caricature of Monroe/Hayworth/Gardner/Ekberg matinee goddess, while at the same time a wide-open lampoon of herself as well, heaving her bust and hips around in Tashlin’s tightly composed frames like a jack-in-the-box with a stuck lid. There’s no question, Mansfield was a skilled comedienne, and her Marlowe is a blast, blathering in babbling-brook monologues like a hyperactive schoolgirl and punctuating every paragraph with an overdubbed squeal that could weaken pane glass. All in all, it’s a wildly inventive piece of all-out social satire, and an acidic antidote to those of us romantically besotted with the ’50s ad world as portrayed in Mad Men.
270/365: Bad Lieutenant (Abel Ferrara, 1992) (Tubi, Hulu, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon)
Ferrara, purveyor of a particular variety of cheap, grade-B New York grunge, takes his instincts toward squalor as far as they go in this belly-crawl, in effect a day in the life of a monstrous, self-detonating wretch whose depraved behavior is a gut-roiling reflection of his environment. It’s an ugly, ferocious debauch, a model of excess whose form follows its content and whose wrecking-ball attitude cares less for itself as a movie experience than as an experimental moral process. A fallen Prince of the City with a drug ingestion rate that could power all of Times Square for a full late-night hour, Harvey Keitel’s Lieutenant is a man so emptied of humanness that he dedicates himself, like a Sadean aristocrat, to the pursuit of badness: abusive sexual combat, compulsively self-jeopardizing gambling, hapless violence, and the aforementioned ingestion of every chemical he can find, most commonly crack. A bare bones character study that couldn’t have been made without the precedent of Taxi Driver, it nevertheless begins with a pivotal case: the Lieutenant confronts a devout nun who was brutally raped but who refuses to identify her attackers, a situation that sends the tortured protagonist over the edge in a way that indexes the Paul Schrader/Martin Scorsese interrogations of sin, guilt and penance. Lost in his own poisoned blood, Keitel’s nihilistic mad dog is a textural masterpiece, a career apex. By the time the Lieutenant moves on to shooting smack (in close-up, administered by Ms. 45 herself, Zoe Tamerlaine Lund), and the visions of Christ begin appearing, we’re set up for a full-scale auto-da-fe, and both Ferrara and Keitel take this train to the end of the line. It’s excessive, with a vengeance.
271/365: The Battle of Chile (Patricio Guzman, 1975–78) (Ovid.tv, Amazon)
Possibly the most riveting and vital historical document ever put on celluloid, Guzman’s multi-part guerrilla epic is an unembedded, unfiltered political grenade that explodes anew with every fresh consideration of political power and America’s global skullduggery. Documenting the rise of the socialist Allende regime in Chile, and then the coup d’etat that snuffed it out in favor of the subsequent Pinochet junta, this heart-thumping saga carefully traces every step: a people-power government is successfully installed, wrests control of the starving nation’s major industries and resources from corporations and multinationals, and is answered by an overt and covert insurrection led by the business-owners, bankers, and CIA-guided military. You know a truly democratic, for-the-people policy is working if you enrage the wealthy, and Chile was a ground zero for reestablishment of conservative power in the hemisphere. (In the chaos Guzman and his team were free to film, but of course they were also free to be shot; Part 1 ends, famously, with soldiers gunning down the cameraman filming them, and Guzman’s main DP, Jorge Muller Silva, was soon Pinochet death squad carrion.) How could such a summoning of injustice, social disaster, worker unity and powermad malice not help to change history itself? It didn’t, of course, but Guzman never stopped filming; the small library of documentaries he’s built ever since is a living testament to not forgetting this crucial moment in Chilean history, and the bloody fallout of the years that followed.
272/365: Major Dundee (Sam Peckinpah, 1965) (Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon)
A blustery, madcap preamble to the full-blooded anti-westerns that Peckinpah scorched earth with a few years later, this thorny genre beast is virtually without rival as a reflection of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia at the time, because it simultaneously gloats on irresponsible bloodshed and abhors military slaughter. Opening with a killing field presided over by a maniacally evil Apache campaigner, the Civil War-era scenario sludgily traces the resolve of the titular military-prison warden (Charlton Heston) to assemble a command and set out into Mexico after the bastard, without orders or strategy. His resources are pitiful, so Confederate prisoners, drunks, fallen Apaches and even “coloreds” are employed, including one Captain Tyreen (Richard Harris), a bitter but honey-toned and “fanciful” Johnny Reb who turns out to be Dundee’s primary antagonist. The typification of the Apache is old-school ghoulishness, but Dundee and his troops are equal parts imperialistic bulletheads and multiculti misfits. (The background cast is a who’s who of growling, man’s-man character stars: Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, L.Q. Jones, Slim Pickens, R.G. Armstrong, etc.) James Coburn’s one-armed, gone-native scout is the only character undemented by spite, prejudice or ambition. In this westernized ‘Nam, fragging is always on everyone’s mind, the Enemy is a ghost in the bush, and American intervention (on the heels of the French) is a generalized, steamrolling disaster. What rescues the film in the end from its many conflicts and unresolved passions is Heston — always effective as ruthless, self-righteous sons-of-bitches, this most reviled of dimestore demigods makes a fearsomely convincing misanthrope-authority figure, a loathsome frontier-despot capable of convincing everyone in his wide path that he’s destined to create history, not just witness it.
273/365: City of Life and Death (Lu Chuan, 2009) (Vudu, Kanopy, Amazon)
Another history lesson. A big-budget Chinese movie that opens up its corridor of horrors in breathtaking, silvery black-&-white, this period nightmare is a necessary scald, doing something cinema does best: confront us with a past the world has tried to forget. The metropolis of the title is Nanking, and Lu’s film is a campaign that dares to tread where no film has gone before, re-envisioning the city’s famous “rape” is graphic detail and with a scrupulous eye toward documented history we’re not intimate with. Westerners are in for a fresh dose of qualm, as the film methodically lays out the history, almost hour by hour, of the Japanese army’s six-week siege of Nanking in the winter of 1937, beginning with enthralling urban combat with the remnants of Chinese forces. After the Japanese take control of the city, the movie attempts to split perspectives between Chinese victims and Japanese soldiers of ambivalent, or evolving, attitude toward the civilians, and it’s to Lu’s credit that the film doesn’t demonize the often foolish and brutish occupiers, and doesn’t clarify perfectly for us the politics behind the army’s actions. Sometimes the idle soldiers are whimsically kind to the Chinese, other times homicidal, but it’s clear that the orders for the mass executions and “comfort women” mass rapes come from above. Lu’s movie is authentic as only a war film made in a country scarred by the experience can be, from the way in which the massacres seem almost natural in the eye-poppingly cratered cityscape, to the wheelbarrows of women literally raped to death, the harrowing notion of fathers literally fighting and begging with crowds of Japanese to keep their teenage daughters from mass assault, and the way in which the Chinese women would masculinize themselves in an attempt to appear less sexually interesting. (The cut hair and bulky clothes reverbing, oddly, with the androgynous peasant uniform installed by the Communists a few years later.) One single shot, of a Japanese soldier putting a bullet through the forehead of a hospital patient sitting up in a suspended neck brace, has more chilling veracity to it than a hundred Hollywood films.
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, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38
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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