Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 41
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
281/365: They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948) (Criterion Channel, HBO Max, DailyMotion, Amazon)
Ah, noir. The original film noirs remain, despite formidable culture-rehash odds, the coolest and most resonant school of movie to have ever emerged in America — 60 or 70 years after the fact, the then-disregarded classics of the genre sit high on our trophy shelf while the huge hits of the ‘45-‘60 period — think Forever Amber (1947), Jolson Sings Again (1949), The Robe (1953), White Christmas (1954), Guys and Dolls (1956), Around the World in 80 Days (1957), etc. — are forgotten like the blundering, uninsightful trash they were. This tender slice of darkness is one of the genre’s world-beaters, and auteur-god Ray’s disquieting debut. Not nearly as well remembered today as he should be, Ray was once the Cahiers du cinema crowd’s most sanctifiable discovery, Godard’s personal Star of Bethlehem (“Henceforth there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray.”), and the auteur theory’s prototype: the irascible Hollywood pro who turned studio formula into quizzical masterpieces of pain, rue and struggle. Adapted from Edward Anderson’s Thieves Like Us, this movie is prototypical, a decent-hearted but despairing portrait of the American ideal gone sour, with central characters (luckless crook-on-the-lam Farley Granger, his hapless girl Cathy o’Donnell) driven toward one dead end after another by impulse and fate. Moody, subtle and emotional vulnerable, it’s one of the greatest debuts in film history.
282/365: Lunacy (Jan Svankmajer, 2005) (YouTube, Amazon, EasternEuropeanMovies)
Famously a die-hard Surrealist who still “belongs” to a recalcitrant Surrealist federation in the Czech Republic, object-animator Svankmajer has been exploring the anxiety of everyday objects for over 50 years, inheriting the Czech puppet tradition and forcing it down the gullet of his own noxious id. His filmography is basically one long smash-up of subconscious fears, cultural recyclings, sociosexual commentary, food used in ways it shouldn’t be, things that shouldn’t be food but are, dream frustration, and a crystalline faith in the desire of objects. This one is quintessential, and the “story” is an almost abstracted play on nightmare logic — our hero Jean (Pavel Liska) has reoccurring dreams about being mugged in his sleep by asylum attendants and strait-jacketed, a situation that proves sympathetic to a cackling maniac called, simply, the Marquis (Jan Triska), who has more than a whiff of Sade about him, and who dresses 18th-century style and lives in a castle performing outrageous black masses. Needless to say, Jean’s singular nightmare returns again and again, the Marquis’s sanity is hardly to be trusted, and a climactic visit to a Charenton-style nuthouse leads us to question if there’s any significant difference between the patients and the staff. Throughout, Svankmajer interpolates his narrative with parallel visions of rogue flesh on the animated march — literally, perambulating cow tongues, eyeballs, moist calves’ brains, self-slicing steaks and bleached bones, all roaming over the film’s interior landscapes like escaped lab mice. (In one appalling sequence, chickens pecking at self-grinding beef lay eggs that hatch more meat, which jump into the grinder…) Surrealism will out: it’s Svankmajer’s little universe to command, and we’re just tourists.
283/365: Comedy of Power (Claude Chabrol, 2006) (Kanopy, Amazon)
The true French heir to both Hitchcock and Lang, Chabrol has famously been all about crime — its motivations, its fallout, its ripple-effects and ironies. This satiric, eccentric drama fictionalizes the notorious corporate-scandal “Elf Affair” that sent scores of corrupt French CEOs and oil execs to prison in 2003. Chabrol casually stretches in the sun of a legal procedural that typically has less to do with facts than character and social intercourse; like Enron writ even larger, the case had all to do with mountains of absconded public money, and yet would probably still wilt the interest of any other filmmaker (or screenwriter — in this case, frequent Chabrol collaborator Odile Barski). But as usual, Chabrol views the situation from an unlikely personal perspective: through the prickly, confrontational eyes of Isabelle Huppert as the chief investigating judge, who takes no greater delight in her work than when she can corner a rich man and make him sputter in horrified rage. Huppert, 53 at the time and as vibrant a force as ever, sauces up the movie so indelibly that Comedy of Power evolves into a post-feminist character study — don’t expect suspenseful machinations or unrealistic courtroom shenanigans. It’s all about the people, and Huppert’s workaholic avenging angel, dangerously underfed and self-amused, is fabulously, pathologically invulnerable — even as the murder threats pour in.
284/365: John and Mary (Peter Yates, 1969) (YouTube)
In the late New Wave era, spurred by European art films and the country’s own psychosexual climate, American movies started taking seriously looming slices of life it had previously either neglected or idealized into froth: relationships, sexual norms, gender inequality, maturation, modern ambivalences about social roles, and so on. This hand-sized drama was a conscientious effort to excavate the brainpans of the average twenty-somethings of 1969, as they collide, ricochet, succeed at growing close quickly but fail at maintaining intimacy. Yates’s film begins in bed, prowling across the snoozing forms of Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow, and as she wakens and looks around, it’s clear she doesn’t know where she is, or even with whom. She gets up and wanders, looking for clues (on the bookshelf, where Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe loom ominously); when he awakes, he hits the bathroom, rummaging a bit through her purse for a hint toward her identity. Not a word is spoken for some time. Clearly, the two did things in reverse, as modernity would have it — they had sex before getting to know each other at all, and now that task, over breakfast and rainy-day slumming, is all the more vexing and difficult. They banter, flirt, bicker, interrogate, while Yates and screenwriter John Mortimer fill out the two of them with flashbacks and their own unspoken and often sexist thoughts, heard as whispered narration right over and amid dialogue (eight years before the subtitles in Annie Hall). Thematically, the movie is almost anthropological in the purity of its intent — casting an analytical eye upon men’s and women’s roles and rules as they’re changing right under our feet, leaving the new generation to, essentially, reinvent the romantic wheel. The couple are nice without being, by rom-com standards, terribly nice at all, and not very inspiring; we know more or less from the outset that they’re not “destined” for each other, as lovers in all Hollywood films are supposed to be, neither are they even remotely “in love.” They’re just glancing off each other, like particles, and however much the film suggests a romantic coalescence in the end, the characters are so clearly drawn and so four-dimensional that we aren’t convinced for a second that the relationship, should it last out the weekend, has any chance of surviving for more than a month after that.
285/365: Burma VJ (Anders Ostergaard, 2008) (Tubi, Pluto TV, Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon)
This doc is both your daddy’s sort of classic political non-fiction film — the activist kind, that stalked the world’s battlefields, like The Battle of Chile and In the Year of the Pig — and a varietal of doc that could only belong to the present moment. It’s utterly contemporary because it is in effect documenting the plight of modern, ‘net-age journalists secretly at work in what the film’s subtitle calls “a closed country.” A Swede, Ostergaard essentially assembled the film out of footage shot by some thirty-odd undercover reporters working for the Democratic Voice of Burma, a still-active pirate broadcast project. Then, and especial;ly now, being caught on the streets of a Burmese city with a video camera in your hand is enough to ensure your arrest and perhaps your date with a shallow grave, but pressure like that often creates movements like the DVB, who send their footage to Sweden and have it sent, untraceably, back to Burma via satellite. The DVB becomes an instrument of history when, as they’re watching, street protests begin to form in 2007 (first in response to price hikes, but then in response to violent oppression), and grow, day after day, spearheaded by the stunning appearance of thousands of Buddhist monks, until the crowds, violating curfews and prohibitions, face down the Army 100,00 strong. The DVB guys are real cowboys, laughing and gasping and risking everything for the shot — and what shots, endless city-long streams of blood-red-robed monks buttressed by floods of innocent civilians holding hands and caught up in the anti-junta fever. This is close to what many said movies were best for when they were invented — capturing an otherwise unseen reality and disseminating it to the world. The heroism and imagery is daunting, and if the uprising’s eventual failure (monks were killed and filmed floating in neighborhood rivers) is disappointing, so is the fact that we saw almost nothing of this epochal happening on American TV when it was happening in 2007. As Ostergaard’s edited weave makes plain, the rest of the world, including the BBC, broadcast big chunks of the DVB footage. But not the US media.
286/365: Ride with the Devil (Ang Lee, 1999) (Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon)
Fanatically eclectic as he is, Lee here makes the most ambivalent battle epic ever made about the Civil War, taking place exclusively in the war-fringe arena of Missouri and Kansas, where North/South, good/bad dichotomies were so muddied by South-sympathisizing Northerners and ex-slaves fighting on the rebel side and immigrants being targeted for their nationality alone that it amounted to a free-kill zone, and clear narrative propulsion would therefore be hard to come by. It takes the most tribal and ethically fraught conflict in American history and opens it up so that whether we are good slavery-hating, Lincoln-loving liberals or an unreconstructed reactionary bigots, we don’t know exactly how to feel about the carnage. The film’s heroes, as in Buster Keaton’s The General, are Union-hating rebels, but in Lee’s film the boyos — including lovable farm-boy Bushwhackers played by Tobey Maguire and Skeet Ulrich — also slaughter innocents and raze homesteads. If they sound like terrorists, that’s because they are — the climactic decimation of Lawrence, Kansas stood as the bloodiest homegrown terrorist act in U.S. history up until the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and in this film it’s a wanton act of impulsive fury, little else. What are we to make of it? While we’re wondering, the details of Lee’s film are seductive — the constant letter-reading, the twisty slangy-slash-schoolhouse patois of the era, the relentless confrontation with teenage boys converted by fate into homicidal maniacs, the galloping battle scenes rich with playing-war-in-the-woods excitement. But its ideas about war and the Civil War and terrorism are not expressed on the surface of the film, but somewhere beneath, implicit but always mysterious. It remains a grand, gorgeous pickle of a film, perpetually fascinating for its determination to resist ethical categories. The real prize is Jeffrey Wright, as an ex-slave dragged into fighting against the Union by a childhood friendship, cagey and glowering and slowly discovering what his next step must be as an emancipated man. Lee’s film is large but its small things are what catch you, like Wright’s guttural, secretive concept of how to deliver his ex-slave’s shrugging speech patterns, which fall out in such distinctive rhythms that you suspect that the actor had somehow learned it firsthand.
287/365: Ex Drummer (Koen Mortier, 2007) (Vudu, Kanopy, Amazon)
Consider: a Belgian movie about a failed punk band in which the fact that the lead singer is a serial killer is a minor plot point. You can’t pull your eyes away from this monster very easily, from the credits sequence on — Mortier’s tracking camera follows three punk-band miscreants back from a meeting with the “hero” (Dries Vanhegen), a hedonistic local author with violent tendencies himself, as the three idiots walk and bike-ride backward through town (passing the credits on signs and graffiti), experiencing car accidents and brawls backwards along the way, as Vanhegen’s nihilistic narrator fills us in about their “handicaps” (deafness, childhood trauma, psychosis), and the amble ends eventually with a murder, also experienced backwards. That’s just the beginning; the formation of the one-time band (to compete in a local contest, with the famous writer jerk as the drummer) is just the lazy thread onto which precariously hangs a circus parade of conceptual sequences: the bloodthirsty lead singer’s worldview is so upside-down he literally walks on the ceiling of his blood-spattered flat, and Mortier constantly leads his hair-trigger brood into violent confrontations and then shoots the mayhem in slo-mo and scores it with a drippy ballad. Nothing is safe, and the aggression is palable; naturally it ends in a bloodbath. Touches of satire rear their heads, but prepare for a nasty Euro-punk-ish punch in the face, or don’t sign up.
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, 39, 40
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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